Occasionally, no matter how dissatisfied he was with himself, he protected what belonged to his body, pampered it, and found it enjoyable.
The old car, pulled over by the woods, was gasping for air, its overheated red body steaming and knocking in the reddening twilight.
The sky was blue over the low pine forest, light blue, the air mild for the season, somewhat misty, and the weather report did not call for snow during the night.
According to the map the farm was five hundred meters from here but a locked barrier blocked the trail-like dirt driveway leading to it. He had to jump high to hurdle it. He noted that the owners maintained the road but must not be using it much for vehicles. He saw no fresh wheel tracks among the old ones. He observed and carefully registered everything that might be important professionally, but in the meantime he was also daydreaming about his sweetheart, and he especially enjoyed his thoughts running on parallel tracks. Of course, it was enough for his happiness that he was walking here in the forest dressed in Christmas silence, breathing and moving his limbs, stiff from the long drive. As one coming home at last, body and soul rising to an unknown level of reality, excited yet relaxed. In his amorous daydreams, this was the definite impression he had of himself. As if he had found his own life’s unknown basic rhythm in someone else. The ground was soft in the woods, springy, sandy; he noticed no fresh footprints. As to the smells, he could choose between two kinds of pleasant sourness, and he became even happier because he was thinking of such trivial matters.
In the vaporous air he experienced differently the resin trickling down the rubescent trunks and the juniper crawling everywhere in great profusion, its berries ripened to a downy blue, sprinkling the rust-colored carpet of pine needles.
Later he waited patiently and a little insecurely at the edge of the woods. Everything that had led him to this point had something to do with smells, but smells were hardly palpable. He had a tendency to overdo little things; at least his intuition often told him something about a case that differed from what his factual knowledge and experience claimed. Döhring had to be alone; he hoped he was. The two locations from which Döhring had telephoned had been successfully identified, and before Kienast had set out he had listened to the recordings again. The call from Düsseldorf had been made in hysterical haste and the second call, made from the telephone of a solitary gas station somewhere near here, gave evidence of obvious panic. A person not in control of his conscience is unlikely to call the police right away, though Kienast realized that Döhring had meant the call for him, personally, more than for the police in general. And he did not seriously think Döhring was contemplating or preparing to commit suicide, though he was not a harmless boy, indeed was a serious threat to others.
Solitude has a tendency to magnify things that hardly have any perceptible significance for others.
Professionally there was no justification for him to set out from Berlin because of those insignificant phone calls. He could have said to himself, knowing what he already knew, that Döhring, given his mental tendencies, was not going to run away and would not even hang himself. And what if he did. Or if he chalked up another victim. That would make the case neither more valuable nor more complicated. Let him go on his insane way; let him go to hell. It’s just a shitty little case anyway. It would have been more sensible and more comfortable that way, if only because his mother was expecting him for Christmas Eve dinner. Although he had not become cynical in the midst of so much sorrow and dread, he never deceived himself or others that an individual life had any special value. He had a personal reason for not wanting to dismiss his unexpected idea. At least he wouldn’t be spending the next night with the woman: that was the most important thing. Give the suddenly turbulent emotion of love a little breathing space, retrieve from her a little bit of his freedom before any fateful turn of events and only then decide. Because he felt more strongly than anything else that it had already come to pass; at best he could give his conscience a belated blessing for what had already taken place in his senses and the higher regions of reality; he was still defending himself. His freedom was at stake, and he was not ready to part with it. I’ll fuck up Mother’s holy night, that’s true, I’m getting into irresponsible professional adventures because of a woman, that’s also true, but by the time I get to him, this unfortunate boy will have softened up and then I’ll kill two birds with one stone.
Kienast’s mother lived alone; his father had ended his miserable life by his own hand. In the family no one ever talked about the father’s depressions and manias, and since his death they never uttered those words or mentioned epilepsy or the father’s profession, which the father had given up prematurely so as to keep as far away as possible from his own father’s career — the latter being something that Kienast came near to, given the profession he had chosen. Although he did not dissect bodies, he knew as well as a well-trained dissector or renowned forensic specialist did what to find where, or what biophysical processes occur in the human system after death.
He could not have said in what area or how Döhring would soften up, but his mind was feeling its way in that direction. The morning of the day before, he had found significant clues and therefore could not forbid himself a few suppositions about the student. Even if there was something irrational in his interest and suspicion. Deep in his heart he pitied the young man more than was necessary. No investigation can be carried out without empathy, but this was too much warmheartedness; psychologically speaking, it was transference. As if he were unable to override his professional responsibility with the imperative of his love and was now asking himself, why have I come here, what am I looking for, why don’t I let him go, why am I messing up my evening and my night. One doesn’t do this kind of thing out of sheer pity, or rather, one should ask what trick of the soul does one’s pity conceal. He could not seriously imagine he had often disappointed his mother. Yet the belated rebellion gave him pleasure, that he had not even called and she might worry. This means that no matter how long a man lives he can never outgrow being a boy, which keeps him from coping independently with his life. Where is the big freedom then. Kienast was positively a good boy; he had been one even as an adolescent; the tragedy cooled off slowly in the family, though its narrative dimensions were so vast that it could never cool off completely. He got along with his older sister, something of a prankster, or at least he had managed to live up to the male role, not perfectly tailored for him, between the two women. And that was the very reason he could not forget that epilepsy in their family was hereditary on the male side.
This remained with him as a secret threat for both possibilities: that neither as boy nor as man had he behaved properly, or fulfilled his duties.
It lurked out there somewhere, it would not be wise to awaken it with intemperance. But he knew he was scaring himself in vain. The yellowed final report prepared by the racial biology service’s expert was included among the family papers, and he had gone over it in great secrecy even before his father’s death. It set his mind at ease because according to strict genetic estimations, in his family at worst only a male grandchild of his would be in danger. And one reason he feared engaging in a deeper, more serious relationship was because he did not want to have children. He considered both the world and himself unsuitable for raising children, and was unwilling to discuss even whether it was worth discussing such a possibility. Or whether there was a suitable world. It even occurred to him that he might comply with the verdict of Nazi science and have himself sterilized, which his father for inexplicable reasons had not done despite expert medical opinion.