F

1

The flowering apple tree was close to the wall, and you could see into the house through the window. On the main floor were the salon, the living room, the former media room, now empty, and the library. If you climbed higher you could see through the fanlight into the entrance hall and from still further up, directly into the study with the desk and the pale patch of wall where the little matchstick man had hung until recently. Anyone who still had the strength for it could keep climbing all the way up onto the roof.

Marie wouldn’t have dared go up there on her own, but along with Georg and Lena it was possible, because if there were three of you, none of you wanted to be a coward, and sometimes Jo came too. You had to set one foot in the fork of the branch and the other on the upper edge of the window frame, and then it was really important not to look down. Just don’t think about it, close yourself off inside, or you’d feel in your stomach how far down it was, you’d start to sweat, you’d seize up with fear and hang there like a sack. The right way was to grab the tin gutter, get a swing going, push one knee against the wall, and barrel forward until you could work your fingers in between the roof tiles and pull yourself up. Then you could sit there with your back pressed against the slope of the roof and your heels in the gutter, looking over the top of the tree and the house where Georg lived all the way to the street beyond the next one. Ragged clouds were being driven across the sky, pulled and crushed and torn by the wind. As soon as they dissolved, the sun stood there like a blazing fire — even when you squeezed your eyes tight shut, it burned its way through to your eyeballs.

Georg often talked about his father being a policeman, and how he was allowed to play with his pistol at home, but no matter how often he announced he was going to, he never actually produced it. He also told stories about robbers, murderers, con men, and crocodiles. A crocodile could lie there motionless for hours on end, looking like an old tree trunk, and then suddenly it lunged and snapped its jaws. He’d been in Africa and in China, in Barcelona and in Egypt.

They talked about what could have happened to Ivan. Maybe he’d gone to America. People often took secret trips to America, sometimes they went by ship, and sometimes even an airplane, people over there wore big hats and boots.

“Or maybe China,” said Lena.

“China’s too far away,” said Marie. “And besides, they speak Chinese there.” She felt the sun on her skin, she heard the rustling of the apple tree and the soft buzz of a bumblebee close by her ear.

“Can’t he learn Chinese?” asked Georg.

“Nobody learns Chinese,” said Marie, because it was too hard, and there was no point, how could anyone find words in all those brushstrokes? And what if even the Chinese were only pretending they could? It was possible — she did the same, pretending she understood what her father was talking about when he kept explaining to her that the big crisis had saved him.

“And if he’s dead?” asked Georg.

Marie shrugged. How warm the tiles were. You could doze off, but you mustn’t, you had to keep your heels stuck tight in the gutter so as not to slide off the slope of the roof. “If he’s dead, they’d have found him.”

“He could be in the forest,” said Georg.

“What sort of forest?”

“The forest. Where the wolves are.”

The bumblebee landed somewhere, paused for a moment or two, then flew off again. Marie blinked. A cloud was looking like a bicycle with a man on it who had a hat but no head.

“Does space up there just keep on going?” asked Lena. “Or does it end somewhere?”

“Maybe there’s a wall,” said Marie.

“But even if there is,” said Georg, “you can always keep flying. You could make a hole in the wall. It can’t come to an end. It can never come to an end.”

“But if the wall is solid,” said Lena. “Really, really solid?”

“You could still make a hole in it,” said Georg.

“The most massive wall in the whole world?”

“Then imagine you have the pointiest tool.”

For a while none of them said anything. The buzzing of the bumblebee rose, then fell, then rose again.

“Matthias is stupid,” Lena said eventually.

“Yes he is,” said Georg.

“Why?” asked Marie.

“Marie and Matthias,” sang Lena. “Matthias and Marie. Marie and Matthias. Matthias and Marie.”

“When’s the wedding?” asked Georg.

Without opening her eyes, Marie made a fist and punched him. She hit him smack in the middle of his upper arm, and Georg let out a scream. Marie didn’t like Matthias that much, and of course both of them knew this. It was just the usual talk up on the roof.

Once Mama had caught them as they were climbing down. She had worked herself up into a terrible state. Georg and Lena had been forbidden to visit for a while, as had Jo and Natalie, even though Natalie had never ever been up on the roof. Marie had given her solemn word never to do anything so dangerous again, but she had crossed her fingers in the pocket of her jeans so it didn’t count, and luckily Mama soon forgot about it again. Mama forgot things quickly. She hadn’t been home a lot recently, there were costumes to try on and people to meet, and lots of telephone calls, and she had to have regular meetings with the divorce lawyer, a courtly gentleman with a beard, big ears, and eyes like a seal.

Her father came twice a week and took her to the zoo or the cinema. She wasn’t that interested in animals, and the films were always the wrong ones — he simply didn’t get what you wanted to see if you were eleven. Sometimes she also went to visit him in the presbytery. It was a secret that he was living there, she wasn’t allowed to tell anyone, not her grandparents, not Ligurna, not anyone at school, and most of all not Mama.

The presbytery smelled of mothballs and cooking. Her father slept on a couch next to the TV under a picture of Jesus looking as if he had a toothache. Her father always wore jeans and a red-checked shirt, and sometimes he wore a baseball cap that said I Boston on it. When she asked him when he washed the shirt, he got cross and said that he had two others just like it. He no longer owned a computer, or a phone, or a car, and only one pair of sneakers. She had never known him to be in such a good mood.

“The crisis!” he cried as they were walking around the zoo. “Nobody saw it coming. It’s like the end of the world. And eight months ago nobody was even dreaming of it!”

They stopped. A gnu with empty eyes returned Marie’s glance.

“Real estate derivatives. If only we’d predicted it, we could have made billions! But nobody predicted it. The exchange rates are in free fall, not even the banks can borrow money.” He clapped his hands. “And everyone knows it, they all keep talking about it, nobody wonders about it, do you understand? Nobody has any questions! Do you understand?”

Marie nodded.

He squatted down. “Everyone’s losing money,” he said in her ear. “Everyone’s losing everything, do you understand?”

Marie nodded.

“Nobody’s asking about their own money now. They’re all expecting it to be gone, they’re reckoning on it because it’s happening to everyone. It’s a miracle. Not one client is asking what’s happened to his investments.”

Marie knew the way you were supposed to look so that it seemed you were understanding everything. She used this look in school, and it was often enough to get her good marks. And she always put it on when her father decided to tell her things that were important. He believed that the two of them were alike and that she understood him better than anyone else did.

“Marie,” he said. “You understand me better than anyone else does.”

Seeking help, she looked over at the gnu.

“If, for example — it’s just an example, Marie! If you’ve made losses, and you were expecting that — but then suddenly no one’s asking questions anymore!”

“Are we going to go see the tigers?”

He leapt up and clapped his hands again, so loudly that a woman who was passing, pushing a baby carriage, looked at him reproachfully. “And Kluessen’s in the hospital! It may be a long time, he could even die, who knows! I’ll soon be done with the son. Who could have seen it coming!”

He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her forward. She wasn’t surprised that they were heading for the exit. She wasn’t going to see the tigers today either. Her father never went to see the tigers.

“Finally!” called Georg when he saw them coming back. He was sitting on the garden fence wearing his Robin Hood cap, he’d tied on a quiver, and he had a bow in his hand. He’d obviously been extremely bored.

“Are they sharp?” asked her father.

“Not sharp, pointed. No, they’re not pointed.”

“They look pointed.”

“But they’re not.”

Her father paused for a few seconds before saying, “You’re not allowed to shoot with pointed arrows. It’s too dangerous.”

“They’re not pointed,” Georg said again.

“Honestly!” said Marie.

“Is that true?”

Both of them nodded. Georg even laid his hand on his heart. But her father didn’t see this because he was looking absentmindedly at the other side of the street.

“I’ve never liked this house.”

“Me neither!” said Marie.

“Were you ever in the cellar?”

“There’s a cellar?”

“No. There isn’t, and you’re not going down there!”

“Is it true that you lost all that money?” asked Georg.

“The crisis. Completely unexpected. No one saw it coming. Do you watch the news?”

Georg shook his head.

“Do you know what derivatives are?”

Georg nodded.

“And what mortgage-backed CDOs are, do you know that too?”

“Yes.”

“Really?”

Georg nodded.

“Be careful with the arrows.” He gave the house across the street another anxious look, then stroked Marie’s cheek and left.

“They really aren’t pointed!” Georg called after him.

“Promise!” called Marie.

As she was watching her father go, she thought of Ivan again. It was only recently that she’d grasped that maybe the riddle would never be solved. Never, which meant: not now and not later and not even much, much later, not in her whole life and not even after that. She often found herself thinking how he’d once explained to her in the museum why artists painted ugly stuff like old fish, rotten apples, or boiled turkeys: it wasn’t because it was about the things themselves, it was about painting the things, so — here he had looked at her solemnly and spoken very quietly, as if he were betraying a secret — so what they were painting was painting itself. Then he’d asked her if she understood, in the same voice her father always used when he asked her the same question, and she’d nodded the same way she always nodded. Her uncle had always seemed a little weird to her, because he looked so exactly like her father and had the same voice and yet was someone else. Things were sometimes strange. People painted fish in order to paint painting, bicycles fell over when you set them on their two wheels but were perfectly stable on these same wheels when you rode off on them, there were people who looked exactly like other people, and sometimes someone disappeared from the world just like that, on a summer day.

“Hit it!” Georg handed her the bow. Over on the other side of the garden an arrow was embedded, quivering, in the target. “But careful, they’re very pointed!”

For a while they took turns shooting. Although it wasn’t a large bow, it was hard to pull; sometimes Marie hit the target, but more often it went wide. Georg had more practice. Her fingers were soon hurting from the bowstring.

Lena came by, climbed onto the fence, and watched. Her mother had let her go out for an hour. A man in an expensive leather jacket had come, she said, and had brought her chocolate.

Georg shot and scored. Marie shot and didn’t score. Georg shot and didn’t score, Marie shot and didn’t score, Georg shot and didn’t score, Marie shot and scored, a window was thrown open in the house next door, and a woman called over that she hoped these weren’t pointed arrows. All three of them swore they weren’t.

Gradually the gathering dusk made it hard to aim. The tree seemed bigger than before, but its contours were getting blurred, and it became more difficult to focus on it. Marie aimed one more time and the taut bow trembled, because her arm was already exhausted. She held her breath. The moment stretched out and stretched out, as if she could stop time with the bow. And still it stretched out. Then she shot. The arrow drew its path in the half-light, brushed the trunk, and vanished into the grass.

She said goodbye to Lena and Georg and went across the street. How come evenings smelled different from mornings? Even noon had its own particular smell. The shadow of a bird flew up out of a bush and she jerked back: a fluttering, a cawing and swirling, and it was above her head, already gone into the upper air. She tipped her head back. If Ivan was really dead, then he was up there too now, and the clouds wouldn’t obstruct his view, because the dead could see through everything.

The gravel path crunched under her shoes. Through the kitchen window she saw Ligurna stirring a pot, with the phone clamped between her cheek and her shoulder. The window was open, it would have been easy to listen in. But it usually wasn’t worth the effort; grown-ups rarely talked about anything interesting. Should she climb the tree again? Not as far as the roof, she didn’t dare do that on her own, but maybe as far as the study window? But then this seemed too dangerous as well. It was hard to see the branches in the dark, you could fall, and if unexpectedly a witch was sitting in the tree, you’d be helplessly in her power.

She went through the hall and up the stairs to the dining room. Her plate was already waiting for her: a piece of brown-red meat with some sauce, rice, a little mound of peas, and a glass bowl of pudding on the side. She touched the meat. It felt warm, squishy, and stringy, alive and dead at the same time. She opened the window and threw it out. She did that a lot. An animal would get it outside; at least it had never happened that food she’d thrown out in the evening was still there the next morning. She was never allowed to leave anything on her plate. If she failed to eat something twice in a row, Ligurna reported it to Mama, who then came and took her hand and asked if she was worried about something, or stressed, or if she had something she didn’t want to tell her.

Of course she had, because it felt good to have secrets. Mama knew nothing about the money that Marie had hidden in the nursery: three hundred and twenty euros, folded and squashed flat under the foot of her bed. Part of it was from her pocket money, and part of it from Grandfather’s wallet, which he always left lying around carelessly in the hall. It was important never to take too much, twenty at the most, never a fifty. As soon as a fifty went missing, the grown-ups noticed. They never missed smaller amounts. Mama also didn’t know that the brooch she’d been hunting for for so long was buried next to the apple tree; Marie and Lena had been playing Treasure Hunt and then couldn’t find the place again. Nor did she know that Marie had already forged her signature on excuse notes to her teacher twice, so that she could go fishing with Georg. Unfortunately they hadn’t caught any fish, because neither of them could bring themselves to stick a worm on the hook.

Besides there was so much Mama didn’t know about this house. Some things you just couldn’t explain to her.

Two months ago Marie had come home from school, set down her bag, and lain down on her back on the carpet, to listen to the rain — sometimes she’d lifted up her hands, closed one eye, and looked at the outlines of her fingers against the white of the ceiling. She had called Lena and Georg, but neither of them was at home, then she tried Natalie, who already had her own phone, but she hadn’t answered either. So she’d gone up to the top floor. There was a whole room full of empty suitcases up there; in earlier times Marie could spend hours just opening and closing them, loving being able to get into them and sit down, or climb from one into the next, but when you’d turned eleven, the excitement wore off.

In the room next door were cupboards with bed linens, hand towels, and all sorts of embroidered stuff; she’d locked herself in there and listened for some time to the drumming of the rain on the roof. Then she’d gone out into the hallway again and opened the door to the little bedroom next door. In it were a table and a chair; the wallpaper was ancient and had bleached-out brownish rectangles on it. The window was dirty; Ligurna obviously never cleaned in here. Marie had actually wanted to go in, but then she’d closed the door carefully and gone back downstairs.

Only when she was back in her room with the desk lamp switched on and her arithmetic notebook open did she turn ice cold with fright. There had been someone sitting at the table — hunched forward, his head turned toward the door and propped up on his elbows, hands pushed deep into his hair. She’d seen, but hadn’t been able to take it in at first; only in her memory did it become clear. The one thing she couldn’t recapture was the face. How could you explain something like that to your parents? Not even Ligurna would have believed it.

She ate the peas, the rice, and the pudding. Then went to Mama’s door, knocked, and walked in.

“Why don’t you knock?” Mama was lying on the bed learning her script. “Well, come here and sit down. Will you help me run lines?” She held out the sheets of paper to Marie.

There were only three pages. The first one went:

7/4, INTERIOR, DAYTIME — ELKE’S APARTMENT

Elke and Jens next to each other at the table.

ELKE

It can’t go on like this, Jens.

Jens, looking worried, shakes his head.

ELKE

You know it and I know it.

JENS

And Holger knows it too.

ELKE

Don’t talk about Holger.

JENS

How am I supposed not to talk about him? He’s between us.

ELKE

He’s my husband. The father of my children.

JENS

And what am I?

Elke looks him in the eye.

ELKE

You’re everything, Jens.

“Elke is full of contradictions,” said Mama. “Sometimes I feel close to her, then she’s a total stranger again.”

“Why does the world exist?” asked Marie.

“Elke wants to be free. That’s the most important thing to her. But she also knows she’s responsible. She’s trying to live this contradiction.”

“God made it, but where did God come from? Did He make Himself?”

“Did I already tell you who’s playing Jens?”

“When people say God made everything, that’s not an explanation. Why does something exist?”

“Why does something exist?”

“Yes, why?”

“Mirso Kapus.”

“What?”

“That should be ‘Excuse me?’ Mirso Kapus is playing the lead. You know him from TV.”

“I don’t watch TV. I watch DVDs. Lena’s cousin burned us a copy of Star Wars yesterday.”

“Nobody can say why the world exists, the world doesn’t need a reason. Mirso Kapus won the biggest TV award.”

“Things would be so much simpler if it didn’t exist.” Marie crawled under the bedclothes. “All the people and cars and trees and stars. And all the ants and bears and the sand in the desert and the sand on other planets and the water and Georg and the Chinese and everything else. There’s so much of it!”

“Elke can grow and develop. The story can go in all sorts of directions.”

It wasn’t totally dark under the bedclothes; a little light could make its way in. “Can I sleep here?”

“Not today. I’ve got to learn this thing.”

“But it’s only three pages.” Marie tugged on the blanket a bit so as to be able to breathe better. Through the crack she could see Mama’s dressing table with the mirror, she saw the picture with the teddy bear that had hung until recently in her father’s study, and she saw one corner of the window.

“Three pages or twenty or a hundred — that’s not the point,” said Mama in irritation. “You have to come to grips with a role, find your way into it.”

Marie closed her eyes. Her limbs felt heavy. She heard Mama murmur, “He is my husband, the father of my children.” Then she must have gone to sleep for a while, because Mama shook her gently and then she was holding her hand and feeling her way along the hall. In the nursery Mama helped her off with her shirt, jeans, and underwear, pulled on her pajamas, put her into bed, covered her up, and gave her a kiss, so that her hair tickled her cheek. And all the time Marie was thinking that she hadn’t had to brush her teeth, Mama had forgotten, sometimes you got lucky. Then the door closed, and she was alone.

Pale spots of light from the streetlamps flickered on the blanket. She heard the apple tree scraping against the wall. She heard the wind. She pulled the covers over her head so that now all she heard was the rustle of the material, but if you lay still, really really still, and didn’t breathe, then you stopped hearing anything at all, there was no more world and there was almost no more Marie. This must be sort of what it was like to be a stone and lie there while time passed. A day, a year, a hundred years, a hundred thousand years. A hundred times a hundred thousand years.

All the same, a day was a long time. So many days still until the holidays came around, so many more until Christmas, and so many years until you were grown up. Every one of them full of days and every day full of hours, and every hour a whole hour long. How could they all go by, how had old people ever managed to get old? What did you do with all that time?

2

The trees were already a riot of color, but the leaves had not yet started to fall. Marie was coming home from school with her backpack slung over one shoulder and her cell phone in one hand when she saw that there was a man waiting at the garden gate.

“Marie?”

She nodded.

“Do you have some time?”

Arthur was tall and pale and stood leaning slightly to one side, as if he had back pain. His hair was a mess. He held the car door open for her; the seats smelled of new leather, and there was no dirt on the floor, not even the tiniest scrap of paper.

It had been two months since Marie had received his letter. It was the first proper letter she’d ever had in her life, and Ligurna had simply laid it next to her plate, as if it were nothing special. But Ligurna had given up being interested in what went on in the household: since Mama had given her her notice, the food tasted even worse than before and dust was collecting on the furniture. They weren’t going to be able to hold on to the house for very much longer either, said Mama, even with help from the grandparents it was too expensive. Mama was sad about this, but Marie was not. She had never liked it.

The envelope had held a single sheet, on which the handwriting was astoundingly legible. Unfortunately, wrote Arthur, they still didn’t know each other, but she could get in touch with him at any time. Under this was an email address, and under that was his signature.

Dear Arthur, she had replied, thank you for your letter, this is Marie, how are you? This is my email address. With warm regards, Marie.

The answer came a week later. He wanted to know what day her birthday was, what class she was in, and whether she liked school or not, who she sat next to, what the name was of her dumbest teacher, which TV programs she liked best and liked least, if she liked arithmetic, if she liked her father, if she liked her mother, what she thought of Ivan and Martin, what her favorite color was, if rain made her depressed, how often she thought about Ivan’s disappearance, if she thought people should be allowed to eat meat, if she thought Wednesdays were better than Mondays, and, if so, were they always better or only sometimes, and if she thought it was better to be subject to a king, a president, or no one at all. He asked about balloons, and books, he asked about teddy bears and dolls, he asked about her friends. He asked why she had answered his questions so far, he asked her not to feel compelled to answer them, he thanked her for answering him, and ended with a brief salute, without having given away a single thing about himself.

She had only recently been given her own phone. It lay in her hand, red, smooth, and cool to the touch, flat at the back, the entire front forming the screen, but she wasn’t yet used to typing without keys. You kept touching the wrong place, the spell-check program kept on replacing the words you’d written with others that made no sense, but she typed and she typed. She was thirteen now, questions weren’t a problem anymore. When two days had gone by without a reply, she wrote, Dear Arthur, did you get my email, how are you? Can we meet? With warm regards, Marie.

The car ran almost soundlessly as she looked around. She didn’t know this part of town and had no idea where her grandfather was taking her. Plaster was peeling off the walls and the street was littered with discarded cans.

“In the meantime, has there been any word?” asked Arthur.

She immediately realized he was talking about Ivan. “No, but there was an article recently.”

She began to search on her phone. Bookmarks, lists of links, ah, here it was: www.​Art-​Review-​Online.​com/​sebastian​zollners​opinion/​eulenboeck. She cleared her throat. She liked reading aloud and was always pleased when her turn came in school, even if she pretended she found it embarrassing, because who wanted to be seen as a suck-up. She pronounced everything right, she rarely made mistakes and hardly even stuttered when she came to the hard words. She would never be as beautiful as Mama, or become an actress, but her voice was faultless.

What does it say about our fragmented society that Heinrich Eulenboeck of all people is our country’s artist of the hour? Are we in such need of a dandy for the middle classes, are we really so terrified of uncertainty, that we find it necessary to encase ourselves in the protective armor of irony? Obviously the answer is yes. Few artists in this crisis were able to maintain their prices; almost none of them were able to increase them. Scared collectors preferred to tread lightly and invested in bricks and mortar or gold nuggets they could keep in a safe in the cellar. Blue-chip painters became as rare as pink elephants. So how did this artisanal, rock-solid classical irony suddenly feel itself being snatched out of the hands of dealers and auction houses like hotcakes?

“Let’s face it,” says the chief curator of the Free Gallery in Bochum, Hans-Egon Eggert, “it’s all about the new estate executor and his battle plan: do a hard U-turn race to cash in.” The background: since August of last year, Ivan Friedland, the go-get-’em heir of the Old Master, has vanished without a trace. “Friedland’s main claim to fame was his tending of Eulenboeck’s reputation,” continued Eggert. “But now the focus of attention has shifted.” Karl Bankel, the director of Hamburg’s Koptman Museum, is even more critical: “Looking after the opus of an important artist is a highly complex task. Very few people are up to it. Ivan Friedland was not. His successor is even less so.”

In the art world it was always an open secret that Friedland owed his position not to any particular competence, but to an intimate relationship with the venerable old prince of painting. His controversial activities unsettled collectors, but kept prices within moderation. Under Eric Friedland, who was at first the provisional and then the permanent successor of his brother, this policy has changed: suddenly Eulenboeck’s paintings are appearing in every possible exhibition of this-or-that private collection: Art Forum Rottweil, the Telefonica Art Center in Madrid, the Bingen Artists’ Union, the Project Space of the City Bank in Brussels, and the Ebersfeld Savings Bank Foundation, you name it. What was once an artificial shortage of paintings has become an absolute torrent, and even articles of merchandise — or, as we say, merch—have now been sighted in museum shops: cups, sheets, tea towels, all decorated with the beloved rural landscapes of Eulenboeck’s early period. For some time now the major museums on both sides of our beloved Atlantic have been retreating from this artist. But shame on anyone who sees a possible connection between all this and Eric Friedland’s supposedly precarious business circumstances. Already there’s word on the Rialto that prices are stagnating. One does not need to wear the mantle of a prophet to guess that he who flies high may plunge to disaster — and who can feel sympathy, when the body of work, in the opinion of connoisseurs, lacks all substance and is mere gruel? But once the vagaries of momentary fashion no longer cloud our eyes, perhaps we shall be ripe for another art, a delicate, more subtle, but nonetheless courageous art, an art that no longer looks back to the past but forward to the future. It will be the Hour of the Quiet Ones, far from hype, far from hysteria, the hour — to take but one example — of Krystian Malinovski. His work is not that of a profiteer in this crisis, it overcomes it. When asked how he imagines a time when …

“But it’s all contradicting itself, isn’t it?” Marie looked up. “First he says he’s important, then he says—”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Should I keep reading?”

“It’s enough.”

“Papa says pictures just can’t bring in the kind of money to make his debts disappear. Papa says art isn’t worth that much. But he says it still keeps the bank away. They take every cent, but they let him live as long as there’s money coming in. That’s why he’s living in the presbytery, but I’m not supposed to say that. Where do you live?”

“I travel a lot.”

“Are you still writing?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you come before now?”

“I have things to do.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Nothing.”

“You do nothing?”

“It isn’t that easy.”

Arthur turned the car and headed for an almost empty parking lot. Big clowns’ faces made of paper and all sorts of artificial stuff grinned above an entryway, and behind them you could see the outlines of a roller coaster.

“A fair,” said Marie, disappointed. “Wonderful.”

They got out. A man was leading two boys by the hand, a woman was pushing a baby carriage, some young men were drinking out of beer bottles, and a man and woman were standing arm in arm in front of a shooting gallery.

“Why did you go away back then?” she asked.

“People will tell you life is all a matter of obligations. Maybe they’ve already told you. But it’s not always the case.”

Marie nodded. She had no idea what he meant, but she hoped he wouldn’t look at her and realize this.

“You can live without ever having a life. Without entanglements. Maybe it doesn’t make for happiness, but it takes the load off.”

“Why don’t we …?” Marie pointed to the maze. Mazes were never hard. Just keep following the right-hand wall and don’t take your eyes off the ground: provided you don’t get distracted by the mirrors, you’ll be back out in no time.

She pulled out her phone. Go figure, she typed, I’m at the fair. While Arthur was paying, she headed for the entrance. The door opened with a hum.

What the hell fair? asked Georg.

Is there a carousel? wrote Natalie.

Tell me where to come, wrote Jo.

She groped her way along the wall. A pane of glass let her see the booths and the semicircle of the Ferris wheel, and the roller coaster. A small boy was licking an ice cream cone and stared right through her as if she were invisible.

Very funny, she texted.

Not funny at all, Jo replied. I love fairs. Wish I were there too.

So where was Arthur? Okay, she’d been in this situation before, this was how it was when her father took her to the zoo. She was doing it for him, he was doing it for her, both of them would much rather have just stayed at home. She kept feeling her way along the wall, then around the corner, then around another corner, then around yet another corner, and then she should have found herself at the exit. But she wasn’t at the exit, she was standing in front of a mirror, and there was no way forward.

But we were going to go to Matthias’s birthday party, wrote Lena.

Later, she replied, and tucked the phone away, because she had to concentrate.

There was a splash of blue on the floor. She went past the mirror and around a corner, and then around yet another corner, and finally she saw the turnstile at the exit, but she was looking at it through glass, because the way was clearly leading in the opposite direction, left, then left again, back toward the entry. There was the blue splash again, and next to it a bent stick of metal, one end rounded like the head of a walking stick, and the other filed to a sharp point. She bent down. No question, the splash was the same splash. But there was no mirror in front of her; could the splash have moved? And where had the metal stick come from? So — right and then right again, and here was the blue splash once more. Something wasn’t adding up. Do it again: right, and then again right, and the blue splash was there, but now the stick of metal had disappeared. She went in the opposite direction. Left, then left again, and she was facing a wall of glass and could go no further. She turned back and reached the entrance. It was locked.

She touched it, shook it, knocked. Pointless. She knocked harder. Nothing. She banged with her fist. More nothing.

She stepped in front of the sheet of glass through which she could see the fair, and tried to wave at the man in the booth who was collecting entrance fees. But the angle was impossible — she couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see her. Maybe call Emergency? But she’d paid her entrance fee, she’d just make herself look ridiculous. She went left, then she went right, then left again and right again, then past the glass partition twice, and three times past the wall of mirrors, and then she was back looking at the splash of blue. On the other side of the glass a man went down on his knees and looked right at her. She flinched. Only then did she recognize Arthur.

She banged on the glass. He laughed and banged back: he obviously thought the whole thing was a joke. She pointed left and then right, and put her hands in the air to tell him she didn’t know how to get out. Arthur stood up and wandered out of her field of vision. Her throat tightened, and in her fury she felt the tears begin to come. Just as she was starting to call Emergency, someone tapped her on the shoulder.

“Right here,” said Arthur.

“Sorry?”

“The way out. It’s right here. In front of you. What’s wrong, why are you crying?”

It was true, the exit was just a few feet away. One turn to the left, then another to the right, and the turnstile was smack in front of her. Why hadn’t she been able to see it? She whispered that of course she hadn’t been crying at all, wiped away her tears, and ran out into the open air.

Arthur pointed to a tent. Small, blue, with a red curtain over the entrance, and electric lights blinking over it like stars: Your future, they said, in the cards.

“I’d rather not,” said Marie.

“Come on,” said Arthur, “maybe it’ll be good news.”

“And if it’s bad news?”

“Then you just don’t believe it.”

They went in. A reading lamp threw its yellowish light onto a wooden table with a dirty felt cloth. Behind it sat an old man wearing a pullover. He was bald, except for two tufts of hair over the ears, and he was wearing spectacles. In front of him lay a pack of cards and a magnifying glass.

“Come in, come closer,” he said without looking up. “Come here, take your cards, read your fortune, come right up.”

Marie looked at Arthur, but he was standing there with his arms folded, saying nothing.

“Come closer,” said the soothsayer mechanically, “come here, take three cards, read your fortune.”

Marie went to the table. His glasses were incredibly thick, and his eyes behind them were almost invisible. Blinking, he held up a little pack of cards.

“Choose twelve, and read your fortune.”

Hesitatingly, Marie picked up the deck. The cards were greasy and much handled, and like no cards she was familiar with. There were strange figures on them: a falling star, a hanged man, a knight on a horse holding a lance, a masked figure in a boat.

“Take twelve,” urged the soothsayer. “Take them. Twelve euros for twelve cards. One euro per card.”

Arthur put fifteen euros on the table. “Have you been doing this a long time?”

“Sorry?”

“Have you been doing this a long time?”

“Before this I did other things, and before that still other things, but they didn’t go so well.”

“Hard to believe,” said Arthur.

“I packed entire halls.”

“Big halls?”

“The biggest.”

“So what happened?”

The soothsayer looked up.

“What happened?” Arthur asked again.

The soothsayer blinked, and held his hand up to his forehead. “Nothing,” he said finally. “Bad times happened. Bad luck happened. The years went by, they happened. A man is not who a man was.”

“And yet a man is finally who a man is,” said Arthur.

“Who a man is?”

“Who a man was.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just a joke.”

“What kind of joke?”

Arthur didn’t reply. Marie looked at the cards she was holding and waited.

“We don’t have much time,” said Arthur.

The soothsayer nodded, groped for the money, found it, tucked it away, hunted around in his pocket, and laid three coins ceremoniously out on the table. “Take your cards,” he said to Marie. “From the middle, or the top, or the bottom. Whatever you want. Close your eyes. Listen to your inner self.”

“Twelve?” asked Marie.

“Lay them out here. One next to the other. Right here on the table.”

“I have to take twelve?”

“Right here. One next to the other.”

She gave Arthur another questioning look, but he was staring at the soothsayer in a most peculiar way. How was she supposed to pick the cards? She could choose any single one of them individually, or she could take a whole dozen right out of the middle of the deck. Uncertainly, she twisted the whole packet in her hands.

“Doesn’t matter a damn,” said Arthur.

“Excuse me?” said the soothsayer.

“If it works, it works, no matter how you pick the cards,” said Arthur. “And if it doesn’t work, so what?”

“Your future,” said the soothsayer. “Your fate. Right here on the table, please.”

Marie pulled a card out of the middle of the deck and set it on the table, facedown. And another. And then another. And then, from different parts of the pile, nine more. She waited, but the soothsayer didn’t move.

“Done,” she said.

The soothsayer blinked in her general direction. His mouth gaped open. He pulled a green silk kerchief out of his breast pocket and blotted his brow.

“Done!” she said again.

He nodded, then he counted as he briefly touched each card with his finger. “Twelve,” he said softly, half to her and half to himself, poked at his glasses, and then arranged the cards neatly in a semicircle.

“No matter what it costs,” said Arthur. “It’s just a matter of making the effort. With everything you’ve got.”

“Excuse me?” said the soothsayer.

Arthur didn’t reply.

The soothsayer began to turn over the cards. Something horrifying emanated from the images; they struck Marie as primeval, brutal, indescribably ugly. They seemed to announce sheer power, a world in which no creature ever befriended another creature, in which anyone could do absolutely anything to another person, and in which it was suicidally stupid to believe anything anyone said. There was a figure captured in mid-leap in a dance, and on another card was a great round moon, ringed in clouds. The soothsayer bowed forward, his head almost touching the table, and his bald spot was unmistakable. He picked up the magnifying glass and examined one card after the other.

“The Three of Swords. All standing on their heads.”

“There aren’t three,” said Arthur.

The soothsayer raised his head. His eyes shimmered in a tiny flicker behind his glasses.

“Count them again!” said Arthur.

There were five swords. Marie could see that at a glance. The soothsayer’s index finger wandered from one sword to the next, but his hand was shaking and the swords were so narrow that he kept missing them.

“Seven,” he said. “Standing on their heads.”

“That’s not seven,” said Marie.

The soothsayer looked up.

“Five!” she called out.

“Five swords,” said the soothsayer, and set his finger on the next card. “Five swords, standing on their heads, beside the Sun and the Lover.”

“That’s the Moon!” said Arthur.

The soothsayer took off his glasses and mopped his face with the green handkerchief.

“Sun and Moon must never be mixed up!” said Arthur. “They’re polar opposites.”

“Polar whats?” asked the soothsayer.

“In the Tarot. They’re polar opposites, or so I’m told. It’s really not my thing. Don’t you have a hearing aid?”

“They always make that whistling noise and you can’t understand a thing.”

“A hearing aid that whistles must really mess up hypnosis.”

“No,” said the soothsayer, “if it whistles, you can’t do it.”

“But reading cards goes okay?”

“The prices to rent a stand are too high. Bunch of crooks. Not enough customers. I used to fill entire halls.”

“The biggest?” said Arthur.

“Excuse me?”

“Do please go on!”

The soothsayer lowered his head until his nose was only a fraction of an inch above the cards. He pulled one of them out from the middle of the pack. It displayed a fortress and a bolt of lightning, and there were people frozen in the wildest contortions.

“The Tower,” said Arthur.

“Excuse me?”

“Is that the Tower?”

The soothsayer nodded. “The Tower. In combination with the Five of Swords, standing on their heads. Plus the Moon. It can mean …”

“But it isn’t!” exclaimed Arthur. “That is not the Tower.”

“So what is it?” asked the soothsayer.

“You can’t see a thing,” said Arthur. “Am I right? You don’t hear a thing, and you can’t see a thing anymore.”

The soothsayer stared at the table. Then he slowly set his magnifying glass aside.

“Goodbye!” cried Arthur.

The soothsayer said nothing. They left.

“But you paid him anyway,” said Marie.

“He gave it his best shot!”

“What was it all about? The Tower, the Five of Swords, and was that really the Moon or was it actually the Sun? And what did it mean, anyway?”

“That he couldn’t read a thing.”

“But my future!”

“Seek it out yourself. Seek out the one you want.”

She wondered why Arthur seemed so relieved. She would have liked to take a trip on the ghost train, but he suddenly seemed to be in a hurry. They walked to the parking lot. He hummed to himself quietly all along the way, and was still smiling as he unlocked the car.

“I have a house,” he said as they drove off. “It’s by a little lake, and there isn’t another house to be seen in any direction. When I’m there, I can work all day. It rains a lot. I thought nature would do me good, but that was before I knew that nature mostly consists of rain. Sometimes I take a trip somewhere, and then I come back again. For a long time my work was a cut above average, then it wasn’t anymore, and now all I do is read other people’s books. Books that are so good, I could never have written them myself. You asked what I do — well, that’s what I do.”

“That’s how you spent all your time?”

“It went quickly.”

“Where are we off to now?”

Arthur didn’t answer. For a time they drove in silence.

Then he braked and parked the car. Marie looked around. She’d been here with her class before, and not too long ago, on a school outing.

“Are we going to the museum?”

“Yes.”

Marie sighed.

They got out and went up a marble staircase and then down a long corridor.

“I’ve got to get back soon,” she said. “Homework.”

“Do you get a large amount of it?”

She nodded. It was Saturday, and luckily they never got assignments over the weekend. “Yes, a very large amount.”

What gives with Matthias’s birthday party??? wrote Lena.

Yeah yeah yeah later, wrote Marie.

Pictures hung one smack against the next, some of them just had lines, others had blotches, and on some of them you could see actual stuff: landscapes, buildings, even faces. There were whirling things and whizbangs and torrents and explosions of color. Anyone who was interested in this sort of thing, she thought, would certainly be interested here. But she wasn’t that person.

“I really have to get home.”

Arthur stopped in front of a picture. “Look at this.”

She nodded. It had a gold frame and it featured the sea. There was also a ship.

“No,” said Arthur. “Look at it.”

The sea was blue the way all seas are blue, under a cloudless sky and a big sun. The ship was being followed by a whole swarm of seagulls.

“No,” said Arthur. “Really look!”

In fact, the sea wasn’t all blue. There was foam on the waves, and the water had darker and lighter areas. And the sky had lots of colors in it too. Right on the horizon there was a sort of misty transitional space, and around the sun everything dissolved into a thick impasto of white. When you looked at it, it was like being dazzled. And yet it was all just bits of color.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “That’s it!”

The ship had a long keel, five smokestacks, and portholes that sparkled. Little lines of flags fluttered in the wind, people were crowded onto the decks, and the stern sported an anchor on its own substructure.

Out in front, in the bow, was a piece of sculpture: one of those over-sized bent watches, like the ones Marie had seen on slides in school, some very famous artist had made them but she couldn’t remember his name. She looked at the little plaque on the wall: Sea Voyage with Expensive Sculpture. H. Eulenboeck, 1989.

She stepped even closer, and immediately everything dissolved. There were no more people anymore, no more little flags, no anchor, no bent watch. There were just some tiny bright patches of color above the main deck. The white of the naked canvas shone through in several places, and even the ship was a mere assemblage of lines and dots. Where had it all gone?

She stepped back and it all came together again: the ship, the portholes, the people, even though she’d just seen that none of it was even there. She took another step back, and now it seemed as if the picture were telling her that whatever it was communicating to her had nothing to do with what it was actually portraying. It was some kind of a diplomatic message that seemed to be contained within the brilliance of the light, the vast expanse of the water, or the distant trajectory of the ship itself.

“Fate,” said Arthur. “The capital letter F. But chance is a powerful force, and suddenly you acquire a Fate that was never assigned to you. Some kind of accidental fate. It happens in a flash. But the man could certainly paint. Think about that, and don’t ever forget it. The man could paint.”

“Who?”

“Ivan.”

“But that’s not by Ivan.”

Arthur stared hard at her. She waited, but he didn’t say a word.

“Can we go now?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m going to take you home.”

3

As Marie and Matthias reached the presbytery, Eric and Martin were fighting again. There was nothing unusual about this, it was pretty standard.

“Good that I’m moving out!” yelled Eric.

“I’m not stopping you. What I truly don’t need here is some kind of fanatic. How can anyone even begin to assert—”

“That God performs miracles?”

“God does not perform miracles. The minute you start with miracles, you cannot begin to explain why He fails to make them most of the time. If He saves you, why didn’t He save everyone else? Because you’re more important?”

“Maybe.”

“You’re not serious, are you? You mean He sent a complete economic crisis just to rescue you from the mess you’d gotten yourself into? You’re not just saying that, you actually mean it?”

“Why not? Why shouldn’t it have come just to save me personally, why not?”

“Because you’re not that important!”

“Obviously I am. Otherwise it wouldn’t be—”

“That’s a totally circular argument!”

“You people always say that His ways are not ours to know. You keep telling us that no one can predict how He will steer our fate and by what means.”

“And Ivan? Did he disappear just so that you could grab his paintings and use the proceeds to pay the interest?”

“You may not say any such thing!”

“You were the one who said it!”

“I never said that!”

“It follows implicitly from what—”

“We were twins. You don’t understand. I’m not just me, and he’s — well, he wasn’t just him. In a certain way we were always just one person. It’s hard to explain.”

“Every day!” said Martin to Marie. The acolyte held out the white shirt to him, and he panted as he slipped his arms into the sleeves. “Every day he explains to me that God watches over the world and over him in particular. Every day!”

“He didn’t want to baptize me!” cried Eric. “I had to go to another parish. My own brother didn’t want to baptize me!”

“Every day he stands in front of me in that checked shirt of his and says that God sent a financial crisis just to save him.”

“Go play with your cube, and leave me in peace.”

“The cube isn’t a plaything.”

“No, it’s a serious sport, really hard stuff!”

“Save yourself that tone of voice! I’m back at number twenty-two again!”

“On which list?” asked Marie. She knew the answer, but she also knew how much Martin liked repeating it.

“The national one!”

The acolyte put the stole around Martin’s shoulders. He was an unprepossessing young man with whom she’d had a brief conversation the week before. It hadn’t been easy, because at first he’d been so shy, but after she’d smiled at him twice, he’d immediately asked her to go out with him. She’d tried to say no as nicely as she could, but he was stricken anyway, and since then he’d avoided her. Martin had gotten to know him at the Catholic Youth. There was a hole in his right nostril from which a ring had recently been removed, and his name, if she remembered correctly, was Ron.

Marie put her arm around Matthias’s neck. She felt him flinch; he found it awkward whenever she touched him in front of her father. He was afraid of him, you couldn’t reproach him for that.

It wasn’t easy having a boyfriend. Sometimes she wished she’d waited, but Lena already had one, Natalie had one, and even Georg would have liked to have a girlfriend. In desperation he’d even asked Marie, but she’d had to laugh, the thing was too absurd. She’d been together with Matthias, who was already sixteen, a year older than she was, for a month now, and she’d already slept with him three times. The first time it was strange and a bit exhausting, and the second time it just seemed really dumb, but the third time, at his house, while his parents were away and the dog kept scratching pathetically at the door, suddenly made her understand why people made such a fuss about it all.

The acolyte stepped back. Martin was now in his full vestments. Immediately he looked thinner and radiated worthiness.

“Is Laura coming too?” asked Eric.

“She’s shooting,” said Marie. “They’ve enlarged her role in the new season.”

“So what’s it like, this series?” asked Martin.

“Very good,” said Matthias. “Really interesting.” Marie poked him with her elbow. Both of them had to grin.

It was a year ago when she’d begun to draw. Nobody knew, she was still too inept in the way she laid down her lines, the shapes of things were not yet under her control, but she had no doubt that she would get better. Later she intended to study graphic arts alongside her major, which would be medicine, and then she’d pick up another language, or maybe three or even four, but not more: she still wanted to be able to read books and take trips to distant continents, Patagonia was a mustsee, as was the coast of North Africa, and she also had to get to China.

“So, let’s do this.” Martin opened the door. Outside the snow was coming down in big, slow-falling flakes.

It was only a few steps to the church. Martin went first, followed by Ron, then Eric, with Matthias and Marie bringing up the rear. She stuck out her tongue to taste the snow. The white cold stifled all noises. She tucked her arm into Matthias’s.

“Can we go to my place afterward?” he whispered in her ear.

Maybe that was a good idea. His parents were off on another trip. They would have the house all to themselves, and yet she wasn’t sure. She liked Matthias and didn’t want to hurt him, but maybe what she needed was a different boyfriend. She tipped her head to one side so that her hair brushed his cheek. “Maybe.”

Eric looked back at them uneasily. Marie was too young to be running around arm in arm with a boy, let alone a pathetic one. It was far too early. If things kept on going like this, they would soon be kissing each other. How was he going to stop it?

He had to pray more often. Praying always helped. If he’d prayed more in the past, he’d never have gotten himself into such difficulties. All of his hunches had proved true: people were under constant surveillance, the cosmos was a system of signs arranged so as to be legible, nights were infested with demons, and evil lurked in every corner. But he who entrusted himself to God had nothing to fear. It was all plain and simple, and he couldn’t understand why his brother got so cross every time he talked about it. He’d always understood Ivan, but things with Fatso were eternally complicated. It was simpler to talk things over with his new friend Adrian Schlueter, who’d explained to him that God was obliged to forgive anyone who went to Confession: the Lord Himself was bound by His own Sacrament.

So Eric went every day to Confession. He had already been in every church in the city, he knew where you got stuck in line and where you were next up right away, where the priests were approachable, where they were inquisitive, and where even after the tenth time they didn’t recognize you; he knew which churches were better to avoid because there were demons staring down off their façades, hissing swear words and trying to prevent you from getting in. Confessing every day demanded its own discipline. Sometimes you’d done nothing wrong and you had to invent it, but it was worth the effort: you could go through life devoid of sin, as weightless as a newborn, without any fear of the Last Judgment.

He looked up. Flakes of snow were dancing against the gray of the sky. It had started to snow the previous evening, and lying on his lumpy sofa he had been unable to sleep because of the sheer silence. He had spent the night visualizing his desk, his business cards, his phone setup, his computer, his company car — everything that would be his again soon.

It was only two months since he’d bumped into Lothar Remling. Much boxing on the shoulders, loud cries, football talk: Unbelievable, whooped Eric, apropos of absolutely nothing, the game! Remling replied that you couldn’t believe how the idiots had frittered the whole thing away, and then he started talking about how these were high times for Remling. Consult, governments had been pumping so much money into the system that nobody knew what to do with it all, could you have imagined such a thing even a year ago! Then he asked how things were going for Eric, and Eric was about to answer that he was up to his ears in new projects and working himself into exhaustion, but then suddenly, to his own astonishment, he said he wasn’t doing anything.

Nothing?

Absolutely nothing. Totally, absolutely nothing. All day. He had withdrawn from the world and was living in the presbytery. With his brother. The priest.

Totally crazy, said Remling. Are you for real?

Eric said he’d realized things couldn’t go on like this. Everyone needed to declare time out once in a while. Sit and think. As for him, he dipped into the Bhagavad Gita. Meditated. Went to Confession. Spent time with his daughter. Was also administering the art collection of his dead brother. Of course he’d be making a comeback, but there was no hurry. It was so terribly easy to lose sight of the essential.

The essential, said Remling. Yes, exactly, that was what it was all about.

Then he had asked for Eric’s number, and Eric had told him he didn’t have a cell phone anymore, but he could be reached at the presbytery.

And Remling had actually called three days later, and they’d met to eat, and two days later they’d met again, and then again that same week, and everything was in the bag. No, Eric had said, he didn’t need a lawyer to take care of the contract, his future was cradled in the hands of God, and Remling had exclaimed that all this was so cool.

Eric had no doubt whatever that he was on the fast track to glory at Remling. Consult. As regards experience, he had it nailed, he knew every trick in the book, he had built one of the biggest asset-planning companies in the country. The fact that it had been torpedoed wasn’t his fault, no one had foreseen the crisis, no one had been able to know what was bearing down on them, everyone who worked for him had said the exact same thing. He met twice a week with Maria Gudschmid and Felsner for tea, and they went around in a circle saying Who Could Possibly Have Known?! Which was why the investors had accepted their losses, and why Kluessen’s son had decided not to sue. The only fly in the ointment was his onetime chauffeur, who’d written a letter to the state prosecutors, but the accusations it contained were so off the wall that nobody had wanted to pursue the thing. The sale of the almost one hundred paintings and almost one thousand sketches that had been found partly in Eulenboeck’s studio and partly in Ivan’s apartment, when combined with reproductions of Eulenboeck’s farmhouses on pens, children’s crayons, pajamas, and cups, had become so profitable that he could pay off the interest on the bridging loan. But such a shame that so many pictures had gone missing: there were three dozen paintings described exactly in Ivan’s records — nobody had ever seen them, nobody knew a thing about them, it was just as if they’d never existed. Now the boom was unfortunately a bust, Eulenboeck’s prices were shrinking, and the license agreements were all eroding, but the worst was past. He wasn’t going to jail. God had decided that one. And his instincts had sharpened themselves, and he was thinking faster than he ever had — it had been genuinely helpful that he’d had to restrict his budget for medications — he now took only the essentials, those things that made it possible to stand more or less upright and get through the day.

And that’s what he’d said to Sibylle. He hadn’t seen her for four years, she’d lost weight, and she looked exhausted. He’d told her what he’d told Remling: Bhagavad Gita, Confession, no cell phone, time out, hand of God. He’d talked about the crisis that nobody could have foreseen, he’d talked about the presbytery and about the divorce. He’d talked about the fact that he would never again be a complete human being since the day his twin brother had died. Sibylle had asked if Laura was okay again, healthwise, and he’d said, Thank God, yes! And now he was going to move in with her. His income was down to the bare minimum it took for sheer survival, he had no means to pay for an apartment of his own, but he absolutely had to get out of the presbytery, no matter what. It was no place for a pious human being of any stripe.

Eric bent down and scooped up a handful of snow. It was still so powdery that it was almost impossible to shape it into a ball. He wanted to hurl the crumbling lump at somebody, but couldn’t see any particular target. Marie suddenly seemed too grown-up to have snowballs thrown at her, and he didn’t want to target her disgusting boyfriend either — if he hit him in the face, it would be really embarrassing. And he couldn’t snow-bomb Martin anymore either, now, when he was wearing his priest’s outfit. So he took aim at the acolyte.

He hit him in the back of the head, and the snow dusted itself into a halo. The young man spun around, with the momentary look of an animal on the attack, then his face softened into an effortful smile.

There was something odd about him. The first time he’d come into the presbytery and met Eric’s eyes, he’d begun to giggle hysterically. He still could barely talk to Eric without turning pale and beginning to stutter. Eric guessed he must have been commissioned by someone to spy on him, but it just didn’t matter anymore. He was under the protecting hand of God.

They went into the church. The organ advanced triumphantly from one chord to the next, and the congregation was bigger than before. The five old women who always came were here, along with the friendly fat man, the sad young woman, and Adrian Schlueter. But this time there were also a few old friends of Ivan’s, including a Belgian painter with a pointed beard and a silk shawl, and a cousin none of them had seen in ages, and Eric’s secretary Kathi, who was now installed at the Eulenboeck Trust to oversee merchandising. Martin’s mother was here, and next to her, upright and calm, was Prelate Finckenstein. In the front row, face hidden behind dark glasses, maybe out of grief and maybe out of a desire to pass unrecognized, sat Ivan and Eric’s mother.

Ivan had been missing for four years now, and in the previous week he had officially been declared dead. Eric had insisted on this Mass, he had begged, cursed, and finally threatened to intervene with the bishop. Martin had defended himself as long as he was able. Ivan had never been baptized, and besides which, Masses for the souls of the dead were absolute rubbish — why would the Almighty, All-Knowing God change His view of a single human soul because that soul’s survivors sang a few songs? Or, to put it better, any Mass for the dead would have been rubbish if there really had been an all-knowing God and any sense in theology. Which was why he’d finally given way.

The congregation rose to its feet. “The Lord be with you,” said Martin. Since he had come to understand that faith was never going to alight on him, he’d felt free. Nothing was ever going to help: never in this life was he going to be thin, and never in this life was he going to escape the power of reason.

“And with your spirit,” murmured the congregation.

Martin spoke about his brother. He wasn’t a novice, so the sentences flowed freely, without his having to think about them: Ivan Friedland had lived and painted, he had researched, he had seen much in the world, because the act of seeing was his passion. He had behaved badly to no man, and he had dedicated his work to a greater artist, whose authority he had been the first to acknowledge. Much was to have been expected of him, but an untimely fate had cut short his life, only God knew how. He would never come back.

Martin folded his hands. The acolyte took a ragged breath, rubbed his face, made little coughing noises, and sniffled in a way that could drive anyone mad. The boy was doing his best, but he just wasn’t suited for this job, someone had to find another solution for him. Perhaps Eric could help, he still had all these connections.

As Martin heard himself speak, he closed his eyes. He imagined the snowflakes falling outside. If the weather report was to be believed, they were going to keep falling for days, big machines would be working at full power to clear the streets, chemicals would be sprayed around with abandon, but the snow would keep falling on the pavements, on the parked cars, on the gardens, trees, roofs, and antennas. For a few days to come, the world would be a thing of beauty. He noticed that he was getting hungry again.

“And now,” he said, “the Profession of Faith.”