under Gebhart.
“Talk, Gebi,” he said. “I want to hear your stories. More stories, now. Okay?”
Gebhart opened one eye but didn’t look at Felix.
“Oh Christ,” he whispered, and grimaced, and closed his eye again.
Panic seized Felix, and the yawning space around him pulsed and quivered again.
“You listen then,” he said, louder than he had intended. It was his own voice, his mind said, but it sounded like someone else’s.
The bile at the back of his throat hurt, and the breeze pressed his wet shirt against his skin, chilling him.
“I’m going to talk. Are you listening? I’m going to tell you what we’re going to do when this is fixed. You know that stube out near the Woods, the heurigen place…?”
He paused to hear any word from Gebhart, but he was beginning to shiver.
“I’m paying, Gebi,” he went on. “There’s going to be everything. On me.”
His grandfather was on one knee know, and his face had fallen.
He looked ancient, and his eyes rested on the reddening towel in Felix’s hand. He was mumbling, and for a moment Felix thought he was praying.
“Opa, phone them back, the Gendarmerie. Tell them the helicopter, a mountain rescue one. The road is blocked.”
His grandfather had difficulty getting up. He hesitated before heading for the farmhouse. He looked down at Felix.
“You,” he whispered and shook his head. “You and that father of yours.”
FORTY-ONE
The July night before Felix was to attend the Sonderkommission at Strassgangerstrasse, he slept deeply: until 2 a.m. That was when he sat up, half in sleep and half awake, with a groan. Giuliana was off the pillow almost immediately.
“What’s wrong?”
He was sure she wasn’t awake when she had spoken.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Go back to sleep. It’s fine.”
He had already pivoted over to the side of the bed, and had his feet on the floor. He had woken up in the middle of the running dream. Like all the other times, he was instantly awake and ready to keep running. He looked at the rectangle of yellowed light cast up from the streetlights outside. Though the windows were open to cool the apartment after the heat of the day, the room still felt stuffy.
He couldn’t hear any traffic. He concentrated on his breathing, and felt around his ribs to the left side. Then he tried one deep breath.
There was pressure on the ribs, but it didn’t hurt. Slowly he raised both arms. There had not been any real jabs of pain for weeks now, but the stiffness was staying longer than he’d expected.
The glow from the window had turned her skin to bronze. He gazed at her breasts resting in shadows, and then at her navel. The planet, they called it, for no good reason. Maybe it had something to do with rings of Saturn, or something she’d said when they had started out together and she had been self-conscious about her full figure.
“Have you got pain?”
Her eyes were closed.
“No. Really. Back to sleep.”
He lay still and listened to her breathing. He had stopped being paranoid about every ache or feeling of tiredness, or even a wormy stomach. Concussion had different ways to show its effects, they kept telling him at the follow-up scans he had each Wednesday. So yet again they had detected no abnormalities, he reported to Giuliana. Except for what they had done those afternoons and nights of the week he had at home.
It seemed an age ago. Often he thought of the strange sex they’d had that night he’d gotten home from the hospital, with tensor bandages across his chest. Giuliana hadn’t figured it out either, she admitted, and refused to talk about it. Pagan love, they’d agreed to call it. She was the goddess astride him, demanding. It was as if she were trying to cure him of something, to draw out poison, to exorcise something. The week was almost compensation enough for their missed holiday.
He counted back the weeks and days. He still found himself doing that even when he was at work, even when Schroek was saying something to him, or when he and Gebi’s temp, a good-natured veteran named Fischbach, were on a patrol. Maybe it was the brain trying to fill in gaps by itself. But still he got that woolly feeling when he tried to remember details from the farmyard. He put it down to the concussion. There was no need for fancy theories of the unconscious, yet anyway. Even Schroek had understood that Felix wasn’t holding out on him. He had stopped asking him even casual questions about it.
Try as he might, the simple fact was that he could not remember everything. There was no point in feeling guilty, or frustrated about it, that neurologist told him. He had only to do his best with the investigation, to try to answer the million questions they’d thrown at him. But understand that this is what the brain did to protect itself. And be glad you have one that still works.
She murmured something and shifted her head on the pillow.
He raised his head, looked over at her. Then he reached across and put his arm around her waist, and drew her to him. Her scent began to soak into his head. He let his hand along her thigh. Her skin seemed suddenly hot.
“This is you getting well,” she muttered, and drew in a breath.
“Is it?”
“Medicine,” he said. “Yes.”
“What woke you?”
He stopped stroking. It wasn’t impatience he’d heard, he told himself; it was concern.
“The usual,” he said.
“The running one?”
He nodded. His hands seemed to have their own ideas. He felt them work over her hips.
“But nothing gets any clearer. There’s always talk, or words, but I don’t understand them.”
He heard her yawn. He focused on his hands now, and traced her hip bone.
“How long do you think before… you know… ”
It was what he’d hoped she wouldn’t say.
Did she mean “the talk” she had postponed? The evenings at Gebhart’s?
He thought about Gebhart reading the travel brochures he had his daughter gather for him. Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt. Soon then this would stop, as it had to, this sitting in Gebhart’s garden reading magazines together, and interrupting their long silences with a word from Gebhart about some foolishness in a furniture plan he was studying, or the quality of Opels these days, or something the doctor had said recently about one kidney being plenty.
Gebhart’s take on things had not changed: It could have been a hell of a lot worse. Right after he’d gone to see him, Gebhart had been able to make some dry crack about things. Twenty-four years of normal, too normal, and now he got his 10 minutes of excitement and fame. Gebhart had not even known about it at the time, he admitted.
He pretended to feel a little cheated not to have witnessed all the fuss with the helicopter and the swarm of paramedics and police.
“How long?” he said. “As long as it takes, I suppose.”
Her rested his hand, and waited for sleep, hers or his.
After several minutes, she raised her head from the pillow.
“Is that your heart?”
“Yes,” he said. He felt her hand move up his leg.
