The Sweetness of Life

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  Manuela Gasselik opened the door. She was wearing a light-blue dressing gown, a fringed white cotton cloth was looped tightly around her neck, and her hair was tied in a loose bundle. A slight look of horror flickered across her face then she relaxed again. “I know you,” she said, smiling. Kovacs nodded and offered her his hand. “He’s in his room,” she said.

  The hall smelled of cigarette smoke. A large heap of coats and winter jackets was hanging on the coat rack. Music floated in from the radio in the kitchen. Through the open door he could see a blond boy sitting at the table eating cornflakes. For a second he was confused. “Björn, his brother,” Manuela Gasselik said. The boy raised his head for a moment and gazed into space.

  They stopped in front of the third door along the long corridor. She grasped the door handle. Kovacs took her arm. “Where’s your husband?” he asked softly. She looked up and shrugged.

  “I don’t know. He might be off with a customer. Do you need him?”

  He hesitated for a second. “Perhaps later,” he said then thought, why do I have the feeling that I need the husband? He glanced at Demski. He looked as tense as a bowstring.

  Daniel Gasselik was sitting at his desk with his back to the door. He lifted his fingers from the computer keyboard, reached for his neck, pulled the hood of his dark-gray sweatshirt over his head, and turned around slowly. He was grinning. Nobody said a word.

  “How’s your son, Herr Demski?” Even the voice was still clear and scratchy like that of a thirteen-year-old.

  “Why are you missing your probation appointments?”

  “He’s starting school in autumn, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what that’s got to do with you.”

  “I’m just interested. I mean, you’re interested in my probation.”

  “So?”

  “Grimm’s an incompetent ass.”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Would you let Grimm look after you?”

  Kovacs started feeling edgy. Demski’s got to learn to avoid falling into these traps. “I’m sure you know these interrogation games,” he said to Gasselik. “In real life they’re just as you see on television: Where were you on this occasion? Who’s your witness? So, can you remember where you were late the evening of December 27?”

  “Here.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Here, in this room.”

  “You were alone, I assume.”

  “No, my brother was with me.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “Playing. As usual.”

  “So how can you be so sure that you were here?”

  Gasselik closed his eyes and made the sign of someone’s throat being slit. “That was the night the old man was killed, wasn’t it?” Kovacs said nothing. Lost in a dream, he thought. When Gasselik closed his eyes, that was the phrase that came to mind. Demski folded his arms tightly, clenching his fists in his armpits. In the paper it had said that first the man’s throat was slit, and then his skull was mashed to a pulp. Was that right? Kovacs stared past the gray hood and over to the computer. The screen saver had started up. Three heads from Star Wars that appeared and vanished one after another: Darth Maul, the Emperor, and Darth Vader. As soon as he’d read it he’d wondered what it would feel like to mash a skull to a pulp, what it would feel like in your hands when you let the hammer go and the bones offered resistance for a split second before giving way. He’d imagined it again and again—it must be a hundred times now—looking down at the blood continuing to spurt out of the cut in the throat; the forehead or the right half of the face already dented. You’d then get the urge to have another crack, and then a third and fourth one, until there was nothing recognizable of the original face.

  “The best thing is the noise,” Gasselik said. “Do you know what it sounds like when a bone breaks? Do you know how it gets right inside you? You can’t ever forget it.”

  Kovacs thought of the light saber in the Star Wars films, of Yoda’s mini light saber, and the scene in which Darth Maul, cut in two by a single stroke from Obi-Wan Kenobi, topples into that bottomless shaft.

  “Are animal bones the same as human ones?” Demski asked. Gasselik looked shocked then he laughed out loud.

  “Geese, cats, dogs, hamsters—I’m afraid that wasn’t me either,” he said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Who then?”

  “Who’s the police here, me or you? Anyway, all that comes under criminal damage as far as you’re concerned, even in the worst instances.”

  “Who, do you think, could do something like that?” Kovacs asked. Gasselik cracked his two middle fingers. Then he pushed his fingers under his thighs. “Some psycho,” he said. “Someone who hears voices or acts on the instructions of a higher power.”

  Kovacs thought of the Apulian decapitator and his image of Lefti’s cousin with a belt of explosives around his body. He felt pretty stupid. Which of us isn’t a psycho? he thought and turned to go. “Have you got any wool gloves?” he asked from the doorway. Gasselik thought for a moment. “Yes, I have,” he said.

  “How many pairs?”

  “One pair of mittens. One pair of gloves—the kind with removable fingertips.”

  “What color?”

  “The mittens are gray, the gloves reddish-brown.”

  “Excellent. Thank you.”

  There was a blank look on Demski’s face. Kovacs pulled him out into the corridor and closed the door. “I’ll tell you in the car,” he said.

  Manuela Gasselik was sitting in the kitchen flicking through a magazine and smoking a cigarette. When she saw Kovacs and Demski coming, she stubbed it out, tied the white cloth around her neck, and stood up.

  “Did he talk?” she asked.

  “He did,” Kovacs said. There was a glint in the woman’s eyes. He felt sorry for her. “Can your son drive?” he asked.

  She laughed. “That’s the one thing my husband taught him. When he was ten.”

  “How often does he drive?”

  “Haven’t a clue. He takes a car out of the parking lot and drives around. Just like that. Nobody checks on him.” She couldn’t care less, Kovacs thought. The farther away he drives the happier she is.

  The streetlights were now switched off. The sky above the assembly hall was blue with a touch of orange. The man in the green overalls was shoveling lumps of ice onto a small truck. He quietly cursed to himself and kicked the back wheel several times.

  Kovacs sat in the car, reached behind, and got Demski’s tin duck from the back seat. He put it on top of the dashboard and let it hop along the windshield. Desmki was baffled.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m talking to it,” Kovacs said.

  “And what’s it saying?”

  Kovacs stared for a moment at its blind eye. Then he returned it to the backseat.

  “It wasn’t him,” he said.

  Wieck was shrieking as she stomped up and down the meeting room. Lipp stood by the wall looking at a loss, and Bitterle sat motionless at the table, her hands clasping a teacup. Kovacs unzipped his coat. “What happened?” he asked. As she passed the board, Wieck grabbed the sponge and hurled it across the room. “Now I am worried,” Kovacs said. He stepped over to the desk, poured himself a coffee, and waited.

  “We were in Bergheimstraße, as planned,” Lipp said.

  Wieck went over to Kovacs, leaned on the table, and shouted, “And then this sleazy bastard is grinning at us, saying, ‘Do you really believe I could do anything to my daughter?’ And you say, ‘Yes, I do.’ And he keeps on grinning and says, ‘But look at me—I’m mentally ill. Even if I were capable of it, there’s nothing I can do about it!’” Kovacs’s mind wandered as he stirred sugar into his coffee. He thought how nice it was to tromp through the snow with Wieck, and how wonderfully she fumed when she was angry.

  “You were at the Schmidingers’ then?” he asked.

  Lipp nodded.


  “If I remember rightly,” Kovacs said, “that was not what we’d planned.”

  Lipp gave a swift reply. He said they’d thought it might well be useful to take the opportunity to speak to the girl’s mother. He had phoned the woman beforehand and she said, yes, she was indeed alone; her husband was at the hospital with their daughter. Nobody could have known that he would be standing there at the door. Wieck sat down, reached for a napkin, and wiped her eyes.

  “In fact it made no difference,” she said.

  “What made no difference?” Kovacs said.

  “Whether he was there or not.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  They had started with the neighboring house on the left, Wieck explained, forcing out of bed a young railway official who had just gone to sleep after his night shift. So the man was in a pretty bad mood. Yes, he did have a wife, he said; and no, he certainly didn’t have a dog. He could provide a four-year-old son who was at kindergarten at the moment, if that would help. He said he had never seen the letter she was holding in front of him, and he could not imagine that his wife would have written it, even though there was no doubt that Norbert Schmidinger was a mentally deranged individual. What did he mean by “mentally deranged”? they asked the man. He said, “He stands on the balcony with his binoculars, looks into every window he can see, and if he gets horny enough he whips out his cock and rubs one out. That’s what I mean by ‘mentally deranged.’” That is what the man had said, after which he apologized for having used that sort of language in front of a woman.

  Bitterle raised her head. “Do you really believe he does that?” she asked. “I mean, so publicly.”

  “I’ve no idea what that asshole gets up to,” Wieck said. Lipp tried to hide a smile by putting his cup in front of his face. Everybody looked at him.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re laughing?!”

  “I was just trying to picture this endurance test—minus fifteen on the balcony . . . I’m sorry, it’s very crude.”

  “Yes,” Wieck said. “It is crude!”

  If they want to stay in this job, Kovacs thought, they’re going to have to keep on putting up with the crudeness of the erect male organ; and he thought that he would rather have a man who jacked off publicly on his balcony than one who broke his child’s legs, any day. Bitterle drew a penis on a piece of paper and then crossed it out. Wieck saw it and calmed down.

  As soon as the door to the other neighboring house opened, a small dog rushed at them through the front garden, she went on. It was yapping loudly; it must have been a dachshund mix. A woman, perhaps sixty, appeared at the door in a shocking flowery housecoat—Hannelore Iffenschmid, a former secondary-school teacher. “You saw her face, and the housecoat below it, and you knew at once that she’d deny everything,” Lipp said.

  Kovacs could remember how confused the woman had been, how shrill her voice had sounded, and how she had said she was calling from a phone booth because she did not want to be identified. He thought that this specific combination of naïveté and timidity was characteristic of the country as a whole, in particular of certain groups of people such as teachers, police chiefs, or leading politicians.

  No sooner had the woman let them into her hall, Wieck said, than she had indeed embarked on a comprehensive and consistent denial of everything: no telephone call, no letter, no girl’s legs being battered against a metal pole. “She’d even have loved to deny she had a dog,” said Lipp, but that would have been tricky, so instead she said that dachshund mixes were ten a penny, even in this town. At that point he had been unable to hold himself back. He said to her, “Perhaps not for much longer.” This gave her one hell of a fright, and he asked her whether she read the papers. The dog, by the way, was named Augustus.

  She’s afraid that he’ll stand on his balcony and look over at her through his binoculars, Kovacs thought. And she’s afraid that he’ll take out his thing, which she probably doesn’t even dare to give a name; but most of all she’s afraid that he’ll take her dog and batter him somewhere.

  Bitterle asked whether the woman had made any comments about Schmidinger, and Wieck replied that she hadn’t said anything apart from the fact that it was her principle not to poke her nose into how other people brought up their children. She had more important things to worry about, such as her garden, her dog, and the house. The dog, meanwhile, had spent the whole time hopping against her lower leg—a quite asocial brute.

  Wieck did not want to say anything more about Barbara Schmidinger; she found it so frustrating that this woman had just sat there with a vacant expression and, like the old cliché, repeated her husband’s story: a dark-blue station wagon, the bumper hitting a young pair of legs, driver vanishing, and in all the confusion nobody noting the registration number. But the eeriest thing of all, Wieck said, “was this appalling man suddenly standing there in the room. You could see from his demeanor, his tone of voice, and the expression on his face, just how certain he was that his wife had not given anything away.”

  Kovacs could picture the woman’s strawlike hair, and how she spent the whole time cowering. Sometimes, he thought, the magnitude of a threat was the only significant benchmark in life. He felt miserable.

  Wieck looked over at Lipp. “And then I made a mistake,” she said. He could see the tears welling up in her eyes again. All of them were waiting. Demski scratched at the sugar at the bottom of his coffee cup. She said that she had persuaded Florian to drive to the hospital. She had gone to U14, the accident ward, presented her ID, and said she had to ask Birgit Schmidinger something. The ward sister was hesitant, saying she did not know if that was a good idea. Her father had just been in, and that had caused her considerable anxiety. In the end, however, they had let Wieck in.

  The little girl was lying in bed, and an older ward sister was reading to her from a book. Everything seemed very peaceful until she said that the two of them were from the police. The girl’s eyes burst open wide and the whole of her body started to tremble. Wieck could not think of a sensible way to calm the situation. The sister motioned for her to leave, but for some idiotic reason she asked, “Does your mom have something in the garden that she hangs the washing on?” At this the child started howling pitifully, clawing into the blanket with her fingers, while repeating the same single sentence over and over again: “It was a blue car. I’m sure it was a blue car.” Wieck stood there, feeling guilty and angry at the same time and was clueless as to what to do until a tall, lean doctor arrived—the psychiatrist as she later found out—and sent her out.

  “‘A blue car,’ she said. ‘It was a blue car.’ She’s five years old. Five!” Wieck was sobbing.

  Kovacs grabbed his coat and got up. “I’ve just got to pop out for a bit,” he said. As the others gave him puzzled looks, he added, “To organize something.”

  As he was going down the stairs he thought of Marlene, who had recently said that this job was absolute hell and that it was irresponsible to let young people do it. He also thought of Gasselik with the ugly red-and-black face of Darth Maul right behind him, and of Norbert Schmidinger stepping onto the balcony with his binoculars. Finally he thought of “Sheriff,” who knew people who would do anything you asked them to, given a small amount of cash and a few assurances.

  Outside the main entrance Mauritz heaved himself out of his silver Renault and waved Kovacs over. “I’ve been out of town again, trying to bring this beehive disaster to a conclusion,” he said. “And I talked to Christoph Moser, the young farmer who discovered it all. He claims to have seen someone in the woods that morning. It doesn’t really fit with what we’ve got, but he insists he’s right.”

  The picture appeared in Kovacs’s mind of walking that day through the winter larch forest, along the tire tracks, and how they had chatted in a relaxed way; and yet he also remembered the vivid impression that something was unresolved, but he could not tell what.

  “Did Moser recognize the person he
saw in the woods?”

  Mauritz nodded. “Yes, but he didn’t think very much of it, he said.”

  “And?”

  Mauritz closed the car door behind him. He took off his right glove before starting to talk. It looked a bit funny.

  Twenty

  There they are. They’re crossing the parking lot. There are two of them, and maybe they’ll take him with them. Just like before. It won’t do them any good. At some point he will conquer them. Perhaps now, perhaps in the next star age, perhaps in the one after that. He is the Emperor. I know that he’s got all the time in the world.

  I don’t eat my cornflakes any quicker than usual. They ask about my dad. He’s gone somewhere, Mom says. Actually he’s over in the office. They all go down to Daniel’s room. Mom comes back and lights a cigarette. I hate it, but she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about Daniel either. Luke Skywalker and his sister, Leia, get adoptive parents when their mother dies. My mom hasn’t got a clue who Luke Skywalker is.

  Through the wall I can hear them talking quite calmly. The interrogations that start calmly are the most dangerous ones, Daniel says. At they end they do you in. I check my backpack: the mask, the warhammer, the new Stanley knife—the big one from the set of three—the school things, the cloak. I reach under the mattress and pull out the thing that Daniel uses to show me what it’s like inside. At the front it’s made of silver and it’s black at the back. It looks a little bit like Yoda’s light saber. Nobody must find it. I stuff it in with the other things.

  The coat, the boots, the cap. When I put the mitten over my right hand it hurts, even though I smeared four different creams over the hole under the bandage. Had I been bitten by a pit bull rather than a collie mix, my hand wouldn’t be there anymore, Daniel says. It was a sign from the dark side of the Force, he says, and if I kill a pit bull next he’ll make me his deputy. I don’t know how long it’ll be before I’m able to do a pit bull, but Daniel says that I’ve got time and that I should study him. Konrad Seihs, the fascist bastard, has got a pit bull, Daniel says. He lives in Linzer Straße, left at the second crossroads, fourth house. That’s a task for later, he says.