“NORMALLY YOU JUST hold up your passport and they let you in. But in this case …”
“They’ve figured that trick out,” Adam said and took a sip of his beer. Michael was having a bottle too. They were sitting on Margaret Island in Budapest, not far from the green tent—pitched close to the water but hidden by bushes—where Katja and Evelyn lay asleep.
“How late is it?”
“Somewhere between one and two, I’d say. You’re the one with a watch.”
“I forget to wind it sometimes, and then I can’t be sure of the time.”
“Mine’s an automatic, self-winder.”
“At home I don’t need a watch. This one is a present from Evi.”
“A man always needs a watch.”
“Actually all I want now is my new Lada, and maybe a second garage, but otherwise …”
“My ex always says—”
“Who?”
“My ex, my former wife. I was married once, about as long as you were a Party member.”
“And what does she say, your former wife?”
“If you love someone, she says, you always know what to give them.”
“That’s her best quote. I really couldn’t think of one other thing to give her.”
“Maybe she had everything.”
“It used to be I’d just walk along the street and instantly see something.”
“What I’d most like to give Evi is admission to a university.”
“That’s easy for us, you give it to yourself as a gift and can study forever.”
“No limits?”
“There are people who’ve stretched it out for ten years and longer.”
“Over here you first have to be selected for admission, and if you aren’t—Evi got such a stupid evaluation her senior year, because she was the only one in her class who smoked, and showed up late sometimes, even though she lived just around the corner. Her grades were good, but she was turned down twice to study art history.”
“Art history is a good way to starve.”
“What do you mean? They don’t earn less than anybody else.”
“Maybe on your side, but you need to find a job first.”
“Once you’ve been admitted to study, then at the end you’ll get a job too. The university even has to make sure you’re taken care of.”
“Why the university?”
“It’s better if you find a job yourself, but if you can’t, they have to find something for you, or let you continue studying.”
“Now that’s strange.”
“Ask Evi.”
“How long is your provisional whatchamacallit good for?”
“Till the thirteenth,” Adam said and pulled the four-page, six-by-eight-inch document from his shoulder bag. “ ‘Provisional Travel Pass A 08969, for Hungary, the Czechoslovakian Socialist Republic, and the German Democratic Republic (Bad Schandau).’ What do you think—could I find work on your side?”
“If you really want to, why not?”
“It can’t be that easy.”
“Anybody who wants to work can find work.”
“But not necessarily the work you want.”
“No problem. You need an idea, an idea, and elbow grease and a little luck. Sometimes all it takes is being friendly.”
“Isn’t everybody friendly over there, at least the ones who want to sell you something?”
“Any of you folks who are good at what you do will find work on our side. There’s always room at the top. What makes you ask?”
“We can’t live with the Angyals forever.”
“They idolize you, you’re the ideal son-in-law.”
“Erszi isn’t all that bad either.”
“Her mother? Are you serious?”
“Why not? She might be even younger than you?”
“Well, I certainly wouldn’t put it past you.” Michael held his beer out to him, Adam tapped the bottle with his own.
“Were you ever here before?”
“No, the East never interested me much. It got left behind twenty years ago.”
“You mean in terms of economics.”
“Any manufacturer who calls his bus the Icarus,” Michael said with a laugh. “How do you think that’s going to turn out? Progress is at home in the West.”
“I don’t live badly.”
“If your nabobs would release the cancer statistics, you wouldn’t say that. Take Rositz, just a few miles from your doorstep, spews filth that would be forbidden in the West. Inconceivable! Mona showed me that tar pit once. A plague pit. It’s criminal.”
“What is it you do actually?”
“Cellular biology.”
“Okay, and?”
Michael smiled. “We’re trying to figure out why we get old and die, so that someday we won’t get old and die.”
“And why do we get old and die?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes, of course.”
“When cells multiply, when chromosomes are copied, a little something always gets lost, a piece gets lopped off every time. At some point so much information is missing that the cell goes bad, that’s after about fifty cycles. But that doesn’t have to be the case. If cells could reproduce without any loss, we would continue to live, which is to say, we don’t have to die.”
Michael flipped his cigarette away like a firefly and lit another.
“Inhale deep, go quick.”
“That doesn’t have anything to do with it, or not a lot. There’s a clock inside each one of us, and when it runs down, that’s it, the end, unless you keep winding it up again. In principle we’re already able to calculate how long you’ll live, fairly precisely in fact.”
“So you mean that it’s feasible, rewinding the clock?”
“Yes, sure, just a matter of time. In forty or fifty years we’ll have the knack of it, for the most part.”
“In forty years?”
“Approximately. At least you’ll be able to wind it up so that you’ll live to be two hundred or maybe longer.”
“And you’re looking for the wind-up key?”
“Have you ever heard of telomeres?”
“Some kind of little animal?”
“Telomeres are the ends of the chromosomes, a kind of overlap, like the plastic tip on your shoelaces. Each time a copy is made they get shorter, if you want to picture it that way—that’s the ticking clock. We’re pretty close to it with pinworms.”
“And you guys are gonna pull this off.”
“More likely the Americans.”
“You say that as if it was the most natural thing in the world. But doesn’t that mean we’ve had the rotten luck of being the last people who are going to die?”
“Or the good luck; depends, I suppose. Maybe we’re the next to the last, or the next to the next, but in a hundred years we’ll have done it.”
“And why don’t we hear anything about this, if you’re so close?”
“It’s not all that simple either, but take cancer cells for example. Cancer cells are immortal, they don’t come to an end, they keep on copying without any loss. We have to transfer what cancer cells can do to healthy cells. We’ve got the model, so to speak.”
“For immortality.” Adam massaged his chest. “So people who get themselves pickled or frozen—they’ve got the right idea.”
“Might be, may well be.”
“I’d be satisfied to grow as old as Elfi.”
“As your turtle? As pets they never get older than fifty, life’s too stressful living with us.”
“No older?”
“In the wild they can live to a hundred or more, but Elfriede definitely won’t. Didn’t you know that?”
“No.”
“If I could still be alive at the moment when we turn off the death switch … that’d be something!”
“I don’t know. If you’ve got some who are going to die and others who won’t, or at least will live five times as long—”
“It’s already that way. Fear isn’t going to get you anywhere. We have to free ourselves from life’s brevity, from mortality. That’s the only categorical imperative—escape from your own self-inflicted mortality.”
“Sounds strange somehow.”
“It’s like a drug, once you’ve been up there with it, you never want to come down.”
“Do you live to work, or do you work to live?”
“That’s not a legitimate question.”
“Yes it is. You’re spending your whole life working for eternity.”
“For me work is life. Isn’t it for you?”
“Yes, but we don’t mean the same thing.”
“Why not? What you do is great work.”
“Precisely because I can do what I want.”
“But if she wants a dress, you can’t make her a pantsuit.”
“Sure I can, if she looks better in a pantsuit.”
“You’re sure sure of yourself, I’ll give you that.”
“Do you love Evi?”
“Do I love Evelyn?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t be here otherwise. I ought to have been in Hamburg long before now.”
“Are three weeks too long?”
“Do you have any idea what it means to disappear for that long? Three weeks can mean letting go of everything, the whole shootin’ match—not just your own existence, but that of the others, and of the project.”
“Or of immortality.”
“Right, of immortality too.”
They both nodded, as if they were finally in agreement.