Count Luna

by Alexander Lernet-Holenia

  As Jessiersky looked at the trees, one after the other, he began once more to ponder the question of their age. There were other trees elsewhere that were undoubtedly far older than these; the oaks in Germany, for example, a few of which may even go back to the days of the pagans; the araucaria in Mexico on the “Hill of Locusts,” the site of the summer residence of the hapless Montezuma and of the no less hapless Maximilian; or even the tremendous sequoias in California. But what made the firs here older than all other trees was the fact that their age was unremembered. In other words, even if their age could be recalled, no one had ever recalled it. It was impossible that one of the peasants who owned one of the three huts might have heard from his father’s father that one of these trees had been comparatively young when that grandfather was a boy. For the trees were not in actual fact so terribly old. But neither the grandfather nor the grandson spoke about the age of these trees, nor had they ever spoken about it, and this made the trees timelessly old. There were other timeless things here. In fact, from this point of view, everything was timeless.

  Down at the edge of the forest, for instance, were the remains of a fodder shed on which Jessiersky kept close watch, imagining that Luna might have stationed himself there to keep an eye on the huts. And because of his long experience in using the binoculars, he could tell that the wood the shed was built of had been used before for other purposes. In several of the planks there were notches where other planks had been joined to them. But the other boards were not there and perhaps no longer existed. They may once have been part of the roof of a hut that had also long ceased to exist.

  There might be people who knew or might have known at what period the shed was built. It might have been put up during the time of Napoleon. And the hut, whose roof had been used in its construction, might, perhaps, have been another hundred or hundred and fifty years older. But nothing around here could go back more than four hundred and fifty years. For it was then that Emperor Maximilian I had first settled the region with his huntsmen. The peasants either were descended from these huntsmen or had migrated here later on. Before that time, there had been nothing but wilderness.

  But no one gave a thought to the emperor, his hunters, his own ancestors, or the number of years that had passed. If something here was old, it could be a hundred or a thousand years old, or even much older. It made no difference, for it had dropped out of time, or might even have passed far beyond it. In such surroundings it seemed a little petty, almost ridiculous, to take too seriously the things that were still within time, the events still taking place — such as this conflict with Luna! But Luna himself, if he were really named after the moon, which was certainly very old, should have behaved a great deal more timelessly. He ought not to have purchased shooting rights in the next preserve in order to come over here to shoot someone down. . . .

  Jessiersky was still looking through the field glass when the young woman from the hut came up behind him again and offered him her room for the night. She herself, she said, obviously following the advice of her neighbors, would go up to the hay loft.

  Jessiersky laid down the binoculars for a moment, thanked her with a faint smile, and told her to go right on sleeping in her room. He himself, he said, would either sleep in the hay or not sleep at all. He then took up the field glass again.

  Toward evening, without his knapsack and loden cape, but equipped with the Mannlicher, the ammunition, and the field glass, Jessiersky was back once again in the region of the gorges.

  This time he discovered, far away on the other side of the boundary line, two people who were obviously stalking game and behaving in a manner characteristic of gamekeeper and sportsman guest. There was no doubt, therefore, that it was one of Koller’s men with a guest of Koller. The gamekeeper walked ahead and did the scouting. The guest, who followed behind, did no scouting at all, leaving that task to the gamekeeper. As a result he would be totally unprepared should the gamekeeper suddenly push him into the trees and ask him to shoot at a chamois that had already taken off like a bolt of lightning. However, there was little danger of that in the Koller grounds; there were hardly any chamois left there. As Jessiersky saw only two people, he decided that it could not be Luna — who, as his own gamekeeper had said, was accompanied regularly by two Koller men! Jessiersky, therefore, carefully searched the Koller preserve still further and studied in particular the pastures where the cattle had been let out after having been kept in the huts all day. He saw several herd boys and milkmaids but no sportsmen. He did find at least one of the Koller hunting huts, but nothing was stirring anywhere around it.

  Night was falling as he walked back. There were flashes of rose-colored sheet lightning above the far-off glaciers.

  That night there was a heavy storm, and the herders were out searching until early morning for a few head of cattle that had lost their way in the downpour.

  It continued to rain for two full days. Jessiersky, who remained in the hut — with the poor visibility it would have been futile to leave it — made advances to the milkmaid, partly out of boredom, partly out of nervousness. And as the pasturelands were enclaves in the Zinkeneck property, the young woman did not dare rebuff him; he could have made it very unpleasant for both her and the peasant she worked for. It was indeed singular, now that Luna was closer than ever to him, that he should make advances to this woman, when before, obsessed by the thought of Luna, he had so neglected his wife that Spinette had finally had to pay with his life for it. But such things always operate according to the laws of singularity rather than those of reason. And in the end it was to turn out that to behave in this singular fashion was the wisest thing Jessiersky could have done.

  On the morning of the third day, the rain stopped and Jessiersky betook himself once again to the gorges where he saw a large number of animals but no human being. On the way back, however, on a slope far below him, he caught sight of his gamekeeper who, apparently worried by his long absence, had come to look for him. Jessiersky, although far from a perfect shot, picked up his gun with the telescopic sight and, for a joke, planted a shell in the gravel right at the gamekeeper’s feet. The lead shot exploded on the stones, and the gamekeeper, more deeply offended than ever, vanished in the direction of the valley.

  But on the evening of that day, Jessiersky discovered a group of three people approaching from the Koller preserve. He sat down once again beside the ruined hut, and hiding behind a clump of nettles, watched the movements of the men, the binoculars shaking in his trembling hands.

  The men were carrying guns, and their walking sticks moved as rhythmically as lances. Two of them, the gamekeepers apparently, were walking about one hundred steps ahead, and the third, probably Luna, was following. But this was not the proper way to stalk game. The two men in front would certainly startle the game prematurely and the guest would have no chance to shoot! This was a kind of battle march, and Luna was using the two men to protect himself from being shot at unexpectedly in the alien preserve. And unless this march, which had already been attempted several times before, were halted, it would continue on to Zinkeneck, into the castle, to Jessiersky himself. . . .

  When the group had crossed the boundary and had advanced almost a thousand feet beyond it, Jessiersky could see the men clearly and he was sure that he recognized Luna. He had never really seen him, but how could that slender body and that head, which was a little too large, that haughty carriage, and the pushed-in face with the pockmarks belong to anybody else? Jessiersky stared through the field glass without once averting his eyes, as though simply by staring at him he could compel the elusive adversary to come to him. When they were within six hundred feet of him, he let the binoculars, on their straps, drop onto his chest and felt for the gun. His eyes still riveted on the approaching group, he raised the gun to his cheek and tried to watch Luna through the telescopic sight. But his hands were trembling like those of a real sportsman when he is suddenly confronted with a royal stag. At fi
ve hundred feet, he raised the gun again, put his finger to the trigger, and tried to aim. It would have been wise to have waited a little longer before shooting. The group was approaching slowly and steadily over fairly level pastureland. But he simply did not have the nerve to wait. It seemed to him that if he did not shoot now, he might never be able to shoot — that, in fact, it might be too late already! But as he tried nevertheless to cover Luna’s breast with the intersection of the cross hairs, it occurred to him that he had not set the sight for the proper distance. He therefore lowered the gun and examined it. The sight, after his shot at the feet of the gamekeeper, was still set at five hundred. He raised the rifle again, but with a feeling of futility, as though he were trying to bring down a bird on the wing with a stone, or to strangle a ghost with his bare hands. Everything became blurred, and he could see virtually nothing. But after a few seconds he pulled the trigger, felt the back kick of the telescopic sight against his eye sockets, and heard the shrill whine of the bullet.

  Curiously enough, his nervousness vanished in a flash, and he was able to watch the shot through the telescopic sight. He saw that it was not Luna who was knocked down by the shot, but one of the two men ahead of him. Luna and the other man had immediately flung themselves on the ground and crawled behind the jagged rocks that were scattered over the pasture. Jessiersky at once fired the rest of the magazine at the spot where Luna was lying, and at the third or fourth shot he saw the dust fly high in the air.

  But now Luna and the other sportsman, although they could not see Jessiersky, and only knew the general direction from which he had been shooting, were firing back. Jessiersky, hearing the shots whine past him and ricochet from the stone wall of the hut, threw himself down into the nettles, raised the Mannlicher, and discharged a second and third magazine against the rocks behind which Luna was hiding.

  Meanwhile, the fallen sportsman was lying motionless in full view. The shots fired by Luna and the other man soon became more infrequent. The two men apparently had only a few more shells. The echo was tossed back and forth across the gorge and gradually died away. Before long their shooting stopped altogether.

  Jessiersky, however, kept on firing until nightfall, at the place where he supposed Luna to be. He used up virtually the entire supply of ammunition with which he had stuffed his pockets several days before — nearly seventy shells in all.

  Then he heard Luna and his man call each other in the darkness. He concluded that they had decided to get up, and a little later he, in fact, heard them running off across the pasture, pounding like deer. He too got up, walked over to the place where they had been lying, and examined the ground by the light of some matches. The man he had hit with the first shot had undoubtedly been killed instantly. The shot had ripped open the top of his skull; had Jessiersky’s wavering gun moved so much as a hair’s breadth to the left or right, the shot would have dropped into empty space. But where Luna and the other fellow had been lying, he found only empty shells — no blood, no sign that either had been hurt. Even with more than five dozen shots, Jessiersky had been unable to hit his adversary. On the field of battle, so he had heard, it was as a rule necessary to fire off a man’s weight in ammunition to kill him; to finish off Luna, it would perhaps have required a quantity of ammunition equal to the weight of the moon.

  Chapter 10

  “Why,” Jessiersky asked himself as he stumbled back over the pasture, toward the ruined hut, “was I so set on using duck shot? Was it because lead sits like butter in the rifling and is supposed to be a fraction of a degree more accurate than steel? But when you aim at one enemy and hit another, you might just as well have used steel. Or did I insist on using lead bullets because they would lose their shape and no one would be able to tell who shot what at whom, and what kind of rifle he used? True, if only two or three bullets are shot off, they usually flatten out, and often the majority will spatter onto the stones and become unrecognizable; but out of sixty or seventy shots at least a dozen will remain intact, and anyone can tell in a moment they came from a Mannlicher, caliber such and such. Exactly because they are made of lead, it will be all the easier to find out who was misguided enough to use them!”

  But at the same time he felt somewhat relieved, if only because he no longer had to carry around the ammunition which had been weighing him down for the past few days. How far off could the noise of the shooting have been heard, he wondered, and when would they come to gather up the dead and wounded of the battle. For it must have sounded like a regular battle! “Probably they won’t come for a long time, or maybe not at all. They will pretend not to know — those people are always anxious not to get involved.”

  Meanwhile, he had groped his way back to the ruin and began to look for the empty shells. He got his fingers stung by nettles in the search and used up all of his matches. “What am I doing?” he wondered. “I can never find all the shells. They have rolled in among the nettles or into the talus. But even if I found all of them, what good would it do me? What with the sensation I have caused by choosing to come up here for the first time in so many years, the excitement of my chief gamekeeper and the wide-eyed amazement of the household, the police are bound to arrest me, whether they find the empty shells or not!”

  But unlucky as he had been in his attempt to shoot Luna, he was to be very lucky indeed when the case came to be investigated. In the first place, that same night, all telltale prints of hobnail shoes, of elbows which might have been pressed into the ground by a man leveling his gun, and any scent that police dogs might have followed — all such clues were completely washed away by a fresh downpour. In the second place, it did not occur to anyone that Jessiersky could possibly have shot the man, a certain Eisl, the father of five minor children. As Jessiersky’s chief gamekeeper had been foolish enough to disobey the express orders of his employer and had followed him into the critical area, the police assumed that it was he who had fired at Eisl. He was immediately jailed and held for a time during which it was proved that he shot the same caliber gun as his employer and, at least on the rifle range, used duck shot as well. It also became quite clear why Jessiersky had forbidden the gamekeeper to follow him. For the woman he had spent the night with very shortly announced that she was expecting a child by him. There could be no doubt, therefore, that he had gone up to the mountain pastures for this purpose, although it had been perhaps a trifle too soon after his wife’s death, and not in order to commit a murder.

  If the stupid and primitive notions, so typical of the country and the people, had worked against him instead of to his advantage, it would have thrown Jessiersky into a frenzy. As it was, he felt as if he really were becoming insane only when it was brought home to him not only that he had killed Eisl to no purpose, but that — as was revealed in the course of the investigation — this particular Luna was not Luna at all. That is to say, the man’s name was Luna, but he was by no means the obscure would-be university lecturer who was Jessiersky’s mortal enemy. He was a real Luna, of the family of Azlor de Aragon which appears in every court almanac — where, in fact, Jessiersky had found it. It was just like his gamekeeper, a man of fine character but limited intelligence, to have considered it superfluous to inform Jessiersky that the gentleman who had purchased shooting rights in the Koller preserve was a Spaniard!

  Incidentally, the gentleman was conspicuous not only by reason of his foreign origin, but also on account of his stinginess. In his own country, where he had shot the native varieties of the ibex, the Capra pyrenaica in the Pyrenees and the Capra hispanica in the Sierra Nevada, he had become consumed with the desire to bag some Alpine ibexes as well. Upon learning that this was a costly project both in Switzerland and in Italy — where a high fee is demanded for the shooting of ibexes — he had a Prince Porcia, who acted as agent, buy for him the right to shoot four chamois bucks in the Koller preserve. But, as one of the Koller gamekeepers had so correctly observed in the Schreinbach inn, it turned out that there simply were not four c
hamois left in that preserve. And the Spaniard, instead of accepting the fact that he had been cheated, insisted on getting his money’s worth. He began trespassing upon the neighboring preserve — which was why he always had two men walk ahead of him! The Koller men, who had long before ceased to pay much attention to boundaries, were not themselves averse to his poaching. If the Spaniard, then, had been reasonably prudent, the two gamekeepers of Baron Koller certainly had not — as was proved by the firing duel with Jessiersky.

  At any rate, the Spaniard was required to pay a high fine, and he left the country cursing, without so much as a single chamois horn as a trophy.

  Jessiersky, anxious to find out exactly which Luna he was, sent to Vienna for the court almanac and looked through it. This Luna, he decided, must have been Ferdinand, Count and Duke of Luna, born March 2, 1910, at San Sebastian, the eldest son of José Antonio (17th Duke of Villahermosa, 6th Duke of Granada de Ega, Lord Marshal of Navarre, twice Grandee of Spain, 1st class, former Lord Chamberlain of the Prince and Princess of Asturia, Knight of the Sovereign Order of the Knights of Malta) and his wife, née Isabel de Guillamas Caro Pineyro y Széchenyi.

  In spite of all that, however, Jessiersky could not rid himself of the idea that the person really behind this entire episode had been another Ferdinand Luna, the sociologist and one-time prisoner in the Ebensee concentration camp.