In Free Fall Read online

  Outside, summer speeds by in a band of green and blue. A road runs alongside the tracks. The cars follow the train as though they are glued to it. The pavement is flecked with flat pools of light. Oskar has just pulled out his sunglasses when a young man asks if the seat beside him is taken. Oskar turns away and hides his eyes behind the dark glasses. The young man walks on down the aisle. A brown puddle of coffee spreads on the foldaway table.

  Oskar’s aesthetic sense is often what makes life intolerable for him. Many people cannot stand their fellow men, but few are able to explain precisely why. Oskar can forgive the fact that his fellow human beings consist merely of protons, neutrons, and electrons. But he cannot forgive their inability to maintain their composure in the face of this tragic state of affairs. When he thinks about his childhood, he sees himself at fourteen, surrounded by boys and girls who are laughing and pointing at his feet. He had, without his parents’ permission, sold his bicycle in order to buy his first pair of handmade shoes—three sizes too big, to be on the safe side. To this day he despises tactless laughter and avoids pompous people, show-offs, and the Schadenfreude of the stupid. To his mind, there is no violence greater than an offense against aesthetics. If he were ever to commit murder—certainly not something he has planned—it would probably be because his victim had made an importunate remark.

  His schoolmates suddenly stopped teasing him when he reached a height of 1.9 meters at the age of sixteen. They began to vie for his attention instead. They spoke loudly whenever he was in earshot on the school grounds. When a girl raised her hand to answer a question in class, she would glance over at him to make sure he was listening. Even the math teacher, an unkempt person whose neck hair stuck out over his shirt collar, would turn to Oskar with a “That’s right, isn’t it?” when he placed the chalk-breaking period after a row of figures on the board. Yet Oskar was the only one in his class who had left school after the Abitur exam without a practical experience of love for his fellow man. He viewed this as a victory. He was convinced that there was not a single person on this earth whose presence he could endure for more than ten minutes.

  When he met Sebastian at the university, the magnitude of this error made him quite dizzy. The fact that they noticed each other on the first day of the new semester was due to their height. Their eyes met over the heads of the other students, and they seemed to be automatically drawn to sit next to each other in the lecture theater. They sat in silence through the embarrassing welcome speech by the dean, then started chatting easily as they left the hall. Sebastian did not say anything even faintly naive in the following ten minutes, and he did not laugh in an irritating manner, not once. Oskar could not only tolerate his company, but even felt a desire to continue their conversation. They went into the dining hall together and continued talking into the evening. From that moment on, Oskar sought the company of his new friend, and Sebastian acquiesced. Their friendship had no preliminary stages—nothing had to grow and develop. It simply turned on, like a lamp when the right switch is flicked.

  Any attempt to describe the following months runs the risk of getting lost in exaggeration. Ever since Oskar started at the university in Freiburg, he had appeared in public dressed always in a morning suit—long jacket and striped trousers—and a silver cravat. It was not long before Sebastian started appearing at lectures in a similar dandy’s uniform. Every morning they walked across the lawn in front of the Institute of Physics as if drawn to each other by an invisible string—bypassing all the other students in various different years who seemed to exist only to get in their way—and greeted each other with a handshake. They bought only one copy of every textbook because they liked bending their heads over each page together. The seats next to them in the lecture theater remained empty. Everyone found their getup odd, yet no one laughed at them, not even when they walked arm in arm on the bank of the Dreisam in the afternoons, stopping every couple of steps, because matters of importance could only be discussed while standing still. In their old-fashioned garb, they looked like something from a yellowing postcard, carefully cut out and pasted—but not seamlessly—into the present. The ripple of the Dreisam punctuated their conversation and the trees above them waved in the wind. The late-summer sun was never more beautiful than when one of them pointed at it and said something about the solar neutrino problem.

  In the evenings, they met in the library. Oskar strolled along the shelves, returning from time to time to their shared table with a book. Ever since Oskar had got into the habit of putting his arm around his friend while bringing his attention to something interesting in a book, female students of German literature had started gathering on the benches behind the glass walls of the reading room. At parties, when Oskar and Sebastian glided through the crowds separately, Sebastian, with a heavy heart, sometimes kissed a girl. When he lifted his head, he could count on seeing Oskar smiling at him from across the room. At the end of the evening, the girl would be led to the door and handed over to anyone passing by, like a piece of clothing. Then Oskar and Sebastian would walk together through the night until they had to part ways. They came to a standstill, the light from a streetlamp falling around them like a tent that neither of them wanted to leave. It was hard to decide on a suitable moment to say good-bye—this one, or the next? As the headlights of passing cars caused their combined shadow to rotate on its axis, the friends made a silent vow that nothing would ever change between them. The future was an evenly woven carpet of togetherness unrolling before them. When the chirp of the first bird sounded, they turned away and each disappeared into his half of the coming morning.

  On the first Friday of every month, Oskar allows himself to imagine for a few seconds that the InterCity Express is bringing him back to one of those farewells beneath the streetlamps of Freiburg. Back to a heated discussion on the banks of the Dreisam, or at least to a moment over a shared textbook. He feels his lips curve into a smile, but immediately falls into a peevish mood. Clearly the Freiburg of the streetlamps no longer exists. What does exist is this: a circular underground tunnel in Switzerland where he makes elementary particles collide at nearly the speed of light. And the Freiburg where he has been invited by Sebastian’s wife to dinner with the family. It was on a Friday that Oskar had met Liam—tiny as a doll then—for the first time. It was on a Friday that he had learned about Sebastian’s renown at the university. On Fridays, they look each other in the eye and try not to think about the past. On Fridays, they fight. For Oskar, Sebastian is not just the only person whose presence brings him pleasure. Sebastian is also the person whose slightest movement can turn him white-hot with rage.

  WHEN THE TRAIN COMES TO A STANDSTILL on an open stretch of land, Oskar leans down to his bag to remove a rolled-up copy of Der Spiegel magazine, which falls open at the right page. He doesn’t need to read the article again—he practically knows it by heart. He looks at the photo instead: it shows a forty-year-old man with blond hair and eyebrows, and clear blue eyes. He is laughing, and his half-open mouth has taken on a slightly rectangular shape. Oskar is more familiar with this laugh than with his own. He touches the photograph carefully, stroking the forehead and cheeks, then suddenly presses his thumb into it, as if he were trying to stub out a cigarette. He is worried about the train stopping like this. In the seats across the aisle from him, a mother in a flowery outfit is handing out sandwiches from a Tupperware container. The smell of salami fills the air.

  “So it’s four now!” exclaims the father, whose fat neck bulges over his collar. He slaps his newspaper with the back of his hand. “See! Four people have died now! Bled to death during surgery. The medical director continues to deny it.”

  “Four little Negro boys,” a childish voice sings, “on the river Rhine.”

  “Quiet,” the mother says, and she stops the song midflow with a piece of apple.

  “‘Is the pharmaceutical industry behind the experiments on patients?’” the father reads. He shoves out his lips crudely as he drinks from his bottle of beer.r />
  “Criminals, the lot of them,” the mother says.

  “Ought to be locked up.”

  “If only.”

  Oskar puts Der Spiegel back into his bag and hopes that Sebastian will not smell salami on his clothes when they greet each other. He strides out of the carriage and almost stumbles when the train jerks into motion. Send all the stupid people to war, he thinks, as he leans against the wall next to the toilets. Let them burn to a crisp in some African desert or in an Asian jungle, it really doesn’t matter. Another fifty years of peace and the people in this country will have regressed to the level of apes.

  Outside, the first well-tended front gardens of the Freiburg suburbs have appeared.

  [3]

  “SUMMER IN FREIBURG IS JUST WONDERFUL.”

  Oskar is standing by the open window behind a half-drawn curtain, cradling a glass of wine and breathing in the scent of the wisteria that he had admired from the street when he got out of the taxi. He is wearing a dark sweater despite the heat, but he looks fresh as a daisy, as though sweating is not something of which he is capable. He hears the parquet creak behind him, and turns his head.

  Sebastian is walking across the large dining room, arms dangling by his sides, deliberately relaxed, quite the opposite of his friend. His hair is as startlingly fair as Oskar’s is dark. While Oskar always looks as if he is attending a formal celebration of some kind, Sebastian has something boyish about him. His movements have a playful openness about them, and though he dresses well—today in a white shirt and linen trousers—he always looks as if he has slightly outgrown his shirtsleeves and trouser legs. On him, growing older seems to be a mistake, and age has merely deepened his laugh lines.

  He walks right up to Oskar and places a hand that he knows is warm and dry upon Oskar’s neck. Sebastian closes his eyes for a moment as the smell of his friend sweeps over him like a memory. The calm way they stand so close together indicates habit.

  “I’m going to murder someone in four days,” says Sebastian, “but I don’t know anything about it yet.”

  Sebastian could have said that without telling a lie. Instead he says, “Summer in Freiburg is as beautiful as those who appreciate it.” His words strike a false note—they betray his uneasiness rather than conceal it. Sebastian’s hand slides off Oskar and falls into emptiness as his friend steps smoothly to one side. Below them, outside, Bonnie and Clyde have reached the start of the street. They turn and float past the house like flotsam and jetsam.

  “Let’s get to the point,” Oskar says, his eyes resting on the ducks in the canal. “I read your outpourings in Der Spiegel.”

  “I take it you’re congratulating me.”

  “It’s a declaration of war, cher ami.”

  “My God, Oskar.” Sebastian shoves one hand into his pocket and passes his other over his face. “The sun is shining and the birds are singing. It’s not a matter of life and death. It’s about a theory of physics.”

  “Even a harmless theory like the earth being round cost a lot of people their lives.”

  “If Copernicus had had a friend like you,” Sebastian replies, “the earth would still be flat.”

  The corner of Oskar’s mouth twitches. He takes out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and waits until Sebastian, who doesn’t smoke, has found some matches and given him a light.

  “And if Copernicus had believed in the Many-Worlds Interpretation,” Oskar retorts, the cigarette between his lips jerking as he speaks, “mankind would have been wiped out by idiocy.”

  Sebastian sighs. It isn’t easy arguing with someone who is part of the greatest intellectual endeavor of the new millennium. Oskar’s goal is to unite quantum physics with the general theory of relativity. He wants to bring E = hν together with Gαβ = 8πTαβ and thus make two views of the universe into one. One question and one answer. A single equation that describes everything. He is not alone in searching for a theory of everything. There are hordes of physicists working on it, all competing with each other, knowing that the winner not only will receive the Nobel Prize, but will also follow in the footsteps of Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg in gaining a piece of immortality. The winner’s name will forever be associated with a certain epoch—the age of quantum gravity. Oskar’s chances of winning are not at all bad.

  Sebastian’s focus, to put it carefully, lies elsewhere. He is an experimental physicist in nanotechnology at the University of Freiburg and is regarded as brilliant in his field. But from Oskar’s point of view, Sebastian is a mere bricklayer and it is theoretical physicists who are the architects. Sebastian is not engaged in fighting for immortality. His free time is taken up by the Many-Worlds Interpretation—whose very name, from Oskar’s point of view, reveals that it is not a theory but a hobbyhorse. Sebastian is grazing in an empty field. The great physicists left it behind some fifty years ago. In Oskar’s eyes, it is now of esoteric interest only, or for show-offs. A dead end.

  Sebastian knows that Oskar is basically right. Sometimes he feels like a child who stubbornly persists in trying to make a lightbulb out of a preserving jar and a piece of wire despite his parents’ objections. But in front of his less gifted colleagues, in front of his students, and, most of the time, to himself, he claims to be looking for a new approach to questions of time and space. An approach that would leave the Many-Worlds Interpretation behind. Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether Sebastian still believes in it or not, for he has no choice but to continue on the path he has carved out. Even if he were to take it upon himself to join the race Oskar is in, he would never be able to make up for the ten years he had lost. The final push to find the theory of everything had begun once the existence of W and Z bosons had been successfully proved in experiments. Oskar and Sebastian had been in their twenties then, the age at which people have the best ideas of their lives, the age at which Oskar had his only idea. Oskar had devoted himself to his theory of discrete time, behaving like an obsessive lover. Hour after hour, week after week—for ten years he had pursued it, regardless of whether it would eventually yield to him. Sebastian had not wanted anything to do with it. At an appropriate juncture, he had turned his attention to other things—not only to another theory, but, above all, to another life.

  THE MAN WHO HAD THE DUBIOUS HONOR of presiding over this turning point in Sebastian’s life was called Little Red Riding Hood. He had earned the nickname because of the bald pate, glowing red from wine, that emerged through his threadbare fringe of hair. He always wore a shabby corduroy jacket, the shoulders of which were covered with a white layer of dandruff. Unlike many of his colleagues, Little Red Riding Hood was adored by his students. And while he took them seriously, and stimulated their intelligence with complicated assignments, the affection was not mutual. Little Red Riding Hood especially disliked students who challenged what he said.

  He had a particular aversion to the two young men who stood blocking the entrance to the lecture theater every morning. Their arrogance was legendary and their friendship was the subject of gossip even among the lecturers. They were said to love physics even more than they loved each other, and they fought over it with the passion of rivals. Little Red Riding Hood could not bear listening to their bragging conversation. Their backs were far too straight as they stood there surrounded by a circle of listeners, reciting formulae like the verses of a libretto, ordering the universe with conductors’ hands. Every now and then Oskar would turn his head to draw on one of his Egyptian cigarettes, doing so with an affectation that stirred his audience into nervous movement.

  The entire faculty had long since been made acquainted with Oskar’s view that the world was a finely spun web of causalities, with a hidden pattern that could only be deciphered either from a great distance or from up close. Recognition of the pattern, he intoned, was a matter of being at the right distance, and was therefore possible only for God and for quantum physicists. Normal people remained in the middle distance, blind to the nature of things.

  Sebastian, who always spoke a little
less loudly and also more slowly, called his friend a despicable determinist. He claimed not to believe in causality himself. Causality was, like space and time, a theoretical problem of cognition. To provoke Oskar and everyone around them, he cast doubt on the validity of empiricism as a method of establishing scientific findings. A man who stands by the river and watches a thousand white swans swim by cannot conclude that there are no black swans. Therefore physics is ultimately the servant of philosophy.

  Little Red Riding Hood pushed past the arguing students impatiently. It was impossible to give a lecture any longer without hearing their intrusive voices. Sometimes he looked up grumpily from his notes, thinking that their whispering would drive him to the brink, only to realize that Oskar and Sebastian were not even present.

  But they were very much present on the day that Little Red Riding Hood set a problem on dark energy, which could be solved only by the assumption of an Einsteinian constant that was not a constant. The next week, Oskar and Sebastian were not standing before the doors when Little Red Riding Hood arrived, but already sitting at their usual places, looking him in the eye. He summoned them to the board even before he had reached the lectern. They rose in unison. Oskar went to the right-hand side of the board; after a second’s hesitation, Sebastian went to the left. They flung their frock coats over their shoulders, and each held his with one hand as the other hand scratched frenziedly with a piece of chalk on the board. They wrote like men possessed: Oskar from the right and Sebastian from the left. The lecture theater was silent apart from the squeak of chalk that accompanied the growth of the equation. When their hands met in the middle of the bottom line, all fell still. A few faces in the auditorium cracked into smiles. Oskar completed the final lambda and clapped his hands together to shake off the chalk dust. Little Red Riding Hood was standing behind them looking at the panorama of equations with his mouth half open, like someone gaping at an impossibly beautiful view. Oskar turned around and tapped him on the shoulder with the tip of his finger, as if he were striking a triangle.