Daniel Kehlmann - F

“Because that was yesterday!”

“But for God,” says Legner in his soft, hoarse voice, “there is no today and there is no yesterday. No now, no before, and no hundred years from now. He knows just as clearly what you’re going to do as you know what you did yesterday.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And you don’t have to,” I say. “It’s a Mystery.”

Against my will, I’m impressed. Sixteen semesters, two of them at the Gregoriana in Rome, and I still wouldn’t have come up with that.

Legner looks at me as if he’s read my thoughts. Triumphantly he bares his teeth. In spite of it all, I pity him. Poor, desiccated schemer, where has all your cunning gotten you?

The boy picks up his school backpack and is already out the door. Seconds later I see him shuffle past the window and down the street. I close my eyes and quickly mix up the colors on the cube. Then I open them again and start to reorder the colors.

“The stops are whistling,” says Legner. He doesn’t look at my hands, because if he did, he’d have to be impressed, and he’s not going to cede his ground. “On the organ. We should arrange for them to be repaired.”

“Perhaps the Lord can perform a miracle.” Why in the world did I say that? It wasn’t even funny. The red side is now all completed.

He glowers at me.

“Just a joke,” I say wearily.

“He could do it,” says Legner.

“I’m sure.” Now the yellow side is done too.

He says nothing, I say nothing.

“But He won’t,” I say. Now the white.

“It’s not impossible.”

“No, not impossible.”

We’re both silent.

“He could,” says Legner.

“But He won’t.”

“You never know.”

“No,” I say, and put down the cube, which is now fully rearranged. “You never know.”

I had often stood in front of the mirror coolly but angrily reassuring myself that I didn’t look bad. My face was symmetrical and well proportioned, my skin was okay, my body big enough, my chest and chin substantial, my eyes not too small, and I was also lean. So what was it?

Today I think it was all accidental. There is no such thing as fate, and for example, if I’d asked Lisa Anderson on another day, or at least asked her differently, everything might have turned out another way, and now I’d have a family maybe and I’d be a TV editor or a meteorologist.

Lisa was in my class and she sat diagonally in front of me. When she wore something with short sleeves I saw her freckles, and when the sun came through the window the light played on her smooth brown hair. It took me five days to come up with the right words.

“Shall we go to the theater? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ”

“Who’s … what?”

Not that I would have enjoyed going to the theater. I found it boring, it was always stuffy, and it was hard to understand the people on the stage. But someone had told me that Lisa liked it.

“That’s the name of the play.”

She gave me a friendly look. I hadn’t stuttered, and as far as I could tell, I hadn’t blushed.

“What play?”

“In … the theater.”

“What kind of play is it?”

“When we see it, we’ll know.”

She laughed. Things were going well. I was relieved, and laughed too.

She turned serious.

Granted, something with my laugh hadn’t been quite right: a little too loud and too high, I was nervous. I quickly tried to correct it and laugh the proper way, but I’d suddenly forgotten what that was supposed to be. When I realized how weird I sounded, I blushed after all: my skin tingled and went hot. In order to get past the moment, I laughed again, but this time it sounded even worse, and I suddenly saw myself standing in front of Lisa and staring at her and still laughing and watching myself standing in front of her staring and laughing. My skin burned red.

“Today’s no good, unfortunately,” said Lisa.

“But you just—”

Unfortunately, she said. It had just occurred to her. No time.

“Pity,” I said hoarsely. “And tomorrow?”

She paused for a second. Then: Unfortunately, she said, tomorrow was no good either.

“The day after tomorrow?”

Unfortunately she really had a lot on in the coming weeks.

After that I hardly even dared to look at her from behind. But I couldn’t stop her from continuing to appear in my dreams. In them she was adorable, willing, and she hung on my every word. Sometimes we were alone in a wood, then again we were lying in a meadow, and sometimes we were in a room, so dimly lit that I could barely make out the curve of her shoulders, the outlines of her hips, and the soft sweep of her hair. When I then woke up, still riddled with lust and already tormented by shame, I couldn’t come to grips with the fact that I could even have thought any such thing was happening in real life.

A few months later at a party, I fell into conversation with Hanna Larisch, who was in our parallel class. I had already drunk a second bottle of beer, the air seemed to be turning as soft as velvet, and suddenly we were talking about the cube. She had one too, everyone had one back then, but like almost all of them, she had only ever managed to sort out one side.

It was quite easy, I explained, it’s best to begin with the white layer, then you make a T on each of the four side layers, then you permute the corners, for which there are several alternatives: like this, and this, and this, I demonstrated the hand movements. The trick, I said, is to decide quickly how to rotate the corners, there’s no formula for that, it’s just practice and intuition.

She listened. The cube was at the peak of its popularity at that time, experts discussed it on TV, and magazines had articles about the people who won championships. My voice didn’t even catch when I brushed her shoulder apparently absentmindedly; and when I took a step closer to be able to hear her better, because the music was so loud, she stroked her hair back and looked at me attentively. Yes, I suddenly thought, this is how it can go, this is how you do it. I took another bottle, it was easy to talk. And that was my bad luck. I talked and talked. I talked about how hard it was at the end to rotate the corners. I talked about having a shot at the state championships if I practiced enough and maybe the national championships weren’t totally out of reach. I could feel that time was passing and something was going to have to happen soon, and to hide how nervous I was, I kept on talking.

She stroked her hair back, looked at the floor, looked at me again, and now there was something stiff about the way she moved. This made me anxious so I talked more quickly. She stroked her hair again, but she didn’t say anything. And I talked. I was waiting for some instinct to tell me what to do next, but this instinct was struck dumb. How did other people know how to behave, where was it written, how did you learn it? I looked at my watch to be sure that we still had time, but she misunderstood my glance and said she had to be getting home too. “Already?” I cried, and: “No!” and “Not now!” but then I couldn’t think of anything else. We were both silent as the music blasted. Drunken fellow pupils were dancing beside us, their bodies squeezed against one another in the haze of cigarette smoke; over by the window two of them were kissing. Hanna hesitated and then left.

“Was it awful?” my mother asked. She was still awake. She usually was if I came home late. She sat in the kitchen and stirred lemon juice into a cup of tea.

“Was what?”

“I don’t know, but I can tell from looking at you that it was awful.”

She set down the spoon next to the cup as though it were liable to break. “There are some things you have to keep trying. Again and again. No matter how often they defeat you. You think it just happens to you, but it happens to everyone. It’s absurd to keep on going regardless, but that’s what you do — you keep on going.”