The Sweetness of Life
MacLehose Press
An imprint of Quercus
New York • London
© 2006 by Deuticke im Paul Zsolnay Verlag Wien 2006
Translation © 2008 by Jamie Bulloch
Originally published in Germany as Die Süβe des Lebens in 2006
First published in the United States by Quercus in 2014
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e-ISBN 978-1-62365-306-4
Cover photograph (c) Mark Owen/archangel-images.com
Cover design by James Nunn
“Father of Night” by Bob Dylan © 1970 Big Sky Music
“Desolation Row” by Bob Dylan © 1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music
“Ballad of a Thin Man” by Bob Dylan © 1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music
“A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” by Bob Dylan © 1963; renewed 1991 Special Rider Music
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Zero
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
But since the great foundation of fear in children is pain, the way to harden and fortify children against fear and danger is to accustom them to suffer pain.
—JOHN LOCKE
Zero
The child slowly pushes her index finger around the rim of the cup, until the tip touches the liquid’s wrinkled surface. She draws a tiny circle, lifts up her finger as soon as she is sure that the skin is going to stick, moves it carefully away from the cup and wipes it off. Although she knows that a lot of people do not like milk skin, she does not mind it herself. The cocoa tastes bitter, just how she likes it, lots of cocoa, not much sugar. When she tilts the cup and stands it upright again, a dark-brown mark is left on the inside.
Grandfather is playing Ludo with the child. She got all sorts of new things for Christmas—Lego, books, an animal family, and a Game Boy—but ever since she learned how to count, he has played Ludo with her. Just because it is Christmas, he told her, there is no reason to do things differently. In the beginning he used to help her count, or he miscounted on purpose to help her win. But he does not need to do that anymore.
Three. Square by square, the child moves her pawn. She only ever has one pawn in play at a time and she is always yellow. Five. Grandfather’s soldier makes a huge leap over all the squares. The child’s pieces are called pawns; the grandfather’s are soldiers. It has always been like that. Grandfather’s soldiers are blue. Six. The dice rolls to the edge of the tabletop. On the floor doesn’t count. That has always been the rule too. “Again,” Grandfather says. “Again,” the child says. Two. Shame. Sometimes she rolls two sixes in a row, and then a five afterward. Grandfather raises his eyebrows. “Eight,” the child says. In September she started primary school. She sits next to Anselm with the special glasses for his lazy eye. He has no clue about six or eight. The yellow pawn is now right by home. If Grandfather throws a four then it is dead. Grandfather has knobbly fingers. On the chest of drawers there is a tiny Christmas tree with three silver baubles and a few strands of tinsel. “There’s no point in me having anything bigger,” Grandfather said, and when the child asked him why he had not put any candles on it, he replied, “It would be dangerous if I fell asleep.” Four.
The doorbell rings. Grandfather gets up. He glances at the board. His hand grasps the edge of the table for a second. The child cannot see who is at the door. Grandfather is talking. The other person is talking. Grandfather turns around again.
“Four,” he says. “Got you!” Then he puts on his jacket and leaves.
The child climbs along the bench to the alcove. She pushes the curtain on the left to one side. It is dark outside. At Christmastime it is always dark very early, but that does not matter if the moon is shining. Opposite, its windows lit up, is the house where she and her parents live, together with her sister, brother, Emmy the dog, Gonzales the jerboa (who belongs to her brother even though he never feeds it), the white dolphin, the reindeer, and the dolly whose name nobody knows. Behind one corner of the house are the black trees that you can walk between. But that bit is not yet the wood. If Emmy is with you, it is easy and you can go from tree to tree as far as the raspberry bush without being frightened. Emmy is a Border Collie; they are the cleverest dogs in the world.
Sometimes the child imagines she lives somewhere completely different, down in the town, in a tiny room at the back of the newsstand where her mother buys the papers and cigarettes for Grandfather; or on the Mühlau, up where the animals forage, and where the road is not paved anymore and leads through two tunnels in the cliffs, because there is no room for it next to the gushing stream. She imagines that the moon is in the sky and that Emmy is there, and that she can eat chestnuts and hay, and that it is a little cold outside and very warm inside, and she imagines that she will go home at some point and Mother will open the door and look very surprised.
Four. The yellow pawn is standing there, having a rest, and it is almost home. The blue soldier is standing there and resting too. Maybe neither of them knows what is in store for them. You could take both of them—one in the left hand, one in the right—climb the hill behind the house and look out over the town. Then you could dig out a cave in the snow with a peephole at the front, and inside you could make tea and eat Christmas biscuits, but only those tiny pastry musical instruments with icing sugar on top.
She will return the pawn and the soldier to their squares: the pawn just by the home column, and the soldier four squares behind, as if nothing had happened. Grandfather will take off his jacket and while he turns away she will put them both back, very quickly and quietly.
The child climbs off the bench, her right hand clutching the pieces, and crosses the room. She takes her new red quilted jacket with the squirrel on it from the stool next to the chest of drawers and puts it on.
It is cold outside. The moon is so bright that the snow between the front door and the wild cherry tree shines like the glass lampshade in the bathroom. The path to the house is well trodden, as usual. Other tracks lead off to the left; these are new. The child steps into the footprints. They are not very
far apart, like Grandfather’s when he walks in front of her.
A blue horse comes galloping over the hill behind the barn. The yellow pawn sits on the horse and laughs. He reaches out his smooth pawn-arm to the child and pulls her up. They ride over the triangular field, straight ahead to the large juniper bush, past the old stack of spruce wood to the point where the path divides: left into town, and right into the mountains. The snow sprays up. The yellow pawn sitting behind the child feels as warm as a radiator.
The tracks run alongside Grandfather’s house as far as the box hedge. The child pushes a finger into the snow that sits on top of it. A caterpillar could come along, crawl into the hole, and go to sleep. The child sniffs. In winter the box has only a slight smell. She can still taste the cocoa. Good. Where the footprints are replaced by an even track curving to the right, she notices something else. The hum of an engine. The child looks up, convinced that a helicopter is about to rise above the barn. She will wave with both arms, that is what you do. But the helicopter does not come, and the noise goes away again. The child trudges on a few more steps and finds herself standing beside two wheel tracks, from a car or tractor. She steps into the right-hand rut and walks up to the black rectangle of the barn. To one side, the snowchild and snowdog that they built together two days ago are playing in the moonlight. Everything is still there: the cap, the broom, the chestnut that sticks out for a snout. The child goes over to the dog and stretches out her arm as if she were holding a broom too. “Now there’s three of us,” she says. She spins around and around and feels happy, as if the whole world were watching her. Then she realizes that she has got a bit farther to go. There is something in front of her, on the ramp, which slopes gently up to the barn door. It is not a snowman.
It is lying there like someone making an angel in the snow, its arms spread wide like wings. It is swallowing up the moonlight. The child steps slowly forward. Then she bends over. The black lace-up boots are like Grandfather’s. Looking closer she can see that the pants are dark green. The pants are turned up a few centimeters at the bottom. The jacket is made out of that coarse light-brown material that never wears out. Almost everything is the same. No gloves. Almost everything. The arms, the shoulders, the collar. But there is no head where it should be. Even a pawn has a head there. The child crouches right down. The head is not missing. Where there should be a round head on the ground, there is something flat instead. The flat thing is squashed into the snow and it is completely black. The child reaches toward it and pokes around in the middle with her finger, where it is a bit silvery. The child shudders in horror. The silver stuff feels wet, but also hard. The child stands up and makes her way back.
First along the car tracks, then the footprints. The snowchild, the chestnut nose, the box hedge. The hole where the caterpillar sleeps. The horse is not coming this time. Things change.
Along the wall, then left to her parents’ house.
The moon disappears in the light of the doorway. Her brother stands there and looks at the child’s hand. “What have you got there?” he asks. The child opens her fist. A yellow pawn and a blue soldier. She should have put them back, the pawn right by the home column and the soldier four squares behind. The child does not move. “Four,” she says. “Four. Got you.” The tip of her index finger is red. The pawn still has its head, and so has the soldier.
Now the dog is there. It sniffs the child’s legs, then her hand. It crouches, flattens its ears, and lets out a howl. The child steps toward the dog. It creeps backward and stares at the door as if it has seen a ghost standing there.
One
He opens the door. Cold tumbles into the room. At first all is quiet, then he can hear a car starting in the distance. Nothing else is stirring.
On the wall, the poster with the Rule. He can feel himself falling apart. The phrases.
Listen, O my son, to the precepts of thy master.
It begins in the middle. A fault line that he cannot locate. He swallows a couple of pills.
He stands there. His skin is burning. Only the tips of his fingers are free of pain. A rustling sound comes from outside. Probably the fox slinking across the courtyard. The air smells of nothing. The moon set a long time ago. Everything is a delusion. He slowly tenses his thighs. The Rule. Words that he puts together.
Cheerfully execute.
He goes through his routine. Isometric exercises to begin with, one set of muscles after another. Legs, arms, neck, upper body. Contract, relax. Contract, relax. Afterward, a few stretching exercises. First the hips. Kneebends. Gentle stretch jumps, no straining at all. He swings his arms, then thrusts them upward.
From the age of forty the risk of tearing muscle fiber increases dramatically. He read that in a weekend supplement, just after his fortieth birthday. One always learns about the scary things in life at precisely the right moment. His torso slowly starts to warm up. He stretches his arms out sideways. That wild clear-sightedness emerges from his temples into his field of vision. The fissure begins to disappear. The fear remains. He knows he cannot do anything about it.
He slips into the gray cotton tracksuit, puts on socks and running shoes. The right shoulder of his sweater is wearing through. He will give it to Irma to mend. She might complain about her elbow pains, but she would rather none of them tried to patch up their own clothes. Her eyes have gotten worse recently, and her sewing is even more atrocious than it used to be but nobody tells her.
iPod on the waistband, headphones in the ears. It is always the same. Number six. “Father of the Night.” On a loop.
Along the corridor, no light, twenty-seven paces. Down the steps, left past the offices, through the narrow door, and into the back garden. Packed snow beneath his feet, the path has been cleared. By Bernhard, the man who can go for weeks without uttering a word.
He sets off. The night is as black as the inside of a velvet pouch. It spurs him on. Earlier in the evening the stars were bright in the sky. He thought of the small village by the Salzach River with its curious promise. For a while he was unbeatable. Now he has the Devil at his back.
He crosses the open courtyard to the plane tree near the wall, slips through the railing gate that is not quite closed, although it looks as if it has been locked for centuries. He is out.
He knows that they call him “the runner,” and that some also call him “Mr. Perfect” because of his physique. For several weeks, Ngobu, the visiting student from Nigeria, has just been referring to him as LDR—“Long Distance Runner.” That will catch on, he senses; everyone will call him that. These things always catch on.
He jogs along the north side of the boundary wall. There is no wind, and he reckons it is one or two degrees below zero. He crosses Weyrer Straße and turns into Abt Reginald. Single-story houses. Wrought-iron fences as old as he is, cream-colored louver shutters, box hedging, and tall conifers in the front gardens. The tax consultant has a sensor positioned too far away from his house, activating the light by the front door when anybody passes. The plaque, about a meter square, gold lettering behind thick acrylic: MAGISTER NORBERT KOSSNIK, REGISTERED TAX CONSULTANT AND ACCOUNTANT. Accountant: a crook who bribes tax officials and blackmails his clients—that is the truth of it. And there he is, standing in his loden body warmer, his heavy silver-plated watch chain across his paunch, three days’ stubble, hobnailed shoes, reading glasses on a cord. Hit him, he thinks. Smash his face in.
The kindergarten, the primary school. Pictures in the windows, a snowcastle in the playground, a well-ordered world. Friedegund Mayerhofer, the head of the kindergarten who is soon to retire. Her designated successor: Lea Wirth, whose whole life has been plagued by the fear that one of the children might fall off something. Cut down all the trees and demolish multistory buildings! Keep children on the ground! That is what some of the fathers say.
At the end of the street he turns right into the unnamed cul-de-sac that stops behind the council’s vehicle depot. Under the shed roof stand two huge, dark-red snowplows, with several sm
aller ones for the side streets. Behind them is a pile of gravel, as tall as a house. Everyone is saying that this winter has been a joke. But it might arrive yet.
The small alleyway that hits the promenade by the river at the point where it enters the wood. The passage that he always sings along to loudly: Father of night, Father of day, Father, who taketh the darkness away. Alders and willows with thick trunks. He can hardly see the ground at all. One early October morning he came across a badger here. An enormous torpedo-like animal that bolted into the undergrowth, slurping and hissing loudly.
Now he can really feel the running taking effect; he can feel how, starting with his legs and ears, this frame that supports him is growing. Suddenly there are extensions—small, shiny wire grids—around his nerve tracks. For a time he will forget that the other side exists, the black abyss where Satan sits, the one who annihilates everything. Father of day, Father of night, Father of black, Father of white.
He knows every square meter of this area and he closes his eyes for a moment. His step remains as sure as ever. He keeps imagining that he is driving through the streets in a gigantic snowplow. First he tosses the parked cars aside as if they were toys, then lurching left and right he tears chunks out of the facades of the houses.
He runs on with long strides, the balls of his feet pounding on the ground. And so he starts to fly; he recognizes this from some of his dreams. Relax, run straight ahead, and keep pushing off. At some point you lose contact with the ground and hover for ten, twenty meters, then you land again with two or three steps. There are people who do not touch the ground at all. Clemens is one of these permanent hoverers. He glides over steps, gravel, and grass as if he were on an air cushion, always a couple of centimeters above the ground, while his face radiates an inner arrogance, a sense of superiority that comes from his position. At some point he is going to hit Clemens. Just like that. Not a brutal punch, but a half-serious slap in the face; more a demonstration of principle than an act of violence. Controlled aggression is a much-neglected strategy when standing up for one’s ideological beliefs. It is not about destruction but occasionally using a bit of muscle to back up one’s actions. Those in important positions—head teachers, police, politicians—could do with being slapped about a bit; why not Clemens too? With his trimmed goatee, his darned socks, and his signet ring.
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