The captain is not a control freak, but once he takes charge of something, everything has to be done the way he imagines, which isn’t always easy because he ignores details and is so sparing with his speech it’s as though words on board ship were rationed. He comes from up north in Lower Saxony, from a village near Friesoythe, apparently that explains a few things, people who know say the locals there limit themselves to one sentence per day, they start it in the morning and end it in the evening, I can’t say myself, I was only once in Bremerhaven on business and once privately in Sankt Peter-Ording, to me those northern states might as well be a foreign country. Now that we’ve managed to survive a vertically divided Germany unscathed, as far as I’m concerned we could happily divide the country along some middle latitude. “I’ve got this bad feeling in my gut,” says the Captain after a mumbled “good morning.” The way he says “gut” makes it sound like an onomatopoeic expression for bad mood.
“You mean Dan Quentin?”
“I have this bad feeling.”
“I can understand that.”
“The company is keen on the idea.”
“The siren call of fame.”
“We don’t know the man.”
“His manager, on the other hand …”
“Gets on your nerves?”
“You might say that. Maybe he’ll relax a bit once his boss arrives. When is Quentin supposed to join us?”
“King George Island, they’re flying him in.”
“He who would achieve much has little time,” I say in an exaggeratedly nasal voice, but the Captain is immune to all irony. Even when he does speak he looks off in the distance somewhere beyond your shoulder, where some more urgent task seems to await him.
“We’re supposed to give him all the help he needs.”
“I take it we’re supposed to do it out of love.”
“Will you manage?”
“Do you expect complications?”
“It involves a lot of people.”
“We can limit the number of participants.”
“He wants to make the biggest SOS he can.”
“But to do that he’ll need our passengers.”
“The biggest SOS in history.”
“I assume that he’s been informed of the restrictions.”
“We’re turning a blind eye to that.”
“Are we?”
“If anyone inquires, the whole thing was an emergency preparedness exercise.”
“The passengers will have to agree.”
“That’s your task.”
“I’ll tell them tomorrow about Mr. Quentin’s installation.”
“We’ll discuss the rest another time.”
After Helene moved out, when relocating to the house in Solln failed to achieve its therapeutic goal, the pictures on the walls faded into strange reminiscences. Whenever I looked at them I had the feeling I was looking through the window at some random life stored in the building across the street. I took them down one by one as I imbibed the red wine Helene’s father had bequeathed to us: the old man had squirreled away these excellent bottles so that one far-off day they might help his son-in-law cope with the separation from his daughter. The pictures had left annoying outlines on the wall. Why is it that everything we do leaves an imprint (it takes a hundred years for a footprint in the Antarctic to disappear), why can’t we simply glide through moments without a trace, like birds through the air? I didn’t want to repaint all those walls, it was unclear how long I’d last inside them anyway. So I went into town and bought a large A3-size sketchpad and some watercolors, and started painting single letters of the alphabet onto individual sheets, after spending a long time deliberating which color to use for each. For A I chose a richly darkened yellow, like an aged Riesling, and for Z a garnet red pinot. O came out in a gray so soft it was indiscernible from more than a couple inches away. I painted one letter per day, and as soon as the paint dried I tacked the finished artwork to the wall. When at last the entire alphabet was adorning my walls I felt better in this house that I would never call “my house.” The letters allowed me to believe in a new beginning, and they beckoned to me from the walls, enticing me to read. On a trip to Ladakh I’d heard of a man who had become a reading recluse and withdrawn into a single book. Twice a week he visits a sandalwood dealer who lives in a wooden house on a stone base near the Indus River, and whoever wants to hear him read can find him there. The man reads one line from his book and then takes his listeners on an exegetical journey through all possible nuances. I felt tempted to adopt the same procedure. At random I selected a book out of a faux-antiqued series devoted to ancient philosophers and began reading line by line, paragraph by paragraph, with the same concentration as the guru in Ladakh, after which I took three sips and laid the book aside. Then I stretched my legs and returned and wrote down everything I could remember of the reading. Little by little all my initial flippancy evaporated and my supply of red wine dwindled but I sipped away until I had practically memorized the entire book. According to my informants in Ladakh it takes the word-fasting guru twenty years to guide his students through that one book, whereupon he starts all over again with a new batch of followers. Despite my admiration there was something about the whole procedure that bothered me, something didn’t seem to make sense. How can people consider a book holy unless they’ve rewritten it for their own purposes? Is it even possible for two people to mean the same thing when they say “God” or when they talk about love? At first I underlined individual words or sentences, often two or three times, I circled them, boxed them in, filling the small spaces between the lines with my observations until I realized there was no reason not to use the margins. I didn’t set the book aside until it was covered with my scribbling. After that I bought this leather-bound notebook. I declined the seller’s offer to have my name engraved.