Juli Zeh - Decompression

I’d completed my military obligation with the Army Engineer Divers and trained as a diving instructor with the DLRG, the German Lifesaving Association, during semester breaks from my law studies. When Antje and I arrived on the island, I had more than five hundred dives in my logbook, and from the very first hour I was able to earn money as an instructor. Antje had studied Spanish in school, and in addition she had a real talent for organization. Founding a diving school required a great deal of work out of the water. Antje took on all the logistics, from visits to the authorities and bookkeeping to equipment maintenance, so that I was able to concentrate on diving right from the beginning. It soon became undeniable that we made a good team.

Todd died a few months after our disappearance from Germany. By then he was almost thirteen years old, but Antje wouldn’t accept his age as the reason for his demise. She was convinced she’d killed her best friend in order to be with me. When the diving school started doing so well we could afford to buy the houses in Lahora, she moved heaven and earth to have Todd’s breeder send her an identical dog from the same part of the Rhineland. The new Todd actually looked indistinguishable from the old one. He loved Antje, and Antje loved him. I found it weird that she could silence her guilt feelings with such a simple trick.

“I’ve got a bottle open. One of Nenad’s.” Nenad was from Slovenia, and for the past twenty years he’d cultivated a vineyard in the La Goria region. “Shall we have a glass and loosen up a little?”

“Good night.” I turned to go.

“Jola was here,” said Antje.

I stopped. If a client was the subject, that was something else again. Todd lay in front of the couch and slapped the floor with his tail when we sat down. Antje poured a second glass of wine, handed it to me, and held hers up to be clinked. It was her unchanging opinion that I needed to “loosen up.” She generally seemed to believe that people were capable of interacting with one another only after an appropriate amount of loosening.

“So what did Theo talk about?” she asked.

“You were going to tell me why Jola was here.”

Antje looked at the window, through which there was nothing to see but black night. She leaned forward to pat Todd’s head and flicked some fluff off the arm of the couch. For a second I thought she’d invented Jola’s visit to stop me from going to bed. Then, however, she began to talk.

Somehow, she said, Jola had grown bored with studying and then had somehow decided to drop over. And since Antje had just finished preparing the tuna salad anyway, somehow or other Jola had stayed to dinner. They’d opened a bottle of Nenad’s wine and somehow managed to have a very good conversation.

I asked her not to constantly use the word somehow .

First, Antje said, Jola had talked about how much she liked diving and how much playing the role of the Girl on the Ocean Floor meant to her. Overall, Antje said, Jola seemed to be afflicted by an intense Lotte Hass fixation, which probably stemmed from a panic about missing the boat professionally. It was something along the lines of “If I don’t get this part, my career’s over forever.” Antje had found it interesting that a woman like Jola, who appeared so successful and self-confident, would in reality suffer such torments. Despite her 384,000 Google hits, Jola obviously had enormous anxiety issues.

Having registered the information that I wasn’t the only one who’d googled Jola’s name, I asked, “Well, so what?”

Somehow, Antje went on, Jola seemed to be having doubts about all her hopes and aspirations. She’d begun talking about people’s decisions and actions, how they were like pieces of furniture people installed in their lives. That was why someone who did evil could never live happily again, no matter how rich and famous and successful he might be. By the same token, good deeds never arose from love of one’s neighbor but always and only from self-love. How to lead your life was therefore not a moral question but an aesthetic one. Of course, there were people who felt more at home with ugliness than with beauty. Because unless you were totally nuts, it wasn’t likely you’d do something bad by mistake. In this vein, Antje said, Jola had gone on for a good while, and she’d said a whole lot of remarkable things.

In the first place, I found Jola’s line of thought not particularly remarkable, and in the second, I had no idea why I was sitting there listening to the summary of an innocuous conversation. I made these very same observations to Antje.

After a brief hesitation, she explained that there was something about Jola that wasn’t right. She’d kept looking around as though some invisible menace was lurking in the room, and more than once she’d seemed on the verge of tears.

Now came the part where Antje invoked feminine intuition so as not to be at the mercy of concrete facts. My lack of interest escalated into anger. When I started to get up, she grabbed my arm.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “Jola’s afraid.”

“Of what?”

Antje put on her psychiatrist’s demeanor and explained that Jola’s real subject had been Theo the whole time. That when she’d talked about people who furnished their lives with evil deeds, Jola had meant no one but Theo.

I wanted to know if Jola had said Theo’s name.

No, but somehow it had been clear that the conversation was about Theo.

“Nonsense,” I said.

Antje remained stubborn. She said Jola had signaled that she needed help.

I asked whether the word help had been spoken.

Likewise no, but at some point Jola had suddenly seized Antje’s hand and said, word for word, “You should thank heaven for your Sven.”

I hadn’t ever been able to put up with the female propensity for psychologizing. With the assistance of a bottle of wine, Antje could construct an entire world out of mere interpretations, a world as dramatic and shimmering as a musical, and then confuse this production with reality. Only women had the ability to be angry with their mates because of bad dreams about them the previous night.

It seemed to me impossible that Jola had dropped over to ask for help, for protection from Theo. When it came to a taste for dangerous practical jokes, she was as bad as he was. I stood up.

“Okay,” I said. “Sleep well.”

Antje jumped up from the couch too. “Then she said, ‘Sven would never do anything to you.’ ”

I kissed her on the forehead. “It’s good that you two get along so well.”

“But,” said Antje.

One of the pleasant things in life is the fact that everyone is entitled to his own worldview. I took my perceptions to bed with me. I knew tomorrow would be a thoroughly normal day, a day on which I’d go diving with a couple of clients. Beyond that knowledge there was nothing that needed to be taken into account.

JOLA’S DIARY, THIRD DAY

Monday, November 14. Evening .

I’m choking. I can’t shake the feeling of being unable to breathe. It’s lodged in my throat. As if there’s something stuck in there. A cork. A convulsion. Instead of studying, I jump up every three minutes and dash over to the window. I yank it open and suck air into my lungs. I tell myself, That’s oxygen! Your body inhales it automatically! You aren’t going to die. My heart races so hard it hurts. I try to calm down, to subdue my panic. To breathe slowly, the way Sven taught me to do. If only he were here. If only he would take my hand. Give me his air to breathe. I need a diving instructor on land. Someone who can teach me how to keep from choking on this crappy life .