“Where can you pee around here?” Jola said. It wasn’t a question, it was a warning. Not a tree or a bush within five kilometers in any direction. Just the gravel road where the van was parked. Beyond that, nothing but rocks and black sand.
Jola went to the other side of the van and squatted down beside the left front wheel. I bent low over the passenger seat, pretending to concentrate on my search, out of fear that she’d be able to see me through the half-open driver’s door if I straightened up. A stream struck the hard ground. I could practically feel it splashing on her feet and ankles. The longer the situation went on, the more impossible it became. The splatter seemed to present an increasingly detailed and shameless account of Jola’s insides. It wouldn’t stop. I stared at the dust at my feet.
Slowly, the hissing became a trickle, and under the passenger door a thin rivulet appeared. It showed no inclination to seep away into the earth. Instead, the little stream was ferrying along a certain amount of dust at its edges, so that it wallowed rather than flowed. It was getting close to my toes. I didn’t move my foot. All at once, Jola was standing next to me. Her eyes were not on me but on the ground. On the damp print of my left foot.
“Let’s do it,” I said. My upbeat tone was a rebellion against her contemptuous smile.
As we made our difficult way down the rocks, she started to stumble. I instinctively reached out my hand to catch her; she took hold of it and didn’t let go. I said to myself that when we were carrying heavy equipment and going over dangerous terrain, it was my duty to support her. Her grasp wasn’t coy, it was tight and warm, almost like a man’s. It felt completely natural to go the rest of the way hand in hand with her.
Before we entered the water, I showed her once again how to protect her mask and diving regulator. I inflated her buoyancy compensator and tested every buckle on her outfit. When her fingers wandered over my suit during the safety check, I closed my eyes. Then I turned around and jumped.
All quiet. Jola lay in the water much more calmly than she’d done on the previous days. It was as though Theo’s absence relaxed her. She sank slowly, one hand on her nose for pressure equalization, while her hair floated around her like a living thing. She spread out her arms and legs and hovered in place, gently lifted and lowered by her own breathing. She turned on her back and looked up at the air bubbles rising toward the sun from her mouth like glinting jellyfish. I knelt on the sea bottom and couldn’t stop looking at her. We were together down there in the water. Two slow-motion creatures in a slow-motion world. In fourteen years and with hundreds of clients, such a feeling of solidarity, of connection, had never come over me before. Jola approached and landed on her knees directly opposite me. We remained like that for a while, as though we were worshipping each other. A little cuttlefish swam up and looked at us inquiringly. It exchanged its camouflage for a striped courtship display to determine whether we were male or female. Eventually Jola raised her thumb and forefinger to signal, Okay? I responded in kind: Yes, okay.
I don’t remember whose hands reached out first. I do remember taking her by the shoulders and pulling her into my arms, and I remember that she immediately returned my embrace. We couldn’t kiss each other, because we had to keep our breathing apparatus in our mouths. We couldn’t caress each other, because our skin was covered by a layer of neoprene, and pieces of equipment blocked the way everywhere. The only parts of Jola available to me were her hands and the back of her head. I thrust one hand into the armhole of her buoyancy compensator so that I could at least feel the flattened shape of her breast under the neoprene. Then I turned her around, bent her forward, and rubbed myself against her rubberized behind. I considered whether I dared to undress her. I thought I could grip her weight belt with one hand and carefully remove her buoyancy compensator with the other. Then I’d lay her tank on the seafloor, and she could hold the tank tight in both arms to keep from being carried away by the current. I probably could have managed to peel her diving suit half off. The mere idea of pulling down her zipper and lifting out her breasts while she lay facedown on the bottom of the sea, helpless as a newborn babe, chained by a hose to her air supply — that image alone drove me out of my mind.
Naturally, I did nothing of the kind. We were twenty meters below the surface of the water, it was her fifteenth dive, I was her trainer, and the responsibility was mine. The cuttlefish got bored and swam off. Three butterfly rays hovered close to the ocean floor in the middle distance. Theo would have been ecstatic.
All my adult life I’d considered myself a person with little capacity for love. Occasionally I’d gaze at Antje’s face and think that she was really nice-looking. At such times, I felt happy that she was with me. Those brief moments were the peaks of my emotional life. Love, on the other hand, the kind of love that ruined entire families, incited wars, or drove the lovelorn to suicide — I knew a love like that only from the movies. The very idea seemed foreign to me. It was as though I was missing the organ whose function was to engender such a love. And so for a long time I’d believed there was something wrong with me. During my university days, I’d invested a lot of effort in trying to fall in love. That led to sex. But I was too honest to mistake horniness for true romance.
One day after Antje and I had been living together for some years, I heard Don Draper, an ad executive in the television series Mad Men, say to a woman, “What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons.” From then on, things got better for me. From then on, I stopped feeling deficient. I considered love a mixture of social convention and psychosomatic response. I believed people like Antje felt love because they were assured on all sides that it had to be. Antje had started saying “I love you” to me the first time we slept together. Eventually I learned to reply, “Love you too.” I’d simply decided to call a longtime, functioning companionship “love.” And I was even relatively sure that Antje and I meant the same thing.
Up until the moment when I embraced the statuesque, neoprene-wrapped Jola on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Until she clung to me. Until she thrust one hand between my thighs and grasped me hard, trying to overcome the barrier of the diving suit by brute force. Nothing like Antje’s girlish shyness when, once a week, she’d start to stroke the back of my neck. She usually came up behind me when I was sitting on the couch or at the computer and rubbed my neck and tickled my ears with little begging touches until I took hold of her wrists and kissed her purely in self-defense. When we kissed, she’d stick just the tip of her tongue between her teeth and lick my lips instead of properly opening her mouth. She’d giggle and slap her flip-flops on the floor extra loud when she ran ahead of me to the bedroom. She’d always want to lie on her back, because that was the only way she could come.
Thanks to Jola, it suddenly seemed obvious that my lack of belief in love had been the only reason I’d never left Antje. Antje was like the practical, convenient wardrobe we’d bought when we moved into the Residencia, a provisional solution that was still standing in the same place years later because it had proved itself useful and provided no immediate reasons for being discarded. When it came to not providing reasons, Antje was an artist.