The Greed

by Scott Bergstrom

  Someone comes in when I’m in the middle of rinsing, goes into one of the stalls. I don’t see her, but I hear her singing to herself in German. I start pulling the comb through my hair when I hear her call out angrily, Scheisse. Shit.

  “Bist du ok?” I say.

  Silence for a moment, then a sigh. “You got a tampon?” she says.

  “Pad,” I say.

  “Would you mind?”

  I dig through my backpack, find one, then gently tap on the door. It opens a crack and a ruddy hand with bitten-down nails reaches out and takes it.

  I finish up at the sink and wipe up the counter just as she’s coming out.

  She bends over the sink, the tan jacket she’s wearing pulled taut over her wide body. “Danke,” she says.

  I meet her eyes in the mirror. “Wohin gehen Sie?” Where you headed?

  * * *

  North, it turns out, traveling empty through Barcelona to Marseille. There she picks up a load of industrial equipment and passes through Italy and Austria and the Czech Republic before dropping it off in Krakow, Poland. The pad I gave her gets me to France, she says, and after that, meals are on me until I get off at my destination, Vienna.

  Cordula is the driver’s name, and she’s been schlepping across Europe for twenty years, she says. Livestock, car parts, toys, gasoline, frozen vegetables—anything that moves by truck, she’s moved. Her cab smells dankly of banana peels and spilled coffee, but the seat is accommodating and the music, Chopin, soft.

  “Have kids?” I ask as we pull out from the truck stop.

  She raises her finger to her lips and gestures with her head to the sleeping area behind us. “She’s napping,” Cordula whispers.

  “Your daughter?”

  “Another stray,” she says. “Like you.”

  The other stray, it turns out, goes by the name Sabiha. Cordula picked her up outside Malaga, at a gas station, just like me. “Refugee girl,” Cordula says in a low voice. “Syria. Speaks English. Educated.”

  We talk in whispers for a while longer, then somewhere outside Barcelona, I fall asleep to the sound of Cordula humming along with a nocturne.

  I’m out for a solid six hours. Deep, restful sleep, the kind that’s rare these days. I don’t wake up until we’re halfway between Barcelona and the French border.

  “So she’s alive,” Cordula calls out in English when I open my eyes and stretch. “Sabiha, this is—what’s your name?”

  My mouth opens, but no sounds come out. Then I remember. “Judita,” I say.

  “Spanish?” says Cordula.

  “From Uruguay,” I say. “I’m—a student.”

  “I as well am a student.” This from a soft voice behind me. I turn and see Sabiha, a small woman, thin, about my age. She’s sitting with her knees tucked up against her chest on a cot that folds out from the wall. She corrects herself: “I am a student as well.”

  I extend my hand, and she shakes it weakly. “Good to meet you,” I say.

  “Yes. For me also.”

  “What did you study?”

  “Art. In Beirut. Painting,” she says. “Then, in Aleppo, a year of medical school. When there was still a medical school.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “Why? I hated medical school,” she says.

  * * *

  In Marseilles, a bit of rest for Cordula. She’s parked on the road outside the port in a line of other trucks, waiting for their loads of whatever they’d come for. Sabiha and I walk for a while, squinting into the warm Mediterranean sun as we look for a place to buy food. Cordula had given us a list: tampons, coffee, bananas, toothpaste, supplies for sandwiches.

  “Sun feels good,” I say.

  “Yes?” Sabiha says. “I’d rather the rain.”

  I look at her. “Why?”

  She ignores the question and breathes in sharply through her nose as if trying to identify a smell she doesn’t like. “There. A shop.”

  The store is well-stocked and clean. We split up to gather what we need, and I find Sabiha lingering in front of a cooler of soda. She grabs a few tall bottles, tries to fit them in her full basket. I take them from her, put them in my own.

  “I saw tables out front,” she says. “We can sit. If you like.”

  We leave the store with a pair of bags each, settle at one of the tables beside the parking lot, and open two bottles of orange soda. Sabiha takes a long sip, closes her eyes with her face to the sun, as if she’s been waiting for this for a long time.

  “Where are you headed?” I ask.

  “Artists go where it pleases them,” she says, eyes still closed, then spouts a line as if from memory: “Borders are arbitrary lines drawn by patriarchal agents wishing to preserve their power.” She laughs at what might be a joke meant only for herself.

  I smile along with her. “Berlin might be a good fit,” I say. “Lots of artists. Cheap rent.”

  “Mm,” she says. “Maybe. Where go you?”

  “Austria first. To see a family friend. Then Switzerland. Zurich.”

  “Good art in Zurich. A colony, in the west part. I read about it online. Maybe there for me, too.”

  “Expensive in Zurich.”

  “Artists care nothing about money.”

  It isn’t hope I pick up in her voice, but something closer to certainty. That it will all work out. That what she’d seen before—war, the brutal trip across the sea, whatever horrors the refugee camps provided—were aberrations in her mind, not the real Europe.

  I take another sip of soda. It’s cold and sweet and very good.

  * * *

  Fifteen hours to my destination, with Chopin turning to Brahms and then Tchaikovsky for the daytime drive, Cordula humming along, knowing every note. An accident outside Venice and the road work between Villach and Klagenfurt in Austria slow us down, so when she drops me off in a little town just west of Vienna, it’s too late to catch a train.

  Cordula lets me off in front of a plain little hotel. I climb down, thank her again, say good-bye to Sabiha, and watch as the truck pulls away. It stops again fifty meters down the road. The passenger door opens, and Sabiha clambers out, holding a small duffel bag.

  She approaches me, grinning, as Cordula drives off. “I decided,” she says. “Zurich. The art colony there.”

  But the last thing I need is a companion. I tell her I have an errand here in Austria, but she’s welcome to stay the night with me.

  She agrees, and so we take a hotel room together. Thankfully, the clerk doesn’t ask for her papers, only mine. In the room—small, with two twin beds, but very clean and smelling faintly of fresh paint—I shower while she watches television. She’s still watching when I come out, fascinated by a game show in German, a localized version of an American show where people guess some name or phrase and buy vowels to help them along.

  “Do you know German?” she asks, not looking away.

  “Some,” I say.

  “Can you guess this?”

  I look at the screen as I comb my hair: St _ _ t _ _ _ t _ _ c _ t f _ e i, says the game board.

  “No idea,” I say.

  “Come on, guess.”

  I keep combing and sit on the end of the other bed. A contestant, a heavyset man in a suit who looks like an accountant, guesses d. A pretty blond in a sequined dress turns a letter in the first word.

  “Stadtluft Macht Frei,” I say.

  Sabiha looks at me with delighted eyes. “Yes?” she says. “What does it mean?”

  “It’s—I don’t know. An expression. ‘City air makes you free.’”

  “Why does city air—have this property?”

  I rack my brain, trying to remember the context, or even where I read it. “In medieval Germany, if a peasant could escape to a big city and live there a year, they’d no longer belong to the landowner. They’d be free.”

  She smiles at the TV screen. “I like this idea.”

  “I do too,” I say.

  * * *

  She doesn’t slee
p but pretends to. I lie awake, facing her in the other bed, and watch her back lifting the blanket up and down too quickly. Traffic rumbles by outside all night in a constant low rumble, but it’s the soothing kind of noise, like a waterfall. It explains why I don’t hear her crying until a long time after she must have started.

  I close my eyes and try to ignore it: her problem, not mine, I tell myself. But I know the nature of this particular way of crying, its qualities and causes. It sounds soft, easily defeated, but it’s not. It’s the sobbing that comes from hopelessness and exhaustion. I’d done it every night my first six months in Montevideo, until I discovered alcohol.

  “You okay?” I whisper.

  She freezes under her blanket, holding perfectly still.

  “Sabiha, you okay?”

  A long silence, then, “Fine.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The pain radiates from her like heat, and I feel it all the way over on my side of the room. “Yes,” she says. “Fine.”

  * * *

  In the morning, we both have breakfast at the train station, croissants and coffee, all of it pretty good for train station food. She’s bright and hopeful again, checking the clock on the wall over and over, waiting for the 9:17. That’s the way our kind of sadness is, though. The worst of it always comes at night. Whatever hopefulness you can pull together in daylight is never enough to get you through a full twenty-four hours.

  She gives me her mobile number, and I promise to call.

  “Zurich.” She grins as if the idea were impossible, like Shangri-La. “I’ll be with much experience when you come. I can show you about.”

  “Yes,” I say. “You can show me about.”

  An electronic chime signals the arrival of a train, and I rise, throw my backpack over my shoulder. “See you,” I say as I give her a hug.

  “Very soon,” she says.

  Eighteen

  The train pulls away and I’m alone on the platform. Not much of a station here, just a ticket booth, a sterile waiting room with benches, and a coffee cart already closed for the day. I take a pamphlet from a dusty display—the chamber of commerce welcomes you to Hareth bei Bärenbad. Hot springs, good for relieving arthritis and gout. Hiking trails, breathe the healthful air. St. Michael’s Lutheran church, purify the soul. There’s a little map on the back, and I find the road where the Pension Alexandra is located.

  Late afternoon light reflects off the street, and a somber sedan passes by, shushing over pavement silver with the rain that only moments ago stopped falling. It’s Austria here, but Bavarian in spirit. Steeply gabled buildings with stucco walls and exposed beams, two old men chatting on a corner, both wearing russet-colored lederhosen and green caps with feathers—not a costume, just what they wear. If I have my bearings right, Hareth bei Bärenbad isn’t too far from Berchtesgaden, where Hitler took his summers, breathing in the cool air scented with pine, every bit as healthful as the brochure promises.

  Only two or three shops are still open—just like Valencia, it’ll be another month before the tourists start coming—and what few people there are on the streets look me over as I pass. I’m younger than all of them by at least four decades, and my presence here in the off-season is a mild curiosity. A small market on the corner catches my eye. It has shelves out front, piled high with squash and potatoes and apples. Next to the front door, there’s a rust stain on the sidewalk in a perfect circle, as if something had stood in that spot for a long time and now is gone. A signpost? No, says something in my mind. Something else. For just a half second, I hear a sound in my memory, laughter, and a tune played over a loudspeaker. A memory mixed with something imagined.

  A woman in a long dress and thick-soled sneakers comes out of the shop, hunched over her cane. There’s a loaf of brown bread just visible in the burlap shopping bag she carries. She nods at me; I nod back.

  Then the sidewalk ends, as does the town, and I’m walking along the shoulder of a road. The hill climbs and the road winds, disappearing at each curve behind overgrown pine trees heavy with rain. How the hell did my dad ever think to hide something here?

  * * *

  In time, I see a little break in the forest, a gravel path barely wider than a car. A small wooden sign, the words PENSION ALEXANDRA painted in white, is posted next to it. Even on foot, I barely see it. Someone driving would have to know it’s there. I turn up the steep path, leaning into the climb, my boots crunching on the wet stone. Then the inn comes into view. Gables with blunted points and walls of weathered wooden shingles rise up grandly from the forest floor. A few of the windows are lit, rectangles of yellow cut into the shape of diamonds. I expect a cuckoo to come bursting through a balcony door on the second level and chirp the time. But, instead, the door opens and a woman in a white bathrobe appears. She lights a cigarette, leans on the balcony railing, and taps her ash into a pot of purple flowers hanging over the edge. I can smell a fire burning, and something layered over it—baking pastries. Only a few cars are parked on the unpaved lot out front: a little red roadster, a black BMW just smaller than a limousine, a boxy SUV in white. People with money escaping for a midweek weekend.

  In the lobby, the smell of baking pastries is stronger, and in a little parlor off to the side, a maid—hat, frilly apron, the whole thing—is vacuuming a faded rug. At a reception counter at the end of the room, an old man with a head of silver hair is bent over a ledger, writing figures in a column. He’s handsome, north of seventy, trim and elegant in a spotless black suit.

  “Guten Abend,” I say.

  “Abend,” he says coolly without looking up.

  “I’m looking for the owner,” I say. “Walter Kahn.”

  The writing in the ledger stops, the nib of the pen forming a broadening black period where it came to rest on the paper. He looks up at me over the top of silver eyeglasses. “Just missed him,” he says.

  “I can wait,” I say.

  “He’ll be a while,” the man says.

  “I’m not in a hurry.”

  He studies me as he screws the cap onto the pen. “Gone for the night. Perhaps I could be of assistance.”

  “I was told to ask for him specifically.”

  Something flashes on the man’s face. A grimace. Anger. Curiosity. “Then why don’t I take you to him,” he says. “You may call me Herr Mucha.”

  * * *

  The loden-green cape over his shoulders snaps in the wind as he climbs the path through the forest. It’s dusk now, the light growing thinner with each passing minute. His walking stick taps twice on a root jutting through the soil, a warning.

  We hike for what must be a kilometer along a trail that grows narrower and darker with each step. Thick, ancient forest surrounds us. Fairy-tale forest. Talking-wolf-disguised-as-grandmother forest. The wind whistles and groans through it, swinging branches through the air, and it’s only my reflexes that keep the woody fingers from slashing at my skin. You’re not welcome here tonight, the forest seems to say. From somewhere nearby, I hear something enormous and powerful crashing through the brush, and my body tenses in anticipation of the attack that, in any event, doesn’t come. The sound bleeds off into the distance as the fearsome whatever moves away from us.

  “Stag,” the silhouette of Herr Mucha says. “If Walter were here, we’d eat like kings for a month.”

  The trail ends at a clearing at the top of the hill. The light is hard blue, and there’s enough of it that I can see the clearing ends abruptly at the edge of a cliff. There’s a valley below, and more forested hills on the other side. I turn back to Herr Mucha expectantly, but he’s standing at the end of the trail, hands resting on his walking stick.

  “You wanted me to take you to Walter,” he says.

  I look around, then see the punch line hiding in the shadows of the pine trees on the far end of the clearing. Two gravestones sit side by side, with precarious piles of small stones atop one of them. I approach, not wanting it to be true, not wanting the gravestone to say what I know it says. I f
all to my knees, lean in close, and read the inscription. WALTER KAHN. I pinch my eyes shut.

  “Four hundred thirty-three,” he says.

  “What?”

  “How many stones there are.” There’s an implicit sigh in his voice, mourning with the edge worn down. “I bring one every day.”

  I’ve missed him by over a year.

  Herr Mucha approaches me from behind. “The other grave is mine. For someday. Soon, maybe. Or not.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, meaning it.

  “Why? Did you love him?” His voice is stern again, coming from very close behind me. “There are those who love us. And there are those who want something from us. You are the second, I think.”

  I nod, slowly, admitting guilt for whatever sin this is. “I’m looking for—for information. It was given to Herr Kahn. Left with him by someone, a mutual friend.”

  “Whatever secrets Walter kept, they are with him.”

  “I understand,” I say. “I’m very sorry to have disturbed you.”

  A firm tap of the walking stick on the ground. “No, they are with him. There. Beneath. Buried.”

  “In the—?”

  “Good God, no. Just half a meter down. Papers. Myself, I would have burned them, but the old fool insisted they remain intact. Promises and oaths, he said. Someone would come, he said.”

  A pang of hope lifts my stomach, and I run my fingers over the soil. Rocky. Packed hard. But only half a meter—I could do it with my hands.

  “Who did he say was coming for them?” I say.

  Herr Mucha clears his throat, lets out a little chuckle. “The Bloom girl, he said. The one who used to come here.”

  I blink at him through the darkness.

  “And here you are, as predicted,” says Herr Mucha. “You look just like your mother, you know.”

  * * *

  Herr Mucha sits on his own gravestone, watching as I dig. A very slow, very cold rain patters against the dirt as I scrape my fingers through the soil, my nails catching on rocks and twigs. It occurs to me I’m burrowing like a dog, throwing the dirt behind me, between my legs. Is there a polite way to do this, desecrate a grave?