The next day is also radiant and sunny, the sky a bright, polished surface garnished with freshly washed clouds. There’s a light wind, unusually warm already, though it’s still early morning. Since Richard’s taking Vera to school today, Britta goes to work on her bicycle. She pedals as little as possible, opts for a zigzag route through the neighborhood, peers over fences and hedges into gardens, occasionally greets a neighbor who has decided to spend his unconditional basic income on lawn mowing and tree pruning. Lehndorf is a quiet district, one- and two-family houses built by the Nazis back in the 1930s, perfect for children and as ugly and practical as the rest of the city. Precisely because Britta has slept very little, waiting all night for the moment when she would finally be able to talk with Babak, she forces herself to go slow. Mental control; the boss in her own house.
When she crosses under the autobahn, she starts pedaling a little faster, enjoying the ride along the wide lanes, beautifully straight and bordered by king-size sidewalks that look as though they were built for a tank parade. In the city center, the streets are still wet from the cleaning brigade’s water cannons. There are some days when Britta loves Braunschweig as much as though it were her own creation. The chunky pomposity of totalitarian luxury buildings, which look like palaces and in reality are only shopping malls. The Deutsches Haus hotel, where she occasionally puts up clients and whose corridors somehow smell like socialism. The city’s nonexistent aura, a result of having eliminated, in deference to vehicular traffic, any sort of aesthetic appeal. This all represents something of a relief compared to the claustrophobic pluralism of the metropolises. After graduating from high school in the 2000s, when it was still relatively chic to move to Berlin, Britta felt little desire to live in the capital. TV commercials featuring young, unshaven types who rented apartments in Prenzlauer Berg were all the rage. Britta moved to Leipzig to study and later to Braunschweig to work, and in the meanwhile, changing trends proved her right. Independent professionals left Prenzlauer Berg in droves to move to medium-size cities that had been destroyed in the war and were still being rebuilt in the spirit of rationalism—function, construction, and form.
While Britta’s waiting for the bicycle light to change, she looks at the display screens on the traffic poles and reads the headlines.
Fine weather to continue—Efficiency Package Number Five on the way to the Reichstag—Spelt & Sesame Slice named Bread of the Year—Regula Freyer on a visit to China.
Braunschweig suits Britta so perfectly because here, somehow, you fly under the radar. Well-thought-out mediocrity, inconspicuous muddling through. Britta wants a peaceful existence for herself and her family; she wants to do work and to take on responsibility, but only for things she’s capable of handling. Why should she feel responsible for the rest? These days, nobody knows what to be for and what to be against anymore. Of course, the Concerned Citizens are dismantling one hard-won democratic achievement after the other. But even so, people are doing well, maybe even better than before. When Trump was inaugurated, there was talk of the Decline of the West, and then, after forming an alliance with Putin, he quite casually put an end to the Syrian Civil War. American isolationism halted Israel’s settlement policies and as a result almost inadvertently brought about a two-state solution and a peace treaty between Israel and Palestine. The economic war between Europe and the U.S. transformed the Middle East into a lucrative outlet for American products, and this in turn caused the whole region to flourish. Practically all at once, Islamic terror stopped being a global problem, and now ISIS has dwindled from the Western world’s scariest nightmare to a handful of decadent warlords.
Meanwhile, people have given up political speculation. They live their lives and stick their heads in the sand, because in a world where someone like Trump can be accepted as anything other than a shit, they can think of nothing better to do.
Britta operates under no illusions. She doesn’t think she understands ongoing developments, and she doesn’t try to know any better. She lives in a tidy house in a tidy city and runs a tidy company. That’s her contribution. Once—a long time ago, before founding The Bridge—she read a sentence that made an indelible impression on her: Morality, the compulsory part of the program, is for the weak; the strong excel in the free skate.
As she nears the main railroad station, her heart starts beating fast again. Ever since the previous evening, she’s been repressing the desire to pull out her smartphone and look for more information. Instead of doing that at breakfast, she picked up the local newspaper, the Braunschweiger Zeitung, which is still being printed in small editions for nostalgic ironists like Richard. She found a report on the events in Leipzig, a brief article obviously squeezed onto page three just before the edition went to press. There was also a photograph, which she recognized from the television news she’d seen: black uniforms in a large, hangar-like space, and a long, narrow shadow on the ground. The copy revealed as little as the picture. The previous evening, two suspected terrorists, apparently carrying explosives, had forced their way into the cargo terminal at the Leipzig airport. Acting on an anonymous tip, the security service was able to intervene quickly and prevent the worst from happening. One suspect was shot dead, the other is in custody. Interior Minister Wagenknecht reacted to the incident by declaring that Germany remains a target for terrorists, and that there is cause for heightened vigilance, but not for panic. The government is doing everything it can to ensure the safety of the people. An example of this commitment can be found in the measures granting wider powers to the police and the secret service that, along with federalism reform, are included in Efficiency Package Number Five.
While Britta is racing down Kurt Schumacher Street, she raises her head, delighting in the way the wind blows back her hair. She’s grateful to her mother, from whom she inherited that hair: thick, straight, wheat-blond, perfect for short haircuts; a bit of tousling is all it needs to look good. Hair you don’t need to brush, shirts you don’t need to iron, vacuum cleaners you don’t need to push around—Britta likes such things. She also likes having a coworker willing to stay up all night long to compile the latest news for her. Smooth operation is for Britta the highest principle.
The Kurt Schumacher Apartment Blocks on the northwestern side of the Braunschweig railroad station are part of an odd sort of neighborhood, tidy but featureless. Apartments stacked high; on the balconies, laundry; on the ground floor, storefronts and offices, mainly doctors and dentists of Arab origin, Nabils and Sahids and Jawads, who X-ray, massage, peer into mouths, noses, and ears, drill into teeth, and cut away liver spots. A clump of dreariness in an excellent central location. An example of ghettoization, which the CCC steadfastly maintains does not exist.
There’s a passage between the blocks, an accumulation of low-rise buildings, gray and inconspicuous, as though built for badly performing businesses of all kinds. Britta pushes her bicycle into a bike rack and opens a door with her own name on it: “The Bridge, Britta Söldner and Babak Hamwi.” Under the names, in smaller lettering: “Medical office. Licensed healing practitioner. Psychotherapy and applied depth psychology, self-managing, life coaching, ego polishing,” and a few other terms that have nothing whatsoever to do with the practice’s real activities. In the dental laboratory across the hall, the pony-tailed blonde at the reception desk keeps her eyes fixed on her computer screen, doesn’t greet Britta, and doesn’t budge. Every morning, Britta wonders whether the girl is real.
The practice smells like coffee; no trace of Babak.
With the surrounding high-rise buildings, it’s dark in The Bridge’s offices. The ceiling lights are on, as always, dim fluorescent tubes set in square fixtures and glowing overhead at all times, in all seasons. The Bridge’s rooms are extremely unsuitable for a healing practice; its display windows are too big, and its atmosphere is too murky; a tattoo salon would have made a better fit, or a dog-grooming service, or the next Humana Second Hand store. There’s a brownish carpet on the floor; the reception counter was held over from the previous owner, even though the practice has no need for it at all. Other amenities include a living room suite where Britta sits with new candidates for their initial conversation, and a large worktable for Babak’s sole use. Everything’s well-worn but clinically clean; after all, Britta personally handles the housekeeping duties in the office. The uninviting atmosphere is purposeful; walk-in business must not be encouraged.
Britta leans over the worktable, to which a sheet of paper two square meters in area is fastened with special clamps. Babak has the paper custom-made and gets it directly from the manufacturer. One corner of the sheet looks dirty, but if you gaze more closely, you can see that innumerable little differently colored dots cover it so thickly that there’s hardly any space between them. The Bridge experiences long lulls in activity, no cause for alarm, just a part of the normal work rhythm. While Britta uses such phases to catch up on paperwork, fetch Vera early from her after-school day care center, putter in her garden, and—on hot days—inflate the wading pool, Babak holds down the fort in the office and passes the time making dot pictures. In leisurely fashion, he removes the cap from a felt-tip pen, adds a couple of dots, puts the cap back on, and opens the next pen. There’s something meditative about the clicking of the pen caps. Months can pass before such a picture is finished. Britta must admit that she admires the results. They display indistinct gradations, the colors bleeding, oscillating from red through purple to blue and back, moving in waves, like rain veils or sand whirls the eye can scarcely perceive.
Noises come from the basement. Like all the commercial spaces in the Kurt Schumacher Passage, the practice has an underground floor, windowless rooms level with the nearby expressway and the traffic roaring past on it. Coffee cake can be found down there, along with toilets, a tiled multipurpose area, and the well-secured server room, where Babak spends the greater part of his working time.
Now he mounts the spiral staircase at a rapid clip, carrying a stack of documents that he drops on the coffee table. Then he looks at them pensively and wipes his brow with his forearm. He and Britta know each other so well that they forget to say hello. Even when they go a few hours without seeing each other, they never feel separated. Twelve years ago, when they first met, Babak was fat, gay, nerdy, and Iraqi. These days he’s not fat anymore, and as for the other things, he’s no longer ashamed of them. In his view, Britta saved his life, and therefore he idolizes her like a big sister. Whenever he’s agitated, as he is today, it’s not because he’s confounded by events, but because he’s worried about Britta’s state of mind.
“What have you got there?”
“Dossiers. All the information on the attack.”
“In quadruplicate?”
“One for you, one for me, one for the files, and one just in case.”
Britta can’t help laughing. Babak has spent the entire night in front of the computers; she can tell from the bluish circles under his eyes, even though he took an early morning shower in the office and put on a fresh shirt. Since starving himself down from 250 to 165 pounds, he handles his body like an object of great value. When he comes over for dinner, he and Richard can discuss Scandinavian gentlemen’s outfitters for hours, bemoan the persistence of “hipster fashion,” and philosophize over the shape of a perfect shoe toe cap. On such occasions, Britta listens in silence and remembers how women used to be ridiculed because fashion was their sole topic of conversation.
“Sit down. Here’s some coffee.”
Babak brings a tray with two little cups and a small copper pot, in which he prepares the coffee Turkish-style. When he fills the cups, Britta sees his hands shaking.
“Let’s hear it. What have you got?”
“Markus Blattner and Andreas Muradow, twenty-one and twenty-five years old, automobile mechanic and chemistry student.”
“Chechens?”
“Germans. The name Muradow isn’t all that rare.”
“Which one’s dead?”
“Andreas.”
“And which one is the convert?”
“Probably neither.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“An overview of the situation indicates that we can’t assume an Islamist background.”
“Hasn’t ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack?”
“They claim responsibility for every overturned watering can.”
Britta sighs. “Just the facts, please.”
“Two men forced their way into the sorting center in the freight terminal at the Leipzig airport yesterday evening around nineteen hundred hours.”
“Shift change?”
“The freight hub operates twenty-four/seven, but the big crush takes place in the evening. Markus and Andreas were dressed in DHL uniforms and carrying fake ID cards.”
“So their handlers were professionals.”
Babak shrugs. “Or ecstatic amateurs.”
“I thought I saw a belt on the TV screen.”
“You thought right. They were both wearing explosive belts.”
“Shit.”
They fall silent. Britta finishes her coffee; Babak pours her some more, adds a bit of sugar, stirs it in for her. Of course, she’s known the whole time that the disastrous operation was a suicide attack. Her gut feeling was unequivocal. No heavy weapons, no resistance. But there were two of them, side by side, and that had given her a little hope. Most suicide bombers act alone.
“We knew this would happen one day, didn’t we?” says Babak, and Britta nods.
“It was only a matter of time. It’s not really so bad.”
Britta nods again. Then her rage comes welling up. “Who was it, dammit?” She strikes the table with both fists, capsizing the freshly filled coffee cup and turning the contents of the pretty sugar bowl into a brown slurry. When she realizes that Babak doesn’t need to run downstairs for cloths and sponges to clean up the mess because he already has them ready under the tray, she lets herself sink back into her chair. “You’re incredible, Babak.”
“How so?” He puts on an innocent expression. “We’ve always worked with prognoses.”
They grin at each other.
“Stop worrying,” Babak says. “We’ll get a handle on this.”
She lifts the tray while he wipes up. Although the dossiers have escaped unstained, Babak runs a dishcloth over their protective covers. Britta picks up her copy. Biographies and metadata, page after page printed too small for her to read without glasses.
“You were thorough.”
A smile makes a brief appearance on Babak’s face and immediately vanishes. He doesn’t want to show how happy praise from her makes him.
“Unfortunately, there’s not much we can use in there. No traffic within the groups, no videos, nothing in preparation. Andreas had been active on Facebook during the past few weeks, even with some Arabic-language contacts; a little insha’allah and alhamdulillah, along with mountains of emoticons. The usual rubbish from people who don’t know the language. He’d also posted videos of a couple of preachers, including jihadi stuff.”
“So Islam, after all.”
“I don’t know. Pretty superficial, all of it.”
“Death to the infidel?”
“Sure.”
“And who did the tip come from?”
Babak shrugs. Britta looks at him thoughtfully.
“You don’t like it.”
Babak raises his hands defensively. “I’m just putting pieces of information together.”
“What do your instincts say?”
“That it had nothing to do with Islam. Maybe it was supposed to look like it did. But that’s all.”
Britta nods. “Has there been a press conference yet?”
“They say they’ll hold one today. But in any case, they don’t know anything. We can skip it.”
As they say nothing for a while, a noise moves into the foreground, a sound that Britta up to now has been only half-conscious of. It’s an electrical buzz, accompanied by the humming of a large fan. It climbs up out of the opening to the spiral staircase, it seems to set floor and furniture vibrating, it fills the entire space, familiar and soothing; it’s the operating noise of their shared existence.
“Lassie’s running,” says Britta.
“Been running all night.”
“When will we have results?”
“Any minute now.”
Britta leafs through her dossier. She’s been hoping for more photographs. The two on hand have been greatly enlarged; they’re pretty blurry and not very informative. Nevertheless, Britta thinks one of the two men looks familiar.
Babak holds up the palms of his hands. “I couldn’t find better pictures. You can see the belts, but you can’t tell how they’re packed.”
“TATP?”
Babak shrugs again.
“What about the store receipts?” asks Britta.
“Cheese slices and dental floss. Neither of the two bought anything relevant.”
“Acetone and hydrogen peroxide are in every drugstore.”
“Right, but generally people do some web searches first.”
“Well, the dead guy was a chemistry student.”
“Suicide-belt construction isn’t part of the curriculum. You have to have a little electrotechnical knowledge too.”
“Could they have brought the system in from abroad?”
“They weren’t abroad. Besides, TATP is much too explosive to transport over any significant distance.”
“Or they mixed some kind of stuff together themselves. After all, nothing got blown up.”
“I think they were intercepted before they reached their target. They didn’t get far enough to do anything serious.”
“Babak, you’re getting on my nerves.”
“Sorry, Britta, I know what you want to hear.”
“But you don’t want to say it.”
“We can only speculate at this point.”
“You don’t think they were acting on their own. You think they had help. They were sent.”
Before Babak can answer, the printer in the basement begins to hum.
“Lassie’s delivering.”
Britta forces herself to remain seated while Babak runs down the stairs to get the printout. But when he comes back, she gets up anyway, so that they wind up standing in front of each other as though they’ve met by chance, he with a single sheet of paper in his hand, she with a question mark on her face. Babak holds up the page.
“Markus: two-point-five. Andreas: two-point-eight.”
“Say that again.”
“Two-point-five and two-point-eight.”
Britta feels herself turn pale. Babak’s eyes seem fixed, as if the brain behind them has shut itself off. The moment passes, and they look at each other. It’s Babak who finally finds his voice again: “Lassie thinks they didn’t want to kill themselves at all.”