The Sweetness of Life

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  Mom never hears us when we go out. She’s either still lying in bed or she’s sitting somewhere smoking a cigarette. Daniel says she’s a good-for-nothing bitch. I’m not sure that’s true. Sometimes I don’t believe my mom thinks very much. That means it’s not so tragic that she couldn’t give a crap about us. At the moment she’s got BH around her neck. I don’t know how that happened. Daniel says it’s nothing. Anakin Skywalker’s mom dies in Episode II. He also gets by without her. Anakin doesn’t have a dad. He’s never missed him. Yet he became Darth Vader.

  The bald bus driver. In winter he wears this wool hat that fits the back of his head exactly, like a lid. He’s all right. Sometimes you get people who you feel do their job and could never be unfriendly, like R2-D2. At some point they simply burn out, then it’s too late. That’s the disadvantage.

  The bastard is sitting in the row just behind the driver; Markus is next to him. Markus isn’t a problem, he never says anything. The bastard talks incessantly. Homework and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and Need for Speed Underground, all the usual stuff. I tell him I got up late and look away. That doesn’t change anything. He gives off bad vibes.

  In the passage to the first courtyard a short corridor branches off to the right. Actually, it’s the back entrance to the abbey pharmacy. A few meters along is a recess with three blue trash cans. I crouch behind them and wait. I think about the fact that on Hoth you can dig yourself snow holes anywhere. Nobody would find you in one of those, no wampa, no Jedi, not even Yoda. The church clock rings out four bright chimes and eight muted ones. I count up to one hundred then I make a move. I’ve got a mission.

  Leo always comes by bike. He lives nearby and the tires of his BMX are so wide that they also work on snow. The number of his chain lock is 1407, his birthday. That’s stupid, but everybody does it. I open the quick release and put the saddle a little lower before I sit on the bike.

  Daniel smacked me, then again, and said that I was to stick to my tasks. Then he pressed my face against the newspaper article, and I said I didn’t do it. He said if I was lying he’d fuck me up the ass, exactly like they do inside, and then he said that there was a strange power at work.

  From the time we were all there, the whole class, I can remember that the path begins by the road behind the ocher hall of the woodworking factory. All the primary school kids go there at some time, and you get a detailed explanation all about the pollen and the back legs and the queen, and at the end you get a small jar with a sample to try.

  The surface has been cleared of snow up to just beyond the last house. After that it gets hard. There are two deep tire tracks, and I cycle in the right-hand one. I stand on the pedals and try to get a proper rhythm going, but it’s so bumpy that every few meters I have to put a foot on the ground. After the first bend the path is covered in a whole pile of snow, perhaps from a small avalanche, or maybe it’s been shoveled there. I lean the bike on the side. I don’t lock it. Nobody comes here. I climb up the mound of snow. At the top I throw the cloak around me and put the mask on. I push it over my forehead to the top of my head. Then I continue on foot, in the right tire track as before. I imagine I’m sitting on top of a tauntaun and just have to give it orders. It runs forward at high speed and it doesn’t have any problems with even the steepest climbs. I wonder about various things, like how quickly the bees froze to death when their hives were destroyed, whether some of them flew on another five meters or even to the trees at the edge of the wood, and whether it was possible to do it all in the same way as the stuff with the ducks and cats—with a warhammer and a lot of force. And I also wonder whether in the meantime they’ve been badgering Daniel with a damp towel, or using various psycho-tricks, and whether they’ve threatened him with sleep deprivation or solitary confinement. All I know is that he won’t have said anything, not a single word.

  There are eleven bends in all, before it flattens out. Another thing I learned from Daniel was this: life is safer if you count. I put the mask over my face. I start breathing like Darth Vader. There’s no more undergrowth, the trees are not as dense anymore, and after two or three hillocks you’ve got an open view of the clearing.

  I stand there and I know that something is very wrong. I can remember it all in much detail. We see a pair of great spotted woodpeckers spiraling up the trunk of a pine tree; Frau Zelsacher, our teacher, has bags of gummies; Dorothea Schaupp falls over and cuts her knee, and someone picks her up and carries her the last little bit to the place where the meadow is in summer. I can remember exactly the brightly colored beehives, and even that the first hive in the bottom row is painted dark red, and I also remember the old black barn behind on the right. Everything is exactly as it was before. But that’s not right at all.

  I noted that it said “a picture of destruction” in the newspaper, and it also said that sixteen beehives were demolished. Here there are twenty-two hives lined up: twelve in the bottom row and ten in the upper one. All of them are fine. I walk slowly past the woodshed. Nothing has been destroyed, absolutely nothing. There’s perhaps thirty centimeters of snow on top of the shed roof. At one end somebody wiped away the snow; who knows why?

  I’m going to go straight home on Leo’s bike. I’ll go to Daniel’s room and tell him, “There is no strange power, it was all a big mistake.” Then I’ll look at him and ask how he did it with the old man, what car he used, what tool, and when he did it, seeing that he spent the whole evening in his room with me.

  I cross the open space to get back to the tire tracks. They lead straight up to the black barn.

  There is no lock on the barn door, just a wooden handle. I turn it and open the right door a tiny bit. At first I can’t see anything, but then I can make out something.

  Twenty-One

  There are twelve people in the staffroom. Now there are thirteen; Verena Steinmetz has just come in. She is carrying her red briefcase as if she were a lawyer in an American film. There is nothing on her desk. Brandhuber’s place is next to hers. On his desk is a fourth form “textus,” a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid, Livy’s Ab urbe condita, and twenty-seven exercise books from the sixth year. Brandhuber is not there yet. He does not start teaching until second period. The phosphorous tube to the right above the door is flickering. That is new. On Altmann’s desk there is a copy of Autorevue, half an apple, an unopened chocolate bar, and a trial copy of Mistlbacher’s new mathematics book for juniors. Altmann is standing next to Krivanel and laughing.

  A dense web of gridlines is hanging in the room. He has been here for two and a half hours, spinning these threads back and forth, back and forth, between objects and heads and tiny trivialities. Nobody else has noticed it yet. It is no longer remarkable that he is the first one. He is always the first one. He is going to throw himself into this web. It will hold him. Sylvia Ruthner looks at him. He looks away. She is a bad woman.

  Call things by their names. Take them for what they are. An exercise book is an exercise book. A bad woman is a bad woman.

  Right at the bottom of the pile on his desk, a laminated sheet of paper with the Rule, A3, printed in small type on the front and back. He has underlined three sentences with a marker pen:

  The time has come to rise from sleep.

  Run, so that the shadow of death does not vanquish you.

  The talkative man is not stable on the earth.

  On top of that, his papers. First period, math with the seventh year; second period, math with the first year; third period, religious education with the sixth year; fourth period, free; fifth period, religious education with the first year. Textbooks, exercise books, notepads. Four small piles next to each other. Sometimes life consists of threads and piles.

  Freyler asks him how he is. He says fine, thank you. Freyler puts the model of a human eye on his desk. He is a nice man, but sometimes what he does creates a peculiar atmosphere.

  The time has come to rise from sleep.

  Earlier he had been thinking about the woman and the child, about how often she goes
to the hairdresser, and whether she has a little color put in her hair from time to time. Now he thinks that in a few years the child will be learning about the sensory organs, and that perhaps he will have a teacher who brings ox eyes into the classroom, and then he will raise his hand and say, yes, I’d like to cut one out too.

  He takes the pile on the left and waits. Around him people are heading for the door. Seventh year. The first discussions about curves. The astonishment of some pupils that it always works: you set the first derivative to zero and you get the high point and low point.

  Out into the school hall with the others, into the stairwell, up to the second floor. He goes along the corridor.

  Through the large arched window one can see the parking lot down in the first courtyard. Altmann’s Espace, Steinmetz’s turquoise-colored Peugeot. Keindl is getting out of his old Mercedes. He often arrives late. Someone is coming over from the main entrance. The headband, the backpack, the small figure. Björn. He goes straight over to the bike racks and tampers around with something.

  He can see him standing at the back of the church and between the cypresses in the cemetery. He can hear him saying, “Daniel’s back.”

  The web is now getting tense. Here and there a thread snaps.

  He puts the small pile on the floor by the window and turns around.

  Run.

  Back along the corridor, down the stairs, right to the gate. He sees the backpack disappearing in the archway. He breathes in air through his nose. It has gotten a touch warmer. Right across the courtyard. He is running.

  I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest.

  Clemens has forbidden him from bringing his iPod into school. He has threatened to bar him from teaching if he refuses to obey. At the moment he is not really fussed by this. He still gets his music in his ears. All he has to do is to reduce his Seroquel dosage again. Otherwise everything goes quiet and empty.

  A short way along Stiftsallee, then straight over the railway and left into Grafenaustraße. Björn seems to be in a hurry. He can see that it is not his own bike.

  Something feels wrong. The pants, the warm sweater, most of all, the shoes.

  I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children.

  The blocks on the estate, then the three halls of the woodworking factory, the smaller olive-green one, the larger olive-green one, the ocher one. On the extension of Grafenaustraße is a group of old peasant barns; behind them the forest begins.

  Björn takes the right of the two tire ruts. He stands on the pedals and looks like he is struggling. This is because the tracks are coarse. The snow is still hard and cold.

  He is now running quite slowly. In some parts his soles still slip, however.

  At a point where the path is laden with snow, Björn gets off the bike and puts it to the side. He climbs onto the mound of snow that is right across the path and continues on foot. He does not turn around. He looks hectic.

  He can see Björn standing in the cemetery, between the second and third cypresses on the right. When the old man is under the ground and everybody has left the cemetery, he approaches the north wall. Björn does not run away. He asks him what’s wrong and Björn replies that there’s nothing wrong, apart from the fact that Daniel’s back. He’s the Emperor of all beings, and he talks about a number of things you can learn from. One of the things he says is that, inside, everything is relative. For example, it’s much better to be fucked up the ass by a bit of metal or rubber than for them to do it with their own cocks. It’s the sort of thing you don’t know beforehand.

  Where black is the color, where none is the number.

  The bike belongs to Leo. He had it when they did their last school outing.

  He climbs the heap of snow. Perhaps his son has also got a bike like that, spanking blue, or silver with a reddish-brown fox on it. Stabilizers—you still need them when you are five.

  The tire tracks continue on the other side.

  There will come a time when he will take off the stabilizers for him, hold the back of his saddle, run a few steps alongside, and then he will let go and he will ride a short way on his own and be totally amazed.

  Björn speedily climbs the snaking bends that make up this goods track. He has put something around his shoulders that from a distance looks like a black coat.

  He leaves a distance of one and a half bends. He takes medium paces. Turning to the side he has a view over the whole town. A vertical column of smoke is still rising from the chimney of the woodworking factory. Sometimes he can know the exact moment when the weather is going to take a turn. On those occasions it is like looking at the clearest sky imaginable, and then, when one takes a second look, everything has a yellow tinge.

  There are eleven bends in all. Afterward, the slope evens out and the path runs in a flat arc to the southwest. The trunks of the larches and pine trees are separated. The sun sends shimmering triangles of light into the forest.

  Björn leaves the tracks and goes over to the beehives in somebody else’s old footprints. He paces out the row, as if he needs to check something. He stops at the end of the row and rests his hand on the shed roof for a second. He turns through ninety degrees, returns to the tracks, and approaches the barn slowly. He is wearing a Darth Vader costume; that is easy to see now.

  Where black is the color, where none is the number.

  The overhang of the barn roof is bowing substantially in the middle. At several points the layer shingle has recently been redone.

  Björn steps up to the barn door and examines it. After some time, he shifts the latch and pushes it up a little way with both hands.

  He gets closer with definite, equal steps. Björn does not turn round, even though he must be able to hear him coming.

  He stands next to him, and the two of them peer inside the barn. He cannot make it out properly. Something like the arm of a crane is looming toward them from the darkness. Right at the top something black and threatening is clinging there. Björn has the Darth Vader mask in front of his face and is snorting.

  Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?

  He opens the door the whole way. Now it all becomes clearer. In the barn there is an old tow truck. Spots of yellow paint here and there, worn tires with a coarse tread. On the platform behind is a swivel arm, at the bottom of it a steel winch, at the top the pulley. Directly underneath this, about one and a half meters above their heads, a medium-size anvil is hanging from a strong, welded loop. As if it had come straight from the blacksmith, he thinks.

  It’s going to get warmer soon, he thinks. The Föhn will blow for a few hours, and then we’ll start sinking in the snow. Then the rain will arrive like a gray wall.

  Twenty-Two

  I killed him.

  It’s quite easy. You go a step behind him, grab his hair with your left hand, bend his head back, and make the cut with the right. You need a sharp tool, like a Stanley knife. But not one with a snap-off blade, or the whole thing will go pear-shaped. If you get the carotid artery, he’ll be unconscious a few seconds later. You put him down just as you want him, then drive the tow truck over him so that the length of his body is between the two rear tires. You align the anvil—you might have to push it forward or back a bit—hoist the thing up to the pulley, and let go of the catch on the winch. The anvil falls three and a half meters onto his face. You’ve got what you wanted.

  I realize that the vehicle will be found sooner or later, and also that the little girl might have recognized my voice, as most of the primary schoolchildren in the town have heard it. I hadn’t planned on losing a button from my sleeve in the process, but there’s nothing I could have done about it.

  As I said, doing it was easy. The period before was the hard part.

  Afterward I felt tired, nothing else.

  There are those phrases you unquestioningly use as a guide in life, which then turn out to be utter nonsense, such as “Time heals all wounds.” Quite the opposite is true. Time heals nothing at all, and some
times it’s just a few seconds that determine your whole life. To the end.

  Imagine, for example, that I’ve got a brother. Imagine we’re pretty close in age, and for both of us the other one is a bit like our other half. On one occasion, when I’m livid, I clobber him over the head with the meat grinder, and on another he yanks the neighbor’s aggressive Alsatian away from me with his bare hands, even though he’s already got me by the throat. Imagine I repeat a year, or even two, so I can have him sitting next to me, and it’s to stay like that till we finish school. We wear the same clothes, read the same books, and we sleep side by side. We’re never apart save for the two weeks I have to spend in the hospital with appendicitis. Afterward he reproaches me and says that if I hadn’t eaten so many cherry stones it wouldn’t have happened.

  It doesn’t really matter where or when it happens. It could have been yesterday, or four weeks ago, or sixty years ago. It might have taken place in Furth, in Salzburg, or on the edge of the Thüringer Wald, in a village between Eisenach and Meiningen, on a low hill above the Werra. A few are people there, including him, my brother and me, and someone else who’s called something like Dorner or Strolz or Zillinger. Let’s say he goes into the first house, yelling all over the place, banging the table and demanding board and lodging. Because there’s nothing there, he marches the entire family outside—husband, wife, and two daughters—and then he asks whether there is anybody else in the house, and the woman says yes, their son, but he can’t walk. He asks where he is, and the woman says upstairs, and he forces her to go up with us. We find the son in a small room. He sits tied with a sheet to an armchair, and the woman says the wheelchair is broken. On the table in front of him the son has an unruled exercise book, next to it a flat wooden box with colored pencils. It looks like he’s loosened the pages one by one out of the exercise book, and he’s made them into flags: the German one, the British one, the Italian one, the French one. He’s in the middle of coloring the area around the stars of the American flag blue. He picks up the flag drawings and gives the order: everything downstairs. We untie the son and I carry him down the stairs; he’s quite light. Downstairs he puts the flags on the kitchen table, asks how old the son is, and the mother says fifteen, even if he doesn’t look it, but that’s because he’s disabled. Then he says quite calmly that there is an order from Mansteuffel stipulating that every male over the age of fourteen living in a house displaying a white flag is to be shot, without exception. As he finds the British, French, and American flags much more abhorrent than the cowardly white one, then there’s no question that order will have to be carried out. My brother says you can’t do that, and he says just see if I can’t, I’ve got an order, only we won’t actually shoot them. There’s a stable with places for two horses, and above that a small hayloft. At the front a beam runs right across the room. He himself kicks the stool from under the husband. He hardly writhes. The son is cowering on the ground, his head between his crippled knees. He goes up to my brother and says, you lift him up and put him in the noose, that’s an order, and my brother asks, what happens if I refuse? I say to him, you can’t do that, and he takes his pistol, aims it at me, and says to my brother, I’ll shoot him first and then you. My brother puts the son in the noose and he hardly writhes either. I’m staring into his face the whole time, and it takes just a few seconds to engrave itself on my memory like nothing else in the world.