Daniel Kehlmann - F

“So!” says Remling. “Well then!”

“Absolutely!” cries Eric.

“Why don’t we. Get together.”

“For sure!”

Remling nods to me and goes back to his table at the window.

“I hate him. Almost wrecked the Ostermann deal for me last year.” Eric sits down again and starts tapping at his phone. The waiter reappears behind him, bends over his shoulder, and whisks away my empty plate and Eric’s untouched one so fast that I can’t protest. “So!” Eric puts the phone away, pushes his chair back, and gets to his feet. “Nice to see you. I’ve got to run, you can’t imagine everything that’s going on. Of course I’m paying.”

“But why did you want to talk to me?”

Eric is already on his way to the exit. He doesn’t turn around again, pushes the door open, and is already gone.

Shall I order something else? But it’s expensive, the portions are small, and I can get a curry sausage right on the corner.

I stay for another few minutes. I will have to ask the waiter to pull the table out, then the man next to me will be forced to stand up, then they’ll pull his table out too, which means in turn that the man sitting opposite will have to stand up too. Half the restaurant will be on its feet by the time I’m on mine.

I’m late. Mama will be waiting with the cake by two p.m., then I have to get to a meeting of the Catholic Youth, and in the evening I have to hold Mass again. What on earth did Eric want with me?

Thoughtfully I finish the water in my glass and smile amiably at everyone in the room. Blessings be upon you, whether you want them or not. That’s my job. Day after day I bear witness to the fact that there is an order to things and reason rules in cosmic affairs. What is, must be. What must be, is. I am the legal representative of all that prevails, defender of the Status Quo, whatever that may be. That is my profession.

And the world really isn’t that bad. Thanks be to God, though He doesn’t exist, for things like restaurants and air-conditioning. I’m going to order dessert after all. I’m already signaling the waiter.

I was sitting in the seminary library with the cube hidden behind an edition of Stages on Life’s Way when Kalm came in to tell me my father was on the phone.

To reach the public phone, you had to go down a flight of stairs, along a long corridor, then up a second flight of stairs. The whole way there I was worrying that Arthur might hang up again. I was panting when I reached the phone; the receiver was swinging on the cord.

“Do you have time?”

It really was his voice. I’d never been able to conjure it up in my memory, but now I recognized it as if not a day had gone by.

“Time for what?”

“I’m in the neighborhood right now. Bad moment?”

“You mean — now?”

“I’m here.”

“Where?”

“Come out.”

“Now?”

“So it’s really a bad moment?”

“No, no. You’re here?”

“That’s what I’m saying. In front of the building.”

“This building?”

Arthur laughed and hung up.

It was a year since his strangest story had appeared in his last collection. It was called “Family,” and it was about his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, it was the story of our ancestors, generation by generation, all the way to some vaguely sketched version of the Middle Ages. Most of it is pure invention, for according to Arthur right at the beginning, the past is unknowable: People think the dead are preserved somewhere. People think their traces are inscribed on the universe. But it’s not true. What’s gone is gone. What once was, is forgotten, and what has been forgotten never returns. I have no memory of my father. Oddly, this made me feel robbed. They were my ancestors too.

I went out into the street and he was standing there. His hair as mussed up as always, his hands in his pockets, the same glasses on his nose. When he saw me he spread his arms wide, and for a moment I thought he was going to hug me, but it was a gesture of astonishment at my seminarian’s garb. He suggested we go for a walk. My voice was suddenly so hoarse I couldn’t answer.

We walked in silence. Streetlights flashed, cars honked, and I heard fragments of words as people passed. It felt as if all the noises were part of a secret conversation, as if the world were talking at me in hundreds of sounds, but I couldn’t concentrate and didn’t understand a thing.

“I’ll be in the city for a while,” he said.

“Under a false name?”

“I’m only a well-known writer. Nobody knows well-known writers. I don’t need a false name.”

“What have you been doing all these years?”

“Have you read my books?”

“Of course.”

“Then you know.”

“And apart from that?”

“Nothing. I haven’t done anything apart from that. That’s what it was all about.”

“Oh, that’s what!”

“You’re angry with me?”

I said nothing.

“That I wasn’t there? That we didn’t have sack races, or visits to the zoo, that I didn’t come to parents’ days, roll around on the carpet, and take you to the annual fair? You’re angry about that?”

“What if the books aren’t any good?”

He looked at me sideways.

“What then?” I asked. “Everything sacrificed and then they’re no good? What then?”

“There’s no insurance against that.”

We went on in silence.

“Obligations,” he said after a while. “We invent them when required. Nobody has them unless they decide they have them. But I love you a lot. All three of you.”

“And yet you didn’t want to be with us.”

“I don’t think you missed much. We’ll talk about all of it. The hotel opposite the station, come this evening, Ivan will be there too.”

“And Eric?”

“He doesn’t want to see me. Come for dinner at eight. I’m guessing you like to eat.”

I wanted to ask what gave him the right to say such a thing, but it had been his form of farewell. He waved, a taxi pulled up, he got in and shut the door behind him.

That evening we sat together for hours. Ivan talked about the moment when he realized he would never be a great painter, and Arthur described his idea to write a book that would be a message to a single human being, in which therefore all the artistry would serve as mere camouflage, so that nobody aside from this one person could decode it, and this very fact paradoxically would make the book a high literary achievement. Asked what the message would be, he said that would depend on the recipient. When asked who the recipient would be, he said that would depend on the message. Around midnight, Ivan talked about how his suspicion that he was homosexual was confirmed, without anxiety or distress, when he was nineteen, but how he had never been able to tell Eric, for fear it would make him lose faith in himself because they were so alike. At one a.m. I was on the verge of admitting that I didn’t believe in God, but then didn’t, and talked instead about Karl-Eugen Zimmerman, the thirteen-year-old who beat me by three seconds in every championship, I had no chance against him. At one thirty, Arthur said he had worked out how to live with guilt and regret the way other people live with a stiff foot or chronic back pain, around two a.m. I cried a little, at two thirty we said our goodbyes and promised to meet again the next evening.

When we reached the hotel the next day, Arthur had checked out. He had left neither an address nor a note. For a few weeks I kept expecting him on a daily basis to make contact and explain things. Then I gave up.

A windowless room in the cellar of the bishop’s palace. It doesn’t smell good and there is no air-conditioning. Linoleum on the floor, whitewashed walls, the ceiling covered with soundproof tiles, the regulation crucifix on the wall. A table for table tennis, a table for foosball, two ancient computers, two PlayStations, and a horde of adolescents who know that they just have to accept the presence of two priests and all this will be at their disposal. Even the drinks are free. There are many duties that come with my job. If I could be spared one of them, I would choose this one: the Catholic Youth meeting.