The Sweetness of Life

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  “Minus four degrees,” Lipp said, making a sour face. Wieck adjusted her coat, pushed her scarf up to her chin, and sat down. Lipp growled.

  “The sun’s shining,” Kovacs said.

  They began discussing strategy by running through the people who could be expected to attend the funeral: the five Maywalds; Wilfert’s son, who ran a beverage import firm in Munich, his ex-wife, and their seventeen-year-old daughter; the two of Wilfert’s siblings who were still alive—his sister, who lived with her second husband in Bruck an der Mur, and his brother, who might not come as he was in a wheelchair following a severe stroke that had left the right-hand side of his body paralyzed; Wilfert’s late wife’s three siblings and their families; the neighbors, although the farm’s location meant that these consisted of just two families; delegations from the hunting club and OAP association; and perhaps a few close friends. That was it. In her last interview Luise Maywald had said it was a long time since her father had had any really close friends.

  “Will the hunters do a rifle salute?” Lipp asked.

  At that very moment, Lefti opened the door to the terrace. On the table he placed a tray with a large, round clay pot, three light-blue glass bowls, and cutlery. “Bismillah,” he said.

  “Mahlzeit,” said Kovacs.

  “What is it?” Lipp asked.

  “Root vegetable tagine with couscous,” Lefti said.

  “No, I mean that ‘Bisma’ thing.”

  “Bismillah. In God’s name. That’s what the host says in Morocco at the beginning of a meal.”

  Lipp did not reply. Kovacs lifted the lid and sniffed. “Star anise and coriander.”

  “To put the stomach back in order after the holidays,” Lefti said. He’s more serious than usual, Kovacs thought. Something’s up.

  “I don’t think hunters let off their rifles at funerals,” Kovacs said, and the other two agreed with him. Soldiers perform rifle salutes, maybe the Tyrolean riflemen do as well, but not hunters.

  Lipp ate with gusto. Time and again he dipped a large chunk of flatbread into the sauce. He’s never eaten anything like this, Kovacs thought. Try as he might he could not remember what Lipp’s mother looked like.

  They decided that Wieck should keep an eye on Wilfert’s family, Lipp on the other funeral-goers, while Kovacs would watch the surrounding area. Lipp would also take pictures, just in case. The murderer who tries to get close to his victim even after the crime might be a cliché, but nobody could say with any certainty what murderers thought of clichés. Kovacs tried to picture the cemetery: the area with the tall, sculpture-laden gravestones just to the right of the entrance, where the town’s nobles and some select grandees were buried; the neo-Gothic hall, where bodies lay in state, with its narrow arched windows and the shocking Resurrection fresco; the row of old cypresses inside the north boundary wall. It would be cold, and because of this the funeral-goers would not just protect their necks but wrap themselves tightly with scarves and hats, which was only right. No clear faces, he thought—how appropriate in this case.

  The door to the terrace opened. Lefti was talking to somebody. Kovacs turned around. A foreign-looking man in an orange-colored winter coat came out. Tall, slim, perhaps thirty years old, no hood, no gloves. He placed two chairs a few meters apart against the sunny wall of the building.

  Lefti walked around the table. Using a pair of silver tongs, he put pieces of candied ginger into narrow glasses and poured over peppermint tea. “Ginger warms you up,” he said. With a brief sideways glance he added, “That’s my cousin.” Then he went and sat over with the man.

  Step by step they discussed the expected funeral procedure, the ceremony, the location. “What are we expecting in fact?” Lipp said after a while. Kovacs looked at him in surprise.

  “Somebody who likes to show himself,” he said. All of a sudden he felt uneasy. It was a combination of Lefti’s cousin and the fact that Wieck appeared less alert than usual. She kept on peering to the side and fiddling with the arm extensions of her fleece coat. She likes the man, he thought, and I’m jealous. He tried in vain to picture him with a few packs of Semtex attached to his body and an electronic detonator. The man had a conspicuous, rolling laugh, and Lefti was almost boisterous in his company; that was odd. Where’s Szarah, thought Kovacs, with her prudence and sobriety?

  When they got up, the shadow of the Kammwand was projected onto the veil of mist across the lake like a hologram. The deterioration in the weather that had been forecast for the coming days was not yet apparent. Kovacs had the taste of parsnips and Hamburg parsley in his mouth. He thought of Marlene and how he liked it when she cooked; then of Demski, about whom he still knew so little. Finally he thought of sixteen-year-olds who smirk and break other people’s arms, and of men who throw children against metal bars.

  Sixteen

  My hand feels weird—like a block of ice on the outside, and inside like a fire that is getting bigger and smaller. I know that if I stand out here in the cold long enough, with just the cloak and my thoughts, everything will become normal again; and when that old man with the slit throat and mashed up head is lying deep in the ground and they fill the hole, it’ll all be over. I imagine myself sitting in my starfighter, flying high over the ice planet, Hoth. Far below me a herd of tauntauns are galloping over the endless tundra, maybe fleeing from a wampa, the huge predator, or maybe not. Nothing can happen to me, and it doesn’t hurt anymore either, because a long time ago I got a mechno-hand like Anakin Skywalker.

  It all began when Dad went through the house in the morning—five times, ten times, fifteen times—because he’d forgotten to sort out a few things like the floor sealant in the servicing area or the new garage door. Daniel stood by the microwave and said it wasn’t the end of the world; Dad just made a small sign with his hand: to the office.

  When Daniel comes back you can’t see that much, only that his lower lip has a slight split, and when he walks he twists his body to the right. If he had his hooded sweater on, you wouldn’t notice anything funny about his face. He takes a sheet from the notepad by the phone, writes something on it, and thrusts it at me: Gerstmann’s cat.

  He goes out of the room, his body twisted to the right, and doesn’t turn around. I realize right away that it’s not going to work. So what if Gerstmann is a stuck-up groundsman with a stuck-up groundsman’s wife and three stuck-up groundsman’s children, and that he deserves every bit of it? It doesn’t alter the fact that they all live in one of those enclosures in the north of town, on the fifth or sixth floor, with only a balcony—nowhere near any garden. This means that the tortoiseshell angora cat that he always talks about as if it were his fourth child—and that they say is just like you’d imagine Gerstmann’s cat to be, i.e., an arrogant, stuck-up groundsman’s cat—always stays in the apartment and nobody gets near its neck, let alone with a knife.

  When I go into Daniel’s room and tell him this he punches me, and then again, which is fair; after all, I did say no, and he’s the Emperor now because he’s putting the gray hooded sweater over his head. From here his face looks as if he’s had a bad allergic reaction, with swollen, bright-red eyes and everything, but in the shadow of the hood it all disappears. He says that it doesn’t matter about the cat; the ugly angora animal will come to our street one day, and then Gerstmann will show up with his stupid face. I’m happy about that and say, yes, he will turn up. Then I say—just because this comes into my head—a dog, the next thing I’ll get will be a dog. He’s satisfied with this and says that as a reward he’ll tell me a story from his time inside, or maybe even show me something. Just so long as I’ve deserved it.

  The fridge is empty. At New Year anything left in there is always chucked out. Lore has to do that, otherwise Mom has a fit. I’m just checking to make sure. She could have forgotten something. I throw the black cloak over me, put on the mask, and lie on the bed. I breathe and make the right sound. I am Darth Vader.

  There’s a Spar on the corner of Ettrichgasse and Linzer Stra�
�e. I know the thin lady with the red glasses at the meat counter. I know she’s got a daughter who’s training to be a hairdresser, and that she drives a dark-gray Citroën. She understands right away when I ask for a salami with a bell, or star, or Christmas tree. She says that it’s already been ten days since Christmas, and that there’s normally not a demand for that type of salami at this time. She looks in the refrigerator room all the same and finds the rest of one with a comet in it. A five-pointed star and curved tail. She asks me how much I need and I say a hundred grams, because everybody asks for a hundred grams when buying salami, and she lets me have it for half price because nobody else wants it.

  A short way along Linzer Straße, first right, past a billboard, right again, and then it’s the second house. There are several antique figures in the garden—gods, nymphs, and that sort of thing—but all made of some nuclear-proof plastic. I go another fifty meters, to where Linzer Straße curves to the left, and straight ahead there’s a really small pine wood. You could almost call it a park but it doesn’t have any benches. I go into the middle of it, under the trees, so that nobody can see me. I look at my watch and I’m sure: in ten minutes.

  The door opens and, although I can’t see him, I know that Reithbauer is standing there on the steps in his bus-driver bulkiness and saying to the dog, “Off you go!” And the dog scurries down the steps, jumps up in the air, pushes the handle of the garden gate with its paws, and then it’s out.

  I keep my eyes on it as it zigzags its way along the road, back and forth, back and forth, from one lamppost to the next. While it does this I take off the backpack, put the mask on, and take out the packet of Christmas salami. The dog is so fat that with each pace its belly swings a little to the side, to the left, then to the right. The thing’s a salami itself, and salamis are there to be sliced. It’s the sort of thing Daniel might say—you see, you can justify anything. I put the warhammer in the snow next to the backpack and push out the blade of the Stanley knife as far as it will go. A dog with a fat neck needs a long blade. When the dog reaches the edge of the wood, I call softly, “Cora!” The dog stops, pricks up its ears, and then comes over to me, its tail wagging behind. Dogs don’t give a toss if you’re wearing a Darth Vader mask; they always go by the smell of salami in your hand. “Cora, sit!” I say. The dog obeys, sits down a couple of meters or so away from me, and emits a stupid whimper. I take a double slice of comet salami in my left hand, the Stanley knife tight in my right, and slowly go over to it. I put out my left hand, say, “Good Cora,” and at the very moment the dog extends its neck and carefully takes the salami with the tip of its muzzle, I stab it.

  You don’t think that a knife won’t pierce a dog’s skin as it does a human’s; and you don’t think that when the fully extended blade of a Stanley knife tries to pierce a dog’s skin with a layer of fur, it will bow like a handsaw getting stuck in a piece of wood. So at the vital moment you hesitate, only for a split second, but that’s enough. The dog yanks its head around just as I’m attempting my second thrust, the blade snaps, and when it bites my hand I can see half a slice of Christmas salami hanging from its right lower canine tooth. I hit and kick it until it leaves me alone and runs away howling. I grab my things and run away too.

  When I get to the boathouse of the wildlife observation center—the place where the lake never freezes—my hand is hurting so much that it’s unbearable, and it’s still bleeding. The Stanley knife with what remains of the blade is in my left hand, and if any-body saw me they’d probably think I’d just tried to slit my wrists. I kneel down on the jetty, right next to the boathouse door, and when I see that it’s too far down to the water I lie on my tummy. The moment I put my hand into the water I stop feeling the cold that is getting to my body through the snow.

  I remember thinking what Wawrovsky, our bodywork tinsmith, once told me: “If you burn your hand, like on the engine mount or exhaust muffler, the most important thing is to plunge it into ice-cold water until you can’t feel it anymore.” Then I thought of skiing with my parents, which was a pretty unpleasant affair, as Dad kept on barking, “Upper body forward!” or something like that, and if you didn’t do it he’d thump you, right in the middle of the trail. Finally I started thinking of the ice planet Hoth and how everything’s white there, and even Han Solo wears a white padded jacket while riding on a tauntaun through the tundra. I now had no feeling in my hand whatsoever. Just to be on the safe side I left it in for another minute, and when I took it out it was all white. No more pain and no more blood, just like Wawrovsky said, even though it wasn’t a burn. I stroked my hand with the mitten and threw the Stanley knife into the lake. Nobody’s going to find it in there.

  Now I’m standing in the cemetery, in a spot where nobody can see me, and my hand’s starting to hurt again. I don’t think it’s because I ought to have left it longer in the lake, but because I didn’t carry out the job properly. Daniel will tell me that if such a thing happened inside, they’d smash your hand to a pulp. Then he’ll keep on pouring alcohol onto the bite until I say that it’s really burning.

  They’ll be here in ten minutes, twenty at most, in a long, black procession. With all the snow the whole thing will look like a scene out of an old film. I can picture an altar server at the front carrying a crucifix on a long pole and another one swinging a censer. I can also picture the priest making the mistake of asking whether there is anyone present who wants to see the dead man again, and someone actually standing up and saying yes, and someone else opening the coffin lid at the head before the others can shout “Stop!” I think that when they fill the hole with the dead old man, it will all be over and at some point later on I can ask Daniel how he did it.

  Seventeen

  The aisle stands before him, crystal clear. Like a block of ice into which the cone of light from the rose window pours. The people are down below, scarcely any room to move at all.

  Inside he is shuddering. It is cold beneath his breastbone. His breath is freezing inside his body. He can hardly exhale it.

  May the Lord be with you.

  And with your spirit.

  Some people stand. Some kneel. A moment of uncertainty, as always.

  May Almighty God bless you. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Amen.

  At the end they sing the “Bless, O Holy Virgin.” The tearjerker. Anybody failing to howl during the third verse cannot have had any real connection with the deceased: Bless, O Holy Virgin, our final hour here! / Whisper words of comfort, and remain very near. / Come close our eyes with your hand so soft and light. / Bless us both in life and throughout th’eternal night. / Bless us both in life and throughout th’eternal night.

  At the front of the aisle, the light-colored oak coffin. On top, the wreath made out of fir twigs, holly, and box, punctuated by hawthorn berries and a few dark roses. The ribbon is black with a narrow, golden trim. “A last good-bye. Luise, Ernst, Ursula, Georg, Katharina.” Frank, the oldest of the altar servers, raises the processional cross. He is wearing wool gloves with alternate gray and black fingers. The coffin is lifted onto a trolley and wheeled to the door.

  He puts his hand inside his tunic, pulls up the zip of his quilted body warmer, and feels in the side pockets. iPod on the right, fingerless gloves on the left. For all eventualities.

  The trunk of the hearse is already open. The coffin is carried down the steps by the portal and pushed into the car. To the left and right, people standing around looking helpless. He hears the gentle noise of the car engine directly behind him. I’ll go quickly. That is one of the few things that he can think with any clarity.

  Perhaps they will not come. He will stand on the platform, open out his arms, and nobody will be there. They will be sitting in their small house in the small village by the Salzach River; they will not have come, and he will turn around and put the headphones in his ears.

  You try so hard / But you don’t understand / Just what you’ll say / When you get home.

  Through the courtyard at the front,
out into the wide main driveway. Opposite the Rathausplatz. A few high piles of old snow under the chestnut trees. Left into Stiftsallee, along the south side of the monastery. For a while the smallest of the bells rings out.

  He has Clemens to thank for all of this. An urgently arranged meeting for all the priors and abbots of the diocese, he said. Because of the problems with the new bishop. There was no way he could not go. Robert had commitments in his parish and Jeremiah was recovering from a hip operation. There was no alternative.

  The young policeman directing the traffic at the junction with Abt-Karl-Straße salutes as he goes past. He salutes back.

  Along Abt-Karl-Straße, into Weyrer Straße, dead straight to the cemetery. The wrought-iron gate is wide open.

  One earphone. The left one.

  Because something is happening here / but you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?

  All the paths in the cemetery have been cleared to perfection; most have even been gritted. Weinstabel has done the whole thing himself. The gravedigger is standing in front of the tool shed, small and gaunt, in a dark-gray loden coat, fur cap in his hand, his head bowed.

  The grave is at the eastern end of the cemetery, in the penultimate row. It is somewhat raised, so you get a good overview. A total of 311 people are inside the cemetery walls, twenty-seven of these at the graveside itself. A bit to the side are the bugle blowers, on the central path the representatives of the public institutions, including Steinböck, the Bürgermeister, and Jelusitz, the Bezirkshauptmann. Behind these, the delegation from the hunting club, and around a black-and-silver flag a group of ancient men, representatives from the friendship league.

  The coffin is placed on the straps of the lowering apparatus. The name of the manufacturer is on the black lacquered frame: Lovrek. Perhaps all the coffin-sinkers in this world are called Lovrek, he thinks, and Herr Lovrek is rolling in it.