The Weeping Girl ivv-8

by Håkan Nesser

  ‘Let’s get going,’ said Henning. ‘We’ve got all day. I once dug a hole that very nearly came out on the other side of the world. I was nearly there — but then I had to go in and eat. I could hear them talking down there.’

  ‘Talking?’

  Fingal couldn’t suppress his surprise.

  ‘The Chinese. I was that close. I placed my ear against the bottom of the hole, and I could hear them talking quite clearly. I couldn’t understand what they said, of course — they speak a different language, the Chinese do. Shall we dig a hole now that goes all the way through?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Fingal.

  The cousins dug away. Fingal’s spade was red and much newer than Henning’s, which was blue and a bit worse for wear. Perhaps it had been used during the previous China excavation, so it was understandable. But a red spade always digs faster than a blue one.

  It was still only morning. They had just come down to the beach with their mothers, who were sisters and currently busy lying down on their backs and tanning their titties — it was that kind of beach.

  It was quite easy to dig. At first, at least. But soon the sand they’d dug out started to run back down into the hole. Henning said that they’d have to make the hole a bit wider at the top.

  It was rather boring to have to make the hole wider when what they really wanted to do was to dig straight down and come to the Chinese as quickly as possible. But if they wanted to get through, they would have to put up with a few annoying little problems. And keep at it even so.

  And so Henning got stuck in, and Fingal followed his example.

  ‘Shut up now, I’m listening and trying to hear something!’ said Henning when the hole was so deep that only his head and shoulders stuck out when he stood upright on the bottom. That was certainly true of Fingal, at any rate, who was some ten centimetres shorter than his cousin.

  ‘Sh!’ said Fingal to himself, holding his index finger over his lips when Henning pressed his ear down on the wet sand.

  ‘Could you hear anything?’ he asked when Henning stood up again and brushed the sand out of his ear.

  ‘Only something very faint,’ said Henning. ‘We have quite a bit to go yet. Shall we play at slaves?’

  ‘Slaves? Yes, of course!’ said Fingal, who couldn’t remember just now what a slave was.

  Henning clambered up out of the hole.

  ‘Let’s start with you as the slave and me as the slave driver. You have to do everything I say, otherwise I’ll kill you and eat you up.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Fingal.

  ‘Get digging!’ yelled Henning, threateningly. ‘Dig away, you idle slave!’

  Fingal started digging again. Down and down, with sand being sprayed around left, right and centre: it was wet and quite hard going, halfway down to China.

  ‘Dig!’ yelled Henning again. ‘You have to say: Yes, Mister!’

  ‘Yesmister!’ said Fingal, digging away.

  We ought to be making contact with those Chinese soon, he thought; but he daren’t break off to lie down and listen. If he did, his cousin might kill him and eat him up. That didn’t sound very pleasant. Instead he started digging slightly to one side, where it seemed to be easier. Maybe that was the right way to China. He had the feeling it must be the case.

  ‘Get digging, you idle slave!’ screeched Henning.

  His arms were really beginning to ache now, especially the right one that he’d broken when he was out skiing and fell on the ice six months ago. But he didn’t give up. He dug away with the spade and stuck it into the sand wall at the side of the hole with all his strength.

  A large chunk of sand fell down as he did so, but that was okay. He realized that he had got there. At last. A foot was sticking out of the sand.

  A foot with all five toes and a sole with sand stuck to it. A real Chinese foot!

  ‘We’re there!’ he shouted. ‘Look!’

  The slave driver jumped down into the hole to check. Good God! They really had dug so far down that they’d come to a Chinaman’s feet.

  ‘Well dug!’ he said.

  The only questionable thing — which seemed to challenge the theory that the earth was round — was that the foot hadn’t appeared at the bottom of the hole. It was sticking out from the side instead; and the leg to which the foot was attached also seemed to be sticking out sideways instead of from the bottom up.

  But that was a bagatelle.

  ‘Let’s dig the sand away and take a look at the rest of it,’ said Henning, who had now given up his job as slave driver and was prepared to dig out that leg — and indeed all the rest of the body, which didn’t seem to be a Chinaman after all, but the corpse of an ordinary mortal.

  Which didn’t necessarily make matters any worse — although he would never admit to his cousin that he had never seen a corpse before.

  But just as he dug in his blue spade and made another chunk of sand fall down into the hole, his auntie Doris appeared at the top of the hole, glowering down at them.

  His auntie, Fingal’s mum.

  At first she glowered.

  Then she screamed.

  Then his own mum appeared and she screamed as well. Both he and Fingal were lifted out of the Chinese hole and people came swarming up from all directions — bare-breasted women and women with their breasts hidden away, men with and without sunglasses, some of them with big, flashy swimming trunks, others with tiny ones that more or less disappeared up their backsides. . But all of them pointing and singing from the same hymn sheet:

  ‘Don’t touch anything! Don’t touch anything!’ shouted a large, fat bloke, louder than anybody else, ‘There’s a body buried down there in the sand! Don’t touch anything until the police get here!’

  Henning’s mum lifted her son up, and Fingal’s did the same with hers: but there was a red and a blue spade left lying in the hole, and nobody seemed to have the slightest interest in them.

  But those feet — they’d exposed another one when Henning made his final thrust with his spade: everybody seemed to be extremely interested in them.

  So, Fingal thought: it really was one of those Chinese we dug up.

  ‘The earth is round!’ he shouted, waving to everybody while his mum did her best to whisk him away to where their picnic hampers were waiting, filled with apples and buns and sandwiches and juice that was both red and yellow. Oh yes, the earth is round!

  THREE

  23

  22 July 1983

  She didn’t register what the girl said at first. The red digits on the clock radio said 01.09; her irritation that somebody had had the cheek to ring at that time of night was mixed with worry that something must have happened. An accident? Her parents? Her brother? Arnold or Mikaela — no, that wasn’t possible, they were both asleep in the same room as she was.

  ‘I’m sorry — what did you say?’

  ‘I want to speak to my teacher, magister Maager.’

  A pupil. She stopped worrying. A fifteen- or sixteen-year-old chit of a girl telephoning at ten past one in the morning. . Magister Maager? Arnold rolled over in his bed, and the first unmistakable coughs came from Mikaela’s cot: she was awake, and would start howling at any moment. No doubt about it. If that didn’t happen every night, it happened every other, at least.

  Some nights more than once. And without any help from the telephone. Her anger burst forth in full bloom.

  ‘How dare you telephone us in the middle of the night? We have a little child, and we’ve got better things to do than. .’

  She lost the thread. No response. For a moment she thought the girl must have hung up, but then she heard the sound of slightly asthmatic breathing at the other end of the line. Arnold switched the light on and sat up. She gestured to him, telling him to see to Mikaela, and he got out of bed.

  ‘What do you want?’ she asked sternly.

  ‘I want to speak to Maager.’

  ‘What about?’

  No reply. Mikaela started howling, and Arnold picked her up. Wh
y the hell did he have to pick her up? she wondered. It would have been enough to stick the dummy in her mouth. Now she wouldn’t go back to sleep for at least half an hour.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked. ‘Surely you realize that you simply can’t just ring people up at this time of night?’

  ‘I need to speak to him. Can you tell him to be at the viaduct a quarter of an hour from now?’

  ‘At the viaduct? Are you out of your mind? What are you on about, you little. . You little. .’

  She couldn’t think of a suitable name to call her. Not without swearing, and she didn’t want to lose control altogether. Mikaela’s first shrill shriek echoed through the room. Hell’s bells! she thought. What’s all this about?

  ‘Can I speak to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s. . It’s important.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  Silence again. Both from the receiver and from Mikaela, who was evidently tired and didn’t have the strength to run through her whole repertoire. She seemed to be happy enough to hang over her father’s shoulder and whimper, thank goodness.

  ‘Tell him to come to the viaduct.’

  ‘Certainly not! Tell me who you are, and explain why you’re ringing in the middle of the night.’

  Arnold came to sit on the edge of the bed, and looked enquiringly. She met his gaze, and as she did so the girl at the other end of the line decided to lay her cards on the table.

  ‘My name’s Winnie, I’ve had sex with him and I’m pregnant.’

  It was strange that Arnold and Mikaela should be so close to her just as these words drilled their way into her consciousness. That thought struck her now, and recurred later. The fact that they were all sitting next to each other in her half of the double bed at that very moment. The inseparable family. Extremely damned strange, in view of the fact that the chasm that had suddenly opened up between them was so deep and so wide that she knew immediately they would never be able to bridge it. That they would never even try. No chance. She knew that immediately.

  What was also strange was that she was able to think such thoughts in a mere fraction of a second. She handed him the receiver and relieved him of his daughter.

  ‘It’s for you.’

  But she didn’t remain calm for long. Once Arnold had replaced the receiver and collapsed in a pathetic heap on the floor beside the bed, she lay Mikaela down between the pillows and began hitting him. As hard as she could, with clenched fists. On his head and shoulders.

  He didn’t react. Made no attempt to defend himself, just bowed his head slightly; and soon her arms began to ache. Mikaela woke up again but didn’t start crying. She sat up and watched instead. With eyes open wide, and her dummy in her mouth.

  Sigrid ran out of the bedroom, into the bathroom, and locked herself in. Bathed her face in cold water and tried to take control of all the frantic thoughts bombarding her brain.

  Stared, first at her own face in the mirror, and then at all the familiar, trivial items beside the washbasin and on all the shelves: all the tubes and jars and tablets of soap and scissors and toothbrushes and packets of plasters — all the things that were the most mundane features of her mundane life, but which now suddenly seemed alien and tainted with threatening and horrible overtones that she couldn’t grasp. I’m going mad, she thought. I’m going out of my mind in this damned bathroom at this very damned moment. . There are only seconds to go.

  She dried her face with a hand towel and opened the door.

  ‘The viaduct, a quarter of an hour from now — is that right?’

  He didn’t answer. Not a sound, neither from him nor Mikaela. Nothing but silence from the bedroom. She fished out a jumper and a pair of jeans. Her blue deck shoes. She was dressed and ready to go within half a minute.

  Goodbye.

  She thought that, but didn’t say it

  ‘Wait.’

  She didn’t wait. She opened the outside door and went out. Closed it behind her and hurried out into the street. The night air was cool and pleasant.

  She could breathe.

  When he left Mikaela he wasn’t sure if she was asleep. But she was in her cot with her dummy in her mouth, breathing audibly and regularly, as usual. All being well she would be okay for an hour or so on her own.

  He closed the outside door as quietly as he could. Thought about taking his bike, but decided not to. He wouldn’t be first there in any case.

  It would take eight to ten minutes to walk up to the viaduct, and perhaps he needed to make the most of those minutes. Did he even want to get there first? Didn’t he need these minutes in order to work out some kind of decision? To make up his mind what he was going to do?

  Or was everything already cut and dried?

  Wasn’t everything decided as soon as he’d overstepped the mark, a month ago? Decided irrevocably? Six weeks ago, to be precise. Hadn’t everything since then been no more than a slowly ticking time bomb?

  Had he ever expected anything else? That he would get away with it? That he wouldn’t have to pay for such a catastrophe?

  He registered that he was almost running along the dimly lit Sammersgraacht. No sign of another soul, not even a cat.

  He turned off right along Dorffsalle, and continued along Gimsweg and Hagenstraat. Past the school.

  The school? he thought. Would he ever. .?

  He didn’t follow that thought through. Passed by the north-west corner of the playing fields and increased his speed further. Only a couple of hundred metres left.

  What’s going to happen now? he thought. What will happen when I get up there?

  He suddenly stopped dead. As if the thought had only just struck him.

  Why don’t I go home and look after my daughter instead? he asked himself. Why not?

  He hesitated for five seconds. Then made up his mind.

  24

  Interrogation of Ludwig Georg Heller, 2.8.1983.

  Interrogator: Chief Inspector Vrommel, Chief of Police.

  Also present: Inspector Walevski.

  Location: Lejnice police station.

  Interrogation transcript: Inspector Walevski.

  Vrommel: Your name and address, please.

  Heller: Ludwig Heller. Walders steeg 4.

  V Here in Lejnice?

  H Yes.

  V What is your relationship with Arnold Maager?

  H We are colleagues. And good friends.

  V How long have you known him?

  H Since we were sixteen years old. We were at school together.

  V Have you been in close communication ever since then?

  H No. We studied at different universities, and lived in different places. But we resumed our friendship when we ended up as teachers in the same school. About three years ago.

  V Would you claim to know Maager well?

  H Yes, I think one could say that.

  V Think?

  H I know him well.

  V His wife as well?

  H No. We have only met once or twice.

  V Once or twice?

  H Three times, I think. We acknowledge each other if we meet in town.

  V Do you have a family?

  H Not yet. I have a girlfriend.

  V I see. You know what has happened, I take it?

  H Yes.

  V You know that Maager had a relationship with a schoolgirl, and that the girl is dead?

  H Winnie Maas, yes.

  V Did you teach her as well?

  H Yes.

  V In what subjects?

  H Maths and physics.

  V What marks did you give her?

  H Marks? I don’t see what relevance that has.

  V You don’t? Please answer my question even so.

  H I gave her a six in physics and a four in maths.

  V Not especially high marks, then.

  H No. I still don’t see the relevance.

  V Was she pretty?

  H I beg your pardon?

  V I asked you if Winnie M
aas was pretty.

  H That’s not something I have an opinion about.

  V Did Arnold Maager think Winnie Maas was pretty?

  H /No answer/

  V I suggest you make an effort to answer that question. In all probability you’ll be asked it again during the trial, so you might as well get used to it.

  H I don’t know if Maager thought that Winnie Maas was pretty.

  V But you know that he had an affair with her?

  H I’d hardly call it an affair.

  V You wouldn’t? What would you call it, then?

  H She offered herself up to him on a plate. He made a mistake. It only happened once.

  V So you think his behaviour is defensible, do you?

  H Of course I don’t. All I’m saying is that you could hardly call it an affair.

  V Were you present in the flat when Maager and Winnie Maas had intercourse?

  H No.

  V But you know about it?

  H Yes.

  V Did you know about it before the girl’s death as well?

  H Yes.

  V How and when did you hear about it?

  H Some colleagues talked about it.

  V Who?

  H Cruickshank and Nielsen.

  V Two of those who were present at the party after the disco on the tenth of June?

  H Yes.

  V And they said that Maager had sexual intercourse with Winnie Maas?

  H Yes.

  V When was that?

  H A few days afterwards. The last week of term. Maager said so himself not long afterwards.

  V In what connection?

  H We’d gone out for a beer. At the very beginning of the summer holiday — round about the twentieth.

  V Where?

  H Lippmann’s. And a few other bars.

  V And that was when he told you that he’d had intercourse with a pupil?

  H He told me a bit about how it had happened — I already knew about the basic facts.

  V What did he say?

  H That he’d been as pissed as a newt, and regretted what had happened. And he hoped there wouldn’t be any repercussions.

  V Repercussions? What did he mean by that?

  H That neither he nor the girl would get into trouble as a result, of course.