Daniel Kehlmann - F

“What are you talking about?” I asked coldly.

She was silent for a moment. “The championships. It’ll happen. You mustn’t let yourself get discouraged.”

Although she really wasn’t old yet, her hair was already turning gray. She was a little plump, and she often smiled in an absentminded, sad sort of way. At this moment, in the kitchen, after midnight, I thought a number of things all at once: I thought that of course she was right, and I thought that I couldn’t talk about any of it with her, and I thought that in earlier times I would have been able to stay at home and live with her, freed from having to compete, safe from want, wrapped in her care, without anyone thinking it in any way peculiar. Only in the age of psychologists had this become frowned upon.

I fetched a cup for myself. In the room next door, where the record player was kept, piano music was playing softly. I poured myself some tea. Did everyone have to go out into the world? Could I really not live here, in this house, in this kitchen?

She shook her head, as if she’d read my mind. “Don’t give up,” she said. “That’s the whole trick.”

“But why not?”

She said nothing. I took my cup and went to bed.

On the other hand, a few months later I found myself in Sabine Wegner’s apartment. We were alone, her family had gone out, we wanted to work on our Latin. Sabine was fat. She was a sweet girl, clever and warmhearted, but everything about her was fat: her face, her calves, her body, her hands. And I, who had no idea yet what I myself would look like one day, looked down on her just as mockingly as everyone else. Her whole appearance said that she wasn’t a part of the game. She didn’t come into it.

We sat at the dining-room table and deciphered Tacitus. Sabine drank peppermint tea, I drank apple juice. Finally we got to the end and I stood up.

“But the news is about to come on,” she said.

We sat down on the sofa. Gorbachev and Reagan shook hands, Honecker yowled into a microphone, Tom Cruise sat in a cockpit, a woman stood in front of a bluish background and announced rain, and then the ads were already starting: a housewife waved a cloth and told a proud man with a tie and a briefcase that things had never been cleaner. Then I put my hand on Sabine’s neck.

In that first moment I thought it was some mistake. Why was I doing this, what was I thinking?

She sat there rigid. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that she didn’t even turn her head. Take your hand away, I thought, there’s still time. I leaned toward her. There was a roaring in my ears and my heart was thumping.

But she’s so fat, I thought.

And I thought: But she’s a girl.

Then she turned her head. Her eyes were strangely clouded. The large shadow made by her body. The sweetish smell of her perfume. My hand on her soft neck.

I felt dizzy. Really, I thought, she’s not that fat. And her face, so close it was distorted, wasn’t ugly. I saw that one of her eyelashes had fallen out and was lying on her cheekbone. I saw a little scratch on her temple. I saw that a tiny vein divided in the white of her right eye, and I saw the pores in her skin.

Her lips felt like cotton wool as she put them against mine. Uncertainly I put my hand on her hip and pressed down. Sabine pulled back, looked me in the face, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and came back to me. We kissed a second time, her mouth opened a little, and I felt a small living thing that was her tongue. Her breasts rose and fell, my heart pounded, I couldn’t draw breath, but it seemed to be okay without oxygen. After a while she pulled her head back. I inhaled. She fumbled with my belt.

I stood up and let her pull down my pants. Then she took hold of my underpants, pulled, and was looking at my nakedness. The opening credits for some crime series were blaring from the TV. I looked at her breasts. They were round, and large and full under her blouse. I reached for them, she leaned forward to meet me. The door opened and in came her father, followed by her mother and her sister, followed by a dachshund, followed by my mother.

Nobody said a word. In silence they watched as I pulled up my underpants and my pants and buckled my belt. The dog grunted, lay down on the carpet, stuck its legs in the air, and waited for someone to scratch it. Getting dressed took longer than usual because of my trembling hands. The roaring in my ears was even louder than before, and the floor seemed to be a long way away. The dog heaved a pleading sigh, in vain. On TV a policeman with a mustache said something about ordering an arrest and the police force in Duisburg. I crossed the room, which seemed to be wobbling, picked up my Latin textbook, my notebook, dictionary, and fountain pen from the dining-room table, and went to the door. Sabine’s parents stepped aside to make room. Her sister giggled. My mother walked out ahead of me.

We went down the stairs.

“They were waiting for the bus,” she said. “I happened to drive by, and offered to bring them home. Then I thought I’d take you home.” She paused for a few seconds. “I’m sorry.”

She unlocked the car door and I got into the passenger seat. She carefully adjusted the rearview mirror and started the engine.

“I didn’t think …,” she said. “I mean. Because Sabine. I wouldn’t have imagined …! She’s not exactly … I mean, I wouldn’t have just …”

I said nothing.

“When I got to know your father …”

I waited. She never talked about Arthur. But either she realized it wasn’t the right moment, or she suddenly didn’t want to divulge whatever it was, in any case she didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t say another word before we got home.

Just give up — what was so bad about that? The thought was large and seductive. I came in second in the state championships, I qualified for the national championships, but I also knew along the way that the cube would never turn into a career. Against all my hopes, no government agency was interested in the services of cube experts, nor were the big firms looking for them, and even the creators of computer programs and games favored people with qualifications in math or business.

But I liked being in darkened spaces, I liked listening to Monteverdi, and I liked the smell of incense. I liked the windows in old churches, I liked the network of shadows in Gothic vaulting, I liked the depictions of Christ Pantocrator, the Savior swathed in gold as ruler of the world, I liked medieval woodcuts, I also liked the sweet gentle humanity of Raphael’s Madonnas. I was impressed by Augustine’s Confessions , I felt instructed by St. Thomas’s exercises in hairsplitting, I was drawn to humanity in general, and I really had no desire to sit out my days in an office. Besides which I had no talent for self-abuse. There had been a time when I did it regularly, filled with anger and disgust and convinced I was committing an aesthetic transgression, a sin against beauty rather than against any moral code. I saw myself as if at a distance: a red-faced young man, already a little plump, laying hands on himself frantically, eyes almost closed, and so I soon cured myself of it. It’s not something to admit in this age of psychologists, but the cube was actually more fun.

I’d get the thing with God worked out too. Or so I thought. It really couldn’t be that hard. All it required was a little effort.

Secretly I expected it all to happen at my baptism. But when the moment arrived, the church was in the middle of being renovated: the walls were almost hidden behind steel girders, plastic sheeting hung in front of the altar, and unfortunately the organ was also out of action. The water felt like water, the baptismal priest looked like an obstinate muddle-head, and standing next to my mother with her sad smile, my brother Ivan was obviously trying not to laugh.