Klaus Hanhn recognized the gestures and his thoughts drifted off to the journey he would make that night. He thought about the airport, the suitcases he had checked in the day before, the twenty gift-wrapped belts he’d placed in those suitcases, and the ten-thousand-mark notes — folded and refolded — contained in each of those belts. Twenty belts, two hundred thousand marks. The treasure that was to provide the foundation of this New Era of His Life.
Then he thought of the savings that would allow him to do without that treasure for a sensible period of time. Far off on the island of turtles. Eight hours from now night would fall and the red, winking light of the plane would make its way through the darkness of the sky.
The hands of the masseuse pressed into his flesh, producing tiny spasms of pain that just as suddenly became pleasure. He closed his eyes in order, mentally, to follow the flight path of the plane until it landed on the island. But there was so much joy in his heart that he couldn’t think. It blinded him, the way the sun blinds those who look directly at it.
The objectives he’d set for himself for the morning of his birthday ended there, with the visit to Sebastian’s beauty salon. Out on the pavement of Brauerstrasse again, Klaus hesitated over which direction to take. He looked at his watch. It was two o’clock.
“Which is the best restaurant in this sad city, Alexander?” he asked as he looked up and down the street, completely empty at that hour. But his little brother knew nothing about the banal facts of the world and remained silent. “I’ll go to the Paris restaurant,” Klaus decided after a moment’s thought.
It was a restaurant frequented by all the wealthy inhabitants of the prosperous parts of the city, the ones who ordered speciality breads for their family suppers. It was bound to be excellent. Moreover, it was in the Stadtpark, not far from Brauerstrasse.
Klaus raised an arm and hailed a taxi.
“The Paris restaurant, please,” he said to the driver with feigned tedium. He tried to disguise his normal accent.
“There’s no need to talk like that, Klaus. You’re wearing so much cologne, no one would dare question your high social status,” said Alexander with a little smile he intended to be ironical.
The dining room of the restaurant was broken up by golden columns, and the tables — about twenty at most — were scattered around a huge glass aquarium. Through the restaurant windows you could see the trees in the Stadtpark, their leaves already stained with red. The napkins were blue and the tablecloths white.
Klaus Hanhn sat down at a table near the aquarium, with his back to the other customers. He wanted to dine facing the tropical fish that swam in the aquarium.
“It would be a good idea to get accustomed to what we’ll be seeing on the island of turtles, Alexander,” he remarked.
“What’s your name?” he said in a firm voice. The question was directed at the waiter who’d just approached him bearing the menu.
“Marcel, monsieur,” replied the waiter, rather ruffled.
“Trés bien, Marcel. I want your best advice. Today is my birthday.”
Klaus was looking apprehensively at the menu he held in his hands. Despite the fact that the ingredients of each dish were given in brackets below, in small writing, in a manner he could understand, most of the names written there were utterly incomprehensible to him.
“Our savarin is excellent, monsieur,” the waiter advised him, having murmured a few words of congratulation.
“Savarin it is then.”
Klaus tried to find that particular dish and ascertain its ingredients. But he couldn’t. He got lost in that strange menu.
“Isn’t that rather a strange name for a meat?” he hazarded.
“Forgive me, monsieur, but it is in fact a fish. But you’re quite right. It is rather a strange name,” agreed the waiter, giving him a friendly smile.
“Of course, of course,” he said hurriedly.
“You’ve made a fool of yourself,” he heard a voice say. His brother’s voice was sharp, as it always was when he wanted to hurt him.
They were brothers and they loved each other, but there were times when Alexander didn’t seem to understand him.
“You know what Marcel will say as soon as he gets to the kitchen, don’t you?” he went on in that same sharp tone. “He’ll say that the customer sitting at the table next to the aquarium is a fraud, a vulgar man putting on the airs of a rich one. You really made a fool of yourself there, Klaus.”
A cold sweat broke out on Klaus’s forehead and hands. He was still looking for that savarin.
“There it is, monsieur,” said the waiter helpfully, bending over the menu.
“I can see it! I can see it!” said Klaus brusquely. The dish (Savarin scandinave avec brocoli d’aneth) appeared in a separate section of the menu, among the ten dishes recommended by the chef that day.
The price of the dish made him open his eyes wide. It was ten times the price of any meal he’d eaten in his long and still very recent past.
“Fine. Bring me that,” he ordered the waiter. But he was stunned by the price and had to make a tremendous effort not to show it.
“You think like a poor man, Klaus. You’re rich and you still think like a poor man. You’ll never change,” the sharp voice said reproachfully.
“Be quiet, Alexander!” All those years together and he still didn’t understand what made his little brother tick. Sometimes he turned against him, for no reason. It was as if he enjoyed making him suffer.
“And as an hors d’oeuvre, monsieur?”
“Crêpes de roquefort,” replied Klaus, without knowing what it was he was ordering.
“And a white wine of the region? A Rhine wine perhaps?” The waiter was still smiling but not as warmly as before. For a moment Klaus thought he caught an air of mockery in his look.
“Perfect! Just what I need! A Rhine wine!” agreed Klaus enthusiastically. But his enthusiasm rang false.
When the waiter disappeared among the columns, Klaus tried to fix his attention on the trees, still full of sun, in the Stadtpark, or on the tropical fish in the aquarium. But it was in vain that he tried to redirect his thoughts. Again and again they returned to the savarin scandinave that had made a fool out of him. All morning he’d been the sleeping fish he wanted to be, thinking he was being borne along on a gentle current. A dream, nothing but a dream. A slight disturbance of the waters was all it had taken for him to wake and realize that the current didn’t exist. He wasn’t in the sea, he wasn’t in a river; he was in a fish tank, just like those tropical fish in the restaurant. Except the fish tank he lived in was smaller. It suffocated him, made him sweat.
“It’s all your fault, Klaus,” said the sharp voice.
Alexander’s reproaches increased the anxiety he was feeling at that moment and he was pleased to hear the waiter’s voice at his side. He had brought him the bottle of Rhine wine.
“Would you like to taste it, monsieur?”
The wine was the color of amber. Klaus nodded.
“Do you have any paper?” he asked, after approving the quality of the wine.
“Paper, monsieur?” The waiter wore a look of incomprehension. “To write a few short notes. Can’t waste any time, you know. I’d like to, but I can’t.”
“Now you’ve got it, Klaus. Now you’re talking,” he heard inside him and Klaus smiled with satisfaction. Alexander’s voice was no longer sharp.