Decompression

3

“They’re sort of funny.”

This was the prelude to what I called the “postgame analysis.” Scarcely had a person left the room when he or she became the subject of instantaneous, diagnostic discussion. Assessments were compared, details of judgments mutually corrected, and speculations transformed into a consistent psychological profile. Antje and her girlfriends practiced this discipline at the expert level. As for me, when it came to postgame analysis, I was the worst partner imaginable. If Antje gave it a try all the same, she must have felt some real sense of urgency.

I stood at the sink, scraping food remnants from the plates and trying to ignore Todd while he stared a hole in me. Right from the start, it had seemed creepy to me that he not only had the same name as my parents’ now-deceased dog but also looked exactly like him. Antje firmly believed that we’d killed the first Todd by leaving him behind in Germany. I was afraid she believed just as firmly that the second Todd was a reincarnation of the first, whom she’d called back into life by recycling his name.

“Don’t you think?”

I turned my back to her and the dog. I hated it when people judged one another. It was an obsession, a curse. I had left Germany because I couldn’t stand living any longer in an all-encompassing net of reciprocal judgments. Judgers and judged found themselves in a permanent state of war, and everybody, depending on the situation, played one of the two parts. Everything my clients from back home told me was a report from the judgment front. What they thought about their boss. What their colleagues thought about them. What they thought about the chancellor. What they thought about the other divers. Then, after the first three beers some evening, what they thought about how their wives performed. And at the end of their dive holiday, they’d log on to a diving website and post what they thought about how I’d performed. It was as though people were afraid they’d fall silent forever if they stopped passing judgments.

“Sometimes Jola just stares into space,” Antje said. “Like she’s miles away. And she eats nothing. Did that strike you too?”

There was a reason for my aversion to judgments. Before I left Germany on New Year’s Eve in 1997, I had studied law for five years. I belonged to a generation of students who didn’t want school to come to an end. For us, high school graduation was by no means a happy event. It scared us. Most of us had no idea what to start doing with our lives. In school everything had been simple. You knew how to do things right and how much rebellion you could permit yourself. If something went wrong and there was any doubt, it was the teacher’s fault. I did my compulsory military service, extended it for a year with the Army Engineer Divers, and then decided to go for a law degree, because it was said that such a degree left all possibilities open. It wasn’t long before I really began to love my studies. Once again I’d found a field in which I could do everything right. As long as I took notes during lectures and spent three evenings a week in the library, I could enjoy the pleasant feeling that I was on the safe side. As a rule, I passed my exams with grades of 90 or higher. My fellow students’ envy relieved me of the necessity of having any doubts at all.

After five years of study, my scores on the final written examinations were so good they made the impending oral exam seem like a mere formality. I bought a new pair of shoes, shopped around for the most appropriate aftershave lotion, and visited the barber. On the day of the exam I felt slightly nervous, but a sense of impending triumph buoyed me up on the way to the Justice Ministry.

Four professors seated behind a long desk. In front of it, me and another examinee, whose bad preliminary marks were stinking up the whole room. The longer the professors put him through the wringer, the more restlessly I shifted in my chair. I sat on my hands so I wouldn’t forget myself and start waving one like a geek in German class. I tried to establish eye contact with the examiners and to indicate by movements of my eyebrows that I knew the answer to every single question. In short, I behaved like a complete jackass.

At last, Professor Brunsberg, an expert in constitutional law, addressed himself to me. Notorious for his halitosis, Brunsberg had a reputation for speaking directly in students’ faces, knowing that his victims, fearful of bad grades, wouldn’t turn their heads.

“Herr Fiedler,” said Professor Brunsberg, “as you are obviously a very knowledgeable man, you’re surely familiar with the name Montesquieu.”

As if he’d pressed a button, I broke out in instantaneous perspiration. Political theory had played no part in my five years of legal studies. We were supposed to learn, for example, what constitutes an Erlaubnistatbestandsirrtum, a “permission facts mistake,” and not what dead philosophers had said about the functioning of the state. I had no choice but to nod slowly.

“Good, Herr Fiedler. Then spell it, please.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Am I not speaking clearly? Spell Montesquieu!”

A row of blurred letters appeared before my mind’s eye: a Q, a couple of Us, some Es. I got the “Montes” part right away, I knew it was followed by “qu,” but everything thereafter lay in God’s hands.

“M-o-n-t-e-s-q-u-e-u-e,” I said.

Brunsberg slapped the table in delight. “Queue like ‘cue stick,’ right, Herr Fiedler? Is that what you’ve been doing the past few years? Playing pool?”

It became clear he wasn’t going to let it rest. He was out to get me.

“You get a second attempt, Herr Fiedler. We’re not inhuman.”

Under my jacket, my shirt was stuck to my back. A spot on my behind itched so unbearably that my brain stopped working. I produced an alphabet salad that didn’t have very much to do with Montesquieu. Brunsberg’s mood abruptly darkened. His bored colleagues looked toward the window. Outside, a couple of sparrows were fighting for the best spot on the ledge.

“Good, Herr Fiedler, or rather, not good. The question about Montesquieu has a second part. You’d like to get at least fifty percent in this examination, wouldn’t you? Then tell me — quickly — the great father of constitutional doctrine’s first name.”

I took my time. I’d learned by heart examination presentations for fourteen different forms of legal action. I was thoroughly familiar with the Maastricht Judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court. While the sparrows’ dispute got louder, I wondered why it was that neither Montesquieu nor Voltaire seemed to have had a first name. You included the first names quite naturally when you referred to Thomas Hobbes or John Locke.

I felt at peace when I said, loudly and clearly, “Friedrich.” That was Brunsberg’s first name. The rest of the examination disappeared into fog.

When, two hours later, we were called back into the room to be given our results, I had become a different person. I couldn’t understand myself anymore. Had I really paid four thousand marks for tutorial courses, spent eight hours daily in the library, and sat for a six-hour mock exam every week just so I could be inducted into the Asshole Club? The thought that I could spend the rest of my life in an occupation where people like Brunsberg called the shots nauseated me.

Maybe life would simply have gone on all the same if they had subtracted half a point from my total exam score because of that wretched oral. I would have gotten angry, done better in the next state examination, and landed a decent job in a law office. But in fact my average was even slightly improved by the oral. Brunsberg himself gave me almost a perfect score. When he shook my hand, he bared his teeth with joy. “You’re a good lawyer, Herr Fiedler,” he said. “If you do a bit of delving into the philosophical underpinnings of the law, you’ll get even better.”

Seeing that he no doubt meant well, on top of everything else, made the interior light in my head switch on. Everything in me was radiant with realization. My friends gathered around to congratulate me. The other candidate had failed the exam; he stood alone at the window, weeping. I stopped hearing what was being said. In my mind, I’d already left the country.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. From that time on, there was no problem that formula couldn’t solve. “Montesquieu” prevented me from passing judgments on other people, meddling in their lives, or even just handing out well-meant advice. I wanted nothing more to do with Germany, which I’ve thought of as “the war zone” ever since. When I began my new life on the island not long afterward, the fundamental expression of my worldview was “Stay out of it.”

“Maybe she’s a drug addict,” Antje said. “Lots of actresses have drug problems.” I slammed the dishwasher door and inadvertently stepped on Todd’s paw. “Don’t talk nonsense,” I said.

It sounded harsher than I meant it to. If I didn’t want to show that my tone of voice had been a mistake, the next thing I said had to be spoken just as sharply. “You’re not allowed to take drugs and dive. If she’s using, she’s obligated to tell me.”

Antje shared with Todd a bad habit of looking utterly innocent when you fussed at her. “You want to know what I think?” she asked. “I think Jola’s the kind of woman who needs to have a child. It would do her good. Think about Luisa. Or Valentina. Remember how nervous they always were? And they’re super calm now that they have children.”

Antje had a great many Spanish girlfriends who envied her blond hair and who were all raising children or expecting children or both. It irritated me exceedingly that she let pass no opportunity, however far-fetched, to present me with her own desire to have kids.

“Don’t you think a child would be a good idea for her?”

I said, “As you well know, I don’t want children. So stop with this shit.”

Antje’s head sank. I left her standing next to the dishwasher and went to bed, where a bad feeling kept me awake. When Antje quietly crept into the bed, I closed my eyes tight and turned to the wall.