Authors: Clemens J. Setz
â There are people, said the teacher, they inscribe a coin and spend it, what do I know, in a bar, for example, somewhere, and then look at every coin they come across very closely, to see whether it might have come back to them. As you can see, I've signed every piece of paper here. Here (he leafed through them) . . . here . . . you see?
â Yes.
â And, well . . .
The woman entered the room and touched her husband on the head. The head had grown considerably rounder, Robert thought, since back then. Well, okay, in the lecture hall at Helianau he had actually always seen him only from above.
â For me? he asked.
It wasn't entirely clear to him what he was supposed to do with all these pieces of paper.
â In the green folder, began the math teacher.
â Clemens?
He turned around to face his wife.
â Look, I have something for you here, she said.
She placed it in his hand, and he looked at it, smiled gratefully, and put it in his mouth. With his hand he made a grasping movement and looked around. The woman gave him a glass of water. He emptied it in one gulp. Then he winked at her, gestured to Robert as if to say, We got him, and even nudged Robert with his elbow and laughed.
â Such a little rascal, said the woman.
Robert nodded politely.
â Doesn't he look like an owl? said the woman, stroking his face with both hands. Here, this part here, it keeps getting rounder, and this hair here, he has a cowlick there, it always sticks out. And in the eye of the hair tornado . . . appears the bald spot. Do you like bald spots?
â Um, Robert said with a shrug. No idea.
â I like them, said the teacher, again forming a grasping claw hand.
â Okay, said Robert. So, thanks for this here . . .
Just get out of here
.
â Why did you write that on your T-shirt? the teacher suddenly asked.
â Hm?
Robert looked down at himself.
â Oh, that, he said, well, I don't know.
â I see.
â A statement, I suppose.
â What does it say? asked the woman, leaning forward.
â Can you make it out, Julia? asked Setz.
â Nnn . . . The writing isn't easy to read . . . Din . . .
â Dingo Bait.
The woman made a surprised face.
â Let me see! she said, pulling Robert closer to her by the T-shirt with both hands.
â
Ts
, she said. You're an odd duck. You should actually get along well with my husband.
â Ah, yes, said Robert. We do get along . . . very well . . .
â I once visited his family, that must be fifteen years ago now, said Clemens Setz.
â Oh, that was you? asked the woman.
â I assume your relationship with your family isn't the best?
â No, said Robert. It's not.
â Thank God, said the teacher.
He pointed, as if in proof of his assertion, to the folders in Robert's hand.
â Yes, as I mentioned, some people also mark the coin with a notch on the side.
â Oh, are you telling him your coin story? said the woman. You know, he really did that once a long time ago. In Paris.
Robert looked up.
â In Paris, that was on a day when we were on our way somewhere . . . Where were we when it poured so terribly?
â Um, said her husband. We fled into the Virgin Megastore, as soaking wet as otters after a meal.
â You and your comparisons, said the woman.
â And the people there, those weird Parisians, looked at us as if we were crazy, even though we were only wet. As if they had never seen a wet human being before. My God, we were really drenched to the . . . that was something, hahaha, that was something.
He clapped his hands.
â Doesn't he look like an owl when he laughs like that? asked the woman, again stroking his head.
The teacher found that so funny that he slapped Robert's knee instead of his own. Robert winced a little, clenched his teeth, and smiled amiably. He had an urge to break small things.
â And the coin?
â What?
â The coin, said Robert. The one you marked and spent. Did it ever come back to you?
Setz gave his wife a look that meant, Isn't he funny? Then he again patted Robert on the knee. He took off his glasses, cleaned them, and said, in a somewhat altered tone:
â Read it. You'll see, it's a very, very peculiar network, the whole thing . . . And let me say something else. I'm happy that you're here, Herr Tätzel. I mean, here. Not elsewhere. It could have been otherwise. Maybe my effort paid off.
When Robert stepped out of the taxi and crossed the street, he had to put a hand on his Adam's apple, because he had the sensation that the air he was breathing was coming out at that point in the neck without permission. As if his breathing were doubled, had an echo, so to speak. He couldn't swallow, at least his mouth didn't want to, his chest was also narrower than usual.
Even though he debated silently for several minutes with the supervisory authority in his head, which advised him strongly against doing something stupid in this state, as he passed a pleasantly colorful graffiti wall near the Kepler Bridge (on which a rat dressed in drag was painted, holding a long Saint Nicholas staff in its paw), he stopped a passerby and asked him to hold the telephone card for a moment and then give it back to him. No, no, just hold it first, you don't have to do anythingâ But the man recoiled from the strange offer and hurried away. Robert tried it a few yards farther on with a young woman who was walking with a stroller. In the stroller lay a baby with bluish, almost translucent skin. Like a fish dressed up as a baby. He explained to the frightened-looking woman what to do. And she did it, but she looked so intimidated and braced for disaster that the soothing effect wouldn't set in again. Annoyed, Robert took the telephone card out of her hand and walked on.
In his apartment the heating had switched off, and he left his coat on. One warm autumn day was all it took for the iBall, like his neighbor, to think it was the middle of summer. Wretched, poorly designed thing. Robert put the green and the red-checkered folders on the bed. He planned to stay awake a long time and study everything. But then he simply fell over from exhaustion, wriggled out of his coat while lying down, and slept for several hours, and in his dream a golden tuba was the only being who understood his language, which for some reason made him so sad that he awoke around three o'clock in the morning with tears in his eyes.
[RED-CHECKERED FOLDER]
At that time I first heard of the experiments by Dr. Harry Harlow. He was, it seemed to me, a doctor who was interested above all else in pain and suffering. In the sixties he performed various isolation experiments with rhesus monkeys. He compared, for example, a monkey who had grown up motherless with another monkey who had lived with his mother, locking each of them in a solitary cell, in which the little monkeys had nothing but food and a place to sleep. He kept them confined there for a year. Afterward he released them and examined them. Both monkeys showed clear symptoms of psychotic behavior, were scarcely capable of interaction, and soon died. Harlow repeated the same experiment again and again, until he finally achieved the result that confirmed his thesis: Even a happy childhood doesn't offer complete protection from depressionâan insight that had been known to the human race since the beginning of time and had never been called into question by anyone. I was quite upset when I read this story and had persistent hiccups for several days. I called the boarding school late in the evening, but I was told the girls were sleeping already and shouldn't be disturbed. Only if it were an emergency, they said, would it be possible. â No, no, I replied, it wasn't an emergency. And hung up.
(Moreira,
The First Three
, p. 44)
9.
Getuige X-1, Rue des Minimes
[GREEN FOLDER]
â No reason to be ashamed, Herr Ferenz said the next morning. It's in our nature.
â What do you mean?
â We're Europeans. We're capable of torturing people if that will make our headache better. I think something's wrong with us. Probably our genes. Hard to say what exactly went awry, or when. But maybe it was all the plagues we survived. We were the first to live in cities that were so filthy that soon a whole range of completely new diseases arose. Bacteria, viruses. We bred them, so to speak, in us, died of them in huge numbers, and only a few of us remained. And they then dragged the plagues into the New World, and the people over there nearly died out. That's how simple it was back then. But something's wrong with us, we're not quite right in the world. We don't fit in, nature is of no consequence to us. Maybe it's we who are the descendants of aliensâand not the Asians, as current theories claim.
â Asians? What theoryâ
â And that more robust body of our remote ancestors, whoever they were, has a
défaut du matériel
, so to speak. Hardware error. Our thoughts take strange paths. That results in a great deal of art. Yes, subversive art too, of course. But we would probably even sink a whole continent in the sea just to be a little bit less lonely. We like to hear people scream, for example. Don't you like to hear people scream?
â Me? No, I don't know . . . Definitely not, no.
â Where are you from, may I ask?
â I really don't understand what you're trying to tell me.
â Okay, said Herr Ferenz, raising his hand. It's fine. I didn't want to . . . But you're familiar with Dürer's angel, right?
â Angel . . . No, I don't know.
â But of course you're familiar with it, it's a famous image, the angel, who sits among all sorts of objects and rests her chin on her hand.
â
Melencolia?
â Yes. What would the angel do if she saw a man burning behind her? Or she sees on the horizon a man broken on the wheel, who is hanging between the spokes while vultures gnaw away at him? Or one of those cat sacrifices in the Middle Ages, where a live cat was . . . um . . . sewn intoâ
â Aaah, I said. Please don't.
Herr Ferenz laughed.
â Hold on, he said. I'm going to send this soon to Olivier in Bécs . . . May I show it to you?
â What is it?
â The consequences of a relocation, said Ferenz.
The mere fact that it was an old VHS cassette lent the whole thing a menacing air: No one had transferred the tape in all these years.
First only white stripes flickered, then the figure of a sitting child suddenly fell from above onto the screen. Over it floated the time code of a video camera counting minutes, seconds, and tenths of a second in white digits.
Herr Ferenz pressed pause. Shaky and blurred at the edges, dissolving in spectral colors like the toxic rainbows in oil puddles, the video image froze.
â Is everything all right? he asked.
â With me? Yes.
â
Vous saignez du nez
, he said with a smile.
I put my hand to my nose. A red dot on my finger.
â Thanks, I said, and attended to my nosebleed.
It was over right away, hardly worth mentioning.
The Lufthansa napkin I had pocketed yesterday on the plane absorbed a few red stains.
The head of the girl on the screen meanwhile jerked steadily downward, as if the creature captured on magnetic tape knew that it was trapped in a frozen image, but still absolutely had to try to escape. The pixels of the television screen gradually turned into grains of sand that vibrations caused to trickle down. The VCR was so old that it took energy and effort for it to hold the frozen image. Soon it would slip out of its grasp. The shaking and flickering increased, the colors at the edges became more psychedelic . . .
Herr Ferenz pressed play.
The suddenly restarting movement of the tape brought back three-dimensional space, I staggered a step forward.
â
Ãa va?
â I'm okay, I said.
A girl of about seven or eight sat in a somewhat strange posture on a chair. She squirmed this way and that, bent over her knees. Then I realized: The child was tied up.
â Okay, shut it off, I said, turning away.
â But . . .
â No, I can't watch this. It's too awful.
â Yes, it's awful, Herr Ferenz said softly. But you must know what kind of planet you've lived on for . . . for how many years?
â Huh?
â How old are you?
â Twenty-five.
â Well, then you know. But you see, here, nothing happens to the girl. She's just tie . . . tied . . . she's just stuck here, you see?
â Yes. Please, turn it off.
â But why?
â Because I can't stand it. It's horrible. Herr Ferenz pressed stop. The dark screen was such a blessing that I could take a deep breath and close my eyes for a moment.
â You don't want to see what happens?
â Can I sit down for a minute . . . ?
â
Mais oui, bien s
ûr
. . . Here.
He took a stack of old magazines off an armchair. I sat down and leaned my head back.
â Describe to me what happens, I said. I want to know, but I can't watch it.
â Why do you want me to tell you?
â It's . . . well, it's easier that way. I can't watch that girl be tortured.
â She isn't tortured.
â But she's tied up!
â Yes, but . . .
â That's torture! Who ties a child to a chair, in some . . . prison or wherever that was taped . . . It's sick, I mean, it's . . . Please, I can't watch something like that.
And because he was still staring at me blankly, I added in French, the language that must have affected him more deeply than German:
â
C'est atroce.
He nodded, put the remote control on the small table. Then he cleared his throat, waited a little while, and said:
â But you still want me to tell you?
â Well, I said, I have to know what happens.
â But how will you know that my version is true? If you don't see it with your own eyes, then you'll never be able to be certain. What if I leave something out? Or I don't remember all the details?
I couldn't look him directly in the eyes. On my knees I discovered smears of a white, powdery substance. Perhaps from a wall, crumbling plaster.
â I think you should watch it.
â I'm sorry, I can't.
When we were back on the street, Herr Ferenz spoke softly to me. He said he would like to do something nice for me. Some gesture. A favor. To make amends, so to speak. He hadn't meant to frighten me, he had thought that was why I had come to him. To see.
The sky was cloudy, the air smelled like just-fallen rain on asphalt. He could take me, Herr Ferenz offered, to parties where you had to sign confidentiality agreements to get in. Then he slapped me on the shoulder and laughed. He was just kidding.
Then he brought me to the club with the Flemish name Getuige X-1. It was a gloomy cellar, sparsely filled at this time of day (late morning). A sort of bouncer eyed us, but didn't budge.
The curtain went up, and a figure stepped onto the stage. To swinging Benny Goodman jazz it began to dance. Its legs looked normally developed, the face was that of a roughly thirty-year-old man. But where the upper body should be was almost nothing, just a shrunken stalk, similar to a thick neck. After the short dance performance, a man with a top hat came onstage, grabbed the figure by the neck, and carried it away, while it kept moving with an indifferent face.
There was restrained applause. A brief whistle rang out. I had leaned far forward to see how the trick worked. Herr Ferenz touched me on the shoulder:
â Okay, he said, I can tell you're worried. So I'd like to tell you . . . um, the following story: A mother, okay? Let's imagine a mother who knows that her existence is vital to her children. She is a single mother and has no one, no social support network. Okay. Her own well-being, her mental and physical health, are very important to her, because her children's lives depend on her. She is not permitted to be sick a single day of the year, or else chaos would break out. So she watches herself very closely, tends toward hypochondria, excessive cleanliness. One day an old acquaintance gets in touch, who once felt slighted and humiliated by her and now wants to take revenge on her. He threatens her, berates her. The mother, of course, automatically equates a threat to herself with a threat to her children, right? So she takes a paradoxical approach to the threat: She sends her children ahead, even leaves them alone with the unpredictable man. Because, as she tells herself, the children's chances of survival are considerably higher than hers, the man has no quarrel with the children. At most he could regard them as representatives for her, and even in that case there's still the possibility that he would take revenge on them only symbolically. Their wounds would definitely heal, whereas she would run the risk of being permanently damaged or even obliterated, if she came near the dangerous man. Prize question: Is the woman acting out of selfishness or not?
â What?
â Where did I lose you? Ferenz asked in a kind tone.
â Nowhere, I . . . Maybe we can go outside for a minute?
â
Sì, certo
, said Ferenz. It's in the back of the building anyway.
I followed him down a corridor that led past a kitchen, then came the bathrooms (stick figure man and rocket woman), finally we stepped through a door into an inner courtyard. On the opposite wall I saw two entrances, each with intercom and number pad. Between them a narrow metal door, on which a caution-electricity sign had been put up: a jagged arrow hitting a thickheaded stick figure in the belly. Herr Ferenz unlocked this door with a key that hung from a small silver UFO. Stairs leading up. The legs of a man standing on a higher step could be seen. He came down several steps until he was at street level.
He smiled when he recognized Ferenz, and greeted us. I raised my hand, because I was suddenly afraid to let the stranger hear my voice.
â
Combien?
asked Ferenz.
The man opened his hand and showed: five.
â
Et sur le toit?
Two fingers disappeared.
Herr Ferenz nodded.
Then he climbed the extremely narrow staircase. I followed him. The man turned away from me pointedly as I squeezed past him. When my face was for a brief moment very close to his, he even shielded his eyes with a hand.
â We'll go right up to the roof, said Herr Ferenz.
Having arrived on the roof, I had the sensation of being really close to the cloudy Brussels sky. It was astonishingly warm up here. In a corner sat three men. Cameras or something similar dangled around their necks. As I came closer to them, I realized that they were breathing masks.
The men were playing cards. On the floor next to them were three beer bottles. Blanche de Bruxelles. At some distance from them a few large toy cars stood around, dirty and faded from wind and rain. A little excavator, about the size of a rat, was missing all four tires. A police car lay on its side, as if after an accident.
â Taking a break, said Herr Ferenz, gesturing to the men.
They waved to him.
We went back into the narrow stairwell.
â What is this here? I asked.
â
Traitement sudorifique
, said Herr Ferenz.
â What does that mean?
â
Cure de transpiration
.
I saw what Ferenz meant. The man on the stairs was sweating quite profusely. He seemed to take no notice of us standing two steps above him and talking about him. His head was freshly shorn like that of a novice monk. On the back of his shirt a huge V-shaped sweat stain soaked through.
â Ah, fuck you, he said softly, and a shudder ran through his body.
He extended his arm and touched the wall with junkie-like crooked fingers. As if it were burning hot, he recoiled, brought the fingers quickly to his mouth, and sucked on them. I made an attempt to touch the wall myself. An ordinary, cool wall.
â
Voulez vous lui donner un coup de pied?
â What?
â Would you like to kick him?
â Why would I do that?
Herr Ferenz descended a step and touched the man gently on the head. The man winced and writhed as if he had been dealt a brutal blow. Then Herr Ferenz drew his arm back and punched him with all his might in the shoulder. The man seemed not even to notice the second blow, but instead kept moaning while holding the spot on his head, which clearly hurt a lot.
â That's the new delivery. There, behind the wall. Arrived yesterday morning. The early bird gets the worm. And I picked this out for him. Here.
Herr Ferenz showed me a little toy model of a cable car, still in the original packaging.
â Come back tomorrow, he said. Then we'll go in. In the tank.
In the hotel I lay in the bathtub and poured warm water with my cupped hand over my head. One scoop after another. After a while Julia called me and asked what was the matter. Without bothering to ask why and how she knew that something was wrong, I told her about the horrifying conversation with Ferenz, the bizarre stairwell, the model cable car in its original packaging, the video, and was concluding with a description of the impressive steel structure with the ravens yesterday in the park, when Julia interrupted me and said, at home an hour or so ago a somewhat distraught-sounding woman had called, whom she had at first not even understood.
Gudrun Stennitzer.
â Okay, I'll call her right back.
â Yes, do that.
â I'll be home the day after tomorrow, I murmured, before I said goodbye to Julia.
I called the number. Roaming charges, I thought wearily.
â Hello?
â Frau Stennitzer, how are you doing?