The Sweetness of Life

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  He went into the kitchen, put some water on to boil, and dropped some dried mint leaves and a few lumps of sugar into the teapot. This was another thing he had learned from Lefti: peppermint tea instead of an afternoon schnapps. I’m turning Asian, he thought. But his headaches had become less frequent since he had adopted this routine.

  The sky had remained clear. From the kitchen window he could see the pale-red tint of the evening in the southwest. The first stars would soon be visible. The telescope was beside his bed; the last few times he had not bothered to put it away. Tonight he would go up to the roof, take his time, and align it properly. He would start by looking at the zenith, where at this time of year Andromeda was in view. As always he would look for M31 and, as always, he would get annoyed that he could not make out the spiral structure of the galaxy, even at the highest magnification. Then he would turn eastward and start by searching for some of his favorite objects, for example Capella in Auriga, or Aldebaran in Taurus. Of course he was upset when Eleonore Bitterle had joked, “My boss has become a stargazer,” and of course it had bothered him when his other colleagues kept on riding him about it. But when Strack had asked him what the point was of spending hours staring through a tube, he had said, “I’m looking for God, that’s the point,” and all of them had shut up, for good.

  The triumphal march from Aida, slightly muffled. He had to get his bearings. The cell was in his inside jacket pocket, in the wardrobe. He had decided that he needed a martial ringtone, and Demski had helped him to download it. He flipped the phone open.

  “I hope you’re not going to get too upset about this, but New Year’s Eve is not going to be as you planned,” he said.

  “I’m very sad about that,” said the voice at the other end.

  It definitely was not Marlene’s.

  “I’m sorry you’re sad,” he said. “Who is this?” On the display there was a landline number that he recognized.

  “But Kommissar?”

  The smug tone, the slight Swiss twang—it was Patrizia Fleurin, the forensic pathologist. She had been in charge of the district for years, and whenever possible she carried out her postmortems at the pathology unit of the town’s hospital; she sent corpses to the Vienna University institute in Sensengasse only in special circumstances. Much to the chagrin of the pathology assistants she loved unconventional working hours. “As I can’t believe you’d call me on a private matter, Frau Doktor, I assume that you’re standing by the postmortem table,” he said.

  “Precisely,” she said. “Do you know what? I wouldn’t dare call you on a private matter.” A body was lying in front of her: an old man who had once had a head. At the bottom of this former head there was something significant. She thought he ought to take a look at it.

  Eight

  I’m sleeping just in my black cloak. The mask is on the floor next to the bed. They were presents from Daniel. He said they cost a load of money, but he has inexhaustible reserves. Our mother reckons he must be stealing, but she can’t prove anything; and our father says that if he catches him nicking anything, he’ll chop his hand off. Our father’s the biggest car dealer in the area. He sells Jaguars, Rolls-Royces, and Range Rovers, and once he shot somebody in the leg while out hunting, but it was an accident. Not long ago he sold young Stuchlik a Dodge Viper. He made the worst profit of his life on this deal, although he did give him a 12 percent discount. He sat in the sitting room and roared with laughter the whole time. Daniel says that if our father dies he’s going to take over the business, but only for a short time, because then he’s going to sell it for shed-loads of money.

  It’s silent in the house. It’s always like this on Sunday mornings. If I look out of my window I can see the roof of the assembly hangar, above it the hill that looks like the pointy end of a lemon, and further above that the sky.

  I go into the larder and cut myself a slice of the marble cake that our mother got from the shop yesterday. She can’t cook or bake herself. She says that her own mother was a failure and never taught her how to do it. I really want to make myself a hot chocolate, but something’s bound to go wrong and I’d wake everybody in the house, so I leave it.

  The fridge in the kitchen is buzzing. If no one else is around I just stay there until it stops again. I watch the red second hand of the clock on the wall. Three minutes and twenty-one seconds. Not even as long as school break. And then everything is at the right temperature again: the mineral water and the milk and the Christmas salami with the mini Christmas tree or bell pattern inside. Daniel says they were fed this salami inside, on his last few days, and he thinks it’s horrid because it’s the same bog-standard, low-quality Extrawurst; it’s just that the mini trees or bells are darker than the bits around them. Daniel says that there’s no difference in taste between the light bits and dark bits.

  My clothes are ready. The gloves, the headband. And my boots in the hall too. I’m wearing the cloak under my coat. I’ve got a mission.

  Daniel gave me another present. It’s heavy. I try to put it in my waistband, but it won’t go. So I take my backpack.

  Daniel said I can choose the first target. It’s a practice. Vader also needed a bit of time to get where he is. Daniel says that you don’t know you can do something until you’ve tried. He says that it’s only when you can do things that you can defend yourself, and he says that’s the only important thing in life: to be able to fight.

  It’s not yet fully light and it’s cold. The first thing that happens is that I bump into Frau Reithbauer with her really fat half-breed collie. That fuck-awful face and then the inevitable question: “Where on earth are you going at this ungodly hour?” I smile like C-3PO and say, “To church,” and she says, “Well, it is Sunday, but you’re rather early,” and I say, “There’s a requiem mass beforehand,” and she asks, “For whom?” and I say, “I don’t know.”

  I go along Ettrichgasse as far as the newspaper kiosk. The dark-green shutters are pulled down. I turn into Lorenzgasse. You can easily spot Roland’s house by the red mailbox which looks like the mailboxes in American films. Roland says his dad once drove through America on a motorbike, that’s where they got the mailbox. I don’t believe him, but it doesn’t matter now. Roland’s a useless bastard; I’ve known that since the cinema story. Daniel says that when someone lies to you, you either smash his face in or you pronounce him dead in your mind—that helps too. Right now Roland is skiing in the Zillertal with his parents and his unnecessary sister, and that’s just as good. His granny, who’s looking after the house, lives in Mühlau and, as I can’t see her car anywhere, she won’t be there.

  A footpath that runs between the second and third house takes me to the back of the estate. I go the other way along the fence and climb over with the help of an old cherry tree. Daniel says that if you don’t fight this bunch of lesbians, gays, and niggers then you’ve had it. It’s intuition—that’s how he knows it, he says, and he also says that if you want to fight then the very first thing you’ve got to do is to send the right signals.

  The nature reserve is covered in snow; the reeds next to it are almost all broken. One of the ornamental balls is missing a piece as big as my hand. Roland knocked it out with his catapult, but no one else knows that except me. A pretty brilliant shot to just graze it like that, anybody else would have destroyed the ball outright.

  The key to the garden shed is under an old brick slab on the woodpile. Any old idiot could find it.

  When I go in, the rabbits and guinea pigs hop around nervously in their cages. I shut the door behind me and sit on an old garden chair. I tell them the story of Anakin Skywalker who becomes Darth Vader, and how after the battle with Obi-Wan he’s lying there on the lava bank, nothing left of him—no arms, no legs, no breath—just burned skin, and how the Emperor comes and gives him a new face. The animals calm down while I’m talking. They all listen to me.

  Twelve rabbits: five black and white, two white with red eyes, one white with blue eyes, one black with white on its chest, th
ree gray. Seven guinea pigs: five with smooth coats, two curly ones. The white rabbit with the blue eyes is named Kylie Minogue. Roland’s sister christened it.

  I open the backpack. I put the thing that Daniel gave me on the ground. It’s a warhammer. It’s got an oval wooden handle.

  I put on the Darth Vader mask. I start breathing like him. Then I open the guinea pig cage and take out one of the animals. It’s gray and dark-brown at the back. It doesn’t squeal. It doesn’t even look at me.

  Nine

  The dark-green Golf has been on new winter tires for a week and a half. They still stand out—they look as if they have been painted black. A young policewoman, who obviously has no idea about our special agreement, stopped Robert and measured the tread. Robert, who always knows everything better, stands there and pays the forty-five Euro fine; what a picture it makes! Clemens then sorted it all out over the phone. That is why you have an abbot—to sort out these things.

  It crunches when he changes gear from first to second. The Golf has already racked up 160,000 kilometers; that may be the reason. Out of the parking lot, right into Stiftsallee, along the Rathausplatz, Severinstraße, over the bridge up to the large roundabout. He drives around it three times. He sometimes does this if nobody is coming. Off toward the west, gas station, the junction off to the wildlife observation center. Two kilometers later the fast road begins.

  The rosemary chicken he had for lunch is sitting in his stomach. But it tasted good, and Irma had made a real effort. The chickens that his mother cooks are always repulsive: unseasoned and raw inside. She usually accompanies it with rice that has been boiled to a mush. Then his sister laughs and says that he used to like chicken with rice when he was a child.

  There are sections where the hard shoulder has not been properly cleared. If one were to come off the outside lane it would be dangerous. A silver-gray BMW overtakes him. In the rearview mirror the car’s headlights are yellow circles. The Golf chugs like a tractor. It does not go faster than 140 kph.

  At lunch they talked about the program for New Year. The Service of Thanks on New Year’s Eve. The High Mass on New Year’s Day. They will all be there, the Bürgermeister and counselors will sit in the first few rows; in his sermon Clemens will try to make diplomatic references to the issue of the socially disadvantaged, as he does every year; and, as every year, he will lose all contact with reality as soon as he looks into one of those piggy faces. Otherwise there is nothing special over the coming days: no weddings, no baptisms, no funerals. Sebastian Wilfert’s body has not been released yet. A squashed face—the notion of it is quite cheery, in a funny way.

  To the left, the flat sheds of the poultry farm emerge above an oak-covered hill, followed by the church spire in Waiern. In the bend of the exit lane he takes his foot off the accelerator only when he feels the back of the car starting to move sideways. By his standards he has not had an accident for a long time; the last was more than two years ago when he crashed the Volvo into a milk tanker.

  In the parking lot of the old people’s home there are thirty-one vehicles; in the front row on the very left there is a VW Toureg that he has not seen here before. Most of the lines marking the parking bays are covered by the remains of old snow. That is not good. The whole of life runs along demarcation lines. He parks next to the blue-gray Renault Megane. It belongs to a landlord from Sankt Christoph who put his mother in this home and visits her more or less every other Sunday.

  The air is dry and packed with frost. Sometimes he gets these images: the air in the depths of winter, consisting of nothing but densely packed, bright-blue blocks. Or very narrow passageways that run under the surface of the snow, kilometers long, tiny creatures scurrying along them from A to B with unimaginable speed.

  The building has that intrinsic ugliness common to all Austrian old people’s homes. To be fair, old people’s homes in Switzerland, Germany or Norway might be just as ugly, but he has no experience of them. No, in Norway it is very unlikely; but in Germany, definitely. Anyway, this one has endless balconies, which it is strictly forbidden to use, for fear that the old people will climb over those green railings by mistake and fall to their deaths. An entrance hall in which yucca palms and huge fig-type specimens planted in hydroculture clay pebbles strain toward the light of high-output plant lamps, cloth parrots perch on top of wooden poles, and a reception booth staffed by someone to whom everybody entering the building is an imposition.

  Here he comes to see people who receive no other visitors: Franziska Zillinger from Mooshaim, and Leopold Rödl from Furth. But right now Leopold Rödl is in hospital with circulation problems in his legs. He sometimes gives a service in the chapel at the home; scarcely anybody attends.

  Franziska Zillinger is ninety-eight and almost blind. Her daughter died some years ago from heart failure—actually from excessive obesity—and her granddaughter, who is a successful bank clerk, has no time to visit. Frau Zillinger loves hymns; it makes the whole thing fairly easy. He hums “A House of Glory Watches” when he enters her unit, and she says, “Yes—a house of glory watches,” and starts to sing. She knows approximately eight to ten verses; he knows three, but that does not matter. She becomes quite passionate during the chorus, and she rapturously belts out the “O let us all be safe in thy house” as if at that moment she were singing for the benefit of heaven itself.

  “How are you, Frau Zillinger?” he asks. She turns her face toward him and her right hand creeps in his direction. Her hand is a little like an old branch. “If that’s you, Herr Kaplan, I’m well.” Although he is not actually a chaplain, he likes being addressed as such. She knew a chaplain once, he thinks. He imagines how they fell in love; it was like something from a Heimatfilm. At this point the memory of Sophie does not intrude, which sort of amazes him, but sometimes there is a certain distance. He looks into those eyes with their whitish, sad lenses and wonders whether old people’s irises tend to turn blue again like infants’, or whether that is a just figment of the imagination.

  He talks to her about the approaching year’s end, and she says that she has never liked New Year’s Eve—all that noise really gets on her nerves, particularly since she lost her sight. Mind you, it is not as bad here in Waiern as it was in Mooshaim, where they used to live by the lake, right next to the jetty where the big fireworks were let off at midnight. For days afterward the cats would not come out from under the cupboards; it was the same every year. She had stopped asking whether it would be her last New Year; since the loss of her daughter it was irrelevant. Her happiness had vanished with the death of her husband shortly after the war, and with the death of her daughter her life had lost its meaning—that was the truth. “The ‘safe in thy house’ is like a lovely fairy tale,” she says. “I picture a house in which everybody’s together and happy, and you don’t feel so alone. Just like a fairy tale. But I shouldn’t be saying these things to a priest.”

  Something begins to dash around in circles inside his head. He realizes that he can still resist it quite well. Two questions enter his mind. First: What has happened recently? Second: What is meaningful in my life? The Rule, the Redeemer, the mother, and the child.

  “By the way, did you ever know anybody by the name of Sebastian Wilfert?” he asks.

  At first something flashes over the lady’s face like a breeze, fleeting and indefinite. Then it is as if somebody had held her under her elbows and slowly straightened her. She is sitting there in her armchair, her eyes open wide and her fingers digging into the arms. She looks like she’s just met the Devil, he thinks. After a while, her face relaxes again and she sinks back into the chair. She shakes her head. “No, I never knew anybody by that name,” she says softly. “But my husband. All those years ago.”

  “Somebody drove over his head, probably with a tractor,” he says. She closes her eyes and says nothing.

  The bag with his pants, sweater, and shoes is on the backseat. His iPod is in the glove compartment. He must get away from here. He must run; it does not matter
where.

  Ten

  This year is not ending well, thought Raffael Horn. Lying on his stomach, he shifted his body to the right and tried to reach the receiver. He dreamed he had arrived at a station, totally out of breath, only to watch the train pull away from him. His heart was pounding. The digital alarm clock on his bedside table showed 4:47.

  It was Brunner. Her voice was strained. “I’m sorry, Raffael, but I think you ought to come in.” Apparently, Caroline Weber had become more tense and paranoid since the previous evening. Among other things, she was convinced that her little daughter was standing outside the door downstairs, just waiting for the opportunity to slip in. The invisible girl was going to come up to the ward and tear her mother’s soul from her body. They had tried everything to calm the woman down—close personal attention, all sorts of medication—but without any success.

  “Where is she now?” Horn said.

  “In the kitchen.”

  “How did she get in there?”

  “She elbowed Lydia in the face and took her key to get in.”

  Lydia was a Chilean nurse, one meter sixty at most, but a fighter nonetheless. Anybody getting past her must have a mountain of energy.

  “Have you called the locksmith?”

  “She said that if anybody tries to fiddle with the door she’ll slit her wrists.”

  “Call him anyway. Tell him to wait until I get there,” said Horn, and hung up.

  Irene sat up beside him and looked at him, still half asleep. “Who?” she asked.

  “Caroline Weber,” he said.

  “Is it serious?”

  “If Lili Brunner can’t disguise her concern on the phone, then it’s serious.”