I help her into her quilted jacket with the penguins on it and tie her shoelaces. I know all that stuff about fresh air is what old people go on about, but sometimes you really do need it. We do our usual walk: towards the lake until the turn-off to the gorge, up to the viewpoint above the waterfall, back, then past the owl rock and on to the marina. There’s frost on the jetty. But we go to the end anyway. I look back at our footprints and tell her the story of a little pelican kept in captivity by humans, who one day starts collecting objects in his mouth: a knife, a pair of pliers, a few lighters, a pack of cigarettes, a file and a tiny camera. By using these things he eventually manages to escape. “How do you catch pelicans?” Switi asks. She draws a wavy line in the frost with the tip of her foot. “In the normal way,” I say, because I can’t think of a better answer.
The marina is almost empty. People have put their boats in large sheds to keep them dry, in Waiern, for instance, like us. They get washed and scrubbed there, and the joins are resealed. Out on the lake there’s a lone electric boat heading slowly for Sankt Christoph, probably someone from the wildlife place observing families of ducks or water fleas. Switi’s staring at her fingers. “Should we have brought gloves for you?” I ask. She shakes her head and says nothing.
I think they’re doing all the things to her that they did to me. At some point it gets less regular, and then it’s someone else’s turn. That’s what happened to me. The visions don’t begin until later. They never stop.
I stand on tiptoes and look through the window. Neither of the cars is there. That means she’s on one of her trips and he’s at the office or with a client. Nobody knows where her trips take her. When she says she’s off, he gets nervous and tries to take the car keys away from her. She says he should have a good think about it, and he lets her go. The way out through the garage is escape route number four. It’s really easy and it works because the garage door can be opened by a button from the inside. From the outside either you need the remote control or you know the code. Two letters, three numbers.
Tyre prints from the X6 are visible on the garage floor, wide and clayey. The man I call Bill sometimes drives into the countryside with his clients, to the meadow between Waiern and Moosheim, for example, where they used to cut peat. They shoot deer there, or otters if they’ve been released. There’s no trace of the mad woman’s Mini.
Switi sits in her red pedal car and snakes around the garage, shrieking loudly the whole time. When she starts deliberately grazing the walls on the turns I stop her and lift her from the car. “You’re too big for that,” I say. “You’ve got to learn to ride a bike.” She shakes her head.
We go into the house and look in all the rooms on the ground floor. I always do that when they’re not there. I turn the page of the calendar in the hall. A Dalmatian with two children. In the kitchen dirty plates are piled next to the sink. I put them into the dishwasher even though I know Marika’s coming tomorrow. I really hate seeing dishes lying around.
I fetch the key I need from the old sugar jar behind the water glasses. A stupid hiding place; any old fool could find it there. “Come on,” I tell Switi, “let’s go and practise.” She shakes her head again. “You have to,” I say, taking her hand.
We go up the stairs, turn left and go into their bedroom. I hold my breath and look over to the window and up to the ceiling. We go to the back of the dressing room, to the little door between the cupboards that you can only see if you know it’s there. I take the picture of the hedgehog and the owl off the wall. Behind it is the keyhole.
There are three rooms: the white one, the stripy one and the flower room. I named them after the mattresses lying in them. To be precise, there are two white mattresses and one with bright-blue dots in the white room; in the stripy room there’s a huge double mattress with wide blue and yellow narrow stripes; and in the flower room are four mattresses piled on top of each other, all covered with pastel-coloured blossom. The two tripods with the cameras are always in a different place. This time they’re in the white room.
“Which one do you want today?” I ask her. She stays silent. I say, “Stripy.”
She lies on her tummy and I tell her about the film I discovered in the red and yellow sleeve, about all the things that can happen to you, and about the five-point palm stroke that stops your heart. Now and then I press her face into the stripy mattress, telling her she’s got to keep her eyes open. Every time I grab her neck she whines like a dog.
NINE
The classroom smells of children, of Julia’s curly hair, Stefan’s boiled-wool cardigan, Lara’s dog, and Manuel’s sweaty feet. The aroma of the lilac bunch, which she put on her desk yesterday, is drowned out by the competition. The board has not been properly wiped clean, which is always the case when Sükrü is class monitor. On the right-hand section are the words: THE SUN MAKES THE MOON SHINE. Because Easter is linked to the full moon she has been trying to teach the children a little astronomy. What is a fixed star, what is a planet, why does the moon shine? Because it’s got a really strong electrical connection, was Leonard’s guess, and Katrin said: When the moon shines criminals don’t dare go into the streets.
She can feel her throat tighten. It is partly the sentence on the board, but also the image of a huge black man in front of her, beating somebody up. She doesn’t want it, she doesn’t want it at all, she is certain of this.
She strolls the length of the wall to the back of the classroom. Somebody has put stickers of Diddl, the cartoon mouse, and a hen with three chicks on the door of the craft cupboard. Julia and Sophie are sitting right next to it. Both of them love stickers. Knowing things like that gives her security. She goes to the window and looks out into the courtyard. Fine threads of rain are falling, even though the sky is mainly blue and the sun is shining on the roof of the library block. She rummages in her handbag, pulls out a file, and begins tidying her fingernails. She always does this when she is waiting for somebody, and sometimes when she is in the car, too. Things like that get on some people’s nerves.
Elke Bayer appears first and walks to her left across the white gravel surface towards the car park. She is wearing anthracite-coloured pumps, a light-grey suit and a dark-red velvet bow in her blonde hair. She is almost running. It is remarkable that she is here at all. She never usually comes to extraordinary meetings. Maybe it is because she is the form teacher of the other first-year class and worried that the business might affect her soon, too. To begin with she had deliberately ignored the headmaster’s instruction to discuss it with the children. Then she discovered that Michael Richter from her class had been going around for a couple of days already, bragging that he would stick his father’s taser into the black owl’s stomach until it had an electric fit. This put paid to her argument of “What I don’t know can’t hurt me”. Everybody had a good laugh about the electric fit, although they were only too aware of Michael’s father and his gun licence, collection of steel truncheons and re-enactments of World War Two battles.
Trude Lassnig and Veronika Derkic leave together, one a special-needs teacher, the other the form teacher of 4B. They both live in Sankt Christoph and do a car share. Then come Reinhard Gelich, 2A’s form teacher, and Dienbacher, the headmaster. From the outset Gelich has behaved as if none of this has anything to do with him: No-one in my class has ever been battered. He is living proof that arseholes become primary school teachers too. The key thing about him is that he drives a Corvette. Sometimes he takes his favourite pupils for a quick spin, the others are allowed to watch.
When Bauer trots in from the other direction in his grey cotton uniform, she throws the nail file back into her bag. She used to keep a Stanley knife with a yellow handle in her manicure set. It has been a while since she last needed it.
Bauer is waiting for her in the cloakroom. He jabs her nose with his index finger. “Where were you?” he asks. “In the classroom,” she says, opening her locker.
“You mean you spoke to the children?” he says, laughing.
/> “Sort of,” she says.
He does laps of the room while she gets changed, listening as ever to music on his iPod. After a while she stops him, even though she’s wearing nothing but her bra and has one leg in her tracksuit bottoms, and pulls his earphones out. “That’s driving me potty,” she says. “Great,” he says.
“What did you think of the meeting?”
“Unnecessary,” he says, jogging on the spot and murmuring. When you are near / It’s just as plain as it can be / I’m wild about you, gal / You ought to be a fool about me. By now she knows the lyrics by heart. The zip on her sweater has stuck. He notices this, goes up to her, carefully jiggles it about to free it, and gives her a kiss on the lips. “Why are you laughing,” he says.
“I just thought of something.”
“What?”
“A sentence.”
“What sentence?”
“I wrote it on the board today: The sun makes the moon shine.”
*
They run his standard route. Diagonally across the first courtyard, through the ground floor of the senior school block, across the courtyard with the fountain, through the utility corridor into the rear garden, through the gate in the railings by the tall plane trees, along the northern wall of the abbey grounds, right into Abt-Reginald-Straße, past the tax advisor’s office, the kindergarten and the tiny esoteric shop with the brightly painted facade, before taking a short cut though the municipal lorry park to reach the promenade by the riverbank.
The rain stopped a while back. Beneath the willows and alders it has stayed dry. He increases his pace on the springy ground. Like a Masai running after his cattle, she thinks, lean and lanky, all he’s missing is the long stick. She knows that he will stop and wait for her after a few hundred metres, she keeps her pace and tries to take in everything around her, the smell of freshly cut grass and elder-flower blossom, the bright green flickering in the trees, and the birds who are even loud in the afternoons at this time of year. She thinks of Michaela Klum and the folder printed with different types of tits that she had in front of her during the meeting: great tit, crested tit, coal tit. She said nothing throughout, and afterwards, when it was all over: It’s absolutely ridiculous. I gave my daughter a slap only yesterday. She’d called me a bloody cow.
She watches him disappear around the next bend. He’ll wait under one of the prominent trees, under the lime above the first cataract or under the oak where the path branches off to Hohenwart cavern. On the opposite bank of the river, someone is using a high-pressure hose on the landing jetty of the rafting centre. Business usually gets going in the last weekend of April, if the weather is settled.
Nobody on the staff can establish a connection between Felix and Britta. Gelich sits there, pulling a soppy face, and says he is convinced that the over-spiced Hungarian beat up his son himself. Britta’s mother wouldn’t do a thing like that, Trude Lassnig says, her husband left her and she’s got nobody except her daughters. That’s exactly why, Gelich says. Do you hit your children? Lassnig asks, and he taps his forehead at her.
The surging and fading of the high-pressure hose sounds like a strange song. The rushing of the river joins in. Spirit on the water / Darkness on the face of the deep. There’s something biblical about it, she thinks, I’ll have to ask him. She listens as she quickens her pace. She can no longer hear his footfall. A great spotted woodpecker flies over her head with a loud clamour. So as not to have to turn around she pictures the native species of woodpeckers: black woodpecker, green woodpecker, great spotted woodpecker, white-backed woodpecker, wryneck. Who had ever seen a wryneck? She thinks of Dienbacher, how he had slammed the table with the palm of his hand and insisted, “Dear colleagues, this is a serious situation, a really serious situation,” and how she had thought that he had probably never experienced a really serious situation in his life.
If you do not stop before the first cataract, you have to go through it. Some years ago the river rescue service winched up a kayaker wedged between two boulders and laid him out on the sandbank below the rapids. They said his face had been completely obliterated, as if someone had taken him by the legs and dashed him against the rocks hundreds of times, as they do to octopuses in Greece. Apparently the man was a tourist from the Czech Republic.
She meets a walker, an elderly man in a straw hat with a dog dancing at his heels. As she runs towards him the man keeps his eyes fixed on her breasts. He gives her a smile as they are about to pass each other. She imagines herself stopping, walking right up to him and asking, “Do you think it’s a good thing that women have breasts?”
She makes herself run on her heels. You move quicker that way, and it protects your joints; at least that is what people who do a lot of running claim. She pushes her chin out and tries to shake off the vague feeling lingering at the back of her mind. In five days it is Palm Sunday. Most of the children will come to the procession, each with a bunch of pussy willow, box and thuja. All of them will be smiling and some will be wearing new clothes. That is what it is like in a Catholic primary school.
He has disappeared from view. Past the first rapids you have a view of a long right-hand bend, it must be at least three hundred metres long. Mister L.D.R., she thinks, my inconsiderate, asocial Mister L.D.R. She thinks of the period after last Christmas when he was not once able to put his iPod away, not even in bed, when he occasionally talked in one of his voices about how the only way was to be fired into the cosmos in a space capsule and fly solo to Jupiter, Uranus and beyond. Yet he gave her a sense of security that she had hardly ever felt before.
Each breath burns inside her chest. She cannot go any faster. He is chasing after her. He will catch her up. He always catches up with her. She will stumble and fall. He will loom over her like a giant and laugh, a little bit muddy and a little bit embarrassed. Then he will bend over and help her up by her arm.
Suddenly something brushes her elbow. She spins round and stumbles. In two swift paces from behind the elder bush he catches her. Now she is screaming out loud. He beams at her. She thrashes at him wildly.
TEN
Sometimes he suspects that she is just pretending to be freezing cold. It’s the sort of thing people do to make others feel guilty. She was sitting in one of her oversize roll-neck sweaters, wrapped in a blanket, and shivering. Her face registered a look of laboured disinterest. Sometimes he would go and fetch some gloves, and if he said he might find it easier to believe her if she left out the hysterics, she would reply that, professionally, she couldn’t afford to have frostbitten fingers. He would laugh at this and she would get livid.
“Yes, yes, Mister Eskimo,” she said, spooning out her egg. “It’s at least sixteen degrees,” he said. “Too hot for an Eskimo.” Fourteen degrees was the threshold. When it was warmer than fourteen degrees he took his breakfast outside, if his schedule allowed it. On those Wednesdays when the child protection group met in the afternoons, he always gave himself extra time in the mornings and would leave home an hour later. He would set the table on the terrace behind the house, make soft-boiled eggs or scrambled eggs with tomatoes, and look forward to her company. Usually she came of her own accord, with rosy cheeks and glowing ears, and carrying a sheet of music. Occasionally he would tiptoe into the former cowshed and stable, now a music room, to listen to her before they had breakfast. But today he had not. “What were you playing?” he asked. “Opus five, number one,” she said. “It’s warming.” “Of course. Opus five, number one.” He hated it when she tested him. “Beethoven, my dear. Mister Psychiatrist needs to concentrate more on his music,” she said. He took the egg in his left hand, rolled it in his palm, and sliced through it with his knife. He carefully removed the top. A tiny brown and white feather stuck to the shell. I fail to concentrate on most things, he thought, on music, books, my house, my wife. Maybe people became psychiatrists to cling onto the illusion that they were concentrating on everything, and in reality they were concentrating on nothing. He sprinkled some chives on his egg and mix
ed them into the yolk with his spoon. “Why don’t you say something?” Irene asked. “Right at this moment I’m concentrating on the whole world,” he said. She gave a short laugh. She supposed he meant the question of the perfect egg. No, he meant the question of what anaesthetisation and self-harm had in common, he meant young men who tried unsuccessfully to hang themselves from the ceiling, and mothers who couldn’t give a damn about it, more important was that they had the opportunity to be in the spotlight. She looked directly at him. “What have you got against me at the moment?” she asked. “Nothing,” Horn said, he was merely thinking too much about tenors.
They had not bargained on Tobias. All of a sudden he was standing right beside them, supporting himself on the tabletop with one hand, pointing the other at his father, and saying, “You’ve got to do something.” Horn noticed that his hair had not been brushed, he was not wearing any socks and he looked pale. “Are you ill?” he asked.
“No. But you’re a head doctor, aren’t you?”
“If you’re not ill, by my reckoning you ought to be in school in half an hour.” Horn felt himself getting angry.
“Well, aren’t you?”
“Aren’t I what?”
“A head doctor? A nerve doctor?”
“Yes. And?”
“Mimi’s falling over.”
“What do you mean Mimi’s falling over?”
Tobias explained that the cat had followed him into the bathroom, and as usual jumped straight on the sink to steal the top of the toothpaste tube. After patting it around for a while, she had taken it into her mouth and was about to leap onto the rim of the bathtub. At that instant she froze, tipped over like a block of wood, and lay there still. His first thought was that she was dead, but then he noticed her whiskers twitching and he poked her side. She tried to bite him, and all of this had happened in slow motion. “So where is she now?” Horn asked. “On the greengage tree,” Tobias replied.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 10
