Daniel Kehlmann - F

I pick up the phone and unfortunately hear Elsa’s voice, not Kathi’s: “I need to speak to my brother. Call him, ask him to come here.”

“Which brother?”

I rub my eyes. “What do you mean, which?”

She says nothing.

“So call him! Tell him it’s really important. And will you finally get Kluessen in here!”

I hang up, cross my arms, and try to look as if I were sunk in thought. Suddenly it occurs to me that I didn’t see Kluessen outside in the waiting room. The couch was empty. But didn’t she tell me he’d arrived? If he was already here and not in the waiting room, would that mean …? Worried, I look around.

“Hello, Adolf!”

He’s sitting there, staring at me. He must have been there the whole time. I smile and try to look as if it had all been a joke.

Adolf Albert Kluessen, a substantial old man in his mid-seventies, well dressed, accustomed to being obeyed, skin wrinkled by the sun, bushy eyebrows, looks at me as if he’d swallowed a frog, as if he’d lost his key today, along with his passport and his briefcase, and was being held up to ridicule for all of it, as if he’d been robbed and then his sports car had had its paint scratched. There are dark patches of sweat under the arms of his polo shirt, but that’s a result of the heat and doesn’t mean a thing. Adolf Albert Kluessen, son of the department store owner Adolf Ariman Kluessen, grandson of the founder of the department store Adolf Adomeit Kluessen, scion of a family whose eldest son has borne the name Adolf for so long that no one could rally themselves to give up the tradition, go figure, looks at me as if the whole world were despicable. And with all of that, he doesn’t even know he’s bankrupt.

“Adolf, how nice to see you!”

His hand feels as knotty as wood. I hope mine isn’t damp with nerves. Nonetheless, I have control of my voice, it isn’t trembling, and my eyes are clear. He says something about me not answering his emails, and I cry that it’s a scandal and I’ll fire my secretary. I quickly lay three printed sheets in front of him: figures that mean nothing, and include the most famous risk-free stocks: Apple, Berkshire Hathaway, Google, and Mercedes-Benz, lots of pie charts, everything as lit up as can be.

But today it’s not working. He blinks, then sets the sheets of paper aside, leans forward, and says he has something really basic he needs to get off his chest.

“Something basic!” I get to my feet, walk around my desk, and sit on the edge. Always make sure you’re a little higher than your counterpart — an old negotiating trick.

He’s no longer the youngest of men, he says. He doesn’t want to risk things anymore.

“Risk?” I fold my hands. “On my father’s life!” Folding your hands is helpful, it looks sincere. By contrast, what looks totally false is laying your hand on your heart. “We’ve never taken risks!”

Warren Buffett, says Kluessen, has advised never to invest in anything you don’t understand.

“But I understand it. It’s my profession, Adolf.” I stand up and go to the window, so that he can’t see my face.

A few years ago everything was still in good order. The investments were lucrative, the results satisfactory. Then there was a bottleneck in liquidity and it occurred to me that nothing was stopping me from simply asserting that I’d made gains. If you report losses, investors pull their money out. Declare profits and everything stays the same — you can continue, you balance out the loss, no one is hurt, it’s only numbers on a piece of paper. So that’s what I did, and after a few months the money was there again.

But a year later I was in the same situation. At the worst moment my second-most-important client wanted to withdraw twenty-nine million euros. I had positions I couldn’t liquidate without losses, so I reported fake gains, which brought me new investors, and I used their money to cover the payments. I was sure that the stock exchange would quickly recover its equilibrium and everything would go back to normal.

But the market kept dropping. More investors wanted to take their money out, and if I hadn’t made more raids on capital, the whole thing would have blown up. When the market really did recover, too much was already missing.

But I still had hope. I was considered to be successful, investors flocked to me, and I used their money to pay previous investors their gains: ten, twelve, sometimes even fifteen percent, so much that almost nobody had the idea of withdrawing their capital. For a long time I thought a way out would suddenly present itself. Then, one night two years ago when I was forced to run the numbers in my head, and run them, and run them, I knew it wasn’t ever going to happen.

Argentina or Venezuela. Ecuador. Liberia. Ivory Coast. New passport, new name, a new life. I should have done it. Marie might have been enchanted. Laura could have given parties someplace else. The weather is inarguably better anywhere but here.

But then the moment was lost. I had been too slow, too undecided. It takes a lot of money to vanish in comfort. Now I am totally wiped out. All the capital is gone, all my credit is used up.

“Do you know the Bhagavad Gita?” I ask.

Kluessen stares at me. He hadn’t reckoned on this.

“The god Krishna says to the commander Arjuna: You will never be able to explain why things are as they are. You will never be able to sort out the complications. But here you stand, mighty warrior. Don’t ask why, stand up and give battle.”

I once heard this on the car radio. The quote pleased me so much that I asked Elsa to look it up.

“Yes, but where?” she asked.

“In the Bhagavad Gita.”

“How do I find it?”

“When you read it.”

“The whole thing?”

“Only until you hit the right sentence.”

“And if it’s right at the end?”

She didn’t find it, so I’m quoting from memory. Kluessen isn’t going to be looking things up.

He’s silent. Then he says: Whatever. He wants to reassign his portfolio.

“Adolf!” I clap him so hard on the shoulder that the old man’s body shakes. For a moment I lose the thread: it’s to do with his eyebrows. With brows that bushy, it’s no wonder that someone might get confused. “Together we’ve earned a great deal of money. And it’s going to grow! Base prices are all on the uptick. Anyone who bails out now is going to regret it.”

Whatever, is his response once again, and he massages his shoulders. His wife, his son, and he have reached an agreement to redistribute the assets. His son thinks the entire system is heading for collapse. Everyone is piled with debt. Capital is far too cheap. It’s not going to come out well.

“Redistribute assets? You don’t even know what that means !” No, this time I’ve gone too far. “I mean, of course you do, but this doesn’t sound like you, these are not your words, this isn’t the Adolf I know.”

He says his son has just gotten his MBA and—

“Adolf! University is one thing, but reality …!” What is all this, what is his son doing, mixing himself up in it? I say nothing for a moment, then draw back and cut loose. It doesn’t matter what I say, Kluessen understands almost nothing and notices even less. What counts is that there is the sound of a human voice, with no interruption and no hesitation, what counts is that he hears my voice and grasps that there is something more powerful at work here than he can summon up, with an intellect that dwarfs his own.

Soon I’ll have to talk this way in front of the court. My lawyer will advise me to make no statement, that’s what lawyers always do. They worry about contradictions, they don’t trust anyone to cope with the prosecutor, they think no one can talk with conviction about anything. It’s possible that I will even have to part company with my attorney, which in the middle of a trial will have a devastating impact. Perhaps it’s better if I conduct my own defense. But people who defend themselves are regarded as idiots, any respectable defendant must have an expensive defense attorney, a pompous, grandstanding gentleman. There’s no way around it. But I’ll keep control of my own testimony.