by Dan Vyleta
Beer listened to the man’s high, accented voice with some misgivings. For all its idiosyncrasies of intonation, it had the fluency of an actor’s. Beer had never heard a foreigner speak the language as well as this, and that alone spoke against him somehow. And yet his story might be no more than the truth.
‘Why not come to me?’ he asked, when Yuu had finished and sat smoothing the crease of his trousers above the thighs. ‘When you found her passed out.’
‘I thought-you were a doc-tor on-ly for the head.’
Yuu put a finger to his temple, the people’s gesture for a madman. Again the fluency of his response grated on Beer; it reminded him of himself, lying to Teuben. There was nothing else he wished to ask, and yet he found himself reluctant to leave, looked around himself, found his gaze reflected in the mirrors. Yuu watched Beer watch himself and stretched his lips into an insinuating smile.
‘I-know who kill-ed the dog,’ he said without preamble, leaning forward on his bed.
‘So do I,’ answered Beer. ‘You saw it?’
‘Yes.’
He listened to the man’s account in silence. It helped confirm what he had surmised.
‘Why did you not tell the police what you saw, Herr Yuu?’
The fat man wagged his head from side to side, as though shaking water from his ears.
‘For the same rea-son I did not tell any-one about the girl. No-need to get caught-up in thes-e things. Not as a for-ei-gner. The police learn every-thing any-way. Soon-er or la-ter.’
‘Not everything,’ said Beer. ‘Some secrets live right under their noses.’
He paused, weary, cast his eyes down on the table. ‘Play something for me,’ he added, pointing to the trumpet. ‘Something quiet.’
Yuu nodded, and gestured for Beer to pass him the case. He watched Beer eagerly while he attached the mouthpiece, then warmed it in one fist. ‘It-is an an-cient instru-ment. Did you-know the Egyp-tians played?’
‘Please,’ said Beer. ‘No lecture on the trumpet. Just play.’
And Yuu did, strains of Händel rising from his horn. Beer listened for a quarter of an hour, unmoved, unmoving, fingers folded in his lap, then suddenly leapt up and ran out of the room without uttering a word. Yuu looked after him, still playing, double-tonguing arpeggios to the rhythm of his receding steps.
6
As Beer sat listening to Yuu’s playing, a strange agitation took hold of him. The numb restraint that had helped Beer through the day dropped away from him and was replaced by a manic sort of energy, inarticulate and hostile to all thought. He ran out, possessed by the need to be by Eva’s side, then faltered before he reached the door to his bedroom that was now her sick chamber. Beer dived into his study instead, found his desk littered with photos, dead bodies staring up at him, heads and limbs outlined by blood. He poured a brandy, sat smoking with the snifter in his hand. A fleck of cigarette ash fell into the glass, hung suspended in the liquid. He sent a finger to its rescue, watched the laws of optics break it at the knuckle, the liquor burning on his skin. A noise startled him: he pushed back the chair, ran into the corridor, stood dog-like, his head cocked to one side, limbs unmoving, in the stillness of the hunt. It was not the first time he’d thought he could hear Eva shift within her room. She had woken him, two nights ago, and he had lain there on the couch, fully expecting her to float into the room, his wife’s lace gown too large for her and tripping up her little feet. Angry now, elated by this sudden clarity of anger, he stormed into her room. The open door threw a shaft of light across the bed. It found the outline of her buttocks and her upper thighs, stiff under the whiteness of the sheet. Deflated, unwilling to abandon his suspicion, he scanned the features of the bedding. Her pillow seemed more crumpled to him than he had left it, the folds around her feet more pronounced and as though recently disturbed. He pounced, dug out her foot, held on to it in search of warmth brought on by recent movement. How often, he wondered, had Otto stood like this, one foot between his angry hands, begging her to be a fraud, or stuck a needle through the surface of her skin just to see if she might flinch? He moved around to the side of the bed, found her face, her green eyes open to his stare.
‘Are you awake?’ he asked, too loud for the room.
She waited a heartbeat before she winked: from tiredness, or from flirtation, or because her sickness had long hollowed her into a cretinous shell.
‘I saw Teuben today. The detective.’
She closed her eyes.
‘He wants a date.’
The phrase appalled him. He wished to see her cry, a sob to rend her listless chest, but all she did was lie there, breathing, eyeballs roaming under her thin lids. She gave no reaction when he dropped his face into the scraggy, inch-long stumps of unwashed hair and rooted around for a place to press his lips. He thought he loved her, but even this seemed false to him, devoid of focus and desire, and he quickly stood to turn her and to change her diaper, his movements gentle, absent, disconnected from his rage.
Two hours later, restless, Dr Anton Beer left his flat and headed out to town. ‘Life is short,’ he said to Eva, as he turned his back on her and stooped to retrieve his hat that had fallen from his fingers.
‘I’m sorry. I’ll be back soon.’
On the way down, midway between the third and second floor, he stopped at the large window that looked out on to the yard there, and was surprised to find Otto’s painted face staring back at him through the chill and rainy night. The greasepaint surprised him. It had been his impression that the mime was out of work. Nor was he sure why he would stand there, playing idly with his knife. The tip of his cigarette flared red as Otto inhaled. Beer turned and continued on his way.
7
Otto took a last drag, then threw the butt out into the yard. He drew the curtains, turned to the mirror, raised the knife. He’d held it like this when he had killed the man, his left fist dug into his jacket: underhand, the grip reversed so that the edge would point up into the wound; his right thumb pressing hard into its base, splitting the skin, his own blood trickling down on to the handle.
It was just as well the knife was blunt.
He swung the knife on a trajectory that started level with his hip, then curved inwards and up: mimed the impact while his left hand reached to grapple with his unseen foe, fingers curled around the collar of his coat. Up ahead, in the gleaming square of the soap-flecked mirror, his movement made a pretty picture, balletic and savage all at once. Otto repeated the motion three or four times until he was sure of its effect: the weight of the slumping body pulling down the drooping blade. It was thus that he had killed his man.
He supposed that one might kill a dog in a manner much the same.
He practised it: raised his left elbow instead of reaching forward with his hand, to protect his throat from its approaching jaws; slipped down to one knee, adjusted the angle of the blade and cut low into the plain where haunch flows into belly. The furry triangle of its retracted cock near snagged the knife as he cut across. Walter. He’d been a boxer, a neighbour had told him, stood hip-high to his master. He tore upwards until the ribcage caught the ripping blade, then dragged the carcass to one side by its hind legs; bent to wipe his hands upon the matted fur. When he rose again to face the mirror he could almost hear the crowd’s applause. His face was a plaster cast of apathy. Otto folded up the knife, placed it on the sink, then sat down on his bed and lit another cigarette. His stomach was grumbling; he had neither food nor beer.
A magazine distracted him. It had always been like this for him: one thought flicking to replace the next, oil-slick with its urgency and bloated with emotion – Otto Frei, eternal citizen of the now. He snatched the magazine from the heap upon the floor. Dried-in beer had crinkled its pages, made them brittle, a corner coming loose in his impatient hand. For a moment he sat entranced – brow knit, spine rolled forward into itself – by the half-page advertisement for a body cream that guaranteed the rapid swelling of the breasts (there was a drawing there, of a long-haired woman s
tanding in profile, her black sweater rising like a leavened clump of dough); then he threw it aside, leapt from the bed, and planted a handstand between washstand and door. Upside down, face flushed beneath its mask of white, he wondered whether Zuzka would come. Since the closing of the club, she had called on him thrice: obliged him to draw the curtains, then threatened she would scream should he approach. She’d watched him, touched him, told him he stank; had raised her skirt once, to rearrange a garter, drinking in his stare. She said she knew now how a woman might please a man using only her mouth; wrinkled her nose then, in deep disgust. On two occasions they had kissed. His hands had searched her body and had felt her break away; his spit wet on her chin.
‘I mustn’t get pregnant,’ she’d said.
And: ‘Tell me how you killed Walter.’
Always her conversation returned to this, the death of the dog, and then to Eva, whose broken body she thought he had sought to avenge. When she had shown him the article outlining Speckstein’s trial, he had read it first with fear, then with a sly sort of excitement. He knew the story: it had struck him a blow when he was a mere child. Their father had talked of it, a mute, crying Eva listening in. She had still been able to move back then, hobbled along dragging her left leg, one arm dead and falling stiffly from its shoulder. It had been six months since the attack, and they’d had hopes she would recover, though none that she’d agree again to earn the family’s bread. For a week or two they’d followed the trial and their father had kept cuttings in the cabinet drawer. After Speckstein’s acquittal in court and his subsequent resignation from his post at the university, the newspapers’ interest faded, as did Otto’s. He was learning to breathe fire then, and to vanish a canary by collapsing its cage and quickly replacing the dead bird with its mate. It was the year he had started to smoke.
When Otto had moved into the building, he’d recognised Speckstein’s name at once; had been beset by a renewed rage at what had happened to his sister; then had dismissed it as the coincidence it was, and had henceforth thought of the Professor only as the eyes and ears of a hostile State from which one did best to hide. Then Beer had shown up with his odd questions, and Zuzka had brought him a page from a newspaper as though it held the answer to some urgent riddle. In the club, when she’d come to visit, he’d paid it no heed and assumed only that she came to him as a woman comes to a man. It was only after he had returned to his rooms that he’d read it, his make-up running down the clogged and stinking drain.
Otto was not a thinking man. ‘Your stomach does your thinking,’ his mother had once told him, hugging him from behind and placing her hands across the broad front of his chest. And also: ‘Your stomach is quite clever.’ She had not praised him often, and so he remembered it, trusted in his stomach and the pressure of his glands, and looked upon all his actions as both necessary and good, with a satisfaction unknown to a more considered man. What became clear to him upon his reading of the newspaper report with its vivid pictures was that Zuzka mistook Eva for the girl Evelyn, who had not dared to speak the name of her tormentor, but mutely pointed at the Professor when asked if he was present in the room. He understood, too, that this was why she thought he’d killed the dog. It was impossible to calculate what would be the harm or benefit of disabusing her of the notion. Denial might cost him her favour, and he feared her retribution, for there were things he sought to hide more damaging than the slaying of a mutt. She professed a hatred for her uncle, to whose party he now found himself invited, and whom he held to wield great power. All he wanted was to live: to eat, and drink, and maybe poke this girl who was so young and pretty, smelled of perfumed soap, with not a callus on her little hand; and not be thrown into some prison, or go tempt bullets in some foreign war. His stomach told Otto to remain silent and admit to nothing. At most he would trade a charade of slaughter for the favours of her fanny, though it was as she had said: She mustn’t get pregnant.
Nor must she complain.
It’d be best if he held his new act in reserve: dog killer, to be performed – if ever – only to a naked audience of one.
A sound reached him, still upended, sent him spinning from his handstand into a tumbler’s roll. Someone stood outside the door. He’d heard some steps upon the stairs, too dimly to be certain whether they were walking up or down, and now they had stopped some inches from his door. Otto did not hesitate. He took hold of the handle and swung open the door, reached to grab her by the wrist and pull her into the room; touch her, kiss her, before she could object. His hand shot forward and hit the brim of a black felt hat that hovered in front of him at the height of his navel. Beneath it, on the square yard or so of landing, kneeled a man, fat, tuxedoed, busy with his left shoelace. The man looked up into the greasepainted face, eyes like tadpoles buried behind cheeks of fat, then re-aligned the angle of his hat.
‘Good-evening,’ he said. ‘I was-just la-cing my shoe.’
Otto found himself laughing in response.
‘You’re the trumpet player. You gave me quite a scare.’
‘Herr Yuu,’ the fat man nodded. ‘You would-not have in your kit-chen some-thing to eat?’
‘To eat?’
‘Yes. Or a glass-of beer per-haps.’
‘I haven’t a thing.’
‘A-pity. I had-no dinner.’
They studied each other a moment longer until Otto turned to snatch his cigarettes from the bed.
‘You want one?’ he asked and proffered the packet.
‘Much o-bliged.’
They stood smoking in the stairwell, eyeing each other’s clothes and recognising each other as performers. When they were done, Herr Yuu offered him his hand. Otto shook it.
‘You are-a clown?’
‘A mime. I don’t speak.’
‘No voice.’ Herr Yuu nodded. ‘Have-you used mu-sic in your-act?’
‘Never.’
‘Per-haps it is some-thing you-should try.’
‘You have your trumpet with you?’
‘All-ways.’
And Yuu came in and sat on his bed; laughed at the girl in the body-cream ad whose breasts looked inflated like balloons, and played a slur, a whisper, then a thump for every step that Otto took and every transformation of his face. He played shyly at first, then with growing confidence, until they moved in perfect harmony and it was to Otto as though it was his body that was playing the trumpet, and that every crease of brow sang with a certain pitch and temper; and little trills to greet each flutter of his glove.
8
And it was this music that greeted her, not the same night but the next, past three o’clock and less than forty hours to the party. It was cold out, no longer raining, the street lamp shedding orange light. The child had a key to the building’s front door, but her fingers were frozen and it took her a while to work the lock and slip into the hallway. There was no hurry to her movements. She had already spent two idle hours in the yard in which they’d found the dog; had lain down briefly (though the ground was muddy) in that sideways sprawl that bared the stomach, thinking with this gesture rather than her head. To think – to speak! – was dangerous, could set on you like the shadow of the Wolf (from the age of four or five she had pictured it as never more than a dark shadow, and in that darkness lived a yellow eye). Her dirty brow was flushed with fever. Cold sores caught the snot upon her upper lip.
The chill had driven her across the street, and drove her on now, into the courtyard.
She looked around. The yard seemed small to her, as though shrunk. Someone had overturned the rock under which she used to hunt for earthworms. She stuck a toe in that place, felt clammy earth and the twisted knot of a big root. A neighbour had chained a bike against the chestnut tree, and a pile of leaves sat clumped together on its seat. On the metal frame which was used to beat the dust off carpets there sat a magpie, chattering. There were no people around.
For that, at least, she was grateful.
She feared this place, feared conversation, words that would m
ake official all she already knew: and yet her eyes strayed upwards, first to Zuzka’s window, then to Anton Beer’s, both of which were dark. As for her father’s kitchen window, she avoided it, for was it not possible that he was still awake, drinking, the curtains open and his merriment visible for all to see? A memory came to her, brisk and tidy like a postcard, of the moment when he’d beaten her for having stolen his knife, then bought her a handkerchief patterned in orange, in black, and in blue. She wore it now, over her hair and ears, though at this instant she pulled it down and thrust it in the pocket of her dress, as though to hide the present was to hide the thought of him (of him, of knives, of darkness shrouding their four windows at which she laboured not to look, and failed, and failed, and failed again).
It was then – one hand in her pocket, eyes darting from the windows to the yard – that she caught the music, that peal of a trumpet coming from an unaccustomed room. The trumpet continued, bent the note into a sort of snort; farted, apologised, whistled away the sudden stench. The girl did not smile. Her naked feet were wrapped in rags.
A light caught her notice, no more than a glimmer, coming from the cellar door. It had been closed but had not locked. The thought of the cellar seemed to cheer the girl, and for an instant her arm described a motion in which the wrist flicked away from her at the height of her chest. It was as though she were striking a match away from her body, or throwing a marble underarm across the yard. Her tongue followed it with a single click. She walked to the door, pushed it open, descended the stairs. There was nobody in the janitor’s workshop, but noise and light spilled from the door at its back. En route, passing the game table, she noticed a wicker cage sitting on top. She ran up to it, and stared with great emotion at the animal that crouched inside, a leaf of lettuce between delicate paws. Five more steps brought her to the half-closed door. She stopped to look through the gap, saw two men, one of them the janitor, both bending low over a bath tub. Their arms were cut off by the bath tub’s rim; they wore aprons, were cursing, shirts upturned to the elbow and beyond. When they straightened, their hands and wrists were slick with dark blood; they wiped it into rags before it had a chance to stain their clothes, though one of them, coughing, held on to a clump of solid, dripping flesh, mottled and spongy, like a large ball of moss. The girl saw it, turned around and left.