The Sweetness of Life

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  “My wife . . . you already know . . . same as ever.”

  “I bet she even got to you under the Christmas tree.”

  “If it’s never happened to you . . .”

  “With a present she absolutely knew you’d hate?”

  “You can’t imagine . . .”

  “I expect your daughters started up the day before. While decorating the tree.”

  “I’m trying really hard!”

  Who copped it this time, Horn wondered—Renate, his wife, or Birgit, the youngest one again? She had just turned five.

  “Who copped it this time?”

  The red-veined marbles hung motionless for a second. Then Schmidinger drew breath through his teeth. “You know who it was,” he said. “It was you who wrote that clever thing about my impulse control.”

  Why are we so damn afraid of describing them as they are, Horn asked himself. Why don’t we write “full-blown psychopath” when there’s one sitting opposite and double underline it?

  “I’ve read there are some people who can’t stand on one leg, no matter how hard they try,” Schmidinger said. “And if you’ve got a weakness like mine, well, I don’t think it’s any different.”

  “Who copped it?” Horn asked. “Who was on the receiving end of your weakness?” Schmidinger did not answer, but kneaded the fat on his stomach and licked his lips.

  “You see, I came here. I’m not skiving. I want to be treated,” he said and gave a crooked grin.

  Horn felt slightly faint. Enough, he thought. That’s really enough. Nobody’s going to ruin Christmas for me, nobody—least of all someone like that!

  “Are you still taking your medication?”

  Schmidinger shook his head ruefully. “I got problems with dizziness after the first week.”

  Eczema, Horn thought, I’d have put money on eczema. In the instruction leaflet it’s listed before dizziness as one of the “common side effects.” He had always been repulsed by people who were “provoked” by their nearest and dearest. He prescribed Schmidinger half a tablet of Clozapine twice a day and instructed him to come back for another examination in a week.

  “And if you don’t come, I won’t sign those forms anymore,” he said.

  Schmidinger folded the prescription, put it away, and got up. “Thanks,” he said. “Thanks a lot.” As he left he was still wearing a crooked grin.

  Horn wrenched open the window. Outside, an HGV with carrots painted on the side drove past. Schmidinger would probably not come. He had his prescription and would use it to demonstrate his willingness to receive treatment if anybody asked him.

  He drives me crazy, thought Horn, leaving the room. I try to resist it, but he really drives me crazy. “If the police ask about him,” he directed Linda, “just for once they can have all the details.”

  Linda was in total agreement. “For that you can have biscuits afterward,” she said. Just at that moment biscuits were what Horn least desired. I’d like to get my hands on her now, he thought.

  The next patient, a new one, was panicky. Maybe thirty years old, pale, and wearing a jacket, shirt and cords that did not match. He would not sit until Horn assured him that nothing would happen. He reminded Horn of somebody. He could not say who.

  “Are there any animals in here?” the man asked. “Please tell me whether there are animals in here!”

  Horn shook his head. Most of the puzzle fell into place quite quickly.

  “How long ago did you stop drinking?” he asked.

  The man shrugged his shoulders and then looked Horn in the eyes. He seemed quite relieved. “How did you guess?” he asked.

  “When someone reaches a certain level of misery, they always think they’re in it alone,” Horn said. Then he talked about those young men who take their work stress home with them and cannot let their hair down before they have helped themselves to a few units of alcohol. As soon as the pressure increases in accordance with their position at work, these men resort to the tried and tested remedy during the daytime as well, knocking back a few glasses of schnapps at decently spaced intervals. Then, during the Christmas break, because playing with the children and sleeping with the wife provide some relaxation, they forget about the supply of these few units of alcohol. “And then your brain starts to make you see pink elephants,” Horn said. He fetched a small bottle of Diazepam solution from the cupboard and counted out forty-five drops into a small tumbler. “Drink this now and sit in the waiting room for twenty minutes,” he said. “Then we’ll see what happens.” The man gave the impression that he would be prepared to hold his breath for twenty minutes if he was asked to. He was quivering pitifully when he left the room.

  “He reminds me of somebody,” Horn said, popping an aniseed biscuit into his mouth.

  “Pippin,” Linda said.

  “What?”

  “He looks like Pippin, that hobbit from The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps a tad taller.” A picture formed in Horn’s mind. A small man with a rather desperate smile. Linda was absolutely right. He had seen the third part at the cinema with Tobias. At the end of the film Tobias had been much the livelier of the two of them, even though he had sat through the whole ten-hour marathon. Ten hours in one go.

  “Does Pippin drink?” he asked.

  “Of course,” Linda said. “All hobbits drink. Wouldn’t you drink if you were a hobbit?” Horn was stuck for an answer. Besides, Heidemarie had just breezed in. She was wearing a fake-fur coat and a dark-red headband. “An Elven princess,” Linda muttered. He had no idea whether she was jealous. With her, at any rate, he could spare the line about paternal feelings; that was certain.

  Heidemarie looked as if she had been crying. It transpired that she’d had a string of sleepless nights, during which she had spent long periods weighing up the reliability of various methods of suicide. Her parents had given her money for Christmas, a medium-size sum, in a polka-dotted envelope, with a note saying it was the simplest solution—their expectation was that she would reject the things she was given. “They can’t do anything else,” she said. “They don’t give each other presents.” They had agreed on that years earlier. Probably most relationships are based on an arrangement to steer well clear of each other, Horn thought.

  They talked about her childhood Christmases, the emptiness of the massive sitting room, and Christmas trees hung with tinsel. Music came from the record player, of course, and the food was always ghastly. She had only ever felt understood by one great-aunt, whom the family had tolerated for a few hours on Christmas Eve over a period of about ten or twelve years. When the aunt died in the wake of a cardiomyopathy, her mother said, “Thank God! We’ll finally have some peace.” Perhaps it was then that the feeling of loneliness had begun; she did not know exactly. I’d like to give her a big hug, Horn thought, and he knew that, deep down, that was the diagnosis. You write “depression,” he thought, prescribe some medication, and know that in every case it’s about wanting to be hugged.

  “Do you know what the worst thing is?” she said after a while. “The worst thing is when you notice yourself getting lost; you see the very thing you think you’re made of seeping out of you. At the end, what’s left of you is an empty sack, nothing else.” Horn had no idea how to reply. As you get older, he thought, there are certain things you no longer know what to say to.

  She talked about having passed an exam in administrative law, and he still had no answer as to why this young woman had started studying law and not tunnel engineering, architecture, or picture restoration. Or even psychology. Nevertheless, he could imagine her standing at the front of the courtroom and representing abused boys or little girls who had been thrown against the wall by their fathers. “The worst thing, Your Honor,” she would say, “is not that something is planted inside these children, what we might, for example, call violence or trauma. No, the worst is that everything that was once inside these children is beaten out of them or fucked out of them.” She would not be afraid to say “fucked,” and the judge’s eyes wo
uld pop out of his head.

  “I imagine it’s lovely to have a wife who can play the cello at Christmas,” Heidemarie said, and looked sad.

  Horn hesitated with his reply. “Yes,” he then said. “It is lovely.” He thought about how Irene had played the largo from Handel’s “Xerxes” on Christmas Eve and how, at that moment, he had loved her so much it had hurt. And he reflected on how it was essential for psychiatrists to let people get close to them—he never, for instance, pushed Heidemarie away when she overstepped the boundary to his private sphere. They discussed how life could be unfair and the forthcoming summer semester. He slightly increased her dose of antidepressants and also prescribed her some sleeping pills. “When you’re back in Vienna, you won’t need them anymore,” he said. She nodded and stood up. When he made to shake her hand, she took a small packet out of her coat pocket.

  “Happy New Year.” Dark-blue paper with tiny, brightly colored stars. It looked like a CD. Before he could thank her she was gone.

  He turned the thing over a few times then put it aside. He would open it when he got home.

  Linda was deep in conversation on the phone and waved him away when he bent down to ask her to send Pippin in. “That’s unbelievable,” she said, ignoring him and twirling a lock of hair with her index finger. Horn went into the waiting area himself.

  The man came up to him, beaming. “It’s all gone,” he said. “Completely disappeared as if it had never happened.” Horn gave him half a packet of Diazepam pills together with precise instructions as to the dose.

  “Do you need me to give you the usual warnings?” he asked. The man shook his head.

  “I’d like to see you again in a month,” Horn said. He knew that this one was not going to come back, either.

  Horn made his notes in the patient files. The data-processing system was functioning perfectly. Even the diagnosis key was working. After the disaster caused by the program changeover that had been going on throughout the hospital since the middle of October, this was a pleasant surprise. People expect my generation to be skeptical toward technology, Horn thought. That’s really terrible.

  Linda was still on the phone when he left the outpatient ward. He blew her a kiss. She lifted her arm and just for a moment he thought she wanted to keep him there. He waited for a few seconds then went on his way.

  In the stairwell Horn looked through the referral notices. He arranged them by floor, from top to bottom as always. Seven cases—three in orthopedics, the smallest department in the hospital. Köhler had been on duty; that explained everything. Not only was he was a textbook neurotic, but he showed too keen an interest in psychiatry. In the beginning Horn used to tease him quite a bit—hammer toe was really a complex psychosomatic phenomenon and stuff like that—but this had led to a large increase in the number of consultant referrals, and so Horn had stopped.

  Third floor. In casualty, an old man who had just had a pelvic plating. In a state of disorientation because of the long period under anesthetic; it would sort itself out, more or less. In obs, an extremely pale, tear-stained nineteen-year-old mother who seemed to be slipping into postpartum depression. As expected, two of the three referrals in orthopedics were unnecessary: a young man with an aseptic necrosis of the tibial plateau, who had been stupid enough when outlining his medical history to admit that he occasionally smoked cannabis; and a woman who was in pain following an operation on her vertebral discs—it appeared to be the psychiatrist’s job to sort this out. Horn scribbled “analgesic deficiency syndrome,” even though he knew that Köhler was a rather humorless man. The third referral was justified: a fifteen-year-old gymnast whose right lower leg had been amputated two days before Christmas. An osteosarcoma in the upper third of her tibia. Horn chatted to her about dancing and skiing, and said that a prostheticist liked nothing more than measuring up a pretty girl for a new limb. Before he left, Horn gave her the number of Konstanze Witt, a psychotherapist who had her practice above the promenade, just a few minutes’ walk from the girl’s house. Just in case she felt she could not deal with it all on her own.

  Second floor. I22 reeked of burned milk. It was one of those smells he had hated as a child. Sweaty feet and burned milk. Perhaps doctors turn to psychiatry, he thought, if they can’t bear the smell of sweaty feet. “It stinks in here,” he said to Doris, who was just coming from the storeroom with an armful of bed linen.

  She grinned. “That’s what happens when a Filipino sister tries to make coffee with frothy milk.”

  “Josephine?” he asked. Doris nodded and laughed. Josephine was always doing strange things. For Christmas she had decorated every available spot in the ward with colorful origami swans. Most people had thought it a nice touch.

  The big cheese from the highways agency Cejpek had told him about was enthroned in his bed, staring at the TV. Home Alone 2 for the thousandth time. When Horn asked him to switch it off for a moment, his face turned red. The patient revealed himself to be a compulsive personality, no hint of depression. Horn jotted down those very words: “no hint of depression.” With Cejpek it was always best to be as frank as possible. Among other things the man was responsible for awarding a variety of contracts for highway repair. “How often do you get bribed?” Sometimes Horn felt the irrepressible urge to be confrontational. The man went pale. It was probably a good thing as far as his blood pressure was concerned. “By the way, a major American study has shown that television makes you impotent,” Horn said before leaving the room. He was sure that the man was one of those people who were impressed by major American studies, just like Cejpek.

  I’m hungry, thought Horn as he crossed the hallway. Recently I’ve been much hungrier than usual. He checked the time. Another unusual thing: half a day had gone past, and all that remained of it was the unpleasant memory of a psychopath like Norbert Schmidinger. Perhaps also just a trace of that feeling that a sad law student had wanted to be hugged.

  He went into the kitchen. I23 was one of those wards where it was best to go into the kitchen first, whether you were hungry or not. Twelve psychiatric beds, which were Horn’s responsibility, plus seven people on the verge of death, divided between three rooms at the end of the corridor—the start of Brunner’s hospice ward. This accumulation of misery needed to be compensated for by satisfying one’s basic urges. Horn saw a truffle cake that was missing a small piece, less than a quarter. The partners and children of the hospice patients always brought cakes with them, especially at holiday time, even though they knew that these offerings could not put off death. The relatives of the psychiatric patients brought nothing but anxiety and stale coffee. Christina, the deputy ward sister, came in and put a bag of food on the work surface. “I’ll make us something afterward.” She was tall, slightly angular, and she went snowboarding in winter. Even giving birth to a Down’s syndrome daughter three and a half years ago had not put a stop to her hobby. The little girl had been going to preschool for a few months and was making excellent progress; Lea Wirth, who had been very skeptical at the start, had taken a particular liking to her. The girl’s father had taken off before her first birthday. “Selling sailing boats and a handicapped child—clearly not a good combination,” Christina would sometimes say bitterly.

  “So that means no cake before my round.” Horn made a face. Christina laughed and felt his upper arm. “You’re still so unbelievably thin.”

  “Nonsense!” He took a step back, feigning disgust. He had always let Christina get away with everything: criticism, compliments and comments about his physique. It had nothing to do with the fact that her daughter was handicapped.

  Benedikt Ley, the eighteen-year-old carpenter’s apprentice with the double nose ring. On Christmas Eve he had helped himself to the remains of the (unidentified) chemical hallucinogen that had left him in a pretty ugly state a week earlier. In spite of substantial neuroleptic infusions, he was perched on the bed, sweating, his eyes wide open in horror. When Horn asked him why he had taken the stuff, he merely ranted unintelligibly.
“Perhaps it was just too expensive to throw away,” said Raimund, the orderly, who was accompanying them on the round. He must have some experience of these things. Horn had never quizzed him about it.

  “His father’s still beating him up, even in public,” Christina said from outside the room.

  “Even though he’s grown up?” Horn said.

  “A real long-distance driver couldn’t give a shit about that,” she said. Horn had never met Herr Ley, although he had seen the mother on several occasions. She always wore black-rimmed spectacles and a dark-violet flowery suit. This mom’s desperate to look good, Horn thought, but then found this a tasteless observation.

  They were standing by Caroline Weber’s room and Raimund was explaining how she had dragged him into her delusion as one of Satan’s helpers, when Elfriede came down the corridor. “I23 extends Christmas greetings to the pediatric department,” Christina said, smiling.

  Elfriede ignored her. “They’re coming with a seven-year-old girl,” she said to Horn. “Completely numb, not saying a word, not even moving. The paramedics say they’ve never seen anything like it.” Horn thought for a second.

  “It’s not the first time they’ve brought us one of these.” Elfriede waved her hands around in frustration. For a moment she was unable to express herself.

  “It must have something to do with the grandfather,” she said finally. “The little girl found him. In the snow. There was something about his face.”

  Three

  Kovacs took the spruce stakes that Lipp, the young uniformed officer, had brought him from the barn, and, with the face of an ax, drove them into the ground, one after the other—six in total. For the first two or three knocks he could feel the resistance of the frozen earth under the snow. Then he took the roll of yellow police tape and stretched it from stake to stake, around once, twice, and three times. Kovacs would have preferred not to have stopped at all, but to have continued going around and around in circles until what was in the sealed-off zone vanished. This was the last thing he wanted, no matter what was behind it. He could cope with violent husbands; with the drug dealing that in summer took place on the promenade, and in winter in the back rooms of a particular hotel; with the illegal prostitution on the Walzwerk estate; and with the recent car thefts from locked garages, too. The knives and brass knuckles that were occasionally seen glinting at night did not horrify him, and even when, a year back, Clemens Weitbauer had thrust a shotgun into his half-brother’s chest during an argument and pulled the trigger, he had been able to deal with it. But this, on the other hand, he just wanted to wish away, far away; he felt it with the full force of his fifty-three years. It had nothing to do with the Christmas amnesty, which was now well and truly shafted, nor with the fact that he had let the entire team—or at least Bitterle and Demski—take their vacation. Old Strack had been on sick leave since October, but nobody seemed to have missed him.