“That’s it then,” said Bärger aloud.
He was already at the door when the phone rang.
Bärger glanced at his watch. It was just before ten. He turned on the drawing lamp and reached for the receiver.
“Bärger,” he said. “I’m really not here anymore.”
But the caller didn’t pay any attention to him. “Are you still there? I’ve been looking for you at your house. What are you doing still at the office at this hour?”
It was Lothar, the representative of the Construction Committee, thorough and conscientious as usual. Had he forgotten anything else? Bärger pulled his desk calendar into the cone of light cast by the drawing lamp. Right, there it was. Tuesday, inspection of nuclear power plant. 8 o’clock.
“Hallo Lothar,” he said. “I’m doing what everyone in the office does, drinking coffee. No, no. I’m not kidding. I’ve just packed up the last of my stuff and I’m going straight home. Everything’s set. Tomorrow at eight in the parking lot. Yeah, see you tomorrow.” He hung up. The last telephone call, thought Bärger, perhaps even a gesture by fate, a glimpse of the future. Then he shoved both boxes over to the door, turned out the light, and shut the door.
How did that Spanish proverb go? When one door closes, another opens.
It was still summer.
But already the broad leaves of the lindens were turning yellow; the umbels of the mountain ash were a coral red color; and in the mornings, apples fell to the damp lawns with a dull thump.
Why am I doing this again, thought Bärger, as he walked toward the car just pulling in. I haven’t even finished drinking my tea, and besides, the whole thing is just a little senseless - as if I could evaluate a shutdown nuclear power plant.
He had requested materials, at least a construction plan, but there was nothing else available except for a site map provided by the prospective investor. It’s always this way, thought Bärger. I can only think about a building with a paper and pencil in hand.
The car door swung open and Bärger raised his hand in greeting as Lothar motioned for him to get in. He was correctly dressed as always in a light gray suit and freshly ironed shirt, the tie somewhat too loud, but tied with precision. Bärger looked down at himself. At least his jeans were clean, but he was wearing only an open shirt beneath his light blazer.
“Who did you dress up for today?” he asked.
Lothar grunted, annoyed, and drove the car out of the parking lot, turned on to the street and competently eased his way into the heavy traffic moving toward the outer ring road.
They had known each other long enough to be comfortable with silence.
The car passed over a bridge, and the man-high parapet reflected the traffic noise through the open window. The car began to climb a long hill. Bärger sat up in his seat when the sun began to shine in his eyes. He blinked, pushed the shoulder belt to one side and looked at the road, now straight as a die, which led up to the crest of the ridge.
“How far is it now?” he asked.
“A half hour or so,” growled Lothar, and shifted down to the lowest gear without using the clutch. I would never do that, thought Bärger. Once I would even have doubleclutched whenever I downshifted, the way I learned when I was driving trucks.
Halfway up the slope, it became evident that the road made a wide turn to the west at the top and followed the ridgeline for a while. From above, you could see green hill country with isolated patches of trees. A coniferous forest traced a dark line along the horizon in front of a chain of softly rounded mountains, which faded into different shades of blue in the distance.
He looked forward when Lothar turned abruptly onto a side road, and shortly thereafter the car dove into the shadows of a pine plantation.
“We’re almost there,” said Lothar. When they emerged from the wood, Bärger could see the dome of the atomic reactor in the distance behind a long, low building.
A group of four cooling towers, blinding white against the deep blue of the sky, stood off to one side, on a small hill.
“What are you going to do now?”
Bärger let himself sink more deeply into his seat and looked at Lothar, who was concentrating on the road. Light and shadow alternated rapidly in a rhythm imposed by the spacing of the large ash trees on each side of the road.
He had been asked repeatedly to stay with the firm as an independent consultant, even before the company manager had placed his termination notice on his desk. He knew why. They needed him because he was licensed in four of the German states, and his stamp was required for preliminary authorizations by those building authorities. None of his colleagues had a license yet from the Architects’ Council. But he had only grinned and shaken his head when they had offered him money for his stamp and signature. He told them that they would have no problem finding someone else to do it, then he had left.
What was he going to do now?
“First of all, I registered with the council as an independent architect. I’ll have to see how that works out. Then, I still have work on a rebuilding job over the next six months. After that, I can at least keep busy as a construction supervisor. It isn’t really what I want to do, but it’s a living. I made friends with a construction engineer who was happy to find someone to take some of his workload.”
They drove past the colorful targets of an archery range set on a meadow scattered with tall poplars at the edge of a new subdivision.
“Did you see that?” Lothar pointed at the archery range. It was somewhat overgrown, but the targets looked almost new and little used.
“Yes, I did,” said Bärger.
‘Weren’t you an archer once?” asked Lothar.
“Oh, yes,” said Bärger and nodded his head several times. “Oh, yes, that I was.”
“Why did you quit?”
Bärger was silent for a while. “That’s a good question,” he said. “I’ll have to think about it for a while.”
Once more the car turned, this time onto a concrete drive, the approach to the reactor.
Although it had been shut down for years, from a distance the entire installation looked to be in astonishingly good shape. It had a three-story administration building, with a large turbine shed behind it right next to the reactor dome. They were all overshadowed by the group of four gigantic cooling towers, which appeared to sway on a row of supports, of almost ornamental appearance, like a pleated ribbon. Almost as if they had to be tied down, not supported, thought Bärger. He felt an intense attraction, almost like a suction when he looked at the immeasurably huge curved surfaces, like the sensation he had felt when he first saw the Chapelle de La Ronchamp.
The car rolled forward silently and stopped in the shadow of a birch, but Bärger couldn’t take his eyes off those towers.
The town-councilor’s voice brought him back from a state of deep contemplation.
“Those are certainly not on our schedule.”
She walked over to them, elegant as always, a vision of freshness and energy. Her fiery red hair was carefully disarrayed, and her unsuitable, high-heeled red shoes tapped on the coarse concrete. Was she the reason Lothar had dressed up like that? Shut up, thought Bärger. He grinned in a friendly way and took the offered hand. “Black Robert,” Bärger’s name for the man from the PDS1