The Devil's Sanctuary

by Marie Hermanson

  “Not in the conventional sense, obviously,” he went on. “But she’s got something, don’t you think? Did you notice how big her backside was? All the women born round here are like that. You can tell at first glance if a woman is actually from the mountains or has moved here. Well, I’m talking about the ones whose families have lived here for generations, of course. They’ve all got an excess of subcutaneous fat, mainly concentrated around their backsides and hips. The men are thickset as well, but you see it most clearly in the women. Do you know why that is?”

  “Why you see it more clearly in the women? Probably because you look at them more than the men, I suppose,” Daniel said.

  “Very funny. I mean what makes people up here in isolated mountain regions fatter than people down on the plains? It’s the same in all the mountainous parts of the world. But not just there. People on islands, in the Pacific for instance, or deep in the jungles of South America, exhibit the same solid, fleshy body shape. Whereas people who live on plains, like the Masai in East Africa, for instance, are tall and thin. Why? Well,” Max said, pointing at Daniel with his fork, “when there’s a famine, the people on the plains can walk to new areas to find food. People with long legs, the ones who are most mobile, survive, while the little fat ones are left sitting on their big asses and starve to death. But in isolated places there’s no advantage to having long legs, because you’re still not going to get anywhere. On an island, or in thick jungle or snowed-in alpine valleys, it’s no use being agile. The ones who survive periods of famine are the ones who have an extra layer of fat to live off.”

  Daniel nodded. He always had trouble keeping up with Max when his thoughts wandered off into uncharted territory like this.

  “That sounds plausible.” In an effort to shift the conversation into calmer waters he added, “This trout really is very good. It seems very fresh. Do you suppose they caught it nearby?”

  “The trout? Of course. In the rapids. Who knows, it might have been me who caught it.”

  “You?”

  “Or someone else. I catch more than I can eat, so I give the rest to the restaurant. But it’s interesting, isn’t it? In this age of globalization. That genetic predispositions like that still survive. You can travel all round the world, but nature has still programmed you to live in an alpine valley where you might be forced to live off the fat you’ve built up. It’s quite attractive. Women with big backsides, I mean. It piques your imagination. Don’t you think?”

  He glanced at the waitress, who was passing their table on her way to the solitary diner at the corner table.

  “Maybe.”

  The waitress cleared the man’s table and went past them again with her hands full of dishes. Max quickly stuck out his hand and gave her a light slap on the buttock. She turned round with a slight grimace but said nothing.

  “That was completely uncalled for,” Daniel said disapprovingly.

  Max laughed.

  “A madman has to permit himself a few moments of madness. You have to live up to expectations. It’s all about knowing what the boundaries are. Otherwise they’ll have you strapped down in a straitjacket before you know it, your life of luxury replaced by the torture chamber in the cellar.”

  “Is that true?” Daniel said, then realized it was a joke.

  To cover up his mistake he quickly went on: “So why are you really here, Max? You seem to be doing very well.”

  Max’s taunting smile vanished. He stretched, then said seriously: “I’m working in Italy these days, maybe you know? With olive oil.”

  “No, I didn’t know, actually,” Daniel said in surprise.

  “It’s a tough business. Particularly for a foreigner like me. I’ve done pretty well, if I do say so myself, but success has its costs. It’s not exactly a forty-hour week. Recently I’ve been working round the clock.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said quietly. He knew what it usually meant when Max worked round the clock.

  “I hit the wall, as the saying goes. The same’s true of most people here at the clinic. The working environment for business executives is completely inhumane these days. And I’m not talking about Sweden here, which is a kindergarten compared to the rest of Europe. Down here no one manages to stay at the top for long. No one talks about it openly, but most people fall apart every so often. It’s built into the system. We’re like Formula One cars, we have to go into the pits at regular intervals to change tires and take on more fuel. Then we’re ready to get going again.”

  Max made a rolling gesture with his finger and laughed, pleased with his own imagery.

  “So this is the pit stop?” Daniel said, looking round the restaurant, where they were now the only guests.

  “Yep. Himmelstal is a pit stop. Possibly the best in Europe. Now for coffee and something stronger.” Max slapped his hand down on the table. “But not here,” he added. “I know a nice little place down in the village. Come on.”

  He screwed up his napkin and stood.

  Daniel looked round for the waitress. He felt like he should pay for dinner but wasn’t sure how things worked here.

  “In the village?” Daniel said. “Can you really leave the clinic just like that?”

  Max laughed.

  “Of course. That’s the whole point of Himmelstal. Put it on my tab, darling,” he called to the invisible waitress, then marched toward the exit.

  8

  MOSELLE WINE. Cool, refreshing, like it had been drawn from a well deep in the earth.

  Gisela Obermann wished she still had the Bohemian crystal glasses she’d inherited, instead of the dull, mass-produced glasses of the staff quarters. But she’d given the old glasses away to charity, and they had been sold to raise funds. She had given everything away when she got the chance to work at Himmelstal. She had gotten rid of her beautiful apartment and put an end to a damaging long-term relationship. The only things she kept were a few decent items of clothing, some psychiatric textbooks, and her cat, Snowflake.

  “I’ve burned my boats,” she said to herself.

  She loved that expression. In the past generals would burn their boats so that their men wouldn’t be tempted to set off for home when the fighting got too tough. She could see the burning boats before her, flames reflected in the water. A beautiful, terrifying sight.

  Gisela lay down on her bed and curled up beside her long-haired cat, breathing in its faint, clean smell. Unlike dogs, cats always smelled good. She’d have liked to have a cat-scented perfume.

  The cat purred, its soft white coat vibrating gently against her face.

  The window was ajar. A blackbird was singing outside. She could hear voices and the sound of metal scraping against stone. Then she picked up the smell of burning charcoal. Yet another staff party. She wasn’t thinking of going.

  She closed her eyes, letting the cat’s fur caress her cheek and pretending it was Doctor Kalpak’s hand.

  She would never see Doctor Kalpak at a staff party. He didn’t go to parties. She had shaken his hand when she arrived at the clinic and introduced herself to him. She had never forgotten the touch of his hand. Slender and brown, with the longest fingers she’d ever seen. It was more like an independent object than a hand. Some sort of animal. A quick, agile, silky animal. A weasel, maybe.

  His lilting accent fit in well up here in the mountains, soft, with a rising note to it, like Austrian or Norwegian. But his expressive hands were his true language: When you saw them you almost forgot to listen to what he was saying.

  Gisela Obermann had let go of most of her dreams. One by one she had let them fall and drift off on the harsh winds of life. But the dream of one day feeling Doctor Kalpak’s hands on her naked body remained, and she would take it out and enjoy it when she was alone.

  She shut her eyes again and felt the wine drawing swirling patterns in her brain. She remembered that Max had had a visit today. From his brother. Max was the only one of her clients who still gave her a glimmer of hope. What would a visit like this do to him?
<
br />   The cat’s purring motor speeded up.

  “I love animals because they are alive without being human.” Who was it who said that? Mayakovsky? Dostoyevsky?

  Gisela went back to thinking about Doctor Kalpak’s hands. Two silken weasels padding over her body. One on her breasts, and the other on her stomach and down between her thighs.

  9

  IT WAS DARK outside now. Widely spaced lights lit up the paths in the park surrounding the clinic. Max and Daniel were heading down the hillside toward the village.

  “You seem to be able to come and go from the clinic as you like,” Daniel remarked.

  “Of course. The clients here would never accept anything else. As long as I go to bed like a good boy each night, I can do pretty much whatever I want during the day.”

  They had reached the bottom of the slope and come to a narrow paved road where the lighting was brighter and more regular, like a jogging track. A funny little electric cart, bright yellow, was coming toward them with a gentle hum. The driver said hello as he glided past. He was wearing some sort of uniform, like a janitor or hotel porter, and there was a similarly dressed man sitting beside him in the cramped vehicle. Daniel guessed that they belonged to the clinic staff. Absentmindedly and without comment, Daniel returned the man’s greeting, then quickly crossed the road.

  They passed a few houses, went round a bend, and suddenly found themselves, without Daniel actually realizing how it had happened, in the center of the village.

  Houses with flower-covered balconies surrounded a small square with a well at its center. There was a cozy glow from the leaded-glass windows, and from somewhere there came the sound of voices and a dog barking, echoing between the rocky walls of the narrow valley. It was strange to think that people lived their lives in this fairy-tale world.

  Max turned off into an alley and stopped in front of a brown house set in a small garden where colored lanterns hung from the trees.

  “Hannelores Bierstube,” Max explained rather unnecessarily, seeing as the name was written above the doorway like icing, in looping, ornate white lettering.

  “And there was me thinking it was the witch’s gingerbread house,” Daniel said.

  “Who knows?” Max said. “Are you brave enough to go in?”

  “I’d love a beer. Let’s forget the idea of coffee and liqueur. A large tankard of cold German beer is just what I need. Come on, let’s go in. It looks nice.”

  “That’s what Hansel and Gretel said too. Well, if you like,” Max said, gesturing to Daniel to go first.

  It looked like Max was a regular customer in the gingerbread house, because as soon as they got in he settled down in a corner of the dimly lit room, then turned toward the bar and ordered beer for them both without saying a word, by just holding two fingers in the air. His order was received with a nod by a thickset older woman, and a moment later she was on her way over to them with two huge tankards. She set them down firmly on the table. She had arms as big as a lumberjack’s and a mouth like a bulldog.

  “What did I say?” Daniel whispered with a shudder. “Do you think she’s going to gobble us up?”

  Max shrugged.

  “I’ve been okay so far. I think she’s waiting until I get a serious beer belly first. She usually pinches my waist to see how it’s coming along. Well, cheers, bro! It’s really good to have you here!”

  They raised their tankards.

  “I feel the same. Much better than I thought, in fact. I never imagined—,” Daniel said, but was interrupted by an unexpected “cuckoo,” and only now did he notice the large cuckoo clock on the wall beside them.

  The clock played out an entire little scenario. In addition to the cuckoo popping out of its door, there was an old man chopping wood and an old woman trying to milk a goat. But the goat kept kicking its hind legs, knocking over the little pot, and the old woman kept having to stand it up again.

  “Damn,” Daniel said, taken aback, once the performance was over and the cuckoo had disappeared behind its door.

  Max seemed untroubled. He was gulping his beer greedily, and some of the froth ran down onto the table. A skinny little man in an apron with thin back-combed hair appeared out of the gloom like a ghost and wiped the table with a cloth. As the man leaned over into the light of the candle Daniel thought that his cheekbones stuck out like a skeleton’s.

  “I take it that was Hansel?” he said after the man had withdrawn with a silent bow. “He’s doing a good job of not letting himself get too fat.”

  “There’s a Gretel as well. I don’t know if she’s here today,” Max said, looking round the room. “Maybe she’s been gobbled up already. It wouldn’t surprise me. She’s fairly tasty. If I didn’t have my little Giulietta I might have been tempted to have a little nibble.”

  “Who’s Giulietta? Your latest conquest?”

  “Latest, last, and only. A stunningly beautiful twenty-two-year-old olive farmer’s daughter from Calabria. She still lives at home with her parents, but we’re engaged.”

  “A twenty-two-year-old! But you’re thirteen years older than her,” Daniel objected.

  “That’s not unusual in Calabria. Her parents are very happy with me. I’m mature, experienced, and comfortably off.”

  “And burned out. In a rehab clinic. But perhaps you haven’t told them that?”

  “No, I’ve told them I’m in Sweden on business.”

  “What about Giulietta? Is she happy with you as well?”

  “She’s crazy about me.”

  “And does she think you’re in Sweden on business too?”

  “Yes. But I’m going to take things a bit easier from now on. When I leave Himmelstal we’re going to get married and settle down in Calabria. We’re going to have our own olive farm. Children. Seven or eight.”

  He nodded happily to himself, as if this was a decision he’d just made. Then he looked up and asked, “You don’t have any children, do you?”

  “No, you know that perfectly well. Emma wanted to wait, and then we got divorced.”

  Max put a calming hand on his shoulder.

  “There’s no rush. Us men have time on our side. It’s different for women. Shall we have another beer?”

  “I haven’t gotten through this one yet. You have another. I’ll pay.”

  “You’re not paying for anything. You’re my guest,” Max said, gesturing with his hand to order another tankard from the bulldog woman.

  The room had filled up and the noise level had increased. Most of the clientele were men, but it was hard to get any idea of what sort of people they were, seeing as the lighting was so dim. Except for a few spotlights on the bar, the only lighting was the candles on the tables.

  “Your stay here seems to have done you good,” Daniel said. “I was actually quite worried when I got your letter.”

  “Like I said, this is the best clinic in Europe for nervous exhaustion. You should have seen me when I arrived.”

  Max tilted his head to one side, stuck out his tongue, and crossed his eyes.

  “Nervous exhaustion,” Daniel repeated. “You’ve never been diagnosed with that before.”

  “No. Weirdly enough. Because if you think about it, all my breakdowns occurred after periods of seriously hard work. The last time I was in the hospital was after I’d spent a while working twenty-four hours a day. I never slept. It’s hardly surprising I got exhausted.”

  “But,” Daniel said, “that sort of hyperactivity is a symptom of your illness. Not one of the causes.”

  “Are you sure about that? Maybe we’ve been getting it wrong. Maybe we haven’t understood what was the chicken and what was the egg. Maybe I’ve been wrongly diagnosed all these years. The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that I’ve simply been suffering from recurrent bouts of nervous exhaustion. Exhaustion can express itself in any number of ways.”

  “Well,” Daniel said with a yawn, “if we don’t go home to bed, I’m going to end up with nervous exhaustion. And I wouldn’t l
ike to imagine how that might express itself.”

  Just as he said this a few long notes from an accordion broke through the noise of the room, and a moment later a woman started to sing in a low voice with a clear, lilting rhythm. Daniel looked round in surprise.

  In the glow of a newly lit spotlight at the far end of the room a young woman had appeared and was standing there singing, dressed in some sort of peasant costume with a laced bodice and puffed sleeves. She was accompanied on the accordion by a middle-aged man wearing a flowery vest, tight knee-length trousers, and a ridiculous flat hat with flowers stuck under the brim.

  “Look at that, tourist entertainment,” Daniel exclaimed. “I thought we were well away from the tourist trail. Maybe I could find a hotel nearby after all.”

  “Well,” Max said nonchalantly, “I’m not sure I’d call it tourist entertainment. More like locals entertaining other locals. They’re here a couple of evenings each week. Do you want to listen, or shall we go?”

  “We can’t go as soon as they’ve started. Let’s wait a bit,” Daniel said.

  The woman sang with exaggerated clarity, emphasized by gestures with her hands and eyes, as if she were singing to children. Yet Daniel still understood practically none of her Swiss German. Every now and then she rang a cowbell. It was a long song, with an amusing, narrative text—he understood that much—and after a few verses he found he was able to predict when the cowbell was going to be rung.

  “They carry on like that for ages. Come on, let’s go,” Max said in his ear, but Daniel shook his head.

  There was something about the singer he found fascinating. She had narrow brown eyes, bright red lipstick, and a stubby little nose with a scattering of freckles. Her hair was chocolate brown and cut in a short bob with bangs as straight as a ruler.

  Daniel looked at her, trying to work out the nature of her beauty, because it wasn’t at all obvious. She was pretty in an enchanting, doll-like way, but beneath the prettiness there was an entirely different sort of face, with heavy peasant features that could only be seen from certain angles. Daniel could guess what her older relatives looked like, and what she herself would look like one day. There was something enticing about this solid core beneath the pretty exterior, and in no way did it detract from her appeal.