“Are you crazy, doing this”—she drew her hand across her throat—“when the fish was alive?”
“That,” I said, also making the slashing gesture, “was a deadly fish!”
She stared at me aghast. “So when you stirred up the sand around it, were you doing that so we could see it better, or what?”
“I wanted to wake it up so it would do a somersault for you.”
“That close to us?”
“It wasn’t my first electric ray, Jola.”
“All the same, it was as pallid and limp as a corpse. I thought it was dead!” She repeated my gesture yet again. “Theo could have been killed!”
“Because you shoved him!” I shouted.
“No!” She stood right in front of me, her arms folded, her breasts molded as though in plastic under the tight neoprene. It briefly occurred to me that maybe she wasn’t angry at all, that she simply enjoyed putting on such a performance.
“Because you gave a signal that wasn’t agreed on in advance,” she said. “Haven’t you ever heard that you’re supposed to use only prearranged hand signals? For safety reasons? That’s one of the ‘Do It Right’ principles you value so much, isn’t it?”
Her tone of voice was slowly getting on my nerves. I said, “It’s a gesture everybody understands.”
“No it isn’t, as we see.”
“But you shoved Theo!”
“Don’t try to turn the tables on me. You’re the one who bears the responsibility. You communicated badly, so you alone are to blame. If something had happened to Theo, you’d have had to answer for it.”
She turned around and went over to Theo, who was leaning against the van, smoking a cigarette. He looked like a detached observer, waiting with quiet curiosity to see how the scene would develop. The bit of sidewalk we were standing on felt like a stage to me too. Not a good feeling.
“Sorry, Theo,” Jola said. She stroked his cheek as though he were a little boy who’d cut his knee. “It was supposed to be just a stupid joke. Theo and the dead fish. Ha-ha.”
“Forget about it,” Theo said, drawing on his cigarette and not taking his eyes off Jola.
“It was Sven’s mistake. Complain to him.”
She threw a last, annihilating glance at me over her shoulder and then stalked around the van and out of my sight. There was no other possible way to exit the stage.
That was probably the exact moment when I should have understood the game Jola was playing. She’d dropped enough hints. Along with Lotte Hass’s biography, Jola had been reading countless nonfiction books about diving and the underwater world. And she, of all people, was supposed not to have known what an electric ray looked like and what my warning sign had meant? And when I tried to goad the torpedo into reacting, she’d thought — what? That I was playing around with a dead fish? I should have made it my business to recognize what was consistent in Jola’s behavior. Lawyers are supposed to have a sixth sense for patterns. But I wasn’t a lawyer, after all; I was a diving instructor. Instead of wishing the two of them a nice vacation and taking to my heels, I came to the conclusion that Jola wasn’t completely wrong. If Theo had collided with the ray and suffered a fatal accident, I might have been accused of involuntary manslaughter. Maybe even of murder. The motive would have been clear if half the island had taken the witness stand and testified to my alleged affair with Jola.
We separated for the rest of the day. Theo and Jola wanted to stay in town a little longer, go to dinner later, and take a taxi back to Lahora. I was grateful for the evening off. I steered my Volkswagen van through the volcanic landscape, alone and enjoying it.
It’s easy to judge your past self. How stupid you were, how little you grasped. Patterns, though not necessarily explanations, show themselves only in hindsight. So with all our efforts to do everything right, we can still be sure to arrive notoriously too late.
JOLA’S DIARY, TENTH DAY
Monday, November 21. Afternoon.
I don’t have much time. He could come back at any moment. I’m in the Wunder Bar café, surrounded by German tourists. There’s a piece of cheesecake and a cup of filter coffee on the table. It’s 3:32 in the afternoon. Scarcely an hour ago, Theo tried to kill me again. Sounds like the beginning of a crime novel. But it isn’t. Maybe I should compose an appeal for help while I’m sitting here: Dear Sir or Madam, if you find these notes, please inform the police at once! Inquire as to the whereabouts of a certain Jolante von der Pahlen. Has she disappeared? Has something happened to her? Please tell the police it was no accident! They should question the writer Theodor Hast, and they shouldn’t forget he’s a true master in the art of twisting the truth. That’s his profession.
It was so brazen, the way he attacked poor Sven! He said he’d misinterpreted Sven’s hand signal and assumed the fish was dead. The dead fish and the actress — ha-ha. I wonder if he concocted that story before he decided to push me onto an electric ray? Or is he ingenious enough to come up with such explanations spontaneously? In any case, he actually threatened to file a complaint with the police, while the truth was that Sven would have been perfectly justified in showing us the door. But the race is to the cheeky. In the end, Sven really thought he was to blame for everything.
Now the old man’s looking for an ATM. He wants to withdraw a hefty sum from my account so he can take me out to dinner this evening. Such a failed murder attempt calls for a celebration. He probably didn’t even want to kill me. One doesn’t break a pretty toy on purpose; one merely wants to find out how much it can take. One wants to see it perform a two-hundred-volt dance at the bottom of the sea. To watch it roll up its eyes, twitch epileptically, swallow water, lose consciousness. What fun.
Did he think Sven wouldn’t see him push me? Or was he determined that he should? Maybe it’s not really about me. Maybe it’s some kind of suicide attempt. Maybe Theo beats me right in front of the living-room window and shoves me onto a lethal fish before Sven’s eyes as a way of provoking Sven. Until he has no other choice but to avenge me and hang the old man on a rock the next time we dive. Theo’s clever enough to know that staging an accident would be easy for an experienced diver like Sven. No marks. No witnesses. If that’s so, I’m less than a toy. Less than an instrument. Only a kind of lure. The piece of cheesecake in the mousetrap.