by Dan Vyleta
10
It was Frau Vesalius, not the police, who came for him the next morning. Almost despite himself, Beer had fallen asleep: had seen off the girl, then lain down next to Eva, eyes closed, holding her hand, and fallen asleep. When the bell rang and he ran to the door, there clung to him still a snatch of his dream: his wife in a smoking jacket, beating Teuben in a game of chess. Two painted fingernails, swooping down upon his queen. Beer opened the door, smiling a little, then turned around to check his kitchen clock. It was a little after nine.
Beer had expected someone earlier; he thought it good of the Professor to give him warning before sending for the police. There was an odd agitation in the housekeeper’s features that he had never observed in them before, but Beer was too preoccupied to pay it much heed. She gave him no time to wash his hands and face. ‘You must come at once, at once,’ she kept repeating, and ran ahead down the broad flight of stairs. When they reached the flat, he was surprised to see that she had left the door wide open. Nor did Vesalius bother to close it after them: she simply ran on, through the entrance to Speckstein’s living room, and turned right into his bedroom without pausing to knock. The curtains were drawn and the room was lit only by the bedside lamp. Speckstein was in bed, half buried under blankets, the legs sprawled out at awkward angles. His eyes were open, frothy spit was dangling from his chin. In his struggle he had knocked over a glass of water on the nightstand; it had soaked through the pages of a leather-bound volume of Klopstock’s verse.
‘He usually rises early. I came in to look five minutes ago. Is he –?’
Beer jumped forward, found a pulse.
‘He’s had a stroke. Call an ambulance.’
Vesalius left the room, and Beer began talking to Speckstein, the reassuring, sober queries of his office. He was answered only by a moan.
The ambulance arrived after ten or twelve minutes. Beer was granted permission to ride along. At the hospital, he sat for an hour in the waiting room, then went outside to breakfast on a coffee and a salted bun. On his return, the chief physician agreed to see him. Gruffly, in the blunt shorthand used among colleagues, he confirmed that Speckstein had suffered a severe stroke. The right side was paralysed, he had lost the power of speech, and there was a possibility of brain damage. For now, he was to remain under observation. When asked whether he would contact the next of kin, Beer replied that he would entrust the task to Speckstein’s housekeeper. The man nodded his agreement, then shook Beer’s hand.
‘Speckstein,’ he said as he was leading the doctor out the door. ‘Not the same Speckstein who raped that little girl some years ago?’
‘He was acquitted,’ Beer replied stiffly.
‘Got away with it, eh? Well, now the chickens have come home to roost.’
He closed the door after Beer.
Outside, in the hospital gardens, the sun was shining. Beer bought a piece of pastry in the bakery across the street, then sat down upon one of the park benches, and stared up into the sky. At one point he started laughing and laughed so violently that he spat pastry crumbs all over his chest. He was thinking of a pair of painted fingernails, slowly converging upon the ivory features of a chiselled queen.
Part IV
Whispers, Echoes
A sound wave is a longitudinal wave whose speed of diffusion through air at twenty degrees Celsius is approximately three hundred and forty-three metres per second. As it passes through air, molecular friction and related effects begin to absorb the sound until it leaves the range audible to human ears. If initiated within an enclosed space, the wave will be both reflected and absorbed by the enclosing walls, in proportions that depend on the walls’ physical properties. Absorbent materials such as glass wool will convert the sound wave’s energy into heat and have a dampening effect; polished concrete, by contrast, will bounce back the wave with minimal absorption and can, in specially designed spaces, be utilised to direct and focus the sound towards a specific place within the room. Individual objects whose natural frequency of vibration matches the frequency of the sound wave (or one of the wave frequencies belonging to its harmonic series) will absorb the wave’s energy and register a corresponding increase of vibration in a process known as ‘material resonance’; in specific cases this may lead to an amplification of the sound and/or to the destruction of said object. If the enclosed space within which the sound wave is released is connected to other enclosed spaces through a system of open pipes such as those found in ventilation and heating systems, the pipes’ diameter is likely to match the amplitude of specific pitches of sound, and thus allow for their easy entry and transmission. In the case of cylindrical tubes this may result in their undistorted transmission across surprising distances.
1
Professor Josef Hieronymus Speckstein did not recover his powers of speech. The right half of his body remained paralysed. After two days of near-total immobility, he summoned sufficient strength to reach for a pencil and a piece of paper left on his bedside table for that purpose, but his left hand was so shaky, and so unaccustomed to writing, that nobody could make any sense of his wild squiggles. Perhaps they were nothing but squiggles: it was possible he had lost a substantial part of his mental faculties. Faced with the nurse’s incomprehension, he closed his eyes and whimpered like a dog.
Six days after his initial attack, Speckstein suffered a second, more violent stroke. Resuscitation was attempted but proved futile. The physician on duty did not reprimand the nurse when he overheard her telling her colleague that it was ‘just as well the old pervert is dead’. He signed the death certificate at 4.57 in the morning. He had three more hours on his shift.
The funeral was splendid, if small. The Gauleiter and Mayor both sent flowers. Of the guests who had attended his party ten days previously, only Dr Anton Beer was present. The Professor’s brother, Ernst, came by himself and left no sooner had he settled all formalities. He explained to the priest that his daughter was very sick; otherwise he would have come to sit with his brother during his final moments on this earth. They shook hands by the side of the fresh grave. In the air between them hung the winter’s first snow.
Frau Vesalius was also present at the funeral. She is not reported to have cried. Some weeks after the ceremony, she was pleased to receive a letter from Speckstein’s executor informing her that the deceased had left her a sizeable inheritance in his will. She opened the first bank account she had ever had, rented lodgings of her own, and indulged her taste for pastries to the full. Within three months she had put on fifteen pounds. They suited her. Her face filled out and lost some of its habitual sourness of demeanour.
2
Zuzka arrived home to the news of her uncle’s stroke. No sooner had he greeted his daughter than her father announced he must leave for Vienna the next morning. Zuzka’s lungs had cleared up the hour she had left the city behind, but that very night the numbness in her lower body spread to such a degree that, by the early hours of the morning, she was no longer able to move either of her legs. Her father postponed the journey, then postponed it again when her health deteriorated further. A specialist was called in from Graz, who diagnosed a neurological disorder caused by an untreated infection. He was liberal in his abuse of ‘whatever quack’ had looked after her in Vienna, and gave detailed instructions to the young doctor who had recently opened a general practice in their neighbourhood. As for Zuzka’s erstwhile shortness of breath, the specialist blamed an allergy, perhaps to mildew. When questioned, Zuzka remembered a patch of blackened wallpaper by the side of her bed.
Two months into Zuzka’s treatment, the young doctor who looked after her suggested that her recent bouts of nausea had a cause other than her disease. Zuzka burst into tears when she received this item of news, and the young man sat by her bedside and held her hand in sympathy and consolation. When he went home that evening he carried with him the memory of her smile and the many glimpses of her naked flesh he had caught throughout the period of treatment. These confused him and he spent
a sleepless night. In the morning, he spilled the hot cup of coffee his landlady had brought him and suffered an unpleasant burn on his inner thigh.
The next time the young doctor visited Zuzka, she confessed to him some details of the rape she had endured. He believed her. He wanted to believe: the doctor was not a handsome man. It took him all of three days to declare himself. They married in haste. Once her condition had become obvious, some wagging tongues in town claimed that the doctor had screwed her while she was too sick to object. Bride and groom stayed up late on their wedding night, playfully haggling over the unborn’s future name.
3
Otto and Lieschen made their way to Innsbruck, then on to Bregenz and Dornbirn. From there, the former mime boldly approached the border, but turned tail when he caught sight of the border guards, their holstered guns hanging from their belts. Unconvinced that his papers would pass muster, and unsure what story to tell them concerning the little girl, Otto moved south to Hohenems, where he made cautious enquiries about crossing the border by some other means. After a day of nervous questions, Otto found a farmer who agreed to smuggle them across in the back of his van. The man took his money and shook his hand. They ate well that night, pork sausage and mash, the girl smiling, chewing, one fist buried in the fabric of his coat.
On the night before their journey, they slept in the farmer’s barn. Otto heard the police while they were still out in the yard. It was snowing outside. He sat up, pulled all the money from his pocket, and slipped it down the side of one sock. Next he tore up Beer’s letter and stuffed the fragments in his mouth. He was still chewing paper when the farmer led the inspector up the ladder to the loft. Lieschen woke only when the policeman shook her by the leg. Otto bent to kiss her hair before being led off.
They were separated at once. Otto was questioned, his papers scrutinised. They wired to Innsbruck, then to Vienna, but neither his description nor his fingerprints matched anyone on their wanted list. Faced with the inspector’s questions and threats, he stuck to silence. The only time he spoke was to deny that he had wished to go across the border. The farmer had quite simply misunderstood.
They put him in a cell and charged him with vagrancy. A policeman, posing as a fellow bum, was placed in the cell with him and instructed to pump Otto for information. The man’s hands were dirty, but when he took off his shoes to sleep, Otto noticed that there was not a shred of dirt underneath his toenails. The next day, annoyed by the man’s clumsy attempts to ingratiate himself, Otto broke his nose and shoulder by throwing him into the wall of their cell.
The regional court tried him for vagrancy, assault, and the carrying of forged identification papers. A biometric examination revealed him to be hereditarily tainted; legal records unearthed a prior conviction for assault. He went to a labour camp rather than prison. After nineteen months of incarceration, he was given the option of joining a penal military unit. By October that year, he was sitting in a trench outside Leningrad, a minute cog in the machinery of Operation Barbarossa.
Lieschen, meanwhile, had remained obstinately silent and was transferred to a Bregenz orphanage. On the night of her arrival, the train was delayed due to a derailing further up the line. Lieschen arrived too late to join the other children for their dinner, and was brought straight to the dormitory. The big room held about thirty cots. Each had a number. The blanket she was given scratched, and when she woke the next morning, a ring of girls had collected around her and were laughing and pointing at her hunchback.
In accordance with institutional policy Lieschen was tested for idiocy at the end of that week. The test was administered by a slim woman of fifty, her hair half hidden under a nurse’s cap. Her face was wrinkled and drawn, but she had the most remarkable eyes, green and lively and kind. Lieschen was asked to answer a list of questions. The first of these read: ‘Can you name the twelve months of the year?’ The nurse cautioned her that it was of the utmost importance that she answer all the questions to the best of her abilities. But Lieschen just sat there, staring up into those eyes, and a shy, fleeting smile brushed over her lips.
4
On the day of Speckstein’s funeral, Dr Anton Beer ran into Yuu, the trumpeter, as the latter came walking into the building. Beer asked Yuu for a word. Their conversation was brief.
‘You gave me up,’ Beer complained.
‘I’m a-fraid so.’
‘Will you do it again?’
‘I do-not like to med-dle.’
‘You didn’t seem to mind the first time.’
‘I did-mind, Dr Beer. But I-was hung-ry and I nee-ded to find work.’
‘Did Speckstein help you with that?’
‘He gave-me a letter of intro-duc-tion. It-has proved use-ful.’
‘For what it’s worth, I did not kill him.’
Yuu bowed and brushed past him without another word.
That afternoon, Beer decided to teach Eva how to speak. One at a time, he held up the letters of the alphabet he had drawn on to pieces of cardboard, and instructed her to blink when he reached the one she wished to use. The idea had come to him several weeks previously, but he had put it into practice only with reluctance. Now he embarked on it methodically, going through the cards with great patience and then a second time, thinking that she might have missed a cue. But Eva just stared at him, big solemn eyes. After he had worked his way through the alphabet a third time, Beer gathered up the cards and left the room.
The next day Beer threw the hand-drawn letters in the bin. He did not mention them again.
Beer called his wife. Because he was afraid that all foreign calls were being monitored, he used a public telephone and called collect. A man answered and told him she was out. When he enquired whether a little girl had arrived along with his letter, the stranger told him she had not. He wrote to his wife that evening, and two weeks later received his wife’s answer informing him that neither Otto nor Lieschen had made it through.
On the 3rd of January 1940, Eva died. It was a time of dark nights: a total blackout had been ordered for the city in anticipation of bombs that would not fall for another four years. Eva had caught the flu Beer had contracted over Christmas. She succumbed in a matter of days. He had never much cared for the phrase, but now he felt its comfort: ‘She had lost all will to live.’ Getting rid of her body proved surprisingly easy. Beer claimed she was a vagrant whom he had found on his doorstep the previous night; by the time he had examined her, it was clear that there was no more need for an ambulance. There had been no identity card and nobody came to claim the body; one assumed she may have been a Jew. Many a colleague commended Beer’s charity when he agreed to cover the funeral expenses.
Eva was buried on the 5th of January. Afterwards, stripping the bed, and flipping the mattress, Beer discovered underneath the iron bed-frame a bottle of beer that had rolled there on the night of Teuben’s death. He sat on the floor, clutching the bottle in both his hands. It was only then that he allowed himself to weep.
All week he lay awake at night and listened to the sound of Eva walking up and down the flat. She never spoke to him. He spent many hours wishing that one day she would.
Beer took to drinking in a bar. Even so, he rarely got drunk. In November of 1940 he was sitting there, clutching a letter. He was joined at his table by a veteran of the Great War whose split-open skull had been mended with the help of a steel plate. They exchanged greetings, then drank their beers in silence. After a while, Beer started to cry. The man looked at him with interest.
‘It’s nothing,’ Beer told him. ‘I’m suffering from reminiscences.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Nothing. Something I read. In a book that’s now forbidden.’
The letter he was holding was his notice of conscription. He was to report to the barracks in Krems the next day at noon. When he locked up the door to his apartment early the next morning, he felt a weight shift from his shoulders. Behind the door a pair of naked feet walked steadily from bedroom to waiting room a
nd back, a somnambulist’s step, careless and light.
5
Four months after the laundry boy’s cast had come off, he was arrested for the attempted rape of a fifteen-year-old girl who was taking a walk in the Volksgarten at dusk. After a week spent in investigative custody he was let go again. The girl’s account contained serious contradictions; it was discovered she was sexually active and had expected to meet a lover in the park. Police records indicated that the laundry boy had been investigated before but did not specify the charge. The two detectives who had dealt with his case were both dead. One had fallen out of a window, the other had died of cancer of the bowel.
In November of 1940, on the same day Dr Beer received his conscription notice, the laundry boy, too, was asked to present himself at the barracks in Krems. They met in the exercise yard. Neither of them acknowledged their acquaintance. Despite being described as belonging to ‘inferior stock’, the laundry boy soon distinguished himself as a soldier and was awarded the Iron Cross. He was active in the eastern campaign and transferred to a special commando. His precise duties remain unknown.
6
In the months from September 1939 to May 1940, the janitor spent an average of one night a week making sausages. Neurath supplied the meat, blood and intestines. The factory he was watching at night was adjacent to a knacker’s yard. He was able to steal a few buckets’ worth of meat a week. The janitor supplied the workspace. Theirs was a cottage industry, small-scale and inefficient. But the economics were simple. Meat had been rationed virtually from the beginning of the war. With increasing demand on the various fronts, and an increasing number of farm workers conscripted into the Wehrmacht, domestic supply would shrink. The janitor had seen it happen before: during the Great War, considerable profits had been made on the black market. The two men agreed to hoard their sausage until prices were at their peak. Only occasionally would they sell off a few pounds. Anton Beer received a kilo of pepper salami on Christmas Eve, in grateful acknowledgement of his discretion: he accepted the parcel while feverish with flu. Frau Vesalius bought ten marks’ worth in November 1939 in order to supply her employer’s party with sufficient food. Neurath took a pound or two along whenever he went whoring. The janitor traded sausages for schnapps. He had a nephew who had set up a still in his garden shed, and had contacts with a farmer who supplied him with potatoes and a little grain.