While Ida slept on, groaning and shifting at times, Frederich remained watchful, resting lightly only for short periods. The adrenaline from the fight eventually settled, and he began experiencing strange states of consciousness as the night wore on.
The first images came during a moment of light sleep. He saw the man’s fierce gaze cutting into him, unflinching and uncompromising. He felt the man’s fingers pressing into his face while it was underwater. He tossed and turned under the heavy weight and convulsed from the terror of being suffocated. Eventually, a moment of profound tranquillity broke through, where he looked down on the man’s bloodied, lifeless face partially submerged in the water, his fierce gaze gone forever.
He jerked abruptly and was met by a howling sense of grief and despair. It sucked him in and took his mind back to the day Kraas died. He saw himself in the back seat of the taxi as they raced down the number 2 from Tallinn to Tartu. His foot was tapping rapidly on the floor and he was urging the now annoyed driver to speed up. His phone rang when they were ten minutes away from the hospital. It was Johannes. He answered instantly.
“Johannes! Is he ok?”
There was only the sound of people rushing around in the background.
“Johannes?” he yelled again.
“Frederich,” said Johannes with a weepy voice. Frederich’s stomach knotted up. “He’s gone. I’m sorry, my boy.”
He left his body. The phone fell out of his hand. His eyes widened, and his lips began trembling. He was quick to realise how ill-prepared he was for this moment. He went numb, and the rest of that day and the next became a strange dream. He was now standing dumbfounded at the funeral, unable to cry. Random members of his village approached him, dressed in black, and offered their condolences with a soft touch on the shoulder. ‘He was a great man,’ they said. ‘What a heartbreaking loss.’
It was now late at night, and he was sitting on the sofa in his childhood home staring at the moonlight coming through the window. He felt empty, desolate like nuclear aftermath, unable to grasp the emerging darkness. Without warning, the ground beneath him gave way and he found himself thrust headfirst into the infinite reaches of terror. The howling panic shook him like nothing before, and spurred an overwhelming urge to flee, to escape the place which had come to represent Kraas. That meant leaving Tartu and also Tallinn. The next day he met with Kraas’ lawyer to discuss his inheritance, which turned out to be the house and 400,000 euros of savings. He looked on, stunned. Where did the money come from? The lawyer had no idea. His instructions were only to ensure a swift handover. Frederich reluctantly signed the papers. More condolences came. He returned to Tallinn, packed his bags and fled Estonia without alerting anybody. His only impulse was to escape and then stay in motion.
Green, transient landscapes passed by in the train window, including the farms, towns, forests and winding rivers of the countryside. The void was there, growing stronger as he travelled from place to place across eastern Europe, from Riga to Warsaw, Bratislava to Vienna. He had lived and slept beneath the shadow of Kraas’ death, from hostel to city landmark, each day blending into the next until he reached Berlin, where something told him it was time to stop.
As he sat upright on his bed in the dark, it had all caught up with him. The unravelling process began with a thickness in his throat. Shit. The tears rose to the surface and he lifted the blanket quickly over his face. He clenched his jaw and stuck his head in but with no effect. After three months of tightly holding it in, grief came gushing out of him. He moaned and wailed while the image of Kraas’ face grew vivid. Those sharp grey eyes would never watch over him again. He would never again see that bald head with the rough white stubble. Kraas would never pass by and rub the top of his hair again while he was reading, and he would never have the chance to complain about it while secretly liking when Kraas did that. I miss you. The words kept repeating in his mind, over and over, like a grief mantra, slowly cleansing him of his burden. The tears soaked his blanket until there were none left. Then, without meaning to, he fell asleep.
3
Michael Inselheim rolled up his shirt sleeves and wiped his forehead free of sweat. His associate handed him a cold bottle of water from the Jeep, which he used to cool the back of his neck. He rolled the bottle over his cheek and savoured a short reprieve from the desert heat. How did people live in such conditions, he wondered? He was hard-pressed to think of anything less interesting than the bland rocks, raw dirt and ugly shrubs which covered the Kazakh desert landscape.
“Ten minutes until launch,” said Shirvan, having just spoken to the field team on the phone.
Inselheim nodded.
“Are they ready for post-launch?” he asked.
“Of course. The Neutralaser goes underground straight after discharge.”
Inselheim looked out at the horizon where the dummy rocket would be launched, and his eye twitched again. After a short pause, it twitched again. He loathed waiting. That was why he refused to line up for anything, he thought, as he rubbed his thumb against the pale strip on his bare ring finger. It had been three months since he took his wedding
