“What are you thinking about?” he asks.
“Believe me, you don’t want to know,” she says.
“Why not?”
“You might get angry.”
He scoops up a portion of cottage cheese with the spoon and offers it to her. “O.K., O.K.” she says, throwing up her hands in submission. “I just had this thought, strange as it may seem, that sometimes it’s the mad stuff that makes you feel happiest.” He puts down the spoon and stares at her, wide-eyed. “You see,” she says, “you’re getting angry already.” “Rubbish,” he says. People were forever mistaken in believing that it was the mad stuff that must make you feel dreadful. On the contrary, he says, it was everything else that made you feel dreadful: the people around you, particularly your so-called nearest and dearest, your own history, everything which people might pretentiously call the world or reality. “Then you reconfigure yourself internally and everything becomes bearable,” he says.
She nods. Or you go to bed with a Benedictine priest who is a certified Grade A nutter, she thinks.
She remembers how it all began the previous September. She was in the staffroom with a colleague, Ursula Leeb, paying close attention while a number of things were being explained to her, as she was still new to the place, and then at five to eight this monk burst in, singing the “Dies Irae” at the top of his voice, and explained that the first day of term was inevitably a day of wrath. She remembers Ursula saying she needn’t be scared, he had these episodes, and then he did three or four laps of the room, alternating between singing and greeting his colleagues. When he got to her he paused, looked into her eyes for a second and said, “A new one.” He moved on and she felt the relief a patient does following a medical that turns out to be far less intrusive than feared. When she was on her way to her classroom a little later he was waiting in the corridor. “I’m there for anybody who needs help,” he said. She had enough composure to ask what gave him the idea that she needed help. It wasn’t rocket science, he said, the sleeve of her sweater had ridden up her arm, that’s what gave him the idea. She looked down at her forearm and immediately felt blood rush to her face. Not long afterwards she told him the whole story.
“Who actually knows about us now?” she asks.
“My psychiatrist,” he says.
“Who else?”
“Don’t know. I don’t think anybody does.”
“How on earth is that possible? What about the abbot, for example? Or your colleagues? Whenever you spend the night with me you miss choral prayers the following morning.”
“I used to miss them even before I started spending the night with you.”
She takes his word for it and she also believes him when he says that the other padres do not envy his relationship with her. Each one of us has our contacts, he had once explained, some are women, some men. A few of them have children. The order pays, that’s it. He scoops the remaining cottage cheese out of the pot with a piece of white bread. She thinks that in moments like these he comes across as perfectly calm and orderly. Some day she will ask him whether he would like to have a child of his own.
*
The bus is half empty. They are earlier than usual. She does not care if people see them together. Young teacher seduces Benedictine priest, she thinks; but that’s far from the truth. They sit in one of the back rows. He rummages around in his bag, humming all the while. She grabs his arm. “That’s what you were singing a few days ago when we had that spat in the classroom, remember?” He looks confused.
“When Felix went missing.”
“You’re right.” He takes out his iPod, puts the headphones in her ears, does a quick search, and presses play.
Spirit on the water / Darkness on the face of the deep / I keep thinking about you baby / I can’t hardly sleep.
“Who’s this?” she asks. “God,” he says. “His Holy Bobness.”
“Stupid question, sorry.”
“‘Modern Times’,” he says, “his last album but one.”
God’s last album but one, she thinks, he’s really lost it. He nudges her in the side. “Why are you grinning?”
“Now you’ve disturbed my listening,” she complains. “There was something about pain.” He pulls the headphones out of her ears, and tucks the iPod back into his bag. She knows it is pointless to ask what’s wrong. He’s toppling over the edge, she thinks, he’s plummeting into the abyss and freezing up, from one moment to the next. Nobody’s going to save him from that.
They cross Severin bridge, then follow a loop heading westwards along Waldzeller Straße, Rohrweg and back along Seestraße to Rathausplatz. He spends the entire time looking silently out of the window. As soon as they get off she grabs him by the sleeve of his coat. “What are those monks called, the ones who take a vow of silence?” she asks. He turns to her. “Trappists and Carthusians” he says quietly. Then he starts laughing. He’s good for me, she thinks, he’s so good for me.
*
They are in the large square by the abbey. On the outer wall of the nearest garden a dove is strutting around in circles. “I’ll listen to it some other time,” she says, holding up her hand when he opens his bag again. He shakes his head. No, not the iPod, he had forgotten to show her something else, a drawing from the last lesson he took with her class.
A dark wave, just one, with a ball on top, she thinks as she takes a look at the piece of paper, a sort of Gaussian normal distribution curve, or perhaps someone in a cape, their arms sticking out to the side. He says they were given the task to draw something to do with Easter, after all Easter was quite soon. Most of them had come up with hares or eggs, as he had expected them to, only Britta did something different. Britta? she asks, and he says, yes, Britta, that was the name of the skinny blonde girl in the front row on the far left, who loved talking about her guinea pigs. To start with she had sat there motionless, bent forward stiffly, and when he asked her, “Maybe do a chicken?” she had shaken her head without saying a word. Then she had grabbed a fat crayon and drawn this, quickly and deliberately.
She frowns. “It’s not a guinea pig,” she says after a while. No, he says. He had asked Britta what the curve was supposed to be, and she’d said without a moment’s hesitation: an owl, a black owl, and he instantly knew that it couldn’t be anything else. A brown owl could be black, just for once. “I’m sure she didn’t say owl,” she says, “but awrl, plack awrl. She can’t say owl, even though she sees the speech therapist twice a week.” “You’re really quite pedantic,” he says. “Sometimes it gives me the creeps.” She was right, of course, the little girl had not said owl, but awrl, or maybe even oowl, depending on her particular speech impediment, but still it was obvious that it was an owl and, in any case, that was not so important.
“So, what are you saying?” she asks.
He says he’s certain she heard it from Felix, otherwise what she said made no sense. “What makes no sense?” she asks. “What else did she say?” That she had been beaten on her back, he says, on her back, shoulders and head. The black owl had used a stick to beat her.
SIX
It’s the small things, Horn thought, it’s the things you’d imagine were trivial. Names you forget, new sweaters you don’t show enough appreciation for, the walking speed you don’t try to keep up with. Sometimes just the adjectives you omit: wonderful, prudent, gripping. Or the rolls I’ve forgotten to buy yet again, he thought. If I don’t drop to my knees in contrition, it’s all over. In the end she yells at me and I criticise her for all those things I’ve always wanted to criticise her for.
He had left home ten minutes earlier than usual, seething with anger and without having had any breakfast. He knew where he could shove his idea of going to Scotland in the summer, too, she had shouted after him. Islay, Skye and the Highlands, nothing more than a thinly disguised piss-up – not with her, thank you very much. Fine, not with you, he had answered and slammed the car door behind him. Since then he had not been able to get images of Irene out of his hea
d, first of her diving between manta rays and porcupinefish off one of those Maldive islands, and then of her having sex on a bed strewn with flowers in an air-conditioned bungalow, both these activities taking place with a dark-haired, slightly too short tenor with an Italian grandmother and a spare tyre around the waist. Fine, if that was what she wanted!
He looked around. The meeting room was gradually filling up. Hrachovec was sitting on his right, spreading a croissant with apricot jam. He seemed in a good mood, but he had been like that continually ever since he had landed the junior doctor job. Natalie Bernert, the ergotherapist, stretched her extraordinary long neck over the table, chatting as ever to Renate Mutz, the social worker. Lisbeth Schalk was wearing a new, egg-yolk yellow Moncler jacket and took a couple of seconds longer than normal to sit down. Günther and Vessy looked tired, but so they should after a night shift. Last to come through the door was Leonie Wittmann, rings around her eyes, and her fists clenched. She fell into the vacant chair beside Horn. Two irate women in the same morning – how am I supposed to deal with that? he thought.
Basically, everything had been quiet until just before three, Günther reported. Sabrina had slept through thanks to her extra medication, Fehring had taken himself to bed, and evidently none of the others had been minded to get up to any mischief. Until this Marcus came in and the delicious peace was disturbed. “Which Marcus?” Horn asked. A young man, Hrachovec explained, twenty-one years old, a timber engineering student from an ordinary family. Nobody knew why he had tied a length of climbing rope to the chandelier hook on the sitting-room ceiling in the middle of the night, placed his neck in an amateurish noose and then kicked a chair from under him. He probably hung there for a while, for a few seconds at least, becoming hypoxic, until the hook could take the weight no longer, and the young man came crashing down with the crystal chandelier. “Who heard him first?” Horn asked. “His mum,” Vessy said. “Mums always hear those sorts of things first.”
“And?”
“She came into the room and laughed,” said Vessy, turning red. “Then she asked if he’d hurt himself,” Hrachovec added. He took a bite of his croissant. “She did what?” Horn said. “Laughed,” Günther said. The woman, who seemed to have a big screw loose herself, told them that she’d found the whole thing a bit like a Monty Python film – a suicide everything conspires against, including the ceiling hook – it was just so funny, surely they could see that? In any case Marcus had said that he wasn’t in any pain, and she could see at once that he hadn’t lost consciousness at any point. “It’s Marcus with a ‘C’,” Vessy said. “Marcus with what?” Horn asked. “With a ‘C’, as in Caesar,” Günther said. “Please don’t write it with a ‘K’!” Vessy muttered something in Russian, and Hrachovec, who had swallowed his mouthful, said that fortunately the neighbour from the flat below had come up soon afterwards. As he enquired about the cause of the noise, he caught sight of the man sitting on the floor, the crystal chandelier and a length of rope beside him, and ignoring the woman’s protests he immediately called for an ambulance and the police.
It had been tricky from the moment they arrived on the ward. The woman had revealed that her son had the occasional strange turn, probably as a result of the cocktail of alcohol and energy drinks that he kept on knocking back, but really, they didn’t want to embarrass themselves, nobody here had a death wish, least of all her son, so all this talk of being admitted to hospital must be some kind of mistake. Marcus kept on gazing up at the ceiling, as if this were a nervous tic of his, and when asked whether he would stay on the ward voluntarily, he had shaken his head and finally uttered a single sentence: “I’m a laughing stock.”
Horn turned to his right. “And then you came in.”
Leonie Wittmann replied that, for better or for worse, the telephone had rung at ten to four, the very point which determined whether her night’s sleep would be relaxing or not. But what did it matter? On call was on call, no matter what the clock said. In the car her anger at this mother of a laughing stock, who was totally in denial, had risen to such a level that when she arrived at the hospital the only options open to her were either to give the woman a good thump, or else to keep a lid on her aggression and see the whole thing through, coolly and according to the letter of the law. “She said precisely one sentence, did our consultant,” Günther said, grinning. Horn looked at Leonie Wittmann out of the corner of his eye. When there’s that hint of irony in her face she’s quite beautiful, he thought, despite her straw-like hair and predator’s teeth. There was an expectant silence. “What, do you really think I can remember?” she growled finally. One sentence, Horn thought, I bet it began with Please be aware that … “What?” Leonie Wittmann asked. I’m thinking aloud again, without knowing it, Horn thought. “I just wanted to make a suggestion,” he said.
“What suggestion?”
“About the sentence you might have uttered.”
“And?”
“I bet it began with Please be aware that …”
“Maybe it did. But what else?”
“Haven’t got a clue.”
“Please be aware that your authority ends here, your son will be treated according to the provisions of the mental health act, and Furth district court now has full jurisdiction. Goodbye, see you tomorrow, it’s four o’clock in the morning,” Günther said. Leonie Wittmann thanked him with a nod of her head. “That’s exactly what I said.” The woman had been escorted out and the son given something to eat, she said. She herself had stayed there; it wasn’t worth going home.
“So what’s the background?” Horn asked.
“A long period of despair,” she said. “As always. What twenty-year-old hangs himself from a hook on the ceiling? – Someone who’s been sentenced to an early death by life. He can sense it, and there comes a point where he stops trying to fight it.” Horn said nothing. He imagined Leonie Wittmann coming into a room in which a young man was hanging from the ceiling, very calmly walking up to him, grabbing him around the waist, and lifting him up while somebody else removed the noose from his neck. He imagined her letting him slide down until she was supporting him under the armpits, his head sinking onto her shoulder with half-closed eyes, and the vivid realisation that nothing more could be done. That’s why I’ve wanted her, Horn thought, because she can do things like lift people out of nooses.
Horn had not regretted for a second his recommendation that the hospital employ this short woman, who already in her job interview had been remarkably prickly and determined to reveal nothing about her private life. That was nine months ago and they still knew very little about Leonie Wittmann – she had done part of her training in a specialist forensic clinic in Hamburg and the rest at an adolescent psychiatry department in eastern Switzerland; she was divorced; and she had a grey parrot by the name of Schopenhauer, who apparently could cite entire passages from The World as Will and Representation. Some people claimed she was a psychoanalyst, others spoke of a daughter studying sculpture in Vienna who made large art objects out of waste packaging. Neither of these assertions had been verified. Besides, I can’t picture her together with a man, Horn thought.
“What’s he doing now?” he asked. Leonie Wittmann was confused. “What’s who doing?”
“This Marcus chap. What’s he up to?”
“He’s sleeping,” Hrachovec said. “I gave him an infusion with a few vials of diazepam. Click – he went out like a light!” Hrachovec brushed croissant crumbs from his shirt. Click, Horn thought – there comes a point in your psychiatric training where you need to be certain that you’ve got things under control; putting people to sleep is the quickest way to achieve this. A jab, a little infusion or, if it’s not complicated, a few bitter drops, and they’re in your hands, snoring away. Whenever Hrachovec was on the night shift, half the ward would still be asleep the following morning. Lisbeth Schalk and a number of nurses did not approve. Horn had decided to let it go. As a psychiatrist you were also an anaesthetist, simple as that. Hrachovec had bec
ome a perfectly decent psychiatric anaesthetist; he logged everything properly, gave the correct doses, and when people woke up the worst was usually over. He still needed to learn how to communicate, Horn sometimes thought, but that was the most difficult thing of all.
“Any other business?” he asked, and closed the morning meeting by reading out a statement from the management referring to thefts in the hospital, which requested that staff lock their offices on leaving them; and also the announcement of a scientific conference on new methods for the treatment of eating disorders. Nobody wanted to attend, but that was less to do with the subject, and more to do with the fact that the conference was taking place in Innsbruck. Nobody ever wanted to go to Innsbruck – Salzburg, yes; Graz, yes; abroad, definitely; people would even travel to Linz. Perhaps it was because of the mountains: both Innsbruck and Furth had them right on their doorstep. The Viennese, Hamburgers and their Hungarian colleagues went to Innsbruck. They all thought the mountains were fantastic. Maybe I’ll go myself, Horn thought. “I’ll think about it too,” said Lisbeth Schalk, opening her Moncler jacket. Horn was startled. Not again, he thought, I don’t even notice I’m doing it. Four or five years ago Irene had first pointed out to him that he thought aloud. Like a child, she had said, or an old man, and he soon realised that it had something to do with Michael’s imminent moving out, which she was longing for, but he wasn’t in the least. It’s always the same, he thought, when something makes me tense I think aloud, whether I know what the problem is or not. To distract himself he stared at Lisbeth Schalk’s top: yellow, with a stripe of cornflower blue across the middle. He imagined what it would be like to go to Innsbruck with her and skip the talks. First they would walk hand in hand through meadows, and then shag in the hotel. He put two fingers to his lips, just to be on the safe side.
*
Andrea Emler, the secretary, had placed a photograph on the desk of her daughter in her first communion dress. Horn was confused and wondered for a brief moment whether it was now his memory that was playing up. Andrea gave an embarrassed chuckle. She knew that the ceremony was not for six weeks and that she was a bit neurotic, but she had worried that all the nice dresses would be sold out, so she had got in there early. Her daughter hadn’t minded, and to make things easier they had also photographed her straightaway. The girl looked like her mother: short, blonde and healthy, with an air of determination and a hint of mistrust in her expression. She was holding her baptismal candle in her right hand, and in her left a wicker basket with yellow and white flowers. “Very pretty!” Horn said. He thought about his own first communion, all those years ago, in the sun-drenched village church, and about how everybody said how alike he and Tobias were, tall, lanky and a little out of proportion, whereas Michael looked like Irene. Despite this the two of them had had their difficulties for years now, and he sometimes wondered whether Tobias was actually his, or maybe the son of a tenor, for example. Andrea Emler burst out laughing. Horn gave a start. She put her hand on his upper arm and pointed at the door crack from which a white toy rabbit disappeared that very instant. “It’s Herbert,” she said, “he’s so childish.” Herbert was a powerful, teddy-bear-like nurse who had once trained to be a chef. He’s got a crush on her like a teenager, and she laughs like a twelve-year-old girl, Horn thought. These are the things I find comforting.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 6