We drove past long rows of fruit trees and rapeseed fields beneath a blue sky. In the distance mountains rose and quarries shone. A water tower and a small church with a roof turret appeared before us, surrounded by a few farms, cottages, and old meadows-the perfect summer idyll.
“Have you ever been to Strassenheim?” Peschkalek asked me. I nodded. He drove slowly. “You're wondering why I brought you here? Take a good look.”
I was struck by the stately building next to the church. According to a sign, it housed the mounted detachment and the canine unit of the Mannheim police headquarters. “No, take a good look. There, that truck to the left, and those two to the right. Do you know what they are? They're tanker trucks, each carrying thousands of liters of water. Water for drinking and cooking, and also for the animals. Why do you think these trucks are here? Well?” He enjoyed the suspense. “It looks like the regular water isn't drinkable, wouldn't you say? I suppose that though Strassenheim belongs to Mannheim, it is not connected to Mannheim's water supply, nor to that of Viernheim or Heddesheim. Strassenheim must have its own wells. Can they have dried up? With all the rain we've had in the past few weeks? No, there's plenty of water around here, and the water looks perfectly clear. It might smell a little, but then again it might not. It might taste a little weird, but then again it might not. I'm not saying that you drop dead if you drink it. Perhaps you'll feel a bit queasy, or maybe even get sick as a dog; maybe you'll shit or retch your guts out.”
Strassenheim lay behind us.
“How come you know all this?”
“I'm the kind of guy who puts two and two together. Know what I mean? The official agencies will never tell you anything, but here they're keeping such a low profile that that in itself is suspicious.” He began driving faster again. “We're crossing the border of the Käfertal watershed area. The munitions depot lies in the outer perimeter. Viernheim junction, where the inner perimeter of the wells begins, is about two kilometers beyond Strassenheim. It's anybody's guess how the damn groundwater flows. Be that as it may, Strassenheim has had to bear the brunt of it.” His right hand made a resigned wave, came clapping down onto his bald head, and then brushed back all the missing locks of hair. He chewed his mustache angrily, his teeth grinding.
I can't say that the sky looked any less blue or the rapeseed any less yellow. I've always had trouble believing in the existence of something I cannot see: God, Einstein's relativity, the harmfulness of smoking, the hole in the ozone. I was also skeptical because the munitions depot lay only a few kilometers away from the Benjamin-Franklin-Village in Käfertal, and I had a hard time imagining that the Americans would put their own people at risk. Not to mention that Viernheim lay closer to the depot than Strassenheim, and Viernheim's water supply didn't seem to have been affected. All things considered, had Peschkalek himself tasted the Strassenheim water, or had he sent it to be analyzed?
We were back in Edingen. As we drove down the Grenz-häfer Strasse, we saw Frau Büchler and Wendt's people coming out of the Grüner Baum Restaurant. The funeral meal had taken a long time. My old Opel was waiting in front of the cemetery.
“You and I have to talk this through at leisure,” I said to Peschkalek.
He handed me his card. “Call me when you have a moment. You don't believe me, do you? You're thinking: These are the ravings of a reporter, this is journalistic gob-bledygook. Well, let's pray that you're right.”
7 Tragedy or farce?
Peschkalek's poisonous groundwater streams pursued me into my dreams, and I saw the small Strassenheim chapel grow into a cathedral, the gargoyles on its roof spitting green, yellow, and red water. By the time I realized that the cathedral was made of rubber, its walls bloating and distending, it was too late. It exploded, and revolting brown slime burst from it. I woke up as the slime was about to reach my feet, and I couldn't go back to sleep. During my conversation with Peschkalek I had not been frightened. Now I was.
My father's stories came back to me. Throughout the years I was at school, he hadn't said a word about his experiences in World War I. Some of my classmates bragged about their fathers' heroic deeds, and I would have liked to have done the same. I knew that mine had been wounded a number of times, that he had been decorated and promoted. I wanted to talk about that at school, to brag a little. But he didn't want me to. He only became talkative in the last few years of his life. Mother had died, his days had become lonely, and when I visited him he spoke about many things, and about the war. Perhaps he also wanted to rid me of the idea that the Reich needed more lebensraum, even if it meant war.
He had been wounded three times. The first two times decently, as he put it, by a grenade splinter near Ypers and by a bayonet near Peronne. The third time, his company suffered a gas attack at Verdun. “Mustard gas. It's not a stinking, yellowish-green cloud, like chlorine gas, which you can see and so protect yourself against. Mustard gas is devious. You don't see it and you don't smell it. If you didn't see a comrade grab at his throat or didn't have a sixth sense and quickly slip on your gas mask, then that was it, in the blink of an eye.” My father had had a sixth sense and survived, while most of the men in his company had died. But he had gotten a big enough dose of gas to suffer for months. “The fever went. But that dizziness, even when you weren't moving, and all the retching, retching, retching…and then, mustard gas burns out the eyes. That was the worst part, the fear that it had got you in such a way that you'd never be able to see again.”
I heard the story of the gas attack more than once. Every time my father spoke about putting on the gas mask, he closed his eyes and covered his face with his hand, until he came to the part where he was released from the infirmary.
Had Leo known what her bonfire was capable of? Was that what she had wanted? Was that why she had accused and convicted herself so sternly? As for Lemke, I couldn't imagine that he didn't know what it was all about.
I was now fully awake. Terrorism in Germany. I had read somewhere that all major historical events happen twice, the first time as a tragedy, the second as a farce, and I had always seen the terrorism of the seventies and eighties, the commotion around it and the fight against it, as some kind of farce. Now I had to ask myself if I had been wrong. Poison gas in the air, the water, and the ground was no farce. And there I was, driving with Leo through France and Switzerland as if the world were one long spring.
Now self-recrimination was added to my fear. Whichever way I lay in bed felt wrong. Whether my eyes were open or shut, my thoughts whirled in the same circle. They whirled crazily until the dawn broke, the birds sang, and I showered and was once again my conscious, rational, skeptical self.
8 It makes sense, doesn't it?
I had promised Brigitte and Manu that we would spend Saturday in Heidelberg. Shopping, some ice cream, the zoo, the castle-the works. We took a tram and got off at the Bismarckplatz.
I hadn't been there for a long time. Everything was purple: The tram stops, tram shelters, kiosks, benches, trash cans, lights. The purpleness was disturbed by a yellow mailbox and a pale bust of Bismarck.
“How do you like that! The women's movement has taken over the Bismarckplatz!”
Brigitte stopped. “You and your silly chauvinism. Füruzan is oppressing Philipp, I am oppressing you, and now women have occupied the Bismarckplatz and you, poor man that you are, no longer know-”
“Come on, Brigitte, I was only joking.”
“Ha-ha-ha!” She walked off without beckoning me or Manu with a look or gesture to follow her, and I suddenly felt guilty, even though my conscience was clear. She marched into the Braun bookstore, and I waited outside. Should I have followed her to the Women's Studies section with suppliant eyes, drooping shoulders, and sensitive questions? Manu stayed outside with Nonni and me.