Borkmann's point

45

“Evil,” he began, and his voice was deeper now, barely audible in the densely packed air, “is the concept we cannot avoid, the only certainty. A young person might find that hard to grasp, but for those of us who have understood, it becomes steadily clearer. What we can be sure of, what we can rely on absolutely, is evil. It never lets us down. Good… goodness is only a stage set, a backdrop against which the satanic per forms. Nothing else… nothing.”

He coughed. He lit another cigarette, a glowing point trem bling in the darkness.

“When you eventually acquire that insight, it brings with it a certain degree of comfort despite everything. The difficult thing is simply to rid oneself of all the old hopes, all the illu sions and castles in the air that one builds at the beginning. In our case her name was Brigitte, and when she was ten she promised never to hurt me. That was the time she came run ning over the sands; it was a very windy day at the end of May.

Out at Gimsvejr. She flung herself into my arms and hugged me so tightly that I remember having a pain in the back of my neck afterward. We’ll love each other all our lives and never do anything silly to each other-those were her very words. Any thing silly… never do anything silly to each other… ten years old, blond braids. She was the only child we had, and some people said they had never seen such a happy child.

Nobody laughed like she did-she sometimes even woke her self up, laughing in her sleep-who can blame us for having hopes?”

He coughed again.

“She took her final exams in 1981, then went to England and worked there for a year. Was accepted by the university in Aar lach the following year. Met a boy called Maurice-Maurice

Ruhme-yes, we’re there already. I think she knew him slightly from before; he came from Kaalbringen. He was reading medi cine. Came from an upper-class family, very attractive, and he taught her how to use cocaine… he was the first, but I kept him until last.”

The cigarette glowed again.

“They moved in together. Lived together for about a year until he threw her out. By then he had taught her other things… LSD, pure morphine, which he never used himself, and how a young woman can earn money most easily and most effectively. Perhaps she provided for him, perhaps he was her pimp… I don’t know, we never talked about that. Perhaps it hadn’t gone quite as far as that, not then.

“She stayed in Aarlach on her own for another eighteen months. She had no place of her own, but moved around from man to man. And she was going in and out of hospitals and treatment centers. Detoxified, ran away, moved on…”

He swallowed, and she could hear him holding his breath ing in check.

“She lived at home for a short period as well, but then went back. Kept clean for a while, but before long it was the same old story. Eventually she was ensnared by some kind of sect, kept away from drugs but was brought down by other things instead. It was as if she didn’t have the strength, or as if she shied away from any normal sort of life… or perhaps it was no longer enough for her, the everyday, I don’t know. Never theless, after two years she agreed to leave Aarlach and live with us again, but now all that happiness had vanished…

Brigitte… Bitte. She was twenty-four. She was only twenty four, but in fact she was much older than me and my wife. She knew, I think she knew even then that she had burned up her life… she could still do her hair in blond braids, but she had burned up her life. She realized that, but we didn’t. I don’t know, in fact… perhaps there was a faint glimmer of hope left, a possibility of sorting everything out. That’s what we told ourselves, at least, what we had to tell ourselves… the desper ate illusion of vain hope. We believe what we have to believe.

Until we’ve taught ourselves to see reality, that is what we do.

That’s what this damn life looks like. We cling on to whatever is at hand. Anything at all…”

He fell silent. She opened her eyes and saw the cigarette glow illuminate his face, and pulled the blankets more tightly around her. She felt and sensed the extreme hopelessness that came flowing out of him uninterruptedly. Coming in waves, and for a moment it seemed to compress the darkness, making it solid and impermeable even for words and thoughts.

I understand, she tried to say, but the words wouldn’t come out. They stayed deep inside her. Frozen and meaningless.

“I went to see Maurice Ruhme that same fall,” he said, breaking the silence. “One day during the few months she was at home with us again I went to see him. Visited him in that same well-kept apartment she had shared with him, and where he now lived with another woman… a young and beautiful woman who still retained all her happiness and never discov ered the reason for my visit. He kept her out of the way, and when I wanted to talk to him about Brigitte, we went out and sat in a bar. Sat on a peculiar plush velvet sofa and he waved his arms around and wondered what the devil I wanted; he paid for the wine and asked me if I wanted money… I think that’s when he sowed the seeds of his own destruction, but it wasn’t until he came back here, and the others as well, that I realized the time was ripe. When I killed him, the pleasure was all the greater. Somehow deeper and more intense than with Eggers and Simmel, and that doesn’t surprise me. He was the one who had started it all off, it was the image of a living Maurice

Ruhme who caused the greatest torture during all those sleep less nights before I made up my mind… a living, smiling

Maurice Ruhme sitting on that sofa, flailing his arms about and regretting that Brigitte wasn’t made of sterner stuff. That she would fall so badly and hurt herself so much… he had never imagined that, the little rich boy with the strong safety net.”

He fell silent once again and shifted his position on the chair.

“I have to leave you now,” he said. “I’ll tell you about the others another time. If nothing unexpected happens…”

He remained sitting there for another minute, then she heard him stand up and open the door. Heard the squeaking hinges as he closed it again, locked and bolted it, and it was only after his footsteps had long since faded away that her tongue loosened again.

“And what about me?” she whispered, and for a moment she thought her words remained hanging like symbols in the darkness.

Small, rapidly fading sparks in a black, black night.

Then she wrapped the blankets around her and tried to close the eyes of her soul.