Daniel Kehlmann - F

If you know this, you also know that you’re alone here.

Yes, I know this. And?

Ivan.

Yes?

If you’re alone here.

Yes?

Then I can’t help you with the bolt.

No?

Ivan.

Yes, I understand. Yes. So I have to. Keep going. But when I’m downstairs and the three of them come back, what do I do? Is there some way they can get in, do they have a key? Maybe when they took my wallet, they took my keys too.

If they’d taken them, then they’d be here now, not you.

How so?

Because you’d have no key.

But what would they want here?

Good question. Maybe you should keep on crawling.

But—

It’s urgent.

But—

It’s really urgent, Ivan.

I’ve never noticed how big this studio is. Looking at the window from down here, there’s much more sky, much more blue than usual. I assume it’s still hot outside, but I don’t feel it, I’m cold. Now it hurts a lot again. If you don’t have to breathe in, things would be easier, you can limit it but you still do have to breathe a little bit, and it burns like fire. It’s the pain that’s keeping me conscious. I’m so tired and things keep going dark for a moment, but then I breathe in again and in that moment it hurts so much that I’m awake again, do you understand?

Ivan, I’m not here.

You never were. Since that afternoon we went to the hypnotist. Always somewhere else. But aren’t you impressed? Your son, the hero.

I’ll never hear about it, Ivan. No one will, if you don’t make it to the door and outside. Keep crawling, don’t get stuck in the grass.

Do you remember the two of us in the sandbox? You built towers and I knocked them over, and then you weren’t the one who cried, I was, until Papa came and said, “Eric, stop that!” and it wasn’t even you who’d done it.

The grass is so high. But what if they do come back? The thin man is standing there again, pulling at his hat and saying, “Jaegerstrasse 15b, fifth floor!” He raises his hands as if to command a hearing, and bobs up and down nervously. “That’s where you’ll find him, that’s where your brother is.”

No, I say, that’s where I am, and there is here.

But he’s not listening to me, he’s in such a hurry to impart the information all over again: “Jaegerstrasse 15b, fifth floor!” He hops and waves, all trace of calm has evaporated, he’s actually fading already and I know I won’t see him again.

It’s freezing cold, but I’m safe. The three of them won’t find me. The door is barred, and even if they have the key, the grass is too thick. Everything rises and falls, forward and backward, all of it in waves, to and fro. This building will not be here forever, and even the blue out there won’t always be blue. Only I will always be here, I have to be here, there has to be me, because without me all this wouldn’t exist because there’d be nobody to see it. The cold floor, hard beneath my temple. And a rocking, as if I were on a boat again.

Do you remember when we went to Tangiers, you and I and Mama and Papa, and the evening ferry took us across the straits? We were six years old and when we left Algeciras the air was redolent with the smell of flowers and sweetish gasoline, the stars shimmered around a coppery moon, and Papa is carrying both of us in his arms, and Mama is following along behind, and there’s a fat man, all unshaven, asleep on the deck, his mouth wide open, and I have an intuition that I’m going to remember him all my life, but then the ferry stabbed its way out to the open sea, and the coast became a flicker of light, and next to us were pale cliffs and the sounds of the waves. The four of us belong together, it will always be like this, and I know, as I lay my head on his shoulder, that I’m about to fall asleep although I don’t want to, it’s night everywhere, nothing but stars close above our heads, more of them than ever, Africa will soon appear, only the pain when I breathe in reminds me how hard the ground is, and it’s cold again, everything keeps going up and down, and think about how excited the two of us were the first day, naturally they sat us next to each other so that everyone would notice that we look exactly alike, and our parents stand behind us against the wall, and the teacher says is there one of you or are there two, and the question strikes me as so hard that I turn around to Papa and Mama, but they smile and say nothing, as if to make clear to us that from now on we have to be the ones to answer, and look, there’s a bird fluttering past the window, I don’t see it, just its shadow in the rectangle of light, I’ve never seen a bird fly so slowly, we’ll be in Africa soon, and then it’s morning again, I could go after it, I’d really love to know

The flowering apple tree was close to the wall, and you could see into the house through the window. On the main floor were the salon, the living room, the former media room, now empty, and the library. If you climbed higher you could see through the fanlight into the entrance hall and from still further up, directly into the study with the desk and the pale patch of wall where the little matchstick man had hung until recently. Anyone who still had the strength for it could keep climbing all the way up onto the roof.

Marie wouldn’t have dared go up there on her own, but along with Georg and Lena it was possible, because if there were three of you, none of you wanted to be a coward, and sometimes Jo came too. You had to set one foot in the fork of the branch and the other on the upper edge of the window frame, and then it was really important not to look down. Just don’t think about it, close yourself off inside, or you’d feel in your stomach how far down it was, you’d start to sweat, you’d seize up with fear and hang there like a sack. The right way was to grab the tin gutter, get a swing going, push one knee against the wall, and barrel forward until you could work your fingers in between the roof tiles and pull yourself up. Then you could sit there with your back pressed against the slope of the roof and your heels in the gutter, looking over the top of the tree and the house where Georg lived all the way to the street beyond the next one. Ragged clouds were being driven across the sky, pulled and crushed and torn by the wind. As soon as they dissolved, the sun stood there like a blazing fire — even when you squeezed your eyes tight shut, it burned its way through to your eyeballs.

Georg often talked about his father being a policeman, and how he was allowed to play with his pistol at home, but no matter how often he announced he was going to, he never actually produced it. He also told stories about robbers, murderers, con men, and crocodiles. A crocodile could lie there motionless for hours on end, looking like an old tree trunk, and then suddenly it lunged and snapped its jaws. He’d been in Africa and in China, in Barcelona and in Egypt.

They talked about what could have happened to Ivan. Maybe he’d gone to America. People often took secret trips to America, sometimes they went by ship, and sometimes even an airplane, people over there wore big hats and boots.

“Or maybe China,” said Lena.

“China’s too far away,” said Marie. “And besides, they speak Chinese there.” She felt the sun on her skin, she heard the rustling of the apple tree and the soft buzz of a bumblebee close by her ear.

“Can’t he learn Chinese?” asked Georg.

“Nobody learns Chinese,” said Marie, because it was too hard, and there was no point, how could anyone find words in all those brushstrokes? And what if even the Chinese were only pretending they could? It was possible — she did the same, pretending she understood what her father was talking about when he kept explaining to her that the big crisis had saved him.