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  His father was a tutor in the household of Count Schulenburg. The count had a daughter. There were secret letters, oaths, and plans to flee overseas, to a country that had just apparently been discovered, but might also be no more than a fairy tale, how could one possibly know? Their fate seemed to the two of them to be so weighty that it must be written down somewhere in a book.

  But when the girl became pregnant, two men trapped the tutor on the street and beat him to death with iron bars. She gave birth in secret, the child was given away, and she was forced to marry a local minor nobleman who never knew he wasn’t the first.

  After some years, she withdrew from worldly life into the convent at Passau, where she wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s book on clouds. God, she explained, was not outside the world, He was the world, which was thus without either beginning or end. As a consequence one could describe God as neither good nor bad—He was the sum of all things and thus there was neither chance nor stroke of fate, for the world was not a theater. She would be renowned until today, if the manuscript had not been devoured by termites.

  The father of the luckless tutor was a priest. That wasn’t so bad. Luther hadn’t yet nailed up his Ninety-Five Theses and the Holy Mother Church wasn’t in an uproar. He had numerous children. He gave last rites to victims of the plague, then he opened their veins, which only brought on death quicker.

  It was a quiet time for the Black Death. Bubonic plague was on the wane, the worst outbreaks were occurring farther south, but then he got infected anyway from the blood of the sick. It was not unexpected—almost no one who was involved with victims of the plague survived. He prepared to die with something close to relief. At his bedside there suddenly appeared an old, old man, one-eyed and one-legged, and weather-beaten, who placed a heavy hand on his shoulder and whispered incomprehensible things in his ear. It was as if he had lost the power of human speech. Muttering and hopping, he went on his way.

  The father of the priest was a farmer, prosperous, with a lot of land. He was a man with a happy disposition, without ever knowing why. He liked playing with his children. Many of them died, and when he stood at their tiny graves, he thought it would be sensible not to give one’s heart too soon.

  He never left his property. He paid his taxes to the authorities without complaint. Sometimes people came by who were from other places and wanted to go who knows where, but they seemed to him to be as unreal as ghosts. One time an old man appeared who had only one eye and only one leg, and who insisted the two of them were related. He stayed for several weeks, eating copiously and frightening the servants at night with his screams. Then he hobbled away on his crutches.

  One night the farmer was overcome by a feeling that he’d been cursed by someone, so that he was too afraid to look anyone in the eye, not his wife, not his servants, not his children. For a time he was plagued by lust, but he knew he must resist, in order not to end up in hell. He failed to resist. Then he resisted for a time. Then he failed to resist again. When he was dying, he wept a lot, for fear of hell. His oldest son, who had just been ordained as a priest, would dearly have liked to know how his father’s soul had fared, but his father never came back, and no one knew.

  His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding. Occasionally people passed by who came from other places and were heading for still other places. He wanted none of it.

  His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding. Occasionally people passed by who came from other places and were heading for still other places. He wanted none of it.

  His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding. Occasionally people passed by who came from other places and were heading for still other places. He wanted none of it.

  His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding, and he didn’t understand why people got on the road, as if trees, hills, and lakes weren’t the same everywhere. He tilled his fields, made sure he never saw his sisters, died young, and never came back.

  His father too was a farmer. He never left his landholding and had many children. Two of them came into the world in one go—they were girls, and they resembled each other so exactly that they seemed to be one and the same person. The work of the devil, he cried. Even the priest said there was no good explanation for it, and his wife called on the grace of God. But he couldn’t bring himself to drown them. So the girls grew up and married farmers in the village nearby. He gave them generous dowries. Their children looked nothing like one another.

  His father was a traveler, a magus, a puller of teeth, and a con man. He had fled the plague, and in Cologne he had taken flight before a huge crowd and soared three times around the as-yet-unfinished cathedral. Later people told all kinds of stories about how he’d faked it, but in reality flying isn’t hard, provided you are devoid of either scruples or fears, and you’re crazy besides. Somewhere near Ulm he was accused by a merchant of having stolen money, which was true, but he also knew you just had to be able to run faster than the idiots on your tail, and nobody would be able to threaten you. In a village under particularly high trees he fathered a child. He never saw it, but then he’d never known his own father either.

  And so his days passed. Some said he had been killed in Palestine, others that he had ended on the gallows. Only a handful later asserted that he was still alive, for you could kill almost anyone, but not someone like him.

  His father was the son of a mercenary who had overcome an unwilling woman by the side of the road as they campaigned. As he held her, she understood that God would not help her, because hell was no future thing, hell was now and hell was here. Suddenly the mercenary realized that things were wrong, and he let her go, but it was already too late, and he ran away and forgot. She abandoned the child in the stable as soon as it was born, and she forgot it too.

  But the boy survived. He survived the miasma of the plague that swept through the land, he survived pain, he survived typhus, he did not want to die, even when nothing held out the promise of life, and there was almost nothing to eat; he survived even when there was nothing but vomit and flies, he survived, and if he hadn’t, I would not exist and nor would my sons. There would be others in our place, others who regarded their existence as inevitable.

  He grew up, became a blacksmith, found a wife, started a little business that was soon destroyed by fire, then became a groom. He sired eight children, three of whom survived. Soon thereafter he was run over by a wagon, lost a leg, but didn’t die, although the gangrene also affected his brain. He dreamed that the devil came to him, and he asked the devil for a long life; the devil went back to hell, and soon after that the fever broke.

  One morning, weeks or perhaps years later, he woke up with confused memories of cards, wine, and open knives. He didn’t retain many memories of the night before, the world seemed somehow smaller, something was missing, and as he reached up past his nose, following the path of the pain, he realized that an eye was missing. At first for a brief moment he was shocked, but then he laughed. What a good accident it was that that was all that happened to him, and nothing worse, for men had two eyes. Only one heart, one stomach, but two eyes! Life was hard, but sometimes fate was kind.

  Duties

  I’ve already been hearing the sobbing for some time. At first it was a sound in my dream, but now the dream is over and the sobbing is coming from the woman next to me. Eyes closed, I know that the voice is Laura’s, or, rather, that suddenly it’s been hers all along. She’s crying so hard that the mattress is shaking. I lie there motionless. How long can I pretend I’m asleep? I would love to give up and sink back into unconsciousness, but I can’t. The day has begun. I open my eyes.

  The morning sun pushes through the slats of the blinds and draws fine lines in both carpet and wall. The pattern on the carpet is symmetrical, but if you look at it for a long time, it captures your attention, gripping it until you can’t shake free. Laura is lying next to me in perfect peace, breathing silently, sound asleep. I push back the blanket and get
up.

  As I’m groping my way down the hall, the memory of the dream returns. No doubt about it, it was my grandmother. She looked tired, worn out, and somehow not complete, as if only a portion of her soul had managed to force its way through to me. She stood in front of me, bent over, leaning on a walking stick, with two ballpoint pens sticking out of her bun. She opened and closed her mouth and made signs with her hands; she was determined to tell me something. She looked unutterably weary, lips pursed, eyes pleading, until in the next moment some change in the dream washed her away and I was somewhere else, surrounded by other things. I will never know what she wanted to tell me.

  I shave, get into the shower, and turn on the hot tap. The water is warm, then hot, then very hot, which is how I like it. I tip my head back and let the water beat down on me, listen to the noise, feel the pain, and forget absolutely everything for a moment.

  It doesn’t last long. Already the memory comes crashing back like a wave. Perhaps I can hold out for another couple of months, maybe even three, but not longer.

  I turn off the water, get out of the shower, and push my face into the terrycloth of the bath towel. As always, my memory reacts to the smell, calling up images: Mama taking me to bed wrapped in a towel, Papa’s tall figure outlined by the ceiling light, his tousled hair in silhouette, Ivan already asleep in the other bed, our sandbox where I always knocked over the towers he built, a meadow, a worm he found that I split in half, and he cried and cried. Or was it the other way around? I put on my bathrobe. Now I need my medication.

  In my study everything is normal. This calms me. The desk with its big screen, the Paul Klee on one wall and the Eulenboeck on the other, the empty files. I have never worked here. Even the drawers are empty and not one of the reference books has ever been opened. But when I sit here and pretend to be lost in thought, no one comes in, and that counts for something in and of itself.

  Two Throprens, a Torbit, a Prevoxal, and a Valium—I can’t begin the day with too much, because I have to be able to up the dose if something unforeseen occurs. I swallow them all in one gulp; it’s unpleasant and I have to use all my willpower to conquer the gag reflex. Why I always take them without water, I have no idea.

  Already I can feel them working. It’s probably my imagination, nothing could work that fast, but is that important? Indifference settles over me like cotton wool. Life goes on. One day you’ll lose it all, the name Eric Friedland will be abhorred, those who still trust you will curse you, your family will fall apart, and they’ll lock you up. But not today.

  I’ll never be able to tell anyone how much I hate this Paul Klee. Lopsided diamonds, red on a black background, and next to them a wind-blown, truly pitiful little matchstick man. Even I could have painted it. I know I’m not supposed to even think such a sentence, it is utterly forbidden, but I can’t help it, even I could have painted it, it would have taken me less than five minutes! Instead of which I paid seven hundred and fifty thousand euros for it, but a man in my position must possess a very expensive painting: Janke has a Kandinsky, Nettelback of BMW has a Monet—maybe it’s a Manet, what do I know?—and old Rebke, my golf partner, has a Richard Serra on the lawn, huge, rusty, and always in the way at garden parties. So I asked Ivan two years ago to get me a picture too, it just had to be something that was a sure thing.

  He immediately pretended he didn’t understand me. He likes doing that—it amuses him. What did I mean, “sure thing”?

  “Sure thing,” I said, “means that it impresses everyone. That no expert has something against the artist. Like with Picasso. Or Leonardo. One of those guys.”

  He laughed at me. He likes doing that too. Picasso? There were hundreds of experts who didn’t take Picasso seriously, and if you chose one of his wrong periods, you’d be criticized willy-nilly. Almost no one had a good word to say about his late work, for example! But Paul Klee, you could get one of his, no one had anything against Paul Klee.

  “And Leonardo?”

  “No Leonardos on the market. Take Klee.”

  Then he attended the auction for me. At half a million he called me to ask if he should keep bidding. I would like to have yelled at him. But what if he thought I couldn’t even afford a matchstick man? For a while it hung in the salon, then Laura suddenly didn’t like it anymore. So since then it’s been hanging over my desk, staring at me in a pushy way and doing damage in my dreams. I can’t sell it, too many people have seen it in the salon where I have of course pointed it out to them, look at my Klee, what do you think of my Klee, yes of course it’s genuine! As soon as the investigators start work, one of their first questions will be where the Klee is. Art is a trap, nothing more, cleverly dreamed up by people like my brother!

  Still in my bathrobe I go along the hall and down the stairs to the media room. There’s a screen and a video beamer. The black cubes of the speakers are powerful enough to service a football stadium. A soft leather couch sits in front of it.

  The remote is lying on the table. Without thinking about it I sit down, reach for it, and press a couple of buttons. The screen hums into life: the early-morning TV programming—a nature film. A dragonfly lands on a stalk. Its legs are no bigger than a hair, its wings tremble, and its antennae touch the rough green. Interesting, but it reminds me about the camera.

  There’s one hidden in one of the appliances. It would be strange if there weren’t one, because they’re so easy to conceal, I would never find it among all the lenses. I push another button, the meadow disappears, to be replaced by some undersecretary standing behind a lectern and talking so fast that you’d think everything must hang on his finishing as fast as possible.

  “No,” I say. “No, no, no, no. No!”

  Luckily that helps. He slows down.

  But unfortunately he’s noticed me. Without stopping talking, he casts a swift glance in my direction. He did it very unobtrusively, but it didn’t escape me.

  I hold my breath. I must not make a wrong move now. Without question it’s crazy, I know it, the broadcast with the undersecretary is a recording, nobody gives press conferences this early in the morning.

  But I also know that he looked at me.

  “Totally calm. Always keep calm.”

  With cold terror I realize that I said it out loud. I can’t make this kind of mistake. And the undersecretary, whose name I suddenly recall—he’s called Obermann, Bernd Richard Obermann, and he’s responsible for power or education or something—heard it, for a mocking smile appears for a moment on his face. I don’t let anything show; I don’t lose my cool so easily. Keep calm, I say to myself again, but this time silently and without moving my lips, behave as if everything’s fine! Somehow I have to manage to look away from the screen. I concentrate on the edge of my field of vision, and then somewhat blurrily I see something on the carpet, a disturbance in the symmetry: a red wine stain. Damn it, this carpet cost thirty-five thousand euros!

  My fury helps me to look away from the screen. Out of the corner of my eye I register that Undersecretary Obermann has disappeared. Some harmless man is now talking into the microphone and has no interest in me. Quickly I lift the remote, the picture flames up for a moment and is gone.

  That was a close-run thing. I stand up, notice someone in the doorway, and jump back.

  “Did I frighten you?”

  “No, of course not. No, no. No!” I look at my daughter, my daughter looks at me, and to say something I ask, “Do you have a test to take today?”

  “Yes, in math.”

  I congratulate myself, now I’m behaving like a father who has a grip on things and takes part, while all I know is that children are always having to take tests for school. Something mean is always in the offing, and every day is certain to bring its own unpleasantness.

  “Do you know anything about this red wine stain?”

  She shakes her head.

  “If it was you, it’s okay to tell me. You won’t be punished.”

  “I don’t drink wine!”

  She
said it charmingly. I would love to kiss her now on both cheeks, but I think about the camera and leave things be. “And?” I ask instead. “Learned it all? Well prepared?”

  She shrugs her shoulders as if she doesn’t believe I’d be interested. This upsets me. Because even though it really doesn’t interest me, I do my best to act like it matters.

  I notice a tiny spider—a little dot working its way up the wall by the door. What does it live off, what does it eat, what does it drink, or don’t spiders drink? I would like to ask Marie, she’s bound to learn things like that in school, but instead I ask, “What’s up for today? Have you got as far as differential calculus?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m ten, Papa.”

  She has an answer for everything. Meanwhile the spider has worked its way over to the other side of the door; how did it get there so fast?

  “What?” she asks.

  “ ‘Excuse me.’ You must say ‘Excuse me,’ not ‘What.’ ”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What?”

  “What sort of spider, Papa?”

  Did I talk out loud? For heaven’s sake!

  “You said—”

  “No!”

  “But you did—”

  “I didn’t say a word!”

  That came out too loud. I don’t want to frighten my daughter, and I mustn’t forget the camera. Stricken, I run my hand over Marie’s head. She smiles at me, then turns around and leaves, the way children always do, with a hop, a step, and a leap.

  “Hurry up!” I call after her. “You’re late, school’s about to start!” I have no idea when school starts. But it’s bound to be true.

  What will she think of me when I’m in prison? On the way to the dressing room upstairs I ask myself yet again why I don’t pluck up the courage to cut things short. So many have managed it: guns, pills, a leap from a high window. Why not me?