Decompression

6

She’s asleep. Her lips are slightly parted, revealing the adorable space between her front teeth. I feel a mighty urge to stroke her head, and I consider whether I dare do such a thing. When my fingers touch her forehead, she opens her eyes. I say her name: Jola. We look at each other for a few seconds, and then her jaws spring open. Like a moray eel, she has a second pair of jaws in her throat and launches them into her mouth. With the teeth of a predatory fish, she snaps at my fingers.

I flinched away from her and sat up in the bed. It was pitch-dark; the digital alarm clock read 4:00 A.M. Very gradually, I came to the realization that the woman beside me was not Jola but Antje. She was sleeping on her back with outstretched arms, her head tilted down to one side, in an attitude of crucifixion.

My revved-up heart slowly calmed down. Now I understood the unnatural darkness: Antje had closed the shutters. The wind was still blowing around the corners of the house, though not howling as hungrily as a few hours earlier. I hated dreams that seemed like the inventions of a psychologist. There was no question of my going back to sleep. I figured I might as well get up and go out to my workshop.

I stood briefly in front of the house, looking over at the Casa Raya, the only bright spot in the midst of black darkness. For a moment I thought something long-haired and human-shaped was crouching on the garden wall, but it turned out to be nothing but a cactus pear whose paddles were moving in the wind.

The package had come the previous day, and Antje had put it on my workbench. For the first time, I’d decided to equip a dry suit with a heating system. At a depth of one hundred meters, seawater’s cold. The helium in the gas mixture promotes the loss of body heat, and the long decompression times are an additional factor. The package I’d received contained twenty meters of monopolar wire — the kind also used in heating car seats — a heating unit, electric cable, a couple of E/O cords, and a twelve-volt battery. I spread my undersuit on the table, threaded a needle, and got to work. In an instant, I forgot everything else. When Antje came to get me, it was already broad daylight outside and almost time to set out.

The weather had turned cooler. Theo had exchanged his linen suit for jeans and an anorak, which made him more simpatico. Although the wind had died away, experience told me the sea wouldn’t calm down until late in the afternoon. My suggestion that we spend the day sightseeing on land was rejected. My references to the waves we’d encounter when entering the water and the bad visibility below the surface also fell on deaf ears. I spoke sentences in which the phrases difficult conditions and at your own risk occurred. Jola smiled at me and climbed into the van. I was glad to see that her teeth were in fine shape. We started to drive across the island — I thought it would be best to try our luck on the leeward side.

There was something strange about my two clients that morning. We were in Teguise before I realized what was different about them: they were behaving like perfectly normal people. Theo asked, “Sweetheart, can you reach in the backpack and get the water bottle?” Jola answered, “Sure,” and handed him the mineral water. They were both sitting up front with me, swaying a little with the movements of the van and holding their hands on their knees. When a phone rang, it was mine, with a text message from Jola: “Looking forward to the dive. J.”

The dive site near Mala was a lonely spot, not easy to reach. Level places for entering the water were nonexistent. You had to clamber down barefoot over slippery rocks with the heavy scuba tank on your back and the fins and mask under your arm until you were close enough to the bay to jump. I left the van on the edge of the gravel road; we stood in black sand and changed into our diving gear. Slowly, step by step, reaching for each other’s hand to get over the hard parts, Jola and Theo climbed down. The sea was rougher than I’d hoped it would be. I decided to hurry up so they wouldn’t have too much time to stare down into the waves. I quickly demonstrated how they should jump into the water, with one hand on their weight belt and the other in front of their face. Theo stroked Jola’s shoulder before launching himself. He surfaced near me and made the “okay” sign.

Jola was still standing on the rocks; her body language was the picture of a struggle. Apparently she was giving her legs orders they had no wish to carry out. At last she leaped forward, a little too forcefully, and dropped right on top of me. I softened her impact, held on to her, fully inflated her buoyancy compensator, made sure her head remained above water. She’d temporarily lost her diving regulator, and she was coughing. I wanted to get under as quickly as possible, because it was dangerous to stay so close to the rocks. Under the water, calmness would reign. I gave the sign to submerge, and down we went.

Immediately, a great quiet surrounded us. The special silence of the sea. Movements slowed down and communication became a dance, a choreography of signs and gestures. Underwater, relationships were simple, requirements unequivocal, and responses radical. If you dove down ten meters, you simultaneously traveled back ten million years in the history of evolution — or back to the beginning of your own biography. You were in the water where life began, floating and mute. Without speech, no concepts. Without concepts, no justifications. Without justifications, no war. Without war, no fear. Not even the fish were afraid of us. Some curious ones came close and accompanied us for a while. If we kept still, they’d cast intense glances into our diving goggles. In exotic worlds, the tourist doubled as an attraction. I was fascinated by the peace that prevailed underwater, where hunter and prey lived together, courteously avoiding one another — a peace interrupted only by the brief cravings of hunger, which was no treachery but rather a generally accepted process of selection.

Despite the swells, subaqueous visibility was amazingly good. One of the most beautiful dive sites on Lanzarote stretched out before our eyes. The island’s bizarre volcanic landscape continued underwater, forming a stone city with towers, columns, archways, and battlements. When the sun broke through the clouds above, we found ourselves floating inside a dome of rising air bubbles and light. I felt happiness like a fist in my stomach. Theo lay in the water next to me and looked up too.

Something wasn’t right with Jola. In order to get around a lava stream that reached well out into the sea, I’d led my two clients close to the rim of the ledge, where the seafloor dropped straight down. Two groupers, as long as grown men, lay on the rim as though enjoying the view. Jola had swum out over the ledge, emitting air bubbles far too frequently. Like a bird unsure of whether it could really fly, she was staring into the deep. Fear of heights presented a serious problem underwater. With a couple of fin strokes, I moved beside her and grasped her arm. She flinched away. For a second I thought she was going to strike at me.

Over the years, I’d developed an automatic reaction: the more frantic a diver was, the calmer I became. I slowed my movements down to the point where I hardly knew whether I was actually doing something or merely present. Behind her diving goggles, Jola stared at me with wide-open eyes. Her chest rose and fell much too fast; she was already hyperventilating. I squeezed her forearm several times, trying to get her to focus her attention. When her eyelids stopped fluttering and she began to concentrate on me, I nodded approval and signaled, Good. I moved one hand slowly away from my mouth and closed my eyes: Exhale. Wait. I opened my eyes: Now you. She exhaled but immediately filled her lungs again, shot panicked glances left and right, and even looked upward, considering whether she should simply go back up to the surface. I tightened my grip on her arm and shook my head emphatically: No. Look at me. Exhale. Wait. Inhale slowly. Now she was following my instructions, but her eyes were still too wide. We found a common rhythm. Exhale. Wait. Inhale slowly. She calmed down. I let go of her arm, took her hand, and shook it: Congratulations, well done. She sheepishly returned my “okay” sign. When I tried to withdraw my hand, she clung to me hard: Don’t leave me! Peering through her mask, I could see she was crying. The sensation of suffocating is among the worst a person can experience. At that moment, Jola needed only one thing in the world: me.

The reading on her pressure gauge was under 100 bar; she’d breathed her tank half empty in two minutes. I was determined to proceed with the dive, and it was essential to do so in an orderly fashion. One of the most important principles beginners must grasp is that diving problems have to be solved underwater. Emergency surfacing isn’t an option. I signaled to her that we were going to share my air supply. We’d practiced this — two divers breathing from one tank — in shallow water. Now I showed her my octopus, my spare demand valve, and made sure she understood me. Inhale. Take your own regulator out of your mouth and switch to the octopus. Breathe again. She did everything right.

We took each other by the hand. From that point on, we were joined together like Siamese twins, connected to the same air supply by two different hoses. We swam away slowly. I could feel her trembling; hyperventilation leads to poor blood circulation. She probably felt she was on the verge of freezing. As well as our equipment would allow, I put an arm around her waist and drew her close to me. Naturally, my body heat couldn’t warm her underwater, but freezing, like most things in life, is primarily a matter of attitude.

Theo had observed the scene with interest. Instead of looking out for rays, he’d kept his eyes on us, as though he’d discovered the two most fascinating marine animals in the Atlantic Ocean. I guided Jola close to the coastal rocks and showed her some bright yellow snails and the shrimp that were hiding in crevices between stones and groping toward us with their long feelers. I shone my pocket flashlight on a starfish to bring out its red color. Jola turned her head and smiled at me, and then something happened. I suddenly realized that I liked holding her in my arms. I didn’t want to let her go. I wanted to stay down there with her, I wanted us to observe the creatures of the sea together until the last trumpet. Jola felt how hard I recoiled and pressed herself closer to me. I gently pushed her away and signaled that she should switch back to her own air supply before we started to ascend. The exchange was flawless. We detached ourselves from each other. It felt like an amputation.

When I knocked on the Casa Raya’s door that evening, intending to pick up Theo and Jola and drive them somewhere for dinner, Jola didn’t want to come. She declared that she had to study for her nitrox certification. Then she looked away and drummed her fingers on the tabletop. Nothing to be done. After the unsuccessful dive a few hours earlier, she’d stood off to one side, wrapped in a towel, with the volcanic panorama in the background. I could still see her like that: shivering piteously and looking small, as if the coldness of the water had shrunk her, with hunched shoulders and blue lips and strands of wet hair stuck to her cheeks and neck. Theo had carried her equipment to the van. Now he glanced over at me with a new, thoughtful look on his face.

Theo and I left Jola in the Casa Raya and drove away. While we rumbled down the gravel road in the direction of Tinajo, I reproached myself. I shouldn’t have expected Jola to execute the difficult water entry at Mala. Instead I ought to have insisted on taking a day off and chalking it up to bad weather. At the very least, I should have kept Jola away from the brink of the ledge. After all, I knew she lacked Theo’s fundamental confidence in uncertainty. I also knew she had a strong will, which caused her to make bad decisions in moments of doubt. In all probability, she’d felt fearful of the sheer ledge and for precisely that reason she’d swum out past it. That wasn’t her fault. Judging how much I could expect of clients was part of my job. If my assessment was wrong, the responsibility was mine and mine alone.

After a panic attack like that, some people never went diving again. That’s why it would have been important for Jola to recompose herself a little more. I would have gladly told her that such a thing could happen to anyone. I knew experienced divers who went out one fine day and for no apparent reason began to hyperventilate. We could have discussed my theory that it was particularly hard for women to feel safe while diving, because unlike men, women didn’t readily make their lives dependent on technical apparatus. Women liked to maintain control. It was the same reason why they viewed automobiles, computers, and airplanes with mistrust. Above all I wanted to tell Jola that she would become a good diver, more than good enough for the role of Lotte Hass. It was harder to overcome fear than not to be afraid. We would have had so many things to talk about. If she didn’t want to see me, it probably meant she was angry.

At this point I forced myself to stop brooding. It wasn’t my style to try to think my way into other people’s heads. I’d accept their behavior, and in that way I’d get along with them quite well. Now it was a question of winning back a diving student’s confidence. I stopped the van on the side of the road, asked Theo to excuse me for a moment, and got out. While I positioned myself beside a large rock as if I had to pee, I took my cell phone out of my pocket and wrote, “Good luck with your studies. You’re in our thoughts. S.” Because I rarely sent text messages, I needed a long time to tap out those few words. The answer came back so fast it made me jump. It was brief and it hit me like an open hand, delivering either a blow or a caress; I couldn’t tell: “It’s not because of you. J.”

Giselle made a fish soup that was one of a kind, a recipe handed down from her French great-grandmother. Giselle was French-Canadian; her husband came from the Congo. On the walls of their little restaurant, African masks hung beside photographs of Notre-Dame de Québec. We were the only guests. Theo let me talk, and I talked as though I’d been wound up. One diving story after another. About manta rays, dolphins, and whale sharks. About the wrecked ship I was going to dive down to in the following week and how this exploit would make me famous in diving circles. Along the way I praised his and Jola’s talent and stressed how enjoyable it was to dive with sensible people.

He asked, “You find us sensible?”

Aside from that he sat there in silence, smiling thoughtfully and drinking apple juice. After the meal he suggested we go for a walk.

As a general rule, Tinajo’s streets were lively, but that evening the temperature had dropped below sixty degrees — unusually cool — and there was barely a soul in sight. Theo walked down the middle of the street, swinging his arms and watching his feet. For the moment, he seemed to have forgotten my presence. In the village square, we sat on one of the whitewashed benches near the little church. The dragon trees screened the light from the streetlamps. At regular intervals, the end of Theo’s cigarette glowed in front of his face. Now that we’d come this far, I found myself wishing we had simply walked back to the van after dinner.

He said, “You’ve got the hots for her, don’t you?”

I started to make some reply to this, but he waved me off. “Forget about it. It’s what she does. It’s like an addiction with her.” He offered me a cigarette, which I declined. “Basically, I just want to warn you.”

It would have been easier for me to listen to him that evening if he’d been drinking. Unfortunately, I knew he was cold sober.

“Jola comes from an old family. They got rich by exploiting other people and managed to preserve their fortune through two world wars. A woman like Jola has no idea what it means to work for something. She expects to be given what she wants. The only thing she’s never been able to get is recognition. And that’s precisely what makes her dangerous.”

I wasn’t remotely interested in anything he was telling me. Nevertheless, I suddenly wanted him to go on talking.

“Basically, she’s still just a little girl, trying her best to win her father’s respect. Hartmut von der Pahlen. Does that name mean anything to you?”

I shook my head.

“Film producer. One of the most important in the business. Also an asshole. Whatever.”

Theo stubbed out his cigarette and lit himself another one before going on: “I’m a substitute father for her. She’s still looking for paternal love, and that’s where I come in. As long as I don’t give it to her, she stays with me. And exacts her revenge a thousand times a day.”

“Only child?”

I bit my lip. Listening was bad enough. Asking questions was even worse. Normally in such situations, I changed the subject.

“She has two older brothers, one a doctor and the other a banker. Jola’s father never gets tired of enthusing about how successful they are. Whatever.”

A motor scooter drove by. The young woman sitting behind the driver yelled something in his ear. They both laughed.

“I’ll tell you a story,” Theo said. “It’ll help you understand how Jola grew up. When she was a child, she desperately wanted a pet. A guinea pig, a bunny, something she could cuddle with, something she could love. When she got a kitten for a Christmas present, she was overjoyed. She tended to the little animal night and day and carried it around with her wherever she went. Two weeks after Christmas, the heating in her house went on the blink. So the kitten wouldn’t freeze, Jola took it to bed with her and covered it with her pillow. The next morning she found the kitten under her pillow, cold and stiff as a piece of wood. Jola’s mother threw the kitten into the trash can, and from then on she told the story at parties. She’d pull Jola’s braid and laugh and say, ‘My little murderess.’ ” Theo looked around the square with narrowed eyes. “Whatever,” he said. It seemed that this was becoming his favorite expression. We fell silent for a while.

“Maybe you’re asking yourself what I’m doing with her in the first place,” Theo said at last. “It’s quite simple. I love her. Besides, I can’t get it up with other women. I’ve tried. With assistant directors in theaters, with culture-hungry housewives after readings, with street hookers. Total disaster.”

He turned to me and pointed his index finger at the tip of my nose. “The first rule in dealing with Frau von der Pahlen: never believe what she says. Particularly if it’s anything to do with me. She tells the whole world I’m a man of leisure, a layabout. Whereas the truth is I’m working on a big social novel. It’ll appear in three or four volumes, I’m not sure yet.”

He marked a pause and stretched his back as if we were in the middle of some physically demanding job. Then he went on: “For years I’ve watched colleagues slogging through the quagmire of their own mental states, wearing themselves out in the effort to make sculptures out of sludge. Not me. I’m after the big picture. I can wait. Jola calls it writer’s block; I call it patience.”

Theo moved his fingers in the air as if he were playing piano. “In the meantime,” he said, “I write short stories. Finger exercises.” He looked at me sideways. “Would you like to read something?”

I cleared my throat. “Unfortunately, where literature is concerned, I don’t get it,” I said.

“So much the better. The enemies of literature are the best readers. Remind me to give you something of mine when we get back.”

He stood up and slapped his pants as though we’d been sitting in the worst kind of filth.

“This is what I really wanted to say: If you’re hot for Jola, I have no problem with that. I would just advise you to be careful. At the moment I don’t know what she’s planning to do. But she’s surely planning something. Shows like the one she put on when we were diving are typical of her.”

I hid my smile behind a yawn. What was really typical was the logic of the war zone: some dark plan lay behind every sort of behavior. You asked a lot of questions, and as a punishment you got the answers. Theo sneezed three times on the way to the car and then lit another cigarette. “Shit,” he said. “I probably caught something on that cliff last night.”

Light shone through the Casa Raya’s closed shutters. Apparently Jola was still awake, studying her nitrox materials. Theo and I bade each other good night with great warmth. I liked him. He was suspicious, but he couldn’t help it. All the inhabitants of the war zone were like that. Suspicion was a natural result of their lifestyle. I felt satisfied. In the course of our conversation, it had become clear to me that the three of us were going to get along just fine for the remainder of their stay. I’d earn a pile of money, they’d learn how to dive and maybe along the way even how to have a normal relationship. They wouldn’t be the first to figure out what really mattered while underwater.

Antje was standing in the hall. She looked as though she’d been waiting for me for hours. When I kissed her forehead, I held her by the shoulders so she couldn’t cling to me.

“How was it?” she asked.

“Nice,” I said. “Really very nice.”

“How about a nightcap?”

“I’d rather not.”

“Come on, stay up another thirty minutes. We’ve got something to talk about.”

“I’ve had a hard day.”

“It’s only ten o’clock!”

She knew I hated to go to bed after ten o’clock. I needed to feel I could lie awake for two hours and still get six hours’ sleep. And if I stayed up past midnight, the fear of not being able to fall asleep would keep me awake all night long.

“Please,” Antje said. “Fifteen minutes, no more. Please!”

I’d known Antje since before she was even born. The Berger family lived two streets away from mine. Antje’s future father came on the weekends to mow the lawn; her mother cleaned our bathroom on Thursdays. I was almost ten when Frau Berger’s belly began to swell. From then on I used to watch her through the keyhole every Thursday while she was at work in the bathroom. Until one day she stopped coming. A few weeks later a baby carriage was standing in the shade of the linden tree while Antje’s father mowed the lawn. My interest in the former contents of Frau Berger’s belly died.

At thirteen I started asking my parents for a dog. Asking turned into begging. I was unlucky in love, not particularly athletic, and much in need of a friend. My parents were strenuously opposed to the idea. They claimed I’d lose interest in the dog before very long and then saddle them with the work. I swore they were being unjust to me.

For my fourteenth birthday I got Todd, a brown cocker spaniel with soft eyes and long ears. We were inseparable. I took him on walks three times a day. No one but me was allowed to feed him. Once I brought him to school, where all the girls swooned over him and I became — for a day — the most popular boy in the class.

Two years later, I was going out with Mareike, and I’d forgotten why I’d needed a dog. Todd was sweet, loyal, devoted, and tiresome. Because I begrudged my parents the triumph of having been right, I clenched my teeth, did my duty, and kept on walking him. Every day our walks got shorter. I’d haul Todd like an object once around the block, and in the end I threw him out of my room, where he’d slept happily at my feet for the first two years of his life. He’d look at me sadly, but without reproach. My bad conscience made me hate him.

His salvation arrived in the shape of little Antje, who came to our door one day and asked if she could take Todd for a walk. From that moment on, Todd was the happiest dog in the world. He loved Antje, and Antje loved him. They’d spend whole afternoons in the town woods. When Antje got a little older, they’d take a bus together and go hiking in the forests of the Neandertal. My mother would give her some pocket money, but the tip had less to do with Antje’s expectations than with my family’s habit of paying members of the Berger family for their services.

After I moved to Cologne to attend the university, on rainy days Antje would lie with Todd on the floor of my room, listen to my music, read my books, and wait to get older. When I came home for semester break, I’d sit at my desk and try to solve the riddles of some legal homework while Todd and Antje shared a bag of jelly babies on the Flokati rug. If I wanted to go to the bathroom, I’d climb over the two of them. Antje didn’t bother me. Her presence had a tranquilizing effect. She was almost sixteen when I inadvertently slept with her one wet afternoon. Since this one-on-one leisure-time activity harmed neither of us, we occasionally repeated it.

Later Antje would say it was me and not Todd she’d been in love with as a child. But a seven-year-old can’t approach a seventeen-year-old. Likewise, a twelve-year-old girl has no chance with a twenty-two-year-old student. A girl has to be sixteen before she’s capable of making an impression on a man of twenty-six. And so her plan had basically been to wait. During the long hikes in the Neandertal, she said, she had imaginary conversations with me. Even the books in my room smelled like me. She’d crept into my clothes closet for her first exercises in masturbation, she said. I would have thought it impolite not to believe her. I’d learned at court how people shaped the past according to self-created patterns. They’d talk the crudest nonsense with sacred conviction. That was maybe the most important insight I gained from my legal education: he who doesn’t tell the truth is still a long way from lying. In my eyes, Antje was such a case.

On the day when I stopped by my parents’ house to pick up a few things I’d need on the island, Antje was lying on my bed, doing a crossword puzzle. My mother stood in the doorway and screamed at me. My father backed her up, having left work at the clinic where he was the chief physician for just this purpose. Since he’d paid for my university studies, I owed him my life. That was his position. We agreed that I couldn’t expect the smallest financial support when I came back from my reckless adventure, a failure and a disgrace, in a few weeks. I slung my army duffel bag over my shoulder and fled the house.

Antje followed me to the train station, to the train itself, and into my Cologne apartment. She simply refused to leave my side. I was exhausted, and I decided I couldn’t forbid her to turn up at the airport at the same time as me on December 31, 1997. It so happened that the pocket money she’d received for taking care of Todd, year in year out, nicely covered the price of a plane ticket.

I’d completed my military obligation with the Army Engineer Divers and trained as a diving instructor with the DLRG, the German Lifesaving Association, during semester breaks from my law studies. When Antje and I arrived on the island, I had more than five hundred dives in my logbook, and from the very first hour I was able to earn money as an instructor. Antje had studied Spanish in school, and in addition she had a real talent for organization. Founding a diving school required a great deal of work out of the water. Antje took on all the logistics, from visits to the authorities and bookkeeping to equipment maintenance, so that I was able to concentrate on diving right from the beginning. It soon became undeniable that we made a good team.

Todd died a few months after our disappearance from Germany. By then he was almost thirteen years old, but Antje wouldn’t accept his age as the reason for his demise. She was convinced she’d killed her best friend in order to be with me. When the diving school started doing so well we could afford to buy the houses in Lahora, she moved heaven and earth to have Todd’s breeder send her an identical dog from the same part of the Rhineland. The new Todd actually looked indistinguishable from the old one. He loved Antje, and Antje loved him. I found it weird that she could silence her guilt feelings with such a simple trick.

“I’ve got a bottle open. One of Nenad’s.” Nenad was from Slovenia, and for the past twenty years he’d cultivated a vineyard in the La Goria region. “Shall we have a glass and loosen up a little?”

“Good night.” I turned to go.

“Jola was here,” said Antje.

I stopped. If a client was the subject, that was something else again. Todd lay in front of the couch and slapped the floor with his tail when we sat down. Antje poured a second glass of wine, handed it to me, and held hers up to be clinked. It was her unchanging opinion that I needed to “loosen up.” She generally seemed to believe that people were capable of interacting with one another only after an appropriate amount of loosening.

“So what did Theo talk about?” she asked.

“You were going to tell me why Jola was here.”

Antje looked at the window, through which there was nothing to see but black night. She leaned forward to pat Todd’s head and flicked some fluff off the arm of the couch. For a second I thought she’d invented Jola’s visit to stop me from going to bed. Then, however, she began to talk.

Somehow, she said, Jola had grown bored with studying and then had somehow decided to drop over. And since Antje had just finished preparing the tuna salad anyway, somehow or other Jola had stayed to dinner. They’d opened a bottle of Nenad’s wine and somehow managed to have a very good conversation.

I asked her not to constantly use the word somehow.

First, Antje said, Jola had talked about how much she liked diving and how much playing the role of the Girl on the Ocean Floor meant to her. Overall, Antje said, Jola seemed to be afflicted by an intense Lotte Hass fixation, which probably stemmed from a panic about missing the boat professionally. It was something along the lines of “If I don’t get this part, my career’s over forever.” Antje had found it interesting that a woman like Jola, who appeared so successful and self-confident, would in reality suffer such torments. Despite her 384,000 Google hits, Jola obviously had enormous anxiety issues.

Having registered the information that I wasn’t the only one who’d googled Jola’s name, I asked, “Well, so what?”

Somehow, Antje went on, Jola seemed to be having doubts about all her hopes and aspirations. She’d begun talking about people’s decisions and actions, how they were like pieces of furniture people installed in their lives. That was why someone who did evil could never live happily again, no matter how rich and famous and successful he might be. By the same token, good deeds never arose from love of one’s neighbor but always and only from self-love. How to lead your life was therefore not a moral question but an aesthetic one. Of course, there were people who felt more at home with ugliness than with beauty. Because unless you were totally nuts, it wasn’t likely you’d do something bad by mistake. In this vein, Antje said, Jola had gone on for a good while, and she’d said a whole lot of remarkable things.

In the first place, I found Jola’s line of thought not particularly remarkable, and in the second, I had no idea why I was sitting there listening to the summary of an innocuous conversation. I made these very same observations to Antje.

After a brief hesitation, she explained that there was something about Jola that wasn’t right. She’d kept looking around as though some invisible menace was lurking in the room, and more than once she’d seemed on the verge of tears.

Now came the part where Antje invoked feminine intuition so as not to be at the mercy of concrete facts. My lack of interest escalated into anger. When I started to get up, she grabbed my arm.

“Don’t you understand?” she asked. “Jola’s afraid.”

“Of what?”

Antje put on her psychiatrist’s demeanor and explained that Jola’s real subject had been Theo the whole time. That when she’d talked about people who furnished their lives with evil deeds, Jola had meant no one but Theo.

I wanted to know if Jola had said Theo’s name.

No, but somehow it had been clear that the conversation was about Theo.

“Nonsense,” I said.

Antje remained stubborn. She said Jola had signaled that she needed help.

I asked whether the word help had been spoken.

Likewise no, but at some point Jola had suddenly seized Antje’s hand and said, word for word, “You should thank heaven for your Sven.”

I hadn’t ever been able to put up with the female propensity for psychologizing. With the assistance of a bottle of wine, Antje could construct an entire world out of mere interpretations, a world as dramatic and shimmering as a musical, and then confuse this production with reality. Only women had the ability to be angry with their mates because of bad dreams about them the previous night.

It seemed to me impossible that Jola had dropped over to ask for help, for protection from Theo. When it came to a taste for dangerous practical jokes, she was as bad as he was. I stood up.

“Okay,” I said. “Sleep well.”

Antje jumped up from the couch too. “Then she said, ‘Sven would never do anything to you.’ ”

I kissed her on the forehead. “It’s good that you two get along so well.”

“But,” said Antje.

One of the pleasant things in life is the fact that everyone is entitled to his own worldview. I took my perceptions to bed with me. I knew tomorrow would be a thoroughly normal day, a day on which I’d go diving with a couple of clients. Beyond that knowledge there was nothing that needed to be taken into account.

JOLA’S DIARY, THIRD DAY

Monday, November 14. Evening.

I’m choking. I can’t shake the feeling of being unable to breathe. It’s lodged in my throat. As if there’s something stuck in there. A cork. A convulsion. Instead of studying, I jump up every three minutes and dash over to the window. I yank it open and suck air into my lungs. I tell myself, That’s oxygen! Your body inhales it automatically! You aren’t going to die. My heart races so hard it hurts. I try to calm down, to subdue my panic. To breathe slowly, the way Sven taught me to do. If only he were here. If only he would take my hand. Give me his air to breathe. I need a diving instructor on land. Someone who can teach me how to keep from choking on this crappy life.

So the old man came out of the shower with a wet towel over his shoulder and that special expression on his face, and already I felt the air go out of me, I got cold, and my inner voice was hollering, Tough it out! You can stand it! It won’t kill you! Think about something else and hold still, it’ll be over with faster that way!

But the old man just laid a hand on the back of my neck and asked me, friendly as you please, if I really didn’t want to go to dinner with them in the little restaurant in Tinajo. I made a frantic grab for the diving books. A thin defensive perimeter. Then Sven arrived and looked shocked when he found out I wanted to stay in. Now I’m staring at the clock on the wall. It’s set an hour ahead so that vacationing guests won’t miss their programs on German TV.

Studying theory is pointless. Math formulas and page-long descriptions of different pieces of equipment. As if theory could safeguard you in practice. As if the world didn’t have ways and means to sneak up on us from behind. And then there’s the constant blather about your “buddy.” You have to be able to rely on your buddy. You and your buddy must practice underwater communication. Always make sure you’re not endangering yourself or your buddy. I’m sick of my “buddy.”

I know Theo loves me. Not only because he says so. I see it in his eyes. I feel it in the way he puts his arm around me. Comforts me. Tries to protect me from himself. I know it from the efforts he makes. From the way he honestly tries to be someone else. Often enough, I provoke him, I ask for it. Come on, do it then. Give it to me hard. Stick your dick in my ass. You can’t get it up unless you can play the rapist. And so on, until he grabs my neck and forces me to stop talking. To provoke is to maintain control. In some situations, the greatest mercy is the knowledge that at least you’ve brought them on yourself.

Do people have opposites? If they do, then Sven’s the opposite of the old man. Sven watches out for me. How quickly he moved to my side when I swam out over the ledge! He noticed I was losing control well before it became clear to me. His eyes behind the diving goggles. His firm conviction that he could help me. His calm was contagious, and I caught it. He should never have let me go. We would have simply stayed underwater forever.

He sent me a text message a little while ago: “You’re in our thoughts.” He’s always worrying. I’ve never known anyone who worried so much. I can literally see the wheels turning inside his head. Broody wheels, worry wheels. Sometimes I want to grab his arm and hold on until he stops thinking and tell him, You’re a good person.

I try to imagine Sven killing the old man. He grabs him by the throat, pushes him underwater, and holds him down. I’m wearing diving goggles. I sit on the bottom and watch. I see the mortal fear on Theo’s face. The sudden understanding that he’s gone too far. Drowning’s an ugly death. Music by Carter Burwell, as in a Coen brothers film, accompanies the scene. I press STOP.

Everything could be so beautiful. We’re on an island, we have money, we’re healthy. But everything’s ugly. And the more I think and do ugly things, the uglier my life becomes. Like a splendid home furnished with the most tasteless objects. It hurts to have to see that every day. Being inside is unbearable. The open window’s not helping anymore. I have to get out of here.