He knows that he has to say something, but his brain seems to be void of any ideas.
Grace be unto you.
He gives a sign to the four men in the bugle band, and they play a chorale. He worries that it is going to disrupt his music as well. He shelters his left ear with his hand.
When someone attacks your imagination.
The people are looking at him in astonishment, but he does not care.
Directly in front of him, the daughter and son-in-law of the deceased with their three children. Close to the mother’s side, the younger of the two daughters in a green quilted jacket with a picture of a squirrel. She is the only one of the family without a small bunch of roses.
One of the buglers has a problem with the high notes. Perhaps it is because of the cold. Luise Maywald has tears in her eyes nonetheless. She stares into the distance, past the wall, past the treetops of the lakeside woods, too. Her left cheek has gone a purple color.
He knows that he has to speak now. He thinks of the Book of Ecclesiastes. He knows it by heart. But still he motions over to one of the altar servers and pretends to read out of the book.
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to be born, and a time to die. A time for everything.
They all bow their heads. He knows he ought to say something about the life of the deceased, and he knows that he has left his notes in the liturgical book, but at the same time he is breaking up and flying off somewhere in several fragments.
He has counted three people from the police: just to the left of the door, Florian Lipp; by the path that leads to the grave, a young woman with dark-blond hair and ear muffs, whose name he does not know; and by the eastern boundary wall, directly behind him—and thus out of his line of vision—Ludwig Kovacs. Lipp was one of the pupils in his very first mathematics class, a slim, dark-haired boy, always circumspect, kept his own counsel, no escapades. They say of Kovacs that he loves nothing better than the quickest way to a simple explanation. Once he had been in charge of interviewing all the teachers when it was rumored that large amounts of cocaine were changing hands in the abbey school. Kovacs’s behavior in the interviews had been neutral and he remained impartial throughout—all in all, he was very proper in his approach.
You put your eyes in your pocket / And your nose on the ground.
A gust of wind sweeps across the cemetery, here and there sucking up the snow like mini tornadoes—a meter high, perhaps one and a half. He puts his arms around his body to prevent the tunic from flapping about.
You should be made / To wear earphones.
The Bürgermeister takes the pause as an invitation, works his way to the graveside, and pulls his notes out of his pocket. He looks around at the crowd, as if at the beginning of an election speech. “Father! Members of the Maywald family! Fellow mourners!”—authority needs official words. You can rely on politicians.
He looks around. If they were here he would have known by now. Sophie would be standing somewhere in the background, restraining the child, as it would not be right to embrace by an open grave.
In the right of his field of vision he notices something familiar. He tries to concentrate.
Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mister Jones?
Set apart from the crowd, on a slightly wider path, is a woman in a wheelchair, wrapped up snugly in blankets. Franziska Zillinger from the old people’s home in Waiern. She appears to be listening to the Bürgermeister’s speech, and from time to time she shakes her head. She gives the occasional dreamy smile. A young man in a gray coat leans on the handles, no doubt someone doing community service. He moves from one foot to the other and hunches his shoulders.
The corner with the water fountain. The cypresses. Nineteen of them. Suddenly there is an extra person standing by the second one from the right, as if they had just emerged from the trunk of the tree. So 312 in total. Small, dark coat, blue headband, a backpack on the ground in front of him. Björn.
He turns around. Kovacs is still in his place. He is leaning against the wall, right next to the grave of Engelbert Stransky, the former organist at the abbey, writing something in his notebook. He cannot say whether Kovacs has noticed everybody who is present.
Of Björn he thinks: a wanderer, who is passing by chance. Or a boy who steps forward in class and writes something on the board, a sentence that stops in the middle. Of Kovacs he thinks: “stately and plump,” and he pictures him slowly climbing some stairs, something on his arms that he cannot recognize. A knife, perhaps.
Introibo ad altare Dei.
The Bürgermeister steps back. His whole speech has discussed the life of an unassuming man in the service of the community. Nothing but hot air.
Introibo ad altare Dei.
Ad Deum, qui laetificat iuventutem meam.
He steps over to the grave and begins to turn the crank handle. Lovrek, he reads again. One of the bearers nudges him and whispers something in his ear. He withdraws his hand and allows him to get on with it.
Earth, take that which is yours.
Outside the gate a dog is barking louder and louder.
The coffin is entering the abyss.
The point at which things begin to rhyme.
He pushes in the second earphone.
Eighteen
There were days that began very early. Half asleep, you tried to tell yourself it had nothing to do with you, but that was no help. You looked around and there was nothing to make you happy. Apart from the fact that the cat was still alive.
Irene had not been able to sleep any longer. First she had tossed and turned in bed, then she had sat there, her back braced against the headrest, staring into the darkness. He had woken up and dozed off again, and when he awoke a second time she had gone. He put on a pair of jeans and a sweater and went looking for her. She was sitting in the stables, in his armchair, listening to the Schumann concerto, the Jacqueline du Pré recording. “Are you sad?” he asked. She did not answer. He fetched her bentwood chair and sat down next to her.
“Is it good to confront yourself with the unattainable, if you’re feeling bad anyway?”
She turned her head and threw him a brief glance. “She just plays that so beautifully.” After a while he stood up quietly and went into the kitchen. What a psycho-jerk I am, he thought.
He had fed the cat and then started to make breakfast. Orange juice, toast, grilled bacon. She’s missing Tobias and she hates Tchaikovsky, he thought. He looked at the clock. The Schumann concerto lasted half an hour. He went over to the stables again and interrupted her at the start of the second movement. “How many times is that now?” he asked. She raised four fingers. He put his arms around her.
At ten past six, just as he was pouring the second cup of coffee, the telephone had rung. Clemens, the abbot. Bauer was in a weird state; it had been especially awkward at the funeral the day before. The Bürgermeister himself had rung; he was not angry, no, more concerned; after all, they knew Bauer. Clemens was surprised as Bauer had given the impression of being quite stable of late. This is why he’d had no qualms about entrusting him with the delicate ceremony. What is more, the semester had started after the Christmas holidays without any problems, and there had been no complaints from the pupils or staffroom.
He hung up and watched Irene spoon out some pear jelly from the jar. “The hospital?” she asked. He shook his head. “No, Bauer. Clemens is bringing him over right away.” A bonkers Benedictine father, he added. He’s meant to be burying an old man whose skull has been beaten to a pulp, and yet it turns into something comic. Irene remained silent, and he wondered why it was only when talking to him, the psychiatrist, that the abbot called the friar “Bauer,” whereas otherwise he used the title “Father Joseph.” Irene continued stroking the cat for a while and then stood up. “Do you need the stables?” she asked. He shook his head. “No,
I’ll go to the office.”
Bauer’s movements were perhaps a little more awkward than usual. But apart from this Horn could not detect anything different. In the last week or so Bauer said he had increased the Seroquel dose to 250 milligrams per day, and he was gradually noticing the effect of this. That sensation that his body was full of blastholes was returning, and he felt it was just a matter of time before a huge explosion smashed it to smithereens. Yes, of course, he had been running like the wind—day and night—and, of course, he had been listening to his music.
“Even during the funeral?”
“Yes, even during the funeral.”
To be more precise, Bauer said, he had listened to “Ballad of a Thin Man.” The reason why he had chosen this track—he assumed his explanation would be of particular interest to a psychiatrist—was that it was a song about out-and-out paranoia and it stopped him feeling so lonely. Just a smattering of residual tension, Horn thought, a slight projective causticity that makes the other responsible for his own misery. Otherwise there was nothing suspicious: no incoherence in his thought, no lapsing, not even the whiff of an associative relaxation, no hearing voices, no experiences of outside influence or external control, no assigning excessive significance to things, no ideas of greatness. If you were unaware just how quickly Bauer could go over the edge and how quickly he could also recover, you would think Clemens’ description of the previous day’s events pure invention.
Horn held Bauer’s wrists and elbows and checked his passive flexion. “Seroquel doesn’t cause parkinsonoid syndrome,” Bauer said.
“Can do, sometimes.”
Anyway, it was part of the psychiatrist’s procedure and was the only opportunity to touch the patient without making him suspicious. Horn kept quiet about this.
“Did you notice anything during the funeral?” he asked.
Bauer thought about it. “Yes,” he said. “The company that manufactures the coffin-sinker is called Lovrek. I hadn’t seen that before.”
The excessively keen reality control of the psychotic patient, Horn thought, while reflecting that psychiatry must have begun with the observation of people in a very peculiar way. He also thought that “coffin-sinker” was a fabulous word.
Bauer spoke about how difficult it was to recall impressions from phases in his life when a prevailing inner certainty had sooner or later crumbled into bits. He also talked about how anxiety arrived in waves, and how fragmentary the process was of perceiving and ordering things. “Buglers,” he said. “Four of them. The Bürgermeister, opening and closing his mouth, but none of his words reach your ear. A green jacket with a squirrel on it.”
“Excellent,” Horn said, and Bauer gave him a puzzled look.
“I mean, that you took so much in.”
I’m not telling the truth, Horn thought, but he felt no trace of guilt because he was just delighted that the little girl had been there and that nothing dreadful had happened. He pictured her standing at the graveside, staring down at her boots, one hand in that of her mother’s, the other clenched at the bottom of her jacket pocket, three steps away from a priest who was talking gibberish and who had a white wire hanging down from his left ear. Suddenly he was convinced that she had still not yet spoken.
“Are you in a fit state to work?” Horn said. A tiny grin crept over Bauer’s face.
“That’s Clemens’s biggest worry—that people will go to mass and gossip about me afterward; or that I’ll say I’m able to teach and parents will start complaining that in class I’ve said something like: ‘Nothing is certain, not even the commutative law of addition.’”
Nothing is certain, Horn thought, you even get used to that. When they had started hiking together he had not been able to keep up with Bauer’s pace. Over time he had understood that a constant questioning of things did not reflect an urge for destruction, but the need to feel coherent in the world and at one with yourself, however fragmented you perceived your personality to be. He remembered the early sessions, Bauer’s mistrust, his own efforts to find out what attracted him so much to this man, and Irene’s words one evening: “If I were a psychoanalyst I would say it had something to do with homoeroticism—thank God I’m not one!”
“Do you think you’re fit to work—yes or no?”
“I’ve worked before in a quite different state from this.”
Horn tried to picture Tobias and his classmates, with Bauer standing at the front explaining the trigonometric function or the intersection of three planes in space, and coming out with the odd thing that was totally unrelated. He wondered whether he also told them about his wife and child, and how much of this they believed. To begin with, Horn had accepted everything that Bauer said: the names, the faces, the house with the garden that unfortunately was a bit shady, the wife’s love of Scandinavian literature, the child’s predisposition to neurodermitis and his ever more insistent demand for a small white dog. Then doubts started to surface in Horn’s mind. There was not a scrap of evidence of genuine contact between Bauer and these two other people. What is more, all the stories had been nothing but harmonious, even idyllic: no unhappiness, no ambivalence, no conflict. Bauer had just smiled when Horn first shared these observations with him; and even later, when Horn was quite forthright and said he thought the whole thing an elaborate, paranoid construct, Bauer did not contradict him. For the most part, the fantasy had remained resistant to the neuroleptic medication, probably because Bauer was unwilling to let go of it. This was the case with all intricately constructed delusions: people balked at losing them because they provided an immediate psychodynamic benefit.
“Go up to three hundred milligrams,” Horn said. “At least for the next two weeks.”
Bauer nodded. He does what he likes anyway, Horn thought, and part of him did not have a problem with that. Once, when he was still uncertain as to just how real these two mystery figures were, Horn asked him why he had entered a monastery if his wife and child were so important to him. Bauer answered, “That is for me and my God only. In other words: you don’t understand.” At the time they were still on relatively formal terms, and Bauer would behave in a self-assured and detached manner, which vanished later on.
They sat there in silence for a while, both of them looking out of the window. By the birdhouse a bullfinch was trying to assert himself among a flock of great tits. “There’s been the odd hoopoe there in the last few days,” Horn said. “You don’t get that often.” Bauer did not seem to be listening. The cat came and rubbed up against his leg. She wants to go outside, he thought.
Outside in the hall Bauer turned to Horn. “There’s something else I noticed,” he said. “Franziska Zillinger from the old people’s home in Waiern was at Wilfert’s funeral, as was the younger Gasselik boy.” Horn stopped for a second. Then he said, “I don’t know a Franziska Zillinger,” and shuddered in the wake of the cold shaft that had just passed through him.
Clemens was not in the kitchen but with Irene in the stables. The Schumann concerto was playing again. Clemens was sitting on the bentwood chair, leafing through the CD booklet. He got up quickly and, for a brief moment, the hang of his habit revealed that he had an erection. Horn could understand. On the back page of the booklet was the pretty, long-haired girl in a sleeveless summer dress, smiling, her eyes closed and the instrument leaning gently against her body. “I was just following the music,” the abbot said. “I thought at first it was your wife playing.”
“I’m afraid not,” Irene said. She stretched and stood up. She had never liked Clemens.
Horn talked about the multiple sclerosis that had ended Jacqueline du Pré’s career before her thirtieth birthday and no doubt created the myth that had sprung up about her person. “Precocious achievement,” he said. “Someone who’s able to do things at the age of twenty that others can’t manage till they’re fifty.” Irene turned off the music. For a second she stood there quite still, as if she did not trust the silence. The sounds are absorbed by the walls and later they are sl
owly released to the room, like an acoustic stove. That was one of her favorite ideas. When she spoke about it she shook with excitement.
“Some people have only reached their thirties when they die, and yet they leave behind a work that changes the world,” the abbot said.
“Like Schubert.” In fact, Irene detested Clemens, especially when he tried discussing religion in the style of a Sunday sermon. Horn perceived him as an awkward and needy individual. Her view was rather different.
“Doesn’t anything strike you?” Clemens asked when they were sitting in the car, driving into town. Horn was startled. He had been thinking about precocious achievement, about the phrase, “someone who’s able to do things at the age of twenty that others can’t manage till they’re fifty.” Presumably there were some people capable of certain things at the age of sixteen. For a moment he had considered asking Bauer’s opinion on the matter, but he left it. Who knew which mental images Bauer’s fragile psyche could tolerate and which not? With the palm of his hand Clemens caressed the steering wheel and dashboard. The car was new: a black Passat Variant with four-wheel drive. A gift from Seifert that was far more valuable than what he had given in return, the abbot said. Horn knew that the VW and Audi dealer’s children were still too young for the abbey school. It must have been something else. He did not care.
He asked the abbot to let him out after the roundabout. He needed the few hundred meters of exercise and fresh air.
The water level of the river was low. A thin layer of frost covered the gravel banks. On the other side of the river, at the top of the concrete steps leading up to one of the houses in the old town, someone was looking toward the lake. The compact shape stood out clearly against the light-blue sky. He could not tell whether it was a man or woman.
About halfway to the hospital he bumped into Brigitte and Laszlo, who had done the night shift on I23. They looked happy and purposeful, as if they were on their way to have breakfast in one of the lakeside hotels such as the Bauriedl or Fernkorn. Gabriele Zehmann had passed away shortly after midnight, they said; nothing had occurred on the psychiatric side. Brunner had come in specially to administer the opiates herself to Frau Zehmann. The youngest of the three daughters was pretty hysterical—everybody was rather surprised by this, but you never could predict how relatives would react in the end, even after an illness that had dragged on for many years. Gabriele Zehmann had suffered from a rare, autoimmunologically mediated pulmonary fibrosis, and given her general condition an organ transplant was out of the question, even though she was barely sixty years old. She had been far more accepting of it than her family; she said to Horn while they watched television together, “I’m just running out of steam before the others.”
The Sweetness of Life Page 19