Astrid tilts her head.
“Tamara, what’s going on?”
Tamara points to the opposite shore.
“And that’s where we live.”
The opposite shore is a good fifty yards away. Through the dense trees an old villa can be seen. It’s two stories high, and there’s a tower on the left-hand side. There are lights on in three windows.
If fireworks went off now, Tamara would find that very suitable. The view always reminds her of the beginning of winter, and what it was like going down to the shore late at night and looking back at the villa. As if it were all just a dream and the villa could disappear at any moment. Tamara has the deep and certain feeling of having arrived.
“You’re joking, aren’t you?”
“Shall we go ashore?”
Astrid puts a hand on Tamara’s arm to stop her rowing any further.
“Tell me you’re joking.”
“I’m not joking.”
Astrid looks across at the villa, then back at her sister.
“Who have you landed for yourself?”
“Nobody.”
“Nobody with loads of money? Just stop right now.”
“No, really,” says Tamara and can tell by her voice that even she herself hasn’t really quite understood. Six months have passed since they founded the agency, and she still finds it hard to believe that they’ve come this far.
“Kris had an idea,” she begins, and tells her sister what has happened.
At first they were contacted only by companies with internal problems. Next came companies that wanted to apologize to other companies. There were also private requests, but they were quickly excluded. The agency has no interest in patching marriages together or apologizing on behalf of people who had accidentally run over a cat. At first they were limited to Berlin, but over the weeks that followed requests from the south and west of Germany started piling up, Kris said.
“Either we go beyond Berlin or someone else will do it.”
Thus Wolf became a representative of forgiveness and traveled all around Germany. He likes the change and the anonymity that goes with it—night after night another hotel room, day after day another town.
The brothers are responsible for the apologizing. Tamara tried and failed. She makes everything personal, and if she’s honest she doesn’t think much of apologizing for somebody she finds unsympathetic. Kris said:
“You don’t take sides; you do your job, that’s the only way it works.”
And because it only works like that, Tamara let it go. Apologies were out of the question for Frauke as well. She opted for office work, putting timetables together, coordinating commissions, writing bills, things like that. That’s her world, while Tamara sits by the phone and is responsible for the requests. Because anyone who doesn’t get along with Tamara can go hang as far as the agency’s concerned.
“Why haven’t you told me any of this?” Astrid wants to know.
“We didn’t want anyone else muscling in on us. We wanted to be able to go our own way. We had no idea how it would go.”
The machinery was set in motion without any help from them. Apart from the advertisement in two big newspapers there was no other promotion. Frauke said it would be tacky. The companies heard about them and reacted. Guilt-stricken company directors phoned up; managers explaining their problems in the third person, and secretaries who, pushed forward by their bosses, wanted to find out how the thing actually worked.
Often it’s endless phone conversations with embarrassing confessions, and of course there are also customers who don’t want to talk at all and send their ideas by post. They are Tamara’s favorites. Cool and matter-of-fact, they ask for the agency’s help. Tamara’s job is to separate the serious from the non-serious cases. Of every ten commissions three are usually a waste of time.
Of course there are complaints, too. Customers who can’t get their heads around how the agency works. It goes too far for them, and it’s not how the customer would have imagined it. Kris insists that there’s no such thing as “too far.”
“If they don’t know what that means,” he explained to Tamara, “tell them forgiveness knows no bounds, that always sounds good.”
Many people see this as a Bible quotation. Frauke has taken it as a motto and incorporated it into the questionnaire.
Forgiveness knows no bounds.
There were some imitators too, for a while, but they didn’t worry the agency. It’s not just about an idea, it’s about a philosophy. Kris quickly revealed himself as a master of forgiveness. His philosophy is the motor that drives the agency onward.
“Of course people can imitate our idea,” he says, “but our concept will remain a mystery to them.”
And if anyone were to ask what their concept was, all four of them would have to act mysterious, because the truth is that they have no idea of concepts. Kris has taught Wolf everything—the right words, the right gestures, when you have to be silent, when you have to talk. The rest is experience, that’s why it’s no wonder that the imitators had to shut up shop. They simply had no reasonable concept.
“Why didn’t you stay in Berlin?”
“Astrid, this is Berlin.”
“Wannsee isn’t Berlin, Tammi, it’s the East.”
Astrid flicks her cigarette butt into the water, as if to demonstrate to her sister what she thinks of the Wannsee. Tamara doesn’t want to contradict her; Astrid’s never been a star in geography. Instead Tamara says:
“We were getting cramped. The commissions were pouring in, and we were still in Kris’s apartment, coordinating everything from a single room. One evening Wolf had had enough.”
“I hate the fact that we’re still hanging around at Kris’s apartment,” he said. “I mean, commune or not, we’re really too old for this. We should stop behaving like amateurs. With every commission we’re making more than any of us has ever made in six months. Shouldn’t we do something with the money?”
They found a dilapidated villa on the Kleine Wannsee. Tamara couldn’t believe such things still existed. Except in films, of course. Every few minutes you heard the train running quietly in the background, and from the conservatory you could look out on to the shore of the Kleine Wannsee over breakfast. Of course there were a few reservations. Who in their late twenties moves to the edge of Berlin to renovate a villa? Either some kind of prehistoric hippies who inherited money from their parents, or crisply tanned film producers who have to invest their profits somewhere. But them?
They couldn’t have cared less.
The villa turned out to be a dream, a dilapidated dream admittedly, but they were living out that dream. Tamara still can’t grasp how quickly it all happened. The real estate agent took his cut, the bank waved them through, and the villa was theirs. Frauke’s father arrived with a gang of workmen, and together they knocked down walls, scraped off old wallpaper, improved the floors, and put in new pipes, so that the villa was ready to be occupied by the beginning of January.
For the first week they walked speechlessly through the rooms. Everywhere there were freshly sanded floors, freshly whitened walls, rooms full of light. The stench of their youth lay behind them. All of a sudden everything was stylish and authentic; all