Juli Zeh - Decompression

When I expressed my enthusiasm, he grimaced. Then he leaned on a bar table and stared at the dance floor but didn’t participate. In anything at all. He was twelve years older than me, I learned. He explained that actors had to be stupid so that there would be room in their empty heads for their characters’ identities. He said that actors inherently admired writers, because writers provided the texts that they — actors — parroted every day. I danced with a couple of my U & D colleagues and wandered through the rooms of the house and kept going back to the writer leaning on the bar table. As if he were a fixed star and I had slipped into orbit around him. The next thing he told me was that he’d been impotent ever since his publisher started calling him regularly to ask about his progress on his new manuscript. By two A.M., we were screwing in my parents’ bathroom. While we were at it we broke a perfume bottle, and so for the rest of the night we smelled like Mama’s Chanel No. 5 .

Seven years later we’re sitting in a restaurant, eating lobster and drinking a Meursault Premier Cru and crying over the wicked world and dreaming of emigrating. Because living in a penthouse apartment with a roof terrace in Berlin is a total nightmare. Because we’d be much happier with floppy hats on our heads and garden soil under our fingernails. The old man would sit on a simple wooden bench, his back against the sun-warmed wall of the house, and spend the livelong day musing. I’d make pottery, earthenware vessels he’d drink his wine out of. Once a minute, we’d look up and smile at each other. We’d be nice to each other from morn till night. He’d never again, just for fun, try to push me over a cliff .

I thought he wanted to apologize. To blame it all on the wine. To say he didn’t know what had gotten into him, he could have killed us both. Very softly, he came up to the sofa. I lay there with my eyes closed, enjoying the way he was stroking my cheek with one warm finger. He does that so damned seldom. The wind rattled the shutters, which Antje had closed while we were out. When I opened my eyes, it wasn’t a finger, it was his dick .

What would Lotte have done? When I tried to get up, he put his hands around my throat. I told him to let me go. He tried to shove himself into my mouth. I clenched my teeth. He pressed on my windpipe. My lips opened and I gasped for air. It felt like he was choking off my hearing as well as my breathing. The sound of the wind vanished. Absolute silence. It was dark in the room. I could see his face, far away, and his moving mouth. He was looking at me the whole time. I thought I’d better not vomit, it would suffocate me. I wondered how long this could go on. Sometimes he needs a good while. I thought everything would go black soon. Then everything went black .

The thing Lotte and I have in common is that she could take a lot and so can I. I keep thinking about her time on the El Chadra, the hundred-year-old Arab pearl-fishing boat Hans Hass used as an improvised expedition ship. There was Lotte Hass, afloat on the Red Sea off the Sudanese coast, huddled together with ten men on the boat’s vermin-infested planks. I think about how she wrote her diary at night when the heat prevented her from sleeping. “August 12. People who see this in a movie theater will sit back in their plush chairs, offer one another candies, and think, Oh, how nice! I’d love to sail on a ship like that. How romantic!’ In the future, I believe I’ll look at expedition documentaries with different eyes, and when I see our film, I’ll ask myself, ‘Is that really me?’ ”

I lay in his arms. He was holding me the way he should always hold me, good and tight. He stroked my back, my hair, my face. I could hear again. He was crying. He told me what a brave, good girl I was. Said how much he loves me, loves me more than anything in the world, loves me to distraction. Said what a bad person he is. Nevertheless, he said, I can’t leave him. Because he needs me, because I’m his angel. He started crying louder. I sucked in his nearness like a drug. My jaw hurt. I began to comfort him. I told him everything would be all right. Said we just had to try a little harder. He was clinging to me like a child. He thanked me as though I’d saved his life. I smiled. I’m absolutely sure we can do it, I said. I put him to bed .

Not long afterward, he started snoring. The bedroom door was ajar. I took my notebook and came to sit out here in front of the house. Now I imagine I’m on the deck of a ship, and the heat is the reason I can’t sleep .

She’s asleep. Her lips are slightly parted, revealing the adorable space between her front teeth. I feel a mighty urge to stroke her head, and I consider whether I dare do such a thing. When my fingers touch her forehead, she opens her eyes. I say her name: Jola. We look at each other for a few seconds, and then her jaws spring open. Like a moray eel, she has a second pair of jaws in her throat and launches them into her mouth. With the teeth of a predatory fish, she snaps at my fingers.

I flinched away from her and sat up in the bed. It was pitch-dark; the digital alarm clock read 4:00 A.M. Very gradually, I came to the realization that the woman beside me was not Jola but Antje. She was sleeping on her back with outstretched arms, her head tilted down to one side, in an attitude of crucifixion.

My revved-up heart slowly calmed down. Now I understood the unnatural darkness: Antje had closed the shutters. The wind was still blowing around the corners of the house, though not howling as hungrily as a few hours earlier. I hated dreams that seemed like the inventions of a psychologist. There was no question of my going back to sleep. I figured I might as well get up and go out to my workshop.

I stood briefly in front of the house, looking over at the Casa Raya, the only bright spot in the midst of black darkness. For a moment I thought something long-haired and human-shaped was crouching on the garden wall, but it turned out to be nothing but a cactus pear whose paddles were moving in the wind.

The package had come the previous day, and Antje had put it on my workbench. For the first time, I’d decided to equip a dry suit with a heating system. At a depth of one hundred meters, seawater’s cold. The helium in the gas mixture promotes the loss of body heat, and the long decompression times are an additional factor. The package I’d received contained twenty meters of monopolar wire — the kind also used in heating car seats — a heating unit, electric cable, a couple of E/O cords, and a twelve-volt battery. I spread my undersuit on the table, threaded a needle, and got to work. In an instant, I forgot everything else. When Antje came to get me, it was already broad daylight outside and almost time to set out.

The weather had turned cooler. Theo had exchanged his linen suit for jeans and an anorak, which made him more simpatico. Although the wind had died away, experience told me the sea wouldn’t calm down until late in the afternoon. My suggestion that we spend the day sightseeing on land was rejected. My references to the waves we’d encounter when entering the water and the bad visibility below the surface also fell on deaf ears. I spoke sentences in which the phrases difficult conditions and at your own risk occurred. Jola smiled at me and climbed into the van. I was glad to see that her teeth were in fine shape. We started to drive across the island — I thought it would be best to try our luck on the leeward side.

There was something strange about my two clients that morning. We were in Teguise before I realized what was different about them: they were behaving like perfectly normal people. Theo asked, “Sweetheart, can you reach in the backpack and get the water bottle?” Jola answered, “Sure,” and handed him the mineral water. They were both sitting up front with me, swaying a little with the movements of the van and holding their hands on their knees. When a phone rang, it was mine, with a text message from Jola: “Looking forward to the dive. J.”