Indigo (39 page)

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 depression—an 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. – No, no, I replied, it wasn't an emergency. And hung up.

9.
Getuige X-1, Rue des Minimes

[GREEN FOLDER]

– No reason to be ashamed, Herr Ferenz said the next morning. It's in our nature.

– What do you mean?

– 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 aliens—and not the Asians, as current theories claim.

– Asians? What theory—

– 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?

– Me? No, I don't know . . . Definitely not, no.

– Where are you from, may I ask?

– I really don't understand what you're trying to tell me.

– Okay, said Herr Ferenz, raising his hand. It's fine. I didn't want to . . . But you're familiar with Dürer's angel, right?

– Angel . . . No, I don't know.

– 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.

–
Melencolia?

– 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 into—

– Aaah, I said. Please don't.

Herr Ferenz laughed.

– Hold on, he said. I'm going to send this soon to Olivier in Bécs . . . May I show it to you?

– What is it?

– 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.

– Is everything all right? he asked.

– With me? Yes.

–
Vous saignez du nez
, he said with a smile.

I put my hand to my nose. A red dot on my finger.

– 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.

–
Ça va?

– 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.

– Okay, shut it off, I said, turning away.

– But . . .

– No, I can't watch this. It's too awful.

– 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?

– Huh?

– How old are you?

– Twenty-five.

– 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?

– Yes. Please, turn it off.

– But why?

– 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.

– You don't want to see what happens?

– Can I sit down for a minute . . . ?

–
Mais oui, bien s
ûr
. . . Here.

He took a stack of old magazines off an armchair. I sat down and leaned my head back.

– Describe to me what happens, I said. I want to know, but I can't watch it.

– Why do you want me to tell you?

– It's . . . well, it's easier that way. I can't watch that girl be tortured.

– She isn't tortured.

– But she's tied up!

– Yes, but . . .

– 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:

–
C'est atroce.

He nodded, put the remote control on the small table. Then he cleared his throat, waited a little while, and said:

– But you still want me to tell you?

– Well, I said, I have to know what happens.

– 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.

– I think you should watch it.

– 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:

– 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?

– What?

– Where did I lose you? Ferenz asked in a kind tone.

– Nowhere, I . . . Maybe we can go outside for a minute?

–
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.

–
Combien?
asked Ferenz.

The man opened his hand and showed: five.

–
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.

– 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.

– Taking a break, said Herr Ferenz, gesturing to the men.

They waved to him.

We went back into the narrow stairwell.

– What is this here? I asked.

–
Traitement sudorifique
, said Herr Ferenz.

– What does that mean?

–
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.

– 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.

–
Voulez vous lui donner un coup de pied?

– What?

– Would you like to kick him?

– 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.

– 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.

– 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.

– Okay, I'll call her right back.

– Yes, do that.

– 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.

– Hello?

– Frau Stennitzer, how are you doing?