Daniel Kehlmann - F

“And what is your name?” asks the girl.

“Hans.” I’m touched by the fact that they’ve given away their names, but that’s no reason to be careless.

“Bye, Hans!”

I leave and feel so light that I could just float up off the ground. Perhaps it’s the sun, perhaps it’s hunger. I should have eaten my pasta with mussels. In order not to faint, I stop at a fast-food stand.

There’s a long line. Three teenagers are standing ahead of me, arguing with the vendor. One of them is wearing a T-shirt that says Morning Tower , the second has one that says Bubbletea is not a drink I like , the third sports a huge bright red Y . Dumb, says one of them to the vendor, absolute bullshit, to which the vendor says they should go the hell away, to which one of them replies that the vendor is the one who should go the hell away, to which the vendor says no, he’d rather they went the hell away, to which another of them says no, you do it, and it goes on like that for a while. I’m about to give up and move on, but then they run off, cursing, and disappear down the next subway entrance and I can buy my hot dog. It tastes quite good. My phone rings. It’s Ivan. Reluctantly I press Receive.

“I thought I should give you a call,” he says.

“Why?”

“Just a feeling. Everything okay?”

“Of course.”

“So why do I have this feeling?”

“Maybe because today I hoped you and I … Ah!” Now I get it. I stand still in surprise. Cars hoot, a policeman yells at me, once again I’ve gotten myself into the street without even noticing.

“Why are you laughing?”

“I told my secretary to call you, but she … just think: she called Martin!”

“Martin!”

“We went to lunch. The whole time I was wondering why.”

“How’s business?”

“Good. Like always. How’s art?”

“I have to keep an eye on the auction houses. You can’t lose control over prices. Besides …”

“Have you spoken to Mother recently?”

“Yes, right, I have to give her a call soon. She left me three messages. But something’s up with you. I can tell. You can deny it, but—”

“Have to go now!”

“Eric, you can tell me every—”

“Everything’s fine, honestly, got to go now.”

“But how—”

I press the Disconnect button. It’s a strange experience talking to Ivan, almost like talking to myself, and suddenly I’m clear again about why I’ve been avoiding him for some time. It’s hard to keep secrets from him, he sees through me, just as I see through him, and he cannot find out just yet how bad things are with me and with business, it would be too painful, a great defeat, and besides I couldn’t be sure he’d keep it to himself. The old rule: a secret only stays a secret if absolutely nobody knows about it. If you stick to that, it’s not as hard to keep them as people think. You can know someone almost as well as you know yourself and still not read their thoughts. I cannot ask Ivan for money. I cannot ask him to help me disappear. He is too upright a person, and he wouldn’t understand.

I wish he weren’t homosexual. When I found out, it made me totally crazy for weeks. Someone who’s so like me — what does that say about me, what does it mean? Nothing, I know that, nothing, nothing, it means absolutely nothing, but I’ve never been able to forgive him.

I send a message to Knut — the address, and instructions to set off at once. Then I open Sibylle’s front door, run up three flights of stairs, want to wait outside her apartment door to get my breath back, but am too impatient for that, and knock. I could also ring the bell, but after she snubbed me like that, I need to make a more impressive entrance.

She opens the door. I’m immediately struck by how good she looks. She isn’t as beautiful as Laura, but she’s more exciting: the long hair, the delicate neck, the bare arms with their colorful bangles. She was my therapist, but she stopped treating me six months ago because, she said, it would be a breach of professional ethics. It doesn’t matter anyway, the therapy was totally pointless, I told her nothing but lies.

“Is the bell broken?”

I walk across the hall and into the living room. There I catch my breath, search for words, and fail to find any.

“Poor guy. Come here.”

I clench my fists, inhale, open my mouth, but can’t say a word.

“Poor guy,” she says again, and already we’re on the carpet. I want to protest and get the two of us to pull ourselves together, for that’s what matters most, knowing how to pull yourself together, but it doesn’t help, because I suddenly realize that I don’t want us to pull ourselves together, what I want is what is going on right here, in her and over her and on her, and why not, because without this, what else is there in the world?

“But—”

“It’s all right,” she whispers in my ear. “It’s all right.”

It’s hot, she has no air-conditioning, she thinks it makes you sick. It seems to me as if I were on my feet and taking a step back so as to watch the two of us: a trifle strange, the whole thing, more foolish than awkward, and I wonder if people who love to discourse on human dignity have ever actually observed this with a sober eye. But at the same time I’m still the man on the carpet and I feel that the moment is about to arrive when I am no longer divided but a single entity, and only for a few fractions of a second do I form the thought that I’m setting myself up for blackmail if there’s a camera in this room, and then I have an image of Laura, whom I’m deceiving again and to whom I’m doing an injustice with my continual lies, but a moment later the image is gone again and all I know is that every person must do what will save him, and everything is finally what it is, and nothing else, and everything is good.

We lie on our backs, her head on my chest. I don’t want to be anywhere else, nothing is bothering me. It won’t last very long.

“How is she?” asks Sibylle.

I have to think to figure out who she means. I cradle her head, and stroke her silky hair. Very soon everything that is bearing down on me will become real again.

“Perhaps I could help her.”

I pull my hand away.

“I mean, I could recommend a colleague. Ancillary talk therapy. When she’s recovered, we can all get on with our lives. She with hers. And the two of us with ours. Together.”

At the beginning I didn’t have any specific plan, it was one of many tales that I spun, but later it turned out to be helpful: no one leaves a wife who has cancer, no one can demand it of anyone else. And sometimes I feel this version is actually true, as if it were playing out in a parallel universe exactly as I’ve told it to Sibylle. I could talk about it with a therapist, but Sibylle doesn’t want to treat me anymore and I wouldn’t want to try it with anyone else, I’ve got enough problems already.

“I have to leave right away,” I say.

How peculiar that I spend all day thinking about her and yet want only to disappear as soon as I’m with her. Gently I push her head to one side, stand up, and start gathering my clothes together.

“You’re always in a hurry.” She laughs sadly. “You leave me sitting in the cinema and then you write such messages! My therapist asked why I do it to myself. Because you’re good-looking? I said he’s not that good-looking, but then she wanted to see a photo and I couldn’t lie about it. Or is it because of this?” She points at the carpet. “Yes, it’s good, it’s really good, but it’s also a kind of transference. My therapist thinks I show reactions that are triggered quite automatically by the collision of regression and aggression. What can I do?”