Self's deception (5 page)

11
Pictures from an exhibition

Nägelsbach didn't keep me waiting. He told me he had put his ear to the ground but hadn't found out much. “I can tell you the long and the short of it on the phone.” But I wanted to meet with him instead. “This evening? No, I can't. But I'll be back in the office tomorrow morning.”

It was to be a drive I shall never forget. It was almost the end of everything. At some construction near Friedrichsfeld, where neither a center planting nor barriers separate the lanes of the autobahn, a large furniture truck skidded, crossed my lane toward the embankment, and rolled over. I froze. The truck slid across my lane; my car was headed toward it as if to ram it, and the truck grew bigger, came nearer, and towered above me. I didn't brake or swerve my car to the left. I simply froze.

Within a fraction of a second everything was over. The truck had rolled over with a loud crash: Brakes screeched, horns blared, and a car that had careened out of its lane side-swiped another car that had come to a standstill. I stopped on the shoulder of the autobahn and got out but couldn't walk a step. I began shivering; I had to tense my muscles and grit my teeth. I stood there and saw the line of cars grow longer, the driver of the truck climb out of his cabin, a crowd of onlookers cluster around the rear door that had burst open, and the arrival of a police car and also an ambulance that immediately drove off again. My teeth kept chattering.

A man got out of the car that had come to a stop behind my car and walked up to me. “Do you need a doctor?” I shook my head. He took hold of my arms, shook me, made me sit down on the embankment, and lit a cigarette. “Would you like one, too?”

All I could think of was that you're not supposed to sit on the bare ground in any months that have an “r” in them, and it was April. I wanted to get up, worried about my bladder and prostate, but the man held me down.

After the cigarette, I pretty much came around again. The man was talking up a storm—after a few sentences I had already lost the thread. When he left, I didn't even remember what he looked like. But now I was capable of making a statement to the police without trembling.

Car by car, the traffic was waved past the capsized truck, its back door wide open. Its contents had fallen onto the autobahn, pictures from an exhibition in Mannheim. They were to be recovered and placed under the charge of the curator of the Mannheim Kunsthalle. I drove to Heidelberg along an almost empty autobahn.

The information Nägelsbach had found came from the file of a colleague of his who was on sick leave. “His reports are in quite a bad state. It seems he's not been well for some time. But one thing's clear, there's been trouble off and on at the psychiatric hospital over the last few years.”

“Trouble? What do you mean? Trouble, as in a patient falling out a window and breaking his neck?”

“Good God, no. I'm talking about small slipups and glitches. I guess 'trouble' isn't even the right word. It's things like a failure in the hot-water supply, food that's gone bad, workers finding windows they had stacked in the courtyard smashed, a patient being released a few days too late, an attendant falling from a ladder—I don't know if any of this is even significant. And the reports were never made by the management, but always by patients, their families, or anonymously. If only one didn't have to be so goddamn careful nowadays in wards and institutions …”

“Do the problems go beyond what happens in any large institution?”

Nägelsbach got up. “Follow me.” We went out into the corridor, turned around the corner, and looked out the window into the courtyard of the police headquarters. “What do you see, Herr Self?”

On the left, three police cars were parked, and on the right the ground was dug up and pipes were being laid. Some of the windows looking out on the yard were open, some closed. Nägelsbach looked up at the blue sky, across which a fresh wind was blowing little white clouds. “Wait a few more minutes,” he said. And then, as a cloud covered the sun, the blinds suddenly closed in all the windows. The cloud moved on, but the blinds remained closed.

“Of the three cars down there, two are almost always here because they need repairs, the sewer pipes have already been dug up once this year and then covered up again, and every summer the blinds come up with some new prank. Would you say that all this is within the bounds of what can happen in any large institution? Or is this the work of terrorists, liberationists, anarchists, or skinheads?” Nägelsbach looked at me blankly.

We went back to his office. “Do you have anything on a Dr.Wendt?”Iasked.

“One moment. The computer terminal is in another office.” He came back with a blank expression on his face. “There's nothing in the computer. But the name rings a bell. I don't know if that's for any specific reason. I'll have to look through the paper files that we'll be shredding for security reasons, which can't be pulled up on the computer. I'll try to do it as fast as I can, but it might take a while. When do you need this?”

I said “yesterday” and meant it. But what I had to do was clear even without a file on Wendt. Wendt was my lead, regardless of whether the lead was hot, warm, or cold. I had to dig up what sort of man he was, who his friends were, if he'd had dealings with Leo. Leo and her friends were not supposed to get wind of my investigation. But with Wendt I didn't have to mind my p's and q's.

12
In vain

I followed Wendt when he came out of the psychiatric hospital at about seven. He got into his car and drove off in the direction of Heidelberg. I'd been waiting for two hours and thrown my butts out the window because the ashtray was full. Sweet Aftons have no filter and are environmentally friendly cigarettes that burn out completely.

Route 3 is a smooth ride, and Wendt hit a good speed in his little Renault. From time to time I lost him, but caught up with him again at traffic lights, followed him down the Rohrbacher Strasse and through the Gaisberg tunnel, around Karlstor and up Hauptstraße. My Opel rattled over the cobblestones. We both parked in a garage beneath the Karlsplatz. Wendt pulled into a handicapped parking space, I into a well-lit parking space for women. Wendt got out of his car quickly, rushed up the stairs, and ran across the square, up Hauptstraße, past the Kornmarkt and the Heilig-Geist church. I couldn't keep up with him. His silhouette in the billowing beige raincoat grew smaller. I stopped at the corner of the city hall, pressing my hand to my side and trying to ease the pounding and stinging.

After the Florin-Gasse he hurried into a doorway over which hung a sign with a golden sun. I waited for the pounding in my side to grow weaker. The marketplace and the main street were quiet. It was too late for people to be shopping, and too early for strolling. On the houses around the marketplace a tax-advantaged historic renovation spree had left its mark. I noticed that in the niche at the corner of the city hall the stone statue of a prisoner of war was missing. He had stood there waiting for decades in a long coat, with hollow cheeks and emaciated hands. I wondered who might have taken him back home.

Beneath the sign of the golden sun was the Ristorante Sole d'Oro. I peeked inside. Wendt and a young woman were being given menus. Across the street, in the Café Bistro Villa, I found a table by the window where I could keep my eye on the restaurant's entrance. Long after the cassata, while I was on my second espresso and second sambuca, Wendt and his companion came out onto the street. They sauntered past a few houses to the Gloria movie theater. I watched the movie from three rows behind them. What I remember of the movie is the desperation of a woman who is becoming schizophrenic, and images of grand old facades, of a table festively decked on a terrace overlooking the sea, and of the sun hanging large and red in a hazy evening sky. As I came out of the theater I was dazed by the images and let my attention slip. Wendt and his companion were gone. A thick stream of students was moving down the main street, some with bright caps and headbands, along with American, Dutch, and Japanese tourists and loud young people from the provinces.

In the garage I waited for Wendt a long time. When he finally turned up, he was alone. He drove slowly: Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage, Kurfürstenanlage, along the Neckar River as far as Wieblingen. There he parked at the end of the Schuster-gasse. I couldn't make out the house number but saw him opening the garden gate and then closing it, walking around the house, and then disappearing down some stairs. Then the windows of the basement apartment lit up.

I drove home through the villages. The full moon cast its white light on fields and roofs. That night the moon kept me awake for a long time, and then I dreamed about it. It shone onto a terrace with a festively decked table, and I waited in vain for guests I had not invited.

13
Yes and no

One of the advantages of advancing years is that people believe everything you tell them. A man my age is simply too weary to try his hand as a con artist or a marriage swindler— what would he need the money for, anyway?

When I introduced myself as Wendt's father, his landlady didn't doubt my word for a minute.

“Ah, so you are Dr. Wendt's father!”

Frau Kleinschmidt eyed me inquisitively. Her flowery smock enclosed a good three hundred pounds, which protruded in small bulges between the buttons. The lower buttons had got in the way of her bending down and so were open, and her blue and pink petticoat peeked out. Frau Kleinschmidt had been busy with her strawberry beds when I had gone down the stairs to Wendt's basement apartment, rung the bell, and knocked on the door in vain. When I came back up the stairs, she had called me over.

I looked at my watch, and shook my head: “My son said he'd be home by five today. It's already a quarter past, and he's still not here.”

“He's usually never back before a quarter to seven.”

I sincerely hoped that today would be no exception. Twenty minutes earlier his car had still been parked outside the psychiatric hospital. I had taken up my post at four thirty, got fed up with waiting, and remembered the trustworthiness of the elderly. “I know he usually works till six or even later, but he told me he'd get away earlier today. I'm in Heidelberg on business and have to leave this evening. May I sit down on the bench for a moment?”

“I'll be happy to let you into your son's apartment. One moment; I'll go get the keys.”

She came back with the keys and a plate of marble cake. “I was intending to leave this on his doorstep.” She pressed the plate into my hands and unlocked the door. “Perhaps you'd like to try a piece. What did you say you were doing in Heidelberg?”

“I'm with the Union Bank of Baden.” As a matter of fact I do have an account there, and the old gray suit I was wearing fitted the image of a Baden official who had erred into banking. Frau Kleinschmidt found me sufficiently reputable and kept nodding her head respectfully. Her chin doubled, tripled, and quadrupled.

It was cool in Wendt's apartment. There were four doors in the hallway. The bathroom was to the left, the living room and the bedroom, which also served as his study, to the right, and the broom closet straight ahead. The kitchen lay beyond the living room. I hurried, as I wanted to be out of there by six. I looked for the telephone, to no avail. Wendt didn't have one. So there wasn't going to be one of those little books with names, addresses, and phone numbers lying next to a phone. In the chest of drawers I found only shirts and linen, in the closet only pants, jackets, and sweaters. In the wooden cabinets that Wendt used as supports for his writing desk there were ring binders, technical books, and a dictionary that was still in its shrink-wrap. Also loose letters, and letters in bundles, bills, reminders, traffic tickets, and thick reams of writing paper, as if he were planning to write a big book and had wanted to make sure that he wouldn't run out of supplies. Pinned on the cork board above the desk were a movie schedule from the Gloria Theater, a brochure for a water pick, a postcard from Istanbul and another from Amorbach, a key, a shopping list, and a cartoon showing two men. “Do you find it hard to make a decision?” one man was asking the other. “Yes and no.”

I took down the postcards. A thankful former patient and his wife had sent greetings from Istanbul, while Gabi, Klaus, Katrin, Henner, and Lea sent greetings from Amorbach, with the message that Amorbach was beautiful in the spring, that the children and Lea were getting on well together, that the renovation of the mill was almost finished, and that Wendt should come visit them soon. Gabi had been the one who wrote the postcard, Klaus had signed with a flourish, Katrin and Henner had scrawled something in childish letters, and from Lea came: “Hi, Lea.” I looked carefully, but Lea remained Lea, not Leo.

In the ring binders I found the notes and drafts of Wendt's doctoral dissertation. The letters that were bundled together were ten or more years old; in the loose letters his sister described her life in Lübeck, his mother her vacation, and a friend wrote on professional matters. I rummaged through the pile of books, newspapers, patient files, and papers and found a bank savings book, a checkbook, a passport, travel brochures of Canada, a draft for a job application to a hospital in Toronto, a Wieblingen parish newsletter, a note with three phone numbers on it, and the beginning of a poem.

Who can tell

if parallel lines

meet

at infinity?

Who can tell

if you and I…

I would have liked an optimistic continuation for that “you and I.” My father, an official with the German railways, with tracks in mind, had answered the question of whether parallel lines meet in infinity with a “no.”

I jotted down the three phone numbers. On the bookshelf I found a photo album documenting Wendt's childhood and youth. In the bathroom there was a picture of a naked girl stuck to the mirror. Under the mirror was a packet of condoms.

I gave up. Whatever Wendt might be hiding, his apartment didn't reveal it. I stood a few more minutes with Frau Klein-schmidt by her strawberry patch. I showed her Leo's picture and told her how happy my wife and I were that our son had met this nice young woman. She had never seen Leo before.