THE MATTRESS HOUSE
THE MATTRESS HOUSE
A KOVACS & HORN INVESTIGATION
Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch
Paulus Hochgatterer
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
MacLehose Press
an imprint of Quercus
55 Baker Street
7th Floor, South Block
London W1U 8EW
First published in German as Das Matrazenhaus by Deuticke im Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna, 2010 Copyright © Deuticke im Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 2010
English translation copyright © 2012 by Jamie Bulloch
The translation of this book is supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture
The moral right of Paulus Hochgatterer to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
The translator asserts his moral right to be identified as the translator of the work.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 0 85738 660 1
ISBN (HB) 978 0 85705 028 1
ISBN (TPB) 978 0 85705 029 8
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Also by Paulus Hochgatterer in English translation
The Sweetness of Life (2008)
Revenge, revenge! Timotheus cries,
See the Furies arise!
See the snakes that they rear,
How they hiss in their hair,
And the sparkles that flash from their eyes!
“Alexander’s Feast”, JOHN DRYDEN
HOW IT MUST HAVE BEEN
It is windy. As if propelled by rubber bands, the pelicans shoot upwards, squawk, plummet back down with bent wings, and slice through the surface of the water. When, a little later, they resurface somewhere else, they stretch out their bills and shake their throat pouches, emptying the entire contents into their gullets. Then they ready themselves to take off again. Once in the air the flock, maybe two hundred birds in all, breaks out in every direction as if it were disbanding for good, only to re-form moments later into a dark cloud. This process repeats itself hundreds of times. When the offshore winds blow, the birds often linger above the section of beach between the loading dock in the harbour and the long, grey building of the railway works.
The woman does not like these animals. They are loud, and they stink when you get close to them. With a quick jerk of her shoulder she adjusts the yellow cloth bag on her back, without stopping reaches down to pick up the girl who has been walking beside her the whole way, and sits the child on her left hip. The little girl is still for a moment, but then starts chuckling and waving her arms about. She points to a pair of red-backed shrikes hopping through a thistle bush, a wooden shed painted with faces, and an old man sitting asleep in a plastic chair. Her voice slightly raised, the woman utters a few sentences over and over again with a particular urgency, as if she were telling short, serious stories. The girl babbles. Sometimes she appears to be paying attention, sometimes not. Before beginning the steep climb up to the road the woman tightens her grip on the child’s body, nods to the sky and says something which might be, “Now you’ve got to be quiet.” The girl crosses her arms and leans her head against the woman’s chest.
The wind blows ochre swirls of dust across the road. Some distance away cars are veering right to overtake a herd of goats. A lorry laden with crates of vegetables gives a loud honk of its horn. This does not bother the goats in the slightest. The man herding the animals is wearing an eyepatch. Two long bamboo canes are balanced on his shoulder.
The girl raises her hand to grab the hem of the woman’s blouse and starts twisting it between her fingers. The woman shakes her body in irritation. When the girl shows no sign of stopping, she puts her on the ground. For a while the two of them wander behind the herd of goats, and then turn into a wide street lined with hoardings. The girl sticks out her arm to point at a mobile phone advertisement; the woman says something and laughs. Embarrassed, the girl bends over, picks up an orange drinks carton and then throws it away again. The woman watches it skittle along the road. Out of the corner of her eye she can see a huge bank of cloud rolling over the hills beyond the city. She takes the child’s hand and quickens her pace.
They pass the entrance to the corrugated-iron sheds of a haulage company, and then just beyond a row of newly painted houses they come to the rectangular courtyard of a building decked out with flags. A bunch of people are sitting on the lower part of a flight of steps that sweeps up to the entrance. A man walks to and fro in front of them, waving his arms theatrically. Perpendicular to the steps, he has placed three baskets in a row: one longish and box shaped, and two round ones. Squealing with delight, the girl lets go of the woman’s hand and makes to run over to the people. The woman grabs the child’s shoulder and restrains her. The girl whines in protest, struggling to free herself from the woman’s grasp. She calms down only when the woman lifts her up and walks over to the gathering. The man, short and thin, with an abnormally large head, looks at the girl and raises a finger. The girl tries to hide her head behind the woman’s neck; the woman pacifies the child with soothing words and then points to the man and his three baskets. The man lifts the lid of one of the round baskets, reaches his arm in, and pulls out a snake, maybe thirty centimetres long. With his thumb and forefinger he holds the creature just behind its small, triangular head, and presents it to the crowd. The snake is pale green, with two rows of bright-yellow markings on either side. The man climbs a few steps, throws back his head, and slowly begins to push the snake up his right nostril. The crowd shriek; some of them turn their heads away. When all that remains to be seen of the snake is the tip of its tail, the man opens his mouth, inserts his left forefinger, pushing it past his blackish-brown teeth, and pulls out the head in one swift movement. He takes a bow as the crowd howls its approval.
The girl grabs the woman’s blouse again. Slowly, she pushes the first three fingers of her other hand further and further into her mouth. The woman gazes into the distance, beyond the roofs of the city, as if assessing the wind. She does not look at the child until she begins to choke violently. Without a word she pulls the girl’s hand out of her mouth. There is still time. It is going to rain, but they have almost reached their destination.
The man with the large head beckons the woman and girl over. The girl closes her eyes when the man invites her to look inside the basket. The woman smiles and says something like, “Don’t be afraid.” The man bends down and whispers something in the girl’s ear. Then he feels inside his jacket pocket and presses a round object into her hand. The girl puts it straight into her mouth. The woman shakes her head, but does nothing more. Perhaps she thinks it is a sweet.
They walk, quicker than before, first along a line of plane trees, then on a much-worn path up a shallow incline. Now and again the woman looks around.
The clouds tower high above the city. To the east the chimneys of the power station rise like gigantic columns. The pelicans have vanished. The girl runs between the tamarisk bushes growing beside the path, making soft, cheerful noises. When a vermilion-painted house looms before them, the girl moves to the woman’s side and takes her hand.
The servant who opens the door leads them through a sparsely furnished hall into a glass annexe with wide doors that give onto the garden. Three people stand there talking in a foreign language: two men in suits and a woman with a pink handbag. When they notice the woman and the girl they fall silent. One of the men – he is short and fat – approaches them and rests his hand on the child’s head. The girl cowers. The other man pulls an envelope from the inner pocket of his jacket and gives it to the woman. She lets go of the girl, walks over to a round, mosaic table with a jug and some glasses, and opens the envelope. She takes out the money, lays it in front of her, and counts it into a new pile, note by note. She then puts the money back, and clutches the envelope. She slides the yellow cloth bag from her shoulder, waits for a moment with both arms splayed, and then leaves the room smartly without a backward glance.
The girl just stares. The cloth bag is on the floor, two or three metres away. Nobody says a word.
Outside, the woman walks through the wind. She may be laughing. She may be also screaming. The first drops hit the dust hard.
ONE
She stands in the doorway, looking into the classroom, and knows that things are going to get difficult again. It’s like this every few weeks.
She puts down her bag carefully. It’s not my fault, she thinks, the bell rang two minutes ago, the children are riotous, and in the middle of it all there’s a sick person sitting on the desk talking about heaven. It’s really not my fault.
She tries to stay calm, and lets her eyes scan the wall to the left: the whiteboard; the cupboard with the craft materials; the trees in blossom, twenty-one of them, one for each child, some drawn, some cut from magazines; the large map of Austria with the red hare that Lena drew in the bottom right-hand corner; Phillip’s footprints on the wall, the left one 120 centimetres from the floor; the roll-down chart of school handwriting – the headmistress has insisted on it being in the classroom; the windows through which she can see the roofs of the town and, through the right-hand one, just in the corner, a fragment of the lake.
Bauer looks at her, laughs, waves and has no intention of stopping. If nothing else, he seems to be in good form. But then, totally out of the blue, he starts singing at the top of his voice. She tries to identify the song. She can make out On the water, but nothing else. Julia and Sophie are singing along with him, just as loudly.
She claps her hands. “That’s enough, my lovelies,” she shouts. “Now it’s my turn!” “Hello Stella!” Bauer says. “Have you come to join in my lesson?” “I’m Protestant,” she replies, although this is not true. “You’re lying,” says Bauer. “May I?” she asks. “Please?”
“Only if you tell me what God looks like.”
“An old man with a white beard.”
“Correct. And what does he carry around with him?”
“A book and a lightning bolt.”
“Wrong! A guitar, of course!”
She pictures an angry old man smashing a guitar against a whiteboard and, as she stands there, surprised at herself, Manuel tugs on her sleeve. He shows her a drawing. “We did pictures of God,” he says proudly. Given how poor the boy’s graphomotor skills are, it is not a bad attempt, particularly the guitar – a spiral with parallel lines going sideways, one to six. His arithmetic is excellent.
Bauer leaps from the desk, dances the two-step towards her, and plants a kiss on her cheek. The children laugh. “My favourite teacher!” he says. “O.K., O.K.,” she says. “Now, will you put your things away, please?”
“Do you think God has a walking stick?” He circles her and asks whether God wears vests or reading glasses, whether he’s a vegetarian, smokes a pipe, and whether he’s more of a car or motorbike man. “Motorbike,” she says, “and he’s got trouble with his lumbar column.” He pauses, and before he can butt in she says that when God had his last medical check-up they discovered that his prostate was not working properly. What is more, his psychiatrist was not at all pleased as he was failing to take his medicine regularly.
“You are one mean feminist of a schoolteacher,” Bauer says, and she worries that Manuel, who is standing open-mouthed beside her, will want to know what feminists and prostate results are.
While Bauer looks for his shoes, she directs the children back to their seats. One of them is missing. “What’s happened to Felix?” she asks. Bauer looks around, puzzled. “He went home,” Julia says.
“Wasn’t he feeling well?”
“Yes, he looked perfectly fine.”
She tries to catch Bauer’s eye. “Would you mind giving me an explanation? Felix did what? Went home?”
“What’s wrong?” Bauer says. “He only lives two streets away.”
My class, she thinks, this is my class, and is somewhat surprised both by her proprietary attitude, and by the fact that her infinite patience for her fellow human beings – the bedrock of her personality, which without doubt made her ideally suited to such a career – has crumbled within seconds.
“Say that again please! You let him go home? Alone?”
“He does it quite often. He always comes back after a quarter of an hour. I’ve signed him out.”
“Signed him out?” Now she is yelling. All her suspicions about this professional Catholic group are confirmed – dishonest, lazy and, when push comes to shove, irresponsible to the very core. “A six-year-old child is signed out of an R.E. lesson and our pastor thinks nothing of sending him out onto the street alone. Just like that!” Bauer purses his lips, keeps his head down and takes his jacket off the hook. The children avoid her gaze, too. I’m losing it, she thinks, that hardly ever happens. Chubby red-headed Leonard comes up to her. “I’ll go over and see if he’s fallen asleep,” he says. She takes his hand and does not reply. “How long has he been gone?” she asks. Bauer looks at his watch. “Forty minutes,” he says.
“And you weren’t even aware of it?”
“No,” he says. “When I’m in a certain frame of mind, there’s quite a lot I’m not aware of. You know that.”
Yes I do, she thinks. She goes to the back of the classroom to Felix’s desk on the left-hand side. When she stoops to take a look inside his tray, she realises that Leonard is still holding her hand. “He’s left everything here,” she says. “He took his water bottle,” Leonard says. “He’s got a new silver water bottle with a black dragon on it.” From the tray she takes a large exercise book with a red protective cover. English. A hat. A cat. A bat. Drawing a bat is difficult, she told the children, more difficult than a cat. With the tip of her forefinger she follows the words, the drawings, too. What a terrible hat, she thinks – like a molehill. And yet it comforts her to look through the exercise book. “He can’t draw,” Leonard says. “Kids in kindergarten could do better than that.”
Bauer is standing in front of the whiteboard, gawky, pale, his legs twitching. L.D.R., she thinks, Long Distance Runner, that’s what some of them call him. His colleagues say he spends every spare minute running – around the lake, along the river, up into the mountains, sometimes for several hours at a stretch. And listening to music while he runs. Now he is humming. “You’ve got a nerve,” she says. He shakes his head slowly. “I know,” she says, “I’m sorry.” She puts the book back. The tray to the right is empty. It belonged to a girl who left only a few weeks after school started. That happens in the first year. Susi – a quiet, thin girl with wild black hair and an old-fashioned name. Felix liked her. “What are we going to do now?” Bauer asks. There is a sentence on the board behind him: The hare has long ears. She wrote it well over an hour ago. “You’re going to stay right here and look after the class. I’ll go and fetch Felix. Leonard can come with me.”
They walk along the corridor, cross the hall where the children spend break-time, and climb the steps to the main entrance. She has to be careful not to trip. I’m scared, she thinks. She can see through the arched fanlight that the sun is shining outside. She knows that as they go out onto the street she will be dazzled momentarily, and she can already smell the subtle scent of lilac. They might bump into Friederike, who always starts two hours later on a Tuesday, and maybe also catch a glimpse of the tame guinea fowl that belongs to the junk dealer whose office is opposite.
As she reaches for the door handle it is pulled away from her. A small, dark figure stands in the white rectangle of the doorway. Leonard is the first to speak. “What took you so long?”
TWO
The black Porsche Cayenne, which has been tailgating him for a kilometre and a half, flashes its lights for the third time, swings out to the left, screeches past and, without dropping its speed, shoots straight by the bright green newspaper stand they are always waiting behind. Twenty seconds later he sees the highly satisfied face of a policeman peeping above a radar gun, and he knows it’s going to cost the other man around three hundred euros, maybe even more. Whatever happens, there’ll have to be some grovelling at the police commissariat: I really can’t do my job without a driving licence, Herr Inspektor, I’m sure you understand.
Raffael Horn guided his Volvo uphill, first through the pine forest, then alongside the wide open space which was half rape field, half meadow this spring. He was driving extra slow as the trailer was swinging alarmingly on the tight bends and lifting off the road surface at the slightest bump. Meanwhile, he replayed the scene a few times in his mind as if it were a short film: Lissoni puts his foot down, overtakes, and drives into the radar trap. There was no doubt about it, schadenfreude was one of the few things that made life tolerable. But you’d have to be a bit of a psychopath or have been through a good course of analysis to admit to it without feeling bad.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 1
