The Sweetness of Life

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  While Horn spoke, Katharina got about as far as the twentieth illustration. Contrary to his expectations, she had sped up as she leafed through the book. She turned to the pages with the pictures, tapped on the knights’ heads, each time casting a brief glance at the doll as if she wanted to make sure of something, and then kept on turning the pages. At the end, Horn said, everybody would drop a flower into the grave, right on to the coffin lid, like a final farewell. And then they all go to the pub, Horn thought, wondering after whether he had said this out loud. But there was no reaction from Katharina. She had rushed through the last few pages and she shut the book with a loud crack. Then she put the doll on the cover and gazed at it for a while. Horn said that graveyards were particularly cold in winter; an icy wind would whistle between the tombstones, so she should not forget her scarf, hat and muffler. And then the gravedigger will be standing there, he thought, and he’ll be offering out his cap, and people will scrabble around inside their purses, and half of them won’t have the right coin.

  Suddenly, Katharina looked at him. For a second he thought: this is it, now. Now she’s going to speak. But she grabbed the doll, put both arms down to the side of the body, and pulled up the outer of the two layers of the tulle dress so that it covered the arms, torso, and also the princess’s head. Of course it’s still all about heads, Horn thought. Heads must be covered, the memory of the crushed head has to disappear. Katharina put the covered doll back onto the book that she then lifted up with both hands, and carefully pushed into a gap on the bookshelf. While doing this she gave a contented smile. A sort of funeral, Horn thought. She’s laying out the doll and putting it into a slot.

  “It’ll be all right,” Horn said outside to Katharina’s mother. “You’ve no need to worry.” Luise Maywald thanked him.

  “Do you know what I’m pleased about?” she said as they were leaving. “I’m pleased that we don’t have to see him again.” Horn nodded but said nothing. He had just noticed Katharina opening the zip of her right jacket pocket, putting in her hand, and pulling out a clenched fist. The pieces, he thought. Everything’s all right.

  Horn stood by the window. It was still snowing. It seemed to be settling even on the dried-out reeds around the river outlet. He could not make out the rock falls on the south side of the lake. He thought of Irene and Tobias. He reckoned she would be sitting in the stables, practicing Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, which she was due to perform at the Furth Symphony Orchestra’s Carnival concert; and maybe Tobias was falling in love. He remembered that falling in love was what you did on ski courses. During the day you larked around in the snow, and in the evenings you noticed that the girls came to dinner with freshly washed hair. Irene hated Tchaikovsky, but Rauter, the musical leader of the orchestra, insisted that it got butts on seats, and she could not refuse. Horn knew she would turn out a brilliant performance, playing the piece with an aggressive passion. She sits down, plays, and in between she’s afraid, he thought. He thought of Gasselik, whom he could well imagine slitting the throats of animals and then crushing their skulls. The Wilfert thing is a bit out of his league, he thought afterward. He’s too young for it. He gave a cursory glance around the room and was happy that nobody else was there. I bet I’ve been thinking aloud again the whole time, he thought.

  The couple that came for family therapy shortly afterward bored him senseless. They had done from the very start. The husband was a biochemist at Veropharm, a pharmaceutical company based in the town. His main job was the production of phytotherapeutic medicines. His wife was the manager of a small business that manufactured orthopedic aids. The couple had two children: a fourteen-year-old daughter and an eleven-year-old son, both of whom had made unsuccessful attempts over the years to combat their parents’ obsessive behavior and academic ambitions by developing a range of different symptoms. At present the boy was suffering from a nervous cough, while the girl was attending school every other day at most. These people are so painfully conventional, Horn thought. When he asked them what strategies they used for their children, the wife said they had advised their son to suppress his cough whenever he felt it coming. They were clueless vis-à-vis their daughter; they had no ideas at all. She did what she wanted anyway—punk hairstyle, piercings, pentagram pendants, and all that sort of stuff. I hope she does what she wants, thought Horn, and then he imagined this boy lying in his bed at night, confronted by the fantasy of his naked sister, trying as hard as he could to cough away the impulse to masturbate. If he gave in to his urge, he would be forced to do one hundred squats, or say seven prayers seven times. He would end up as obsessive as his father.

  “Did you masturbate when you were a boy?” Horn asked. The woman’s face turned ashen, and she looked as if she wanted to ground to swallow her up. The man went bright red and cleared his throat several times. It’s all so obvious, Horn thought, and it’s all so damn conventional that I’d welcome a migraine attack on the spot.

  “What do you mean?” the man said.

  “Masturbation, jacking off, self-gratification,” he said. The two of them sat there in silence, both in a state of excruciating embarrassment. I’m an asshole and I enjoy it, Horn thought. Finally, the woman lifted her head.

  “I don’t think we’re at that stage yet,” she said. She would not look at her husband.

  “What do you talk about at home?” Horn said.

  “Work, the children, what’s in the newspaper.”

  What’s in the newspaper, Horn repeated to himself. The man’s tie was grayish-brown with pink diagonal stripes. He had not seen anything that ugly for a long time.

  “Do you have any pets?” Horn wanted to know at the end. Yes, a pair of budgies, the two of them answered; the male one is blue, the female one yellow, and both birds are fine. A yellow budgie and a blue budgie, he thought. A yellow Ludo piece and a blue Ludo piece. These things are unconnected. Coincidence creates meaning.

  Afterward he opened the window. He leaned out into the snowfall, stuck out his tongue, and was pleased when the first flakes settled on it. If someone sees me they’ll think I’m crazy, he thought.

  Fifteen

  He had woken with Marlene in his arms, a strand of her hair between his lips and her thumbs in his navel. He had lain there quite still, feeling the cool air in the room. For a minute he was almost happy. They ate boiled eggs and grilled bacon for breakfast, and wasted no more time discussing the subject of New Year’s Eve. Afterward they went up onto the roof and slowly spun around, arm in arm. It had stopped snowing overnight, and the town and lake were lit up by the rays of the morning sun, like a view straight from a postcard. I’m in a good mood, he thought, that’s incredible.

  Most of all it was the prospect of having to go to the office a few hours later that made Kovacs decide to see to the matter himself. What is more, he loved driving the Puch G, this powerful vehicle with its rough charm. Third, Demski had been back from vacation for two days, and anything that might come in would be in safe hands.

  They drove south down Grazer Straße, out of town, and turned west after about four kilometers, just past the old customs house. The road had been well cleared, so there was no scope for four-wheel one-upmanship on the ascent to the Kammwand tunnel, as Kovacs had secretly hoped. The only things he overtook were a milk tanker and a BMW seven series that crept up very tentatively.

  The old man in the passenger seat had a sallow complexion and seemed to sink farther into his gray coat with every bend. “Why didn’t you call yesterday?” Wieck asked from the back. The man lifted his head slowly. “It was dark,” he said after some time. “It would have been impossible to see anything.” Outside, the yellow beams of the tunnel lighting rushed past. Every few hundred meters a huge ventilator spun on the ceiling. “Anyway, you can’t be prepared for something like that,” the man said. “You don’t know what to do.” It was his wife who had said that anybody who could demolish the heads of large animals was also capable of doing something like that; she insisted he notify the police
.

  “Was your wife there when you discovered it?” Wieck asked.

  The man shook his head. “No. I usually go out driving on my own. Anyway, somebody else found it.”

  Kovacs looked sideways at the man. He’s sinking, he thought. It’s just like it was before. He asked him how he had coped during the night, and the man said it had been all right; his wife had been a great support, and he had an array of sedatives in the medicine cabinet for an emergency.

  After the 2.6 kilometer mark in the tunnel, the road began to descend, and shortly afterward they saw a white dot that was the exit. “Sometimes in life there are things that just happen to you and you’re not prepared for them,” the man said. And sometimes in life, Kovacs thought, nothing happens to you at all and you’re not prepared for that either. He sped around the hairpin bends on the way down to Sankt Christoph and enjoyed the sensation at the very edges of the curves that he was on the brink of flying out over the roofs of the restaurants and hotels. When they were at the bottom he muttered an apology, but neither of the other two said anything.

  They took a shortcut to the south around the center of Sankt Christoph, thus avoiding the commuter traffic that usually clogged up the narrow streets at this time of day. They were nevertheless held up by a carriage of tourists wrapped up tight in thick clothes. Kovacs let out a quiet curse. After he had overtaken, Kovacs turned round. “Horses?” he asked. Wieck thought for a while. “No, not horses,” she said. She’s not 100 percent sure, he thought.

  They followed the lakeside road toward Mooshaim until they came to a shallow ravine that sloped down from the left. At the “Holiday Apartments” sign they turned into a road that went through the woods. In a long, rising loop, it led back to a hill directly above Sankt Christoph. About five hundred meters before a farmhouse, Fux instructed him to park the car next to a rectangular pile of beech logs.

  “This is where the path begins,” he said.

  When they got out of the car, Kovacs could see the man trembling. “Are you sure you’ll manage this?” he asked. Fux nodded.

  Wieck walked up to him from behind and took his arm. She smiled. “I’ll catch you if you faint,” she said.

  It was freezing. Kovacs put on his gloves and pulled up the quilted collar of his coat. Wieck stuffed her corduroy pants into her boots. Fux was wearing a new black woolly hat with ear flaps. His overcoat, on the other hand, looked old—the buttons were worn and there was a rip in the left sleeve. Kovacs noted this after he had fetched the shoulder bag with camera, tape and Dictaphone from the car. Stakes, he thought. We haven’t got any stakes or a tool to drive them in. It’s always the same. He said nothing.

  On the stretch where the path ran along open fields there were fierce gusts of wind. Fux said he always walked this bit; he did not dare drive his Astra farther than the woodpile, not even with chains on, and he would never be able to afford a four-wheel drive. They walked in line, Fux at the front, until they came to a dense hedge of blackthorn and hazelnut at the edge of the forest. They stopped under cover of the hedge. Christoph Moser, who owned the woods all around, had discovered what had happened while taking away some larch logs and notified him. “He was in his large SAME tractor and four-wheel trailer,” Fux said, pointing to the deep tire tracks by his feet. They cut wood in winter, Kovacs thought; people still stick to the old customs.

  “When did Moser call?” Wieck asked.

  “At ten past two,” Fux said. “From his tractor cabin. He always takes a cell phone when he goes into the woods.”

  “And when did you get there?”

  “Half-past three.” Fux stood still for a second and raised his shoulders. “At first I really didn’t want to go.”

  They walked the gentle incline up through the open larch woods, crossed a rocky ditch, and turned east after a spot where animals came to feed. When they stepped into the clearing the morning sun rather dazzled them. Fux stopped and stroked his cheeks with both hands.

  “Is it over there?” Sabine Wieck asked. Fux nodded. “Will you be OK?” He stared silently at the snow. In the end, Kovacs pushed past him. “I’ll take a look.”

  Fux grabbed him by the arm and shook his head.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said.

  The door to the shed was off its hinges, and the small, square window had been smashed in. On one of the side walls, all the wooden planks save for two small boards had been torn away. Fux pointed to the back of the shed. “It’s behind there,” he said.

  The moment they turned the corner Kovacs looked over at Wieck. Sometimes people behave as if they’re in a film, he thought. She stood there, her eyes like saucers, a hand slapped in front of her mouth. The snow in front of them was black from dead bees. In the middle was about a meter’s length of splintered wood; bits of its bright paintwork could still be made out here and there. “They freeze to death instantly in these temperatures,” Fux said. Kovacs took off his gloves, bent over, picked up one of the bees, and put it in the palm of his hand. He held it in front of his face—it came into focus a good half meter away—and he examined the compound eyes, the stinger, and the fine veining of the wings. “How many of them were there?” he asked.

  Fux stared at him. “Hundreds of thousands,” he said.

  Kovacs put the bee back in the snow, carefully, as if it were still alive. Sabine Wieck bent over to him.

  “Sixteen,” she whispered. “Sixteen hives, if I counted correctly.”

  Whoever did it must have gone about the job with incredible thoroughness. The beehives had been lined up in a row, and then demolished, one after the other. Leveled to the ground, Kovacs thought, that’s what they say, and he thought of a huge sledge-hammer crashing down onto the wooden cubes.

  “Who could do a thing like that?” Wieck said. “Who kills bees?” I don’t imagine anyone who slits the throats of cats and mallards would have a problem doing it, Kovacs thought. He had no idea why she always asked, “Who could do a thing like that?” and why it sounded so jolly when she said it.

  “Someone who has a problem with the sweetness of life,” he said, astonishing himself with his own words, because it was unlike him to tolerate such fanciful turns of phrase. Fux cast a glance at him, and he looked as if he had tears in his eyes, but perhaps it was just the cold.

  Kovacs took the camera out of his shoulder bag and started taking photographs: the smashed-up hives, the shed, the surroundings. When he aimed the lens at the ground, Fux said, “He must have come with a tractor or a truck.” Kovacs put the camera back. “Why?” he asked. A second later he knew; he saw the ramp up to the barn with the old man whose neck was right on the cusp, and Lipp saying, “Like he’s been crucified.” Wieck got down on one knee and, with great care, fingered the large tire prints before her in the snow. “We’ve got to get Mauritz,” she said. Fux said, “These tracks are nothing to do with Moser’s tractor,” and Kovacs felt as if the ground were crumbling under his feet. The phrase “people and animals” came to mind, a phrase that people use without thinking. Another thought he had at that moment was that it was impossible to crush the heads of millions of bees.

  Wieck called Mauritz. She explained the situation to him, described how to get there, and at Kovacs’ bidding requested him to bring stakes and a tool to bash them in. At the end of the call she lifted her head to check and said, “Yes, it’s very cold.”

  “Is he doing some prophylactic freezing again?” Kovacs asked. She laughed.

  In places, the tire tracks were covered all over with bees. Where they were exposed, the edges looked broken and the surface a little roughened. It was no longer possible to ascertain whether there had been a dusting of snow overnight or if the changes had occurred as a result of frost. The main thing was that they would be able to make a perfect copy of the tread. “It’s the same,” Kovacs said in a quiet voice so the others could not hear him.

  They walked around the perimeter, to avoid stepping on the main area of devastation. Wieck kept on blowing into her gloves and
did knee bends to keep herself warm. She chatted to Fux about beekeeping, different types of honey, and the boom in royal jelly. She listened as he explained about swarming, how nervous the bees were beforehand, the division of the colony, and the fact that it was the old queens who defected, not the young ones. “So how do you get the swarm down from the branches?” she asked, and Fux said, “With a water sprinkler and a goose feather. You carefully wet the cluster of bees and then brush them off with the feather, into a bin or straight into the hives.” She’s talking as if she’s going to take up beekeeping tomorrow, Kovacs thought. But in fact she’s talking to him like that because she’s afraid he might faint. Again he saw the old man with his arms stretched out on his back in the snow, a single eyeball staring at him from the amorphous surface of his face. Madeye, he thought, but could not fathom where this name came from.

  “Did Sebastian Wilfert have anything at all to do with bees?” he asked.

  Fux looked at him with wide eyes and then shook his head. “With bees?” he said. “No way. Not at all.”

  Mauritz was puffing huge white clouds when he got to them. A hefty man in a hefty quilted jacket on a bright winter’s day, Kovacs thought, what an uplifting vision, but he hasn’t got the stakes.

  “Where are the stakes?” he said.

  “There weren’t any left in the depot,” Mauritz replied. “I’d have had to rip out, separate and sharpen the snow poles by the side of the road. Number one, that’s illegal; and number two, it would’ve meant that you lot would’ve had to wait an hour longer. What’s more, the thing seems to be pretty clear anyway.” He pointed to the tire tracks.