F by Daniel Kehlmann
Then the two of them stare blankly into nothing. Obviously neither of them can think of anything to say.
“So!” says Remling. “Well then!”
“Absolutely!” cries Eric.
“Why don’t we. Get together.”
“For sure!”
Remling nods to me and goes back to his table at the window.
“I hate him. Almost wrecked the Ostermann deal for me last year.” Eric sits down again and starts tapping at his phone. The waiter reappears behind him, bends over his shoulder, and whisks away my empty plate and Eric’s untouched one so fast that I can’t protest. “So!” Eric puts the phone away, pushes his chair back, and gets to his feet. “Nice to see you. I’ve got to run, you can’t imagine everything that’s going on. Of course I’m paying.”
“But why did you want to talk to me?”
Eric is already on his way to the exit. He doesn’t turn around again, pushes the door open, and is already gone.
Shall I order something else? But it’s expensive, the portions are small, and I can get a curry sausage right on the corner.
I stay for another few minutes. I will have to ask the waiter to pull the table out, then the man next to me will be forced to stand up, then they’ll pull his table out too, which means in turn that the man sitting opposite will have to stand up too. Half the restaurant will be on its feet by the time I’m on mine.
I’m late. Mama will be waiting with the cake by two p.m., then I have to get to a meeting of the Catholic Youth, and in the evening I have to hold Mass again. What on earth did Eric want with me?
Thoughtfully I finish the water in my glass and smile amiably at everyone in the room. Blessings be upon you, whether you want them or not. That’s my job. Day after day I bear witness to the fact that there is an order to things and reason rules in cosmic affairs. What is, must be. What must be, is. I am the legal representative of all that prevails, defender of the Status Quo, whatever that may be. That is my profession.
And the world really isn’t that bad. Thanks be to God, though He doesn’t exist, for things like restaurants and air-conditioning. I’m going to order dessert after all. I’m already signaling the waiter.
I was sitting in the seminary library with the cube hidden behind an edition of Stages on Life’s Way when Kalm came in to tell me my father was on the phone.
To reach the public phone, you had to go down a flight of stairs, along a long corridor, then up a second flight of stairs. The whole way there I was worrying that Arthur might hang up again. I was panting when I reached the phone; the receiver was swinging on the cord.
“Do you have time?”
It really was his voice. I’d never been able to conjure it up in my memory, but now I recognized it as if not a day had gone by.
“Time for what?”
“I’m in the neighborhood right now. Bad moment?”
“You mean—now?”
“I’m here.”
“Where?”
“Come out.”
“Now?”
“So it’s really a bad moment?”
“No, no. You’re here?”
“That’s what I’m saying. In front of the building.”
“This building?”
Arthur laughed and hung up.
It was a year since his strangest story had appeared in his last collection. It was called “Family,” and it was about his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, it was the story of our ancestors, generation by generation, all the way to some vaguely sketched version of the Middle Ages. Most of it is pure invention, for according to Arthur right at the beginning, the past is unknowable: People think the dead are preserved somewhere. People think their traces are inscribed on the universe. But it’s not true. What’s gone is gone. What once was, is forgotten, and what has been forgotten never returns. I have no memory of my father. Oddly, this made me feel robbed. They were my ancestors too.
I went out into the street and he was standing there. His hair as mussed up as always, his hands in his pockets, the same glasses on his nose. When he saw me he spread his arms wide, and for a moment I thought he was going to hug me, but it was a gesture of astonishment at my seminarian’s garb. He suggested we go for a walk. My voice was suddenly so hoarse I couldn’t answer.
We walked in silence. Streetlights flashed, cars honked, and I heard fragments of words as people passed. It felt as if all the noises were part of a secret conversation, as if the world were talking at me in hundreds of sounds, but I couldn’t concentrate and didn’t understand a thing.
“I’ll be in the city for a while,” he said.
“Under a false name?”
“I’m only a well-known writer. Nobody knows well-known writers. I don’t need a false name.”
“What have you been doing all these years?”
“Have you read my books?”
“Of course.”
“Then you know.”
“And apart from that?”
“Nothing. I haven’t done anything apart from that. That’s what it was all about.”
“Oh, that’s what!”
“You’re angry with me?”
I said nothing.
“That I wasn’t there? That we didn’t have sack races, or visits to the zoo, that I didn’t come to parents’ days, roll around on the carpet, and take you to the annual fair? You’re angry about that?”
“What if the books aren’t any good?”
He looked at me sideways.
“What then?” I asked. “Everything sacrificed and then they’re no good? What then?”
“There’s no insurance against that.”
We went on in silence.
“Obligations,” he said after a while. “We invent them when required. Nobody has them unless they decide they have them. But I love you a lot. All three of you.”
“And yet you didn’t want to be with us.”
“I don’t think you missed much. We’ll talk about all of it. The hotel opposite the station, come this evening, Ivan will be there too.”
“And Eric?”
“He doesn’t want to see me. Come for dinner at eight. I’m guessing you like to eat.”
I wanted to ask what gave him the right to say such a thing, but it had been his form of farewell. He waved, a taxi pulled up, he got in and shut the door behind him.
That evening we sat together for hours. Ivan talked about the moment when he realized he would never be a great painter, and Arthur described his idea to write a book that would be a message to a single human being, in which therefore all the artistry would serve as mere camouflage, so that nobody aside from this one person could decode it, and this very fact paradoxically would make the book a high literary achievement. Asked what the message would be, he said that would depend on the recipient. When asked who the recipient would be, he said that would depend on the message. Around midnight, Ivan talked about how his suspicion that he was homosexual was confirmed, without anxiety or distress, when he was nineteen, but how he had never been able to tell Eric, for fear it would make him lose faith in himself because they were so alike. At one a.m. I was on the verge of admitting that I didn’t believe in God, but then didn’t, and talked instead about Karl-Eugen Zimmerman, the thirteen-year-old who beat me by three seconds in every championship, I had no chance against him. At one thirty, Arthur said he had worked out how to live with guilt and regret the way other people live with a stiff foot or chronic back pain, around two a.m. I cried a little, at two thirty we said our goodbyes and promised to meet again the next evening.
When we reached the hotel the next day, Arthur had checked out. He had left neither an address nor a note. For a few weeks I kept expecting him on a daily basis to make contact and explain things. Then I gave up.
A windowless room in the cellar of the bishop’s palace. It doesn’t smell good and there is no air-conditioning. Linoleum on the floor, whitewashed walls, the ceiling covered with soundproof tiles, the regulation crucifix on the
Next to me stands Father Tauler, a gaunt Jesuit. He rubs his eyes and sighs.
“It won’t be long,” I say.
“An hour.”
“It goes by.”
“You think?”
“It has to.”
He sighs again. “Besides, your friend Finckenstein is here.”
“Oh!”
“Upstairs in the palace. Just back from Rome.”
Father Tauler goes to one of the worn-out chairs and sits down. Immediately two girls come over to sit with him and start talking to him quietly. One of them is worked up, her eyes are glistening, the other one puts an arm around her shoulder from time to time.
Smiling uncertainly, I take the other chair. I’m sweating heavily, and I wish I could get a drink from the machine. But that’s impossible. I cannot drink Coca-Cola out of a bottle here. I have to preserve a remaining scrap of dignity. If I were lean, it would be no problem. But not the way I am.
I sit and wait. Maybe nobody will want anything from me. Two boys are playing foosball, they bang the ball this way and that with angry gestures, behind them three girls are jumping around the table-tennis table, they’re really good, I can hardly see the ball. The PlayStations squeak and whistle; there’s a smell of sweat. A girl comes toward me and I flinch, but luckily she’s heading over to the computers. The worst is when girls come to me because they’re pregnant. I know what I have to say to them, the rules are strict, but in reality I don’t know what to do. It’s easier when it’s about religious doubts. That doesn’t take any reflection, I just talk about the Mysterium. Unfortunately religious doubts have gone out of fashion.
I close my eyes. On top of it all, Finckenstein! I’ll have to say hello to him, he knows I’m here, otherwise it would look odd. And I shouldn’t avoid him. One should never make room for envy.
I open my eyes. Someone has tapped me on the knee. A young man is sitting in front of me. I know him, he’s often here, and his name is … I’ve forgotten. If I were better at names, I’d know. He already has beard stubble, he’s wearing a blue baseball cap with the letters N and Y on it, and his right nostril is pierced by a thin ring. His T-shirt says Bubbletea is not a drink I like. His jeans are torn, but they’re the kind you buy already torn. He has a pale face, which may explain why the beard stubble is so visible. He stares at me, his eyes slightly inflamed.
“Yes?” I say.
He clears his throat, then begins to speak. I bend forward. He’s talking too softly and too fast, it’s hard to understand him.
“Hold on. Please slow down.”
He looks at his sneakers, clears his throat again, starts all over again. Gradually I understand. There’s been a fight, and a butterfly is also involved. Butterfly, he says over and over again and makes fluttering movements with his hand, like this and this and this: butterfly.
Butterfly …? A suspicion dawns on me.
Yes, he says. A knife—a butterfly. This is how you open it, this is how you stab, it all went very fast.
“Just a moment. Say that again.”
Sighing and sweating, he does. Some of it I don’t understand, but I get the gist. He and two friends named Ron and Carsten had a fight in a discotheque two nights ago with someone named Ron; the two of them both being called Ron was an accident and didn’t mean anything. What makes things harder, however, is that the boy in front of me is also called Ron. So: he, Ron, and Carsten had this fight with Ron, for reasons nobody can remember, maybe it was about money, or maybe a girl, or maybe nothing at all, there are always fights happening over nothing, but if someone strikes a blow, the reason for it becomes immaterial, the only thing that matters is that a blow got struck.
“On your shirt there, what does that mean? Bubbletea is not a drink I like. What does it mean?”
He looks at me, baffled; apparently the question has never occurred to him.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Go on.”
He coughs and rubs his eyes. So, he, Ron, and Carsten had run into Ron #3 on the street, Ron being the Ron who’d attacked Ron in the disco.
“What a strange coincidence!”
Not really, he said; in the afternoons they were often on that street, and Ron #3 was on that street almost every afternoon, but they hadn’t seen this coming, nor obviously had Ron #3, otherwise it would have really been too dumb of him to cross their path on this street when he was alone. So he got himself beaten up. Not totally brutally, but good and proper.
“That’s bad,” I said.
Yes, but not the worst, because the butterfly hadn’t come into it yet. A man who was full of himself had weighed in, and …
Father Tauler stands up, goes to the drink machine, gets a bottle of Coca-Cola, opens it, goes back to the two girls, and drinks. I watch him enviously.
“What? I’m sorry, I was distracted—what?”
Ron asks if I haven’t been listening to him.
“Please tell me again.”
Well, so this guy. So he got all full of himself! Although none of it had anything to do with him, absolutely none of it! Such a snotnose. Didn’t fit into the neighborhood at all, no idea where he came from! He just got all full of himself!
“And then?”
Well, the knife. The butterfly. Just like that, push hard, click, stab, all in a flash. Then they’d run away, except Ron stayed lying there.
“Ron?”
Well, not the one who’d done the stabbing, the other one! Number 3! He rubs his face.
The slogan on his T-shirt really bothers me. Why does anyone make these things? “Did someone call the police?”
Probably, he says. Someone always calls the police.
“Was the man wounded?”
He looks at me as if I’m mentally defective. Obviously, he says slowly. Of course. How on earth would he not be? Ron stabbed him. With the butterfly! How could anyone not be wounded, I ask you? He looks over at the Ping-Pong table, then at the PlayStation, then leans forward and asks if I have a solution.
“Absolution?”
Yes, absolution. If he can get it from me. And should the police surface at his place, if I can corroborate that it wasn’t him that did the stabbing, that it was Ron. The other Ron. His friend.
“How could I corroborate that?”
I feel dizzy, and this time it’s not because of the heat. Is this really happening? No one has ever come to me in the confessional and admitted to an act of violence, that sort of thing just doesn’t happen, never mind if thriller writers and scriptwriters think it’s an everyday occurrence. I could call the police. But I’m not allowed to do that. Or do I have to anyway? Is what is going on here a confession at all? We’re not in the confessional, not even in a church. Am I obligated in any way to call the police? It’s all very complicated, and it’s so hot.
As if he’d read my thoughts, he begins to cry. Tears stream down his stubbled baby cheeks. Please, he says, please, Mister Priest!
On the other hand, I think, let’s accept this is a confession. I can decide, and I’m making it into one. In this case I may not go to the police. Canon law forbids it, and the law of the state protects me. That seems to settle the matter. And absolution? Well, why not! There is no God, obliged to forgive the boy just because I’ve made the sign of the cross. They’re words. They change nothing.
Ron wipes his tears away. Everything happened so quickly, he says, there was nothing he could do about it. And why did the snotnose have to get so full of himself?
I know I’m going to reproach myself, or rather I know I’ll have to forget it all, in order not to reproach myself. But since I’ve begun the gesture, I can’t break it off: I make the s
Thank you, he says again, thank you, Mister Priest!
“But go to the police. Tell them what—”
Of course! To the police. And then he wants to start all over again and tell me the whole dismal story a second time, but I’ve had enough. I jump to my feet.
Ron looks up at me—liberated on the one hand because he thinks I’ve taken the sin from him, and worried on the other, because he’s confided it to me. I look into his face, into his vague eyes, there’s fear in them, but also a mild flash of viciousness as he asks himself if I’m not someone who needs silencing.
I smile at him, he doesn’t smile back. “That’s all,” I say, and have no idea what I mean. I hold out my arm to him, he stands up, and we shake hands. His is soft and damp and he lets go again immediately. I have the sense that everything would be clearer, better, more right somehow, if only I could understand the slogan on his shirt. I turn away deliberately and indicate to Father Tauler that I have to go. He raises his eyebrows in surprise; I point to my watch and then the ceiling—the universally recognized gesture that means I’m being called upstairs.
“Mister Priest?” A young girl wearing a cross on a chain positions herself in front of me. “I have a question.”
“Talk to Father Tauler.”
Disappointed, she moves out of the way. I reach the door and the stairwell. I pant my way up, and, bathed in sweat, step into the marble coolness of the entrance hall.
“Friedland!”
He’s standing right there. At this exact moment. He’s thin and tall, his black robe is elegantly cut, his hair beautifully barbered, and his glasses by Armani. Of course he’s not sweating.