45Over the next weeks and months, my new mindfulness began to have a positive effect on my life. Katharina and I developed a relationship as partners in parenting that seemed more sustainable than the fragile relationship we’d had as a couple. The ice we were skating on grew thicker and thicker. We’d agreed to let my mindfulness course run out its three months and then wait at least another month before making any concrete plans for the future.

I wasn’t letting my work get to me that much any more, and my time with Emily worked like an elixir. Breitner taught me not only the importance of breathing and time islands, but also all kinds of exercises I’d be able to use in the future. The principle of ‘perception without evaluation’ opened my eyes, much as that of ‘intentional centring’. Exercises to overcome my internal resistance became just as familiar to me as mindful breathing had.

After twelve weeks, the mindfulness course was over, and I received Breitner’s indispensable Slowing Down in the Fast Lane: Mindfulness for Managers as a farewell gift – considering the steep course fee, I’d expected his handbook to be bound in leather. I made sure to carry it with me always so I could consult it when needed.

To celebrate my mindful new life, I’d decided to use the 46first weekend after the course ended as a time island to take Emily on a mini-break.

Katharina agreed. She also wanted to mark the occasion and enjoy the freedom she’d gained through my increased involvement. She’d booked herself a spa resort for the weekend, something she hadn’t done since Emily was born.

As Dragan’s lawyer, I had access to many of his properties. I had acquired almost all of them for him and assigned them to his various companies. One of these properties was about eighty kilometres from the city, a fabulous house on a beautiful lake, with a jetty, a sandy beach and a barbecue area. Emily loved water, and we were going to turn the lake house into our time island’s own special castle.

I’d bought the house for Dragan out of EU agricultural subsidies he’d received for the Bulgarian aubergine farm. Once you understand that public funding isn’t distributed based on the applicants’ needs but on their shamelessness, applying for more can become quite addictive. In fact, getting a wheelchair-accessible doorway installed in the guest toilet and providing a five-page proposal to convert the rest of the house into a ‘barrier-free training centre for inclusion research’ was enough to earn subsidies from the Federal Ministry of Education. These grants in turn financed the luxurious expansion of the house’s wellness area.

I knew that Dragan was heading to Bratislava that weekend with a pile of cash to settle some business. Dragan knew that I wanted to spend this time at the lake house with my daughter. Sit on the jetty, eat some nuts, feed the fish.47

None of us knew the weekend would unfold very differently.

The week had been stressful. On Friday night, I had been crouched over a brief concerning the upmarket brothel until half past eleven. Unlike all other tenants, who were relatively easy to convince, pay off or intimidate, the preschool on the ground floor stubbornly refused to vacate the premises. So I had to tighten the thumbscrews a little on the co-operative behind it, a parents’ initiative made up of uncooperative bleeding hearts – through legal means, of course.

I’d even happened to have met them before. By the summer, Emily would be old enough to attend preschool. But the criteria for getting into a preschool are much more confusing than for liquor licences at brothels. Liquor licences are issued centrally, unlike preschool spots. So Katharina and I had looked at all thirty-one preschools within a ten-minute driving radius together and applied for a place at each. The co-operative ended up twenty-ninth on our wish list. We felt the parents were a bunch of utopian nincompoops, and not entirely without reason. I assumed Emily would get a spot at a place between one and five on our wish list. I mean, I couldn’t imagine on what absurd grounds we should be rejected at places one to four. So, I had no problems with the fact that number twenty-nine was about to be turned into a titty temple. I had already offered the co-op a very low severance payment and threatened them with a nasty eviction lawsuit besides. Since the deadline for accepting the severance had expired, I was preparing the eviction proceeding.48

I got back to my apartment some time after midnight and, in happy expectation of the weekend, immediately fell asleep.

On Saturday morning, I picked up Emily. It still felt strange to be waiting on my own doorstep like a visitor, but it was a good kind of strange. Only three months earlier, before I moved out, I’d felt so tense when I came home every night, just knowing I would be greeted with accusations or – worse – utter disregard.

Now I rang the doorbell and was greeted by a smiling Katharina: ‘Hi, Björn, nice to see you.’

What a difference in such a short time.

‘Daddyyyyy!’ Emily hurtled towards me from the nursery. After showing me what was new in her world – one doll no longer needed to wear a nappy – she started packing up all her stuffed animals while her mother and I had a coffee.

‘Emily is really looking forward to your trip,’ Katharina told me.

‘I am too …’

‘But do me a favour and please keep her far away from anything to do with your mafia maniac.’

The mere fact that she formulated this as a request represented a quantum leap in our communication. But Katharina’s fears were completely unfounded; there was simply nothing even remotely redolent of criminality in the unused lake house.

‘Please don’t worry about it. As soon as I notice even a hint of mafioso, I’ll immediately break off our trip.’49

‘And ruin my spa weekend?’ Katharina’s tone changed abruptly.

‘No, I …’ I stammered.

‘Björn, I will assume you can guarantee everything will be fine, without any ifs or buts. This is your first weekend away together. If I can’t rely on this to go smoothly, then you’d better not go at all. You know what’s on the line here.’

There they were again: the cracks in the ice – and everything underneath. I took a quick breath to myself and then responded lovingly and calmly:

‘Katharina, I guarantee you that this weekend will be entirely plain sailing. For Emily, for me and for you too.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, warmer again.

Katharina gave Emily a fierce hug goodbye and me a friendly kiss on the cheek.

Shortly after, I walked out of the much-too-big apartment hand in hand with Emily, who was skipping for joy. The fact that a single sentence from Katharina could still take the ground out from under me made me shudder. But if I’d learned anything, it was that when I’m standing outside a door, I’m standing outside a door. When I’m having an argument with Katharina, I’m having an argument with Katharina. So I walked outside and let Katharina be Katharina. From now on, we would be on our time island.

It was the perfect day for a father-daughter trip to the lake. The sky was blue, and although it was nine in the morning and only the end of April, it was already a summery 27 degrees.

*

50A significant issue today is our permanent availability, mainly due to our smartphones. It’s an incredible travesty to call any device ‘smart’ that – through a work call, email, WhatsApp or whatever – can ruthlessly send us to the depths of hell, and from our own pocket! ‘Hellphone’ would be more apropos. But phones are like weapons: it’s not the thing itself that’s dangerous, but the person using it. Unlike guns, smartphones only harm their owners. Sure, you can put a gun to your own head. But you usually do it to end a fucked-up life, not to fuck it up some more.

In Breitner’s book, I found the following on this issue:

Mindfulness means being available to your own needs. Any time you are available to others stands in the way of this mindfulness. Consciously switching off your phone is a good first step – to the extent that it should make it frighteningly clear that always being available to others has already been completely normalised. Yet your goal should be to make your decision to switch on your phone a conscious one. Until then, at least while on your time island, you should leave your phone and computer switched off.

Pay these sentences heed, they can save lives. In recent weeks, I had kept my phone off while I was on my time islands, and not once had something happened that my voicemail couldn’t fill me in on a few hours later. But this had to be the one weekend I forgot about my digital fast. Out of sheer excitement to take a trip with Emily, my mindfulness had slipped. The repercussions were immediate.51

I had just strapped Emily in her child seat and left the driveway when my phone rang – I suddenly realised I’d completely failed at mindfulness.

The screen showed an unknown number, which didn’t necessarily mean anything. Dragan changed mobile numbers like other people changed lawyers. I could have just declined the call. But if the man who’s letting you stay at his lake house calls, it’s considered rude to ignore him. After all, he could have just been calling to say: ‘Hope you have a great time!’ – though that was unlikely. Also not unimportant, he might’ve been calling to say: ‘Hey, Mustafa will also be at the lake this weekend and he’s bringing twelve prozzies, doesn’t bother you, does it?’ I had solemnly promised Katharina that there wouldn’t be any such surprises, so I answered.

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘Dude, where are you?’

‘A good morning to you too, Dragan. I’m just on my way to the lake house with Emily, you remember …’

‘I need you here. Now.’

‘Dragan, this is my weekend with Emily.’

‘We’re going for ice cream.’ Dragan hung up.

Because we’d known for years that Dragan’s phones were being tapped, none of our important talks ever happened over the phone. Instead, we had agreed on a few attorney-client code words. Deciding on code words with a violent psychopath is a delicate matter. If someone already finds it hard to remember whose legs he’d had broken two days earlier, they’re usually also not able to retain even just half a dozen designations for specific dangerous situations.52

That’s why we had two code words, no more. One was ‘watching Titanic’, the other ‘going for ice cream’.

‘Watching Titanic’ essentially meant ‘the ship is going down’: throw any incriminating material overboard and get everyone into lifeboats. Dragan had never had to use that one before.

‘Going for ice cream’ meant ‘it’s getting hot, we need to meet immediately’. There was an ice-cream parlour on the ground floor of my firm’s building. I had rented it for Dragan through one of his own subsidiaries, on the one hand because it was an easy business to launder cash through, on the other because of the place’s layout and proximity to my law firm. The staff rooms of the ice-cream parlour were on the floor above and could be reached via the lift from both the underground car park and my office – but only via the lift. The rooms were windowless, and there were exactly two sets of keys: one for Dragan and one for me. ‘Going for ice cream’ meant meeting there, unnoticed by law enforcement, people from my firm or anyone at all.

So far, Dragan had used the code word twice.

Both times, the reason had been that Dragan was wanted by the police, so before going into hiding he needed to give me instructions in person: which witnesses had to be ‘influenced’ and how I should instruct his employees until the waters had calmed again. I had a whole stack of powers of attorney and even blank letterhead signed by Dragan. This way, I could easily continue all of his business on his behalf in his absence. This had been tried and tested.53

If Dragan wanted to get into the building unnoticed, he’d hide in the back of one of his ice-cream vans, let himself be driven into the underground car park and then disappear into the lift. I’d come down from my office. Nobody saw us.

‘Going for ice cream’ was not only a code word, but also a conversation killer. It should leave police or prosecutors in the dark, and prevent any discussion between the two of us about why we were meeting. This meant I had to meet Dragan. I’d picked up the phone, I’d heard the code word. My time island was moot. But just because my idiot client had once again had someone’s bones broken, some smugglers had thundered into a police checkpoint or some drugs shipment had been blown up, did that really mean I should give up my newly acquired principles? Should a single phone call be able to ruin my hard-won father-daughter weekend? Thanks to my job, I didn’t have a fucking choice. Ignoring a call would’ve been forgivable. Ignoring an emergency code word wasn’t. With Dragan, doing that could result in repercussions that went beyond employment law straight into the anatomical.

Aggravated, I threw the phone into the passenger footwell and stepped on the gas. I accelerated to seventy in a thirty zone, took the right of way from a smaller car – accidentally – and, instead of driving towards the motorway, turned onto the main road towards the city centre with deliberately squealing tyres. The little outburst of fury did me good, and Emily was also very impressed. She liked the squealing tyres and shrieked with delight, ‘Daddy, what are you doing?’54

‘I … I …’

Yeah, what was I doing? I took three deep breaths and made a compromise with myself: I would briefly visit the office, get this unnecessary meeting over with and then officially start on my time island. I was driving to an emergency meeting, nothing more. This wouldn’t betray my commitment to time islands; Katharina wouldn’t have any grounds for reproach. There was nothing wrong with a father briefly stopping by the office with his daughter on a Saturday morning. Leaving aside the fact that he was doing it completely against his will.

‘Daddy is just dropping by the office for a bit,’ I said, as if it were the most normal thing in the world. On the car stereo, I selected the kids’ music playlist, and we sang ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’ all the way to the city centre.