The Sweetness of Life

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  The small snowman with the hooped cap and the snow-animal with the missing nose were outside the sealed-off area, as if they were looking on. Kovacs went over to them. He gave the police tape to Lipp. They had forgotten the camera.

  “What do you think of a detective who hasn’t got a camera on him?” he said.

  Lipp blushed. “Sorry,” he stuttered. “I didn’t think of it either.”

  Lipp was not Demski. Demski was always there and he always thought of everything: cameras, dictaphones, fixing solutions, glass containers, spare batteries, handcuffs, etc. Now he was on vacation—diving in Kenya if Kovacs remembered correctly. Demski was swimming with tiger sharks, and his wife and child were no doubt lying on the beach.

  “Have you even seen anything like this?”

  Lipp shook his head. “Don’t think so.”

  “Are you going to be sick?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Lipp had only just turned twenty, he was stick thin, and you could see from his hair that he cut it himself. “If you’re unsure whether you’re going to be sick or not, then take the car and get hold of a camera from somewhere,” Kovacs said, “so that our colleagues don’t start moaning later on.” For a few seconds Lipp stood there not knowing what to do. Kovacs motioned him over to the car. “In the meantime, I’ll take pictures with my head.” As he left, Lipp turned around again.

  “He looks like he’s been crucified,” he said. What bullshit, thought Kovacs.

  It was cold. A narrow bank of fog was sitting on the hill behind the buildings. Kovacs had also forgotten his gloves. I forgot the camera because Demski’s not here, he thought, and I forgot my gloves because I don’t have a wife anymore. He bent down. There was something in the snow, driven into the broad tire tracks that were all over the place. A small, dark-brown stone, that was all. He put it in his pocket.

  Which Apostle was supposed to have been crucified upside-down? Peter or Andrew?

  Kovacs forced himself to take a look. The man’s body lay on the shallow ramp up to the barn. The legs both pointed to the door; the arms were stretched out to the side. The nape of the neck was exactly at the point where the ramp started, which meant that the head was on the flat. Or what was there in place of the head.

  A flashlight, thought Kovacs as he crouched by the police tape. A flashlight wouldn’t go amiss either. The cameras were back in the equipment store, as were the flashlights. Forensics would have all sorts of flashlights, that was for sure. Kovacs looked at his watch. Another half an hour, maybe a bit longer because of the fog.

  Splinters of bone were visible, a bit of artificial denture, gray hair. One eyeball had remained undamaged; it looked funny. It was underneath the largely intact eyebrow, fairly central but skewed a little to the left. Apart from that, shredded skin and lots of congealed blood.

  The head’s driven over, thought Kovacs. He slips and someone drives over his head. That person gets out of the car, pulls him up the ramp, and arranges him like that—no, that’s got to be crap.

  A jacket made out of thick, ocher tweed. A material impossible to find these days. Three of the four buttons were fastened. Moss-green cords, turned up at the bottom. Tall black lace-up boots, probably with a loden lining. Old men loved wearing things like that. No gloves, no cap. He meant to go outside, Kovacs thought, but not for long.

  A police car stopped in the distance. Töllmann and Sabine Wieck got out. They looked around and then made their way slowly over to Kovacs. Töllmann kept stopping and laughing loudly. He was wearing the steel-gray, calf-length loden coat that the Furth police had stopped issuing ages ago. Even Kovacs had not gotten one when he entered the force fourteen years before. He took a few steps over to them. “Schnapps, frozen to death, or both?” Töllmann asked. “Both,” Kovacs said, stepping aside. The moment Sabine Wieck’s knee touched the police tape, she vomited. Töllmann was standing a few meters farther back and was on the whole perhaps a little less sensitive. But his face was an unhealthy color.

  “A dead old man, Lipp said on the phone,” he stammered. “That’s all he said: a dead old man.”

  “Who could do a thing like that?” Sabine Wieck retched with the remnants of her gastric juices. “What beasts could do a thing like that?”

  Why’s she not thinking it might have been an accident? Kovacs wondered. And: Why’s she thinking of beasts in the plural? Slightly too loudly, as if he just wanted to have something to say, Töllmann asked about forensics and the pathologist. Kovacs said that the man’s name was Wilfert, Sebastian Wilfert. He had always lived here, latterly in an outbuilding—a former stable and machine shed that he had converted for his and his wife’s retirement. His wife had died over a year previously. Lipp had come up with all this information but had not been able to find out anything special about the man. “Just an old man,” Lipp had said. “An old man like hundreds of others. In mourning for his wife, shovels snow, sits in front of his house, and enjoys spending time with his grandchildren.”

  Kovacs told Töllmann to wait for Lipp by the sealed-off area and help him take photographs when he returned.

  “You come with me,” he said to Wieck. “We’ll go into the house and see what those people have to say.” She smiled weakly.

  “Don’t worry about it. Everyone has their vomiting-over-the-yellow-tape moment. You’re not expecting it, but suddenly there it is.” It had happened to him thirty years earlier. A small truck had lost a piece of aluminum on the Tauern motorway, a single object, not that big—perhaps three, three and a half meters long and five kilos in weight. In the police reconstruction it was reckoned that one end of the metal bar had hit the road, and it had flown up in the air, and come back down in an arc like a spear. It had soared over the two cars behind and pierced the windshield of the third, bang in the middle. It passed between the husband and wife, who were sitting in front, without touching them. The couple had three children: eleven, eight, and four. The two older children had the little one between them in the middle. It had been a white Mitsubishi Lancer; he remembered it vividly.

  He said nothing. He felt sorry for her, walking next to him with a yellow face and a uniform that was slightly too big for her. “Look around,” he said. “Free up your mind and just look around. Don’t concentrate on anything in particular; that way you’ll notice the important things.” Wieck lifted her head and gave him a look of surprise. He was grinning. When he spoke like that it always sounded a bit Zen Buddhist, even though he could not give two figs about any of that Far-Eastern stuff. He could see that she was actually looking around. The winter sun stood above the house as in a calendar photograph.

  The husband and wife standing in the door opposite them seemed shriveled. It was always like that in these situations. You would go up to people who had just experienced something horrific and they would look as if they had shrunk by several centimeters. The son-in-law and daughter: Ernst and Luise Maywald.

  Kovacs always began his chatter in the same way: “The most dreadful things usually turn out to be accidents.” He would say it even when he knew for sure that it was utter nonsense. Then he thought of that child and the aluminum bar and knew that he was at least partly right. They always had to start by assuming it was an accident, he said—although a crime could not be ruled out—and the first impressions and most recent memories were crucial to clear the matter up, so he was obliged to dispense with sympathy and courtesy etc. Everybody understood this; no one ever made a fuss. On the contrary, people were happy to be allowed to talk.

  The hall was large and square, like in most old farmhouses. A yellow slate floor. Along the wall, opposite the front door, a long, narrow patchwork rug with the family’s boots lined up.

  In the sitting room, a dog growling and baring its teeth, standing in the way. “Emmy!”—the woman. The dog obeyed at once. A larch floor, broad, oiled planks. Kovacs had a thing about floors. He could not explain where it came from. The walls paneled with a light wood: maple or birch. “It’s very nice here,” Wieck said
. “Bright and welcoming.” She knows what to say, Kovacs thought. “My husband is a skilled carpenter,” the woman said. She was of average height and powerful build. She wore jeans, a wine-red sweater, and a headband over her medium-length, dark-blond hair. Very determined, thought Kovacs, she knows what she wants, and her husband knows how lucky he is to have her.

  A large stove with a dome-like design. Three children on the bench surrounding it: a girl of about fourteen, a slightly younger boy, and a little girl in the middle of the two. I don’t believe it, Kovacs thought. Then he offered his hand to all of them. I’ve seen the woman before, he thought, in town, at the supermarket, at the gas station, somewhere.

  “Do you want to talk to all of us together?” the woman said. She has her grief under control, Kovacs thought, and she’s trying to imagine what’s going to happen now. The man stood a bit farther behind, chewing his upper lip, his right hand in his trouser pocket. The children were sitting there in silence; the older sister whispered something over the little girl’s head to her brother. It would be all right.

  The man fetched four chairs. The children were allowed to stay where they were. The dog lay down at the feet of the little girl. A lot revolves around the children here, Kovacs thought. Wieck got a pen and notepad from her inside jacket pocket. When he got the chance, he would ask her whether she would like to transfer to his team.

  “How can something like that happen?” the woman asked. “Who on earth could do such a thing?” She rubbed her eyes with her thumbs and index fingers. Kovacs waited for a few seconds. She doesn’t believe it was an accident, he thought, and she’s not thinking in the plural.

  “Who found Grandfather?” he said. The man raised his head and looked at his younger daughter.

  “Our grandfather was always careful,” the older girl said, gulping deeply. The boy nodded in agreement. Wieck cleared her throat. The woman pointed first at the younger girl, then at the dog.

  “Katharina found Grandfather,” she said. “And Emmy.”

  The evening before, Luise Maywald explained, her daughter had been over with Grandfather, as she had been every day recently. All three of the children had a very close relationship with their grandfather. It was just as you would imagine it—going for walks, telling stories, playing Old Maid.

  “Ludo,” said the older girl—Ursula, if Kovacs remembered rightly.

  “Yes of course, Ludo too,” the mother said. “Both—sometimes one, sometimes the other.” Then suddenly their little daughter had been standing in the hall. At first glance, the mother went on, she looked the same as usual, perhaps a bit frozen, but it had been pretty cold outside over the last few days. The dog had started to behave oddly; it was tense and annoyed, she remembered, as if somebody it did not like was in the room. Kovacs glanced at Wieck. She’ll make a note of all these things, he thought, things like: “a bit frozen” and “as if someone was in the room.” But that uniform really doesn’t suit her.

  “Katharina stretched her arm out and opened her fist,” the woman said. “Inside were the two Ludo pieces, a blue one and a yellow one. Emmy had flipped her ears back and Katharina said something strange: ‘Four, four, got you.’ Then we could see that her fingers were covered in blood, and from that moment she hasn’t said another word.” For a while they had all thought that Katharina had hurt herself somewhere, and because she would not talk, not even a moan or anything like that, the mother—feeling helpless—had taken her daughter to the bathroom. First she had washed her hands and then undressed her. But she did not find a wound.

  “Which fingers?” Wieck asked. The woman did not understand at first.

  “Which fingers were covered in blood?”

  “Thumb, index finger, middle finger,” the woman said, extending the index finger of her right hand and crooking her middle finger and thumb underneath. “Like that, as if she’d been poking around somewhere.”

  “Poking?”

  “Yes, but we didn’t think of that till much later. Poking—that’s what must have happened.”

  The first thing she had done afterward was to phone her father, but there was no answer. That was quite normal, she said; his hearing had not been the best. After the third attempt she had then sent Georg, her son, over, because at that stage nobody had thought that something might have happened. Georg had come back five minutes later; Grandfather was not there.

  “Did you notice anything about your grandfather’s house?” Kovacs asked. The boy shook his head. One of those twelve-year-olds whose hair was starting to show signs of greasiness.

  “Was the front door open?”

  “No, it was closed.” Wide eyes, still no hint of puberty in the voice.

  “Any lights on inside?”

  “Yes, there were—the light above the table; and on the table was the Ludo board.”

  “And your grandfather wasn’t there?”

  “No, he wasn’t.”

  The boy had called out for him and got no answer. He was not in the bedroom, bathroom, or toilet.

  “And outside?”

  The boy shook his head again. “He wasn’t outside, either.”

  “I mean, did you call him?”

  No, he had not called him—it was cold and dark.

  “And so you just looked straight ahead and ran back the quickest way.” Wieck had bent forward a little. She is attentive, Kovacs thought, she asks the right questions and she understands children. The boy nodded.

  “And Emmy growled at me,” he said. “For no reason.”

  “What kind of dog is she?”

  “A Border Collie.” Whenever the older girl said something it always sounded very definite. A little podgy, Kovacs thought, some flab around the middle, pretty glasses. No doubt a fantastic older sister. When she grew up, she would become like her mother.

  The woman explained that her father used to go out for walks all the time, even at night. He particularly loved the hill behind the barn. There he used to sit on a chopping block next to the pile of spruce logs and would often stare at the mountains for hours, or down at the town.

  “So we didn’t work it out right away,” the man said. “Although Katharina behaved a bit oddly to begin with and looked straight through us the whole time, she then sat down in front of the TV and it was all pretty normal.”

  “It wasn’t until I tried to take the Ludo pieces out of her hand when she was going to bed, and she started to yell hysterically, that we wondered whether something had happened after all,” the woman said. “Her eyes bulged and she howled like she’d never done before. Then my husband said that perhaps she’d seen an animal—a goat or a fox. A little later he said it might have been a dead animal.”

  He had put on his jacket, she said, and done a turn of the property, around the two houses. It had not occurred to him to go over to the barn. He had wanted to take the dog with him, but it was lying next to Katharina’s bed as if bolted in place.

  “It was full moon,” Ernst Maywald said, “and the air was totally clear, that was the only remarkable thing. I stood by the hedge and looked down at the town, for thirty seconds perhaps. It was as if you could touch everything, every single lantern on the promenade.”

  They had then gone to bed without being especially worried. His father-in-law had always been healthy, and he set great store by his independence. There had been no indication that anything had happened to him.

  “How old was your father?” Wieck asked.

  “Eighty-six,” Luise Maywald said. “He would have been eighty-seven at the beginning of March.”

  It was the crows that had attracted his attention, the man said, it had been like in a film. He was on the early shift and so had left the house at half-past five. On his way over to the garage he had noticed two things: first, that the light was on in his father-in-law’s house; second, the excited cawing of the crows. “It was coming from the barn,” the man said. “So I didn’t get into the car, I fetched my flashlight from the trunk.”

  “And then you saw him
?” Wieck asked. Sometimes she can’t wait, Kovacs thought—when the tension gets too great.

  “Yes,” the man said. “I mean, it was strange. First I saw the crows all around, maybe ten or twenty. On the snowman, snowdog, in the snow, as if they were making a circle. They didn’t fly away until I got quite close and shone the flashlight directly at them. There . . .” He hesitated. “There weren’t any birds on the body itself.”

  Kovacs did not find it difficult to imagine the scene that he described. The body did not look as if it had been picked at by animals, he was certain of that.

  “And then you phoned?” Kovacs said. The man remained silent.

  “Then he came back,” the woman said. “I was in the bath and saw him in the mirror. My first thought was that someone had stolen our car from the garage.”

  “The car?”

  “Yes, he was so pale and completely at a loss. He was supposed to be driving to work . . .” She has a feeling for those close to her, Kovacs thought, and she knows her husband. Ernst Maywald was tall, rather gaunt, and had huge hands.