And the pillow was still warm from the indignant woman’s large bottom. André waited for the helpless body to relax so he could thrust the pillow between the floor and the boy’s head. As he lifted the stiff head, he reached into thick blood and felt as if his finger had slipped into the open wound. Because the head is full of capillaries, it bleeds quickly and profusely when injured, but the bleeding can also subside just as quickly. He was hoping the head injury was not serious. The tonic and clonic spasms were alternating more vehemently, which loosened the tensors in the young man’s neck and, as a result, the body writhing in opposite directions was literally bouncing the lifeless head on the red pillow. He waited patiently and there came an opportune moment when he could shove the pink bottle deftly between the young man’s teeth.
In the meantime, the hubbub above them seemed to be growing louder.
In addition, exactly during the worst moments, more bathers arrived. They could barely squeeze by the struggling body on the floor, the long legs of the kneeling man, the upended table, and the loudly protesting hefty woman hovering above them. Two of the new arrivals could not even get inside. Two frightened teenage girls kept peeking curiously through the always steamy windbreaks.
The Real Leistikow
On an empty wall of the aunt’s dining room hung one large and noteworthy oil painting, a Leistikow* that could be found in albums and catalogues and occasionally at exhibitions. Sometimes porters would arrive, take it off the wall, pack it, and take it away. They would bring it back after a long time and then it would hang on the large empty wall the way it was hanging there on this winter morning.
Its perspective was deepened by the shadows of branches swaying in the strong wind.
Catalogues provided the essential data of the painting, of course, such as its size and title, they noted that it was a signed work, but at the aunt’s request they merely indicated that the painting was privately owned. As a child, Döhring often wondered about this. Here was a valuable object in the world, unobtainable for most people, and even its location had to be kept secret. As he saw it, it was only thanks to a strange series of lucky coincidences that he could at any time view a painting others could not see whenever they wished. What this capricious series of coincidences was, he did not understand; what is coincidence, what is sheer luck. Later, he probably wouldn’t have enrolled to study philosophy had these questions not remained firmly in his mind. The painting was mysterious enough to stimulate his imagination.
He could start at any point; at most, he would become bored, but he had never gotten to the end of the road.
Sometimes he caught himself arriving at the same spot; this too is familiar.
Why he, and not someone else, and why this painting when so many others, also privately owned, were concealed from him. When gazing at the painting, he took delight in his own ambition. If he could only fathom this secret system or chain or mechanism that conceals the knowledge of important things from some people while exposing it shamelessly to others — or rather, that sometimes hides and sometimes shows it — then he would be onto something, then he would know and surely understand things.
When it comes to good luck, the world is inexhaustible. True, the same goes for bad luck, in that the world keeps a great many things concealed. On his first afternoon in Berlin, when he pedaled up the treacherously long and boggy slope and, having reached the ridge lined with tall pine trees, wanted to continue on his way, his mouth would have fallen open with amazement had his bicycle not tipped to the side and, with momentum still carrying him along, he almost fell off. Which was embarrassing because several people noticed, a woman and an elderly man for sure, and this sort of clumsiness is usually pretty funny. In the end, he managed to stay upright, grasping the handlebars, both feet on the ground, but the pedals had pounded and bruised his ankle, shin, and calf. He was in pain, sharp stabbing pain, yet he almost shouted with amazement because now he was standing inside Leistikow’s painting. He never would have thought that there was such a sky anywhere in the world, such reflection of light, this kind of lightness, this kind of darkness.
It was among the famous optical peculiarities of that Leistikow that whoever looked at the painting thought its shape was a perfect square, while in fact there was a big difference between the picture’s height and width. And that was the first thing Döhring immediately understood about the painting when he found himself at the original location. The height was filled with a carefully painted empty sky, a pure, cloudless, crystalline, dense sky; a shadow-dappled heavy earth took up the width of the painting, and from the deep throat of this earth a motionless little lake with its leaden surface stared up impassively at the sky. And the sky was the same here too, where he was standing; it had the same texture and volume, the motionless surface of the tiny lake was pulling it down into the ominously darkening depths the same way, tugging into itself the airy perspective of infinity. Leistikow had surely painted his picture at the same spot where Döhring was standing now.
Perhaps in the same hour of the same day of the same month, though one could not claim that nothing had changed during the intervening hundred years.
In the deep valley, on the steep shores of the tiny lake, in the last, waning, reddish beams of the sun, naked people were standing and lolling about. There weren’t too many of them anymore; some were in pairs, others at a respectable distance from one another, alone.
Up to his ankles in the water, a slightly built man with a nearly black suntan stood facing the weakening sun; he swiveled playfully from his waist up when his friend called to him from the shore. Light shone through the outline of the sun worshipper’s body, slid down on his chest muscles, his abdomen, now indented by his turning, and highlighted the rich crests, ranges, and loose shrubs of his hair. His friend, though, was his very opposite, a white giant whose fuzzy skin seemed never to have made contact with the sun. He was shouting short, incomprehensible, though probably funny or sarcastic words while rifling inside a large red bag. Döhring laid his bike on the ground and sat down at the edge of the slope. At first, as if doing it only for a moment and while looking around him, he absentmindedly rubbed his ankle, his aching shin and calf, and then rolled up the leg of his tight pants as far as he could, to see what he had done to himself. Still, his eyes caught the sunburned man just as he was shrugging his shoulders, as though he really wasn’t interested in hearing what his friend was saying, and turning back, apparently offended, to face the sun. Döhring had to take a good look because he felt that while rubbing his ankle, his fingers had slipped into sticky blood.
The bruise wasn’t bleeding much, but it kept oozing from under the skin.