Do you know what they are? They're tanker trucks, each carrying thousands of liters of water. Water for drinking and cooking, and also for the animals. Why do you think these trucks are here? Well?” He enjoyed the suspense. “It looks like the regular water isn't drinkable, wouldn't you say? I suppose that though Strassenheim belongs to Mannheim, it is not connected to Mannheim's water supply, nor to that of Viernheim or Heddesheim. Strassenheim must have its own wells. Can they have dried up? With all the rain we've had in the past few weeks? No, there's plenty of water around here, and the water looks perfectly clear. It might smell a little, but then again it might not. It might taste a little weird, but then again it might not. I'm not saying that you drop dead if you drink it. Perhaps you'll feel a bit queasy, or maybe even get sick as a dog; maybe you'll shit or retch your guts out.”
Strassenheim lay behind us.
“How come you know all this?”
“I'm the kind of guy who puts two and two together. Know what I mean? The official agencies will never tell you anything, but here they're keeping such a low profile that that in itself is suspicious.” He began driving faster again. “We're crossing the border of the Käfertal watershed area. The munitions depot lies in the outer perimeter. Viernheim junction, where the inner perimeter of the wells begins, is about two kilometers beyond Strassenheim. It's anybody's guess how the damn groundwater flows. Be that as it may, Strassenheim has had to bear the brunt of it.” His right hand made a resigned wave, came clapping down onto his bald head, and then brushed back all the missing locks of hair. He chewed his mustache angrily, his teeth grinding.
I can't say that the sky looked any less blue or the rapeseed any less yellow. I've always had trouble believing in the existence of something I cannot see: God, Einstein's relativity, the harmfulness of smoking, the hole in the ozone. I was also skeptical because the munitions depot lay only a few kilometers away from the Benjamin-Franklin-Village in Käfertal, and I had a hard time imagining that the Americans would put their own people at risk. Not to mention that Viernheim lay closer to the depot than Strassenheim, and Viernheim's water supply didn't seem to have been affected. All things considered, had Peschkalek himself tasted the Strassenheim water, or had he sent it to be analyzed?
We were back in Edingen. As we drove down the Grenz-häfer Strasse, we saw Frau Büchler and Wendt's people coming out of the Grüner Baum Restaurant. The funeral meal had taken a long time. My old Opel was waiting in front of the cemetery.
“You and I have to talk this through at leisure,” I said to Peschkalek.
He handed me his card. “Call me when you have a moment. You don't believe me, do you? You're thinking: These are the ravings of a reporter, this is journalistic gob-bledygook. Well, let's pray that you're right.”
7
Tragedy or farce?
Peschkalek's poisonous groundwater streams pursued me into my dreams, and I saw the small Strassenheim chapel grow into a cathedral, the gargoyles on its roof spitting green, yellow, and red water. By the time I realized that the cathedral was made of rubber, its walls bloating and distending, it was too late. It exploded, and revolting brown slime burst from it. I woke up as the slime was about to reach my feet, and I couldn't go back to sleep. During my conversation with Peschkalek I had not been frightened. Now I was.
My father's stories came back to me. Throughout the years I was at school, he hadn't said a word about his experiences in World War I. Some of my classmates bragged about their fathers' heroic deeds, and I would have liked to have done the same. I knew that mine had been wounded a number of times, that he had been decorated and promoted. I wanted to talk about that at school, to brag a little. But he didn't want me to. He only became talkative in the last few years of his life. Mother had died, his days had become lonely, and when I visited him he spoke about many things, and about the war. Perhaps he also wanted to rid me of the idea that the Reich needed more lebensraum, even if it meant war.
He had been wounded three times. The first two times decently, as he