An hour later we weren’t even tired. Perhaps it was even longer, perhaps much less: time seemed to race forward and wind back, it folded itself into bows and tangles like unspooling film and afterward I no longer knew whether this was a result of my disordered memory or reality itself had succumbed to confusion. In one of my recollections I’m stretched out while her body lifts itself above me, silvery white in the dull light from the window, her hands on my shoulders, her head thrown back; in another she’s lying under me, her hands digging into my back, her eyes turned away from me as my hand slides down her body to the place that makes her moan in despair or in pain. Or I in her arms or she in mine and the two of us half on the bed and half on the floor, so entwined that we could be one body or Siamese twins, her hand in my mouth and my arms around her hips—and at this precise moment Hannah’s face flashes in front of me then fades again. Then we’re on our feet and the back of my head bangs against the wall and I’m supporting her entire weight and the space around us disintegrates and then reassembles itself. Just at the moment when I succumb to gentle exhaustion, it all starts again and we clutch each other as if we were swimming in the Sargasso Sea because we don’t want it to end. But finally we become separate, and there’s her and there’s me and I would love to have listened as she started telling me her life story but I’m already drifting into a dreamless sleep.
In the early morning it began again. Was I the one who shook her awake, or did she drag me from my sleep? I don’t know, all I see is a clear, singularly pure sky in the window. Her hair on the white pillow had changed color in the dawn light and now was giving off red glints, but—she gave a sigh—we both sank back into sleep and the last dreams of the night that was ending.
When I woke up, she was fully dressed, murmured a goodbye, and was out the door; she had to get to work. I was late too. Without stopping for breakfast I ran to the car and while I was stuck as always in the 8 a.m. traffic, I called Hannah.
“Yesterday? Boring. The usual bunch of bureaucrats.”
Even as I said it, I wondered about two things. First that people, even those closest to us who know us best, don’t notice when we lie. The cliché holds the opposite, that you always betray yourself somehow and begin to stutter and sweat when you utter a falsehood, that you sound odd, that your voice changes. But friends, it’s not true. And the fact that it’s not true surprises nobody more than the liar. Besides, even if it were true, even if your voice tightened, even if we did sweat and blush and twitch, none of it would give us away because nobody notices. People are credulous, they don’t anticipate being deceived. Who truly listens to other people, who concentrates on the chatter of his nearest and dearest? Everyone’s mind is somewhere else.
“You poor thing. Those bores! I don’t know how you stand it.”
I detected no irony in her voice. And that was the other thing that surprised me: everyone makes fun of officials, bureaucrats, pen pushers, and paper tigers. But that’s us! Every one of us who’s an employee feels we’re an artist, an anarchist, a free spirit, a secret lunatic who recognizes neither norms nor constraints. Every one of us was once promised the kingdom of heaven and none of us wants to acknowledge that we’re part of these people we never wanted anything to do with, have been for years, that nothing about us is exceptional, and that it’s precisely the sense that we’re different that makes us so banal.
“And the children?” Now my voice sounded uncertain. Her saying “you poor thing” to me, just as Luzia said yesterday, hit me with unexpected force.
“Paul insulted his teacher. He’s been difficult recently. You need to talk to him on Saturday.”
“I can’t come home this Saturday. Unfortunately.”
“Oh.”
“Sunday.”
“Fine then, Sunday.”
I said something about appointments, things happening unexpectedly, and the appalling chaos in the office. I said something about a new colleague and incompetent workers. Then I had the feeling I was pushing it too far and I stopped talking.
My crew were waiting for me with the usual anxiety. I knew they hated each other and could understand it, that they hated me was in the nature of things, for I too felt a violent aversion for my boss, one Elmar Schmieding from Wattenwil, but why in the world were they afraid of me? I had never made trouble for anybody, and I didn’t care what they got up to. I know the system and I know that even medium-serious errors don’t cause fundamental upheavals, don’t change anything, simply aren’t important, they irritate this or that client, but we never hear anything about it and they don’t bother us.
So I greeted Schlick and Hauberlan, clapped Smetana on the shoulder, and called a loud “hello” a little emphatically into the room where Lobenmeier and Mollwitz sat opposite each other. Then I sat down at my desk and tried not to think about Luzia. Not about her skin, not about her nose, not about her toes, and absolutely not about her voice. There was a knock, and Mollwitz came in, sweating as usual, struggling under his grotesquely fat body, short, entirely lacking a neck, pathetic.
“Not now!” I said sharply. In a flash he disappeared again. I called Luzia. “Are you free on Saturday?”
“I thought you weren’t in the city on weekends.”
“How’s that?” I got a fright. How did she know that, what had I said to her? “I’m here!”
“Good,” she said. “So Saturday.”
Another knock, Lobenmeier came in to complain he could no longer put up with Mollwitz.
“Not now!”
He could, said Lobenmeier, put up with a great deal. But at a certain point, enough was enough. That he did absolutely nothing, well okay. That he spent his time posting like a maniac on Internet forums, well okay too. One could even get used to him cursing to himself all the time. But his lack of personal hygiene was more, or perhaps less, than could be tolerated in anyone.
“Lobenmeier,” I said gently. “Easy. I’ll talk to him and take care of it.”
I should have reprimanded him for speaking like that about his colleague, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, the more so since Mollwitz, particularly at the end of the day, really did smell appalling.
On Sunday at around midday I entered my row house in the town by the deep blue lake. Hannah was pale, she had the flu. Paul had shut himself in his room because of some fight, the little one was whining and upset, and I suddenly felt so dizzy it was as if I were drunk. I could still feel Luzia’s hands touching me all over my body.
“Till tomorrow?” she’d asked.
“Of course,” I’d replied without thinking.
I already knew I’d have to invent something to deceive her, but at the same time the lie seemed insignificant; the only things that did signify were this room and this bed and the woman lying next to me, and my other life, Hannah, the children, this house, were like some implausible fiction—just as now, when I sat down at the table after the long drive, pushed a rubber duck to one side, and looked at Hannah’s reddened eyes, Luzia became a distant ghost. I leaned back. The little one stuck her spoon into her mashed potatoes, then smeared the yellow mess all over her face. The phone in my pocket vibrated. A message. Luzia wanted to see me, right away.
“Now what?” asked Hannah. “Not on a Sunday, please.”
“They’re so incompetent,” I said, thumb-clicking: office emergency, colleague, death. I pressed Send and had no sense, to my own amazement, that I’d lied—it was as if I really had left another me back there, who was now setting off to the home of the victim: Hauberlan or Mollwitz? Maybe Mollwitz would be better. I nodded in a preoccupied way and left the room to have a serious talk with Paul. After that I’d send Luzia a message describing how I’d arrived in the dead man’s apartment and forced myself to be calm and make the first arrangements. Not too many specifics, just the main outlines, plus two or three well-observed details: a door half off its hinges, a cat searching vainly for its little bowl of milk, the label on a bottle of pills. How strange that technology has brought us into a world where there are no fixed places anymore. You speak out of nowhere, you can be anywhere, and because nothing can be checked, anything you choose to imagine is, at bottom, true. If no one can prove to me where I am, if I myself am not absolutely certain, where is the court that can adjudicate these things? Real places anchored in space existed before we had little walkie-talkies and wrote letters that arrived in the same second they were dispatched.