“Hello, hello! Good news!”
The concrete cube’s front door slams against the wall so hard that for a brief moment it’s unclear whether the milky glass panel will fall out of the frame. Britta abandons stove and pot and runs to the entrance hall, where Richard, with rather more care, is just closing the fortunately undamaged door. He’s smiling from ear to ear and brandishing a bottle of Dom Pérignon. All signs point to a Category 1 celebration. With lightning speed, Britta mentally scans all the possibilities she may have forgotten—birthday, passed test, some Vera success or other—and finds that nothing at all occurs to her. Something must have happened.
The smell of food wafts through the house. As a rule, Britta doesn’t cook; what she’s doing now is displacement activity. Instead of going back to her office after her meeting with Julietta, Britta picked up Vera from day care early. Then she spent the whole afternoon busying herself around the house, seeking out cobwebs, eliminating dust, polishing away all the smears that Henry notoriously overlooks. And all the while, her thoughts kept returning to Babak. Thanks to Lassie’s special mission, he has hardly slept for days. To keep himself awake during the waiting periods, he works on his dot picture, which has grown mightily, regularly, from the corners in. Babak’s strength is all but gone. He was against Lassie’s mission; however, the idea of ignoring Britta’s instructions would never occur to him. She loves him for his loyalty. She should have bought a couple of döner kebabs in the Babylon and gone back to her practice with them. The aroma would have filled the office spaces, and for a brief while things would have been the way they used to be, the ordinary Britta-Babak relationship: kebabs, dot picture, three or four candidates in the evaluation loop, in the evenings family for Britta and gay bars for Babak, a life of many calms and few storms, a life under the radar, a perfect life, an uncommon life.
The pervasive smell at the moment is not kebabs, however, it’s curry. Britta didn’t go back to her office because she had no desire to answer Babak’s questions about Julietta. He’ll explode from curiosity; leaving him hanging like this is cruel. But Britta doesn’t want to discuss what’s so great about Julietta right now, and she wants even less to discuss what’s so disturbing.
She gives Richard a fleeting kiss on the cheek and then leaves him standing in the hall as she hastens back to the kitchen to prevent the onions she’s sautéing from turning to charcoal. Next to the stove sit little bowls of chopped lemongrass, coriander, garlic, cumin, and oyster mushrooms. It’s a recipe Britta downloaded from the Internet, although Richard usually prepares it for her; it’s one of their favorites from the time when they were getting to know each other. Because the dish is too spicy for Vera, cooking it anyway always constitutes something of a small rebellion.
Richard comes into the kitchen, embraces her from the side, and presses a kiss into the parting of her hair, whereupon she spreads her hands, making it clear that her fingers are hot with pepper juice.
“You’re cooking for me? Do you already know?”
“A miracle of telepathy,” Britta says, laughing. “Or a coincidence. Whichever you prefer.”
“I pick telepathy.”
“What’s for dinner?” Vera shuffles into the kitchen, a Mega-Melanie doll in each hand. “Ugghh, I don’t like that.”
“You’re having kids’ pizza.”
“I always have kids’ pizza.”
“You haven’t had kids’ pizza for days.”
“Kids’ pizza is boring.”
“We’ve got something to celebrate!” Richard grabs his grumpy daughter by the arms and shoves her around the kitchen, swinging his hips a little, as though they were dancing to some inaudible music.
“Let go of me! What’s wrong with you?”
“Good mood!”
In fact, it’s been ages since Britta’s seen him in such high spirits. Now he’s holding Vera high above his head and turning around in a circle with her until she starts to laugh in spite of herself, and then they both sink down to the kitchen floor, giddy and whooping. Before she puts the bottle of Dom Pérignon in the freezer, Britta glances at the price tag.
“Do you want to propose to me?” she asks.
“We’re already married.”
“Do you want a divorce?”
“Actually, no.”
“Have you won the lottery?”
“Without playing?”
“Why not?” Britta jauntily pours more sesame oil into the frying pan. “As far as I know, the chances aren’t substantially better for people who do play.”
“Guess as much as you want, you’ll never get it right.”
“Set the table. We’re eating on the terrace.”
Britta pushes ingredients into the pan with the spine of her knife, lets them sizzle briefly, and adds coconut milk. The scent becomes so intense that she closes her eyes for a second. As part of the celebration, Richard has also brought Vera a present. He hands it to her, or rather tries to, but before his arm is fully extended, the little girl snatches the gift from him and tears the wrapping to shreds in the air. Two new members of the Mega-Family, Mega-Milan and Mega-Miró, emerge. Britta is familiar enough with Mega-World by now to know who these two are. He’s a pianist from Zagreb, she’s a painter from Paris; they’re both successful, with penthouses in Brooklyn and Moscow, and famous for their extravagant wardrobes. On the weekends, they stroll arm in arm through the Mega-Mall, spending their artistically earned money. Occasionally, a concert or a vernissage also forms part of the program. Now that they’ve wound up with Vera, the two artists will probably be shot down in a Mega-SWAT operation before too long.
“How cool, how cool,” Vera repeats countless times before disappearing into her room to brief the newcomers on their assignments before dinner.
The bad weather has passed; the evening is mild. The three of them sit out on the graveled area in front of the concrete cube, Vera bending over her pizza while Britta’s still serving Richard and herself. The light breeze carries barbecue smells—grilled meat, charcoal, lighter fluid—from the neighbors’ garden, along with the sounds of laughing children, clattering dishes, the dull thump of a soccer ball, and adult voices in muffled conversation. The curry tastes divine. If Britta breathes through her nose, her whole head fills with the smells of lemongrass and ginger. They bring her back to the party where she saw Richard for the first time, leaning in a doorway and chatting, a tall, broad-shouldered, and yet amazingly supple man with sun-bleached hair. He swayed his hips while recounting an anecdote, the words just gushed out of him, interrupted by laughter, a tale about some guy trying to approach a girl and repeatedly saying the wrong thing, maybe from a movie and not funny at all, but because Richard told the story so well and was so obviously enjoying himself, his listeners laughed with him, good cheer spread out from him in concentric circles, and Britta thought, This is a person from another time, he’s unscathed, I want him, I want to live with him, and she dreaded the moment when he would turn around. And then he turned around because someone called his name, and Britta saw his face and wanted to say, more than anything, Well, there you are, what took you so long? Thai curry was served at this party, because the host had just returned from a long stay on Ko Samui; you scooped your helping out of a pot as big as a field kitchen and ate standing up, using plastic utensils and a plastic plate, and Britta placed herself next to Richard and told him she had just founded a healing practice and for the first time earned her own income, which she planned to use to leave Leipzig, and she asked him to pick a city for her to move to, its population mustn’t exceed 300,000 and it couldn’t be farther south than Koblenz, because the southern dialects, Swabian and Bavarian, made her sick. He could have said Kassel or Siegen, Bremerhaven or Paderborn, but he said Braunschweig right away, without stopping to think, even though he wasn’t from there, he came from Hagen, which was a sad story in itself. They left the party together and soon moved to Braunschweig together, and in between only three or four months had passed, and in those months they’d cooked a whole lot of curry.
“You like it?”
“It’s outstanding. I’ve always known that you just pretend you can’t cook.”
“So are you finally going to explain yourself or what?”
Richard lays down his spoon and, with a flourish, extracts the champagne from the freezer. “No more doorknob polishing,” he says as he removes the foil from the neck of the bottle. “No more ass kissing, no more sucking up to denim-shirted, shaven-headed jerks,” he says as he removes the wire net from the cork.
“You said ‘ass,’ ” Vera cries, her mouth full of pizza.
“You got fired,” Britta says in amazement.
“I own a third of the company, remember? The only person who could fire me is me.” While Richard’s restraining the cork, keeping it from exiting the bottle too fast, his knuckles turn white.
“You’ve taken a lifetime sabbatical.”
“Better. This afternoon, out of the blue, this guy gets me on the line. His name is Guido Hatz.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Google doesn’t know him either.”
“And therefore he’s very insignificant. Or very important.”
“Above all, very rich. He’s a venture capitalist, and he wants to get on board with Smart Swap. Comprehensively. A private investor, not a fund. The usual conditions—he gets a say, he gives advice, he shares the take. Monthly confessions, total transparency.”
“How much?”
“I can’t say. In any case, seed and early financing are covered, and probably a portion of the late-stage financing too. There’ll be no problem getting Swappie market-ready.”
Britta knows she’s got to be happy for him; she can’t have more than a few seconds left before the fact that she’s not jumping with joy makes Richard cross.
“What does this guy look like?”
“No idea, love, it was a phone call.”
“And you two made this ironclad deal, just like that?”
“Hatz knows what he wants. He immediately sent over the preliminary forms, so we’ve already got a rough framework in place.”
“How did he know about you?”
“Sweetie, I don’t go to work just to play darts! Customer acquisition! Advertising! Networking! It’s not completely impossible to know what Swappie is.” He leans forward, pours champagne, and seizes her hand. “Don’t you understand what this means to me?”
“Of course I do. Congratulations.”
“Everything will change now. Swappie will be up and running. Emil and Jonas will calm down. We can hire people, we can become a normal business, I’ll get a workplace where I can actually work!”
“That’s wonderful.” They clink glasses; Britta rises halfway from her chair to kiss Richard across the table. “I’m awfully happy for you. You have so earned it.”
His radiant smile is just as winning as it was twelve years ago. And in general, he’s hardly changed. He still comes across as a person who lives in a world where everything’s all right.
“I love you,” says Britta.
“Bam!” yells Vera, because Mega-Miró has suddenly shot Mega-Milan.
After the meal, Richard carries the dishes into the kitchen, Vera excuses herself to go and play with her dolls, and Britta remains seated for a while longer, savoring the mild air and her third glass of champagne.
She has just convinced herself that there’s absolutely nothing peculiar about Richard’s stroke of luck, and she’s looking forward to putting Vera to bed and continuing the little celebration on the couch, when she hears the sound of an engine. Someone’s driving down the street, slowly but not at a walking pace. She figures she’ll see a police patrol car glide past, but what enters her field of vision is a white pickup. A Toyota Hilux.
This time she can make out the driver’s face, for he’s wearing neither sunglasses nor visor cap. Dark, not exactly newly trimmed hair; a man in his late forties or early fifties, a German teacher or car dealer, an average guy, utterly forgettable if it weren’t for that mustache, also dark, badly trimmed, a bushy, disruptive element between his nose and his mouth. When their eyes meet, he steps on the gas. The pickup leaps forward and at the end of the street turns right, and Britta can hear the engine roar as the driver leaves the neighborhood, heading downtown.
“Hey, you still look totally frightened.” Richard laughs, goes down on one knee next to her chair, and takes her hand. “Is it really so scary if something goes right for me too once in a while?”
Britta summons up a smile and a shake of the head; at this point, it’s only speech that she’s incapable of. Richard kisses her fingertips.
“You’ll see,” he says. “Everything will be fine.”