Juli Zeh - Decompression

She turned around and went over to Theo, who was leaning against the van, smoking a cigarette. He looked like a detached observer, waiting with quiet curiosity to see how the scene would develop. The bit of sidewalk we were standing on felt like a stage to me too. Not a good feeling.

“Sorry, Theo,” Jola said. She stroked his cheek as though he were a little boy who’d cut his knee. “It was supposed to be just a stupid joke. Theo and the dead fish. Ha-ha.”

“Forget about it,” Theo said, drawing on his cigarette and not taking his eyes off Jola.

“It was Sven’s mistake. Complain to him.”

She threw a last, annihilating glance at me over her shoulder and then stalked around the van and out of my sight. There was no other possible way to exit the stage.

That was probably the exact moment when I should have understood the game Jola was playing. She’d dropped enough hints. Along with Lotte Hass’s biography, Jola had been reading countless nonfiction books about diving and the underwater world. And she, of all people, was supposed not to have known what an electric ray looked like and what my warning sign had meant? And when I tried to goad the torpedo into reacting, she’d thought — what? That I was playing around with a dead fish? I should have made it my business to recognize what was consistent in Jola’s behavior. Lawyers are supposed to have a sixth sense for patterns. But I wasn’t a lawyer, after all; I was a diving instructor. Instead of wishing the two of them a nice vacation and taking to my heels, I came to the conclusion that Jola wasn’t completely wrong. If Theo had collided with the ray and suffered a fatal accident, I might have been accused of involuntary manslaughter. Maybe even of murder. The motive would have been clear if half the island had taken the witness stand and testified to my alleged affair with Jola.

We separated for the rest of the day. Theo and Jola wanted to stay in town a little longer, go to dinner later, and take a taxi back to Lahora. I was grateful for the evening off. I steered my Volkswagen van through the volcanic landscape, alone and enjoying it.

It’s easy to judge your past self. How stupid you were, how little you grasped. Patterns, though not necessarily explanations, show themselves only in hindsight. So with all our efforts to do everything right, we can still be sure to arrive notoriously too late.

JOLA’S DIARY, TENTH DAY

Monday, November 21. Afternoon .

I don’t have much time. He could come back at any moment. I’m in the Wunder Bar café, surrounded by German tourists. There’s a piece of cheesecake and a cup of filter coffee on the table. It’s 3:32 in the afternoon. Scarcely an hour ago, Theo tried to kill me again. Sounds like the beginning of a crime novel. But it isn’t. Maybe I should compose an appeal for help while I’m sitting here: Dear Sir or Madam, if you find these notes, please inform the police at once! Inquire as to the whereabouts of a certain Jolante von der Pahlen. Has she disappeared? Has something happened to her? Please tell the police it was no accident! They should question the writer Theodor Hast, and they shouldn’t forget he’s a true master in the art of twisting the truth. That’s his profession .

It was so brazen, the way he attacked poor Sven! He said he’d misinterpreted Sven’s hand signal and assumed the fish was dead. The dead fish and the actress — ha-ha. I wonder if he concocted that story before he decided to push me onto an electric ray? Or is he ingenious enough to come up with such explanations spontaneously? In any case, he actually threatened to file a complaint with the police, while the truth was that Sven would have been perfectly justified in showing us the door. But the race is to the cheeky. In the end, Sven really thought he was to blame for everything .

Now the old man’s looking for an ATM. He wants to withdraw a hefty sum from my account so he can take me out to dinner this evening. Such a failed murder attempt calls for a celebration. He probably didn’t even want to kill me. One doesn’t break a pretty toy on purpose; one merely wants to find out how much it can take. One wants to see it perform a two-hundred-volt dance at the bottom of the sea. To watch it roll up its eyes, twitch epileptically, swallow water, lose consciousness. What fun .

Did he think Sven wouldn’t see him push me? Or was he determined that he should? Maybe it’s not really about me. Maybe it’s some kind of suicide attempt. Maybe Theo beats me right in front of the living-room window and shoves me onto a lethal fish before Sven’s eyes as a way of provoking Sven. Until he has no other choice but to avenge me and hang the old man on a rock the next time we dive. Theo’s clever enough to know that staging an accident would be easy for an experienced diver like Sven. No marks. No witnesses. If that’s so, I’m less than a toy. Less than an instrument. Only a kind of lure. The piece of cheesecake in the mousetrap .

Maybe I’m going crazy. I don’t feel anything anymore. Then again, my brain’s working incessantly. I remember wanting to talk to Sven. He’d rescue me, I thought. But then he suddenly seemed surreal to me. A flat, cardboard figure. As though I’d invented him. How can you be rescued by your own invention? Please let me in on that secret when you’re finished giving your statement to the police, dear sir or madam. And don’t forget to speak with the coast guard. They must search the Atlantic Ocean for the remains of the actress or the writer. Maybe even for the remains of both. Down forty meters deep .

Before I reached the sandlot, I could already see that Antje wasn’t home. In all our years in Lahora, I’d never been able to teach her to shut the gate only when the VW van was parked on the property. Whenever I came home, I always had to climb out and open the gate. There were days when that inconvenience galled me to my soul; on this day, however, seeing the gate standing open caused me only frustration. It meant that Antje wasn’t there. I’d been looking forward to spending the evening with her, to eating and chatting, to discussing the day just past and the new day tomorrow. To putting our heads together under the light of the dining-room lamp. It almost seemed as though I was observing that scene through a lighted window, while I myself stood outside on a cold, wintry German street.

Without Todd’s yapping, the house positively boomed with silence. There was nothing extraordinary about Antje’s driving to town in the afternoon to do some shopping, meet girlfriends, or tend to a holiday apartment. It was only that she usually called me up before she left and asked what I was doing at the moment and whether she should come to the dive site and bring fresh scuba tanks or hot soup. When there was nothing on schedule for the evening, we’d sometimes arrange to meet for coffee and cheesecake at the Wunder Bar café. Or to take Todd for a walk on the promenade. Suddenly it became clear to me how much had changed since Jola and Theo arrived on the island.

I put the wasp-waisted espresso pot on the stove and filled a big glass with lemonade. “Making things nice for yourself” described a method women resorted to; nevertheless, male though I was, I was determined to give it a try. I picked up the scattered pages of Theo’s short story from the floor near the living-room couch and put them in the proper order. I carried the coffee, the lemonade, and a bucket of ice cubes out to the terrace and pushed a deck chair into the shade.

Two hours later, I called Antje’s number. All I got was her voice mail. Just in case she was in a dead zone, I called her three more times at intervals of a few minutes.

It had cost me an effort to read Theo’s story all the way through. In the end I’d felt downright loathing for the typed pages themselves. It was as though the content of the words had bled onto the paper. As though they might dirty my fingers.