Indigo (44 page)

When we leave the man's room, F. stops me, he puts his hand on my shoulder and applies gentle pressure. What you have just seen, he says to me, is a great man. A truly great man. What he was willing to take on—and still takes on—is simply unprecedented. You won't find anything like that again anytime soon, wherever you might look for it, Herr Seyss.

[POSTCARD OF A CHEERFULLY SMILING DOG IN A SPACE CAPSULE. BLOCK WRITING ON THE BACK]

Christmas, heavy whirling snow outside the windows. The attempt to put up the wretched plastic tree. The smell of the wood and the fir needles used to stimulate me, but this odorless plastic piece of shit I'd like more than anything else to throw right back out the window. I break off one of the artificial branches and use it as a cat toy.

[2 PAGES WRITTEN BY HAND]

See article on woman from Great Britain who was convinced that her child was an I-child. Today it has been proven beyond doubt that the child didn't possess the ill effects at all. Nonetheless, it took six whole years for the truth to come to light, beforehand the child was treated as an I-child, was alone most of the time, a doctor came once a week and performed his examinations within a few minutes, literally rushing through them (and complained afterward of a headache). The woman continued to confine the child even beyond the age of six, because she could still feel the effects, the attacks of pain and vertigo were not impressed with the scientific evidence, but instead only worsened, because no one would believe her. She knew, she was firmly convinced that her daughter was an I-child, whose presence was gradually destroying her. She flatly rejected any other explanation of her physical afflictions. Ultimately the youth welfare office had to intervene, and there was a trial, at the end of which the mother was permitted to keep the child but had to undergo therapy and allow regular unannounced inspections by the responsible authorities in her home.

This case had, it turned out, a strange consequence. First it of course sparked debate about whether many Indigo cases might not be based on pure imagination. The unscientific concept of mysterious effects at a distance was again cited, the inadequately performed examinations and experiments, the general suggestibility of people. All old arguments. But then the debate took a surprising turn, a series of articles appeared in the
Guardian
(“Voices from the Void,” May 1–11, 2005) in which parents were interviewed who had been convicted of child abuse. And many of them suddenly mentioned reasons for their inexcusable behavior that brought I-symptoms to mind. A thirty-nine-year-old man who had stuffed both of his just one-and-a-half-year-old twin sons in a washing machine and left them confined there for twenty-four hours (though without turning on the machine) claimed he felt inwardly fine when he was at work or out and about,
no problems whatsoever
, but as soon as he had come home and seen his wife there, who spent her time exclusively with the two new housemates, he had become angry,
physically angry
, the anger had struck him like lightning in the sinuses and he hadn't known where he was or what he was doing. A woman from Leeds who had been accused of gross neglect of her daughter and sentenced to two years' probation said that she had had to defend herself against the tinnitus that she got whenever her daughter approached her and asked her for something, such as a pair of socks.

This dark debate soon spilled over into other countries. In September a similar series of interviews with violent and convicted parents appeared in the weekly magazine
Stern
. And suddenly there were apologists of parental violence everywhere, but the truly remarkable thing

[COMPUTER PRINTOUT, FOLDED TWICE]

Bartleby the scrivener—there's not just the one, there are many of his kind, many, many Bartlebys. In the strangest occupations and areas of life. There is, for example, the mysterious case of a torturer in the notorious Kampuchean prison S-21. In that building, which had previously housed a school, tens of thousands of people died at the hands of approximately fifteen hundred torturers. One of them, a man known by the name of Ek, supposedly refused outright one day to perform the torture. He sat next to the prisoner, from whom he was first to extract a confession with electric shocks, immersion for several minutes in ice-cold water, or cruel surgical procedures, and whom he was then to murder, and repeated mechanically one and the same sentence, he would do nothing more, nothing more, never again. Only a few weeks later was this discovered, and he too was imprisoned. But not even that could stop the man from saying the never-changing sentence. It is said that a former colleague ultimately took pity on him and killed him by high-voltage electrocution.

[AN ENVELOPE LABELED
CLARIFICATION.
THE ONLY ONE IN THE FOLDER. CONTENTS: SEVERAL LOOSE SHEETS OF PAPER, CLOSELY WRITTEN]

On the cable car a migraine attack announced itself. Since my childhood I've suffered from such recurring attacks, most of the time they're accompanied by distorted vision, scotomas, and hallucinations. Lights appear at the edge of my visual field and constantly change their form and intensity, or blind spots emerge and swallow objects on the periphery. A vase on a table is invisible from a certain angle, the hole in my visual field is simply painted over the color of the table by my brain: an empty table. Reading and speaking become difficult, words remain recognizable but appear as their internal anagrams, Sunday, for example, looks like Sudnay, even when I examine the word letter by letter, I simply can't find the mistake and suddenly know that I'm inside a migraine aura. It's a strange world, a parallel universe, in which you can go through doors that are afterward no longer in their former place. You pronounce a word, and it's the wrong color. Or you look at a tree and discover geometries in the arrangement of its branches.

– Open it, said the man with the pince-nez on his nose.

I opened the envelope and took out the photo. A shot of an empty room. Only a table stood in it. On it a cactus in a flower pot.

I gave back the picture. My hand had begun to tremble. The wind whistled around the stationary gondola. In the distance the twinkling lights of Gillingen in the evening. In the gondolas in front of and behind us, unreachable, rocked the others.

– We're offering you a trade, Herr Seitz.

A vibration passed through the gondola. Below us trees, a slope.

– You'll get what you've always wanted.

He pulled something out of his backpack and handed it to me. One very thin and one somewhat thicker packet of paper.

– It's not exactly Fontane, but you'll discover that you'd rather take
this
path than waste awa . . . waste any more time on the one you're on now. Because this path leads nowhere, Herr Seitz.

– Exactly which path do you mean?

A creak in the massive steel cables from which we hung.

– Here, take a look at this manuscript. Generic stuff, basically. But well done. Really good simulation. What do you think of the title?

– Sounds strange.

– Yeah, doesn't it? That works well, these days. You think of family, the battle of the generations, things like that. It's deceptive packaging, of course, stuck-together pieces that don't really belong together. A jumble, but it's already been accepted. It's yours. If you want it.

– I . . . I wrote my thesis in mathematics on a similar topic . . .

– Right, yeah, yeah, yeah . . . You're a math teacher, yes . . . And why aren't you working in your field anymore?

– I broke off my internship.

The wind howled around the gondola. Inside it was as warm as in late summer.

– To devote yourself to other activities?

– Can I leave?

– Of course you can. Anyone can do that. It's like breathing.

Pause.

– That means you're finished?

– No, it doesn't mean that, Herr Seitz. I still have here these two manuscripts. Are you cold? Now, you see, you'll definitely want to begin with this one here. It's shorter and more powerful. This second one here . . . well, heavy shit. Two lunatics from Vienna pounded it out in a couple weeks. But quality work nonetheless.

I sighed. The gondola at that moment began moving again.

– Am I boring you, Herr Seitz?

– No. But I'd like to get off. Can I do that?

– Of course you can. You know, Herr Seitz. If someone tells you that you can no longer leave, no longer speak, or no longer breathe . . . you understand? Then that someone is not your friend. Then you should avoid him.

2.
The Cemetery in Gillingen

In the church everyone stared upward. Their posture was reminiscent of that of a cat sitting under a tree and keeping its eyes on an unreachable bird. A priest had come from the next town, having declared himself willing to bury Christoph Stennitzer, who had died
under such sad circumstances
. Even though Frau Stennitzer's father had paid a special visit to the Gillingen priest, spoken to him for a long time, and even left some bottles of wine with him, the old clergyman had not thought himself capable of celebrating the Mass. A young man who had hanged himself, while all around him the flames of his little house blazed . . .

Frau Stennitzer's lower lip hid under her front teeth. She didn't say a word when I greeted her and offered her my condolences. In general she scarcely responded to the chances to interact provided by her environment, only now and then she touched her father's arm, as if she were trying to tell him:
Stop. Stop speaking.
Even though the baldheaded man with the brown gloves wasn't saying anything at all.

Frau Stennitzer's body seemed heavy, as if filled with sand. People needed both hands to shake hers.

When all the mourners had left the church, I introduced myself to Christoph's grandfather. He gave me his hand, without taking off the gloves. Then he nodded and said he understood where I was coming from.

I didn't know what to say, so I nodded too.

Christoph and the family, that had always been a problem, said the old man, taking off his jacket. He was sweating. The day was hot. Once he himself had been threatened by teenagers from the town.

– From a distance, they even shot at us, with blank guns or something like that. Insanely loud, those things. And the one guy was wearing one of those NBC protective suits, so we thought it must actually be Wernreich Benni, from up there. Because his father's in the army.

With that the old man walked away.

Countryside funerals on hot summer days have something particularly intense and distressing about them. People are constantly wiping the sweat from their foreheads and the corners of their eyes, the sleeves of the much-too-warm black mourning clothes are rolled up, but not so far that it would really bring relief and cooling, because that could appear disrespectful. No one wants to signal that his own physical feeling, the heat permeating him, is harder to bear than the pain over the loss of a loved one. The high temperatures make the mourners at once sluggish and impatient; even glances become monosyllabic. The priest in the church speaks with fervor, because here it's still cool, and he savors it for as long as possible. Then, outside, behind the coffin, on the way to the cemetery, the orderly rows of two quickly disperse, the people stay behind, have to retie their shoelaces. Whoever has a hat puts it back on—he won't take it off again until he steps in front of the grave and, as a sign of his reverence, endures the merciless sun bareheaded.

The procession passes hedges and quiet, fenced-in orchards. A sharp smell of charcoal, mixed with something else, possibly incense, is in the air. Insects whir around the cortege, are waved away, buzz sluggishly and stubbornly among the people marching uphill in a stooped posture.

I was sweating all over my body, the dissolution begins in the pores, liquefaction, but I didn't dare to drink from the mineral water bottle I brought along, the gesture could have come across as impious. In the hot season the feeling of literally belonging to the earth, of having been built out of its planetary chemical supplies, is much stronger and more convincing. The winter with its cold, white scalpel severs thoughts like that from the body, the person turns into a ghost drifting through the snowy landscape, hidden under many layers of warm clothing, and I find it hard to imagine what physical sensation I would have if I had to do without this existential cooling that once a year grants me two or three peaceful months.

– Herr Setz, I'd really like to say something to you.

– Of course. Go ahead.

Frau Stennitzer came very close to me. Her eyes avoided mine, she stared at my belly. Then she raised her head for a moment and squinted as if my face were a too-bright lightbulb.

– You have to understand one thing, she said. I'm not sure whether you can really comprehend it. I'm grateful to you. For . . .

She closed her eyes as if it were too painful to utter the word. In its place she made a writing gesture with her hand.

– People here read your articles, of course, she said. Everyone read them. And a few other journalists were here afterward, not only because of the cable car, and . . . well, do you still remember the spot in my yard, Herr Setz?

– In your yard?

– The cone.

– Ah, yes, of course.

– At the time I explained to you how permission for a bur . . . a funer . . .

She couldn't go on. Her lower lip tried to escape from her face.

I reached for her shoulder, but she backed away.

– I'm grateful to you, she said with a cold, deeply hurt voice. You have absolutely no idea how grateful. Your articles . . . even the mayor . . .

Again she went silent. Then she looked to the side, breathed in through her mouth, brushed a strand of hair from the corner of her mouth, and said:

– Everyone came. I didn't even have to send out invitations. Thanks to you, Herr Setz. Thanks to you and your . . . articles.