Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

Somewhere in the growing distance, Julia rolls onto her other side and sighs in her sleep because the narrow room is slowly growing too warm for her. When Schilf thinks about her, about the soft-skinned being heavy with sleep in his bed, who quite naturally spends the day tidying his apartment and reading his books and glows with cheerfulness all the time like a puppy, his stomach contracts with a mixture of fear and happiness. He does not believe in the redeeming power of love, and therefore does not plan to connect his desire to live with the tingle in his stomach. Nevertheless, he does not want to die—so far he has gotten no further than this with his musings. The only thing certain is that Schilf and the detective must hurry at all costs if they still want anything in particular from each other.

AFTER CHANGING TRAINS IN KARLSRUHE, the detective decides to put his musings aside. From his bag he takes a leather pouch, and from this a matte-silver object no bigger than a pack of cards. His new girlfriend has given it to him. She thinks the game of kings suits him and that if someone were to write a book about him one day, he could be the chess-playing detective, just like Sherlock Holmes was the violin-playing detective. Schilf refrained from pointing out that Holmes was not really a detective and that the violin was not a game of strategy, and accepted the gift with thanks. When he presses the “on” button, the display lights up in shades of blue like a new day dawning. Schilf learned the rules of chess thirty years ago from a friend at school, without mustering any enthusiasm for the game. But he has hardly been able to put down the electronic game since he received it. This pleases Julia. She perches on the side of his armchair looking over his shoulder while he taps away at the blue screen, and her hair tickles him until he has lost and goes out for a meal with her.

The game that was interrupted the previous evening appears at the touch of a button. It is the detective’s turn, as always. The computer never needs more than a couple of seconds to make its move, but he takes half an hour over every one of his. It waits patiently for him. He is unable to work out the simplest algorithm in his head, so he ties himself into knots with his calculations until he finally makes an incredibly clumsy move after rallying himself to “just give it a go.” The gadget lets him make his own fateful mistakes, so at the end he is plagued by the feeling that he has not been beaten but has checkmated himself.

At Offenburg, Schilf’s bishop embarks on a daring attack on the queenside, which he feels he has prepared for by advancing a phalanx of pawns. His little soldiers have marched determinedly against the enemy and are now looking the opposing queen full in the face. Just for fun, Schilf imagines that she has Rita Skura’s face. In the background, a couple of agitated officers are occupied with a plan that is too cunning for their own good. It has not fooled any grandmasters. It has also never worked.

Schilf’s army is literally fighting for its life when the train arrives in Freiburg. On the platform, waiting passengers drop their bags and press their hands to their ears. An infernal screeching of brakes suspends time for three whole seconds. The detective gathers himself and his things quickly.

As he shuffles along next to his greenish reflection on the long row of train windows, he asks himself for the umpteenth time why he plays chess against a stronger opponent as if his life depended on it, without ever once pressing the button to reverse a mistake. In real life he would reverse any number of mistakes without hesitation. He would have given the most personal match of his life—which ended with the fracture, a disastrous checkmate—a new twist. Perhaps the “touch-move” rule applies less to chess than to character, thought the detective , thinks the detective.

AT THE END OF THE PLATFORM, a woman in a flowery dress and a cardigan is waiting for a cup of coffee from the drinks machine. She does not bother to turn around.

“Schilf. Congratulations on your promotion.”

Rita Skura watches the final drops of coffee drip into her cup, giving Schilf enough time to recover from his shock. She takes the cup from the drip tray and sips from it before extending her right paw to the detective, a gesture that in defiance of several thousand years of cultural history has something threatening about it. She grabs the straps of his bag and tries to take it from him, but he resists indignantly. They tug back and forth a few times until Rita Skura suffers the first defeat of the day, as is evident from the look in her eyes. They walk side by side without another word. Secretly the detective steals a glance at his former student: the deep furrow above the bridge of her nose and the pursed lips, with which she sips from the cup as she walks. He is glad to see her again. At the police college he liked her ambition, her chin quivering constantly with tension, a testament to how seriously she took the world around her—it was rather touching. He almost envied her sincerity then. When he looks at her furrowed brow, he is nearly sorry that he had destroyed her childish trust in appearances with a single piece of advice. He had not remembered how short she was. Her bouffant hair barely reaches his shoulder.

Rita Skura takes long strides, and the skirt of her flowery dress swings around her legs like a sail whipping in a storm. She overtakes him on the steps up to the pedestrian bridge and waits at the top, visibly pleased at the opportunity to look down on him.

“Miss your train?” she asks. “Didn’t get out of bed on time?”

“Delay tactics,” the first detective chief superintendent pants as he walks up the steps. “To prolong the anticipation.”

Rita snorts derisively. She has waited on the platform for an hour and God knows she has no time to waste. When Schilf reaches the top step, she looks at him properly for the first time. Her gaze flits over him with an expression of suppressed rage. The detective wonders why she is not pretty, why all the female qualities in her do not make a pretty woman, but simply Rita Skura. The veins on the backs of her hands are prominent and look like satellite images of deltas in the Amazon River, but that cannot be the reason. She tosses the coffee cup into a trash can decisively, pinching her nose with the other hand at the same time to clear her ears. As if she is crashing in an airplane, Schilf thinks, feeling a ripping sensation in the cortex of his brain, going from his left temple down to his ear. The two of us have arrived in this world like seasick fish, he thinks, but he does not know what this means. He reaches for the knob on the handrail and closes his eyes as the pain rises and swells. He hears the people behind him cursing as they have to maneuver past, and he sees Rita slipping her foot out of her flat shoe and wiggling her toes to rearrange the holes in her stocking. But he cannot actually see anything with his eyes closed, and Rita Skura is not wearing stockings.

Schilf tears his eyes open again and stares Rita Skura in the face, shocked because what she is saying comes through to him only after some delay. Her lips are moving like those of an actress in a badly dubbed film.

“You don’t have to act the invalid with me,” she says. “I know you better than that.”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” he gasps in reply.

The headache disappears as quickly as it arrived. Schilf wipes the sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve. Rita stares at him with knitted brows, turns abruptly, and walks on, shoveling air aside with both arms. Schilf has to make an effort to keep up with her. At the station exit he insists on having a sandwich, not knowing whether he is really hungry or simply wants to annoy his colleague. He will find out that these feelings are astonishingly similar.