Indigo (6 page)

Then five children were presented to the woman, among whom she actually claimed to pick out one with a bluish tinge to his aura. Since no one else in the studio could see this color, of course, a second test was done: The woman was blindfolded, and the same children were presented to her again. This time the woman said that with no. 3 she felt a stabbing headache. Even though child no. 3 was not the same one she had originally identified, this experiment was somehow judged a success, at least the audience clapped enthusiastically for a long time, and a few magazines published articles on the strange bat woman.

In early 2003, when the—as Frau Häusler-Zinnbret put it—problem had become acute, people everywhere began speaking of Indigo children, even though this name was criticized in esoteric circles.

– The Messmer study particularly bothered them, said Frau Häusler-Zinnbret. Me too, to be honest. Probably all of us, or . . . well . . .

She put the fan down, picked up her book, and leafed through it. When she found the page she was looking for, she turned the book around and showed it to me. A diagram with various categories: self-esteem, interpersonal skills, group dynamic behavior, and so on, twenty-four items in all. And next to them an elegant bell curve, the helmet that nature wears to protect itself from anomalies.

– Yes, we were a little disappointed too. The pure steel of Scapa Flow, which remained untouched by world affairs, yeah, that didn't appear to be the case, unfortunately. Wishful thinking. I basically knew that already at the time I wrote it, but it's a great story and a good opening for a book, so . . . yeah, the study had a particularly negative effect on the parents' hopes, of course.

I began to copy the bell curve from the page into my notebook.

– Take it as a gift, okay?

Frau Häusler-Zinnbret gave the book a slight push toward me.

– That's really nice of you. Thank you very much.

– Pure selfishness. Otherwise you'd quote from the first edition, which really isn't up-to-date.

– Okay, I said. So was that study to blame for the failure of the school project for affected children that had been planned in Riegersdorf?

– The tunnel project. Well, that fell through due to many factors.

She picked up the fan again, moved her face back and forth in the gentle current of air. A wisp of hair fluttered behind her ear.

– Really? But the study appeared at around the same time, in late 2005. By that point, the building permits for the complex and the tunnel systems had already been issued, and the subsidies had been approved. Despite all that, nothing happened. Of course, you get conflicting information, but as far as I can gather, the Riegersdorf Indigo school project was called off, right?

– Yes, possibly. It's so easy to lose track.

My only real question thrust itself forward. It had waited long enough and wanted to be asked now. I let a moment of pre-explosive emptiness pass before I began to speak.

– One question, Frau Häusler. While I was working at the institute, some students moved away in the middle of the school year and afterward it was very difficult or impossible to—

– Yes?

– And once I saw one of the kids, a certain Max Schaufler, being picked up by a man. And he, that is, Max, he . . . well, he was dressed up as a chimney sweep. Like, with a sooty face and . . . I don't know, I asked Dr. Rudolph, of course, but he said only that he had been
relocated
. And that he was no longer tolerable for the institute.

– And?

A brief pause.

– Well, isn't that strange? I said. I mean, I've never seen anything like it before, it was really eerie, that getup.

– That's often done, she gently interjected. Wearing costumes helps children deal with a difficult situation. I assume that that was a traumatic moment for the d . . . for this, what was the name? Max? Well, for the student.

– Okay, but—

– You often see it in cemeteries, at funerals. A child with makeup on. Dressed up as a cat or . . . or wearing a funny hat. You see it often.

– All right, it's not so much the costume I'm wondering about, but more the fact that so many students at the institute were transferred or . . .

– Relocated?

– Yes.

– I can't tell you anything about that, Herr Setz. But I'll write down for you someone you could visit. The woman was once in treatment with me. After the birth of her son. Single mother. Inding . . . Indigo kid. Depressive. The whole package. She lives in southern Styria.

She reached for her electronic organizer and searched for the entry. Then she wrote all the information on a piece of paper.
Gudrun Stennitzer. Son: Christoph. Glockenhofweg 1, 8910 Gillingen.
Under that a cell phone number. Frau Häusler-Zinnbret continued to fan herself. Her face had begun to shine a little.

– I know, former patients' information, usually . . . (She made a movement as if she were waving away several flies.) But it's okay. She really likes to talk about the topic. She had her son home-schooled
because of it.
Because of the problem. Which is, of course, quite common in the di . . . in the community, as you can imagine.

– What problem? That of the relocations?

Fan movements, bobbing strands of hair. Then she exhaled and said softly, with a slight shake of her head:

– Chimney sweep,
ts
. . . But who knows, well, Frau Stennitzer will probably be happy if you visit her and mention her in your article. She likes to interact, you know. With other people and such. Does her good too, internally and externally.

– Okay. Thank you very much.

– Would you like another glass of water, Herr Setz?

– No, thanks. Just one last question.

She laughed.

– Sorry, she said. But you just grabbed your forehead like Columbo. When you said that. Hahaha.

– Have you ever heard of Ferenz?

She stopped moving the fan and held it next to her face as if she needed a third ear to understand what I wanted from her.

– Excuse me?

– The name. Ferenz.

– That's a game, she said. As far as I know.

A short pause.

– Yes, Frau Häusler-Zinnbret said again. A game.

– A game?

– Yes.

– Like musical chairs?

– Something like that.

The fan began to move slightly.

– Thank God I don't work with I-families anymore, said Frau Häusler-Zinnbret. All that's behind me.

– May I ask why you stopped?

She folded the fan and put it on the table in front of her.

– The mothers, she said. The mothers more than anything else. There's only so much of that you can take, you know. Those dark rings under the eyes, the crooked fingers, the matted and unwashed hair, those accusatory lips, which always tremble a little, burnt-out, burnt-out, and then the absurd notions they have . . . Well, all right, they can't help it, of course, they want their kids to do as well as other, normal kids. But you can stand those mothers for only so long. The way they sit there and talk about nothing but their exhaustion . . . and that suffering tone they always adopt, probably only women can do that.

She laughed.

– No, she added, I've also met enough young fathers who were a nervous wreck. But, of course, the kids themselves were too. That cold, distant . . . The way they endure everything, no matter what you do to them, that . . .

She looked again at my empty glass and asked a second time:

– You really wouldn't like another . . . ?

– No, thanks, I said. What else did you want to say about the I-kids?

– You've met them yourself.

– Well, only from a distance.

She laughed.

– I-kids, she repeated, that sounds so harmless . . . They have no compassion. I mean, the burnt-out cases, they can occasionally regenerate a little over time, but the others . . . drift farther and farther out in their space capsule.

She fell silent. I waited for her to go on.

– Well, it's nice, Frau Häusler-Zinnbret finally said, that you've actually read up on the subject a bit before you came to me. A lot of visitors don't, you know. But I receive them all, of course, without exception, unless they get really impertinent. I mean, really, truly impertinent. But that rarely happens, thank God.

She leaned forward and picked up the book she had offered me as a gift. From the side pocket of her knitted vest she pulled a pen. She opened to the first page.

– Shall I inscribe it for you . . . ?

Because I didn't know how to respond to that, I just nodded and closed my notebook. Frau Häusler-Zinnbret wrote a dedication, affixed a bold signature somewhat reminiscent of Spirograph designs, and then asked me the date.

– Today is the . . . ?

– Twenty-first.

She wrote the date, inexplicably blew on the page, and presented me with the gift.

– Thank you very much.

– As you can see, cursive has certain advantages, she said, gesturing to her signature. You should practice it. Half an hour or just ten minutes a day, it makes no difference, as long as you really do it every day.

– All right.

I stood up. We shook hands.

Frau Häusler-Zinnbret accompanied me to the door, this time it was the other one. Her apartment had, as I now realized, separate entrance and exit doors, like a supermarket or a hall of mirrors at a carnival.

Outside the sky was so blue that you could hear a pin drop in it.

Two Truths

After the conversation with the child psychologist I flipped a bit through the book she had given me, the new edition of her standard work. I had borrowed the out-of-date version from the university library. I had photocopied some interesting pages and put them in my red-checkered folder.

The new edition differed only slightly from the earlier one. The tone seemed in some places somewhat sterner, and there was an expanded appendix in which Frau Häusler-Zinnbret provided a sort of overview of her previous studies. In her typical vivid and illustrative style she writes:

A lone bust of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin stares into the polar night. The monument is located on the so-called southern pole of inaccessibility, the geographic point of the Antarctic farthest from the coastline (about 500 miles from the South Pole). A few buildings of a Soviet research station used to stand around the statue, now it is all by itself. It faces north, i.e., toward Moscow. The bust itself stands on the chimney of a hut now completely submerged in snow, in which a few ghosts of the past might still be living, bent in endless discussion over antiquated world maps . . . As in the case of this lone bust, when we consider phenomena such as
dingo pride
or the call for an
uncivilized solution
to the Indigo problem, we are always confronted with two competing truths. The evolutionary truth (the invisible, submerged foundation) has largely shaped the European cityscape: exclusion and custody of the sick, contagious, abnormal, etc. Similar to the way meerkats deal with a sick member of their species who might endanger the successful progress of the clan, by joining forces to bite it to death or simply leaving it behind. Sick cats withdraw to die alone, because there's no other way to carry out this process anyhow. Evolutionary truth thus intends for some of the population to die in order to make possible the existence of the rest. Human truth (the visible head) says: Everyone must survive, or rather: Everyone has the right to survive. It's pointless to ask: Why? The question cannot be answered, except with auxiliaries like compassion and the avoidance of pain. The reason lies in our brain, which can identify with and empathize with everything, particularly the things it has to protect itself from: sickness, suffering, and death. It's a strange consequence of the evolutionary cultivation of our cognition, our capacity to have a nuanced sense of other existences, that a way of thinking emancipated from evolutionary logic has necessarily developed: human morality, which coincides in only a few points with evolutionary logic (e.g., in the isolation of people with highly infectious diseases, the containment of epidemics, etc.).

An anecdotal refrain of our time is that I-children lack that very ability to put themselves in others' shoes or have learned to suppress it. The evidence for that assumption might be everywhere, right under our noses, so to speak—and yet up to now no one has seen it, let alone managed to derive any benefit from it.

I bent over the page to better make out the tiny photo of the strange bust. An odd smell rose from the book. I inhaled carefully. Disinfectant.

The smell evoked a memory . . . The infirmary at the Helianau Institute a few weeks ago. Minutes after my feigned fall outside Dr. Rudolph's open office door.
The horror, the horror
.

A warm spring day outside the windows. Inside the building the air is stuffy, large heavy casements that are never opened, in every nook and cranny the sharp smell of fresh lacquer and the aggressive floor-cleaning products that are apparently spread each weekend by a cleaning crew with breathing masks in the corridors of the three stories.