After the meeting, Britta orders that the rest of the day is to be spent fixing up and settling into their new location. They guess the time to be about one thirty in the afternoon. Julietta and Babak receive permission to go to the stream to wash up. Britta tidies the conference room and sets about subjecting the kitchen to a thorough cleaning, as far as that’s possible without a cleaning product. At two thirty subjective time, she gives the order to open a can of ravioli. They all gather around the table at once.
The operation is harder than expected. The screwdriver slips off the can, and hunger intensifies impatience until it’s unbearable. Babak has a go with the hammer, while Britta and Julietta outdo each other with good advice. Everyone wants to grab the hammer and try it for themselves. The first hole opens with a bang; red juice spurts all the way up to the ceiling.
“Watch out you don’t cut yourselves,” Babak cries. “Actually, do we have any bandages?”
When Britta replies in the negative, Babak rolls his eyes, but the waspish comment she wants to make gets cut off, because at this very moment, Julietta manages to bend the lid of the can up a little way. As they have neither spoons nor forks, they let the cold, slippery dough pockets slide directly into their hands through the opening in the lid. Red sauce drips on table and floor, and soon it looks as though they’ve murdered somebody. Britta insists that Julietta also must share the meal, and so each of them receives a disappointingly small portion that piques their hunger rather than assuages it.
Afterward, they clean and wipe the whole ground floor together, getting rid of dust, spiderwebs, and dead flies, until Britta feels that she can move through the rooms without trepidation.
Around four p.m. subjective time, just when they’re about to go on yet another expedition to the toolshed in the neighbors’ garden, they suddenly hear voices on the other side of the hedgerow and return to the house with pounding hearts. They lock the door from inside and lie on the floor of the entrance hall in case anyone tries to look through the windows. They lie there for a long, long time while nothing happens. At last, Britta sounds the all clear and gives the group permission to stand up.
It quickly becomes plain to her that from now on, there is absolutely nothing more for them to do. The water buckets next to the toilet are full, as are the reserve bottles of drinking water. The floor is swept, the beds made. Fixing up and settling into the new location has been concluded. Britta estimates the time at around four thirty in the afternoon. They have no smartphones, no tablets, no netbooks, no televisions, no LifeWatches or digital eyeglasses; Julietta doesn’t even have her old-fashioned iPod with her. No newspapers, no books, no pencil, no piece of paper. It’s four thirty on a fair-to-middling summer day. Before them lies the void.
Britta goes into the kitchen and pulls the door shut behind her as if the room were her study, and she’d like to be alone because she has something important to do. With her back to the wall, she sits on the fruit-crate bench and tests the stillness. Waits to see what will happen if she just sits there. Thoughts immediately start racing around and around in her head. They show her Vera, Richard, and her spick-and-span concrete house. Then she sees the burgled rooms of her practice, G. Flossen’s corpse, and Guido Hatz’s mustached face. The stillness murmurs; Britta hears voices, stands up, and opens the window, but there’s nothing there. A beeping begins in her left ear—in her school days, the kids would always say, “Somebody’s thinking about you!”—except that now it won’t stop, it’s in her right ear too, the beeping gets louder, and Britta’s heart is knocking against her ribs. This is tinnitus, it never goes away, it’ll drive you crazy, you’ll go mad, and she springs into action, searching the room, looking for whatever may be causing this beeping, but there are no electronics and no electric appliances, not even a toaster, and besides, she’s already turned off the power in the cellar.
Britta keeps returning to the window and looking out, checking to see if it’s getting dark, but the sun is still high in the sky, apparently time isn’t passing, or maybe her estimates of the time have been totally wrong and it’s only early afternoon or midday or morning, maybe the settling in, the ravioli, the meeting, and the housecleaning didn’t actually require more than an hour and a half. Britta would give anything to have a look at a clock; she’s lost without a map in a wasteland outside time.
Her stomach hurts so much that, against her will, she pulls out the folded backpack and drinks the last two little cartons of multivitamin juice. But that just makes her stomachache even worse; she throws her arms around her body and doubles up in pain. Lying on the cushions, which are constantly sliding away from one another, she closes her eyes and tries to think about something else. The first thing she sees is a plate of pasta with gorgonzola prepared the way Richard does it, steaming linguine covered with thick sauce: peeled tomatoes, two flat blocks of gorgonzola, fresh chives, a cup of cream.
Next she sees Julietta, dressed in black, walking along a street in the morning light, her movements decelerated as though shown in slow motion, her upper body broadened by the suicide vest she’s wearing under her jacket. She throws her hair from side to side like someone in a shampoo commercial, she’s gliding rather than walking, she swings her arms elegantly at her sides: a marvelous sight. Julietta enters a room in which several men—a tall thin one, a little squat one, and three others—stand up from their chairs and stare at Julietta, all five of them with turned-up shirtsleeves and open collars, so that their “Empty Hearts” tattoos can be seen. Julietta turns around and smiles at Britta, and then she detonates the bomb. In slow motion, everything flies apart, Britta sees the horror on the men’s faces, which immediately thereafter explode into pieces, limbs flying around, flesh liquefied, pulverized, turned into the merest biowaste. A flood of happiness surges through Britta, a feeling of relief, euphoria, love for mankind.
Something touches her face. She jumps, she screams, she’s lying on the floor, having slid off the cushions, she was actually asleep, she flails her arms, finally manages to sit up, and sees a cat duck into the corner next to the door and bare its teeth in a threat display. The little bastard was hiding somewhere. When she opens the door, the cat darts out of the room. Britta’s heart is racing as though someone has tried to kill her. I can’t do this, she thinks. I can’t stand it here anymore. I can’t cope. I want to go home. She reels across the hall in the direction of the bathroom, uses the toilet, and inadvertently knocks the little box with the paper towels onto the floor. By doing so, she discovers, under the stacked sheets, a crushed medication package, Ativan, two wide strips of it, and only three tablets missing; Julietta must have packed a supply before they fled the city. This is Julietta’s baggage, it’s the sum of her possessions. Britta picks up the package of pills gleefully, because now she has the girl in the palm of her hand. If Julietta’s as hooked on those things as Britta suspects she is, after two days of withdrawal she’ll be ready to give up on animal protection.
Britta hides the pills in the firebox of the antique stove. Then, with a groan, she lies down on the makeshift mattress again. Exhaustion drones inside her skull; the weakness in her arms and legs is painful. She can’t sleep. Her whole body itches. No doubt, there are vermin in the house, mites, ticks, fleas, something that will eat her alive if she doesn’t keep moving. It’s still not really dark yet, it will never be dark again, is it maybe dusk? Is it a little darker outside than it was before, or at least less bright? There’s nothing to do. Absolutely nothing to do. Britta kneels in front of the stove. She takes out the little cardboard box, presses out a pill, and puts it into her mouth.
The next thing that wakes her up is a hand, a hand shaking her shoulder. And then a voice: “Come. You have to see this.”
It’s Babak’s hand and Babak’s voice. Half-asleep, Britta struggles to her feet.
“What time is it?”
Babak laughs. He goes down the hall ahead of her. It’s night, pitch-black night. One behind the other, they climb the stairs. There’s a light on up there. That must be my flashlight, Britta thinks, they were in the room with me and took my flashlight, but right away she sees flickering, and then the lamp itself: a gas lamp, hanging from a hook on the wall.
“Where did you two…” she begins, but then she’s in the doorway, with a clear view of the bed. Julietta’s sitting on the edge and beaming like an artist at her gallery opening. Britta sees, artistically arranged on the bed, three bags of chips, a cylindrical can of Prinzen Rolle sandwich cookies, three bottles of soda, several little packets of little gummy bears, and a large paper bag, in which, Britta presumes, there are bread rolls and croissants. While she looks, the others remain silent.
One of them left the house; judging from the looks on their faces, it was Julietta. She disregarded Britta’s orders and rode her bike somewhere to buy things. Britta ought to yell at her, reprimand her, maybe even throw her out of the program. But she’s got so much saliva in her mouth that she can’t speak. Before she knows it, Julietta has pressed a cookie into her hand. Britta takes a bite. She’s quite aware that she should eat slowly, preferably a bread roll rather than a cookie, she should chew thoroughly and swallow cautiously, but she polishes off the first cookie and stuffs three more in her mouth and reaches out a hand for the fifth. Babak is scooping chips out of a bag with both hands; Julietta sits next to him, eats nothing, and smiles proudly. She lights a cigarette and begins to tell the story while Babak and Britta chew and chew. She rode pretty far, she says, all the way to Celle and an Aral station there. She was the only customer, and the boy at the night window had put her order together with the most perfect indifference; her case was clear, because the stuff she bought looked like provisions for the final act of a party, when nobody who’s left feels like drinking any more alcohol. As for the time, it was shortly after two when she made the purchases, so now it’s probably getting close to four, they should enjoy this moment of knowing what time it is, and in fact, Britta enjoys this knowledge almost as intensely as she does the chocolate cream in her mouth.
Julietta goes on talking, she says she hid her face as well as she could from the surveillance cameras in the gas station, but without conspicuously turning away, and after all, nobody’s looking for her, nobody knows anything about her, and even though Britta’s aware that these assertions aren’t completely correct, because anyone who’s familiar with The Bridge and observes its activity for a while will know that Julietta’s one of its candidates, she—Britta—tacitly admits that there’s little possibility of the Hearts’ stumbling by chance upon a girl who’s riding a bicycle around a commercial zone in Celle late at night. Britta doesn’t begrudge Julietta her joy over her successful feat; there’s something touching about her enthusiasm, which reaches its peak when she says, “You two are the Red Army Faction, and I’m your support base,” and they all have to laugh at that.
After eight cookies, Britta’s hunger is sufficiently satisfied for her to regain self-control. She stands up, slightly swaying from the sugar rush, and takes her leave to lie down a little longer.
Julietta follows her to the head of the stairs. “Have the tablets made you feel better?” she asks, and she sounds so innocent, so free of reproach, ridicule, or irony, that Britta can do nothing but nod mutely.
“Let’s divide the supply fairly,” says Julietta, and she briefly touches Britta’s shoulder before turning around and returning to her room.