Juli Zeh - In Free Fall

“Damn!”

It was stupid of him to rub his eyes with his hands. The chili and onion take effect, sending Sebastian to the sink, where he washes his face with cold water.

Maike smells the food as soon as she unlocks the door and steps into the hall. It smells of appeasement. Sebastian is standing at the stove with puffy eyes and a red nose, and Liam is doubled over with laughter, pointing at him. The spit between Liam’s teeth is green from secretly nibbled peppers. Maike stands in the door frame and wants to laugh with Liam and cry with Sebastian. She asks herself why she washed the floors of all the rooms in the gallery on her hands and knees in order to put off coming home.

“What’s going on here, then?” she asks, dropping to her knees to catch Liam as he rushes into her arms.

“Dad’s got Thai in his eyes!”

Liam puts up with a kiss and runs back to the stove. He stands on tiptoe and devotes himself to stirring the rice, as though the viscous mass on the wooden spoon could bind him to normality.

“How was your day?” Sebastian asks. For a second, it really seems as if everything were as usual.

As Usual is the worst thing that can happen to Maike right now. She drops onto a chair and smiles helplessly into the growing silence. She feels as though she has been gone not for a few days but for years, and is now returning to a life in which she can participate only as a spectator. Sebastian, who is screwing up his eyes as he tastes his curry, seems as alien to her as an actor who has stepped out of character without warning. She wants to take hold of him and shake him and scream at him, or perhaps hug him and stroke him and smell him, too—whatever it takes to get her husband back.

Since this morning, however, it has been impossible for her to make any movement in his direction, so she can only sit and look and think. It is not only Dabbelink’s death that has driven her half out of her senses. Nor Liam’s mysterious kidnapping. It is the coincidence of these two things as well as the fact that, in some final way, she understands nothing. Emptiness is not an opponent, and it is impossible to defend a family without an opponent. If Maike had experienced a little less happiness and a little more unhappiness in her life thus far, she would know what to call this empty feeling: fear.

“A strange day,” Maike says after clearing her throat, a very necessary action. “A funny guy came to see me in the gallery.”

“As tall as Dad?” Liam asks. “Only old? Bulging tummy, and a face like an elephant?”

“How do you know?”

“That’s our detective.”

“You’re joking.”

Maike has grown paler than before, if that were possible. Her patched-up calm is crumbling at the edges.

“Almost done!” Sebastian calls to her in an artificially cheery voice, like a TV chef. Maike ignores him.

“Are you saying,” she says to Liam, “that this guy works for the police? And that he was here with you both?”

“Just after you left,” Sebastian says in a low voice.

“I can’t bear this any longer,” Maike whispers.

“He promised to make everything OK.” Liam’s voice breaks with desperate enthusiasm. “He’s clever.”

“Everything is OK, my darling,” Maike says to Liam. And to Sebastian, “What did you talk about?”

Sebastian brings a pan to the table and ladles curry onto the plates.

“About the nature of time.”

He asks Liam to serve the rice, and wipes the hot ceramic stove top with a cloth. A burnt smell rises. Sebastian opens the balcony door slightly.

“The nature of time,” Maike repeats, scornfully.

She mixes rice with the curry and adds salt and pepper without tasting her food.

“Is he coming again?”

“Hopefully,” Liam says.

His wife and child are sitting in front of their plates with their cutlery raised, so Sebastian looks at them encouragingly, fishing prawns from his plate and stacking two of them on his fork, by way of demonstration. Maike glances around the kitchen as if she is looking for something: a spoon, a napkin, an answer.

“With a serious crime, you can’t just withdraw the charges,” Sebastian says. “They’re investigating the kidnapping. It’s a matter of routine.”

“Have the police been to Gwiggen?” she asks. “Have they questioned the staff? Found out who took Liam there?” Her voice sounds as if someone were dictating to her. “Have they been to the service station? Did they look for clues? Find witnesses? Question the petrol pump attendant?”

“Maike,” Sebastian says. Nothing more, but he repeats it. “Maike.”

Not far from the balcony, a group of blackbirds is conferring in the chestnut tree. It is clear from their bickering that they are discussing something urgent. Do blackbirds even perch at the tops of trees? Do they spy on apartments in old buildings, or are they earthbound birds who leave their accustomed surroundings only in exceptional circumstances? And what constitutes an exception?

When a magpie lands in the branches the blackbirds fall silent.

“A pity it’s Saturday already,” Liam complains. “Otherwise Oskar would be here.”

Sebastian bends down to him and presses his arm.

“There, there,” he says, “it’s all right.”

Liam loads his fork with curry and shoves it into his mouth. He chews once, twice, and then sits still looking at his plate as his eyes fill with water.

“Still too hot?” Sebastian asks.

Liam shakes his head and swallows with a gulp. “Spicy,” he says quietly.

“I’m sorry.” Sebastian lowers his hands as Maike pushes her plate away from her. “You don’t like it either?”

“I do,” she says, “but I’m not hungry.”

“I can eat the rice,” Liam says. “The rice is good.”

After a few more mouthfuls Sebastian puts down his fork and knife too, because the kitchen seems to be filled with the sound of his chewing. Maike is drinking water and Liam is trying to spear grains of rice on the tines of his fork. A drop of water falls from the tap and hits the stainless steel sink.

“The morning after the kidnapping,” Maike says, “you rang the camp in Gwiggen and told them Liam was sick, didn’t you?”

“Do we have to do this now?” Sebastian asks.

“And no one at the camp wondered about this illness, even though Liam had actually arrived there sometime before?”

“I’ve told you everything I know.”

“Do you wonder, perhaps,” Maike says, her voice rising in a spiral of hysteria, “why your super-detective hasn’t cleared up this point yet?”

“No.”

“Then I’ll tell you why.”

Sebastian resists the impulse to press his hands over his ears. He has never heard his wife speak in these shrill tones before. He has thought of Maike as a strong person ever since he met her, and he has never wondered what the conditions for this strength are. Just as Maike wants to grab hold of him and shake him, he, too, feels the urge to torment the figure on the other side of the table, the figure on the verge of a nervous breakdown, until it releases his wife. Until the usual, cool, collected Maike, stylish and composed to the last, appears again. Sebastian does not want to hear the next words. They have been in the room for some time, and are just waiting to be spoken by one of them.

“The police are not investigating,” Maike says, “because they don’t believe you.”

“I’m going to my room now,” Liam says.

No one stops him. Sebastian sits hunched on his chair, his arms hanging heavily by his side. He looks at Liam as if he were watching a departing train. The food on the table is no longer steaming, and there is a wrinkled skin forming over the curry. This is what a farewell dinner looks like , Sebastian thinks, or, more precisely, something within him thinks—a new, unknown voice, as if spoken by an observer in his head.