While he was inhaling deeply, in order to finish this sentence, the architect died.
The staff of the Asian massage parlor close to Basel’s Central Station waited for him in vain that afternoon. They knew the architect as a man of the clock. It was a disappointment for them, because the night before he had called to say, “Tomorrow I want to try a transsexual.”
And so the architect died without ever having tried a transsexual. Injustice spares no man, and regularly drags down the non-Jewish with it as well.
THE FIRST PERSON to notice that the architect was dying was Marc. He had been sitting in the corridor waiting while the physician on duty sat in his office, trying to explain everything to the architect’s family. While he sat there being bored, Marc was suddenly overcome by curiosity about the man with whom his girlfriend had spent most of her life. He pushed open the door and entered the room.
There he lay, his girlfriend’s ex, peaceful and pale but exhausted. Marc took a few steps towards the bed; the door fell closed behind him. He leaned over the face of the man who was officially still his girlfriend’s husband. And although it wasn’t like him at all, for he was a quiet man who lived in harmony with himself and his surroundings, he said: “Hello, you worthless piece of shit.”
The architect did not respond to these words, either.
Marc walked to the other side of the bed and, to his own surprise, said: “You thought you were really something, didn’t you? Well, look at you now.”
Marc did not consider it immoral to say such things. The architect couldn’t hear him. When people can’t hear you, you may say whatever you like. Strangely enough, it made him feel relieved. Expressing feelings that he had never known he had. It was glorious to finally listen to your heart. They say the heart is good at loving, but the heart can swear mightily as well. Marc’s heart swore to beat the band.
He was planning to go on tossing curses at the dying man, but then his eye was caught by the equipment to the left of the bed. Marc took a good look at the equipment, and while he was doing so, one of the instruments began beeping. Life was leaving the architect for good.
Beneath Marc’s eyes the life disappeared, yet he saw nothing, and, to tell the truth, there wasn’t much to see. He didn’t hesitate for a moment, despite the enjoyment he felt in railing against the dying man; when the actual dying started, he sided with the living. He ran out into the corridor and shouted: “Help! Emergency!”
Within forty-five seconds, two nurses and a young intern had gathered around the architect’s bed, and all three of them noted that there was not much left for them to do. For the sake of protocol, they performed a few maneuvers.
The life had gone out of the architect, and life that has gone does not easily return.
One of the nurses went to the office of the physician on duty, where he was still informing the family of the risks, the possibilities, the dangers, and the hopes for the future. Marc followed her. On their way down the corridor, Marc felt himself growing light with sorrow. Standing eye to eye with death had not left him cold.
The nurse looked at the doctor, then at Xavier and his mother. They had to turn around to see her. When they had, she said, “I’m sorry to have to tell you…”
That was all she needed to say. Marc threw his arms around his girlfriend and said, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” Then he turned and hugged Xavier, who less than two hours before had been weeping bitterly in Bettina’s room, but who now could not shed a tear.
XAVIER THOUGHT ABOUT his grandfather’s club, his beautiful eyes and prominent nose. He thought: I have a duty to perform, and I mustn’t allow anything as mundane as my father’s death to let me lose sight of that. Parents die, that’s something every child has to go through. That is how things are supposed to be. They die. That’s Nature. That is no catastrophe. My father died of natural causes, with the emphasis on “natural.” A person can live with that.
“Of course you’ll want to say goodbye to him,” the doctor said. He led the family and Marc to the little hospital room, where the equipment had already been disconnected, in order to save electricity.
“Come with us, Marc,” Xavier’s mother said. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
They stood around the bed of the man who had missed his first transsexual by a hair. Somewhere in Basel, that transsexual was walking around the massage parlor, shouting, “Where’s my three o’clock?” And in the hospital corridor the physician on duty thought: If I have to go skiing with the family again this winter, I’m going to jump out the window. He was in the midst of a crisis. The combination of family, adultery, and work had produced first a rut, then disappointment, and finally bitterness.
The mother sighed. Marc squeezed her hand, he whispered: “Everything will be fine.” Xavier examined his father’s body. A steam engine that had exploded — that was the closest comparison that presented itself.
Marc, Xavier, and the mother left the room. They had said goodbye. The architect’s life was over. It had been a rich life, by human standards.
“If he had been found a little earlier,” the mother asked the physician on duty once they were out in the corridor, “could you have done anything for him?”
“I don’t think so,” the doctor said. “No, there was nothing we could have done.” He was thinking about the shambles his own life had become.
The doctor shook hands warmly with the remains of the Radek family.
Perhaps Xavier was oversensitive, perhaps he had a lively imagination, but when the doctor’s hand slipped into his he thought about killing as a profession, as work that had to be done, and which therefore resembled all the other work that could not be left undone. If death alone can put an end to suffering, then death would seem to be a solution, an answer. Perhaps even a prudent answer.
He wanted to ask the physician what happened to patients who turned into vegetables, but he held himself in check.
Less than a mile away, the transsexual was pacing peevishly around the massage parlor, shouting: “I could just as well have stayed at home, instead of getting all gussied up like this. And for what?” His colleagues weren’t listening to him. They were smoking and drinking cola in order to pass the time. They had enough problems with their own customers, who often didn’t show up, either.
MARC DROVE XAVIER and the mother back to the house. Death had made Marc silent. It took a while before his mind was once again occupied by the Boeing 737.
They had barely entered the living room when the phone rang. It was the architect’s neighbor.
“How is your husband doing?” she asked. “I’ve been trying to reach you all day.”
“He just passed away,” Xavier’s mother replied.
“That’s terrible,” the neighbor said. But it sounded as though she had expected nothing less. “I feel so bad. He was so young. And so handsome. This is a great blow for all of us, for the city, for the neighborhood, for Swiss architecture. And just this afternoon he was lying there so peacefully under his punching bag. I did what I could, I put a blanket over him and a pillow under his head, I asked whether he wanted something to drink. But he was unconscious. As though he’d been struck by lightning. But, now that I have you on the phone anyway, I know this isn’t the right moment to talk about this, but your husband’s Saab is still parked in front of my driveway, and I can’t get out. I thought, well, maybe you could move the car up a little? If you tell me where the keys are, I can do it myself.” The three of them drove to the villa where Xavier had grown up. They looked for the car keys.
The neighbor lady came, too; she offered to warm up a can of soup for the next of kin, and talked nonstop. When they said they didn’t want any soup, she offered to open a can of pineapple slices. But her pineapple was not wanted, either. The next of kin were not hungry. A death on the street made the neighbor lady extremely talkative. Like so many people, she subscribed to the newspaper only for the obituaries, which she studied closely and read out loud to her husband, often accompanied by remarks of disapproval. After more than an hour, Xavier finally found the keys to the Saab on the floor beneath a dresser.