by Wolf Haas
“It’s not the complete St. Matthew’s Passion anyway,” Klara explained. “At the time we only sang selections from it, of course. On ‘O Sacred Head Sore Wounded,’ we even sang all the verses of the medieval poem that aren’t even part of the St. Matthew’s Passion.”
This interested Brenner less now. On the other hand, generous of Klara to divert so elegantly from their awkward history.
When the coffee was ready, Brenner said: “Your Bach’s not going to help me find the murderer, either. And I’ve only got about fourteen hours. Because, by that point, they will have found the Pro Meddlers in the basement of the Golden Heart, and when they do, I’ll be counting my lucky stars they don’t beat me to death with their dicerolling fists.”
“You know what being sick has made me realize?”
“And here I thought you’d be the last sick person to have any realizations,” Brenner said, acting a little crass. “You wouldn’t believe it. When you drive an ambulance, practically all you meet’s philosophers who’ve realized something. How is it that as long as a person’s healthy, he never gets around to thinking?”
“And here I thought you were the person who wanted to find a murderer,” Klara said, getting him back.
She poured two cups of coffee, and they took them back into the living room.
“When the doctor told me about my fifty percent, I gave that number a great deal of thought. Fifty percent. Half. Really quite simple. I remembered a game that I’d made up back when I was still in high school.”
“You came up with this when you were in high school? How’d that go? In life we’re often deceiving ourselves fifty percent of the time or something?”
“That sounds about right for high school. It’s really only during puberty that you’d come up with stuff like that.”
“Or when you revisit puberty at three in the morning.”
“Back then, I often found it to be the case that the people I didn’t like at first were the very ones who ended up becoming my best friends later. And other people who struck me straightaway as—”
“I’d rather not know right now which category I fell under.”
“I became convinced at the time,” she said, ignoring him, “that, at the end of the day, fifty percent of the decisions we make turn out to be just plain wrong. But if only it were fifty-one percent, then basically it’d be wiser for you to always do the opposite of what initially seems right to you.”
“And why haven’t you adhered to this?”
“Why indeed? It was the first illuminating decision that I didn’t allow myself to adhere to even though I wanted to.”
“Life gets complicated.”
“Well, life won’t let itself be tricked. You’ve just got to muddle through all the crap it slings at you.”
You see, a few sips of coffee and already their concentration’s shot to hell. Nevertheless, Brenner and Klara took a stab at the fifty-percent theory, applying it to the murder case and adopting the overall-least-right opposite solution. But they didn’t get much beyond the possibility of Stenzl, in an unparalleled acrobatic feat, nailing himself with a bullet to his own neck.
As Brenner was finally making his way to the door, Klara said: “It’s already dawn.”
“Don’t remind me,” Brenner grumbled.
In parting she gave him one of those obliging aren’t-you-precious kisses on the cheek after all. Which pressed on his rib a little in the process, but at least it helped Brenner not to get too sentimental.
Their parting words, however, could’ve just as easily been kept to themselves, as far as Brenner was concerned: “What ever happened to that nice Jason King mustache of yours?”
And be honest: after all these years, would you like to be reminded of a blond Jason King mustache? Because to tell you the truth, he would’ve impressed even his colleagues at the Rapid Response with that one. But I say, let’s forget about it. After thirty years, even a blond Jason King mustache has got to exceed some statute of limitations.
Brenner decided to walk home, even though it took him nearly an hour. He felt like he wasn’t going to get any sleep now anyway. And so a walk home at the break of day, well, there’s something to be said for that, too.
“Don’t remind me,” he said, half to himself, half to the pale full moon.
But before anything could dawn on Brenner, two people would have to die first.
It’s often said that the city of Vienna is a particularly good place to die. And I don’t doubt that. Me personally, though, I happen to think Vienna is a particularly good place to go for a walk. Especially in these parts of the city, where it’s a bit hilly. That way, you can take turns, straining this muscle first, then that one, so you don’t get tired as fast as you do when it’s flat.
And needless to say, it was pleasant for Brenner to be walking along Döblinger’s hilly streets at four-thirty in the morning. It almost seemed to him as if the magnificent houses were the ones walking past him, and he was a little surprised that in this fair climate should grow such thorny people as Frau Rupprechter.
Forty-five minutes later, he arrived back at his apartment, his legs sore, his head thrumming, and his rib aching.
He would’ve liked to take a shower, but with the bandage around his chest, no sooner did he turn the faucet on than he’d already given up. Just washed up a little, had a bite of breakfast, and by seven, he was sitting back in the crew room. Within moments, the alarm bell was going off, and somehow it all seemed perfectly normal to him.
And I don’t know how the human brain functions here, either, if coming into contact with related elements actually does have an enhancing effect. Just like it’s rumored time and again that boxers dope up with bull’s blood and long distance runners with reindeer blood. Or if that, too, is just full-moon talk.
Two eighteen-year-old kamikaze racers with the vanity plates POLE I and ELVIS I had staged a duel in the middle of three lanes of commuter traffic on the stretch from Westbahnhof to Schlachthausgasse. The black Audi Quattro didn’t come any closer to crossing the finish line than the red Alfa. Because first the Audi Quattro with the license plate Elvis I skidded out into the Gaudenzdorf median and then the red Alfa plowed full-speed into the Quattro.
Unbelievable, though! As Brenner was cleaning the brains of the two eighteen-year-olds off of the median, suddenly, something in his own brain stirred.
CHAPTER 13
Death might be big. But so is Vienna. If you take the 5 from Westbahnhof to Nordbahnhof, you’ll be on the road for at least an hour. And you still won’t be anywhere near the Bronx. Or anywhere near Grossfeld or out by the racetracks, or out in Schöpwerk, where they’ve got all the rapists and the gangs of youths and the newspaper people.
And you read in the newspapers how dangerous it is out in Schöpwerk, because of the crack, or whatever that junk’s called that makes people so hot-blooded—makes them cut off your head. But nobody’s writing about the deeper causes. Nobody’s writing about the Burenwurst. Because eating a Burenwurst’ll make you so aggressive, you won’t hardly believe it. On the sausage spectrum, Käsekrainer, Zigeuner, Cabanossi, they’ll all make you aggressive, too, but on a fundamental level, they won’t make you anywhere near as aggressive as a hot Burenwurst, except, of course, for a hot Leberkäse.
When you’re an EMT, it’s not uncommon to end up with the stakeholders from a bar fight puking in the back of your ambulance. And you can be up to eighty-percent certain that you’re going to end up with the contents of a sausage stand on your hands, mainly Burenwurst. I don’t know if it’s because of the grease or because of the circumstances. Maybe the sausage-makers mix in some kind of powder that stokes aggression.
I might’ve guessed it’s from the mad cows over there. But cow meat, there isn’t any of that in Burenwurst. No meat at all, actually. That’s what Brenner’s grandfather said anyway in his last years: Nowadays there’s no meat in ’em anymore, only sawdust.
And so Brenner found himself reliving his old days b
ecause, as it turns out, his grandfather had been wrong. Because when they puked in his ambulance, well, it didn’t smell like sawdust.
But here’s what I’m really trying to get at. I was saying: death is big, and so is Vienna. And that’s true, too. But it’s a small world! Because Herr Oswald lived in Alt Erlaa, and so did Lungauer. And though it might be public housing, it’s no Schöpwerk or Grossfeld, neither. On the contrary, high-class projects. Middle-class projects. Eight high-rise towers with as many occupants as all of Eisenstadt. With swimming pools on the roof and kindergarten and everything.
But Lungauer and Oswald sure didn’t know each other from kindergarten. A of all, Alt Erlaa wasn’t even built yet back then. B of all, Lungauer had been living here with his mother ever since the accident. And besides, he was only thirty-eight years old, so chronologically speaking, he never could’ve been in Herr Oswald’s kindergarten class anyway.
Now, why do I keep saying “kindergarten”? Lungauer, a year and a half after his accident, was as helpless as a little kid. He sat there in his wheelchair, all sunken in on himself. Brenner could tell right away that even sitting was too much for him.
He was as gaunt as one of those models in the photos that earn millions today. I always say, a woman can rest easy on a little bit of padding. But needless to say, for a fashion photographer, the film’s the most expensive part. You’ve got to wind it and snip it and wind it and snip it, and come evening, you’ve used up a couple hundred meters of film already—costs a fortune. And so, needless to say, a scrawny model saves you a lot of film.
But fashion model’s one thing—Lungauer’s pitiful form was something else altogether. How he just seemed to be, I don’t know, hanging there in his wheelchair, all skin and bones. And for that maybe we should be grateful that he did weigh so little, because otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to hold himself up.
His greasy hair swabbed the collar of a brand-new jogging suit, and the way he just sat there like that, Brenner couldn’t help but think of that famous universe scientist. I bought the book, too, and I have to admit, I didn’t get very far, but still pretty interesting, what with the black holes and all.
Lungauer’s mother showed Brenner to her son’s room and introduced him. She spoke loud and clear like you would with somebody who’s not all there—upstairs, I mean. “This is Herr Brenner! A new colleague of yours! From the Rapid Response Center!”
“Good day,” Brenner said.
Interesting! Normally, Brenner never said “Good day.” Always, always “Hello.” He’d developed this habit back when he was fifteen or sixteen during a rebellious phase in Puntigam, and ever since, it’s been “hello.” And now, for the first time in thirty years, he says “Good day” all the sudden.
So you see just how far the rebellion had got with him. As if God had placed some kind of divining rod at the window, let the paraplegic dangle from it a little, gave a little wink: Look at you, already picking the “Good day” back up like some drunk bully picking up a Burenwurst, see here, you, too, could be a goddamned cripple.
Although you’d like to believe that, over the past few months of working as an EMT, Brenner had seen enough sickness and suffering that a sight like this couldn’t shock him anymore. No such luck, though. As long as you’re just the one driving and it’s the other guy that’s the cripple, it doesn’t fully scare you. But when the poor dog’s basically your own co-worker, of course, completely different situation. So “Good day” just sort of slipped out of Brenner. And I don’t think any worse of him for it, either.
When Lungauer didn’t respond, Brenner wasn’t surprised. Because he didn’t exactly look like somebody who could still talk—Brenner had to give Angelika a little credit on that one. His head was saddled to the side, leaning on his right shoulder, and a thin thread of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth. The one eye was kaput, while the other seemed to stare all the more for it. Despite the catheter bag hanging off the side of his wheelchair, you wouldn’t have exactly got the idea that this was a top athlete submitting his doping-test sample.
But as Brenner turned back to Lungauer’s mother, he noticed Lungauer very slowly raise his right arm, centimeter by centimeter, and after an eternity, he stretched his hand out to Brenner.
“I wouldn’t know,” Lungauer managed to get out. It wasn’t easy to understand. Brenner needed a few seconds before he was able to string the sounds together. But, then, needless to say: I wouldn’t know!
Lungauer didn’t actually speak all that unclearly. It’s just that Brenner wasn’t expecting the disabled man to bird-dog him like that. That somebody who hadn’t seen a “Good day” in some time should make fun of a cowardly “Good day” from a healthy person.
It’s pretty true, though: Only a person at his fighting weight could act like such a puny coward. Although in Brenner’s defense, I have to say: Lungauer had the advantage of being disabled this whole time, whereas for Brenner, this was a whole new arena that he’d been tossed into.
“Herr Brenner is here because of Irmi!” his mother said, loud and clear again.
“Yeah, I know.”
“You know what happened?” Brenner asked him, not as loud as Lungauer’s mother, but still, louder than he normally talked.
Lungauer jerked his head back and forth on his shoulder because that was his way of nodding, and then he said: “From the lampshade.”
“He heard it on TV,” his mother whispered. “People think he’s mentally handicapped,” she said briskly under her breath, as though she were hoping: If I talk fast, he won’t understand me.
“But the doctors say he’s not. He’s completely normal. He understands everything. Just like before the accident. Except the language center of the brain was damaged. The doctor showed it to me on an X-ray, where the screwdriver destroyed his language center. But it’s not mental—it’s got a name of its own.”
“Aphasia,” the disabled man mumbled from his wheelchair.
“You see, he understands everything,” the mother sighed as if it were somehow unfair to her. “He understands it all even better than I do. Aphasia. Do you know what that is?”
“I drove an epileptic this one time. He had it, too,” Brenner recalled. “He always called me ‘crane-driver.’ I think because cranes are yellow and our ambulances used to be yellow, too.”
“He just mixes up words,” his mother said, nodding along nervously. “But his thinking is completely normal. Just the words he mixes up.”
Lungauer watched the two of them avidly as they exchanged pleasantries. His healthy eye traveled back and forth, always to the person who was speaking at that moment. It seemed to Brenner as if his healthy eye had doubled in size to make up for the other.
Back when Brenner was in the police academy, video games weren’t around yet, but in the rec room, they already had an early precursor. And Lungauer’s eye suddenly reminded him now of that game where you could play tennis with a white dot. For a few months there, he went up against Irrsiegler—practically every day they played Tennis for Two. When you hit the ball, it made this distinct sound. Irrsiegler went on to get in a motorcycle accident, and then, he automatically quit tennis.
When Brenner awoke from the hypnosis of Lungauer’s eye, he asked him about Irmi.
“She was my coat.”
“He means: his girlfriend,” the mother translated, and Brenner came close to asking her to leave him alone with her son for a little while. “He probably said ‘coat’ because she always had that white lab coat on.”
“Or because he had her love to keep him warm,” Brenner said. “Or because she was just a buttoned-up kind of gal,” he continued, and a little haughtily at that. “Or because she hid all his trouble spots. Or because with her on his arm, he felt like he could brave any conditions. Or because when he was a boy he had a camel-hair coat, and Irmi had fantastic humps.”
“Hahahahahaha!” Paraplegic Lungauer nearly shuddered right out of his wheelchair. His face was drooped downward the whole time,
so it’s impossible that he saw much of his mother’s reaction out of the corner of his eye. He sure could’ve felt it, though, just how much Brenner’s outburst had needled her.
Lungauer was beaming, incredible really, how his one eye could just beam like a beacon over his entire face. But all the sudden he gave an imperious stomp with his voice: “Room!”
“But while Herr Brenner’s here, you have to keep us company.”
“Brennerroom, too!”
“But Herr Brenner might still like to speak with me.”
“With me he wants to talk.”
“He wants to talk with you in his room,” she translated, as though she thought Brenner was a little mentally handicapped, too.
I don’t know why that was so uncomfortable for her. Not to mention the view from Lungauer’s room—unreal, you wouldn’t believe it. Only now did Brenner become fully aware of the fact that he was on the twenty-third floor. St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Ferris wheel, the Danube tower, the UNO building—all kilometers away, but you had the impression that you could reach out and touch them. On the far left, you could even see the towers of Vienna General. And one of those anti-aircraft towers that they put there during the War—the black behemoths just never got torn down. But the most conspicuous thing was that, in all of Vienna, there were practically no buildings left that didn’t have those colorful splotches all over them.
“Hundertwasser must’ve tagged the whole damn city,” Brenner said.
“Hahahahahaha!”
It gave Brenner a real kick in the ribs, the infectious laughter of this one-eyed Chuckle King. It’s through peoples’ laughter that you come to know them best. Because a cruel person can only put up a front for so long, but if you make him laugh, he laughs cruel. And a dumb person laughs dumb. And a prude laughs prudish. And a cynic cynically, and a complicated person, complicatedly—so you see, you can scroll through them all, but it’ll always hold true.