“Do you know why I spare the ones who carry around their own little houses?”
Albert glanced at the dying slugs seeping out on the pavement. “Because they’re nicer looking?”
“I’d prefer to put it thus: survival of the sexiest.” Klondi laughed—or coughed, it was difficult to distinguish. “Want one?” She offered him a half-empty packet of Gauloises.
Albert shook his head.
“Good boy. But you’ll still have to take the gum with you.”
“Huh?”
“That chewing-gum crap. In the terra-cotta pot.” She stood with a flounce, as if she were sixteen, and knocked the dirt from her knees. “I’ve got enough butts lying around already.”
“Okay,” mumbled Albert.
“Is that for me?”
He tightened his grip on the attaché case, which he was carrying under his arm. “No. Yes.”
“Which is it?”
“Can I show you something?”
She waved him forward, and he followed her to a granite table in the middle of the garden, which she slapped with the flat of her hand. He unzipped the case and handed her the photo. She tilted it into the light.
“Well, so?”
“Do you know the woman?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“Of course I’m sure.” She blew smoke from her nostrils. “Why?”
“Nothing important.”
He wanted to take the picture back, but she wouldn’t let it go. “Albert, in the eleven years you’ve been visiting your father, you’ve never once set foot on my property. Nothing important? I believe that right now there’s nothing more important to you than this photo.”
“Maybe.”
Glancing down, Albert noticed he’d stepped on one of the dead slugs. He wiped his sneakers on the grass.
“She … could be your mother.”
“Do you know her?”
“Nope. We never met. When you were born, at the beginning of the eighties, it wasn’t a good time for me. I preferred to steer clear of people.”
“Why?”
She cleared her throat and tapped with an earth-smeared index finger at the gap between Fred and the Red Lady. “You would fit into this picture. Right there.”
Albert peered at the photo more carefully. She was right.
“Do you know …,” he began, but wasn’t sure how to end the sentence without it hurting. Where she went? Why she abandoned us? Why she didn’t care about us? What she was thinking?
“I don’t know anything,” said Klondi and drew thoughtfully on her cigarette, as if she might be able to suck information from the butt. “Mothers are overrated, Albert. If you ask me, you can count yourself lucky that you grew up without one.” She handed the picture back to him, and he immediately stowed it in the attaché.
“I wouldn’t keep searching,” she said. “I’m afraid nobody in this village will have anything to tell you. As far as they’re concerned, your father is a Virgin Mary. You’ll find nothing.”
At this early stage, nobody and nothing were words far too glib to make Albert call off his search. For three long years he behaved like a young detective during the holidays, roaming through Hofherr’s beer garden, accosting the diners just after they’d gulped down the last scraps of their meals—since, according to a radio crime series he’d been listening to late at night with a couple of other orphans, that was the ideal moment to take a potential informant by surprise—until at last a dirndl-clad barmaid chased him off with noises like ksss and psh, as if he were a stray dog begging for treats. For three long years Albert knocked at wickets, at garden gates, at front doors with frosted-glass panes, at open doors, at doors upon which, during Epiphany, trios of children in royal garb had scrawled the initials of the Three Kings, C + M + B, in chalk, and at doors that were locked and bolted. For three long years he schlepped his attaché case around with him, eagerly presenting his mug shot to every pair of eyes he encountered. For three long years he made photocopies of the picture, on which he spelled out with letters cut from the newspaper: HAvE yOu SeEn THIs wOMaN? RePORt it TO dRIaJES! and tacked them up on the bulletin board in front of the town hall, in the little shelter at the bus stop, on telephone poles and electrical boxes and over the logo of an American fast-food chain on the only advertising poster in Königsdorf, across from the only supermarket, until the community of Königsdorf, in the person of a man in a beige-green uniform, whom everyone referred to simply as the Village Fuzz, forbade him to paste them up on public property, on pain of a “hot ear.” For three long years, while staying with Fred, he answered every knock at the front door and ring of the telephone with hard-to-quash hopes for a female voice, a euphoric hug, and, naturally, red hair. And for three long years, people came forward—people who, in Albert’s opinion, must be suffering from dyslexia or attention deficit disorder, because they would solemnly proclaim to him that they certainly knew the man in the photograph: he was the invalid from the ’77 bus accident.
And so, over time, nobody and nothing became things to be taken seriously.
One late-summer morning, the morning on which, a few months after his seventeenth birthday, he’d shaved for the first time, after another fruitless six-and-a-half-week summer holiday, Albert sat in the second row of pews for morning Mass, his head lowered, his chin against his chest, his hands folded, and as the prayers dropped from his mouth, wished for the first time that he’d never found the photo. What was it, anyway? A two-dimensional, possibly factitious, and in any case ambiguous reproduction of reality, the mere assertion of a time that Albert understood only hazily. He remembered what Klondi had told him three years before—that he would find nothing. She’d called him a fourteen-year-old simpleton, and advised him to let the picture be, to let the case drop. That’s just what life was, she’d meant: a heap of puzzle pieces that never added up to one great whole, but merely filled you with false hope, because they let you believe that something like an answer—the truth!—existed out there, somewhere. Her last words rang in his head: “Those damned puzzle pieces,” she’d said, “are nothing but Hansel and Gretel crumbs.”
Where the Gold Comes From
Albert mulled over all of this, that night he spent sleepless in the BMW, and it left him, when morning came, with a feeling of helplessness. The fact that capitulation was part of recapitulation, he thought, seemed entirely appropriate.
On the other side of the windshield a dark blue was already mixing with the black, and the first birdsong heralded dawn. Albert pressed “eject,” and with a whirring sound the tape struggled from the slot. In the past, the two of them had sat here listening to the adventures of Benjamin Blümchen, the only talking elephant in the world. For a while, Fred had been entirely intent on the episode in which the elephant believed that acting meant you were lying. He’d replayed it again and again, ten times a day. Until Albert simply couldn’t help himself any longer, and threw the thing away. He could do precisely the same with Fred’s lump of gold and the cassette, he thought—then he wouldn’t have to waste any more thought on these Hansel and Gretel crumbs. He plunked the tape back into the box and reached for Fred’s nugget, marveling again at the weight of that little stone.
“All right, then,” he said.
Early that afternoon, Albert called Fred for lunch in the kitchen.
Within seconds the door sprang open. Fred was wearing his diving goggles, though outside the sun was shining. Usually Fred put them on when he stood by the bus stop in the rain. They’d belonged to his father. Sometimes Albert filled the bathtub with cold water, poured a packet of salt into it, and declared: “Voila! The Pacific!” Upon which Fred would leap with his goggles into the water, slosh around like an inebriated frog, and complain if the brine went up his nose.
Albert had cooked up some scrambled eggs with tomato. Fred pushed the tomatoes to the edge of the plate because “they didn’t taste good at all,” and Albert said, “Eat your tomatoes,” and Fred devoured all of the egg, but
not the tomatoes, and Albert repeated, “Eat your tomatoes,” and Fred quickly rinsed off his plate, and Albert warned, “You aren’t getting any bread and honey,” but Fred swore that next time he’d eat “the healthy tomatoes,” at which point Albert did, in fact, smear some honey on the bread for him, while attempting to ignore Fred’s whispered self-praise: “That was a good trick.”
Albert’s best trick was mixing Fred’s medication into his food, without Fred noticing.
After the meal, Albert set the gold on the kitchen table. “Today I went to a jeweler in Wolfratshausen, who said we have almost enough here to buy a small house.”
“I already have a house.”
“Frederick, you’re going to tell me where you got this right now.”
“I found it,” grumbled Fred, fumbling with the clasp on the goggles.
“Where?”
A mulish stare.
“Sometimes I feel like a schoolmaster,” Albert said, sighing.
Fred shook his head. “But you’re Albert.”
“Nothing else?”
“That’s plenty!”
Plenty was rarely so little, thought Albert, pouring himself a glass of milk and drinking it down.
“Albert!” Fred drew the cassette from the tin box, which Albert had set beside the sink. “You have a cassette, too!” His grin twitched. “A totally similar cassette.”
Albert emptied his glass so hastily that milk ran over his chin. “That’s your cassette.”
Fred held his breath. Silence. Then his grin returned: “You couldn’t sleep, Albert?”
“How did you know?”
“That tape makes an ambrosial noise, like water. And Mama said you always sleep best by the water.”
“Where did you get the tape?”
Fred bit his lips.
“Did somebody give it to you?”
“No.”
“Let me guess: you found it.”
“Yes.”
Albert rolled his eyes. “Where did you find it?”
This time Fred licked his lips like a contestant on a quiz show, confident of his answer, and even before he replied, Albert knew what that answer would be.
“The same place the gold came from!”
“Oh, there,” said Albert, and set the glass down so heavily that the sound of it shocked even him. “Listen, Frederick, this is very important to me. I absolutely have to know.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“What’s dangerous?”
“Everything!”
Albert thought for a moment. “And what if we keep an eye out for each other? I take care of you, and you take care of me. Wouldn’t that be better? Wouldn’t that be less dangerous?”
Fred looked thoughtfully at the gold.
“The two of us on a quest for gold,” said Albert, sensing that this was his chance. “That would certainly be something.”
“It’s dangerous,” Fred softly repeated.
“Would it be a long trip?” asked Albert.
Fred wobbled his head. “It’s deep.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a long way below us.”
“Well, that much I understood.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Because … forget it,” said Albert. His gaze fell on the HA scratched into the kitchen window, and he fought down the urgent desire to hurl something through it. Trying to hold a conversation with Fred, one that actually amounted to anything, was the most terrible, Sisyphean labor he knew.
He was about to flee the kitchen, in order to smoke a cigarette somewhere in secret, when Fred said, “You’ll have to dress yourself really well, though.”
Albert stood still. “Does that mean you’re actually going to show me?”
“It’s going to be soaking wet,” warned Fred. “From below and above!”
Albert nearly embraced Fred in relief, but held himself back, examining him. As always, Fred’s face wore an expression of childishly self-important seriousness, yet if Albert wasn’t mistaken, he could detect behind it an air of genuine worry, one so perturbing that he quickly looked away, and said, “Let’s go.”
PART II
Siblings
1912–1924
The Sacrificial Festival
On a hot August night at the height of the summer of 1912, the village of Segendorf celebrated its three-hundred eighty-sixth Sacrificial Festival.
Three hundred and eighty-seven years earlier, a wandering monk, expelled from his monastery, had paused for a rest at the highest point of the very same hill. He’d dozed off in the shade of a little grove of spruce trees. God had appeared to the monk in his dream, demanding he prove his devotion to his creator by sacrificing his Most Beloved Possession. A princely reward awaited him. So it happened that, after awakening, the desperate monk, banished to this thinly populated region of the alpine foothills, approached the rocky bluff on the south side of the hill, drew out a bronze chalice (which he’d purloined from his former monastery as compensation, so to speak, for his exile), and, after a brief hesitation, allowed it to tumble down into the abyss. He waited. For a sign. Waited. And doubted. Then, at last, a delicate, tinny pling came echoing up over the lip of the cliff. There should have been a plong, bronze against stone, a plong, absolutely—but instead, there followed a pling-pling. It was mocking him, that pling-pling, calling: Come look for me! Come on down! Come to me! And the monk heeded its call.
Down below, gleaming metal ran like a jagged scar through the stone. The monk caressed every inch of it, as if he were kissing the Holy Father’s Piscatory Ring. The newly uncovered vein of gold considerably eased his ascent from destitute drifter to bishop. He consecrated the spot, calling it Segenhügel, the Blessed Hill; and soon, thanks to the exploitation of its gold deposits, the village of Segendorf sprang up nearby. Before it had time to develop into a thriving community, however, Segendorf began to wither. On the one hand, the mine petered out within months; on the other, the landscape itself significantly contributed to the settlement’s ruin. Hereabouts there was little but fields scattered with scarlet corn poppies; the Moorbach, a piddling tributary that wound its way around the Segenhügel; lean game; and hostile grasses that sliced at your hands if you tried to pluck them. When the villagers decamped, the old, the sick, and the idiotic were left behind. Along with the tradition. At first the remaining Segendorfers celebrated the discovery of the gold mine each summer by flinging their Most Beloved Possessions over the edge of the cliff. But as too many animal cadavers had begun to pile up at the foot of the hill, contaminating the drinking water, they decided instead to kindle a sacrificial bonfire each year on the market square, so as to celebrate the ritual in a more civilized fashion.
Back then the population of Segendorf numbered no more than three hundred souls. Of course, there were barns and cowsheds and cesspits, the cobbler right next to the general store, the butcher just behind, and the smithy not much farther off; of course, Segendorf had a moor to the east and the west, and the sheer rock walls of the Alps to the south, and to the north, the sole road that led into the village (and ended there as well); and, of course, just beyond the town limits there was Wolf Hill, atop which an oak tree spread its limbs, and beneath which local women were knocked up every year when spring rolled around. But for anyone who took the map as gospel, Segendorf didn’t exist at all. The place had barely changed since its founding. Light was still generated with sulfur matchsticks, candles, or torches, the people still scrubbed their clothes in the Moorbach, and the next parish was a ten-day march away. The residents first heard about World War I only after it had been lost.
In 1912 all the villagers gathered in the market square, as they did every year, formed a spiraling line, and, one by one, hurled something dear to their hearts onto the flaming pyre of high-piled brushwood. The flames swallowed them noisily, rewarding those assembled with warmth and light.
That same night, in the granary—Segendorf’s largest structure, after the church—a secr
et was conceived. Among sacks bursting with oats, wheat, poppy seeds, and barley, sacks that in the gloom resembled limbless torsos, fourteen-year-old Josfer Habom explored the body of his sister, Jasfe, with his lips; and although both felt unbearably hot, they trembled as if there were a killing frost.
It was said that no Segendorfer could compete with my parents’ beauty. So tantalizing was Jasfe’s glance, so striking Josfer’s dimpled chin, that the pair were never invited to weddings, lest the bride or groom begin to have second thoughts about the business at hand.
Anne-Marie Habom, my grandmother, had died giving birth to the twins, and my grandfather Nick Habom, one of Segendorf’s numerous hunters, and a considerably unattractive man, concerned himself only with putting enough food on the table and making sure that the two had a warm bed to sleep in. He never said more than was absolutely necessary. He was respected for that. In spite of his dwarfish stature, Nick was a man who loomed large in people’s memories. Many maintained that the vertical crease between his eyebrows divided not merely his forehead but also the compartments into which he sorted mankind: those whom he liked—and the rest, among whom he numbered his children. Just recently, he’d broken Josfer’s nose because the latter’s hand had slid between his sister’s thighs while they were bathing—“Don’t put your hands on each other!” he’d bellowed. Since then, Josfer’s beauty had been marred. But Nick’s harshness drove the two children even closer together. Though they didn’t dare oppose him openly, and kept their hands to themselves, as he had ordered them to do, they nevertheless took advantage of every minute they were alone to secretly rub their pale bodies against each other. Until they were crimson.
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