He dropped to the ground on his back and pulled me onto him. We lay together in the dirt. He twisted my hair into braids and stroked the back of my neck. He said, I love you, Jola. I didn’t take it amiss — I knew what he meant. It was a moment of perfect peace.
Theo asks, How come you two went on only one dive?
I say, Oh, you know, without you it’s only half as much fun.
He laughs: Little hypocrite.
While we drove up the gravel track from Mala, Sven kept one arm around me. He feels good even when he’s dressed. Shortly before we reached the main road, he had me move away and sit at a decent distance. Everybody on the island knows everybody else. Our silence now had another quality. We smiled a lot. When he let me out, he said, See you tomorrow. I said, Give my best to Antje. He said, I will. That meant, Everything, really everything, is all right.
8
It was like déjà vu: Jola was sitting on the same step at the same time, waiting for me. Alone. I backed the van up to the Casa Raya, got out, and said, “Hello.” The same mistake. I should have stayed behind the steering wheel. When I was in front of her, she grabbed me by the collar and kissed me on the mouth.
“Morning,” she said.
I took a quick look around to check whether Antje or Theo was standing at one of the windows to wave good-bye to us. Thank God we had no neighbors. The geometric pattern of the morning shadows decorated the empty sandlot. “Get in,” I said.
I’d decided to try Famara. The flat, sandy bottom there sloped down gradually, so that on most days the surf swirled up floating particles and clouded your vision. In any case, apart from fields of seaweed, shoals of Salema porgies, and a Mediterranean moray eel that was always in the same crevice, there wasn’t that much to see. But you entered the dive site directly from the old harbor, which meant that you had to change into and out of your diving outfit right there in the village. It was the best place for us not to be alone with each other.
I talked nonstop during the drive to Famara. My mouth and the speech center in my brain carried out a program I’d given no orders for. For some reason, I expatiated on technical diving, on the enormous expense in equipment and planning required to go down a paltry hundred meters into the sea — a distance you could cover on land in a minute without even noticing it. I explained the tremendous difference between descent and ascent, using the shipwreck expedition I was planning as an example. It would be a matter of a few minutes to dive down to the wreck, and after that I’d have only twenty minutes to inspect it. On the other hand, I’d need more than two hours to go back up, stopping along the way, if I didn’t want to endanger my life. The last decompression stop would require me to remain a full hour at a depth of six meters, with light, air, and the dive ship’s hull directly above my head. I’d have to hover there, constrained by water pressure and the accumulation of nitrogen in my body.
No-decompression dives were surely the only kind Jola would go on in her life, and therefore in all likelihood she’d never really understand what no-decompression time was. She looked out the window. She was wearing an olive-green miniskirt. It cost me an effort not to think about the shaved pubes under it. Bernie came toward us in his minibus and waved as he passed. I lifted my hand, and Jola imitated me. As if we’d traveled down that stretch of road together a thousand times and greeted Bernie together a thousand times. I knew he’d ask me about her the next chance he got.
We parked on a narrow side street. Two old fishermen interrupted their chess game. A Spanish woman stepped out of her house and poured a bucket of dirty water at our feet. A German shepherd was dozing in the yard under a jacked-up rowboat. In our black diving suits and with our tanks on our backs, we waddled like extraterrestrials through the dead streets. Although it was still early in the morning, the heat was accumulating between the old facades. Jola’s face reddened with effort. Before we entered the water, she tried to take my hand. I shook her off. I didn’t know what I thought was worse: that things had gone so far the previous day, or that nevertheless I hadn’t actually had her. It was probably the combination of both.
Visibility was atrocious and the water as warm as urine. We bobbed around in the murky swill at a maximum depth of nine meters. Not even the Mediterranean moray was at home. It astonished me to think I had entertained, if only for a few supremely lascivious moments, the idea that I’d met the love of my life in Jola Pahlen. I wasn’t interested in trouble. For the past fourteen years, my existence had been predicated on the wise decision to stay out of other people’s affairs. “Germany” was the name of a system whose entire focus was on what belonged to whom and who was to blame for what. Jola was Germany. She’d come from there, and there she would return. She and Theo had brought a part of the war zone with them to the island. And instead of keeping the greatest possible distance, I’d come that close to plunging in with both feet. There was no undoing what had happened. But a man could swerve and still get back on a steady course.
Today I’d add a caveat: provided he knows how to drive. Slamming on the brakes and jerking the steering wheel around is never the right tactic.
“Fantastic dive!” Jola cried, stumbled over her fins, and fell back into the shallow water.
I wondered aloud how many more times I was going to have to explain that you must walk backward when wearing fins. Moreover, I added, it was about time for her to learn how to adjust her buoyancy instead of continuing to lurch and zigzag through the water. It wasn’t a matter of lack of talent, no one could be reproached for that. It was a matter of engaging with the fundamental principles of the sport. Or was that too much to ask?
Jola said nothing. I reduced our surface break to a necessary minimum and insisted on executing the day’s second dive in the same spot. Because, I said, calm, shallow water was best suited for unsure divers.
We’d set out from Lahora shortly after eight o’clock; it wasn’t yet noon when we completed the second dive. While I loaded the van, Jola stood behind me wearing a white terry-cloth robe, which she’d brought for the first time, and a towel around her head. She looked like a model in a catalog of luxury bath accessories. It would have been fabulous to feel her breasts through that thick terry cloth.
“Shall we go somewhere else?”
“I don’t have enough cylinders for a third dive.”
“Where we were yesterday? Just to go there?”
I turned to her. “To finish what we started?”
She smiled and held out her hand. “Maybe it’s only the beginning.”
I evaded the hand. The effort not to scream made my voice sound choked when I said, “Maybe you could try not to behave like a tramp for a change?”
She sat down on the curb and started to cry. Softly, without a show. She pressed her face into the collar of her bathrobe.
Fuck the old fishermen. Fuck the woman with the dirty water, who was standing in the doorway of her house again. Hardly any of the indigenous islanders knew me, especially not in Famara. The German shepherd under the rowboat stood up, as if he wanted to see what Jola’s problem was. I sat next to her and put an arm around her shoulders.