Daniel Kehlmann - F

Next to me stands Father Tauler, a gaunt Jesuit. He rubs his eyes and sighs.

“It won’t be long,” I say.

“An hour.”

“It goes by.”

“You think?”

“It has to.”

He sighs again. “Besides, your friend Finckenstein is here.”

“Oh!”

“Upstairs in the palace. Just back from Rome.”

Father Tauler goes to one of the worn-out chairs and sits down. Immediately two girls come over to sit with him and start talking to him quietly. One of them is worked up, her eyes are glistening, the other one puts an arm around her shoulder from time to time.

Smiling uncertainly, I take the other chair. I’m sweating heavily, and I wish I could get a drink from the machine. But that’s impossible. I cannot drink Coca-Cola out of a bottle here. I have to preserve a remaining scrap of dignity. If I were lean, it would be no problem. But not the way I am.

I sit and wait. Maybe nobody will want anything from me. Two boys are playing foosball, they bang the ball this way and that with angry gestures, behind them three girls are jumping around the table-tennis table, they’re really good, I can hardly see the ball. The PlayStations squeak and whistle; there’s a smell of sweat. A girl comes toward me and I flinch, but luckily she’s heading over to the computers. The worst is when girls come to me because they’re pregnant. I know what I have to say to them, the rules are strict, but in reality I don’t know what to do. It’s easier when it’s about religious doubts. That doesn’t take any reflection, I just talk about the Mysterium. Unfortunately religious doubts have gone out of fashion.

I close my eyes. On top of it all, Finckenstein! I’ll have to say hello to him, he knows I’m here, otherwise it would look odd. And I shouldn’t avoid him. One should never make room for envy.

I open my eyes. Someone has tapped me on the knee. A young man is sitting in front of me. I know him, he’s often here, and his name is … I’ve forgotten. If I were better at names, I’d know. He already has beard stubble, he’s wearing a blue baseball cap with the letters N and Y on it, and his right nostril is pierced by a thin ring. His T-shirt says Bubbletea is not a drink I like . His jeans are torn, but they’re the kind you buy already torn. He has a pale face, which may explain why the beard stubble is so visible. He stares at me, his eyes slightly inflamed.

“Yes?” I say.

He clears his throat, then begins to speak. I bend forward. He’s talking too softly and too fast, it’s hard to understand him.

“Hold on. Please slow down.”

He looks at his sneakers, clears his throat again, starts all over again. Gradually I understand. There’s been a fight, and a butterfly is also involved. Butterfly , he says over and over again and makes fluttering movements with his hand, like this and this and this: butterfly .

Butterfly …? A suspicion dawns on me.

Yes, he says. A knife — a butterfly. This is how you open it, this is how you stab, it all went very fast.

“Just a moment. Say that again.”

Sighing and sweating, he does. Some of it I don’t understand, but I get the gist. He and two friends named Ron and Carsten had a fight in a discotheque two nights ago with someone named Ron; the two of them both being called Ron was an accident and didn’t mean anything. What makes things harder, however, is that the boy in front of me is also called Ron. So: he, Ron, and Carsten had this fight with Ron, for reasons nobody can remember, maybe it was about money, or maybe a girl, or maybe nothing at all, there are always fights happening over nothing, but if someone strikes a blow, the reason for it becomes immaterial, the only thing that matters is that a blow got struck.

“On your shirt there, what does that mean? Bubbletea is not a drink I like . What does it mean?”

He looks at me, baffled; apparently the question has never occurred to him.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Go on.”

He coughs and rubs his eyes. So, he, Ron, and Carsten had run into Ron #3 on the street, Ron being the Ron who’d attacked Ron in the disco.

“What a strange coincidence!”

Not really, he said; in the afternoons they were often on that street, and Ron #3 was on that street almost every afternoon, but they hadn’t seen this coming, nor obviously had Ron #3, otherwise it would have really been too dumb of him to cross their path on this street when he was alone. So he got himself beaten up. Not totally brutally, but good and proper.

“That’s bad,” I said.

Yes, but not the worst, because the butterfly hadn’t come into it yet. A man who was full of himself had weighed in, and …

Father Tauler stands up, goes to the drink machine, gets a bottle of Coca-Cola, opens it, goes back to the two girls, and drinks. I watch him enviously.

“What? I’m sorry, I was distracted — what?”

Ron asks if I haven’t been listening to him.

“Please tell me again.”

Well, so this guy. So he got all full of himself! Although none of it had anything to do with him, absolutely none of it! Such a snotnose. Didn’t fit into the neighborhood at all, no idea where he came from! He just got all full of himself!

“And then?”

Well, the knife. The butterfly. Just like that, push hard, click, stab, all in a flash. Then they’d run away, except Ron stayed lying there.

“Ron?”

Well, not the one who’d done the stabbing, the other one! Number 3! He rubs his face.

The slogan on his T-shirt really bothers me. Why does anyone make these things? “Did someone call the police?”

Probably, he says. Someone always calls the police.

“Was the man wounded?”

He looks at me as if I’m mentally defective. Obviously, he says slowly. Of course. How on earth would he not be? Ron stabbed him . With the butterfly ! How could anyone not be wounded, I ask you? He looks over at the Ping-Pong table, then at the PlayStation, then leans forward and asks if I have a solution.

“Absolution?”

Yes, absolution. If he can get it from me. And should the police surface at his place, if I can corroborate that it wasn’t him that did the stabbing, that it was Ron. The other Ron. His friend.

“How could I corroborate that?”

I feel dizzy, and this time it’s not because of the heat. Is this really happening? No one has ever come to me in the confessional and admitted to an act of violence, that sort of thing just doesn’t happen, never mind if thriller writers and scriptwriters think it’s an everyday occurrence. I could call the police. But I’m not allowed to do that. Or do I have to anyway? Is what is going on here a confession at all? We’re not in the confessional, not even in a church. Am I obligated in any way to call the police? It’s all very complicated, and it’s so hot.

As if he’d read my thoughts, he begins to cry. Tears stream down his stubbled baby cheeks. Please, he says, please, Mister Priest!

On the other hand, I think, let’s accept this is a confession. I can decide, and I’m making it into one. In this case I may not go to the police. Canon law forbids it, and the law of the state protects me. That seems to settle the matter. And absolution? Well, why not! There is no God, obliged to forgive the boy just because I’ve made the sign of the cross. They’re words. They change nothing.

Ron wipes his tears away. Everything happened so quickly, he says, there was nothing he could do about it. And why did the snotnose have to get so full of himself?

I know I’m going to reproach myself, or rather I know I’ll have to forget it all, in order not to reproach myself. But since I’ve begun the gesture, I can’t break it off: I make the sign of the cross over him, from top to bottom and then right to left, and he starts to cry again, this time because he’s so moved, perhaps he really does believe he’s been spared the fires of hell, and I fend him off and say that he has to go to the police and tell them everything, and he says yes of course, of course he’ll do that, and I know he’s lying, and he knows that I know.