Daniel Kehlmann - F

Thank you, he says again, thank you, Mister Priest!

“But go to the police. Tell them what—”

Of course! To the police. And then he wants to start all over again and tell me the whole dismal story a second time, but I’ve had enough. I jump to my feet.

Ron looks up at me — liberated on the one hand because he thinks I’ve taken the sin from him, and worried on the other, because he’s confided it to me. I look into his face, into his vague eyes, there’s fear in them, but also a mild flash of viciousness as he asks himself if I’m not someone who needs silencing.

I smile at him, he doesn’t smile back. “That’s all,” I say, and have no idea what I mean. I hold out my arm to him, he stands up, and we shake hands. His is soft and damp and he lets go again immediately. I have the sense that everything would be clearer, better, more right somehow, if only I could understand the slogan on his shirt. I turn away deliberately and indicate to Father Tauler that I have to go. He raises his eyebrows in surprise; I point to my watch and then the ceiling — the universally recognized gesture that means I’m being called upstairs.

“Mister Priest?” A young girl wearing a cross on a chain positions herself in front of me. “I have a question.”

“Talk to Father Tauler.”

Disappointed, she moves out of the way. I reach the door and the stairwell. I pant my way up, and, bathed in sweat, step into the marble coolness of the entrance hall.

“Friedland!”

He’s standing right there. At this exact moment. He’s thin and tall, his black robe is elegantly cut, his hair beautifully barbered, and his glasses by Armani. Of course he’s not sweating.

“Hello, Finckenstein.”

“It’s hot here.”

“You must be used to it by now.”

“Yes, summers in Rome are bad.” He crosses his arms, leans against the stone balusters, and eyes me with a vaguely amused expression.

“I’ve just heard someone’s confession. Imagine, he’s … I mean, what do you do if someone … what happens to the secrets of the confession if … doesn’t matter. Not now. Doesn’t matter.”

“Do you still play with your cube?”

“I’m practicing for the championship.”

“You mean there are still Rubik championships? Do you have some time, shall we go and get something to eat?”

I hesitate. I really don’t want to hear about his career, and his life in air-conditioned rooms, and his rise and success. “Love to.”

“Then come on. An early dinner, something light, it’s hard to get anything done in this weather.” He goes up the marble stairs, and I follow him hesitantly.

“Have you seen Kalm recently?” I ask.

“Still the same. He’ll soon be a bishop, God willing.”

“He’ll be willing.”

“I think so too. He’ll be willing.”

“Do you believe in God?”

He stops. “Martin, I’m the deputy editor in chief of Vatican Radio!”

“And?”

“You’re asking the deputy editor in chief of Vatican Radio if he believes in God?”

“Yes.”

“Seriously?”

“No. But if I were asking seriously, what would you say?”

“I’d say it’s not the right question.”

“Why?”

“God is a self-fulfilling concept, a causa sui , because He’s conceivable. I can conceive of Him, and because He’s conceivable, He must exist, anything else would be a contradiction, so I also know that He exists even if I don’t believe in Him. And that’s why I believe in Him. And don’t forget, we act out His existence through the exercise of human love. We do our work. He becomes real through us, but we can only allow Him to become real because He must exist. How can one love human beings if one doesn’t see them as God’s creation, merely some chance form of life: successful zoological specimens, mammals with lousy digestions and back pains? How is one supposed to feel empathy for them? How is one supposed to love the world if it has not been willed into being by Him who is the very essence of Benevolent Will?”

I think about Ron again, it’s more important, I ought to talk about it. But something holds me back, it feels as if I’ve brushed against something greater and more malevolent than I can grasp right now; maybe it would be better to forget about it.

“And what does ‘believe’ mean anyway? The concept is logically hazy, Martin. When you’re sure of a proposition, then you know it. When you think that something might be so, but at the same time you know it maybe isn’t so, then you call that belief. It’s a speculation about probability. Belief means assuming that something is probable, although it might be otherwise. Lack of belief means assuming that something probably isn’t so, even when it absolutely could be so. Is the difference really that big? It’s all a matter of nuance. What’s important is that we do our work.”

We climb step by step. Our tread echoes through the stairwell.

“Did you mean it when you asked?”

“I was just curious.”

“And what do you believe?”

“I believe I should be in Rome too.”

“Yes, that’s an injustice. But you didn’t answer my question.”

We reach the second floor. The statue of a saint with virtuously steepled fingers fixes his eyes on us.

“What question?”

“The question of what you yourself believe.”

I stop, support myself on the banisters, and wait for my heart rate to drop. “I believe we should eat soon.”

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.

He wrote poems. I haven’t read any of them. He wrote them on scraps of paper, he wrote them at the bottom of menus, and on envelopes, casually, for pleasure. Some he took with him, others he left lying, he kept thinking up new ones, and he knew it was all just a beginning.

It was at the university that he first learned he was a Jew; until then he had thought that kind of thing was as meaningless as a horoscope sign. His mother was Jewish, although she was a nonbeliever. Her grandfather had been a long-bearded trader from Bukovina.

He never went to lectures. A girl he had met through mutual friends said she was prepared to marry him. One afternoon there was a crowd. Men waved flags and their fists, he wanted to get a closer look, but a fellow student pulled on his sleeve and said it would be a better idea to disappear. He thought this was ridiculous. His father had been killed in the war, he was the son of a hero, what could happen?

When I was born, he was working in a factory, he had been expelled from university. The factory made things out of metal; what they were used for, he had no idea. One time two workers took him aside: they knew he was a saboteur, they said, but there was no need for alarm, they would cover for him. When he replied in astonishment that he’d always worked the hardest he could in the factory, they laughed and said they didn’t believe a word, nobody could be that clumsy. On the way home that day, he composed a poem in his head about the droning propellers of a plane whose pilot has nodded off for a moment and is dreaming of an ant climbing a stalk that’s trembling in the wind, which still carries the distant echo of the droning of a plane. Not bad, he thought, it has a rhythm and a simplicity; if things keep on this way, I’ll soon be able to have something printed. When he got home an official letter was waiting for him, asking him coolly to present himself at the railroad station with a change of clothes and a blanket.

Better for you to head for Switzerland, he said to my mother, I’ll follow as soon as I can. There’s an official there who was an admirer of my grandfather’s, he saw him playing Laertes. He’ll help you.