The Sweetness of Life

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  After a minute in the wood you notice just how many different shades of black there are. Even the edges of the path are distinguishable, as are the bare branches against the sky. At this hour in the park, the crows sleep in the lime and chestnut trees.

  Father of cold and Father of heat. He is thinking constantly, no interruption. Hot and cold. All his life. One day, he will fetch them, both of them, and nobody will dare raise an objection. It will be a sunny day, they will arrive by train, and when he collects them they will rush toward him, right into his out-stretched arms.

  Brightness from lamps. On the left, the wooden bridge that leads to the paths on the north side of the river. The bridge has been lit up at nighttime ever since old Schöffberger missed the first step a few years ago and plunged over the bank into the river. Straight ahead the rafting camp, perhaps two hundred meters away. The shallow pitched roof of the shed stands out slightly against the background. He cannot make out the annex with the office and changing rooms.

  He wheels to the right. Imhofstraße, named after a former Bürgermeister. The road is clear. At the northwestern corner of the cemetery there is a path with a thick layer of gravel. People visit cemeteries throughout the year. Father of minutes, Father of days. Winter burials. Weinstabel, the gravedigger, has the red-and-white mini-digger in his garage back home. He loves digging through layers of frozen earth and he makes notes about how thick they are. A lined notebook with an orangey-red cover. Some people say he makes his lists on the left-hand side, while on the facing page he describes the state of decomposition of the bodies. He is also said to have a huge collection of skulls, but all gravediggers must attract these sorts of rumors.

  The plaque beside the door. The Rule. It is now the hour for us to rise from sleep. The night runner. What a name that would be. The key phrase that sinks right in and keeps one alive. At some point it starts to bypass one’s consciousness.

  He crosses the main road, takes the railway underpass, runs alongside the huge halls of the sawmill, then through an estate of terraced houses. Through two windows he can see the blue glimmer of television sets. A few hundred meters down Grafenaustraße, a car advances toward him, its highbeams on. He raises a hand to his eyes and gives the driver the middle finger when there is no reaction. The engine sounds like a tank’s. Looking back at the vehicle, he thinks it might have been a tow truck. An old model, a really old model. People break down at night too, he thinks.

  The butcher’s, the secondhand shop, the esoteric shop with the yellow-green spiral on the outside. Marlene Hanke’s van; she owns the secondhand shop. Two motorbikes—he cannot place their owners. Just before the railway crossing he imagines that the signal lights start to flash, the barriers come down, and a mysterious train rushes past, huge and crusted with ice, like out of one of those films about Siberia or Alaska.

  When the crowns of the Rathausplatz lime trees emerge as silhouettes to his left, he feels better—it is always the same.

  Father of white, Father of black.

  There are few things I’m sure of, he thinks. My name is Joseph Bauer. I live in a complicated world. I made a solemn promise. I recite phrases. I run.

  Two

  On those days when the town was shrouded by fog in the morning, life was usually quite peculiar. People were tense, drivers forgot to turn on their headlights, and one had absurd déjà-vu experiences. The air felt colder than it actually was. The tree trunks shone black. There was the lake, but no sounds came off it. It was unsettling, without one noticing it.

  Horn was walking to work. Normally he went by bike but Martin Schwarz, his neighbor, had cleared the snow in his plow the day before. The road surface was now like glass. The intention was good, but he doubted Schwarz had given the slightest thought to the grip of bicycle tires.

  Although his winter boots had molded soles, Horn slipped frequently in the steeper sections. Wherever possible, he avoided going off the path. The snow got under his trouser legs. Since he was wearing long socks and had tied his boots tightly, this did not bother him. At the point where the road turned to the west, and where the steeples of the abbey poked above a small pine wood, the same thought had occurred to him for the past ten years: Why did I move here? Of course, he had come up with hundreds of different answers: for Irene, who had really wanted to because she had twice been rejected by the symphony orchestras; or for the children, because he and Irene had imagined it would be a better place to bring them up; or for the air, mountains, and the crazy notion that country people were less psychopathic; or, of course, because of the thing with Frege. But he found none of these explanations really satisfactory. Was it your typical escape from the city? An attachment to the idea of an idyll? More variety at work? He did not care. He made a snowball and threw it into the trees.

  Horn took the shortcut over the huge field that sloped gently toward the south, and where they grew corn or beets in summer. He met the highway near the junction leading to the wildlife observation center. He felt warm. He took off his gloves and put them into his coat pockets. The pavement began after the place-name sign. Horn stamped his feet hard a few times to dislodge the worst of the snow from his trouser legs. The entrance into the civilized world, he thought.

  Pappelallee, which forked off at an acute angle, turned into Siedlungstraße after a few hundred meters. One 1970s gabled house after another. Illuminated Christmas trees stood in the front gardens. The occasional chimney puffed out smoke. He imagined people inside coming out of their bathrooms and walking past half-empty plates of biscuits.

  Irene was probably sitting with her cello, trying out her new bow, Tobias was asleep and Michael had left abruptly with his girlfriend the day before. Yet again he had started to argue with his mother the moment he saw her, and Irene was unable to approach the issue in a different way. But he had taken his presents with him. A dark-gray, woolen Timberland sweater and the new Nick Cave album; Horn could not remember the rest. Gabriele, Michael’s girlfriend, was nice. Dark, bristly short hair, slightly heavy build, quiet; no competition for Irene. She had given Horn a Moleskine notebook. He kept it in his pocket and was still astonished that she had been so spot on with her present.

  Right into Gaiswinklerstraße, as far as the river. The view of the long gravel bank on the other side, of the rough-hewn rocks of the embankment and the fronts of houses beyond. A little way down the river, just before the road bridge, he could see the water gauge on the bank. The last flood had been two and a half years ago, in August, when the Kamp had broken its banks and, a little to the northeast, the Enns had swamped the entire town of Steyr. Here, just a few refrigerators had come a cropper, as had a firm’s computer equipment, which stupidly had been installed in the basement. Otherwise nothing had happened. The hospital was on a hill thirty meters above the water level—absolutely safe, they said.

  Horn crossed the parking lot and went in the side entrance as always. Whenever anybody asked him why he did this, he said, “I can’t bear the sight of the porter in the morning.” But it was probably down to some stupid compulsion.

  Behind the doors of the central laboratory the centrifuges whirred, then several people laughed in unison. One of the ceiling lights in the corridor flickered nervously. He climbed the steps to the second floor. By the entrance to the children’s wing he met Elfriede, who was on her way to a ward sisters’ meeting. She looked as round and red-cheeked as ever and tripped up over her words when she wished him a belated happy Christmas. “Fog’s coming down over the town,” he said. “The lake won’t freeze in the next few days.” Over her shoulder she called out something about “skating” and then was gone.

  Horn’s office was tucked away at the back of K1, the general pediatric ward. This meant that it was on the whole very quiet. Only at visiting time did he hear fretful mothers in the corridor or the whining siblings of patients. From time to time a ball or a tricycle crashed against his door, but this had never bothered him.

  Early in the morning he would stand for a while at the wi
ndow—the view over the river and the reed beds as far as the river’s outlet, behind these the lake and the cliff walls. “That’s why I moved here,” he thought. “Because of that.” He hung his jacket up in the cupboard, placed his boots by the heater, and put on his work shoes. His colleagues had smirked when he first turned up in his blue Adidas Records. “They’re making a comeback,” he had said. “I was sixteen then—it’s the only time in your life when you’ve got that inner certainty that you can make something happen.” Some of them had agreed with him, and Sellner, the consultant on I21, had said that he’d been a Puma boy in his time. Thinking about it now, Sellner added, they were due a revival.

  There were coffee and biscuits at the morning staff meeting. That was a one-off. Then Leithner, the Primarius, arrived five minutes late. That never happened, either. He muttered an excuse that nobody took any interest in and wished everybody a happy Christmas. Inge Broschek, his secretary, put a plate of Christmas stollen in front of his stomach. A few people laughed. Leithner usually ate standing up, and there were all sorts of witty remarks about what meals must be like in the Leithner household.

  Cejpek had been the duty consultant. He reported on a young woman who had been admitted with extreme cardiac arrhythmias and kept the team busy all afternoon and half of the night. Then her partner had brought in two empty packets of an old anti-depressant and everything fell into place. One way or another she would have landed up in intensive care. Horn just nodded when Cejpek and Leithner looked over at him. He would deal with the woman as soon as she was in a fit state. There had also been a diabetic who kept on becoming hypoglycemic because he switched his insulin type; a sixty-year-old woman with a fresh infarction of the posterior wall; and a 130-kilo man with an attack of gout in the right metatarsophalangeal joint—nobody had shown the least sympathy for this one. Two patients had died: a man who had been suffering for a long time from pulmonary edema and a ninety-seven-year-old woman. Those with flu had been sent home with aspirins and good wishes, and the wards had been full of Christmas calm.

  Some of Horn’s patients had come back early from their time out of the hospital, including Caroline Weber. A month and a half after her postnatal psychosis she had not yet made a full recovery, and on the evening of December 25 her husband had brought her to the hospital because again she had started to believe that her newborn daughter was the Devil. Horn knew about it already, since he had been telephoned at home and asked for a prescription for medication. Caroline Weber was twenty-eight years old, her husband was a patient man who drove mechanical diggers, and when asked how many children they would like to have together, he said, “A few more.”

  She gave him grounds for concern. A few years back her mother had climbed onto a stationary goods wagon and put both her arms over the contact wire. Subsequently they found several sheets of notepaper in her apartment on which the woman had scribbled over and over again long penitential prayers. Not long afterward, her husband, Caroline’s father, got together with a chubby woman with platinum-blond hair. Caroline seldom mentioned him. Once she said, “I couldn’t give a damn whether I know what my father’s up to or not.” Mother dead, father also dead in a way, the Devil for a child—people had been dealt better hands.

  Horn found himself imagining a little girl cooing in his arms, with Michael and Gabriele, the beaming parents, beside him. Irene remained in the background, muttering something about those men who preferred girls. All of them were quite relaxed. A new element, he thought, introduce a new element and things change. He also wondered if, at forty-eight, he was not a little too young to be a grandfather.

  Lili Brunner, the small, round junior doctor, gave Horn a nudge. He jumped. The others were staring at him.

  “I’m sorry, I was just thinking about something rather funny,” he stuttered.

  “A daydream,” Cejpek said a little sardonically. Cejpek never tired of maintaining that he was a natural scientist, 100 percent, and that the psyche was a highly absurd form of organized matter. On the other hand, he referred every other patient to Horn for assessment. “A high-ranking official in the Land highways agency,” he said. “I was so proud that we’d come to grips with his hypertension, and now he’s getting more depressed by the day.”

  “That happens,” Horn said.

  “Oh, I’m so pleased,” said Cejpek caustically, grabbing a Christmas cookie.

  Horn grinned. “It’s always better when people are suffering from something you know,” he said. Brunner frowned. Among her medical colleagues she was the standard bearer of seriousness. It seemed appropriate that she had been involved for more than a year with the building of a hospice ward, even though she had not had any traumatic death-related experiences in her childhood, as Horn kept on claiming. But she gave the continual impression that she was subjecting you to moral scrutiny, and sometimes he wondered whether she might not be a member of a secret order.

  The rest of the meeting was just trivia: Christmas menu, ungrateful children, etc. We got a blue spruce today, and you cannot imagine how quickly a dropped sparkler can make a hole in the carpet. Among other things, they tried to get Inge Broschek to say whether or not she had gotten the fur-lined Prada bag she had been raving about for ages. No success there. In the end she stood up, brushed a few crumbs from her skirt, threw her head back, and left the meeting room with a sphinx-like smile. Horn was pretty sure that Leithner had bought her the bag, but he said nothing.

  In the office there was a small heap of referral notices in his mail slot. He rolled them up without reading them. Don’t rush anything, he thought, one thing at a time, especially at Christmas.

  He looked at the river through Broschek’s window. The fog was creeping up the hill. “And we’re not supposed to get depressed,” he said, because he could not think of anything better. Broschek did not react. Horn was happy. Something was missing. He could not think what.

  The outpatient waiting room was sparsely populated. A thin woman with obvious breathing problems. An old man who had fallen asleep in his chair. Reisberger, the pharmacist, who clutched the left side of his chest—this was probably another non-heart-attack. A couple sitting on either side of a boy whose lower arm looked to be bound in a whole stationery cupboard of rubber bands. A few people whom he just glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. Of his usual suspects only Schmidinger was there, red-faced with a film of grease shining on his forehead. No, thought Horn, I’m not going to get depressed.

  Linda sat at the reception desk. She was wearing a natural white, merino-wool sweater and brimming with holiday joy. “Nurses shouldn’t be allowed to wear sweaters like that,” Horn said.

  She smiled and offered him her shoulder. “It’s Christmas. You can touch it,” she said.

  “Wouldn’t dare, ever.”

  “Why not?”

  “Your Reinhard might come along with his chainsaw.”

  She laughed. Linda’s boyfriend was a manager in the regional forestry agency, and in fact an extremely gentle soul. “He cries every time he gives the nod for a tree to be felled,” Reiter, the assistant in casualty surgery, had scathingly observed. Everybody knew that Reiter would have liked to have his way with Linda. But given his black curls and neon-colored Hugo Boss shirts he did not have a chance. Linda was one of those redheads whose every freckle represented a chunk of self-confidence. Horn thought briefly of Irene. She had been exhausted recently and a little bit distant. Perhaps it was just because of the thing with their son.

  Linda pressed three card files into his hand. “Schmidinger, a new one, and Heidemarie. She’s not here yet, but she rang.” Horn was pleased. Heidemarie, the student with the nicest depression in the world.

  “I’d always pick her last,” he said. “You’ve got to give yourself a good one to finish with.” Linda frowned.

  In the outpatient room there was a small table decoration made out of spruce twigs. A dark-red candle with gold stars. This piece of high kitsch was one of the few things that made life bearable. It had taken him a
while to admit it. You’ve got to give yourself a good one, he thought. Always a good one to finish with and, if possible, the shitty ones first. The really shitty ones. He called for Schmidinger.

  A hair-raising aftershave with an undertone of sweaty feet. “I tell you, I’ve had it!” Horn had known something like this was coming. Had it. Rock bottom. Destroyed. Broken. Completely finished. The man was sitting in his checkered jacket with leather patches on the elbows. He had pushed the tips of his fingers below his belt and was licking his lips incessantly.

  “What do you mean you’ve had it?” Horn asked.

  “My wife . . . you already know.”

  “Is she provoking you again?”

  Those eyes, Horn thought, those nasty, small eyes that roll around like two red marbles. The nose, slightly upturned, and the pouting lips repeatedly moistened by the tip of his tongue. There are moments when I can’t stand my job, Horn thought.

  Norbert Schmidinger had discovered the usefulness of psychiatry some time ago, just after he had thrown the then one-and-a-half-year-old Melanie against a wall for the first time. A neurologist from Linz had provided him with a certificate of temporary mental incapacitation, thereby saving him from prison. From that time on Schmidinger had been a regular visitor to the psychiatrist, always just after his wife or one of his three daughters had contact with casualty or the police. Horn had gotten to know him during an appeal process against an injunction banning him from the family home. He had not been able to avoid admitting that Schmidinger had shown a certain willingness to receive treatment. Horn had felt dreadful about it for weeks afterward.