Decompression

18

She’d hidden it in such a way that it would pretty much have to be found. Not placed it so obviously that it seemed to have been planted. Nor, however, was it concealed so well that any island police inspector, no matter how dim-witted, could overlook it.

I have hardly any memories of the day after the Wednesday diving expedition. It’s as though that whole Thursday has been expunged. Maybe I slept completely through it. Or spent it staring unseeing out the window, stupefied by the emptiness that surrounded me. On Friday morning I ran out of the house before breakfast, armed with vacuum cleaner and mop pail, as if my life depended on doing the usual post-guest cleaning in the Casa Raya. Normally that would have been Antje’s job. She would have done it on Saturday afternoon, right after Theo and Jola’s departure, so that the house would be ready for the Sunday arrival of our next clients. I, meanwhile, would have taken the day off. But Antje wasn’t there anymore, and I had three free days. I didn’t even dare to think about Sunday. It seemed to me completely implausible that I’d spend part of it waiting in the airport terminal, holding a sign with the names MARTIN & NANCY. That mental image belonged to a universe that no longer existed.

When I stepped into the Casa Raya, I felt as though someone had punched me in the pit of the stomach. They were still there. They’d left the house only briefly to take a stroll by the sea. At least, that was the statement their stuff made. Everything was hanging around as though still warm from contact with them. There were clothes on the floor. Toothbrushes in the bathroom. An open book on the dining-room table. Only the dried coffee dregs in the cups revealed that some time had passed.

I walked around for a while without knowing where to begin. The unmade bed. The remains of a hasty breakfast. Jola’s bikinis hanging over the shower-curtain rod. Tidying up and cleaning had never been my strong points. Most of all, however, I couldn’t bring myself to touch anything. The objects all looked to me like props in an amusement park’s haunted house.

Then my paralysis metamorphosed into a frenzy of activity. Swift as the wind, I gathered up all the clothes that were lying around and threw them into the washing machine. I cleaned out the closets and meticulously distributed their contents between the two wheeled suitcases. I carefully removed Lotte’s photograph from the wall. In the bathroom I packed the toilet kits, never taking longer than a second to decide what belonged to Jola and what to Theo. All at once, things sorted themselves. I washed the dishes, pulled the sheets off the beds, took fresh linens from the bathroom closet, and set about making the beds with the clean sheets. When I lifted up the big double mattress, there it was. On the slats underneath. A black notebook.

I knew immediately what I was looking at. The dates. The handwriting. A few pages torn out and then glued back in. I started reading at random:

What would Lotte have done? When I tried to get up, he put his hands around my throat. I told him to let me go. He tried to shove himself into my mouth. I clenched my teeth. He pressed on my windpipe. My lips opened and I gasped for air.

I dropped the notebook as though it had burned my fingers. Then I picked it up again and laid it on the table. When I’d finished vacuuming and dusting the whole house, cleaning the bathroom, and remaking the beds, when the two suitcases were standing packed and ready at the door, the black notebook was still lying there. The local police inspector would have jumped for joy. The discovery I’d made had been intended for him. If there was one person in the world who wasn’t supposed to get his hands on that notebook, that person was me.

Apparently Jola had figured on never going back to the Casa Raya. Even more certainly, she’d assumed that I would never set foot in it again. Had Theo drowned as planned, she would presumably have waited until I was back on board the Aberdeen and knocked me out with the water-pump pliers too. She’d have taken off my dive suit, maybe arranged a few signs of struggle, and then informed the police by radio. Help! My partner’s been killed! The murderer’s here, right next to me! Twenty-nine north, fourteen west. Please come quick! They would have arrested me while we were still at sea and taken me to the police station for questioning. Jola would have come along as a witness. The suspect: totally distraught. The witness: well prepared. Her statement carefully thought-out and more convincing than mine. Two rivals who have learned to hate each other’s guts in the past ten days come to blows on a boat. Between them is a woman who’s been abused by one of them and is trying to start a new life with the other. A woman too weak to prevent the catastrophe. Jola wouldn’t have accused me; instead she’d have sought, through her tears, to defend me. Confusion and anxiety in perfect balance. And, if possible, in fluent Spanish. It’s all my fault, Señor Comisario. Herr Fiedler was only trying to protect me. He was at his wit’s end, just as I was. I should never have told him about any of that. What would you do if you knew the woman you loved was being beaten by another man? Por favor, if you will, imagine that. What would you do?

I would have remained in custody. The stupid police inspector would have privately expressed his respect for me, man-to-man. Then he would have set to work checking Jola’s statement. He would have asked half the island about our affair. The guests on the Dorset would have been questioned concerning the previous evening’s bitter altercation. Divers would have been sent to look for Theo one hundred meters down and might even, in spite of the current, have found his body. With a bad head wound and scuba divers’ lead weights in his pockets. The police would have searched my house and, it goes without saying, the Casa Raya. And in the end, they would have discovered the rather ostentatiously hidden diary. Germany would have filed a request for extradition. My trial would have been held there.

In the course of the past few weeks, like a man obsessed, I’ve gone over Jola’s plan again and again. Its complexity. Its refinement. The sheer cold-bloodedness with which she’d developed and then implemented her calculations, one by one, carried along by her conviction that life works like a crime novel: no weak points allowed. Of course, one might believe that only a sick mind would be capable of such painstaking malice. But Jola isn’t crazy. It follows, therefore, by an argumentum e contrario, that what she did was normal. Maybe not strictly so, statistically speaking, but still within the ordinary human spectrum. Even though she did it extraordinarily well.

I called up Bernie. Countless times. At first he hung up, and then he refused to take my calls. When he was finally ready to talk to me, I asked him why he’d backed out of the expedition the night before it was supposed to take place. He told me that as far as he was concerned, I was the one who’d backed out. He said he got a text message from me informing him that I still needed the boat but not the crew, and that I wanted to go on my expedition with Jola and Theo instead. Right away, Bernie said, that had seemed to him like an idea conceived by a madman.

A text from my phone, just as described in Jola’s diary. I found the message in my “Sent” box. She’d mimicked my bad English so well that I wondered for a moment whether I’d written the text myself. On the Dorset, Jola had sat next to me the whole time. Practically on my lap. Of course she’d had access to my telephone. I couldn’t help admiring her ingenuity. It’s said that hostages identify with their captors as a way of coping with their own situation. Maybe believing that Jola’s brilliant is the only way for me to bear the unbearable.

I’ve tried to feel sorry for her. If only a small part of what she says about Theo’s excesses is true, she’s lived through hell on earth. A defense lawyer would say that a woman who’s been brutally and systematically abused over a long period of time finds herself in a permanent state of psychological emergency. He’d arouse the compassion of judge and jury and plead for their recognition of extenuating circumstances. But Jola doesn’t need any extenuating circumstances. She’s not the accused. I don’t feel like pitying her. Nor can I manage to hate her, even though she was prepared to put me behind bars for the rest of my life. Loving her for that would certainly be absurd. Maybe fascination is what you’ve got left when you don’t know how you should feel.

Did she arrive on the island with her plan already formed? Or did she come up with it only after she got here? If so, when? Was it some kind of game at first, and then at a certain point it turned serious? Did Theo’s behavior on the Dorset finally tip the balance? Or was it my refusal to have sex with her by the beach in Mala that got everything rolling? Looking for answers, I’ve read her diary so many times I know some passages by heart.

On Saturday morning, I lined up the van, went over to the Casa, and picked up the two suitcases. I left in good time for the return flight to Berlin that Jola and Theo had booked. Their tickets and identification documents were in my shirt pocket. It was as though I was driving ghosts to the airport. When I passed the spray-painted EVERYTHING IS WILL, I turned my head to the right. The passenger seats were actually empty.

I thought about the past Wednesday, the day of the murder attempt, about how I’d driven the same stretch of road on the way to the hospital. I’d brought the Aberdeen back to her anchorage as quickly as I could and forced myself to off-load at least the most expensive pieces of my equipment. After tearing across the island like a mental case, I was made to wait at the hospital reception desk. Half an eternity had to pass before the hospital was able to confirm that one Theodor Hast had been admitted more than two hours previously. When asked whether I was a relative of the patient, I stupidly answered, “No.” Nobody could tell me anything about his condition. No physician was available for me to talk to. Whether one Jolante von der Pahlen was present in the hospital could not be determined. In any case, no patient with that name had been admitted. When I tried Jola’s number, I got a dial tone. She was refusing my calls. Before long, her cell phone was turned off. There was no reception on Theo’s phone either.

People wearing robes and slippers meandered through the lobby, eyeing me curiously. Every thirty minutes, I went back to the reception desk and repeated my questions about Theo’s condition. Always with the same result: no further details were available, and I couldn’t be allowed upstairs. I could only wait for Frau von der Pahlen to come down to the lobby, perhaps to get a drink from the coffee machine, as many patients’ relatives did. Then, I was told, I could talk to her.

Darkness fell. The woman at the reception desk was relieved by a doorman, who produced a thermos bottle and switched on a little television set. I got some coffee from the coffee machine. The lobby was empty. It was very quiet. I gazed at the tall glass walls and through them at palm trees and cactuses and behind those the twinkling lights of the island’s capital city, and I felt a strange peacefulness. Above me, people were sleeping, some of whom didn’t know whether they’d survive the night. I stretched out on the bench. My leaden weariness almost felt good.

When I awoke, a young nurse was sitting in the doorman’s place. The TV was off, the thermos bottle had vanished. Dawn was breaking outside. When I requested information about Theo, the girl immediately reached for the telephone, asked questions, and listened to the answers, which poured out of the receiver in a stream of high-speed Spanish. After she hung up, she explained to me in English that Theodor Hast had already been transferred to the central hospital on the neighboring island; the transfer had taken place the previous evening. As far as she understood, Theo would undergo a few final tests and then take a direct flight back to Germany from the airport on the other island, probably in the course of that very afternoon.

I thanked her and drove home. I figured Theo’s condition must be at least stable. Getting his head cracked open, half drowning, and then spending an hour in cold water — that was enough for circulatory collapse and severe hypothermia. In that condition, you could die if you didn’t get help. But Theo had been helped, he’d turned the corner, and he’d be back on his feet soon. In Germany. Only when I was driving their luggage to the airport did I completely grasp the fact that I’d never see Theo and Jola again, that they’d literally vanished into thin air.

The woman working the check-in counter hesitated a long time and kept asking me to repeat what had happened. A diving accident. Air ambulance back to Germany. She compared the names on the tickets with those on the identity documents several times. Finally she nodded. She promised that the baggage would be delivered to the Berlin address. We put the tickets and papers in the document pockets of the two suitcases. I watched them bump along the conveyor belt and disappear through a rubber curtain into the belly of the airport.

That evening I sat on the terrace with a bottle of wine and read Jola’s diary straight through. In the end, I knew the meaning of fear. I lay awake in bed for hours, waiting for the roar of engines and the slamming of car doors and the voices of broad-shouldered Spaniards, informing me that I was under arrest for the attempted murder of Theo Hast. At last, in the early morning hours, it occurred to me that three days had already passed and nobody had come to my house.

Around noon I drove back to the airport to pick up my new clients. Not out of a sense of duty, but because I had no earthly idea what else to do with myself. While we were still in the van, I informed Nancy and Martin that my assistant, who normally helped me run the diving school, had suddenly been taken ill, and that therefore there would probably be organizational issues. Nancy and Martin looked unperturbed by this warning. Like most tourists, they were in a holiday mood, and it didn’t seem to them that anything in the world could spoil their diving enjoyment. They found the Casa Raya enchanting.

The following Tuesday we were joined by Ralph, a regular client and experienced diver who’d been coming to me for years. Starting Friday, I also had a family of first-time divers, including children, so that I had to work in two shifts. I warned everybody about organizational problems. There weren’t any. In the evenings, I’d drive home as early as possible to fill diving cylinders and wash out equipment. I answered e-mails and did the bookkeeping. I worked late into the night. Sometime after the weekend, I went to my bank’s website and found that a payment in the amount of fourteen thousand euros had been credited to my account. In re: “Diving instruction for casting Lotte Hass.” I stared so long at this entry that my online session was ended for security reasons.

I thought constantly about Jola and her plan. I kept looking in her diary. As long as I could admire Jola, I wasn’t afraid of her. On one occasion, I dialed her cell phone number. It no longer existed. After making that effort, I was soaked with sweat, like a marathon runner. From Jola’s Facebook page I learned that a new season of Up and Down was in the works. About Theo I learned nothing.

Christmas passed without anything happening. On New Year’s Eve, I had clients and went to bed before midnight. The New Year was 2012. A number like any other. After breakfast on New Year’s morning, I sat around for a while. Exactly fourteen years had passed since the day I left Germany and began my new life on the island. Fourteen years. An unimaginable span of time. I thought about the day of the murder attempt, or more precisely, about a very specific moment in that day, and an instantaneous feeling of gratitude flooded through me. All at once, that second appeared to me as the most important moment of my life. I had hesitated, looked at Theo’s unconscious face, and thought about Jola. And then I had decided. I hadn’t let Theo sink to the bottom of the sea; instead, I’d saved his life. Gratitude for that decision drove tears into my eyes. I sat there with my empty coffee cup in front of me and wept. Afterward I could breathe, freely and deeply. Something had changed. I needed only to think back on that hesitation to feel that I’d become someone else. I no longer understood why I’d found “Stay out of it” such an appealing motto fourteen years before. Now it repelled me. When I climbed into the van to go diving, I felt better. In a fundamental way.

January was, as always, a slow time. Who goes on vacation right after New Year’s? Only a few retirees, singles, and freelancers. On the first Saturday of the year, a single new client arrived. Her name was Katja, and she was a criminal defense lawyer, a specialist in such major felonies as murder, homicide, and rape. We hit it off from the start. On the first evening, I invited her to dinner. On the second evening, we made love. She was over forty and correspondingly avid. She sucked my cock for a long time. In the end, she straddled me and rode me like an experienced jockey to the finish line. On the third evening, we signed a contract that bound her to secrecy and stipulated her consultation fee as equivalent to the costs of completing an Advanced Open Water Diver course and obtaining nitrox certification.

I told her the whole story. As I spoke, I had to control myself to keep from blubbering. Only then did I realize how much the previous weeks had exhausted me. The silence. The waiting. The questions. I couldn’t take any more. I described to Katja how Jola’s plan kept turning through my mind in an endless loop, how I couldn’t stop questioning what had happened, how my obsession was eating me up inside. She said she was a lawyer, not a psychiatrist, and I should pull myself together. I gave her the diary. She read it so fast that it looked as though she was just superficially flipping through the pages.

When she finished, she raised her eyes and asked, “So how much of this is true?”

“In the beginning a lot, in the middle not much, and in the end nothing at all.”

She smiled. “One of you is brilliant.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked. “Don’t you believe me?”

“You haven’t hired me to believe you. You’ve hired me to tell you what you should do.”

Katja advised me to write this account. Because you never know what’s coming. Why has Theo kept his trap shut so far about what happened on the Aberdeen? Maybe he and Jola have reconciled. Maybe he’s blackmailing her. Or he’s afraid of a public scandal. But there’s no statute of limitations for attempted murder. Some factor or other completely beyond my control could induce Theo to bring charges after all. And then Jola will defend herself with the oldest of all human sentences: It wasn’t me. She’ll declare that Theo’s only purpose is to destroy her with accusations of murder, while the actual guilty party is Sven Fiedler, the perpetrator of the failed attack aboard the Aberdeen.

After that, Katja said, it would be testimony against testimony. Jola’s word against Theo’s. Jola would probably have the public’s sympathies, and perhaps the judge’s as well, on her side. There were no witnesses to the murder attempt, and it would be too late to gather forensic evidence. At this point, the diary would come into play, just as Jola planned. The added weight, calculated to tip the final balance. Of course, I could destroy the notebook and claim it never existed. But if Jola had been cunning enough to make a copy, I could forget about trying to defend myself. Being caught in such a lie would mean a free ticket to the slammer.

Katja’s observations precisely summarized my fears. She recommended that I start composing my account as soon as possible. She said that I should proceed section by section, setting my version of events against Jola’s diary entries. Otherwise, she told me, my memory would soon start writing its own story. In her view, there was nothing more corrupt than human memory. First the details of incidents would become blurred, and then the incidents themselves.

“Maybe someday,” Katja said, “you’ll even come to believe that Jola’s telling the truth and not you.”

She gave me an ironic smile when she said that. As a defense attorney, she’s probably all too accustomed to being lied to by her clients. I slept with her twice more, out of gratitude. Then she flew back to Nuremberg, where she’s attached to the district court.

The very next day, I got on the telephone and canceled all the clients on my schedule. I took my home page down from the Internet and set up an automatic e-mail reply informing all inquiring parties that the diving school was closed. It took only a few days to sell my complete inventory of equipment. A colleague in Thailand knew someone who was planning on setting up his own business. I arranged for everything to be loaded into containers. Since then, I’ve been sitting around in half-empty rooms, and I have time. Outside there’s a delicate green covering on the slopes of the volcanoes. It’s the island spring. The talk in the news revolves around the euro crisis, the presidential crisis, and the Syrian crisis. As though time’s been standing still. As though nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed.

I occasionally see Antje while we’re both out shopping. She’s looking good. She and Ricardo are considering buying a little house in Tinajo. Todd waits outside, tied up next to the shopping carts, and pretends not to know me. Not long ago, I ran into Bernie in the entrance of the Wunder Bar café. He congratulated me on Antje’s pregnancy and laughed when I looked bewildered. And then we broke records. He delivered the longest coherent speech of his life, and I understood more English words per minute than ever before.

He said I shouldn’t imagine I was getting away with anything, because everybody, but everybody, knew what had happened, and no one believed it was an accident. And therefore I could count on getting what was coming to me, one way or another, sooner or later, and it made no difference if I packed my things and pissed off like a cowardly dog. People had contacts, people were connected, and they’d make sure I couldn’t work anywhere in the world. At least, not as a diving instructor. I was a danger to the clients, he said, and a disgrace to the sport. In other words, he was looking forward to the day I’d leave the island, and he wasn’t the only one who felt that way. Just to let me know, he said.

The expulsion from paradise. There could be no response to such a rant. And so I left him standing there, a stocky fellow with a five-day beard and a pleasant, weather-beaten Scottish face. I didn’t care about any of that. I didn’t care about him. I should have seen what an asshole he was a long time ago.

That evening I called Antje and congratulated her. She started to cry. She said she’d always wanted us to have a child together. Ricardo was a nice guy, but she’d loved only one man in her life, namely me. I took care to sound as cheerful as possible. I told her how well pregnancy became her. I said everything had turned out all right in the end. I suggested we could see each other in Germany when she went home to visit her family. Antje was still sobbing a little, and she kept repeating, “Ah, Sven.” But she sounded more wistful than desperate.

Now that I’ve finished writing, waiting is hard. I often spend a whole day not knowing what to do with myself. I’ve decided against flying. Instead I’m going to put my few belongings on a cargo ship and accompany them back to Germany. The voyage to Hamburg takes fourteen days, departure is early next week. I’m looking forward to the journey. I no longer understand how I could have taken this island for something special. It’s a place like any other. War isn’t a geographical phenomenon.

This morning I googled Jola’s name and wound up looking at a gossip magazine’s website. The headline read, “Jola Pahlen: Dream Wedding with Writer!” Below, a photograph of her and Theo. They looked reciprocally radiant. Jola had her dark hair done the same way as she had that evening on the Dorset, braided into a crown. A pair of spectacles I’d never seen before was perched on Theo’s nose. The brief article reports that “Bella Schweig” has announced her engagement to the writer Theodor Hast. Rumor has it that the pair will go on an Arctic expedition in order to be married at the North Pole.

Right after reading that, I went to the web page of a real estate agency that specializes in vacation homes and listed the Casa Raya and the Residencia at a bargain price. I don’t know why, but I can’t bear the sound of the surf anymore.