When he finally decided to leave his wife, and filed for divorce, it had been a kind of release. Bärger had not expected that his son would be unable to understand this step, much less to accept it. His son had broken off any contact with him, and it had taken years for him to become resigned to that loss.
No, he was happy in his well-lighted apartment with its peculiar floor plan, the large bath, and the huge living room window that even saved him heating costs on sunny winter days. What he really missed was the garden where he could shoot in his bow whenever he wanted to.
And to the loss of his cellar, he corrected himself. Soon after the reunification it had become possible to install gas heat. He had painted the cellar white and had even put light gray lacquer on the floor to make it easier to keep clean. He had set up a small model builder’s workshop and provided it with everything that he needed to work with wood and plastic. Since then, he had often bitterly regretted the loss of his cellar workshop.
It had always been a good feeling to take the bow down from its hooks over the door of his room, take a half dozen arrows from the home-made rack next to it, and then go and shoot a few quick arrows at the straw bale at the end of his garden. Oh yes. That had been a good feeling.
Bärger got up slowly from his bed.
He took a deep breath and stood erect for a while in front of the open window. I am now really relaxed, he thought, and he let his arms hang and closed his eyes.
It is summer. I am standing under the old plum tree and I have my bow in my left hand. The wood is quite warm, and when I feel the shape of the grip, it is as if I am holding another hand – smooth, warm, solid, and reliable. There is a soft snap, when I place the nock of the arrow on the string. I can feel the cool grass under my bare feet and I raise the bow toward the target.
But just as he was pulling his shoulders back to feel the sensation of drawing a bow, the door opened. A Sister stood in the open doorway with her hand on the knob and looked at him blankly. Then she laughed as if she understood and asked, “Are you practicing gymnastics, Herr Bärger?”
“Something like that,” he said, and felt a little stupid.
“Dinner,” said the Sister, and left
Damn, thought Bärger. When am I going to be able to shoot in a bow again?
More from boredom than any real interest, Bärger opened his monthly journal again after he had returned his empty tray to the corridor.
While he automatically sipped the insipid herbal tea, his glance was arrested by the word “competition”.
Look at this, he thought. This is interesting. The Brandenburg district is offering a twolevel competition for ideas and plans for a juvenile detention facility.
They have to know, thought Bärger, that the existing capacity is no longer adequate, because more and more of these useless thugs are hitting other people over the head just for fun. Perhaps the quality and furnishings of the existing structures no longer meet the requirements of a modern prison – also understandable.
Was it really true that today these young criminals were sent to the Caribbean with their social workers to go surfing for the purpose of resocialization?
He had read that a while ago in a newspaper and wasn’t sure whether a couple of clever sociology students hadn’t just figured out a way to get a first class holiday at the taxpayers’ expense. He supposed that, as a rule, the victims of attacks such as he had experienced would never have enough money in their entire lives to spend a vacation in the Caribbean.
The bump on the side of his head began to throb, and Bärger rubbed the bald spot behind his ear with the flat of his hand.
In the newspapers he was constantly reading that the youth of today were increasingly prepared to use violence, as if this were a puzzling phenomenon. He didn’t like the expression “prepared to use violence”, probably thought up by some nutty psychotherapist who believed that a screwed-up childhood gave thugs the right to hit other people on the head.
Preparation was a word that expressed positive social behavior, a word such as sacrifice, help, or industry. He found it perverted to combine it with violence. That combination of words was fundamentally wrong, as it tied together two completely opposite concepts and lacked clarity.
Quite apart from the circumstance that the assailant was almost always under the influence of alcohol and outnumbered his prey or at least was stronger, the violence seemed to be almost an addiction. He doubted whether such an addiction could be treated successfully by vacations in the Caribbean.
The newspaper article had put it well. Accepted social work in many places had become a cover-up for indolence at the cost of the state. He had nothing to add to that.
A contest for the design of a juvenile jail? He would have to get the documentation. There must be specific legal requirements and insurance regulations, including guidelines for the materials to be used. But it was also presented as a competition for ideas, so they were looking for suggestions that departed from current standards as well.
Bärger had been paging through the journal at random when, on the last page, he came across a photograph of the interior of a building. At first glance, it looked like a typical German prison. Of course, he had never been in jail, and that was true for most of the people he knew. But he had seen that particular configuration in so many films that he immediately associated it with a German prison. It was exactly like the photo.
There was a long four-story room, seen in central perspective, with narrow galleries to the right and left and a wide shaft between them reaching from the bottom floor to the roof with daylight coming through a skylight at the top. There were uniformly painted rows of doors on both sides. Just like a prison.
Only in the films, the galleries were always steel and set with steel bars and steel plate. Bärger could almost hear the prisoners walking in lockstep on those steel plates and the clanging of a closing cell door echoing in the empty central chamber.
He was very surprised when he turned back to read the title of the article: “Prize Winning Administration Building for a Major Cosmetics Company”. Even so, he didn’t really think it was very funny. If someone could design an office building today on the pattern of a Prussian prison, what then should (what was the proper expression?) an institution for penal servitude look like?
That night, he slept badly.
He woke up several times, sweating in spite of the thin covers. Finally, he opened the windows as far as they would go just as the sky began to gray over the roofline.
When he eventually fell asleep toward morning, he had a remarkable dream that he was able to remember with knife-edge sharpness after he awoke.
He was standing in the middle of a gigantic cooling tower and was looking about for something to resist a swirling suction pulling him upward. He was tempted to give in to the suction, which was pulling him up into the light of the sun. But it wasn’t the right time yet. He had to wait for something; the right sign had to appear.
Then shadows grew from the triangular openings around the supporting intake ring, black silhouettes against a light background, vague as if they were illuminated from the outside. There were more and more of them until every opening had become a frame for human shadows which now slowly approached him, taking on form as they approached. He saw faces full of evil and malice, which grinned and bared their teeth. As they approached him, and as the ring around him grew tighter and cut him off, the triangular openings behind the shadows began to close slowly and silently. The black triangular surfaces closed from top and bottom into the openings like the sharp teeth in the jaws of a shark.
At