“So, Jawad, how was it?”
“Wallah, Frau Britta, real good, I swear.”
Although Jawad’s twenty-three, Britta’s always tempted to speak to him as though he were a child. “Were the aunts and uncles nice to you?”
“Yo, they gave me pills, real strong, I only take naps, day and night.”
Jawad has spent the past ten days plus eight hours in Langenhagen, a psychiatric clinic near Hanover.
At Step 5 of the evaluation process, candidates check themselves into a clinic as suicide risks and complete a stay of at least ten days, including participation in the entire range of therapy offerings. Checking himself out on the morning after the end of the ten-day period is an indication that Jawad’s stay in the clinic maybe wasn’t so “real good.”
“I am new person, Frau Britta, I swear.”
He laughs and lights a cigarette. Britta and Babak don’t like people smoking in the office, but Jawad notoriously violates prohibitions of every kind, not out of insubordination, but because there’s an area of his brain dedicated to ensuring that prohibitions are immediately forgotten. Britta finds reprimanding him too tiresome.
“If you liked the clinic, why didn’t you stay longer?”
“Abu, Frau Britta, nothing but sleep and yak, yak and sleep. So I wake up in the morning and I want my head back. Doctor comes, and I go like, ‘Wallah, brother, no more pills, for me full contact.’ ”
“Aha.”
Britta leafs through the discharge papers, among which there’s also the medical report. Ativan daily, along with cita-lopram in the morning and mirtazapine in the evening. No wonder Jawad wants his head back.
“Did you participate in the therapy sessions? Were you cooperative?”
“Normal, real coparative, or something.”
“Can you imagine continuing with the therapy?”
“Eh, what?”
“Did you feel a desire to give up your suicide plans and lead a normal life one day?”
“You are kidding me, no?”
“I have to ask that question, Jawad. It’s part of the process. All candidates get asked that after their stay in the clinic.”
“Normal, eh.” He stubs out his cigarette on the sole of his shoe and laughs again. “I thought you want to get rid of me.”
His ingenuousness gives Britta a twinge. She accepted Jawad into the program in the secret hope that he’d heal as soon as possible, leave The Bridge, and return to life. Although Lassie plucked him out of the Net with a high value of 10.1, to this day Britta doesn’t rightly understand why he wants to kill himself. Certainly, he doesn’t have the most promising future ahead of him. He can barely read and write, which explains his terse weekly reports (“today rain, me movies”). Moreover, according to Babak, Jawad’s Arabic is even worse than his German. He has no high school diploma and nothing resembling career aspirations. But other boys like him sell drugs, fight with doormen, dream of muscle cars, and fantasize about girls as obedient as Arab girls and as broad-minded as German ones. Such young men live lives of their own, on the margins of a society that doesn’t want to have anything to do with them.
When Britta talks to Jawad about his death wish during their weekly sessions, he says, “I go Allah, Frau Britta, I swear.” As for the rest of the fifty minutes, he tries to make them pass in arguments about his smoking or with a bit of innocuous jabbering. The fact that he hasn’t fallen into ISIS’s hands is definite proof that they’re not recruiting anymore.
Even though he’s such a pain in the neck, Britta has a soft spot for him. And in his own screwed-up way, Jawad absolutely wants to please her. Contrary to her expectations, he’s sailed pretty effortlessly through the evaluation process so far. The external psychological test required in Step 4 identified, in his case, narcissistic personality disorder, a low intelligence quotient, and extremely strong suicidal tendencies. His stay in the clinic as prescribed in Step 5 has obviously left him entirely unimpressed. Britta sighs. One of The Bridge’s basic rules forbids displaying friendly feelings toward candidates. She knows she must start looking at Jawad with different eyes. He’s not an amusing big baby; he’s a potential suicide. The waterboarding in Step 6 will show how well he copes with mortal fear. Next will come self-harm and breaking off contact with everyone close to him. After a few further steps, he’ll get his final marching orders. Slowly but surely, the time for Britta to start worrying about Jawad’s usability is approaching.
She ends the conversation, sends Jawad back to the hotel, and gets to work on the other reports. On the top of the stack lie the outpourings of Mr. Marquardt, a stiff, prim gentleman who sits bolt upright on the edge of his chair and answers Britta’s questions with formulations as recherché as they are long-winded. He usually fills several pages a day with his crystal-clear miniature handwriting, and Britta dreads slogging, once again, through a compulsive’s interior life.
All the same, Marquardt has quickly and quietly managed to reach Step 8; when he was waterboarded, instead of wildly twitching and writhing the way most victims do, he simply went limp, and afterward he declared that he had seen a bright light. He is, at the moment, the most promising candidate. He’ll probably reach Step 12 with little difficulty and soon thereafter carry out a surgically clean operation for whatever group employs him.
Britta pushes Marquardt’s effusions to the edge of the coffee table, yields to curiosity, and reaches for Julietta’s notes. On the day after their conversation in the Babylon, Britta came into the office to find Babak already sitting at his dot picture. He looked at her with tired eyes. He’d spent another night with Lassie.
“So?” he asked, and Britta nodded. Babak raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment and likewise nodded. That was it. No further questions. Britta loved him for that.
Julietta has been an official part of the program ever since. She has a dossier, a hotel room number, and a coefficient of 8.7. On a hunch, Babak carried out a second scanning, switching the sex indicator to “male.” When Lassie spat out the results, he gave an admiring whistle: 11.3. The highest score ever given at the beginning of an evaluation.
The little sheaf of notes contains ten pages, which means that Julietta averaged a bit more than one page a day.
Instead of reading, Britta flips the pages back and forth. They’re numbered and dated and obviously belong together. However, they exhibit three distinct handwritings, and Britta considers whether Julietta could have handed in material written by other people. Looking more closely, Britta sees that the writing changes in the middle of sentences, going from flowing cursive to ponderous printed capitals, succeeded, one page later, by a barely legible scrawl. The hair on Britta’s arms stands on end. She’s heard of this phenomenon but never before seen it with her own eyes.
The text presents an unusual picture in other ways too. It runs down each page in two columns, as if Julietta has put her thoughts on paper in the form of a long poem.
| Always the same | I extinguish feelings |
| again and again the devil’s | I go out |
| merry-go-round | my mask belongs to me |
| round and around | Reality and I |
| I extinguish thoughts | we don’t fit together |
| I do not | I’ll help you |
| hate | out of there |
| the world | |
| life | scream |
| myself | scream |
| it’s not | scream |
| worth it | |
| rehearse nothingness | |
| indifference kills | spark |
| There! That’s how you are. | fire |
| stupid and nasty | night |
“Hello, sorry, can we talk for a minute?”
When Babak comes in, Britta, relieved, puts the page aside. Normally she doesn’t like to be disturbed while she’s reading, but Julietta’s lines dig into Britta’s brain with barbed tips, scream scream scream, she runs both hands through her hair, scratches her scalp with her fingernails. They make a booming sound, unnaturally loud, as if the inside of her skull has turned into an empty space.
“Everything okay?”
She nods, releases her hair, and concentrates on Babak’s face. It looks considerably better; it’s not so gray as before, the rings under his eyes have disappeared, the youthful dimples in his cheeks have returned. Now that Lassie has fallen silent, Babak’s spending his nights in bed again. All told, he and Britta have picked out a hundred possible candidates, enough to put together a small army. It would take months to prepare these people adequately, but Britta feels more secure with such a trump up her sleeve.
“You wanted to tell me something?”
“I’ve just come from the lawyer’s office. My application’s approved.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“But I am. I’m going to talk with Markus Blattner, the perp who survived the Leipzig attack.”
“How can you?”
“I am now Blattner’s cousin. Torsten Mayer, twenty-six, resident of Bitterfeld. I’ve got special dispensation for one thirty-minute chat.”
“You don’t look like a Torsten.”
“But I can prove it. Look, I have—”
“Stop!” Britta cries. “I don’t want to know anything about that. Any conditions?”
“The magistrate ordered acoustic monitoring.”
Britta shrugs. “What did you expect? This is a terrorism case. They’re probably letting you in only so they can see if he’ll sing to you.”
“Shall I go on with those?” Babak asks, pointing to the weekly reports. “Then you can pick up Vera early from her school.”
Britta feels a clump in her throat. For days now, Vera’s been spending the afternoons at Janina and Knut’s, because Britta’s at the practice until evening and Richard’s so busy with his new investor. Britta’s secretly glad she’s promised to provide financing for the country house because that way she doesn’t have to feel guilty about asking so much of her friend. “You buy your friends,” her mother—a specialist in such pronouncements—would say if she knew, “because you can’t bear to be grateful.” Britta fails to see what’s so bad about the principle of buying and selling; after all, the entire world functions on it. Furthermore, there are indeed people she’s actually grateful to. Babak, for example.
“You’re a sweetheart,” she says, jumping up, acting as though she wants to kiss him on the mouth.
Laughing, Babak wards her off. “Get out of here!”
Feeling the special bliss of skipping work, Britta walks to the door. She’s almost outside when Babak calls her again. “Hey, Britta,” he says. “When all this is over…” He gestures toward the piles of documents that Britta has shoved behind the reception counter. “When this is over,” he says again, “then you’re going to the doctor.”
She herself hardly notices anymore that she constantly holds one hand pressed against her stomach.