Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

Schilf will address Maike with the formal Sie , ask her questions, and not reveal the tightening in his throat. He can’t speak clearly anyway.

I’ve got nothing against emotions, but they really don’t have to hit me with full force every time, the detective thought , the detective thinks.

“Why are you looking at me so strangely?” Maike asks.

“I’m watching you exist.”

“Who are you?”

“Schilf,” says Schilf.

“He says he knows Sebastian,” the redhead explains, disappearing into the gallery.

Maike raises her eyebrows, astonished. “Just don’t tell me any bad news.”

“It’s about paintings,” the detective assures her hastily.

Maike’s eyebrows return to their usual place. “I’ll just quickly give the birds their water.”

They walk by the aviary together. Another parakeet uses its curved beak to climb down a pole at the side of the cage. It stops level with Schilf’s face. Its cheeks are adorned with two red circles like over-applied rouge.

“Can they talk?”

“Not in our language.”

“This morning I spoke to a parrot in town.”

“That must have been Agfa. Look out, look out ?”

It is a good opportunity for them to smile at each other, but Maike does not use it. She pushes the nozzle of a watering can through the bars of the cage and fills the water dish.

“What’s he called?”

“He’s a cockatiel parakeet, from the cockatoo family.”

“I mean, what’s his name?”

The bird in front of Schilf’s face has finished his assessment and climbs farther down the cage to nibble at the peanuts. Maike pauses for a second before she answers.

“He’s called Ralph.”

“And those two there”—Schilf points quickly at a couple kissing on a perch—“they’re in love, aren’t they?”

“They’re both male. They’re kissing to stimulate their brains and their gonads.”

“Is that what male friendships are good for?”

“Among cockatiels, yes,” Maike says, unmoved.

Beneath her light eyelashes, her eyes are slightly puffy and stiff, as if she has forgotten how to blink. Expressionless, she looks the detective in the face.

“Let’s go inside,” she says. “We can talk about paintings there.”

The two chairs that Maike leads them toward are in the middle of the room, and too far apart for a proper conversation. They are red, and twisted into themselves, so that the back supports not the spine of the person sitting on it, but their right shoulder instead. Schilf sees the creative urge of the designer floating around the chairs like a colored cloud, and sits down only with some effort. He is unable to find a suitable posture. Finally he leans forward with his elbows resting on his knees, like a hooligan at a bus stop. He puffs out his cheeks when he sees that Maike has crossed her legs elegantly on her contorted chair, and thus turned herself into the most beautiful of all her works of art. A giant photograph covers the wall behind her. Although it contains no recognizable objects, Schilf knows immediately what it depicts. A crossroads at night, taken with an exposure of a few hours.

Schilf doesn’t have a clue about visual art; only in a moment of insanity could he pretend he was a serious buyer. Sweat trickles through his hair down onto his neck. The way Maike is sitting in front of him—unapproachable, hyper-real, radiating coolness like the canal in front of her house—she is the only work in this room that Schilf would like to acquire on the spot, chair and all. He would display her in his apartment. She would never be allowed to move or talk, certainly not while he was at home, anyway. No wonder Sebastian loves her, the detective thinks. Questions about the laws of nature pale into insignificance next to a woman like Maike. She would be present in every imaginable parallel universe, and always herself.

Maike is also looking at a bright red, sinfully expensive Girome chair, not with a work of art on it, but with a shapeless, sweating person who is casting her strange glances. In her head, a dead Ralph Dabbelink and a kidnapped Liam are struggling to expand themselves into something that could explode any minute. Maike is a victim—she has done nothing other than go on vacation. She is guilty only of being away for a few days, at the end of which she had to witness her husband turn first into a stranger, then into a monster who shouted at her, grabbed her by the shoulders, and threw her to the floor. The fight happened barely three hours ago, but has already become unthinkable to her. She has reckoned with a disaster of some kind, but one she could point to, not a situation in which she could no longer understand a single word in her own language. The list of the most terrible days in her life has begun to grow—each consecutive day will push the one before it out of pole position, and Maike senses that this will go on for a while.

The man in the Girome chair is sweating as if he wished to dissolve into water and then disappear from the surface of the earth. He is sweating too hard for a collector and certainly too much for a normal art lover looking for a deal. Only his eyes are cool. Maike sees something unapproachable in them, hyper-real, a reflection of the most beautiful of all works of art, which this man would buy on the spot if he could. This work of art is she herself. As she returns his gaze, she grows calmer and calmer, almost as if she is approaching an inner death without any fear of dying. She can hold this gaze longer than he can. She will not blink for all eternity. She has the form that is always able to outlast the content.

“How can I help you?”

Maike’s question comes out perfectly. The redhead is sitting at a desk by the entrance, wearing a pair of large glasses and flipping through a file in slow motion. The detective shifts his weight on the chair. His next position, with one arm resting on the too-high back, is just as uncomfortable as his first.

“I’ve come about Blackmail I and II .”

Maike’s face is a blank surface. “You’ve been to my apartment?”

“Just briefly.”

“Strange that you mention those paintings.”

The voices of the parakeets come through the door from the courtyard—they are starting to comment on the scene. Maike crosses her legs the other way.

“When I came back from vacation today, there was a water stain in the shape of a hand on the wall next to Blackmail I and II .”

Schilf does not reply. He noticed the stain.

“My husband threw a vase against the wall because… Excuse me.” Maike shakes her head. Her lips begin to stretch into a smile for the first time. “It’s not a good day. Signs everywhere.”

The smile spreads and makes the detective’s heart lurch.

“There’s a sad story behind those pictures. The world is full of them.”

“Of pictures? Or sad stories?”

“Perhaps they’re the same thing.”

“You could be right.”

“Do you want to hear the story?”

“Absolutely.”

“IT’S THE FINAL WORK BY THE ARTIST. He put forty pounds of oils on the canvas. Painted as if he were using up his supplies. Then he retired from painting.”

Maike speaks quietly and quickly. The artist, a favorite of the Muses, and Maike’s very own discovery, fell in love one day with a young boy, who soon moved in with him. The relationship was of the kind that turned every park bench into the stage for a Greek tragedy. There was nothing remarkable about the artist’s appearance apart from a pair of incredibly bright eyes, but his boyfriend seemed to be made according to the sketches of a Michelangelo. Slender, dark, and supple. Pure body, no soul.

At gallery receptions, the young man strolled gracefully through the rooms, intent only on distracting the guests from the exhibition. Both men and women gazed after him. If the evening went well, there was more talk about him than about the paintings. He did not like his lover’s work. He did not like art at all. He thought that art existed only to detract from the beauty of life, by which he meant, above all, his own beauty.