The Ghosts of Altona Read Free Page A

true reality, where everything was sharper, clearer, brighter. He was bodiless, free from form; all around him, in him, through him, the colours grew more intense, more varied: he now saw colours beyond the spectrum, colours he had not known existed. He saw deep within himself; he saw with eyeless clarity the inconceivable beauty of his own existence – spirals of light and energy of which he was made, an endless coiling that was not just himself, but all the generations that had gone before him. He remembered memories that were not his, but had gone into his making. He sank deep into the warm, fathomless ocean of his own consciousness and saw answers to everything that had ever eluded him.
    Things happened, thoughts came, visions revealed themselves simultaneously, yet without confusion. There was no sequence because Fabel was, he realized, beyond chronology, outside Time, and everything he experienced was instantaneous.
    Fabel, without bodily sensation, to whom a body now seemed an unnatural and distant concept, could somehow sense that he had started to move, and that he was accelerating to a great speed. The light and colours around him became distorted and stretched and he became aware that he was travelling through a tunnel of no substance. A bright light, that would have dazzled had he still had eyes, seemed to fill everything. Jan Fabel felt a euphoria he had never before experienced. A deep, profound, total, indescribable joy.
    In that same instant, and without a sense of motion, he found himself elevated above and looking down on Grosse Brunnenstrasse. The rain-damp road glistened and sparkled with overlapping blue flashes from the cluster of police cars and the ambulance that had pulled up outside the apartment building. There was sudden activity as a group of paramedics and police burst out of the main entrance and rushed a wheeled stretcher over to the open doors of the ambulance. An Emergency Service doctor trotted alongside the stretcher, leaning across it and working on the body of a blond man in his late forties. An oxygen mask obscured the patient’s face, his shirt had been ripped open and the bright white of the wound pads bloomed dark red as he bled out. Fabel observed the scene with dispassion, disinterest: the body on the trolley had been his, but he now had nothing to do with it, had no further use for it. He watched as they loaded the trolley into the ambulance and Anna Wolff, who had been running behind, clambered in after it.
    He remembered, as if remembering a story, how he had once been in the business of investigating deaths, had attended countless murder scenes, and he now wondered vaguely how many of the dead had looked down on him with the same dispassionate curiosity while he had stood over their remains.
    Fabel drifted up, further above the scene. He was now high above Altona and was surprised to see how close Schalthoff’s apartment had been to his own in Ottensen. Higher. He now saw the whole of Altona and beyond, his sense of sight sharper, further-reaching and more detailed than it had been in life. His vision took in everything around him, in all directions. He was now above the Palmaille and he could see all Hamburg. So much water. Hamburg’s element glistered in the night: the lakes of the Binnen and Aussen Alsters; the dark serpent writhe of the River Elbe through the city; the deep harbours of Finkenwerder. He watched the lights glittering along the Reeperbahn, across Sankt Pauli. He could see in all directions at the same time and the whole dark city – from Blankenese to Altengamme; Sinstorf to Wohldorf – sparkled with hard, sharp obsidian clarity.
    Fabel understood why he was here, temporarily back from that other place that wasn’t a place or a time. He had loved this city so much. He had come to say goodbye.
    Suddenly, his view extended even further, reaching out across the low, dark, velvet land beyond the city and taking in the scattered small constellations of