by Wolf Haas
Before Brenner could even decide, Palfinger came out of the neighboring farmhouse. Brenner almost didn’t recognize him. At first he thought, it must be the sunlight that’s making this ravaged swine from the Borderline look civilized all of a sudden. But it wasn’t the sunlight, no, it was as if the whole Palfinger package had been traded in. Polite and quiet, sure, but also not like he was trying to deny that he knew Brenner from the brothel. Because men are often strange about that kind of thing, and the next day they don’t want to know you anymore.
But Palfinger didn’t have any problem with that, he came right over to Brenner and said, “Marko’s disappeared.”
And Horvath’s turned back up, Brenner thought. But, needless to say: best to keep it under wraps.
“Yesterday he invited me for dinner. Because Marko likes to cook,” Palfinger said.
“Did he make anything good?”
Now, Brenner was a little casual there. At the Borderline, he’d been stiff where everyone else had been casual, and now he’s casual all of a sudden. Brenner’s just a little peculiar sometimes.
“Didn’t make anything—because he wasn’t there,” Palfinger said. “He made a big show of saying that he’d make me blood sausage because they’d slaughtered a pig at Neuhold’s in Klöch, and Marko promised me he’d bring back the blood and make fresh blood sausage.”
“That was yesterday?”
“He came over around noon, quite hungover from the opening. And blood sausage is the best cure for a hangover. He took off right away for Neuhold’s. I worked hard all day and really worked up an appetite. Because blood sausage is only good when you’re hungry.”
“And when it’s hot,” Brenner said, because he thought, what applies to frankfurters must be double for blood sausage.
“But then, there I was, just standing there with my appetite, in front of Marko’s closed door. I called Neuhold’s, but Neuhold was also wondering why Marko hadn’t shown up. Because Marko’s car was still parked in Klöch, but no trace of him.”
“He’ll turn up again,” Brenner said, because it was getting to be a little too much for him right about now, how fast people were disappearing down here.
“Sure he will. Do come in, though. I was just cooking.”
“Just now?”
“Cooking’s what I do.”
“Cooking and painting?”
“Painting, less so. But cooking.”
“What’s cooking today?”
Brenner was amazed by how clean and tidy Palfinger’s kitchen was.
“Today I’m making Klachl soup. Do you care for it?”
“I’m not fussy.”
“You can’t be fussy when it comes to Klachl soup,” the painter laughed and took two big bones out of a pot.
“So, those bones are for the soup?”
“Pig bones. Not from a human. Human bones aren’t good for anything.”
“Not for soup.”
“Not for soup and not for anything else, either. I know someone who’s broken twenty-three bones.”
“Car accident?”
“Just little things. Fell out of bed, down a rib. Took a wrong step, the ankle. Slipped in the bathtub—”
“Bathtub’s dangerous.”
“Yes—fractured the base of his skull.”
“It just defeats the purpose. Freshly showered, blood running out of his ears.”
Now, you should have seen Palfinger. The blood was running out of him, too. Not out of his ears, though, out of his face, which was white as a wall.
An artist like this is a difficult person, Brenner thought. On the one hand, a real roughneck, then again, extremely sensitive. And only a moment later did Brenner understand why Palfinger had reacted so sensitively all of a sudden. Because he himself was the man with the broken bones. The man who had fractured the base of his skull. And to be frank, no surprise at all, given how overweight he was.
“Something like that can only occur to an artist who talks about himself in the third person.”
Palfinger didn’t say anything to that. He didn’t say anything at all for a spell, just busied himself purposefully with his Klachl soup until a little of his color returned.
“You probably don’t have enough calcium in your bones,” Brenner said.
“You think that’s why a person falls over in the bathtub?”
“A skull fracture, though?”
“Skull fracture’s not the worst.”
“So what’s the worst?”
Palfinger didn’t answer, but instead said, “I had the bloodied bathtub torn out, and I put it in an exhibit.”
“And what did you call your work?”
“ ‘Smashed Skull.’ ”
“So you exaggerated.”
“I always exaggerate everything. I rode a bike so fast that I did a somersault.”
“And did you put the bike in an exhibit?”
“Don’t bullshit about what you don’t understand,” the painter said, suddenly as touchy again as he’d been that whole night at the Borderline. Because he never would have put the bike in an exhibit, but try explaining that to Brenner—why the bathtub got turned into art but the bike got repaired.
But the painter wanted to explain something else altogether to Brenner now.
“I can’t move properly. I limp once with my left leg, and once with my right. Because I don’t have any rhythm. Every day I bump my head at least once. Do you understand?”
“What’s there to understand?”
“That’s why I like to cook. Because when I’m cooking, I’m at peace. I never burn myself cooking. I never drop anything. And not once have I hit my head while cooking.”
“Even though you’ve got everything hanging over the stove.”
“My body gets very warm when I cook. My thoughts get quiet. And sometimes I’m so at one with cooking that I wish I could cook myself.”
“Now you’re exaggerating again.”
It seemed to Brenner like Palfinger wasn’t listening anymore. And as a matter of fact, he didn’t say a word for the next fifteen minutes, just acted as if Brenner wasn’t even there. This was a contrast—a few days ago, totally berserk at the Borderline, and now so quiet and even-tempered while cooking that Brenner wouldn’t have been surprised if the halo that the spotlight at the Borderline cast on Palfinger should suddenly reappear. Even though “halo” is a bit of an exaggeration because I don’t think there’s much cooking being done up there—they’d have to borrow some fire from their rivals down below.
Brenner was starting to brood a little because he couldn’t imagine why Marko would disappear—and now, of all times, when he’d just found Horvath. He wasn’t getting anywhere, and it was raising a doubt in his mind again about whether this was the right profession for him.
So, he was glad when Palfinger finally ladled up the Klachl soup. Because a bowl of hot soup is always the best cure for a depressive mood, it should really be covered by insurance everywhere today. It warms the soul—it’s not for nothing that that’s how the expression goes. And after a few spoonfuls, Brenner was feeling like himself again, and right away, a concrete question like you’d expect from a detective nowadays.
“Does Marko live here in the farmhouse all year?”
“Half the time he’s in Graz. Apart from yesterday, the last time I saw him was a good week ago. He’d had quite an argument with Jacky—I could hear it from over here. Jacky probably wanted his money.”
“Marko was a customer of Jacky’s, too?”
“Everyone’s a customer of Jacky’s. But Marko’s shortcoming was that he never paid. And Jacky wasn’t the only one he ran up debts with. He’d buy my paintings but never pay me for them. Invite you for blood sausage but never give you the money.”
“It’s always the same with rich people. I just wonder whether it’s the millionaires who are all tight-fisted or whether it’s the misers who all become millionaires.”
“Don’t make me laugh. Marko, a millionaire. Horvath was his last
hope.”
And now, Brenner’s technique for sounding someone out: don’t follow up. And this time it worked. Because Palfinger filled both their bowls again, and then he said, “Do you even know how Marko made his millions?”
Even though the soup was making Brenner so hot that sweat was streaming down his forehead, he started in with his spoon again right away, i.e. I eat, you talk.
“Tires,” Palfinger said.
Brenner now: “Can you really earn that much off tires?”
“If they’re bulletproof, and if a war breaks out a few kilometers away, where bulletproof tires are needed for the vehicles, then, sure. That first year of the war, Marko was raking it in like a fool. Most of us artists profited from it. The prices of paintings skyrocketed. Because a big collector in a small country—he can drive prices up. And Marko bought everything that he could find.”
Brenner drew his head down a little and continued spooning up the soup, well behaved. And Palfinger kept talking, well behaved.
“But when the boycott on imports went into effect, Marko was left sitting on his pile of tires. And this enormous factory with two hundred employees. That’ll eat up your fortune pretty quickly. By the time Marko was getting rid of his collection, the price of paintings had hit rock bottom, too. He only held on to a few artists.”
“You and Horvath, for example.”
“Except, then, the rumor sprang up that Horvath was dead and prices skyrocketed again. That saved Marko.”
“So his only hope is that Horvath doesn’t turn back up.”
“At least not before the big exhibition next month. With the sculptures. Because this week they started with the prints. But Horvath’s really a sculptor.”
“How close friends are you and Horvath, really?”
“Horvath was a loner. He didn’t let anyone get close. And you couldn’t get him to eat with you, either. He was the best cook I’ve ever known.”
It seemed a little strange to Brenner that these artists were all so crazy about cooking. And he would have liked to ask Palfinger how that happens. But he knew that on no account could he say anything now, and so he let Palfinger keep talking.
“Horvath had a sense of taste that I would best compare to having perfect pitch. You could season something with twenty-five spices, and after the first bite, he’d have listed them all off. And he didn’t cook like a cook, but like an alchemist in his laboratory.”
“What a bunch of crap.”
Shit, that slipped out of Brenner. He’d just never been able to stand it when the better folks talked about cooking. This whole nouveau riche pretense, how they examine the wine with a thermometer first before they drink it. Maybe he was only sensitive to it because it always managed to remind him of the certified interpreter he’d once schlepped to Florence, and after two days, they were fighting so much that they had to travel home separately.
But it didn’t bother Palfinger one bit that this had slipped out of Brenner.
“A bunch of crap,” he nodded, “That’s how it must have seemed to Horvath, too. He suffered from compulsive eating. Eating, puking, eating, puking, eating, puking.”
“Usually only women do that.”
Brenner tried to say that as casually as possible. Maybe too casually. Because Palfinger didn’t say anything in response.
Maybe he hadn’t really heard it. Or didn’t want to hear it. Or honestly didn’t know that, for nearly a full year now, Horvath had been working at the Löschenkohl Grill as a waitress, and night after night, serving as his own lover.
CHAPTER 10
Real quick now. Brenner got a ride back with the noon mail truck, and somehow he managed not to puke it full up to the parcel rack. Not because of the Klachl soup but on account of this one little thing that Palfinger had told him.
Because, given how incensed he’d been about Horvath’s delicate sense of taste, Brenner only had a few seconds to press for the truth. And then, it dawned on him. And then, he had to ask himself why the waitress had only been eating sausages for months on end but avoided the fried specialities of the house like the plague. And then he had to go and connect that observation with this question: the human bones found at Löschenkohl’s—where exactly did the flesh end up?
And at the very thought that he himself might have ingested one of these fried bits of flesh, well, it stretched Brenner so far that the half-hour ride on the mail truck seemed about as long to him as his entire life up until now.
When he got back to Klöch, it was peak business time at Löschenkohl’s. Hence, down to the basement to see Jacky’s mother, who’d just finished mopping the hallway.
“Where’s Jacky?”
The bathroom attendant was always so cheerful that it got Brenner to thinking: you see, this is good for a depressive mood—if you have to be preoccupied with the negative. Philosophy, as it were: one person’s interested only in fashion and trifles, but secretly he’s depressed, but the bathroom attendant—who has to clean up after everybody else—pure sunshine.
No sunshine today, though, no—eyes puffy from crying and a trembling voice: “Gone.”
Brenner waited, but that was her entire answer.
“What happened, then?”
The bathroom attendant didn’t utter a word.
And then, I can’t explain it any other way—she must have felt ashamed all of a sudden. Because she turned around and disappeared into the women’s bathroom.
Needless to say, an awkward situation for Brenner. On the one hand: should I follow her? On the other: as a man nowadays, you don’t just go into the women’s bathroom without batting an eye. But when the bathroom attendant didn’t come back out after a few minutes, and because there was nobody around just then, for the second time in his life, Brenner went into the women’s bathroom.
Because there was this one time in Lofer when he’d had to collect a suicide from the women’s bathroom at Café Moser. He could still remember how the kitchen was right next to the bathrooms and the whole time he could hear the chef’s radio. And when he pulled the suicide’s ID from her wallet, at that very moment, Udo Jürgens was singing from the kitchen, “Siebzehn Jahr, blondes Haar.” And believe it or not, the dead girl, also seventeen with blond hair, just like the song.
Now that Brenner was in the women’s bathroom at Löschenkohl’s, he didn’t see the bathroom attendant. With fifteen stalls, though, needless to say, she could be anywhere.
“Frau Trummer!” he called, but no response. “Frau Trummer, say something please!”
Frau Trummer didn’t say anything, though. He didn’t hear a peep out of her. So Brenner looked to see whether any of the stalls were locked because—you know how it is with restaurant bathrooms, depending on whether a red or green status indicator is visible on the lock, you know right away: Vacant or In Use. A good invention actually, for once somebody came up with something. All the stalls were empty, though, Vacant indicators everywhere. So Brenner started opening the doors, one after the other.
When he was already on the second-to-last door, Frau Trummer—still nowhere. And then the last door, not only no Frau Trummer but not even a toilet inside. Only an empty stall. And no tiles on the wall either, just another door.
Brenner knocked, and he could hear Frau Trummer’s sobs from behind the door now. Brenner still thought it was a broom closet that she was hiding in, and so he opened the door slowly.
But then Brenner was in for a surprise. Because it wasn’t the door to the broom closet that he’d opened. It was the door to Frau Trummer’s apartment. She not only spent her entire day working in the bathroom. She lived in the bathroom, too. She was sitting there on her old rust-brown divan in her ten-square-meter hole in the wall that only got a little bit of light from her two basement windows.
Now, Brenner was momentarily a bit speechless when he saw old lady Trummer sitting there in her basement hole with her head in her hands.
But maybe a person shouldn’t be so thoughtless as to call another person’s apartment a
hole. And even if it was only ten square meters and practically dark even in the light of day and toilet smells and sounds inside—to Frau Trummer, it was still her apartment. And so a person doesn’t need to come down here and condescendingly call it a hole, just because chance has treated a few other people a little bit better than this. Because there are people who own entire houses, and from the rooftop terrace you can see all the way to Africa. And despite this they still have a hole—in their heads—and that’s what I think about that!
Frau Trummer had appointed her apartment as nicely as possible: a small credenza, beige, like those poor people in the fifties used to have—well, these days it’s back in style. A rust-brown wicker divan, something as comfortable as this you just don’t find anymore today. A kitchen table with a starched white tablecloth, and over the tablecloth, a clear plastic runner. Which is appreciated if you spill something, because then you can just wipe it up like it’s nothing, and the tablecloth beneath stays picobello.
“So what happened?” Brenner asked, but Frau Trummer just shook her head.
He simply sat down on the white kitchen chair now and waited.
And after a few minutes, Frau Trummer said, “My boy’s disappeared.”
“How long’s he been gone?”
“A week,” Frau Trummer said. “That’s not it, though. Three days ago it was my sixtieth birthday. He promised that he’d take me to Graz, to the Emperor of China. And he’d never forget something like that. Even as a little boy—always kept his promises. He said I have to try Chinese food just once because I’ve never had Chinese.” Frau Trummer pulled out a large handkerchief from beneath the divan cushion. “I don’t need any Chinese food. And I don’t need Graz. But, my son I need, because otherwise I have nothing.”
And then she blew her nose, but it was pointless, because she started crying again right away.
Brenner didn’t get much else out of Jacky’s mother. And when he saw on her old porcelain kitchen clock that it was almost two-thirty, he had to get back upstairs to catch the waitress. Because at this point there wouldn’t be any more customers, but the waitress wouldn’t be on break yet, either, so this was the best opportunity.
