Juli Zeh - Decompression

Above the water, however, the air between us seemed to vibrate. It was as if we were all three waiting for something to happen. And we had an audience. It started one afternoon when we went shopping. Because I didn’t like talking to salesclerks, I maneuvered Theo and Jola past the cheese, fish, and meat counters and made a detour around the produce that customers weren’t allowed to weigh for themselves. Then I stood in front of a shelf with olives in glass jars and waited while Theo studied the wine selection two aisles farther on and Jola disappeared into the cosmetics department. She came back with a brightly colored package, put her arm through mine, and held the product up to my eyes.

“What do you think?”

I looked at the photograph on the box — a woman with wheat-blond hair, dressed to kill — and didn’t understand.

“Bleach,” Jola explained. “Lotte’s a blonde. If you want to know how someone thinks, you need to have the same hairstyle.”

I tried to free my arm from her grasp.

“You think it’ll look good on me?” She snuggled closer.

“I like your hair,” I said.

Jola laughed and kissed me on the mouth. When I felt her tongue between my teeth, I forgot myself. It was only a brief moment, during which my eyes closed and my hands grabbed. I thought I was going to fall down. Until I heard my colleague Laura’s voice saying, “Are you all shooting a scene for Up and Down?”

I could have punched myself in the head. The supermarket was on the way to the beach. Everybody shopped there. Laura looked as though she’d been standing behind us for a good while.

“Or is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation part of the training course?” She seemed to find this question witty.

Jola, whom I’d pushed away from me in fright, leaned against the olives shelf, ostentatiously and provocatively straightening her T-shirt. I raised my hand in a superfluous greeting. “Laura. How are things going?”

“That’s what I was about to ask,” said Theo. He was standing at the other end of the aisle and staring at Jola. “Why not just kneel down and blow him?”

“Well, okay, see you,” said Laura and disappeared.

In some panic, I considered all the people she could tell about this scene. And at the same time, I was searching for the words to apologize to Theo. He came up to me. “Don’t worry about it,” he said without taking his eyes off Jola. “If you didn’t love yourself so damned much, you’d understand you aren’t the problem at all.”

I withdrew to the magazine aisle. Fifteen minutes later, when they loaded their purchases onto the cashier’s conveyor belt, they were joking together. I wondered if I’d been dreaming.

They changed places in the van. Now Jola sat in the middle of the front seat, and Theo leaned against the side window. When she spoke, Jola kept putting her hand on my forearm or my knee. If I told some diving story, she listened gravely and asked questions. If I made a joke, she laughed out loud. In the evenings, she sent so many text messages that I had to switch off the ringer in my phone.

“Thanks for the wonderful day! Your Friend J.”

“Missing you. Your Friend J.”

“Lotte on a school of fishes: It was as if I were in the presence of a great power that observed me with a thousand eyes. Good, don’t you think? So does Your Friend J.”

“Shall we go down to the beach? Surf, moonlight, just the two of us? YFJ.”

In the mornings it would start up again while I was still lying on the couch. “Looking forward to what comes next. Your Friend J.”

I didn’t answer. I tried to keep Jola at a distance. Nevertheless, people I knew kept seeing me with her again and again. I wondered whether she could be doing it on purpose. In the Wunder Bar café, she even sat jokingly on my lap right when Bernie came in. I badly wanted to push her off my knees, but that would have looked like an admission of guilt. And so she stayed there while Bernie and I had a brief conversation about the expedition we were planning. The Aberdeen was shipshape, Dave knew what was up. If the weather held, there shouldn’t be any problem on November 23.

“As easy as a walk in the park,” Bernie said in English. He nodded to Theo and went to the counter in search of a piece of chocolate cake. As if he hadn’t seen Jola.

Another time she was standing in front of me and rummaging in my jeans pockets for the car key. Before I could grab her hands, Bernie’s pal Dave came around the corner. He looked away and didn’t say hello. On the promenade in Puerto del Carmen, Jola was hanging on my arm when a group of Spanish women walked toward us. I thought I recognized two of Antje’s girlfriends, even though with all the bright dresses and big noses and thick black hair, I couldn’t ever be sure about them.

The island was a village. People knew one another. Nothing happened unnoticed. The strange thing was that in actual fact nothing happened, but that wasn’t unnoticed either. I began to feel I was always being watched.

While we waited for Theo, who was off somewhere buying cigarettes, I emphatically asked Jola to stop.

“Stop what?” she said, taking my hand.

“That, for example!” I pulled my hand away.

“Maybe I’m just a bit more honest than you.” She snatched up my other hand and laid it on her hip. “Tell me that feels bad.”

It was always the same: at that very moment, a silver Land Rover Defender drove past us. There was only one silver Defender on the island, and it was driven by Geoffrey, who owned the Lobster’s Paradise. Could Jola know that? Could she have seen him before I did? Or was I getting paranoid? The sun turned Jola’s eyes into green glass. I liked looking into it. Moreover, I couldn’t claim that her hip felt bad. On the contrary. Theo came out of a shop shortly before I let her go.

“Don’t let me disturb you, Little Shit,” he said.

What was even stranger was how lighthearted Jola seemed at that time. She laughed a lot. Antje, with her simplistic understanding of human nature, would have attributed Jola’s behavior to new love. Even though it made no sense, Jola’s beaming smiles made me proud. Her face darkened only when she looked at Theo. Theo, who was now calling me nothing but “Little Shit,” seemed to find real enjoyment in the situation. He followed our every movement with his eyes, smiled pathologically when Jola touched me, and waited eagerly for what would happen next. I didn’t want to form any judgments, but I found Theo’s lack of pride repellent. His presence got on my nerves. It was like being permanently exposed to toxic radiation. Besides, I didn’t understand what he wanted me to do. Whatever Jola might have told him, he was free to find another diving instructor or leave the island altogether. As long as he continued to require my services, my only option was to do my job, as decently as possible. He could hardly have failed to notice my efforts to keep Jola off me. As best I could, I stayed out of the cross fire. Jola was the one who engaged in blatant behavior. Moreover, it wasn’t my fault that we three were together almost around the clock and separated only to sleep. They never wanted to go home after a dive. I chauffeured them up and down the island, trying hard to make the most of its meager sightseeing attractions. We ate duck in Omar Sharif’s former villa. We looked into the green water in the sea-level crater known as El Golfo. We trudged around every single piece bequeathed to the island by its artist. On one side I had Jola’s overheated chatter, on the other Theo’s icy silence. I told myself that only an idiot would have expected to pocket fourteen thousand euros just for a few diving lessons. I was being paid to handle two neurotics who’d anticipated their need of supervision while on vacation. Contrary to Theo’s implication, I wasn’t so stupid as to consider myself the problem. When Jola took my hand in public, I knew she was doing it for him.