David's Revenge

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  I put the street map in my pocket, ran downstairs, and was already on my way to the front door when I stopped. I thought hard, hearing my own heart beating. Then I turned back. I went into my study, took the telephone book off the shelf, searched for Herr Schumann’s number with flying fingers, standing up, and dialled it. The line was engaged.

  I tore my coat off the hook, got my car out of the garage, and drove to Herr Schumann’s summer house.

  Chapter 60

  It’s midnight. Silence has fallen in my house. Ralf is in bed, Julia too has gone into the bedroom after taking a sleeping pill. Whether either of them is asleep I don’t know.

  There was still light at the windows of the industrial consultancy offices when I rang the bell at Herr Schumann’s garden gate. I looked at my watch, glanced up into the bare, black branches of the elms as I waited. I didn’t wait very long, but rang a second time, keeping my finger on the bell push. The intercom crackled. “Yes?”

  “This is Christian Kestner. I’m looking for my son Ralf.”

  “Ralf ? Sorry, Ralf’s not here.”

  I said, “Then I’d like to speak to you. Would you open the door, please?”

  “Speak to me? Do you know how late it is?”

  “Yes, I do, it’s twenty-one minutes past nine. Please open the door.”

  There was a short pause. Then the intercom was switched off and the garden gate buzzed open. In the dim light I walked along the crunching gravel to Herr Schumann’s summer house. Narrow strips of light fell through the Venetian blinds at the French windows.

  Herr Schumann came a little way to meet me, led me down the paved path to the back of the house, and invited me in with a silent gesture. Then he went ahead of me. I followed him into the spacious living room where several standard lamps and table lamps were switched on. A pretty black-haired girl in jeans and pullover was sitting on a broad sofa, leaning back in a relaxed pose in the corner. Herr Schumann said, “This is Frau Kiwitt. This is Herr Kestner, a senior teacher.” He pointed to an armchair and sat down on the sofa next to Frau Kiwitt.

  Herr Schumann was wearing a dark-brown casual shirt, a yellow cashmere pullover, dark-brown jeans—designer jeans, I suspect—socks with a brown-and-yellow pattern and well-polished brown slip-on shoes. I glanced around. The fag of the Third Reich hung on the back wall of the room between two bookshelves. On one of the shelves stood a black portrait bust of Adolf Hitler, perhaps a replica of the heroic statues made in Arno Breker’s studio in the Nazi era.

  I sat down, looked at Herr Schumann and asked, “Where’s my son?”

  Herr Schumann raised his eyebrows, smiled, straightened his gold-rimmed glasses. “Your son? How should I know?”

  “I’m asking you again where my son is. And I mean that seriously.”

  Herr Schumann cast a glance at Frau Kiwitt and shook his head, smiling. “Listen, Herr Kestner, you seem to have the wrong idea of my connections with your son.” He stroked his sleek blond head. “Your son is a nice boy, but I’m not a second father to him. We see each other now and then, but he doesn’t tell me what he gets up to when we aren’t together.”

  Frau Kiwitt picked up her wine glass, sipped from it, and looked at me over the rim. Herr Schumann raised his hand. Frau Kiwitt handed him his own glass, he raised it to her with a smile and drank.

  I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to nail this gangster down. I got to my feet. “If you have been lying to me you’ll be very sorry for it, I assure you. You’ve turned my son’s head. And if you happen to have dragged him into some kind of venture with consequences that he can’t judge, then I promise you will pay for it.”

  Herr Schumann asked, “Forgive me, but are you feeling all right?”

  I turned away and left. When I was in the car I wondered again whether to go to Dr Unger’s office and search the dismal street. But I was afraid that it was too late for that, quite apart from the risk I’d be running—for my son, for me, for my family—if I showed my face there. I drove home.

  I found a note from Julia on my desk, obviously scribbled in great haste. I could barely decipher it. It said:

  David’s been mugged. He’s in the Marienhospital. Am going there now, Julia.

  I felt for the chair at my desk, lowered myself into it and put the note down. After a while I looked at the time. Five to ten. I got to my feet, slowly climbed the stairs to the top floor and opened the door of Ralf’s room. I looked in. In the dim light from the street lamps, I saw that his desk drawer was closed. I thought I remembered leaving it open.

  I switched on the light and went into the room. Ralf was lying in bed facing the wall, curled up under the quilt. He raised his head and looked at me, frowning, his eyes narrowed. “What’s the matter?”

  “Where have you been?” I asked.

  “To the cinema. What’s up?”

  “Do you really not know?”

  “No! I’d only just dropped off to sleep.”

  I said, “Ninoshvili’s been mugged. He’s in hospital.”

  “Oh, shit!” He scratched his cheek. “Who did it?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  “How would I know? I told you, I’ve been to the cinema.” He let his head drop back.

  “Who did you go with?”

  “I went on my own.” He scratched again. “I went to the seven o’clock screening, and I was back at nine fifteen. Julia came in after me, but I’d gone to bed by then.”

  I stared at him. “Then no one can prove that you were at the cinema?”

  “No. What’s this interrogation all about?”

  I said, “Ralf, this chapter isn’t closed yet!”

  I switched off the light and closed the door, went to my desk and wrote a note.

  Dear Julia, in case we miss each other, I’ve gone to the Marienhospital. Love and kisses. Christian.

  I tacked the note to the front door.

  I met Julia on the front steps of the hospital. Her eyes were red with crying. She let me hug her, but she didn’t return the hug.

  Ninoshvili is in intensive care. He’s unconscious. The doctor on duty told Julia everything possible will be done for him, but he’s in a critical condition.

  The police found our phone number in Ninoshvili’s wallet. The police officer who called when Julia had just got home said they had found no trace of his attacker or attackers.

  Chapter 61

  The sun was shining too warmly for the last day but one of October when I set off for the hospital today, Saturday morning. Julia had been going to drive there herself, but when she had phoned the intensive care ward and found out that there was no great change in Ninoshvili’s condition, she asked me to do the hospital visiting. Meanwhile, she said, she’d try to reach Matassi in Tbilisi.

  The city was sparkling as if it had polished itself up for the weekend and was getting ready to enjoy these hours of recreation. The hospital looked polished up too, an old brick building full of nooks and crannies, corridors with high cross-vaulting, lancet windows and stone fags on the floors. The corridors were empty. There was a smell of citrus fruit—probably from something in the cleaning fluid—coffee and only a hint of carbolic. As I passed an open door I saw a nun sitting at a desk; she raised a coffee cup and sipped from it.

  Such peace as this, the silence of a solemn holiday, had both shocked and soothed me once before, when I was visiting my dying father on a hot Sunday morning in July. I hadn’t been able to understand that most of the medical staff weren’t around, only the two or three people on duty, and that even they preserved an attitude of relaxed calm while the patient breathed stertorously, as if death itself knew and respected the fact that it was a Sunday. But at the same time I had felt comforted. Death, coming into the midst of such peace, would walk quietly, without pain and terror.

  After I had put on a green coat, a face mask and white galoshes, they let me take a look at Ninoshvili. He was in a large ward where the beds were separated from each other by screens, lying on his
back with his chest bare and his swollen, discoloured eyes closed as if he were in a deep sleep. He was flanked by apparatus, connected up to it by tubes and cables. His head and nose were bandaged, his right leg splinted. He was breathing lightly but regularly. I saw his chest rising and falling.

  I insisted on speaking to the doctor, as Julia had told me to do. After half an hour he came to the corridor outside the intensive-care ward to see me; he was still a young man, but obviously very self-confident. He questioned me closely to check my right to ask questions about the patient before giving me any information.

  Ninoshvili has suffered fractures of the nasal bone, the lower right leg and several ribs. He has severe lacerated wounds over both eyes, bruising all over the body and a blunt abdominal trauma. X-rays have shown that a fracture of the base of the skull, suspected because of the ocular haematoma, can be ruled out. However, his unconsciousness and vomiting indicate severe traumatic brain injury. The possibility of delayed intracranial bleeding occurring is therefore not to be excluded. The patient is still in a critical condition. If he did not have a very robust constitution in general, he might well have died of his injuries already.

  I asked the doctor if these injuries could be the result of a road accident. He shook his head. “Oh no! He’d have had to be run over from behind and in front at the same time. No, no. It looks to me as if he was systematically battered. The signs are of heavy blows and kicking. He’s been struck with a blunt instrument, something like a baseball bat.” He scrutinized me. “Can it be that Herr Ninoshvili got into a fight with skinheads or similar thugs?”

  I said I could hardly imagine it, though of course I couldn’t definitely rule it out either. I thanked the doctor and left. I called Julia from a telephone kiosk near the entrance, as she had asked, and reported back to her.

  As I was leaving the hospital, Herr Hochgeschurz came towards me in the sunshine on the steps. He nodded, offered me his hand, and said, “Well, Herr Kestner, this is a bad business.”

  I asked him how he knew about it. “We read the police reports,” he replied. After some of his heavy breathing, he asked, “How is he?”

  I said Herr Ninoshvili was in a bad way, hovering between life and death. I was going to shake hands with Hochgeschurz and turn away, but he asked, “Did he tell you what he was doing in that part of town?”

  I said that as far as I knew he had been going to visit Dr Unger, director of the publishing firm Lyra. Herr Hochgeschurz nodded and sighed. “Ah, yes. Another of those outfits.”

  I asked what he meant. Herr Hochgeschurz said, “Nothing concrete.” He massaged his nose. “But as you may know, the mother house of that firm was founded under the German Democratic Republic and is in Leipzig. And you may even know that the profits of the books that Herr Unger publishes probably couldn’t even pay the rent of that place in the suburbs.”

  I said no, I knew nothing about that, and gave Herr Hochgeschurz my hand. He asked, “How was the chess tournament in Schwitte?” I said, “Very interesting.”

  Herr Hochgeschurz nodded. As I was turning away he said, “I don’t want to pester you, Herr Kestner, but what Dr Schmidt and I said to you still stands. We’d be grateful for any information, you may be sure of that. You have my word for it.”

  I said, “Thank you very much,” and walked away.

  Chapter 62

  The hawk and the wood grouse both drowned. The wood grouse had been trying to escape the bird of prey that King Vakhtang Gorgasal had taken out hunting, but it few in vain. The hawk pursued it high above the trees of the Georgian forest and was not to be shaken off, however far the wood grouse few in its time of need. They few far over the land, from Mtskheta where the King’s palace stood to the fortress of Narikala, built by the Persians a century earlier.

  There at last, in the blue sky above the Kura Valley, the hawk seized upon the wood grouse. But it was not to return home in triumph. The long fight had exhausted the predator’s own strength; it fell to the depths like a stone, with its prey in its talons. Hawk and wood grouse, indissolubly linked, fell into the sulphur-yellow bubbling water, and both died there.

  King Vakhtang, who had long been looking for his hawk’s return, did not want to lose his favourite bird of prey, and set out in search of it. The king was greatly distressed when he found the magnificent bird after many days, its claws still clutching its victim. But he also saw the incomparable beauty of the place to which his hawk, even in death, had led him. So King Vakhtang built a new city by the bubbling spring in the valley of the Kura, Tbilisi, and from then on he ruled Georgia from there, enjoying the healing powers of the bubbling sulphurous water.

  I am not sure if the hawk doomed to die in a strange place deserves our sympathy, but I pity it. It must have been a pathetic sight: the beautiful, proud bird floating in the clouded, stinking water with its victim, its talons now still, its plumage shredded by the impact when it fell, and steeped in the sulphurous brew. A murderer may have deserved death, but even a murderer doesn’t deserve a death that humiliates him and ends his life in the shame of defeat.

  Julia has tried unsuccessfully to reach Matassi in Tbilisi. She got through to Ninoshvili’s apartment three times, but no one answered the phone. It can’t be because of the civil war. There’s still some shooting in Tbilisi now and then, but Shevardnadze seems to have the situation under control.

  He watched unmoved when, in one of his assemblies, a young man who had criticized Georgia’s membership of the Commonwealth of Independent States was thrown out of the hall with violence. In an interview, the president referred to King Herakleios II of Georgia who two hundred years ago, in the struggle against the Persians, saw no alternative to calling on the protective power of Russia. “Perhaps our country would have ceased to exist long ago otherwise.”

  Zviad Gamsakhurdia’s supporters must, however, prepare themselves for pitiless judicial retribution. They are being pursued in West Georgia by Dzhaba Ioseliani, former professor of drama and long-term inmate of penal institutions, who went over from Gamsakhurdia to Shevardnadze and formed a kind of volunteer corps against the Zviadists. Ioseliani, clad in baseball cap, T-shirt, windcheater and trainers, Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder and a gold chain around his bare neck, told the Spiegel reporter, “We are the defenders of the sole legitimate power.”

  Perhaps I was right to assume that Matassi separated from Ninoshvili long ago. Perhaps the Nana or Nona who took her place, who signed Ninoshvili’s New Year cards in Matassi’s name, who chose and packed up the present to me, has moved out again. She felt sorry for her self-confident partner but shrank from a showdown with him, and as soon as he set off for the Federal Republic of Germany she took her chance to carry her suitcase down the creaking stairs from the apartment that same day. Her new boyfriend was waiting for her outside the little door into the yard.

  The blinds are down over the window looking out on the balcony; a striped pattern of sunlight falls into the living room. The door to the bedroom is open, the abandoned bed can be seen in its twilit cavern, the woven bedspread neatly adjusted, the pillows plumped up and tidily arranged. The telephone rings. After a minute the ringing stops. The voices of children rise from the yard.

  Perhaps Matassi comes down the street now and then, glances at the little door in the high wall, and goes on her way. Perhaps she’s come to terms with the Shevardnadze party. Her position at the University Library, for which she feared, is still to be hers, or so she’s been told anyway, so long as she cooperates. Matassi has cooperated, she has not kept back information about Ninoshvili’s past.

  Maybe there’s no one left in Tbilisi to weep for David Ninoshvili. David is dead? Better for him, perhaps, than if he had come back. He has acted a little too wildly. There are too many people here who would like to settle accounts with him. He’s been battered to death? Well, who knows what he was up to over there in Germany? If he’d been clever he would have taken his chance to keep quiet and tried to stay there. He could always have said he was
a political refugee. And in a way that would have been true.

  Maybe no one in Tbilisi would demand to see David again. Not that there was anything to see that a sensitive person could bear without horror, without a tormenting pity. That swollen, battered face, no trace of its former handsome regularity left, just a distorted mask. The muscular leg, the powerful knee now out of action, needing a splint at least to give it some rest. The tubes and cables, emergency lines keeping him from succumbing to death. The bared breast, rising and falling faintly. The bandaged brow. What can be going on behind it? What nightmares may be hunting him down, tormenting him, his companions on the way to death?

  That’s enough of that. I must think about my family if I want to keep David Ninoshvili from dragging them down into the whirlpool with him.

  This afternoon, when Julia was at the hospital, I questioned Ralf closely again. He insists that he was at the cinema at the time of the attack. I’ve asked him if he knew about it, if he might perhaps even have staged it. He answered with another question. “What for? What’s this third-degree stuff all about?”

  I told him that if he was going around with any information about the attack not already known to me, he had better tell me as soon as possible, because otherwise I had good grounds to fear that he would be in serious trouble.

  He said, “Don’t go worrying about nothing. How stupid do you think I am?”

  Chapter 63

  According to a story in the local paper, the city CID have been working overtime for the first nine months of this year. The number of criminal offences committed was over 90,000 to the end of September, which means that last year’s alarming record is going to be exceeded yet again by about ten per cent.

  Some forty per cent of those suspected of committing such offences are foreigners. The number of violations by foreign nationals and asylum-seekers of the Foreign Citizens Act and the Asylum Procedure Act has almost doubled since the regulations governing those laws were tightened up. On the other hand, there has also been an above-average increase in offences motivated by xenophobia. Among other abuses of the law, the police place in this category anonymous threats made to foreigners on the telephone and graffiti featuring the swastika.