“So after I left, you told your version to Brigitte.”
“Not my version, the truth. The Trento consortium, Kagol Construction’s financial difficulties. And how I’d got a few words to reach Evi’s ears so as to put a spoke in my competitors’ wheels. I didn’t want Brigitte to get the wrong idea. In the end, she told me she felt better.”
“But it wasn’t true.”
“No, it wasn’t true. I realize that now, but believe me, nobody could have stopped her. It was the third time the poor woman had tried.”
“To kill herself?”
“Yes. She didn’t commit suicide because of Gunther or Evi, Salinger. She committed suicide because she hated herself, and when a person hates themselves to the point of wanting to die . . .”
* * *
Halfway through March, I took Annelise aside and said, “I want to go back to New York. This place has torn us apart. And I don’t want to lose you. Not for anything in the world.”
We hugged and I felt something melt inside me.
That night Annelise left the door of her room ajar.
We made love. A bit awkwardly, as if we were afraid of hurting each other. At the end, we lay there listening to our breathing growing calmer.
I fell asleep under the illusion that the nightmare would soon be over.
Heart-Shaped Box
Werner was on the second floor of Welshboden, lying on the floor, face up. Eyes empty, one hand on his chest, the other bent behind his back in an unnatural position.
Motionless.
* * *
I had found the door open and had gone in, calling his name without getting an answer. I wasn’t worried. I’d assumed he was keeping his promise to tidy the attic. So I’d gone upstairs.
Annelise had asked me to drop by to see how things were going. For the past two days, the only contact we’d had with him had been over the phone. He said he was busy clearing the attic, and that he had a bad headache. Nothing serious, but he didn’t feel like coming down to see us. If it was flu, he might pass it on to us.
The six-pack of beer I’d brought with me fell from my hands. I searched for my phone. I needed help, an ambulance, someone.
“Werner . . .”
I placed my hand on his neck.
His heart was beating. His eyes came to rest on me.
“Hurts,” he murmured.
His back.
“Dammit, Werner,” I said, finding my phone. “You need to go to the hospital.”
He shook his head. It must be giving him a lot of pain to speak.
“No ambulance,” he said. “You take me.”
“Did you fall?”
“I can make it. Just give me a hand.”
“How long have you been here?”
“A few minutes. Don’t worry.”
He tried to get up by himself. He let out a groan.
I helped him.
It was like carrying a dead weight.
We went downstairs. I made him put on a jacket, and had to lay him down on the back seat of the car because he couldn’t sit up. His face was red, the veins sticking out. I feared a heart attack.
“I’m calling Annelise.”
He raised a hand. “Later.”
I didn’t so much leave Welshboden as blast off in the direction of Bolzano. The rise in temperature had melted the ice on the roads and I went full throttle.
Reaching the emergency room, I got a few nurses to help me. Werner refused a wheelchair, but when we went in he felt faint and they forced him onto a stretcher. Then they took him away.
I sat waiting for him, while the waiting room filled up and emptied like the systolic and diastolic movement of a beating heart. In the meantime, I thought it my duty to inform Annelise. A couple of times, I was about to call her. But what could I tell her? That Werner had fallen because in spite of his back pain he had decided to sort out his damned attic? And his condition? What was his condition? I had no idea. I decided I would call her when I had more information to convey to her.
Hoping that it was good news.
* * *
“Papà?”
I had just started reading Clara her favorite fairy story (“Tom Thumb”) when she interrupted me gravely. I closed the book and put it down on the bedside table.
“Why was Mamma crying?”
“Mamma wasn’t crying. She was just a bit sad.”
“But her eyes looked bad.”
“She’s worried about Ops.”
“What’s the matter with Ops? Why did he go to the hospital?”
“Ops had a fall. His back hurts a little, that’s all.”
“And is that why Mamma’s sad?”
“Yes.”
“But did you tell her that all Ops has is a pain in the back?”
I smiled despite myself. Clara had the ability to show me the world through her eyes. A simple, uncomplicated world in which everything worked like a charm.
“Of course. And Ops told her as well.”
“But she’s still sad. Why?”
“Because Ops’s old. And old people are a bit fragile. Like children.”
“Is it horrible to become old, Papà?”
It was hard to answer that question. Especially when the person asking was a child who, however precocious, was only five years old.
“That depends on who’s around you. If you’re alone, it’s horrible, but if you have children, or lovely grandchildren like you, then it’s not so bad.”
“Are you afraid of getting old?”
That was a question that took me aback. I replied as sincerely as I could. “Yes.”
“But I’ll be with you, Papà.”
“Then I’ll be less afraid.”
“I was very afraid, you know.”
“When, sweetheart?”
“The snow,” she said, and her eyes clouded over with anxiety, as if she were reliving those moments. “It ended up on my head. It was all dark. I didn’t know what was up or what was down. And then my head hurt so much.”
I said nothing.
I had a knot in my throat. I stroked her until I thought she was asleep. But, as I was getting ready to tiptoe out of the room, Clara called to me. “Papà,” she said, opening her eyes wide. “Were you afraid, too?”
I made an effort to keep a calm tone of voice. “It’s natural to be afraid, sweetheart. Everybody feels afraid sometimes.”
“Yes, but when you had your accident. Were you afraid?”
“Yes. Very afraid.”
“Were you afraid of dying?”
“I was afraid of losing all of you,” I said, kissing her on the forehead. “I was afraid I would never see you again.”
“Were you angry?”
“Who with?” I asked, surprised by the question.
“I was angry.”
“With me?”
“With you, too. But especially with Ops.”
“Ops Werner? Why?”
Clara’s hand automatically rose to look for her hair. She rolled a strand of it around her index finger and started twisting it gently. “Do you think I should apologize, too? Now that he’s ill, maybe I should.”
“How can I tell you that if I don’t know what happened?”
“I wanted to play with the doll in the heart-shaped box. It was beautiful.”
“The heart-shaped box?”
Clara’s little head went up and then down. Twice. “There was a doll in it. In the attic.”
“And Ops got angry?”
It was as if I had said nothing.
“The box was this big.” She mimed the dimensions with her hands. “And it was full of old things. Horrible photographs and the doll. But the doll was beautiful.”
Horrible photographs.
“What kind of photographs?”
“Pictures from films. Halloween films,” she said solemnly, faced with my puzzled expression. “Pictures from zombie films. Except that the zombies were on the ground. Maybe they were broken zombies, what do you think, Pap
à?”
“Of course,” I said, while my brain tried to translate what Clara was trying to tell me. “Broken zombies.”
Broken zombies.
A doll.
The heart-shaped box.
Zombies.
Broken zombies.
“Ops said I could hurt myself and I told him it wasn’t right for him to keep the doll. He’s not a child, I am. And then I was angry because everyone treats me like a little child. I’m not a little child.”
“So as soon as he was distracted, you took the sled.”
Clara’s eyes filled with tears. “I knew you’d forbidden me, but I wanted to show that . . .”
“That you’re a big girl.”
“Do you think I should apologize to him? For getting angry?”
“I think . . .” I said in a hoarse voice, “I think there’s no need to apologize.” I smiled. “I’m sure Ops has already forgiven you.”
* * *
Why hadn’t Werner told me? Why hadn’t he told me he had yelled at Clara just before she went and crashed her sled? Maybe in the excitement following the accident, he had forgotten. Or maybe he felt guilty and was keeping it to himself. Werner was good at keeping secrets, I thought.
All the same . . .
A heart-shaped box?
A doll?
What most upset me and stopped me from getting to sleep that night were the photographs of broken zombies. What else could they be if not corpses? Why did Werner have photographs of corpses in his house? And who did they belong to? I was afraid of finding out.
There was worse. Not a fear, though.
A certainty.
Werner was hiding something from me.
* * *
That evening, I reopened the file.
I updated it.
Then I went to bed.
The hunt was on again.
* * *
I waited for the right moment. I was patient. The opportunity presented itself a couple of days later.
Werner would be going down to Bolzano for a check-up on his back. We were having lunch together when he announced it. Annelise offered to go with him. I offered to go with him.
Werner rejected both offers, he could perfectly well drive himself. We said we were upset and annoyed.
Only Annelise really was.
I calculated the timing to the split second. From one of the drawers in the kitchen, I took the spare keys that Werner had given us. I waited for Clara to go to bed for her afternoon nap and told Annelise that I was going out for a quick walk.
I sneaked into Werner’s house at three in the afternoon.
At six minutes past three, I was on the second floor, slightly out of breath.
At seven minutes past three, I climbed the narrow staircase that led to the trap door to the attic. A few seconds later, I felt the typical smell of a place that has been closed for too long.
At ten past three, I lit the small lamp that hung from a beam. I started searching. Even though I knew there was nobody about and that even if I started dancing nobody would hear a thing, I did everything in absolute silence.
Twenty minutes later, I found the heart-shaped box. I held it up to the light.
There were recent prints in the dust.
I opened it.
The Wasps in the Attic
When I was a child, I spent more time with my head in the clouds than my feet on the ground. My father always told me that. He was the perfect example of a man with his feet on the ground. At the age of eighteen, he had escaped a destiny that was all laid out for him.
For two hundred years, the Salinger family had been born and died in the same village of some two thousand souls, in Mississippi. My grandfather had been a peasant, my great-grandfather had done the same work and so on back to the obscure ancestor who had decided he’d had his fill of Europe and set sail for the New World.
Just like that Salinger two centuries earlier, my father had dreams of something better for himself. He dreamed of the thousand lights of New York City. But he wasn’t the kind to have crazy ideas. He didn’t want to become a Wall Street broker or a Broadway actor.
He had simply heard that in the Big Apple people didn’t have time to make lunch or dinner for themselves, and so it had occurred to him that the best way to wipe the soil of Mississippi off his shoes was to open a hamburger stand and erase the southern drawl from his speech.
With time and sweat, the stand had turned into a little snack bar in Brooklyn, a place where you got a lot of food for not much money, but the accent stuck to him like chewing gum to the soles of the orthopedic shoes his doctor forced him to wear at work.
In 1972, he had met a young German immigrant, my mother; they liked each other, they married, they set up house, and in 1975 I was born, the first and only child in the Salinger family of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Among the neighbors, there were those who made fun of me. They said I was the son of a redneck, but it didn’t upset me. The nice thing about the United States is that in one way or another we’re all the children or grandchildren of immigrants. The snack bar was a snug little world that kept my father and mother busy fourteen hours a day, and I had a lot of free time to lose myself in my daydreams. Above all, I loved reading and walking around the neighborhood.
At the time, Red Hook was in a bad way. There was heroin everywhere, along with the violence that came with it, and at night even police cars didn’t venture into the harbor area. A little boy who was all skin and bones could be a target for junkies and crazy people in general.
My Mutti (she, too, never lost her German accent, something she often regretted) would beg me to stop my walks. Why couldn’t I stay home and watch TV like all good boys my age? Then she would give me a kiss on my head and rush off to work.
What else could she do?
And anyway, I was very careful, I wasn’t a stupid boy. Curious, yes, but stupid? Never. I read lots and lots of books, for heaven’s sake. Nothing bad could happen to me. I believed that up there, in heaven, there existed a deity that protected book lovers from the ugliness of earthly life. My mother was a Protestant with Marxist tendencies, as she liked to say, my father a Baptist whose only tendency was the as-long-as-there-are-no-priests-bothering-me kind, and the neighbors were Lutherans, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists. There were even a few Catholics.
My idea of heaven was vague and democratic.
So, feeling the hand of the God of readers on my head, I would reassure my Mutti, wait to see her walk out the front door of the red brick apartment block in which I’d been raised, then slip out and resume my wanderings. “This boy wears out more shoes than a team of marathon runners,” my father would mutter whenever my mother informed him that it was time to buy a new pair, brandishing what remained of the last All-Stars purchased. I was obsessed with All-Stars.
Anyway, I liked walking.
I was especially drawn to the older part of Red Hook, the harbor, the grain warehouses. Sigourney Street, Halleck Street, and Columbia, where Puerto Ricans glowered at you, an area that ended in the ocean, like the curled tail of a scorpion.
Or of a hook, of course.
Walking meant imagining. Every corner a mystery, every building an adventure. In my head, everything became as glamorous as in a movie.
Nothing scared me, I had the God of readers on my side, right? Wrong.
I was ten years old, the best age to enjoy freedom without realizing the weight it carries with it. The warm air coming in from the ocean had blown away a lot of the smog and I was walking in the area around Prospect Park, delighting in the rays of the sun. I sat down on a bench, a burrito in one hand and an ice-cold Coke in the other.
I was the master of the world until I heard the noise. A buzzing. Deep, cavernous.
I raised my head to heaven.
I didn’t see any deity intent on reading some novel between the branches of the maple tree above me. I didn’t even see the spring sky. I saw a nest. Ugly, square, and as gnarled as a potato. And dozens of w
asps buzzing around it, looking at me. The sensation I felt, when one of them detached itself from what looked like a paper fruit (the image that had come into my mind as soon as I had seen it), came to rest on my hand, and sucked a little of the grease from the burrito, was horrible. That thing that was moving was real, it was bad. And soon it would hurt me.
It would hurt me a lot.
And it did.
Like the stupid boy I was, instead of letting it be, keeping my nerve, waiting for it to finish its lunch and then running off, I started waving my hand and threw myself on the ground. It stung me three times. Twice on the hand and once on the neck. The sting on the neck swelled so much that my Mutti thought she needed to take me to the hospital. It didn’t get to that, but from that day on I stopped believing in the God of readers. I started fearing any insect that happened to be in my vicinity, and the memory of the hate-filled looks of all those wasps comes back into my mind every time I realize I’ve done something stupid.
Like that day in March.
It was the wasps I was thinking about as I opened the heart-shaped box.
* * *
I staggered back, letting out a cry.
No wasps. Only a heap of dust and yellowed photographs. Photographs of broken zombies. The zombies were Markus. Evi. Kurt.
The broken zombies of the Bletterbach.
Pure horror.
Those photographs must have come from the rolls taken by the forensics team at the crime scene. Presumably Werner had stolen them, and not even Max had noticed . . . Or maybe Max knew? The question occurred to me and quickly went away, as the adrenaline rushed into my veins.
Close-ups of gashed flesh. Muscles severed like offal. Amputated limbs lying in the mud. Those pictures were a branding iron plunged into my guts. And yet I couldn’t stop looking at them.
The faces.
The faces assailed me with particular ferocity.
The face of Markus, slashed by the brambles into which he had fallen, with deep furrows that seemed to bear the nail marks of some animal. The terrified expression of someone who knows he is facing death.
The face of Kurt, twisted into an expression that was the quintessence of despair.
Beneath the Mountain Page 28
