You

by Zoran Drvenkar

  “No.”

  “He—”

  “I said no. My son wasn’t guilty of anything. Whatever happened, I know he wasn’t to blame. But whose fault was it?”

  You look at each other. He knows the answer and still wants to hear it from you. Your son Judas. It’s easy for you to betray him.

  “It was my son.”

  “Thank you.”

  The man leans forward.

  “This is definitely going to hurt.”

  He pushes one hand under your back, the other under your leg, and lifts you up. It’s a bit like someone sticking a red-hot stake up your backside. The pain spreads, shoots up your spine, and you greet it like an old friend that you haven’t seen for ages. Pain means that there’s still hope, no paralysis, no life in a bed with a straw in your mouth. So the connections haven’t been cut yet. Your eyes fill with tears. A hundred-year-old man would have more dignity. Your head hangs down, your arms and legs don’t really exist, only your right hand clutches at the air, spittle trickles from your mouth, and after a few steps the pain’s too much even for your stubborn consciousness and you black out.

  You blink. There’s a dirty glass of water in front of you. You’re sitting at a table, your head manages to move, your muscles work, your left arm doesn’t react, your right comes up slowly, your fingers grip the glass. Your arm trembles. You drink and look at the man. He’s sitting at the other end, his hands are flat on the table, he’s looking at you expectantly.

  The glass is empty and you set it down again.

  “We’re alone,” says the man.

  “My son will come back.”

  “I don’t think so. Your son won’t come back any more than my son will come back. We’re fathers without sons now.”

  For a moment you’re sure that the man must have captured Darian. Then you remember Darian speaking to you and leaving.

  After the idiot had emptied the whole magazine at the hotel.

  “We have plenty of time,” says the man.

  “I don’t think so. As soon as my body’s working again, I’m out of here.”

  He shakes his head.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” you ask.

  “It means you aren’t leaving here. This is the place where you will die. This is the end of you.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  He smiles. Not cruel, not arrogant; kind.

  You think you can feel time breathing down your neck. Of course it’s only the summer wind blowing through the broken windows. Of course the man in front of you is a comedian. You laugh and say exactly that.

  “What are you? A comedian?”

  “You know me, you know who I am.”

  Your fist comes down on the table, the glass leaps into the air, rolls along the tabletop, and shatters on the floor. Your voice is a growl. Ragnar Desche slowly wakes up.

  “You little fucker, what do you think you’re doing here? Do you think you can drag me around the place, sit down at this table, and tell me I’m going to die here? No one threatens me. No one, is that clear?”

  “I haven’t threatened you.”

  “What?”

  “No one’s threatening you, these are just the facts.”

  Your hand searches, the gun’s not in the belt holster anymore. The man picks your automatic from one of the chairs. He leans forward and pushes it into the middle of the table. The table is sixteen feet long. If you stand up now, you’ll be holding the gun in two seconds, and that’ll be that for this comedian. But what if he’s only trying to make you look ridiculous? What if he’s taken out the magazine? It could be an embarrassing moment.

  “The gun’s loaded.”

  The man isn’t just making you nervous, he’s reading your mind.

  “What’s to stop me from grabbing it?” you ask.

  “Your legs. You’ll have to wait a while before they work again.”

  “Who says they don’t already?”

  “If they worked, you’d have grabbed the gun long ago.”

  He’s right, and you hate him being right.

  “And what happens then?”

  “As soon as you’ve got the gun, I’ll kill you.”

  You look at him in disbelief.

  “What with?”

  He looks at his hands.

  You look at his hands.

  They’re lying flat on the tabletop.

  You laugh.

  “What’s that supposed to mean? Is that all you have to offer? Your fucking hands? Have you any idea who’s sitting here in front of you? You’re going to need more than those hands to finish me off.”

  He doesn’t react. You go on, it’s always the same game with you. Wind up your adversary, see how far you can go.

  “Do you think the table’s going to go flying up in the air if you take your hands away?”

  The man thinks for a second before he says, “If I take my hands away, they will kill you.”

  He smiles and adds, “That’s the kind of hands they are.”

  There’s really nothing more to say on the matter. You feel a trembling in your legs. Wake up, damn it, just wake up! Even though you don’t want to, you have to ask, “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m going to tell you a story, and then you’ll know who I am,” you say, leaning forward slightly.

  It’s a wonderful feeling. The pulse of the house flows through your fingers, you knew there was still some life in it, you go on.

  “The summer I turned twelve, I was secretly reading by candlelight one night, when a moth flew through the window into my room. It circled the candle flame, and after less than a minute it burned up. I wondered how the moth could be so stupid. And then it occurred to me that the moth might have seen something in the flame that I couldn’t see. Did it want to die, or did it know nothing of the danger? And what if it had known about the danger and flown deliberately into it? I thought about it a lot and wondered what it would be like to fly into the flames without burning up. Where would I be then? Would I be at the center of the fire? And what if nothing happened to me there, and if from that moment onwards I was untouchable? And if I was untouchable, would I still be me?”

  Ragnar Desche looks at you, he begins to understand, you can read it in his eyes. Where you see the flame, he sees his father. You go on talking.

  “For a year and a half I’ve thought about it, for a year and a half I’ve thought about these questions and nothing else. One day I pulled a boy down to the bottom of a swimming pool and let him die. It was very simple, it wasn’t planned and it wasn’t an accident. I flew right into the flames and nothing happened. At that moment I became invincible, do you understand that? I became the person I am now. No guilt, no regret, and no morals either. I became a part of the flames and there was no retaliation, there was no punishment. No god came down from heaven to strike me dead. No one pointed a finger at me. The impossible became possible. This experience ran against all the rules of our society. It was intoxicating. And I asked myself the most important question you can ask yourself as an individual: If the flames can do nothing to me, how can I stay away from the flames?”

  You pause for a moment, before you add, “That’s why we’re sitting here.”

  Silence. You don’t know what he’s thinking, his face gives nothing away, his left hand has woken up now too, it’s opening and closing. And if you could look into his head, you’d see a fifteen-year-old Ragnar Desche leaving the apartment block after his father’s death and walking away. Not on the pavement, he’s walking down the middle of the road, because he needs space because he’s suddenly big and violent and the pavement isn’t big enough for him. You stepped into the flames in your way, he did in his. The result is the same, you have both grown with it. And now he’s sitting opposite you, and he’s not taking his eyes off you. He’s reliving his own moment, standing in the flames and looking out at you.

  “We’re the same,” you say.

  No reaction. Perhaps everything really is ve
ry different and he’s not thinking anything and wondering how quickly he can get to his gun. Everything’s possible.

  At last he speaks.

  “What makes you think we’re the same?”

  “The darkness and the depth,” you answer.

  “You’re a sick fuck,” he says.

  “And you have no heart.”

  “What?”

  “And I have no soul. You and me, me and you. We’ve found each other. Now we’ll come to rest.”

  And so you tell him who the Traveler is, you don’t leave out a single victim, you tell him every detail and describe your quest. And tell him of the depth from which you always had to rise to open the door to the darkness.

  After thirty-four years your search has brought you here to this place.

  To this room.

  To this table.

  Arrived.

  Ragnar Desche just looks at you. He doesn’t reveal himself. He is not interested if you’ve been looking for him for a hundred or a thousand years. You know it can take a while. He will show you his true face. It will just take a while. His facial expression gives nothing away, only his body reacts. His shoulders hunch, his hands lie flat on the table so that he’s sitting there like you. One foot drums, you can feel it through the floor. His breathing grows faster and more confident, ready for anything.

  The drumming stops.

  “Now we’ve arrived,” you say.

  “Now we’ve arrived,” he says.

  Two men in a kitchen.

  In a ruined hotel.

  On a cliff.

  Alone.

  No Me anymore, no Him anymore.

  Only one thing is left.

  You.

  My Thanks To

  Gregor, you lit the flame and let those sweet bitches from the first sentence on into your heart. They thank you too.

  Martin, you brought me closer to my own novel, your friendship shines and shines.

  Daniela, once again you’ve helped me mull over my doubts in long conversations, stroked my head reassuringly, and grinned away the insecurities.

  Christine & Peter & Ulrike & Stephanie & Martina, you read as if possessed, while I sat at home as if possessed and waited for your comments.

  Evi & Felix for the confidence you give my writing.

  Arnon Grünberg & Larry McMurtry & George R. R. Martin, it’s a joy to learn from you.

  Misophone & William Fitzsimmons & Lloyd Cole, whatever it is, you’ve got it.

  Corinna, my greatest heroine, who puts every sun in the shade.

  A Note About the Author

  Zoran Drvenkar was born in Croatia in 1967 and moved to Germany when he was three years old. He has been working as a writer since 1989 and doesn’t like to be pinned down to one genre. He has written more than twenty novels, ranging from children’s and young adult books to the darker literary novels Sorry and You. In 2010, Sorry won Germany’s Friedrich Glauser Prize for crime fiction. Drvenkar lives in an old mill just outside of Berlin.

  A Note About the Translator

  Shaun Whiteside has translated more than fifty books from the German, French, Italian, and Dutch, including novels by Amélie Nothomb, Paolo Giordano, Marcel Möring, and Bernhard Schlink, as well as classics by Freud, Nietzsche, Musil, and Schnitzler. His translation of Magdalene the Sinner by Lilian Faschinger won the 1996 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize. He lives in London.