F

THE LIVES OF THE SAINTS

I confess. I hear their voices, but see nothing because the sun coming through the windows is blinding. The altar boy next to me yawns. That I have sinned through my own fault. Now I have to yawn too, but I suppress it and clench my jaw so hard that tears form in my eyes.

In my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done, and what I have failed to do.

In a moment the light will fall at a deeper slant, and with it a little group of people emerges from the sea of shadows: the five old women who always come, the friendly fat man, the sad young woman, and the fanatic. His name is Adrian Schlueter. He often sends me handwritten letters on expensive paper. He’s obviously not yet heard of emails.

Forgive us our sins, and bring us to everlasting life. I can’t get used to having to get up so early. The organ starts with a drone. We worship You, we give You thanks. I miss most of the notes, but that’s a given in my profession, almost all priests sing badly. We praise You for Your glory. The organ falls silent. While we’ve been singing, the sun has risen higher, multicolors flicker brilliantly in the windows, thin blades of light flash through the air, each bearing a tiny blizzard of dust. It’s so early still, and yet so hot. Summer is at its merciless height. With the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father. The yawning altar boy lays the missal on the lectern. If it were up to me, the poor boy would still be in bed. It’s Friday, I don’t have to give a sermon, so now I say: The Word of the Lord. The congregation sits, and Martha Frummel comes to the front, seventy-eight years old, she does the morning reading every second day.

First Epistle of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians. When I came to you, brothers, proclaiming the mystery of God, I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom. Martha Frummel is a gentle, good woman, perhaps even one of the Just of the World, but she has a voice like a barrel organ. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling, and my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.

The Word of the Lord, I say again. Martha wobbles back to her seat. My congregation stands and sings: Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! The sun is no longer dazzling, you can recognize the clumsy pictures in the stained glass: the Lamb, the Redeemer with his staring eyes, and the loaf of bread in the cross of rays of light. This church is the same age as I am, the walls intentionally crooked, the altar a raw block of granite that for some reason is not at the east end but the west, so that at Early Mass the sun does not blind the congregation, as is the tradition, but me.

The Gospels. As they were proceeding on their journey someone said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.” My voice doesn’t sound bad; I’m good at my job. Jesus answered him, “Foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to rest his head.” And to another he said, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, let me go first and bury my father.” But he answered him, “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” And another said, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” To him Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.” I close the book. How appropriate, but it’s a total accident, it’s the prescribed passage for August 8, 2008.

And now the Profession of Faith. I clear my throat and declare what I wish I could believe. God, the Father, the Almighty, Jesus Christ, the Only Son of God, crucified, died, and buried; on the third day rose again, ascended into heaven; will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead. The Holy Spirit, the resurrection, the life of the world to come. Yes, I wish I did.

The Prayers of Intercession. We pray for the Dominicans, that they may diligently do God’s work, for today is the Day of Saint Dominic. Hear us, we beg you. We pray for all those who search for the truth, hear us, we pray for all those who are sick, and for all who have strayed from the certainty of faith. In our seminar for the study of the liturgy, we once discussed what sense it was supposed to make to beg an omniscient Being to grant a wish. Father Pfaffenbichel explained to us that the intercession itself was not important, it could always be omitted. But he didn’t know my congregation. Two weeks minus Prayers of Intercession last year and they were already thinking God had forgotten them. Nine emails of complaint to me and unfortunately also three to the bishop and one official resignation from the church. I had to send Frau Koppel a box of chocolates and pay her two home visits to make her change her mind.

The Eucharist. The altar boy pours water over my fingers, the organ sounds the hymn, I lift the chalice with the Host. It is a moment of drama and power. You could almost think these people actually believe that a wafer is transubstantiated into the body of a crucified man. But of course they don’t. You can’t believe any such thing, you’d have to be deranged. But you can believe that the priest believes it, and the priest in turn believes his congregation believes it; you can repeat it mechanically, and you can forbid yourself to think about it. Holy, holy, holy, I chant, and actually feel surrounded by a force field. Magical gestures, thousands of years old, older than Christianity, older than steel and fire. The first humans were already fantasizing about gods being torn limb from limb. Then later the legend of Orpheus, torn apart by the Maenads, then the tale of Osiris descended into the kingdom of darkness and emerging again reassembled as a living body, only eons later came the figure of the Nazarene. An ancient, blood-soaked dream, repeated day after day in countless places. It would be so easy to declare the whole procedure of transubstantiation to be mere symbolism, but that precisely is what constitutes heresy. You have to believe it, for so it is written. And you can’t believe it. You must, you can’t. Lift up your hearts, I say. We lift them up to the Lord, they say. Dying you destroyed our death, rising you restored our life. Lord Jesus, come in glory. The altar boy rings the little bell, its sound trembles in the air, the pews creak as my congregation goes down on its knees.

I lift up the Host. It is so quiet that you can hear the cars outside. I lay the wafers down again and perform the ritual genuflection. I immediately start to sweat, it’s hard for me to keep my balance, I fell while I was doing it last week, it was dreadfully embarrassing. Hold on, Martin, keep your back straight, hold on! Shakily, dripping with sweat, I get back on my feet. Let us pray with confidence to the Father, I pant, in the words our Savior gave us.

Our Father, hallowed be, Thy Kingdom, Thy will, our trespasses, phrases polished by a thousand years of repetition, deliver us, amen. I break the Host, push a piece into my mouth, and savor the dry, salty taste for a moment. It’s not exactly God’s body, but it tastes good. The organ begins the Agnus Dei, the five members of my congregation present themselves for communion. I’m afraid of the old people, who want the transubstantiated wafer laid on their tongues, the way it was always done before Vatican II; it’s hard to lay something on a tongue without touching it with your fingertips. But I’m in luck today, three pairs of hands and only one wrinkled ancient tongue. The last one, as always, is Adrian Schlueter.

The body of Christ, I say.

Amen, he says, not looking at the Host as he does so, but straight at me, unblinking, as if he had to prove something to me. He will come back, this evening, early tomorrow, tomorrow evening, every day, he is my trial.

The organ ascends to the final chords and stops. I begin the concluding rite. Bow your heads and pray for God’s blessing.

Go in the peace of Christ.

Thanks be to God.

I hurry to get to the exit first and position myself in the incoming blast of hot morning air. Martha Frummel’s hand feels like sandpaper, and Frau Wiegner is all hunched over, her heart isn’t good and nor is her back. Frau Koppel looks well, but as lonely as ever. Frau Helgner won’t be back as often, she’s very weak. Who does this to people? I’d really like to hug them, but I’m fat and I sweat, and they wouldn’t like it. So I just shake hands and smile. They’re gone already, only one person is still standing here.

“Dear Herr Schlueter, I’m afraid I’m in rather a hurry.”

“A question of belief, Father Friedland, it won’t leave me in peace.”

I try to look at him as if I’m interested.

“The Trinity. I’ve read Tertullian. And Rahner. And His Holiness Ratzinger, of course. But I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand?”

“The Holy Ghost.”

I look at him despairingly.

“I understand the Son, I understand the Father, I also understand the difference between the Holy Ghost and the Son. But what is the difference between the Holy Ghost and the Father? Barth says God is the subject, the Spirit is the content, and the Son is the act of revelation.”

“It’s a Mystery.”

It works. He blinks. Where would I be without that word?

“It was revealed to us!” I hesitate. “Revealed” or “made manifest”? I’d better check that one out soon.

“God has said to us that it is so. We can try to penetrate it by using our reason, but reason has its boundaries. And where we reach those boundaries is where we encounter belief.”

“I don’t have to understand it?”

“You don’t need to.”

“I shouldn’t even try?”

“You mustn’t.”

His hand is soft and dry, his handshake isn’t even unpleasant. I’ve gotten away with it for today. He goes off and I head for the sacristy in relief.

The altar boy helps me to take off the chasuble. As soon as I’m standing there in my shirt, my eyes avoid my reflection in the mirror. All the same, it’s not so bad: Chesterton, that great Catholic, was well nourished too, and I imagine even Thomas Aquinas as having been round and wise.

Compared with them, I can almost get by as being lean. I sit down on the couch. My Rubik’s Cube is sitting on the arm; as always I’m happy to see it, and my hands reach for it of their own volition. The altar boy asked me recently what it was and why anyone needed one. Sic transit gloria. Twenty years ago it was the most famous object in the world.

“Do you have to get to school now?” I ask the boy.

He nods, and out of sheer sympathy I lean forward and pat his head. He flinches and I immediately take my hand away. How stupid of me. A priest must be careful these days, there are no such things as harmless gestures anymore.

“I have a question,” he says. “Last week in our religion lesson. It was about God’s foreknowledge. How He knows what we’re going to decide, even before we decide it. How can we still be free?”

The gauze curtains belly, flecks of light dance across the parquet floor. The cross on top of the cupboard throws a long shadow.

“It’s a Mystery.”

“But …”

“Mystery means that it was reveal … I mean made manifest to us. God knows what you’re going to do. But you are still free. That’s why you’re responsible for your actions.”

“That doesn’t go together.”

“That’s why it’s a Mystery.”

“But if God knows what I’m going to do, I can’t do anything else. So how am I responsible?”

“It’s a Mystery.”

“What does that mean?”

“Don’t you have to get to school?”

“Excuse me.” The acolyte is standing in the doorway: a Cistercian lay brother named Franz Eugen Legner. He has small eyes and is always badly shaved. He’s been working for two months; before that he was buried somewhere deep in the Alps. He keeps the church clean, updates our website, plays the organ, and, I can’t rid myself of the suspicion, reports on me to the bishop. I’m waiting for him to make a mistake so that I can lodge a complaint about him myself — a tactical preemptive strike. But unfortunately he doesn’t make mistakes. He’s very careful.

“You know what you did yesterday,” he says to the boy.

“So what did I do?”

“Never mind. You know. You remember.”

“Yes.”

“And yet you were free. You know, and still you could have behaved differently.”

“Because that was yesterday!”

“But for God,” says Legner in his soft, hoarse voice, “there is no today and there is no yesterday. No now, no before, and no hundred years from now. He knows just as clearly what you’re going to do as you know what you did yesterday.”

“I don’t understand.”

“And you don’t have to,” I say. “It’s a Mystery.”

Against my will, I’m impressed. Sixteen semesters, two of them at the Gregoriana in Rome, and I still wouldn’t have come up with that.

Legner looks at me as if he’s read my thoughts. Triumphantly he bares his teeth. In spite of it all, I pity him. Poor, desiccated schemer, where has all your cunning gotten you?

The boy picks up his school backpack and is already out the door. Seconds later I see him shuffle past the window and down the street. I close my eyes and quickly mix up the colors on the cube. Then I open them again and start to reorder the colors.

“The stops are whistling,” says Legner. He doesn’t look at my hands, because if he did, he’d have to be impressed, and he’s not going to cede his ground. “On the organ. We should arrange for them to be repaired.”

“Perhaps the Lord can perform a miracle.” Why in the world did I say that? It wasn’t even funny. The red side is now all completed.

He glowers at me.

“Just a joke,” I say wearily.

“He could do it,” says Legner.

“I’m sure.” Now the yellow side is done too.

He says nothing, I say nothing.

“But He won’t,” I say. Now the white.

“It’s not impossible.”

“No, not impossible.”

We’re both silent.

“He could,” says Legner.

“But He won’t.”

“You never know.”

“No,” I say, and put down the cube, which is now fully rearranged. “You never know.”

I had often stood in front of the mirror coolly but angrily reassuring myself that I didn’t look bad. My face was symmetrical and well proportioned, my skin was okay, my body big enough, my chest and chin substantial, my eyes not too small, and I was also lean. So what was it?

Today I think it was all accidental. There is no such thing as fate, and for example, if I’d asked Lisa Anderson on another day, or at least asked her differently, everything might have turned out another way, and now I’d have a family maybe and I’d be a TV editor or a meteorologist.

Lisa was in my class and she sat diagonally in front of me. When she wore something with short sleeves I saw her freckles, and when the sun came through the window the light played on her smooth brown hair. It took me five days to come up with the right words.

“Shall we go to the theater? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

“Who’s … what?”

Not that I would have enjoyed going to the theater. I found it boring, it was always stuffy, and it was hard to understand the people on the stage. But someone had told me that Lisa liked it.

“That’s the name of the play.”

She gave me a friendly look. I hadn’t stuttered, and as far as I could tell, I hadn’t blushed.

“What play?”

“In … the theater.”

“What kind of play is it?”

“When we see it, we’ll know.”

She laughed. Things were going well. I was relieved, and laughed too.

She turned serious.

Granted, something with my laugh hadn’t been quite right: a little too loud and too high, I was nervous. I quickly tried to correct it and laugh the proper way, but I’d suddenly forgotten what that was supposed to be. When I realized how weird I sounded, I blushed after all: my skin tingled and went hot. In order to get past the moment, I laughed again, but this time it sounded even worse, and I suddenly saw myself standing in front of Lisa and staring at her and still laughing and watching myself standing in front of her staring and laughing. My skin burned red.

“Today’s no good, unfortunately,” said Lisa.

“But you just—”

Unfortunately, she said. It had just occurred to her. No time.

“Pity,” I said hoarsely. “And tomorrow?”

She paused for a second. Then: Unfortunately, she said, tomorrow was no good either.

“The day after tomorrow?”

Unfortunately she really had a lot on in the coming weeks.

After that I hardly even dared to look at her from behind. But I couldn’t stop her from continuing to appear in my dreams. In them she was adorable, willing, and she hung on my every word. Sometimes we were alone in a wood, then again we were lying in a meadow, and sometimes we were in a room, so dimly lit that I could barely make out the curve of her shoulders, the outlines of her hips, and the soft sweep of her hair. When I then woke up, still riddled with lust and already tormented by shame, I couldn’t come to grips with the fact that I could even have thought any such thing was happening in real life.

A few months later at a party, I fell into conversation with Hanna Larisch, who was in our parallel class. I had already drunk a second bottle of beer, the air seemed to be turning as soft as velvet, and suddenly we were talking about the cube. She had one too, everyone had one back then, but like almost all of them, she had only ever managed to sort out one side.

It was quite easy, I explained, it’s best to begin with the white layer, then you make a T on each of the four side layers, then you permute the corners, for which there are several alternatives: like this, and this, and this, I demonstrated the hand movements. The trick, I said, is to decide quickly how to rotate the corners, there’s no formula for that, it’s just practice and intuition.

She listened. The cube was at the peak of its popularity at that time, experts discussed it on TV, and magazines had articles about the people who won championships. My voice didn’t even catch when I brushed her shoulder apparently absentmindedly; and when I took a step closer to be able to hear her better, because the music was so loud, she stroked her hair back and looked at me attentively. Yes, I suddenly thought, this is how it can go, this is how you do it. I took another bottle, it was easy to talk. And that was my bad luck. I talked and talked. I talked about how hard it was at the end to rotate the corners. I talked about having a shot at the state championships if I practiced enough and maybe the national championships weren’t totally out of reach. I could feel that time was passing and something was going to have to happen soon, and to hide how nervous I was, I kept on talking.

She stroked her hair back, looked at the floor, looked at me again, and now there was something stiff about the way she moved. This made me anxious so I talked more quickly. She stroked her hair again, but she didn’t say anything. And I talked. I was waiting for some instinct to tell me what to do next, but this instinct was struck dumb. How did other people know how to behave, where was it written, how did you learn it? I looked at my watch to be sure that we still had time, but she misunderstood my glance and said she had to be getting home too. “Already?” I cried, and: “No!” and “Not now!” but then I couldn’t think of anything else. We were both silent as the music blasted. Drunken fellow pupils were dancing beside us, their bodies squeezed against one another in the haze of cigarette smoke; over by the window two of them were kissing. Hanna hesitated and then left.

“Was it awful?” my mother asked. She was still awake. She usually was if I came home late. She sat in the kitchen and stirred lemon juice into a cup of tea.

“Was what?”

“I don’t know, but I can tell from looking at you that it was awful.”

She set down the spoon next to the cup as though it were liable to break. “There are some things you have to keep trying. Again and again. No matter how often they defeat you. You think it just happens to you, but it happens to everyone. It’s absurd to keep on going regardless, but that’s what you do — you keep on going.”

“What are you talking about?” I asked coldly.

She was silent for a moment. “The championships. It’ll happen. You mustn’t let yourself get discouraged.”

Although she really wasn’t old yet, her hair was already turning gray. She was a little plump, and she often smiled in an absentminded, sad sort of way. At this moment, in the kitchen, after midnight, I thought a number of things all at once: I thought that of course she was right, and I thought that I couldn’t talk about any of it with her, and I thought that in earlier times I would have been able to stay at home and live with her, freed from having to compete, safe from want, wrapped in her care, without anyone thinking it in any way peculiar. Only in the age of psychologists had this become frowned upon.

I fetched a cup for myself. In the room next door, where the record player was kept, piano music was playing softly. I poured myself some tea. Did everyone have to go out into the world? Could I really not live here, in this house, in this kitchen?

She shook her head, as if she’d read my mind. “Don’t give up,” she said. “That’s the whole trick.”

“But why not?”

She said nothing. I took my cup and went to bed.

On the other hand, a few months later I found myself in Sabine Wegner’s apartment. We were alone, her family had gone out, we wanted to work on our Latin. Sabine was fat. She was a sweet girl, clever and warmhearted, but everything about her was fat: her face, her calves, her body, her hands. And I, who had no idea yet what I myself would look like one day, looked down on her just as mockingly as everyone else. Her whole appearance said that she wasn’t a part of the game. She didn’t come into it.

We sat at the dining-room table and deciphered Tacitus. Sabine drank peppermint tea, I drank apple juice. Finally we got to the end and I stood up.

“But the news is about to come on,” she said.

We sat down on the sofa. Gorbachev and Reagan shook hands, Honecker yowled into a microphone, Tom Cruise sat in a cockpit, a woman stood in front of a bluish background and announced rain, and then the ads were already starting: a housewife waved a cloth and told a proud man with a tie and a briefcase that things had never been cleaner. Then I put my hand on Sabine’s neck.

In that first moment I thought it was some mistake. Why was I doing this, what was I thinking?

She sat there rigid. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that she didn’t even turn her head. Take your hand away, I thought, there’s still time. I leaned toward her. There was a roaring in my ears and my heart was thumping.

But she’s so fat, I thought.

And I thought: But she’s a girl.

Then she turned her head. Her eyes were strangely clouded. The large shadow made by her body. The sweetish smell of her perfume. My hand on her soft neck.

I felt dizzy. Really, I thought, she’s not that fat. And her face, so close it was distorted, wasn’t ugly. I saw that one of her eyelashes had fallen out and was lying on her cheekbone. I saw a little scratch on her temple. I saw that a tiny vein divided in the white of her right eye, and I saw the pores in her skin.

Her lips felt like cotton wool as she put them against mine. Uncertainly I put my hand on her hip and pressed down. Sabine pulled back, looked me in the face, wiped the back of her hand across her mouth, and came back to me. We kissed a second time, her mouth opened a little, and I felt a small living thing that was her tongue. Her breasts rose and fell, my heart pounded, I couldn’t draw breath, but it seemed to be okay without oxygen. After a while she pulled her head back. I inhaled. She fumbled with my belt.

I stood up and let her pull down my pants. Then she took hold of my underpants, pulled, and was looking at my nakedness. The opening credits for some crime series were blaring from the TV. I looked at her breasts. They were round, and large and full under her blouse. I reached for them, she leaned forward to meet me. The door opened and in came her father, followed by her mother and her sister, followed by a dachshund, followed by my mother.

Nobody said a word. In silence they watched as I pulled up my underpants and my pants and buckled my belt. The dog grunted, lay down on the carpet, stuck its legs in the air, and waited for someone to scratch it. Getting dressed took longer than usual because of my trembling hands. The roaring in my ears was even louder than before, and the floor seemed to be a long way away. The dog heaved a pleading sigh, in vain. On TV a policeman with a mustache said something about ordering an arrest and the police force in Duisburg. I crossed the room, which seemed to be wobbling, picked up my Latin textbook, my notebook, dictionary, and fountain pen from the dining-room table, and went to the door. Sabine’s parents stepped aside to make room. Her sister giggled. My mother walked out ahead of me.

We went down the stairs.

“They were waiting for the bus,” she said. “I happened to drive by, and offered to bring them home. Then I thought I’d take you home.” She paused for a few seconds. “I’m sorry.”

She unlocked the car door and I got into the passenger seat. She carefully adjusted the rearview mirror and started the engine.

“I didn’t think …,” she said. “I mean. Because Sabine. I wouldn’t have imagined …! She’s not exactly … I mean, I wouldn’t have just …”

I said nothing.

“When I got to know your father …”

I waited. She never talked about Arthur. But either she realized it wasn’t the right moment, or she suddenly didn’t want to divulge whatever it was, in any case she didn’t finish the sentence. She didn’t say another word before we got home.

Just give up — what was so bad about that? The thought was large and seductive. I came in second in the state championships, I qualified for the national championships, but I also knew along the way that the cube would never turn into a career. Against all my hopes, no government agency was interested in the services of cube experts, nor were the big firms looking for them, and even the creators of computer programs and games favored people with qualifications in math or business.

But I liked being in darkened spaces, I liked listening to Monteverdi, and I liked the smell of incense. I liked the windows in old churches, I liked the network of shadows in Gothic vaulting, I liked the depictions of Christ Pantocrator, the Savior swathed in gold as ruler of the world, I liked medieval woodcuts, I also liked the sweet gentle humanity of Raphael’s Madonnas. I was impressed by Augustine’s Confessions, I felt instructed by St. Thomas’s exercises in hairsplitting, I was drawn to humanity in general, and I really had no desire to sit out my days in an office. Besides which I had no talent for self-abuse. There had been a time when I did it regularly, filled with anger and disgust and convinced I was committing an aesthetic transgression, a sin against beauty rather than against any moral code. I saw myself as if at a distance: a red-faced young man, already a little plump, laying hands on himself frantically, eyes almost closed, and so I soon cured myself of it. It’s not something to admit in this age of psychologists, but the cube was actually more fun.

I’d get the thing with God worked out too. Or so I thought. It really couldn’t be that hard. All it required was a little effort.

Secretly I expected it all to happen at my baptism. But when the moment arrived, the church was in the middle of being renovated: the walls were almost hidden behind steel girders, plastic sheeting hung in front of the altar, and unfortunately the organ was also out of action. The water felt like water, the baptismal priest looked like an obstinate muddle-head, and standing next to my mother with her sad smile, my brother Ivan was obviously trying not to laugh.

And yet I was confident that faith would arrive of its own accord. So many intelligent people were believers. You just had to read more, attend Mass more often, pray more. You had to practice. As soon as I believed in God, everything would fall into place, and my life would belatedly become my destiny.

I celebrated my twenty-first birthday with my fellow students Finckenstein and Kalm in a smoke-filled college bar.

“Augustine is a shrunken Aristotelian,” said Finckenstein. “He’s stuck in substance ontology, that’s why he’s been superseded!”

“Aristotle has never been superseded,” replied Kalm. “He’s the very essence of reason.”

You only ever have conversations like this when you’re a student. Finckenstein wore thick glasses, had very red cheeks, and was as meek as a child. Kalm was a sweet-natured fanatic, Thomist, and clever champion of the Inquisition. On the weekends he competed in rowing events, he was interested in model trains, and had — and this made him an object of secret envy among his colleagues — a girlfriend. In front of him lay Arthur Friedland’s book My Name Is No One. I pretended not to notice, and no one mentioned it. There was also nothing unusual about this, it was absolutely everywhere this year.

“Augustine’s theory of time goes back much further than the Aristotelian tradition,” I said. “Everyone quotes his remark that we know what time is as long as we don’t think about it. It’s beautiful, but as a theory of knowledge, it’s weak.”

“But the paradigm wasn’t the theory of knowledge,” said Kalm. “The paradigm was ontology.”

We fell silent in exhaustion. I put some money on the table and stood up.

“What’s bothering you, Friedland?”

“The passage of the years. The loss of time, the proximity of death and hell. You wouldn’t know, you’re only twenty.”

“So does hell exist?” asked Finckenstein. “What does ontology say?”

“It has to exist,” said Kalm. “But it could be empty.”

“And what happens there? Fire that hurts but does not consume, like in Dante?”

“Dante isn’t depicting hell,” said Kalm. “Dante’s depicting the truth of our existence. We really visit hell at night during those moments of truth we call nightmares. Whatever hell may be, sleep is the gateway through which it forces its entry. Everyone knows hell, because everyone is there every night. Eternal punishment is simply a dream from which there is no awakening.”

“Well then,” I said. “I’m off to sleep.”

Outside the tram had already arrived. I got in and it departed immediately, as if it had been waiting for me. I sat down.

“Excuse me,” said a thin voice. A man in rags with a straggly beard and two overflowing plastic bags was crouching in front of me. “Will you give?”

“Sorry?”

“Money,” he said. “As to the lowliest of my brothers. So to me, said the Lord.”

He held out a chapped palm. Naturally I reached into my jacket pocket, but at that same moment he knelt, then lay down on his back.

Baffled, I leaned forward. He smiled and rolled slowly, almost pleasurably, to and fro — from his left shoulder over onto his right, and then back again. I looked around. There were only a handful of people in the car, and they were all staring someplace else.

But it was my duty. Christianity demanded it. I stood up and bent over him.

“Do you need help?”

He put a hand around my ankle. His grip was astonishingly strong. The tram stopped, the doors opened, two women hastily got out, the car was now almost empty. He looked at me. His eyes were clear, sharp, and alert, not confused — more curious. A trickle of blood ran out of his nose and disappeared into the gray mat of his beard. The doors closed, the tram set off again. I tried to free my leg from his grip. But he didn’t let go.

No other fellow traveler looked my way. We were in the second car, and the driver seemed impossibly far away. The man’s free hand grabbed my other leg and hung on so tight that I could feel the fingernails. The tram stopped, the doors opened, more people got out, the tram waited for a few moments, then the doors closed, and on we went. I couldn’t get away, the man was stronger than he looked. He bared his teeth, looked questioningly into my face, and closed his eyes. I yanked on my right foot, but I couldn’t get free. He was breathing fast, and his beard quivered. He drew a sharp intake of breath, then spat. I felt something warm and soft run down my cheek. He hissed.

I kicked. He tried to straighten up, but I kicked again and he sank into the floor. My toes hurt. I grabbed one of the straps so as not to lose my balance and kicked a third time. One of his hands let go, but not the other one, a plastic bag fell over, and dozens of balls of paper rolled out: pages from newspapers, pages from books, pages from glossy magazines and advertising brochures. The other bag emitted a whimpering sound: something inside seemed to move. The tram stopped, the doors opened, I stepped on his wrist, he groaned, and then finally his left hand let go too. I leapt out and began to run.

I ran and ran. Only when I couldn’t keep going did I stop, panting, and check my watch. Ten minutes after midnight. My birthday was over.

“It wasn’t him,” said Ivan. “Definitely not.”

“Who knows.”

“It was not the devil! Even if that would suit you. You people are always looking for something to reinforce your faith. But it wasn’t him.”

We were sitting in the room that had once been Arthur’s library. The spines of books marched across the walls in rows, and the peaceful sound of a lawn mower could be heard outdoors.

“Faith isn’t that important,” I said.

“Oh.”

“The priest has the power to bind and to release. Regardless of what he himself thinks. He does not have to believe in the Sacrament for the Sacrament to exercise its power.”

“And you believe that?”

“I don’t have to believe it, it’s true regardless.”

Next year Ivan would be going to study at Oxford. Everyone knew that great things were in store for him, and nobody doubted that in ten years he’d be a famous painter. I had always felt insecure around him, always inferior, but Catholicism suddenly gave me a position, an attitude, and an argument for everything.

Ivan was getting ready to answer when the door flew open and in he came for the second time. Although I was prepared for it, the magic trick worked, and it took me a moment to get a grip on it.

“Please do not ever put this book in front of me again.” Eric threw an edition of My Name Is No One onto the table. “I won’t read it.”

“But it’s interesting,” said Ivan. “I’d really like to know what you …”

“Not interesting to me. For all I care, he can die. I don’t care what he writes.”

“Eric doesn’t mean it that way,” said Ivan. “It’s just that he’s theatrical sometimes.”

“And you?” Eric said to me. “Are you serious about all that? Praying, church, the seminary? Are you really serious? We’re Jews, you know, can you even do that?”

“We’re not Jews,” said Ivan.

“But our grandfather—”

“All the same,” said Ivan. “Unfortunately we’re neither one thing nor the other. You know that.”

“And Martin’s only doing it because he can’t find a girlfriend.”

I concentrated on breathing in and out calmly. I absolutely must not blush.

“I’m appalled by the banality of your mind,” said Ivan. “Martin is a serious person. I know it’s impossible for you to imagine, but he has faith and he wants to serve. You’ll never understand.”

Eric stared at me. “Seriously? The virgin, water into wine, the Resurrection? Really?”

“It’s a process.” I cleared my throat. “In matters of faith one is always a traveler. One never …”

“You just don’t want to work!”

I stood up. How did he always manage to make me furious so quickly? How did everything he said ring true, and yet ring true in such a fake way?

“Whenever all the praying gets to be too much for you, you’ll come crawling,” said Eric. “Then you’ll beg me to give you a job.”

“And what will you do then? When I come crawling?”

“Then I’ll give you a job, what else? You’re my brother.” He laughed and went out without saying goodbye.

“He’s been nervous lately,” said Ivan. “He’s not sleeping enough. Don’t take him seriously.” He opened My Name Is No One, thumbed a few pages absentmindedly, and closed it again. “I also believed once that I’d encountered the devil. It was in the department store, I was ten. There was a woman at a bargain counter, she didn’t look in any way unusual, but I knew: If I stay here a few seconds longer, something dreadful is going to happen. Mama didn’t find me until an hour later, I was hiding behind a fridge in the electronics department, she was out of her mind with worry. I still believe I did the right thing. If she’d seen me …” He looked thoughtfully out the window. A gardener was trimming the hedge outside, the shears glinted in the sunlight. “But it’s all crazy. I was ten.” He looked at the table-tennis table, then at me, as if he’d forgotten for a moment that I was there. “And otherwise? Goals, plans? That’s what birthdays are for. Resolutions?”

“I’m training for the championships.”

“The cube again?”

“The cube.”

“Good luck. But more important …”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

“Say it!”

“Well, somebody’s got to. As long as there’s time to do something to stop it. You should …”

“Yes?”

“Never mind.”

“Say it!”

“Go on a diet, my pious brother! There’s still time, but later it’ll just get harder. You really need to lose weight.”

Is My Name Is No One a merry experiment and thus the pure product of a playful spirit, or is it a malevolent attack on the soul of every person who reads it? No one knows for sure, maybe both are true.

The opening sets up an old-fashioned novella about a young man embarking on his life. All we know about his name is its first initial: F. The sentences are well constructed, the narrative has a powerful flow, the reader would be enjoying the text were it not for a persistent feeling of somehow being mocked. F is put to the test, he defends himself, fights, learns, wins, learns more, loses, and develops as he moves on, all in the grand old manner. But there is a sense that no sentence means merely what it says, that the story is observing its own progress, and that in truth the protagonist is not the central figure: the central figure is the reader, who is all too complicit in the unfolding of events.

Slowly but surely the little discrepancies accumulate. F is home, looking out at the rain, puts on a jacket and cap, takes his umbrella, leaves the house, wanders through the streets, where it isn’t raining, puts on a jacket and cap, takes his umbrella, and leaves the house, as if he hadn’t just done that already. Shortly after that a distant relative appears, who has already been registered in a subordinate clause as having died ten years ago, an innocent visit to the fair by a grandfather and his grandson turns into a labyrinthine nightmare, and a piece of clumsiness on F’s part with major consequences is wound backward until it clearly never happened. Of course this all leads to the construction of theories. Very slowly there comes a dawning sense of comprehension, then the realization of being on the brink, and then the story breaks off — just like that, without warning, right in the middle of a sentence.

The reader keeps trying to make sense of it all. Perhaps the hero died. Perhaps the inconsistencies are harbingers of the end, the first defective spots, so to speak, before the entire warp and woof unravels. For what, the author seems to be asking, is death, if not an abrupt break in the middle of a sentence which the reader cannot elide, a soundless apocalypse in which it isn’t humanity that disappears from the world, but the world itself that disappears, an end of all things that has no end?

The second half is about something else. Namely that you, yes, you, and this is no rhetorical trope, you don’t exist. You think you’re reading this? Of course you do. But nobody’s reading this.

The world is not the way it seems. There are no colors, there are wavelengths, there are no sounds, there are vibrations in the air, and actually there is no air, there are chains of atoms in space, and “atoms” is just an expression for linkages of energy that lack either a form or a fixed location, and what is “energy” anyway? A number that remains constant throughout all changes, an abstract sum that remains inalterable, not substance, not ratio: pure mathematics. The more attentively one looks, the emptier it all is, and the more unreal that emptiness is. For space itself is no more than a function, a model of our minds.

And the mind that creates these models? Don’t forget: nobody inhabits the brain. No invisible being wafts through the nerve endings, peers through the eyes, listens from within the ears, and speaks through your mouth. The eyes are not windows. There are nerve impulses, but no one reads them, counts them, translates them, and ruminates about them. Hunt for as long as you want, there’s nobody home. The world is contained within you, and you’re not there. “You,” seen from inside, are cobbled together on a makeshift basis: a field of vision amounting to no more than a few millimeters, and already dissolving into nothing at the outer edges, containing blind spots, and filled with mere habit and a memory that retains very little, most of it invented. Consciousness is a mere flicker, a dream that nobody is dreaming.

There are fifty pages of this stuff, and it more or less works, you’re more or less convinced. It’s just that there’s a creeping sort of feeling that this too is an ironic demonstration of — well, what? You’re already on the final chapter. It’s short and it’s merciless, and there can be no doubt — it’s all about Arthur himself.

F appears again and a human being is dismembered in the course of a few pages: gifted, gutless, vacillating, egocentric to the point of sheer meanness, self-loathing, already bored by love, incapable of engaging seriously with anything, using everything including art as a mere excuse for doing nothing, unwilling to take an interest in anyone else, incapable of taking responsibility, too cowardly, incapable of facing his own failures, a weak, dishonest, superfluous man, good for nothing except empty mind games, bogus art lacking all substance and the silent evasion of every unpleasant situation, a man who has finally reached the point of such aversion to his own self that he has to assert that there is no such thing as a self.

But even this third part is not as clear as it seems. Is this self-loathing really genuine? Given the representations above, there is no “I,” and this entire exploration of consciousness is meaningless. Which part supersedes which other part? The author gives no indication.

Ivan, Eric, and I had each received a copy through the mail, wrapped in brown paper, minus dedication or sender’s details. The book was not reviewed anywhere, and I didn’t see it in any shop. It was an entire year before I saw it on the street. I was on my way home from school, and for a moment I thought what I was seeing was pure fantasy. But there it really was, in the hands of an old man on a bench who was holding it and smiling as he read it, obviously captivated by the question of the reality of his own existence. I bent over and looked at the plain blue cover, the man looked up uneasily, and I hurried away. Two weeks later I saw the book again, this time in the subway, a man with a leather briefcase and a raggedy hat was reading it. When I saw it again the next week, it was all over the newspapers, and the first people had already killed themselves over it.

It was a dreamy soul with metaphysical tendencies, a medical student in Minden, who having read it set up a lunatic experiment to test his own existence. No one understood the details, but it had something to do with the log he kept of his every flicker of awareness, with controlled needle jabs that he administered alternately to himself and to a pathetic guinea pig, and with the jump that he made, with absolute premeditation and equally absolute precise execution, from a railroad bridge. In the following week a young woman jumped from the television tower in Munich clutching a copy of My Name Is No One, which unleashed yet another flood of newspaper articles, which in turn resulted in a greengrocer in Fulda taking poison along with his wife. Between the two corpses lay a copy of Arthur’s book.

That marked the end of the wave of suicides, although the wave of articles, commentaries, and rebuttals kept going, not least including the incident of the well-known radio talk-show host who voluntarily checked into a locked psychiatric ward after declaring on the air that he was convinced of his own nonexistence. Given that he wound up by reading out a rather long excerpt from My Name Is No One, this provoked a debate in parliamentary committee about whether the index of dangerous films, video games, and books should not be administered more severely. This provoked mocking responses from several MPs, and a pronouncement from a bishop, which in turn engendered a further wave of commentary, in which there was much speculation about who this Arthur Friedland person was, who kept in the background, didn’t defend his book, didn’t step forward, and didn’t allow himself to be photographed.

When the subject had been so exhaustively explored that there wasn’t a human being in the country who wasn’t bored by it, Arthur was famous. His second book, the novel The Hour of the Hunter, a superficially conventional thriller about a deeply melancholic detective who, despite his vast intelligence and desperate efforts, is unable to solve an apparently simple case, spent several weeks on the lower ranks of the best-seller lists.

Shortly thereafter, The Mouth of the River appeared, a novel about a man whose fate branches out again and again, depending on different decisions or the whims of Fortune. Each time the two alternatives are explored, the two paths that life can take from the same event. Death is an ever-more-frequent visitor, between a successful existence and its horrifying end, there is often no more than a moment of inattention or some tiny incident — more and more paths lead to sickness, accident, and death, while very few lead to old age.

This book moved me in some extraordinary fashion, and it provokes my anxiety to this day. In part because it shows how immense the consequences of every decision and every move are — every second can bring destruction, and if you really think things through to their conclusion, how is it possible to live at all? But also in part because I could never rid myself of the suspicion that it had more to do with me than Arthur’s other books did: with a summer afternoon long ago when I was almost killed by a car, now little more than a distant memory, a brief anecdote, at best an echo in a bad dream after a heavy dinner.

There is a creak of wood, a figure pushes its way in and goes down on its knees. I put the cube to one side. I just completed it in twenty-eight seconds; my best time is nineteen, but that was long ago.

“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” I say crossly.

“For ever and ever, amen,” a hoarse male voice responds.

“I’m listening.”

He’s silent, breathing heavily, searching for words. I look at the cube again, but it’s not okay, twisting the rows might make a noise and he’d notice it.

“Unchastity. I pleasure myself. I do it all the time.”

I sigh.

“Even just now. On the street. No one saw. I have a wife and a girlfriend. They both know about each other, but neither of them knows about my second girlfriend, although she knows about them. Then I have a third girlfriend that none of them knows about. And she doesn’t know about any of them, she thinks I live alone.”

I rub my eyes. I’m tired, and it’s so hot.

“Things went wrong when Klara made fun of my wife on Facebook. She didn’t think of the fact that Pia’s her friend and can read it.”

“Her friend?”

“Facebook friend. I told all of them that I’m stopping, things are going to be different now. But it’s so hard! How do you do it? No woman ever! I get shaky after just two hours.”

“We’re speaking about you.”

“And besides I’ve taken money.”

“Ah.”

“Not that much. A thousand euros. From the company cash register.”

“What is your profession?”

“I’m an accountant. My girlfriend works in my office.”

“Which one?”

“Which office?”

“Which girlfriend!”

“Well, Klara. The one my wife knows about.”

“Why an accountant?”

“Excuse me?”

“Why would anyone be an accountant? I’ve always wondered.”

He says nothing. But why can’t I ask questions, where is it written that I’m not allowed to learn anything in the confessional?

“I like crossword puzzles,” he says. “When everything is neatly filled in. All of it is right. I like that. You look at all the receipts, at first it’s all pure chaos, but then you begin to fill in the answers. One thing here, another thing there, this space and that space, and at a certain point it all comes together. In life it’s the only place you’ll find order. Do you need an accountant?”

“No, no. Thank you.”

“The money wasn’t from a client. You mustn’t think that. It was from the office supply for petty expenses. A friend of mine has a furniture business, I told him I need to buy new swivel chairs, but you need to fill out the invoice a little higher, around three thousand euros, and then—”

“You just said one thousand!”

“—he delivered the chairs and I paid and we split the difference between us. Unfortunately he then wanted to write off the money I got as a special expense on his tax return, and because he’s our client, I had to tell him that this wasn’t possible. I tried a couple of bookkeeping tricks—”

“Let’s talk about the women.”

“It’s terrible, Father! They keep calling.”

“Who?”

“All of them except my wife. She never calls. Why would she? And I visit one of them every day, I’ve got things well organized, but it takes too long, I still have to … just like before. How do you stand it, Father? I once managed for a whole week. I stayed at home, played with the children, and helped my wife in the kitchen. In the evenings we watched funny animals on YouTube. There are so many of them. Thousands. Thousands of funny animals.”

“What do they do?”

“Eat, roll around, make noises. On the third day I thought things weren’t really so bad. On the fifth, I thought I’d have to kill myself. Then I went to her.”

“To which one?”

“I can’t remember. Is it important?”

“No.”

“So what should I do?”

“Exactly that. Stay at home. Help with the cooking. Watch animal videos.”

“But that’s terrible.”

“Of course it’s terrible. That’s life.”

“Why are you saying such a thing to me?”

“Because I’m not your therapist. Nor am I your friend. Look truth squarely in the face. You’ll never be happy. But that’s not important. You can live that way.” I wait for a moment, then make the sign of the cross. “I absolve you of your sins. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Be true to your wife for as long as you can. Try it for two weeks. Two weeks have to be possible. And give the money back. That is your penance.”

“How do I enter it on the books?”

“You’ll find a way.”

“That’s easy to say! How do you picture that? I can’t just pay twelve thousand euros back to the office!”

“Twelve?”

“I’d rather stay at home for three weeks. Three, yes?”

“Give the money back!”

He’s silent. “The absolution still holds, yes? I mean, independent of the penance? It’s not a … condition?”

“The Sacrament is fulfilled. But not paying the money back would be a new sin.”

“Then I’ll come back.”

“It doesn’t work that way!”

“Of course I could do it as a tax refund. But if there’s an audit, what do I do? I can’t re-credit it.”

He waits. I don’t respond.

“Goodbye, Father.”

The wood creaks, his footsteps recede. I would have liked to get a look at his face, but the sanctity of the confessional forbids it, and I stick to the rules. The Protestants have a God who wants to know what’s going on in your soul, but I’m a Catholic, and my God is only interested in what I actually do. I pick up the cube, and just as I’m wondering whether to use the classic approach or to start with a block of four, the wood creaks again.

“I drink.”

I put down the cube.

“I drink all the time. I can’t stop.”

I envy alcoholics. People make movies about them, the best actors star in them, articles and novels get written about them. But people who eat a lot? Thin people say it’s all a question of willpower, but maybe they’re just thin because they’re less hungry. Earlier, I bought two chocolate bars from the machine on the corner. Not to eat, just to have on hand. What a stupid idea.

“It’s all I want anymore. Just drink. My wife’s left me, I lost my job, nothing matters. I just want to drink.”

“I can only absolve you if you sincerely want to change.”

My telephone vibrates. I fumble it out and see Eric’s office number on the screen. That’s odd, because Eric never calls me. But I can’t answer it now.

“I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“You don’t know if you want to stop drinking?”

“I would love to not want to drink, but I want to drink.”

Is that a clever distinction or an absurdity? The telephone stops vibrating.

“Are you eating, Father?”

“No! Try not to drink for two days. That’s a start. Then come back!”

“Two days? I can’t.”

“Then I cannot absolve you.” The first bite was wonderful. The breaking chocolate, the fine prickling taste of the cocoa. But already you can taste that it’s too fat and far too sweet. That’s the way it is with most things, something Jesus overlooked. Buddha was more alert. Nothing is ever truly sufficient. Everything falls short, and yet you can’t get free.

“You’re eating!”

“Come back in two days.”

“Stop eating!”

“I’m not eating.”

“In the confessional!”

“In two days. If you haven’t had a drink. Then you should come back.”

The wood creaks, he leaves. I crumple the empty foil and think about the second bar. It’s still in my pocket, and that’s where it will stay.

I pull it out of my pocket.

But I haven’t unwrapped it. And even if it were already unwrapped, I wouldn’t have bitten into it. Everything is within my power. The mystery that is free will: I can bite into it or I can leave it be. It’s up to me. All I have to do for it not to happen is not to do it.

The second bar doesn’t taste good. I chew quickly and angrily. The second one never tastes good. The telephone vibrates. Eric’s office again. It must be important.

“I envy you,” said Ivan.

“That’s going overboard.”

We were sitting on a bench in the covered walk of the Eisenbrunn monastery. Trees swayed in the soft wind, birds sang, cooking smells were coming from the kitchen, and now and then a monk in his habit went past, head bowed. You could think you were in a different century.

I was happy to see Ivan. After a week of grueling spiritual exercises I was tired of the pious faces. My brother had surfaced unannounced, as was his way. The porter had wanted to shoo him off, but then finally let him in. Ivan was not someone it was easy to shoo.

“They even confiscated your cube?”

“Part of the exercises,” I said. I missed it to begin with, but in the meantime I had begun to wonder if what I had regarded as my favorite activity was merely an addiction.

“You met Lindemann?” I asked.

“It was totally unproductive. Not an interesting man.”

“But did he remember? Could he explain to you—”

“I told you, he’s not interesting.”

“But—”

“Martin, there’s nothing to tell! I wish I were like you. You know what you want. I’m not even suited to be an artist.”

“Rubbish.”

“It’s not modesty, and it’s not a crisis. I’ve realized I’m not cut out to be a painter.”

Three monks swathed in their habits came along the colonnade. The one on the left drank, the one in the middle watched sports programs for hours every evening on the old black-and-white TV, the one on the right had recently been given a warning about his collection of pornographic videos. But to Ivan, who didn’t know them, they must look like Illuminati.

“If need be, I can become a professor of art. Or a curator. If I kept on painting … I’d be average. At best, average. At best.”

“Would that be so terrible? Most people are average. By definition.”

“Exactly. But then think of Velázquez and the way he uses the white of the actual canvas as if it were a color. Or of Rubens and his skin tones. Or of Pollock’s sheer strength, his courage to paint like a lunatic. I can’t do that. I can only be me. And it’s not enough.”

“You’re right,” I said thoughtfully. “How can anyone live with the fact that they’re not Rubens? How does anyone come to terms with it? To begin with, everyone thinks they’re the exception to everything. But hardly anyone is an exception.”

“By definition.”

“Are you still looking for a topic for your dissertation?”

“Not a bad idea.” He scraped the toe of one shoe in the gravel, looked up, and smiled. “Not a bad idea at all. We don’t talk often enough. Have you received minor orders yet?”

“Not yet.”

“I mean it, I envy you. Leaving the world behind. Stepping away from it all. Simply no longer being part of it.”

“It would be nice.” Rays of sunshine came through the crowns of the tall trees, flecks of light danced on the pebbles. “But one is always part of it. Just differently. There’s no way out.”

“Pray for me.” Ivan stood up. “I fly to England tomorrow, maybe we’ll see each other at Christmas. Pray for me, Brother Martin. I am one of the people who need prayers.”

I looked after him. The gate to the monastery hummed as it opened. Things looked medieval here, but there was electric current everywhere, and security cameras, and more and more monks could be seen talking into tiny cell phones. Here, as everywhere, the world was changing unavoidably. I slowly got to my feet. The bells would start ringing at any moment for evening services.

For the first two days I thought the boredom would kill me, but then it got better, and along the way I managed to kneel in church for hours and listen to the rise and fall of the Gregorian chants. And hunger no longer plagued me constantly, so I could forget the pain in my knees, look up at the high windows, and be convinced that I was where I ought to be according to fate and providence.

It was just that I didn’t feel God.

I waited, prayed, waited and prayed. But I did not feel Him.

I got along well with the other seminarians. One of them was called Arthur like my father and could do all kinds of card tricks I’d never seen before. Another was called Paul and had had conversations with the Virgin Mary. He asserted that she’d worn a raincoat and an odd hat, but there was no doubt that it had been the Holy Virgin. One of them was named Lothar and wept so noisily every night that we could hardly sleep, and even my old friend Kalm was here, surrounded by the gentle radiance of his own piety.

“I wish I were like you,” said Kalm at supper. There were mashed potatoes with fish. The potatoes were tasteless and the fish overcooked, but I still would have liked more.

“Nonsense.”

“You’ll be able to help people. You’ll go far. To Rome. And who knows how high you’ll go.”

After supper, we reassembled in the chapel. We knelt, the monks sang, their voices flowed together into a single resounding voice, and the candles filled the nave of the church with dancing shadows.

I demand it, I said. I’ve earned it. Give me a sign.

Nothing happened.

I stood up. Curious glances were cast at me, but nobody got involved. After all, these were spiritual exercises, some people had visions, others heard voices, it was expected, part and parcel of the whole thing.

Now, I said. Now would be the moment. Speak to me the way you spoke to Moses out of the burning bush, to Saul on the road to Damascus, to Daniel in front of the king of Babylon, to Joshua when he stopped the sun in its course, to the Apostles of the risen Christ, so that they could spread the truth. The world has barely aged a single day since then, the same sun moves through the heavens, and just as they stood before you, I am standing before you now and I ask for a word.

Nothing happened.

It really isn’t my fault, I said. I’m trying. I look up and You’re not there, I look around and You’re not there, I don’t see You, I don’t hear You. Just one little sign. No one else would have to see it. I wouldn’t make it all into a big fuss, no one would find out about it. Or better still, don’t give a sign, just let me believe. That would be enough. Who needs signs? Let me believe, then it’ll all happen without anything having to happen at all.

I waited and looked into the flickering candlelight. Had it happened? Perhaps I already believed without knowing it. Did you have to be aware of your own belief? I listened to myself.

But nothing had changed. I was standing in front of an altar in a stone building on a small planet that was one of a hundred billion billion. Galaxies expanding unbearably whirled in black nothingness, shot through with radiance, as space itself slowly dissolved into cold. I knelt again on the flat, friendly prayer cushion and folded my hands.

The next morning I was summoned to see the abbot. Fat, intelligent, and intimidating, Father Freudenthal sat at his desk in the purple robes of the Augustinian canons. He waved at me to come in, and worriedly I sat down.

It had not passed unnoticed, he said softly, yesterday at evening prayers.

“I’m sorry.”

Young people such as myself were rare. Such enthusiasm. Such seriousness of mind.

I realized that I was smiling modestly. A hypocrite, I thought in amazement. I had never intended it or practiced, but clearly I was a hypocrite!

Sometimes we think, said Father Freudenthal, that such young men don’t exist anymore. But they do! He was very moved.

I nodded my head.

“A request.” He opened the drawer and took out a copy of My Name Is No One. “Our monastery library collects signed copies. Could you ask your father to inscribe this one?”

Hesitantly I reached out and took the book. Arthur never signed them, nobody knew what his signature looked like.

“That’s no problem,” I said slowly. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to.”

I’ve been waiting for forty-five minutes. I have no idea why I’m here, but the air-conditioning is working, so I’m not complaining. The heat presses against the windows, the outside air is saturated with sunlight; involuntarily I wonder if the panes are going to hold. I take sips of coffee from my paper cup. In front of me there’s an empty glass plate; I ate the cookies that were on it long ago. Nobody refills it.

Office noises echo from the next room: voices, phones ringing, the humming of printers and Xerox machines. A secretary is sitting at a desk. Her skirt is very short, and I can see her legs quite clearly: tanned, muscular, smooth-skinned, and supple. When her eyes meet mine, she might as well be looking at a table, or a refrigerator or a pile of boxes. I’m glad of my priest’s clothes. If I were in street clothes, a look like that would be unbearable.

I concentrate on the cube. I have to get better at using the Petrus method. Competition is fierce, the young people are fast, and the conventional way is too slow for the world championships. Recently cubes in many competitions have started being smeared with Vaseline, to speed up the twisting. When I first started and the cube was new, the routine was to begin with one layer, which got completed, broken up, and then restored, but that’s no good anymore. Today two layers get worked on simultaneously, then the rest gets constructed from there, without ever having to break up anything already completed. It goes quicker, but you have to concentrate like crazy, none of it is merely mechanical, none of it runs of its own accord. You have to locate the first corner intuitively, and if you’re not quick enough, you lose seconds that you can’t make up.

A hand touches my shoulder. Another secretary, a little older. “Your brother can see you now.”

Eric’s office looks the way I’d imagined it: pristine desk, ostentatiously big window, pretentious view out onto roofs, TV antennas, and spires. My brother sits motionless, staring at an enormous screen, and pretends not to see me.

“Eric?”

He doesn’t answer. His finger clicks on the mouse, then he reaches slowly for a water glass, lifts it to his mouth, drinks, sighs quietly, and sets it down again.

How long is this supposed to go on? I pull up one of the leather chairs, let myself sink into it, and am immediately enveloped in its softness.

Eric turns his head, looks at me, and says nothing.

“So?” I say.

He’s silent.

“What’s up?” I say.

“Can I do something for you?”

I rub my eyes. Whenever we see each other, no matter what the circumstances, no matter when, no matter where, he always finds a way to make me furious. “You called me!”

“I know.” He looks me up and down expressionlessly. “We spoke.”

“No we didn’t! That was your secretary. She told me I had to come.”

“I know.”

“So what’s it about?”

He reaches for some piece of paper, looks at it, grins for a moment, reaches for another one, looks serious again, sets both of them aside, picks up his phone, and looks at it. “How are you?”

“Good. The state championships are in six months. I can’t win, but I can still participate.”

He stares at me.

“The cube.”

He stares at me.

“Rubik’s Cube!”

“It still exists?”

I decide not to go there. “And how are you?”

“Interesting developments in the housing market in Eastern Europe. We’re hedging with sources of alternative energy. Have you eaten already?”

I hesitate. I think of my breakfast, the chocolate bars in the confessional, the curry sausage I ate along the way, and the dry cookies outside. “No.”

“So come on!” He jumps to his feet and walks out without waiting for me to follow.

I want to heave myself out of the chair, but the arms aren’t firm and I sink back in. The older secretary is watching me through the open door. It takes me three attempts to get up: I smile at her as if I’d done it on purpose, master clown and king of slapstick, and go down the corridor to the elevator where my brother is waiting.

“Finally!” he calls.

There are two men with ties in the elevator, and the mirror on the wall multiplies us into an army.

“Are there statistical investigations?” asks Eric. “Into horoscopes and people’s lives? Do things come out the way astrologers predict? It should be possible to clarify that statistically. Do you know anything about it?”

“How should I know anything about it?”

“But you make horoscopes!”

“No!”

“No?”

“Horoscopes are sheer nonsense!”

“You don’t make horoscopes?”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?”

He pulls out his phone, taps on it, and puts it back in his pocket. The elevator stops, we get out. I can hardly keep pace with him. We cross the lobby, the glass doors open, I collide against a wall of pure heat. He crosses the street, just like that, looking neither right nor left. A car honks, he pays no attention. Luckily the restaurant is right on the opposite side. I couldn’t go any farther in this temperature.

It is an elegant place: linen cloths on the tables, lamps shaped like glass drops, waiters in black shirts, and, thank God, air-conditioning. Eric heads for a small table, jammed in between two other small tables in front of a leather banquette along the wall. Not a good idea, but how can I explain this to him? The waiter has already pulled out the table, Eric steps to one side, so there’s no option but for me to sit on the banquette between two men in suits who glower at me, their disapproval of my bulk only partially tempered by respect for the cloth. The waiter pushes the table back into position, Eric sits down opposite me and says, “The usual.” The waiter hurries off before I can contradict him. Where does Eric get the idea he can order for me?

He looks at his phone, taps it, puts it away, and stares at the wall behind my head. Then he picks up the phone again.

“How’s the economy doing?” I ask.

“What?” He’s tapping away, not looking up.

“How’s the economy? Do you have a prognosis?”

“Prognosis?” He taps. “No.”

As always, people all around the room are looking at me surreptitiously. I’m used to it. If they were to see me at the head of a procession, they would think nothing of it, and nor would they regard it as odd if I were discussing questions of morality on TV. But seeing me just sitting there in a restaurant like this with a glass of water in front of me, facing a businessman staring fixedly at a phone, strikes them as curious. Many of them feel comforted by the fact that people like us still exist — that we still walk the earth, saying Mass, praying, and behaving as if man had a soul and there was hope. I feel it myself when I see priests I don’t know.

The waiter brings the food. The portions are even smaller than I had feared. A minuscule heap of tangled threads of pasta and mussels in the center of a more or less empty plate.

Eric puts the phone away. “If you send someone a message and he answers and you answer back and ask for a quick reply, and none comes, would you assume he didn’t get the message or that she’s simply not answering?”

“He or she?”

“What?”

“You said ‘he’ and then you said ‘she.’ ”

“And?”

“Nothing.”

“What does that have to do with my question?”

“Nothing, but—”

“What do you want to know?”

“Nothing!”

“It doesn’t matter what kind of message. It’s irrelevant.”

“And that’s not what I asked.”

“Perhaps it’s all part of what you do. Perhaps you have to be so curious.”

“But I’m not curious!”

He stares at his phone, taps on it, and ignores me. That’s fine by me, because the dish is proving so complicated that I have to concentrate. It defies all reason that you’re not allowed to cut noodles. A commandment that carries quasi-religious authority. Cutting noodles would be a gigantic misstep. Why? Nobody knows. And mussels? You have to pull open every shell and then extract the tiny, tasteless lump of stuff. It’s hard enough with your fingers, even harder with a fork.

“Do you still conduct exorcisms?”

“Do we …?”

“Demonic possession. Do you still do that? Do you have people for that?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

He nods, as if my answer confirms a suspicion.

Eric hasn’t yet touched his food. I open the last shell, sauce drips onto my sleeve, then I concentrate on the noodles, but it’s not easy, the plate is full of broken mussel shells. My fingers smell of fish. And my neighbor on the banquette keeps jabbing me with his elbow, he’s gesticulating wildly. He’s facing a man with a bald head and glasses; the two of them are discussing the credit rating of a fixed-income fund.

“What’s the classic school of thought?” asks Eric. “Do you have to let a demon in if he comes? Does he need an invitation, or can he just take possession of someone?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“A book, just a book. I read this book. A strange book. Never mind.” He picks up his glass of water, looks at it, takes a sip, and puts it down.

“So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

He frowns and looks at his phone. I wait. He says nothing.

This is gradually becoming exhausting. I pull out my phone, tap in a message: How are you, call me if you have time! Martin, and I send it to Eric.

He’s just put down his phone. It vibrates, he reaches out and looks at it and raises his eyebrows. I wait, but he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t smile either. He rubs his brow, puts down the phone, picks it up, puts it down again, and says, “This heat!”

I admit it wasn’t the wittiest joke, but a brief smile would not have been amiss. Why does he find it so hard to be polite?

“How’s Laura?” I ask. I barely know his wife. An actress, what else. Very good-looking. What else. “And Marie?”

“She’s doing well in school. Sometimes I worry about her.”

“Why?”

“Sometimes I worry about her. But she’s doing well in school.”

“And your mother?”

“She’s got this TV program now. People call in, talk about their illnesses, and she comments.”

“I thought she was an eye doctor.”

“There was an audition, three hundred doctors, and she won it. She gets good ratings. And your mother?”

“Healthy. Thank God. Retirement suits her, she reads everything she always wanted to read.”

“Do you still live with her?”

I look at him to see what he’s thinking. But why should I keep it a secret? The hours I spend with Mama are bright and peaceful, the best hours of the day. We eat cake, sitting facing each other, we don’t talk much, we wait for evening to come. What’s bad about that? “I live at the presbytery, but I visit her often.”

“Every day?”

“Are you still eating your pasta?”

He looks at his untouched plate as if it’s the first time he’s seen it. But before he can answer, a man stops behind him, bares his teeth, and claps him on the shoulder. “Friedland!”

Eric jumps up. “Remling!” He pretends to box the man in the stomach, while the man holds Eric’s upper arm tight. Both of them laugh awkwardly.

“Do they let just anyone in here?”

“As you can see!”

“Everything okay?”

“Obviously. And you?”

“Absolutely.”

“That last game! A disgrace!”

“Madness!”

“I wanted to shoot myself! This is my brother.”

Remling looks at me. A fleeting look of surprise passes over his face: the usual look people get when they find themselves unexpectedly face-to-face with a priest. He holds out his hand, I reach out too, and we shake hands.

Then the two of them stare blankly into nothing. Obviously neither of them can think of anything to say.

“So!” says Remling. “Well then!”

“Absolutely!” cries Eric.

“Why don’t we. Get together.”

“For sure!”

Remling nods to me and goes back to his table at the window.

“I hate him. Almost wrecked the Ostermann deal for me last year.” Eric sits down again and starts tapping at his phone. The waiter reappears behind him, bends over his shoulder, and whisks away my empty plate and Eric’s untouched one so fast that I can’t protest. “So!” Eric puts the phone away, pushes his chair back, and gets to his feet. “Nice to see you. I’ve got to run, you can’t imagine everything that’s going on. Of course I’m paying.”

“But why did you want to talk to me?”

Eric is already on his way to the exit. He doesn’t turn around again, pushes the door open, and is already gone.

Shall I order something else? But it’s expensive, the portions are small, and I can get a curry sausage right on the corner.

I stay for another few minutes. I will have to ask the waiter to pull the table out, then the man next to me will be forced to stand up, then they’ll pull his table out too, which means in turn that the man sitting opposite will have to stand up too. Half the restaurant will be on its feet by the time I’m on mine.

I’m late. Mama will be waiting with the cake by two p.m., then I have to get to a meeting of the Catholic Youth, and in the evening I have to hold Mass again. What on earth did Eric want with me?

Thoughtfully I finish the water in my glass and smile amiably at everyone in the room. Blessings be upon you, whether you want them or not. That’s my job. Day after day I bear witness to the fact that there is an order to things and reason rules in cosmic affairs. What is, must be. What must be, is. I am the legal representative of all that prevails, defender of the Status Quo, whatever that may be. That is my profession.

And the world really isn’t that bad. Thanks be to God, though He doesn’t exist, for things like restaurants and air-conditioning. I’m going to order dessert after all. I’m already signaling the waiter.

I was sitting in the seminary library with the cube hidden behind an edition of Stages on Life’s Way when Kalm came in to tell me my father was on the phone.

To reach the public phone, you had to go down a flight of stairs, along a long corridor, then up a second flight of stairs. The whole way there I was worrying that Arthur might hang up again. I was panting when I reached the phone; the receiver was swinging on the cord.

“Do you have time?”

It really was his voice. I’d never been able to conjure it up in my memory, but now I recognized it as if not a day had gone by.

“Time for what?”

“I’m in the neighborhood right now. Bad moment?”

“You mean — now?”

“I’m here.”

“Where?”

“Come out.”

“Now?”

“So it’s really a bad moment?”

“No, no. You’re here?”

“That’s what I’m saying. In front of the building.”

“This building?”

Arthur laughed and hung up.

It was a year since his strangest story had appeared in his last collection. It was called “Family,” and it was about his father, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, it was the story of our ancestors, generation by generation, all the way to some vaguely sketched version of the Middle Ages. Most of it is pure invention, for according to Arthur right at the beginning, the past is unknowable: People think the dead are preserved somewhere. People think their traces are inscribed on the universe. But it’s not true. What’s gone is gone. What once was, is forgotten, and what has been forgotten never returns. I have no memory of my father. Oddly, this made me feel robbed. They were my ancestors too.

I went out into the street and he was standing there. His hair as mussed up as always, his hands in his pockets, the same glasses on his nose. When he saw me he spread his arms wide, and for a moment I thought he was going to hug me, but it was a gesture of astonishment at my seminarian’s garb. He suggested we go for a walk. My voice was suddenly so hoarse I couldn’t answer.

We walked in silence. Streetlights flashed, cars honked, and I heard fragments of words as people passed. It felt as if all the noises were part of a secret conversation, as if the world were talking at me in hundreds of sounds, but I couldn’t concentrate and didn’t understand a thing.

“I’ll be in the city for a while,” he said.

“Under a false name?”

“I’m only a well-known writer. Nobody knows well-known writers. I don’t need a false name.”

“What have you been doing all these years?”

“Have you read my books?”

“Of course.”

“Then you know.”

“And apart from that?”

“Nothing. I haven’t done anything apart from that. That’s what it was all about.”

“Oh, that’s what!”

“You’re angry with me?”

I said nothing.

“That I wasn’t there? That we didn’t have sack races, or visits to the zoo, that I didn’t come to parents’ days, roll around on the carpet, and take you to the annual fair? You’re angry about that?”

“What if the books aren’t any good?”

He looked at me sideways.

“What then?” I asked. “Everything sacrificed and then they’re no good? What then?”

“There’s no insurance against that.”

We went on in silence.

“Obligations,” he said after a while. “We invent them when required. Nobody has them unless they decide they have them. But I love you a lot. All three of you.”

“And yet you didn’t want to be with us.”

“I don’t think you missed much. We’ll talk about all of it. The hotel opposite the station, come this evening, Ivan will be there too.”

“And Eric?”

“He doesn’t want to see me. Come for dinner at eight. I’m guessing you like to eat.”

I wanted to ask what gave him the right to say such a thing, but it had been his form of farewell. He waved, a taxi pulled up, he got in and shut the door behind him.

That evening we sat together for hours. Ivan talked about the moment when he realized he would never be a great painter, and Arthur described his idea to write a book that would be a message to a single human being, in which therefore all the artistry would serve as mere camouflage, so that nobody aside from this one person could decode it, and this very fact paradoxically would make the book a high literary achievement. Asked what the message would be, he said that would depend on the recipient. When asked who the recipient would be, he said that would depend on the message. Around midnight, Ivan talked about how his suspicion that he was homosexual was confirmed, without anxiety or distress, when he was nineteen, but how he had never been able to tell Eric, for fear it would make him lose faith in himself because they were so alike. At one a.m. I was on the verge of admitting that I didn’t believe in God, but then didn’t, and talked instead about Karl-Eugen Zimmerman, the thirteen-year-old who beat me by three seconds in every championship, I had no chance against him. At one thirty, Arthur said he had worked out how to live with guilt and regret the way other people live with a stiff foot or chronic back pain, around two a.m. I cried a little, at two thirty we said our goodbyes and promised to meet again the next evening.

When we reached the hotel the next day, Arthur had checked out. He had left neither an address nor a note. For a few weeks I kept expecting him on a daily basis to make contact and explain things. Then I gave up.

A windowless room in the cellar of the bishop’s palace. It doesn’t smell good and there is no air-conditioning. Linoleum on the floor, whitewashed walls, the ceiling covered with soundproof tiles, the regulation crucifix on the wall. A table for table tennis, a table for foosball, two ancient computers, two PlayStations, and a horde of adolescents who know that they just have to accept the presence of two priests and all this will be at their disposal. Even the drinks are free. There are many duties that come with my job. If I could be spared one of them, I would choose this one: the Catholic Youth meeting.

Next to me stands Father Tauler, a gaunt Jesuit. He rubs his eyes and sighs.

“It won’t be long,” I say.

“An hour.”

“It goes by.”

“You think?”

“It has to.”

He sighs again. “Besides, your friend Finckenstein is here.”

“Oh!”

“Upstairs in the palace. Just back from Rome.”

Father Tauler goes to one of the worn-out chairs and sits down. Immediately two girls come over to sit with him and start talking to him quietly. One of them is worked up, her eyes are glistening, the other one puts an arm around her shoulder from time to time.

Smiling uncertainly, I take the other chair. I’m sweating heavily, and I wish I could get a drink from the machine. But that’s impossible. I cannot drink Coca-Cola out of a bottle here. I have to preserve a remaining scrap of dignity. If I were lean, it would be no problem. But not the way I am.

I sit and wait. Maybe nobody will want anything from me. Two boys are playing foosball, they bang the ball this way and that with angry gestures, behind them three girls are jumping around the table-tennis table, they’re really good, I can hardly see the ball. The PlayStations squeak and whistle; there’s a smell of sweat. A girl comes toward me and I flinch, but luckily she’s heading over to the computers. The worst is when girls come to me because they’re pregnant. I know what I have to say to them, the rules are strict, but in reality I don’t know what to do. It’s easier when it’s about religious doubts. That doesn’t take any reflection, I just talk about the Mysterium. Unfortunately religious doubts have gone out of fashion.

I close my eyes. On top of it all, Finckenstein! I’ll have to say hello to him, he knows I’m here, otherwise it would look odd. And I shouldn’t avoid him. One should never make room for envy.

I open my eyes. Someone has tapped me on the knee. A young man is sitting in front of me. I know him, he’s often here, and his name is … I’ve forgotten. If I were better at names, I’d know. He already has beard stubble, he’s wearing a blue baseball cap with the letters N and Y on it, and his right nostril is pierced by a thin ring. His T-shirt says Bubbletea is not a drink I like. His jeans are torn, but they’re the kind you buy already torn. He has a pale face, which may explain why the beard stubble is so visible. He stares at me, his eyes slightly inflamed.

“Yes?” I say.

He clears his throat, then begins to speak. I bend forward. He’s talking too softly and too fast, it’s hard to understand him.

“Hold on. Please slow down.”

He looks at his sneakers, clears his throat again, starts all over again. Gradually I understand. There’s been a fight, and a butterfly is also involved. Butterfly, he says over and over again and makes fluttering movements with his hand, like this and this and this: butterfly.

Butterfly …? A suspicion dawns on me.

Yes, he says. A knife — a butterfly. This is how you open it, this is how you stab, it all went very fast.

“Just a moment. Say that again.”

Sighing and sweating, he does. Some of it I don’t understand, but I get the gist. He and two friends named Ron and Carsten had a fight in a discotheque two nights ago with someone named Ron; the two of them both being called Ron was an accident and didn’t mean anything. What makes things harder, however, is that the boy in front of me is also called Ron. So: he, Ron, and Carsten had this fight with Ron, for reasons nobody can remember, maybe it was about money, or maybe a girl, or maybe nothing at all, there are always fights happening over nothing, but if someone strikes a blow, the reason for it becomes immaterial, the only thing that matters is that a blow got struck.

“On your shirt there, what does that mean? Bubbletea is not a drink I like. What does it mean?”

He looks at me, baffled; apparently the question has never occurred to him.

“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Go on.”

He coughs and rubs his eyes. So, he, Ron, and Carsten had run into Ron #3 on the street, Ron being the Ron who’d attacked Ron in the disco.

“What a strange coincidence!”

Not really, he said; in the afternoons they were often on that street, and Ron #3 was on that street almost every afternoon, but they hadn’t seen this coming, nor obviously had Ron #3, otherwise it would have really been too dumb of him to cross their path on this street when he was alone. So he got himself beaten up. Not totally brutally, but good and proper.

“That’s bad,” I said.

Yes, but not the worst, because the butterfly hadn’t come into it yet. A man who was full of himself had weighed in, and …

Father Tauler stands up, goes to the drink machine, gets a bottle of Coca-Cola, opens it, goes back to the two girls, and drinks. I watch him enviously.

“What? I’m sorry, I was distracted — what?”

Ron asks if I haven’t been listening to him.

“Please tell me again.”

Well, so this guy. So he got all full of himself! Although none of it had anything to do with him, absolutely none of it! Such a snotnose. Didn’t fit into the neighborhood at all, no idea where he came from! He just got all full of himself!

“And then?”

Well, the knife. The butterfly. Just like that, push hard, click, stab, all in a flash. Then they’d run away, except Ron stayed lying there.

“Ron?”

Well, not the one who’d done the stabbing, the other one! Number 3! He rubs his face.

The slogan on his T-shirt really bothers me. Why does anyone make these things? “Did someone call the police?”

Probably, he says. Someone always calls the police.

“Was the man wounded?”

He looks at me as if I’m mentally defective. Obviously, he says slowly. Of course. How on earth would he not be? Ron stabbed him. With the butterfly! How could anyone not be wounded, I ask you? He looks over at the Ping-Pong table, then at the PlayStation, then leans forward and asks if I have a solution.

“Absolution?”

Yes, absolution. If he can get it from me. And should the police surface at his place, if I can corroborate that it wasn’t him that did the stabbing, that it was Ron. The other Ron. His friend.

“How could I corroborate that?”

I feel dizzy, and this time it’s not because of the heat. Is this really happening? No one has ever come to me in the confessional and admitted to an act of violence, that sort of thing just doesn’t happen, never mind if thriller writers and scriptwriters think it’s an everyday occurrence. I could call the police. But I’m not allowed to do that. Or do I have to anyway? Is what is going on here a confession at all? We’re not in the confessional, not even in a church. Am I obligated in any way to call the police? It’s all very complicated, and it’s so hot.

As if he’d read my thoughts, he begins to cry. Tears stream down his stubbled baby cheeks. Please, he says, please, Mister Priest!

On the other hand, I think, let’s accept this is a confession. I can decide, and I’m making it into one. In this case I may not go to the police. Canon law forbids it, and the law of the state protects me. That seems to settle the matter. And absolution? Well, why not! There is no God, obliged to forgive the boy just because I’ve made the sign of the cross. They’re words. They change nothing.

Ron wipes his tears away. Everything happened so quickly, he says, there was nothing he could do about it. And why did the snotnose have to get so full of himself?

I know I’m going to reproach myself, or rather I know I’ll have to forget it all, in order not to reproach myself. But since I’ve begun the gesture, I can’t break it off: I make the sign of the cross over him, from top to bottom and then right to left, and he starts to cry again, this time because he’s so moved, perhaps he really does believe he’s been spared the fires of hell, and I fend him off and say that he has to go to the police and tell them everything, and he says yes of course, of course he’ll do that, and I know he’s lying, and he knows that I know.

Thank you, he says again, thank you, Mister Priest!

“But go to the police. Tell them what—”

Of course! To the police. And then he wants to start all over again and tell me the whole dismal story a second time, but I’ve had enough. I jump to my feet.

Ron looks up at me — liberated on the one hand because he thinks I’ve taken the sin from him, and worried on the other, because he’s confided it to me. I look into his face, into his vague eyes, there’s fear in them, but also a mild flash of viciousness as he asks himself if I’m not someone who needs silencing.

I smile at him, he doesn’t smile back. “That’s all,” I say, and have no idea what I mean. I hold out my arm to him, he stands up, and we shake hands. His is soft and damp and he lets go again immediately. I have the sense that everything would be clearer, better, more right somehow, if only I could understand the slogan on his shirt. I turn away deliberately and indicate to Father Tauler that I have to go. He raises his eyebrows in surprise; I point to my watch and then the ceiling — the universally recognized gesture that means I’m being called upstairs.

“Mister Priest?” A young girl wearing a cross on a chain positions herself in front of me. “I have a question.”

“Talk to Father Tauler.”

Disappointed, she moves out of the way. I reach the door and the stairwell. I pant my way up, and, bathed in sweat, step into the marble coolness of the entrance hall.

“Friedland!”

He’s standing right there. At this exact moment. He’s thin and tall, his black robe is elegantly cut, his hair beautifully barbered, and his glasses by Armani. Of course he’s not sweating.

“Hello, Finckenstein.”

“It’s hot here.”

“You must be used to it by now.”

“Yes, summers in Rome are bad.” He crosses his arms, leans against the stone balusters, and eyes me with a vaguely amused expression.

“I’ve just heard someone’s confession. Imagine, he’s … I mean, what do you do if someone … what happens to the secrets of the confession if … doesn’t matter. Not now. Doesn’t matter.”

“Do you still play with your cube?”

“I’m practicing for the championship.”

“You mean there are still Rubik championships? Do you have some time, shall we go and get something to eat?”

I hesitate. I really don’t want to hear about his career, and his life in air-conditioned rooms, and his rise and success. “Love to.”

“Then come on. An early dinner, something light, it’s hard to get anything done in this weather.” He goes up the marble stairs, and I follow him hesitantly.

“Have you seen Kalm recently?” I ask.

“Still the same. He’ll soon be a bishop, God willing.”

“He’ll be willing.”

“I think so too. He’ll be willing.”

“Do you believe in God?”

He stops. “Martin, I’m the deputy editor in chief of Vatican Radio!”

“And?”

“You’re asking the deputy editor in chief of Vatican Radio if he believes in God?”

“Yes.”

“Seriously?”

“No. But if I were asking seriously, what would you say?”

“I’d say it’s not the right question.”

“Why?”

“God is a self-fulfilling concept, a causa sui, because He’s conceivable. I can conceive of Him, and because He’s conceivable, He must exist, anything else would be a contradiction, so I also know that He exists even if I don’t believe in Him. And that’s why I believe in Him. And don’t forget, we act out His existence through the exercise of human love. We do our work. He becomes real through us, but we can only allow Him to become real because He must exist. How can one love human beings if one doesn’t see them as God’s creation, merely some chance form of life: successful zoological specimens, mammals with lousy digestions and back pains? How is one supposed to feel empathy for them? How is one supposed to love the world if it has not been willed into being by Him who is the very essence of Benevolent Will?”

I think about Ron again, it’s more important, I ought to talk about it. But something holds me back, it feels as if I’ve brushed against something greater and more malevolent than I can grasp right now; maybe it would be better to forget about it.

“And what does ‘believe’ mean anyway? The concept is logically hazy, Martin. When you’re sure of a proposition, then you know it. When you think that something might be so, but at the same time you know it maybe isn’t so, then you call that belief. It’s a speculation about probability. Belief means assuming that something is probable, although it might be otherwise. Lack of belief means assuming that something probably isn’t so, even when it absolutely could be so. Is the difference really that big? It’s all a matter of nuance. What’s important is that we do our work.”

We climb step by step. Our tread echoes through the stairwell.

“Did you mean it when you asked?”

“I was just curious.”

“And what do you believe?”

“I believe I should be in Rome too.”

“Yes, that’s an injustice. But you didn’t answer my question.”

We reach the second floor. The statue of a saint with virtuously steepled fingers fixes his eyes on us.

“What question?”

“The question of what you yourself believe.”

I stop, support myself on the banisters, and wait for my heart rate to drop. “I believe we should eat soon.”