“If I don’t kill the sheep, the eyes will consume the land with fire. The apples of the eye are sin itself; they are the apples from the tree of knowledge, and they will destroy everything.” Philipp began to cry with a child’s lack of all restraint, shaking from head to foot.
“Philipp, please listen to me. You’re afraid of the sheep and their terrible eyes. I can understand that. But the whole thing with the Revelation of Saint John is absolutely cuckoo. John didn’t mean the devil when he used the number six sixty-six; it was a hidden play on the name of Nero, the Roman Caesar.”
“What?”
“If you add up the numbers in the Hebrew spelling of Caesar Nero, you get six sixty-six. That’s all. Saint John couldn’t write that out; he had to say it in numbers. It has nothing to do with the Antichrist.”
Philipp kept crying. There was no point in telling him that there’s nowhere in the Bible that talks about an apple tree in paradise. Philipp was living in his own world. At a certain point, he began to calm down, and we walked back to the car. The air had been washed clean and tasted of salt. “I have one last question,” I said after a while.
“And?”
“What does all this have to do with Sabine? Why did you do that with her eyes?”
“A few days before her birthday, I saw her eyes in my room,” said Philipp. “They’d become sheep’s eyes. And that’s when I understood. I told her that evening of her birthday in the house on the dike, but she didn’t want to hear it. She got frightened.”
“What was it that you understood?” I asked.
“Her first name and her last name each have six letters.”
“Did you want to kill her?”
Philipp looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “No, I don’t want to kill anyone.”
A week later, I took Philipp to a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland. He didn’t want his father to go with us. After we’d unpacked his suitcase, we were welcomed by the head of the hospital, who showed us around the bright and airy modern buildings. Philipp was in a good place, insofar as you can say that about any mental hospital. I had had lengthy phone conversations with the chief of medicine. He, too, even at long distance, had agreed that everything pointed to a case of paranoid schizophrenia. It is not an infrequent disorder; the evidence suggests that approximately 1 percent of the population will be afflicted with it once in their lives. It often manifests itself in phases that lead to the disruption of thought processes and perceptions, distorting both their form and their content. Most patients hear voices; many believe they’re being pursued, that they’re responsible for catastrophes of nature, or they’re tortured, like Philipp, by mad ideas. The treatment involves both drugs and extensive psychotherapy. Patients need to be able to trust, and to open themselves up. The odds of a full recovery are around 30 percent.
At the end of the tour, Philipp came with me to the main door. He was just a lonely, sad, anxious boy. He said, “You never asked what number I am.”
“That’s true. And what number are you?”
“Green,” he said, and he turned on his heel and went back into the clinic.
The Thorn
Feldmayer had already had many jobs in his life. He’d been a mailman, a waiter, a photographer, a pizza maker, and, for six months, a blacksmith. When he was thirty-five, he applied for a post as guard in the local museum of antiquities and got it, greatly to his astonishment.
After he’d filled out all the forms, answered the questions, and provided photographs for his building pass, he went to the uniform store, where he was handed three gray uniforms, six medium-blue shirts, and two pairs of black shoes. A new colleague led him through the building, showed him the canteen and the rest rooms, and explained how to use the time clock. At the end, he was shown the room he would be guarding.
While Feldmayer was going through the museum, Frau Truckau, one of the two employees in HR, organized his documents, sent some of them to Accounts, and started a file. The names of the guards were put on little cards and sorted into a file-card box. Every six weeks, the staff was shuffled in different combinations to another of the town’s museums, to make the work more varied.
Frau Truckau thought about her boyfriend. Yesterday, in the café where they’d been meeting for almost eight months after work, he’d asked her to marry him. He’d turned red and stuttered. His hands had been damp; they’d left outlines on the little marble table. She had leapt to her feet with joy, kissed him in front of everyone, and then they’d run to his apartment. Now she was dead tired and bursting with plans; she would be seeing him again very soon; he’d promised to come pick her up from work. She spent half an hour on the toilet, sharpened pencils, sorted paper clips, dawdled around in the hall, until finally she’d made it. She threw on her jacket, ran down the stairs to the exit, and fell into his arms. But she’d forgotten to close the window.
When the cleaning lady opened the door to the office later, a gust of wind seized the half-completed file card, which was blown to the floor and then swept up. The next day, Frau Truckau was thinking about everything imaginable, except for Feldmayer’s file card. His name did not become part of the staff-rotation system, and when Frau Truckau left her job a year later because of her baby, he’d been forgotten.
Feldmayer never complained.
The hall was almost empty, twenty-five feet high and roughly five hundred square feet. The walls and vaulted ceiling were built of brick, their red tempered to a warm glow by a coat of lime wash. The floor was made of gray-blue marble. It was at the end of a run of twelve interconnecting rooms in one wing of the museum. A bust stood in the center of the hall, mounted on a gray stone plinth. The chair stood under the middle one of the three tall windows, and the window seat to the left held a machine that measured the humidity. It had a glass cover and ticked gently. Outside the window was an inner courtyard with a solitary chestnut tree. The next guard was installed four rooms farther along; sometimes Feldmayer could hear the distant squeaking of his rubber-soled shoes on the stone floor. Otherwise, all was silent. Feldmayer sat down and waited.
In the first weeks, he was restless, stood up every five minutes, walked around his hall, counted every step he took, and was happy to see each visitor. Feldmayer looked for things to do. He measured his hall, his only assistance a wooden ruler he’d brought from home. First, he measured the length and width of one of the marble floor slabs, then used that to calculate the size of the floor. Then he realized he’d forgotten the cracks, so he measured these as well and added them to the total. The walls and ceiling were harder, but Feldmayer had plenty of time. He kept a school notebook, in which he entered every measurement. He measured the doors and their frames, the size of the keyholes, the length of the handles, the baseboards, the radiator covers, the window catches, the distance between the double glazing, the circumference of the humidity machine, and the light switches. He knew how many cubic feet of air there were in the hall, and how far and to which marble slab the sun’s rays penetrated on every day of the year; he knew the average humidity level and its variations in the morning, at midday, and in the evening. He noted that the fifth crack between the marble slabs, counting from the door, was half a millimeter narrower than the others. The second window catch to the left had a dash of blue on the underside, something he couldn’t explain, for there was nothing blue in the hall. The painter had missed a spot on the radiator cover, and there were pin-sized holes in the bricks on the back wall.
Feldmayer counted the visitors and noted how long they spent in his hall, which side they chose to view the statue from, how often they looked out of the window, who gave him a nod. He assembled statistics about male versus female visitors, about children, about classes and their teachers, about the colors of jackets, shirts, coats, pullovers, trousers, skirts, and stockings. He counted how often anyone breathed in his hall, and registered how often which marble slabs got stepped on, and how often which words got spoken the most. There was one statistic for hair color, another for ey
e color, another for skin color, yet another for shawls, for purses, for belts, and one for bald spots, for beards, and for wedding rings. He counted the flies and tried to evolve a system to account for their flight patterns and landing spots.
The museum changed Feldmayer. It began when he found himself unable to tolerate the sound of his TV in the evenings. He let it run on mute for another six months, then stopped turning it on at all, then finally gave it to the young student couple who had moved into the apartment across the hall. The next thing was the pictures. He had a few art prints, Apples on a Cloth, Sunflowers, and The Alps. At some point, the colors began to irritate him; he took the pictures off the wall and put them in the trash. He gradually emptied his apartment: illustrated magazines, vases, decorated ashtrays, coasters, a lilac bedspread, and two plates with motifs from Toledo. Feldmayer threw them all away. He stripped the wallpaper, spackled the walls smooth and whitewashed them, got rid of the carpet, and polished the floorboards.
After a few years, Feldmayer’s life had an absolutely set rhythm. He got up every morning at 6:00 a.m. Then, regardless of the weather, he walked through the municipal garden in a circle that required precisely 5,400 steps. He moved unhurriedly and knew exactly when the traffic light at the street crossing would switch to green. If ever he failed to keep to this rhythm, the rest of his day felt wrong.
Every evening, he put on a pair of old trousers and got down on his knees to polish the floorboards in his apartment—a demanding job that took almost an hour and calmed him. He did the housework with care and slept a deep, quiet sleep. On Sunday, he always went to the same local restaurant, where he ordered a grilled chicken and had two beers. Mostly, he talked to the owner, with whom he’d been at school.
Before the museum, Feldmayer had always had girlfriends, but then they began to interest him less and less. They were simply “too much,” as he said to the restaurant’s owner. “They’re loud and they ask things I don’t have answers to, and I can’t tell them about my work.”
Feldmayer’s only hobby was photography. He owned a beautiful Leica, which he’d bought secondhand at a very good price; in one of his jobs, he’d learned to develop his own film. He’d set up a darkroom in the storage closet of his apartment, but after years in the museum, he couldn’t think of any possible subjects.
He phoned his mother regularly and visited her every three weeks. When she died, he had no relatives anymore. He had his phone disconnected.
His life flowed along quietly, and he avoided any form of excitement. He was neither happy nor unhappy—just content.
Until he got involved with the sculpture.
It was the thorn puller, one of the motifs of classical art. A naked boy sits on a boulder, leaning forward, his left leg bent and resting on his right thigh. With his left hand, he holds his left instep as his right hand pulls a thorn out of the sole of his foot. The marble figure in Feldmayer’s hall was a Roman copy of the Greek original. It wasn’t particularly valuable; there were countless such copies.
Feldmayer had measured the figure long ago, had read everything about it he could find, and would even have been able to draw from memory the shadow it cast on the floor. But sometime between his seventh and eighth year at the museum, he couldn’t remember exactly anymore. That was when the trouble began. Feldmayer was sitting in his chair looking at the statue without really seeing it, when he suddenly asked himself if the boy had in fact found the thorn in his foot. He didn’t know where the question came from; it was just there, and it wouldn’t go away.
He went over to the figure and examined it. He couldn’t find the thorn in the foot. Feldmayer became nervous, a feeling he hadn’t had in years. The longer he looked, the less clear it seemed to him that the naked boy had actually managed to get hold of the thorn. That night Feldmayer slept badly. The next morning, he skipped the circuit of the municipal garden and spilled his coffee. He arrived at the museum too early and had to wait half an hour for the staff entrance to open. There was a magnifying glass in his pocket. He all but ran to his hall, then used the magnifying glass to examine the statue millimeter by millimeter. He found no thorn, either between the boy’s thumb and forefinger or in his foot. Feldmayer wondered if maybe the boy had dropped it. He crawled around the statue on his knees, searching the floor. Then he felt sick and he went to the toilet and threw up.
Feldmayer wished he’d never discovered the problem with the thorn.
In the following weeks, things went downhill. He sat in the hall every day with the boy and brooded. He imagined the boy playing, maybe hide-and-seek or football. Then Feldmayer, having read about this, thought, No, it must have been a footrace. They were always having those in Greece. And the boy had felt a tiny prickle, which hurt, and he’d no longer been able to put weight on that foot. The others had run way ahead, but he’d had to sit down on the boulder. And the damn invisible thorn had now been sticking in his foot for hundreds and hundreds of years and was refusing to be pulled out. Feldmayer got more and more upset. After a few months, he was having anxiety attacks as soon as he woke up. In the mornings, he kept wandering around in the dayroom and (this was the man his colleagues called “the monk” behind his back) spent time in the canteen gossiping with anyone around, doing whatever he could to postpone his arrival in his hall until the very last minute. When he was finally there with the boy, he couldn’t look at him.
It got worse. Feldmayer had sweating attacks, suffered palpitations, and started biting his fingernails. He could hardly get to sleep; when he nodded off, he had nightmares, from which he awoke soaking wet. His everyday life was no more than a shell. Soon he began to believe that the thorn was inside his head and still growing. It was scraping against the inner surface of his skull; Feldmayer could hear it. Everything in his life that had been empty, calm, and ordered until now was transformed into a chaos of pointed barbs. And there was no way out. He had lost all sense of smell and was having trouble breathing. Sometimes he got so little air that he did what was absolutely forbidden and pulled open one of the windows in the hall. He ate only the tiniest amounts, because he believed the food was going to choke him. He convinced himself that the boy’s foot had become infected, and when he stole a glance now and then, he was sure the boy was growing bigger by the day. He had to set him free; he had to release him from the pain. Which is how Feldmayer came upon the idea of the thumbtacks.
In an office-supply shop, he bought a box of thumbtacks with strikingly harsh yellow heads. He bought the smallest ones he could find; he didn’t want the pain to be too great. There was a shoe shop three streets farther on. Feldmayer didn’t have to wait long: A scrawny man tried on a shoe, cried out in pain, hopped over to a bench on one leg, cursing, and pulled a yellow thumbtack out of the ball of his foot. He held it up against the light between his thumb and forefinger and showed it to the other customers.
Feldmayer’s brain released so many endorphins at the sight of the thumbtack being removed that it almost undid him. Pure joy flooded him for hours on end. Every inhibition and every sense of impotence disappeared at a stroke. He longed to embrace the wounded boy and the entire universe. In the wake of this high, he finally, after many months, managed to sleep through the night and had a recurring dream: The boy pulled out the thorn, stood up, laughed, and waved at him.
A mere ten days went by before the boy with the thorn held out his wounded foot to him again in reproach. Feldmayer groaned, but he knew what had to be done; the little box with the thumbtacks was still in his pocket.
He had worked for the museum for twenty-three years and now within a few minutes his time there would be over. Feldmayer stood up and gave his legs a shake; recently they had often gone numb from his sitting so long. Another two minutes, and that would be that. He set the chair under the middle window, the way he had found it on his first day, then straightened it and dusted it with his jacket sleeve; then for the last time he went over to the statue.
He had never in twenty-three years touched the boy pulling ou
t the thorn. Nor had he planned any of what happened next. He saw himself grip the statue with both hands; he felt the smooth, cool marble as he lifted it off the plinth. It was heavier than he expected. He held it up to his face—it was very close to him now—then higher and higher above his head, and then he stood on tiptoes so that it was as high as he could manage. He held it this way for almost a minute, until he began to tremble. He breathed as deeply as he could, then hurled the statue to the floor with all his strength and screamed. Feldmayer screamed louder than he had ever screamed in his whole life. His scream rang through the rooms, bouncing from wall to wall, and was so terrible that a waitress in the museum café nine rooms away dropped a loaded tray. The sculpture shattered on the floor with a dull crash and one of the marble slabs cracked.
Then something strange happened. It seemed to Feldmayer that the blood in his veins changed color, it turned bright red. He felt it surge and pulse from his stomach, spreading throughout his body, all the way to the tips of his fingers and toes, illuminating him from inside. The cracked marble slab, the indentations in the brick walls, the motes of dust all became three-dimensional. Everything swelled toward him. The flying splinters of marble seemed to stand still in midair. Then he saw the thorn. It glinted with a strange light; he saw it from all sides at once before it dissolved and vanished.
Feldmayer sank to his knees, lifted his head slowly, and looked out of the window. The chestnut tree stood veiled in the soft green that only the first days of spring could summon, and the afternoon sun was casting flickering shadows on the floor of the hall. The pain had ceased. Feldmayer sensed the warmth on his face, his nose itched, and then he began to laugh. He laughed and laughed. He was clutching his stomach with laughter and couldn’t stop.
The two policemen who took Feldmayer home were surprised by the meager furnishings in his apartment. They sat him down on one of the two chairs in the kitchen, intending to wait until he’d calmed down and perhaps would be able to explain things.
Crime Page 12
