“Are you following me?” Jonas Weber asked.
“Pure coincidence, honest,” Sophie replied.
“I’ve never seen you here before,” he said. “Do you come here often?”
“I often walk this way, but today’s the first time I’ve been inside.”
Sophie swung herself onto an empty barstool.
“What are you drinking?” she asked.
“Whisky.”
“Okay,” said Sophie and turned to the barman. “I’ll have what he’s having.”
The landlord poured her a glass and set it in front of her.
“Thanks.”
Sophie contemplated the clear brown liquid, making it slosh back and forth a little in the glass.
“What shall we drink to?” she asked at last.
“I’m drinking to the official failure of my marriage,” said Jonas. “How about you?”
Sophie hesitated, unable to digest what she’d heard. She wondered whether she should comment but decided against it.
“I always used to say: to world peace,” she said. “But the world isn’t peaceful and isn’t ever going to be.”
“No toast then,” said Jonas.
They looked into each other’s eyes, clinked their glasses together and knocked back the whisky.
Sophie dug a banknote out of her trouser pocket and placed it on the bar.
“Keep the change,” she said to the barman.
She turned to Jonas. He looked at her with his strange eyes.
“You’re leaving already?” he asked.
“I have to.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I have someone waiting for me at home,” said Sophie.
“Oh. You and your fiancé are…back together?” His voice was neutral.
“No, I’ve found somebody else and I don’t want to leave him on his own for long. Would you like to see him?”
Before Jonas could reply, Sophie had pulled her mobile from her jeans pocket. She made a few hasty taps on the display and then thrust a photo of a tousled pup under his nose.
“Isn’t he gorgeous?” she asked. Jonas had to smile.
“What’s he called?”
“I’m thinking of calling him after one of my favorite authors. Maybe Kafka.”
“Hm.”
“You’re not convinced?”
“Kafka’s definitely a good name. But he somehow doesn’t look like a Kafka.”
“What does he look like then? And don’t come with any of your poets; I’m not calling him Rilke.”
“I think he looks like a Bukowski.”
“Like a Bukowski?” Sophie asked, indignant. “Wasted and boozy?”
“No, unkempt. And kind of cool.”
Jonas shrugged. He was about to say something when his phone rang. He didn’t answer, and a brief buzz announced the arrival of a voice mail.
“You need to call back,” Sophie said. “A new case.”
“Yes.”
“Well, I have to be going anyway.”
Sophie got down off the barstool. She looked Jonas in the eyes.
“Thank you,” she said.
“What for? You’re the one who caught him.” Sophie shrugged.
“Thanks all the same,” she said. She planted a kiss on Jonas’s cheek and disappeared.
29
My world is a thousand-square-meter disk and I am standing on the edge. Out there, on the other side of my front door, lurks my fear.
I push down the handle, open the door. Before me is darkness. For the first time in many years I’m wearing a coat.
I take a tiny step and the stabbing pain in my head is back. But I have to get through this — through the fear. The front door falls shut behind me; there’s something final about the sound it makes. Night air hits me in the face. The stars twinkle in a cold sky. All at once, I’m unbelievably hot; my guts seize up. But I take another step, and another. I am a lonely seafarer on foreign waters. I am the last human being on a deserted planet. I stumble on — ever onward. I reach the edge of the terrace. It is black all around me.
This is where the grass begins. I set one foot in front of the other, feeling the soft meadow beneath my feet. Then I stop, out of breath. The darkness is inside me. I feel sweat on my forehead.
My fear is a dark well that I have fallen into. I’m suspended vertically in the water. I try to touch the bottom with my toes, but there’s nothing there, only blackness. I close my eyes and let myself fall. I’m sinking in the dark, my body is drifting down, swallowed by the water; I’m being sucked down. The well is bottomless; I’m sinking deeper and deeper and I let it happen: my eyes closed, arms waving above me like waterweed. Then, all of a sudden, I reach the bottom of the well, cool and firm. I feel it brush my toes, and soon my weight is resting on it and I’m standing.
I open my eyes and notice in amazement that here, in the heart of darkness, I can stand and breathe effortlessly. I look about me.
The lake is still. A light breeze whispers at the edge of the woods. There are crackling, rustling noises all around me. Birds in the undergrowth, perhaps, or a busy hedgehog or prowling cat, and I realize how much life there is here, even if I can’t see it. I am not alone — all those animals in the woods, on the meadow, in the lake and on the shore — all the roe deer and red deer, all the foxes and wild boars and martens, all the little owls and tawny owls and barn owls, the trout and the pike, the grasshoppers, ladybirds and gnats. So much life.
A smile steals onto my lips. I am standing at the edge of the meadow. There’s nothing left of my fear. I set off again. I step out into Van Gogh’s starry night. I look about me; the stars make streaks and the moon is a smudge in the viscous, gleaming night sky.
I think to myself that the night is not just mysterious and poetic and beautiful.
It is also dark and frightening. Like me.
30
After Anna’s death, everything was too much for me. The looks, the questions, the voices, the lights, the noise, the speed — and the panic attacks, which at first only struck when I saw a knife or heard a certain song but were soon triggered by all sorts of things. A passerby wearing Anna’s perfume, bloody meat on display in a butcher’s window — pretty much anything. That glare in my head, the pain behind my eyeballs, that keen, red feeling. And no control.
It did me good to stay at home for a while: to be alone, getting some peace and quiet, writing a new book. Getting up in the morning, working, eating, working some more, sleeping. Making up stories where nobody had to die. Living in a world in which there was no danger.
People think it’s hard not to leave your house for over a decade. They think it’s easy to go out. And they’re right; it is easy to go out. But it’s also easy not to go out. A few days soon become a few weeks; a few weeks become months and years. That sounds like an immensely long time. But it’s only ever one more day strung on to those that have gone before.
At first, nobody noticed I’d stopped leaving the house. Linda was around; she made phone calls and wrote emails, and when do we actually find time to see each other, we all have such an awful lot to do. But at some point my publishers asked whether I wanted to give a few readings again, and I said no. Friends were married or buried and I was asked to the weddings and funerals, and I said no. I won prizes and was invited to the award ceremonies, and I said no.
In the end, people caught on. When the rumors about a mysterious illness started, I was thrilled. Until then, I had tried to overcome my fear; I had stood and battled with myself at the front door, willing myself across the threshold and failing miserably.