The Cusanus Game

  “Give her my regards when she returns. Is she doing well?”

  “If you would like information, I can relay your questions to Hendrik Casimir. I am at present under the control of the institute’s AI and have only limited decision-making authority. Shall I connect you, Domenica?”

  “No, thank you. Over.”

  Frans too had NEA status.

  “Is he already traveling again?”

  “No, but he does not want to be disturbed,” his ICom informed me.

  “Tell him that it’s me, Domenica.”

  “I am aware of that, but he does not want to be disturbed by anyone. I’m sorry, those are his instructions.”

  “Well, then I really don’t want to disturb,” I said crossly and broke the connection.

  The coachman had given up hope of customers and climbed onto the coach box. “I’ve had it for today,” he said to his neighbor, a robust younger man with a coarse red face, swung his whip, and drove away.

  “Sie Hai!” the macaw squawked at me as I stepped out of the elevator.

  I knew Hai meant “shark” in German. “One day,” I snarled at it, “when the Salzach floods, one will come swimming in here and devour you, you stupid creature!”

  * * *

  IT MUST HAVE been after midnight. The last elegantly dressed visitors to the festival hall had gotten into taxis or fetched their cars from the underground garage and had gone home. The gates had been closed, the lights extinguished. The sky had cleared. A bright moon bathed the street in light and made the rock face appear even darker. A cold wind descended from the mountains. I was freezing. If only I had dressed more warmly.

  I had huddled in the darkness of a house entrance with half a dozen well-trodden stone steps leading up to it and stared across the street. There was no one to be seen. At any moment it would be time.

  And indeed, it then began. It was as if the gray stones of the facade morphed and took human form. They separated from the walls of the festival house, were gray as the stone—gray shoulders, gray faces, gray arms. Emaciated, ragged figures, ten or twelve chained together, they separated from the rock and shuffled, staggering with exhaustion, across to the horse fountain, soundless, in ghostly silence. Only the water burbled. They washed themselves, drank out of cupped hands. Then they were again led away, through the stone. They disappeared into the rock, while the next column was led to the fountain.

  I trembled from the cold.

  Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I spun around.

  “Did you seriously think you could hide from us?” my geography teacher, whom I had encountered at the border, asked me.

  He lifted the small half-sphere and shook it. It was full of darkness.

  I awoke with a scream.

  * * *

  THE NEXT DAY started off with a radiant morning. I looked out the window down into Judengasse. The first few people were out. I watched a scrawny old man with a beige sarong flapping around his calves. On his head a brown turban was enthroned, and over his shoulders he had wrapped a worn gray wool blanket. Supported by a long walking stick, he took measured steps from Waagplatz, accompanied by a dark-skinned, perhaps twelve-year-old boy, who was hauling with both hands a tied-up, suitcase-like piece of luggage made of wood. It was so heavy that he had to put it down repeatedly. The old man pointed with his stick to a spot next to the entrance to our hotel and watched the boy untie and open the object. It seemed to be a sort of bed. Was the old man intending to camp there in the middle of the street?

  As I stepped through the green lacquered door, the old man was resting on his bed, which—I could not believe my eyes—was covered with closely packed nails. The blanket lay folded up under his head. His ribs stuck out from his torso under the skin like the frame of a fish trap, and his scrawny legs looked as if they had been rooted in dry earth for decades. He looked at me with extremely sad tobacco-yellow eyes, as if he had lain down to die.

  “My goodness, the fakir is here!” said Roblacher, our concierge, who had come through the door behind me. “How are you, you old rascal?”

  The old man made a weak gesture toward the boy, who was crouching next to the bed, and uttered a sound as if he were too exhausted to speak.

  “He says he’s not doing well,” said the boy.

  “That means,” said the concierge, “if I understand correctly, you haven’t had breakfast yet.”

  Both nodded.

  The boy looked at me with dark eyes and pushed a shallow little basket imploringly toward me. I rummaged in my handbag and threw a two-euro coin into it. The concierge reappeared and handed each of them a croissant.

  “There you go,” he said.

  The old man reached out his hand commandingly and the boy obediently handed him his share. Both croissants disappeared under the old man’s yellow-flecked mustache.

  “Are they gypsies?” I asked the concierge.

  He shook his head. “No, Bangladeshis,” he said. “They’ve come with the salt caravan.”

  “Salt caravan?” I asked, perplexed.

  “Yes. The salt caravan comes every year at this time. These people hold a market on Residenzplatz. You should have a look at it, young woman. They offer pretty things: pottery, baskets, carvings, but especially seeds and seedlings. They know something about that. First-rate quality. And they’re artists too.”

  “But why salt?”

  “With the proceeds they buy salt. Guaranteed pure salt, with the papal seal, the tiara, which they then sell in Bohemia and especially in Poland. It’s a wonderfully healthy salt, young woman, you can take it from me,” he declared with a laugh. “Miracle salt, so to speak, against all afflictions. Even against radioactivity. The people in the east are wild about it. Especially the Polacks. They’ll pay any price for it.”

  “And where do these people come from?”

  “Where are you from?” he asked the boy.

  “Saxan Analt,” the boy said softly.

  “These two here come from the region between Halberstadt and Quedlinburg. They live there in fortified villages, because of the Nazis, the Asens, and Kicobs. The UN resettled them there. Thuringia, Saxony, the Ore Mountains. The contaminated areas from which the residents have fled.”

  “I thought those regions were uninhabitable,” I said.

  “These people manage astonishingly well, it is said. See for yourself. Radioactively contaminated land is better than none. For their homeland is underwater.” Roblacher chuckled.

  “I know.”

  “Well, then. Petroleum deliveries only in exchange for taking in refugees. You know the motto of the UN. What else is it to do?”

  “And here in Austria-Hungary?”

  The concierge held up his hands. “We’re overflowing with Slavs, young woman, if you will pardon me. The Bangladeshis are still my favorites.”

  With measured movements the old man brushed the crumbs from his mustache. He belched and closed his eyes. The nails seemed not to cause him particular torment. I saw that they were not very sharp.

  The satyr head over the entrance gate looked down at us, grinning.

  * * *

  RESIDENZPLATZ WAS UNRECOGNIZABLE. At the fountain stood about two dozen camels, snorting as they drank from plastic tubs. Along the facades of the carillon tower and the cathedral, large army tents adorned with pennants had been pitched; in front of them were market stalls from which Asian vendors dressed in colorful sarongs offered wares. Between the fountain and the Residenz palace, men wearing turbans and baseball caps erected a large stage from prefabricated parts.

  Two city officials in white protective suits, the yellow propeller-like hazard symbol for radioactivity on their backs, walked around between the market stalls, running their measuring gloves over the displayed items and reading the data from the small monitors on the backs of their hands. They seemed not to have any complaints. At the corners of the square stood squad cars of the gendarmerie, which were there to nip in the bud assaults by militant racists—in order to gain a
ttention, they seldom missed such events. I was, of course, interested above all in the offering of plants. It ranged from flowers through seedlings, ornamental plants, vegetables and fruit, to culinary herbs and spices; native species as well as exotic ones, which they had evidently brought with them from their homeland, but also strains and mutants with which I was unfamiliar. Probably genetically engineered creations.

  I listened to customers comparing notes on their experiences with previous purchases and expressing their satisfaction—indeed, their enthusiasm regarding the yield, the taste, and the resistance to pests and diseases. It did not take long for me to realize that I was looking at products by experts here, by artists of haute couture in the field of botanical genetics.

  I plucked a blade from a pinnate plant that looked like a variant of watercress. However, it belonged to neither the Nasturtium officinale species nor the allotetraploid form of Nasturtium microphyllum; nor was it related to the triploid x sterile, as was cultivated in England and on the other side of the Atlantic in Virginia. I crushed the blade between my fingers and sniffed it; it emitted a strong, sharp smell. It was definitely watercress, but this form was unknown to me.

  “Is this found in the region where you live or is it tailor-made?” I asked the woman at the stall.

  “Those who look for it find it,” she said dismissively, pulling her chador over her mouth; her cheeks were fissured with radiation acne.

  But I did not retreat, plucked a sprig and scrutinized it. It bore six pairs of pinnae instead of four.

  “Have you heard of Dreienbrunnen?” she asked. “Near Erfurt? That’s Dreienbrunnen watercress, young woman, if you want to know exactly.”

  I shook my head. “Not this form,” I said. “I just wanted to know whether this plant is a genetically engineered product or a mutant from the plutonium fallout.”

  “What are you talking about? Do you want to drive away our customers?” she hissed indignantly. “Our goods are officially inspected. The authorities have checked and found no cause for complaint. So stop asking questions like that!”

  “Sorry,” I murmured.

  With a friendly smile, she turned to a customer.

  “Do you know something about genetics?” a male voice asked behind me.

  I turned around. It was a middle-aged man with a pale, doughy face and thinning blond hair. His stomach was kept in check by wide leather suspenders with cross-braces, from which gray-brown buckskin breeches hung. A gruesome bundle of yellow teeth, antler tips, and claws protected his fly. He self-consciously turned a flat black felt hat in his hands, on the double cord of which billowed the hugest tuft of chamois hair I had ever seen.

  “Depending how you look at it,” I said carefully. “I’m a botanist.”

  “Ah, I see,” he said, disappointed. “I heard you saying something about mutants.”

  His gray cable-knit jacket with clasps made of carved tusk smelled intensely like a pet shop. He seemed well-off, but made a somehow helpless impression on me.

  “What do you want to know about?” I asked.

  “It’s more about animals,” he replied. “Birds, to be precise.”

  That explained the smell.

  “I don’t know whether I can help you with that.”

  “Too bad,” he said. “I need some advice. I thought that maybe you … You see, I’m a businessman. My shop is very nearby, on Goldgasse.”

  “You have a pet shop,” I surmised.

  He gave me a sad look and asked with a sigh, “You can smell it, right? Yes, there’s not much that can be done about that.”

  “Hm.”

  “No, not a pet shop, my dear lady. It’s a leather goods store and specialty store for hunting and forestry accessories. A traditional shop—family business for generations…”

  Before I knew what was happening, I was walking across the square at his side and we were turning onto Goldgasse. The man stopped in front of a glass door and unlocked it laboriously. In the display window hung wide leather belts embroidered with edelweiss and ostentatious handbags with sewn-on silver coins and silver-mounted deer teeth, as well as hand-sized, heart-shaped containers equipped with snap hooks, the function of which was impenetrable to me.

  “You’re a foreigner, right?” he asked, opening the door.

  “That’s a matter of opinion,” I replied. “I’m from Rome.”

  He nodded. “Then you probably won’t be able to muster much interest in this. It’s more of a … a national, historical matter.”

  “Now you’re making me curious.”

  Inside the shop a flood of folkloric showpieces surged over me: powder horns for snuff, more Alpine-hunter-style handbags, even more deer teeth in silver, more fashionably spruced-up death for atavistic tendencies of either sex—whole display cases were full of it. And on the walls dozens of antlers in a double row, peruke, cross, and corkscrew antlers, in the dim background whole heads, luxuriously prepared, with alertly gazing glass eyes: deer, sows, eerily grinning pikes, a courting wood grouse, flanked by two pheasants.

  I followed the owner to the back. As he opened a door, the smell that came pouring out took my breath away. I saw an incubator on which small red and green indicator lights gleamed. Next to it stood a sturdy mesh cage in which a feathered something could be vaguely made out.

  “Recently I’ve gotten into something that has already cost me a lot of money,” he confessed, slipping on a leather glove. “But it doesn’t yield anything, even though I have customers who would with pleasure count out a hundred thousand schillings on my table to be able to show something like that to their party guests. But it doesn’t really work.”

  I gave no reply, taking care to breathe through my mouth and pressing my nose into the crook of my anorak sleeve. The man opened the cage and at first I thought he was pulling out a voluminous bird skin, but the thing unfolded strong wings and let out a pitiful squawk. I saw a milky nictating membrane, which slid aside to reveal a shiny, imperiously gazing eye. It was a young golden eagle, a real Aquila chrysaetos, but something was wrong with it. On its neck a lump had formed—a growth like the bib of a turkey, swinging limply back and forth. The neck … Suddenly I realized it: That was no lump. It was a second head, underdeveloped and feeble, hanging down and trying in vain to erect itself—with the beak opened to scream. That was what was letting out those weak squawks.

  “I obtain the fertilized eggs from a genetics laboratory in Klagenfurt. It’s the double-eagle, the original imperial eagle. And the scientists in Carinthia assure me—”

  I was no longer capable of responding. I pressed my fist to my mouth to keep from vomiting over the display cases full of corpse parts and ran out into the street.

  * * *

  AFTER SUNSET THE performers began their acts on Residenzplatz. On the stage appeared acrobats who juggled plates, spat fire, and pushed long swords down their throats. Slender-limbed children in colorful bodysuits were hurled up with a seesaw and formed a living pyramid. A beautiful young woman in a glittering costume and with a fantastic headdress made of glass and little mirrors stood on a camel draped with mulberry- and tobacco-colored rugs. She rode around and held up a neon sign on which each coming attraction was announced. A band played Bengali music: tabla rhythms and sitar sounds—a trancelike endless loop.

  At dusk a tightrope walker came down as if from the heavens on a rope that had been stretched on a slant between the carillon tower and the fountain. He had not yet descended halfway when a shot rang out. A moment of breathless silence and anxious horror—but the frozen figure on the rope, though it teetered, did not plunge to the pavement. A few seconds went by, and then he tentatively placed his right foot forward and moved on. At the ends of the balancing pole a red and a green light glowed alternately. A gasp of relief went through the audience. Was the shot part of the show?

  There were many people on the square, not just pilgrims and tourists, but also numerous residents of the city and families from the surrounding rural communities. As night
fell, a striking number of young men appeared who had been drinking liquid courage in the bars and seemed to be on the prowl for one of the exotic young women who had mingled among the spectators in small groups. Again and again I saw two or three of them get into a taxi with men and drive away.

  Only three coaches stood at the passage to the cathedral square. The horses were nervous due to the proximity of the camels. They grew even more anxious when an older little man, who was dressed in a brown cowl but seemed to be neither a monk nor a priest, climbed onto a coach box and began to sermonize with a shrill voice about the immorality of the youth.

  “Do you not grasp,” he shouted, tearing desperately at his beard, which hung sparsely down to his chest, “that they are only after your most valuable possession, that they are seed robbers, that they steal your seed, plunder your genes, and make off with them?”

  “Bet you’d like to get plundered a little too, eh?” exclaimed one of the coachmen good-naturedly.

  The onlookers laughed.

  “But the bells never move when you pull on the rope!” another exclaimed, cracking his whip so loudly that the horses shied and the preacher almost fell off the coach box.

  “Do you know what they’re doing in their secret laboratories with your seed?” he continued to shout, undeterred, as he held himself steady. “Chimeras and monkeys and demons! That’s what they’re making out of it!”

  Well, certainly not that, I thought, but there’s something to be said for the concept.

  “They go, our young men, unknowing, stupid, and blinded, and let those … those … monkey women fuck them.”

  “That’s enough!” exclaimed the coachman, pulling him off his vehicle.

  The preacher staggered and fell to the pavement on his behind.

  “Fuck them!” he shouted again with all his might, bristling his beard and breathing with a hiss through his teeth.

  “Get lost already!” the coachman snapped at him, raising his whip.

  “Let him be,” said his neighbor, grasping his arm.

  It was the one with the coarse, chubby-cheeked face who had also been standing here the day before.

  * * *