Daniel Kehlmann - F

Luckily today is a weekday, so I’m done in five minutes. Black suit, white shirt, red tie. Everything feels better when you’re dressed in a suit. I nod into the mirror on the wall, my reflection nods back without hesitation. The world is functioning.

As I step into the hall, Laura is standing there.

“Did you sleep well?” I ask. I ask her this every morning, although I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean. Either you’re asleep or you’re awake, but I know from television that people ask one another these questions.

She takes a step back, in order to leave room for the answer.

How beautiful she still is! I nod and say, “Aha!” and “Oh,” while she talks about a journey and a magician and a rose bed. Thousands upon thousands of roses, a whole wide sea. Can you really dream any such thing? Perhaps it’s all invention, the way I invent almost everything I tell people.

“Are you listening to me?” she asks.

“Of course. Bed of roses.”

As she talks on, I stealthily log on to my phone: August 8, 2008, two thousand seven hundred and thirty unopened emails. And even as I’m looking at the screen, in come another two.

“Is that more interesting than what I’m talking about?”

“Darling!” I hastily stow the gadget. “Princess! It couldn’t be less interesting! Do please go on.”

This is in fact true, I haven’t read a single email for weeks, but because it’s the truth she takes it as a lie and sticks her lower lip out in a sulk.

“Laura! Please go on! Please!”

Obviously I’m not managing to hit the right tone today, for her brow furrows reproachfully. “Marie needs tutoring in math. You have to find a teacher. Mr. Lakebrink says it’s urgent.”

This is all going too fast for me. First roses just now, and here we are already with Lakebrink. “Is that her teacher?”

Her frown deepens.

“Lakebrink,” I say. “I know. That Lakebrink. That man.”

She takes another step back.

“Okay, so who is he?”

“Eric, what’s the matter with you?”

“Shall we just fly off somewhere?” I ask hastily. “Next weekend, just you and me …” Now I have to think of a really hot place, and quick. Where have we been recently? “To Sicily?” It was Sicily, or I’m pretty sure it was. Or just possibly it was Greece. Damp and hot as hell, absurdly high prices, impudently whispering servers, mangy cats staring down from sharp rocks like gargoyles, but Laura was in heaven.

She opens her arms, lays her head on my chest, and hugs me. Her hair smells sweet — a little like sage, a little like lemon, in fact she always smells good. She murmurs that I’m wonderful, generous, one of a kind; I can’t hear her that well, because her face is buried in my jacket, and I stroke her back.

“The headmaster,” she says.

“What?”

“Mr. Lakebrink is the headmaster of Marie’s school. You talked to him last week. At the parents’ meeting.”

I nod, as if I’d always known that. Of course I’ll have to come up with a convincing reason why we can’t go to Sicily. She’s going to be so disappointed that I have to come up with an even bigger promise, to sweeten her up, and then I’ll have to break that one too. All of it because of this parents’ meeting, that I can actually remember all too well: low ceiling, some kind of artificial flooring, harsh lights, and a poster with a slogan about getting yourself inoculated against something as soon as possible.

“Just one more thing, Eric!” She strokes my cheek. Her emotion makes me recall just how much I desired her even recently. “The day before yesterday, you told Marie the most important thing is never to stand out. Never to arouse other people’s jealousy.”

“So?”

“She took it very much to heart.”

“Okay, and?”

“But yesterday you told her that one should never make compromises. Keep fighting, keep trying to be the best you can. Never duck a fight.”

“And?”

“Now she’s confused.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s a contradiction!”

“Sicily!” I cry.

Her face lights up at once.

We embrace again, and I am overcome by a sense of déjà vu so powerful that it makes me dizzy. I remember that I stood here once before and held her in my arms and had exactly this conversation with her, in a dream or in another life or even in this life, two or three days ago. And soon we’ll be standing here once again, and then probably Mr. Lakebrink will appear again, and the ax will fall, and the police will storm in, and the loop will finally stop replaying itself. I give her a horribly damp kiss on the forehead, head quickly for the stairs, and say “I love you” without turning around. Why, when it’s true, does it feel like a lie?

“Love you back,” she calls, and although it sounds fake, I know it’s true.

Being distracted, I take the first step of the stair with my left foot. Such a thing should never happen; in this house of all places I cannot afford to be careless. From the beginning, even the very first time we looked at it, I didn’t feel good here.

Do not think about the attic, not right now. I have to pretend I’ve forgotten it’s even there. Everything about it is repellant: the slope of the roof meets the floor at a particularly hideous angle, mud-brown rectangles are printed on the wallpaper, because of the blobs of dirt in the glass shade the old lamp casts a most horrible pentangle on the floorboards, and behind the narrow table, put there by someone, who knows who, many years ago, is an awkward gap. You only have to spend a few minutes up in it to know someone died there.

There’s nothing too unusual about that. In an old house someone will have croaked in almost every room. But what happened in this attic was a particularly hard way to die. It was long and drawn out, and it was extremely painful. Ghosts appeared and demons made themselves visible, attracted by the death throes. But how could I have explained all that to Laura? Seven and a half million. She fell in love with the house at first sight. Moorish tiles on the terrace, five bathrooms, a media room. What was I supposed to do?

So one night I went up there. It’s possible: people can confront fear, until it submits and retreats. I lasted almost three hours. The table, the shadows, the lamp, me. And someone else.

Then I ran. Down the stairs, across the hall, into the garden. A half-moon in the night sky was surrounded by shimmering clouds. I must have lain in the grass for a good hour, and when I slipped back into bed, Laura woke up and told me about her dream, some brightly colored bird, a friendly mailman, and a locomotive. And I stared up at the ceiling and thought about how there will be that room up there for as long as we live. Even when we no longer live here, when other people have replaced us for the longest time, it will still be there.

I open the front door. My God, it’s hot. The car is waiting, with the engine running, Knut sitting sullenly at the wheel. He hates waiting. I have no idea how someone like him became a chauffeur. Besides which I’m baffled about why he’s called Knut. He’s Greek and looks it: stubble, black hair, brown skin. On a long journey once he told me the story of his name, but I didn’t listen, and if I asked again now, he’d be offended. I get in. Knut drives off without so much as a hello.

I close my eyes. Already I hear him honking the horn.

He yells, “Idiot!” and honks again. “Did you see that, boss?”

I open my eyes. The street is completely empty.

“Smack at us from the left!” he yells.

“Unbelievable.”

“Idiot!”

While he bangs on the steering wheel, curses, and points this way and that, I ask myself for the thousandth time how I can get rid of him. Unfortunately he knows too much about me; I’m sure that the day after he was fired, he would be writing anonymous letters to Laura, to the police, to anyone that occurred to him, what do I know? The only possibility would be a discreet assassination. But if I really did want to kill someone, he’d be the only person I’d know to ask for help. He’s one tricky customer. I pull out the telephone and look at the market. Prices of raw commodities have fallen, the euro hasn’t recovered against the dollar, and the IT papers, which were overvalued, are exactly where they were yesterday. I don’t get it.