F Read online

  ALSO BY DANIEL KEHLMANN

  Fame

  Me and Kaminski

  Measuring the World

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Carol Brown Janeway

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in Germany by Rowoholt Verlag. Copyright © 2013 by Rowoholt Verlag GmbH, Reinbeck bei Hamburg

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kehlmann, Daniel, [date]

  F : a novel / Daniel Kehlmann; translated from the German by

  Carol Brown Janeway.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-91181-0 (hardback). ISBN 978-0-8041-9783-0 (e-book).

  I. Janeway, Carol Brown, translator. II. Title.

  PT2671.E32F2513 2014 833’.914—dc23 2013048520

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

  v3.1

  For A

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Great Lindemann

  The Lives of the Saints

  Family

  Duties

  Beauty

  Seasons

  1

  2

  3

  A Note About the Author

  A Note About the Translator

  The Great Lindemann

  Years later, long since fully grown and each of them enmeshed in his own particular form of unhappiness, none of Arthur Friedland’s sons could recall whose idea it had actually been to go to the hypnotist that afternoon.

  It was 1984, and Arthur didn’t have a job. He wrote novels that no publisher wanted to print, and stories that appeared occasionally in magazines. It was all he did, but his wife was an eye doctor, and that paid the bills.

  On the way there he talked to his thirteen-year-old sons about Nietzsche and different brands of chewing gum. They argued about an animated movie that had just opened starring a robot who was also the Redeemer, they traded theories about why Yoda talked so weirdly, and wondered whether Superman was stronger than Batman. Finally they pulled up in front of a line of row houses in a street in the outer boroughs. Arthur honked the horn twice, and within seconds a front door flew open.

  His oldest son, Martin, had spent the last two hours sitting at the window waiting for them, dizzy with impatience and boredom. The panes had misted over with his breath, and he’d drawn faces with his finger, some solemn, some laughing, some with their mouths screaming wide. He had wiped the glass clean again and again, watching his breath spread a fine haze back over it. The clock had ticked and ticked—what was taking them so long? A car, then another car, then yet another car, and still it wasn’t them.

  Then suddenly a car pulled up and honked twice.

  Martin raced down the corridor, past the room into which his mother had retreated so as not to have to see Arthur. It was fourteen years since he had tiptoed swiftly out of her life, but it still tormented her that he could exist without needing her. Martin ran down the stairs and along the main hall, then straight across the street—so fast he didn’t even see the speeding car coming at him. Brakes squealed inches away from him, but he was already in the passenger seat, hands clasped above his head, and only now did his heart let up for a moment.

  “My God,” Arthur murmured.

  The car that had almost killed Martin was a red VW Golf. The driver kept up a pointless honking, perhaps out of a feeling that such an incident couldn’t go unremarked. Then he stepped on the gas and drove on.

  “My God,” Arthur said again.

  Martin rubbed his forehead.

  “How can anyone be so dumb?” asked one of the twins from the backseat.

  Martin felt as if his existence had split in two. He was sitting here, but he was also lying on the asphalt, crumpled and still. His fate seemed as yet undecided, both outcomes were still possible, and for a moment he too had a twin—one there outside, slowly fading away.

  “He could be dead,” the other twin said matter-of-factly.

  Arthur nodded.

  “But is that really true? If God still has a purpose for him? Whatever. In that case nothing can happen to him.”

  “But God doesn’t have to have a purpose for him. It’s enough if He knows. If God knows he’s going to be run over, he’ll be run over. If God knows nothing’s going to happen to him, nothing will happen to him.”

  “But that can’t be right. That would mean it doesn’t matter what anyone does. Daddy, where’s the mistake?”

  “There is no God,” said Arthur. “That’s the mistake.”

  Everyone went quiet, then Arthur started the engine and drove off. Martin felt his heartbeat slow. Another couple of minutes and he’d be able to be certain that he was still alive.

  “And school?” asked Arthur. “How’s it going?”

  Martin looked sideways at his father. Arthur had put on a little weight and his shock of hair, which still had no gray in it, looked, as always, as if it had never been combed. “Math is hard, I’m not sure I’m going to pass. French is still a problem. But not English anymore, thank goodness.” He spoke fast, so as to get out as many words as he could before Arthur lost interest. “I’m good at German, we’ve got a new physics teacher, chemistry is the same as usual, but during experiments …”

  “Ivan,” asked Arthur, “have we got the tickets?”

  “In your pocket,” one of the twins answered, so now at least Martin knew which one of them was Ivan and which one was Eric.

  He eyed them in the rearview mirror. As always, something in their absolute identicalness struck him as false, exaggerated, even unnatural. And this was some years before they started dressing identically too. This phase, in which they liked people to be unable to tell them apart, would only end when they turned eighteen, a short interval during which not even they themselves were entirely sure which of them was which. Thereafter they would repeatedly be overcome by a feeling that they’d each lost themselves at some point and were now leading the other’s life, just as Martin from now on would never be able to rid himself entirely of the suspicion that he had died that afternoon on the street.

  “Stop staring like a moron,” said Eric.

  Martin turned around and made a grab for Eric’s ear. He almost succeeded, but his brother ducked, seized his arm, and twisted it upward with a jerk. He screamed.

  Eric let go and announced cheerfully, “Now he’s crying.”

  “Pig,” said Martin shakily. “Stupid pig.”

  “You’re right,” said Ivan. “Now he’s crying.”

  “Pig.”

  “Pig yourself.”

  “You’re the pig.”

  “No, you are.”

  At that point they ran out of things to say. Martin stared out of the window until he was sure that his tears would stop. The shop windows that lined the street gave back the reflection of the car as it passed: first shrunken, then elongated, then bent into a half-moon.

  “How’s your mother?” asked Arthur.

  Martin hesitated. What was he supposed to say? Arthur had asked this same question right at the beginning, seven years ago, the first time they met. His father had seemed enormously tall, but also weary and somewhat absent, as if enveloped in a fine mist. He had felt shy in front of this man, but
also, in some way that he didn’t quite understand, a kind of pity.

  “How’s your mother?” the stranger had asked, and Martin had wondered if this really was the man he had encountered so often in his dreams, always in the same black raincoat, always faceless. But it was only that day in the ice cream parlor, as he dug around in his fruit sundae with chocolate sauce, that Martin had realized just how much he enjoyed not having a father. No shining example, no predecessor, and no burden, just a vague image of someone who might show up one day. And now this was him? His teeth weren’t exactly straight, his hair was all over the place, there was a stain on his collar, and his hands looked weathered. He was a man who could have been any other man, a man who looked just like any other man on the street, on the train, anywhere.

  “Just how old are you now?”

  Martin had swallowed and then said, “Seven.”

  “And this is your doll?”

  It took Martin a moment to realize that his father was asking about Miss Miller. He had brought her with him, as he always did; he was holding her under his arm without even thinking about it.

  “So what’s she called?”

  Martin told him.

  “Funny name.”

  Martin didn’t know how to reply. Miss Miller had always been Miss Miller, that was simply her name. He realized his nose was running. He looked around, but Mama was nowhere to be seen. She had left the ice cream parlor silently as soon as Arthur came in.

  No matter how often Martin thought back to that day, and no matter how much he tried to summon up that conversation from the shadows of his memory, he always failed. The reason was that he had imagined it too often before it took place, and the things they actually said to each other soon merged into the things he’d imagined so often over the years. Had Arthur really said that he didn’t have a job and was dedicating himself to thinking about life, or was it just that later, when Martin knew more about his father, he simply attributed this answer to him as the only one that seemed to fit? And could it be that Arthur’s answer to the question of why he had walked out on him and his mother, was that anyone who gave himself over to captivity and the restricted life, to mediocrity and despair, would be incapable of helping any other human being because he would be beyond help himself, succumbing to cancer, heart disease, his life cut short, rot invading his still-breathing body? It was totally plausible that Arthur would give such an answer to a seven-year-old, but Martin didn’t really think it likely that he would have felt confident enough to ask the question in the first place.

  It was three months before his father appeared again. This time he picked Martin up from home in a car with two eerily similar boys in the backseat; at first Martin thought they must be an optical illusion. In turn, the pair had looked at him with great but rapidly diminishing curiosity; they were totally focused on themselves, ensnared in the riddle of their doubleness.

  “We always think exactly the same thing.”

  “Even when it’s complicated stuff. Exactly the same thing.”

  “When someone asks us a question, we both come up with the same answer.”

  “Even when it’s the wrong one.”

  Then they both laughed exactly the same laugh, and a shiver ran down Martin’s spine.

  From then on, his father and his brothers picked him up regularly. They went on roller coasters, they went to aquariums with fish that were half asleep, they took walks through the woods on the edge of town, they went swimming in pools smelling of chlorine and full of screaming children and sunlight. Arthur was always credited with making an effort, but he was never fully focused on what he was doing, and even the twins made little effort to disguise the fact that they were along for the ride because they had no choice. Although this was totally clear to Martin, these were the happiest afternoons of his life. On the most recent visit, Arthur had given him a brightly colored cube, with sides you could twist in all directions, a new toy that had just come onto the market. Soon Martin was spending hours with it, he could have spent entire days, he was totally in thrall.

  “Martin!”

  He turned around again.

  “Are you asleep?”

  He wondered about trying to grab him again, but then decided it was better to leave things be. What was the point—Eric was stronger than he was.

  Pity, thought Eric. He would like to have given Martin a whack on the ear, although he didn’t really have anything against him. It just made him mad that his brother was so helpless, so quiet and timid. Besides which he still blamed him for the moment seven years ago when their parents had called them into the living room one evening to tell them something important.

  “Are you splitting up?” Ivan had asked.

  Their parents, shocked, had shaken their heads and said, “No, no, absolutely not, no,” and Arthur had told them about Martin’s existence.

  Eric was so astonished that he immediately decided to behave as if this were a big joke, but even as he tried to draw breath and laugh, Ivan, who was sitting right next to him, started to snigger, which was the way things were if you were yourself and simultaneously one half of a pair, and no thought was ever yours exclusively.

  “It’s not a joke,” said Arthur.

  But why not until now, was what Eric wanted to ask. Except that once again Ivan had already got out ahead of him: “Why not until now?”

  Things were sometimes complicated, was Arthur’s answer.

  He had cast a helpless look at their mother, but she had sat there with her arms crossed and said that even grown-ups were not always that smart.

  The other boy’s mother, according to Arthur, always bad-mouthed him and didn’t want him to see his son, and he went along with that all too easily, if the truth be known, because it made things easier, and it was only recently that he’d changed his mind. And now he was off to meet Martin.

  Eric had never seen their father nervous before. Who needed this Martin person, he thought, and how could Arthur have done anything so stupid to them?

  Eric had known quite early on that he wanted to be different from his father. He wanted to make money, he wanted to be taken seriously, he didn’t want to be the kind of person that people secretly pitied. Which was why on the first day in his new school, he had attacked the biggest boy in his class, without any warning, of course, so surprise had given him the necessary advantage. Eric had knocked him to the ground, then knelt on him, grabbed him by the ears, and banged his head into the floor three times until he felt his resistance give way. Then, just for effect, he had landed a well-aimed blow on his nose, because a nose-bleed always made a big impression. And the big boy, for whom Eric was already feeling sorry, had burst into tears. Eric had let him get up, and the boy had groped and sniffled his way away with a reddening handkerchief pressed to his face. Since then Eric had been an object of fear for the rest of his class, and nobody noticed how anxious he was himself.

  For it all came down to determination, he knew that already. Whether it was the teachers, or other pupils, or even his parents, they were all divided within themselves, all torn, all halfhearted. None of them could stand up against someone who had a goal and really went after it. That was as sure as sure could be, as sure as five times two equals ten, or that we’re all surrounded by ghosts whose shapes are visible only occasionally in the twilight.

  “I’ve made a wrong turn,” said Arthur.

  “Not again,” said Eric.

  “It’s just a trick,” said Ivan. “Because you don’t want to go.”

  “Of course I don’t want to go. But it’s not a trick.”

  Arthur steered to the curb and got out. Warm summer air streamed into the car, other cars raced past, and there was a smell of gasoline. On the street he asked people for directions; an old lady waved him off, a boy on roller skates didn’t even stop, a man wearing a large hat pointed left then right, up and down. For a while Arthur spoke to a young woman. She tilted her head, Arthur smiled, she pointed somewhere, Arthur nodded and said something, she la
ughed, then she said something while he laughed, then they said goodbye, and as she moved past him she touched his shoulder. He got back into the car, still smiling.

  “Did she explain it to you?” asked Ivan.

  “She wasn’t from around here. But the man before her knew the answer.”

  He made a couple of turns, then they were at the entrance to a parking garage. Eric stared anxiously into the darkness. He would never be able to tell anyone how much he hated every tunnel, every cavernous opening, every closed space. But apparently Ivan knew it anyway, just as it always happened to Eric too that he found himself thinking his twin brother’s thoughts instead of his own, and words surfaced in his mind that he didn’t know. It also happened frequently that when he woke up, he remembered strangely Technicolor dreams—Ivan’s dreams were brighter than his own, somehow more all-encompassing, and the air in them seemed fresher. And yet they could still hide things from each other. Eric had never understood why Ivan was afraid of dogs when dogs really were among the most harmless of creatures; he didn’t understand why Ivan liked talking to blondes more than brunettes, and it was a mystery to him why the old paintings that just bored him in museums awakened such complicated feelings in his brother.

  They got out. Long fluorescent bulbs gave off a wan light. Eric crossed his arms and stared at the ground.

  “You don’t believe in hypnosis?” asked Ivan.

  “I believe people can persuade each other of anything,” said Arthur.

  They got into the elevator, the doors closed, and Eric fought to control his panic. What if the cable broke? Such a thing had happened before, it would happen again, so why not here? The elevator finally stopped, the doors opened, and they walked toward the theater. The Great Lindemann, it said on a banner. Master of Hypnosis. Afternoon Performance. There was a poster showing an unprepossessing man with glasses, obviously trying to look forbidding and penetrating at the same time. There were shadows across his face, the lighting was theatrical, it was a terrible photo. Lindemann, it said to one side, will teach you to fear your dreams.