Your Perfect Year(109)
“Only joking,” Lisa replied remorsefully. “Sorry.”
“For goodness’ sake, don’t sit there saying you’re sorry. Just tell me whether or not it was a good idea!”
“Yes! It was good! It is good! Anyway, it’s too late now. It’s in the mailbox; we can’t take it back now.”
“Oh, shit! We should have thought about it longer. It was much too spur-of-the-moment.”
“No, it wasn’t. You’re always saying you should follow your gut instinct—and now that’s what you’ve done.”
“That’s certainly true.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Simon spins in his grave?”
“And so he should! I can’t believe he kept it from you.”
“Yes, well.”
“Well—exactly. Get a move on, now, it’s past my bedtime.”
Hannah started the engine and steered the Twingo out of the broad driveway of the villa back toward the Falkensteiner Ufer. Lisa was right; she shouldn’t think any more about whether or not she had done the right thing. It was done now.
She had driven straight from Simon’s apartment to her friend’s place, told her about the rings, and shown her Simon’s secret manuscript. Lisa was as bewildered about both as Hannah had been herself—and agreed that she absolutely had to keep her rendezvous at Da Riccardo on May 11, if only to ask the guy who had the diary, and now probably the rings, too, whether he had a screw loose.
Together, they had cooked up the idea of what to do with the manuscript. They’d looked up the most renowned publisher in Hamburg and gone to Little Rascals, where Lisa had fed all 323 pages through their long-suffering copier while Hannah had composed a short but appropriately moving cover letter.
At Lisa’s suggestion, she had marked the envelope containing the copy of the manuscript as strictly confidential, for the personal attention of the CEO. “To give it the necessary seriousness,” as her friend had said.
And so the deed was done. Simon’s novel, Hannah’s Laugh, had now been lying in the Grief & Son Books mailbox for a full five minutes.
Hannah turned out onto Falkensteiner Ufer and stepped on it, before she could doubt herself enough to turn back and try to fish the manuscript out of the mailbox.
59
Jonathan
Monday, April 30, 9:03 a.m.
Somehow, Jonathan had managed it. He’d survived April without going entirely out of his mind. He had been helped by the Filofax (no, he hadn’t written his own eulogy, but limited himself to a short-and-sweet entry on the “Notes” pages of the diary: Jonathan N. Grief—a good man, may he rest in peace) and by his conversations with Leopold, who had turned out to be a true friend over recent weeks. With such words of encouragement as “The idea of waiting for something makes it more exciting” (stolen from Andy Warhol, or so he said), the “hobo,” as Jonathan called him in jest, was having more of a therapeutic effect than all the life coaches in the world combined could have done. Jonathan had become a master of composure. Kind of.
Apart from the fact that Markus Bode was still on his back with his constant requests to talk, and Jonathan still didn’t know what to do.
Apart from trying to buy more time—for whatever reason—by telling Bode at the end of March that they should wait for another quarter to see how things progressed with the business. Just to make sure they didn’t make any hasty decisions they would regret later. Or something like that.
Jonathan was beginning to feel rather stupid that he couldn’t just pluck up the courage to tell his CEO, “Go ahead, my old man doesn’t have a clue what’s going on these days, but prefers to go for coffee and cake with his fake wife, and I’m just as clueless when it comes to business affairs, and I’m sure you’ll manage admirably!”
It was absurd and incomprehensible. What on earth was getting him so hung up? What was making him so afraid, so hesitant, so . . . so incapable of making a decision? He was an intelligent adult, wasn’t he?
He was sitting, as he did so often, at his dining table over coffee and a croissant, wondering what exactly his problem was. He didn’t know. He knew only that there was something going on deep inside: something wrong, something lacking, something . . . something . . .
“You think too much.” He could just imagine Leo’s interruption. But the “hobo” wasn’t here. They were both pleased that he had been working for two weeks now as a cook in a Hamburg café, and at that moment was probably whipping up the best scrambled eggs in the city.
With a sigh, Jonathan opened the Filofax to today’s page. Marvelous! As though the creator of the diary were secretly peering over his shoulder, the entry was once again perfect for the situation in general—and for Leopold, specifically, who was currently cooking eggs: Make an internal inventory!
Do you know how Alcoholics Anonymous works? No? A pity, since their 12-step program for combating addiction is ideal for enabling anyone to be happy in life. The most important thing is to make an internal, and above all, fearless, inventory of yourself. This goes as follows: Sit down and think about the mistakes you have made in your life. Who you might have hurt, who you might have neglected, times when you didn’t act particularly well—including times you let yourself down. What unfinished business do you have with other people? Be honest, however difficult it might be! And then set about making good those errors wherever you can. Set about ridding the world of any uncertainty. And from now on live your life with sincerity and honesty toward yourself and other people. What will this bring? Inner peace. Invulnerability. And above all, freedom. Freedom from fear.