The man I call Bill used to sell mattresses. That’s where the supply comes from. Then he switched fields. He says this a lot: “I switched fields.” “I don’t have obligations any more,” he says that a lot too, and “I only do things that are worth my while.” I think that’s what he says most often.
We start in the flower room. I drag the top mattress from the pile of four and lie it on the ground. It’s full of pale pink flowers. We kneel on it, push our fists into it, lie on it. “This is a soft foam mattress,” I say, “easy to clean, but if you sleep on it for a long time you get pains in your spine.” The big mattress in the stripy room is a sprung mattress, and you can feel the wires if you fall down heavily on top of it. The mattress with the bright-blue spots in the white room is also a foam mattress, only thicker and firmer than the flowery one. The two white ones are natural latex mattresses with coconut fibres inside and a cotton cover. They’re the most comfortable to lie on and they smell nice, too. I show Switi the labels sewn onto all these things. If you want to escape you have to be well informed, I say, and then I say she should choose the white mattresses if she can.
THIRTEEN
Eleven. It has not changed. It is the fourth time she has counted, but there are no more, eleven children from the first year, seven from her class and four from Elke Bayer’s. Julia and Sophie, inseparable as always, Leonard, Stefan, Oliver, Günseli, even though she is a Muslim, and Lara with Longbottom, her Labrador. All of them are dutifully holding their palm bushes made out of pussy willow branches, thuja, box and juniper, except Günseli, who has a bunch of forsythia and lilac, but she cannot know about these things. Julia is wearing a new dress, white with turquoise stripes, and Stefan’s felt jacket looks new, too. Some other children from her class are standing with their parents in the group of adults, their hands firmly grasped so they cannot get away: Kevin, with his outrageous streaks of green hair; Jacqueline and Magdalena, the twins; Therese, wearing an eco-dress with large checks, like her mother; Philipp, whose elder brother keeps punching him in the side; fat Vanessa; Britta Kern. People are being careful, she thinks.
The sky is as blue as it can only be in April and October. Cumulus clouds pass overhead, and beyond them the vapour trails of aeroplanes linger. All of a sudden she pictures a path in the Lungau she once walked along years ago from alp to alp in springtime. In her mind the sky is exactly the same as today, tufts of bright-green needles are growing on the larches, and the purple snowbells are just coming into flower. She is standing there, watching the marmots slide down the snowy fields like children, and wondering whether everyone has good moments in their lives.
Into the first courtyard from the arched passageway emerges a delegation from the town’s wind ensemble, in loose formation and out of step. They line up on the church steps, directly beneath the rose window, and play “O When the Saints”. Michaele Klum is in the first row, blowing on her clarinet, possibly annoyed that she had forgotten to give her daughter a good hiding that morning.
The crowd applauds, and then the processional cross appears in the main portal, followed by the entire throng of servers and padres, and at the rear, Clemens, the abbot. Bauer says he hovers: he has no contact with the ground when he moves. He is a few centimetres closer to Eternal Bliss than the others, and therefore must be the right person for the job. Bauer himself is two rows in front of the abbot. A white lead runs from his left ear into the neckline of his chasuble. With each step he bends slightly at the knee, as if ready to jump at any moment. She has come to expect that now. When the long yellow-and-white flag hanging out of the top window of the left-hand tower cracks above their heads he is startled. The musicians are playing “Komm, holder Lenz”. Her cue. She starts to organise her children.
She recalls her job interview, Dienbacher sitting behind his desk, drumming incessantly with his fingertips and insisting that, although this was a state primary school, it had a very close relationship with the abbey, and so the teaching staff were expected to take part in church festivals: Christmas, Corpus Christi, Palm Sunday. She stands there, thinking everybody can see I can’t do anything and can’t cope with anything and I’ve got no imagination and I’m only concerned with myself and my crappy little life, and she says yes, of course, no problem. He asks whether she has any relationship to religion, and she lies through her teeth: Average, she says, like most people in this country. She goes to church occasionally and has a crucifix on the wall at home. Dienbacher nods and notes something on the personnel form. She leaves his office, runs down the stairs, across the courtyard towards the car park, gets into the car, tears open her handbag, takes the Stanley knife from her manicure set and cuts herself in the forearm, one lengthways incision. She has not done it since.
If the weather is nice the procession will be extended and become more like a walk, Bauer said yesterday evening, she should wear comfortable shoes and maybe bring a snack. This appetite for rituals lasting several hours was typically Benedictine, he said, you only had to think of the Latin choral masses that went on and on. She had no experience of those, she said, laughing. They drank wine, joked about the black owl as a motif for Easter egg painting, and she had felt a little unwell. In bed they listened to “Modern Times”, “Workingman’s Blues No. 11”, “Beyond the Horizon” and finally “Spirit on the Water” on a permanent loop. There’s nothing more Easter-like, Bauer said.
The convoy wheels round to the west as it proceeds across the Rathausplatz, moves northwards along Severinstraße as far as the bridge, follows the river eastwards, and back towards the abbey along Abt-Reginaldstraße. The band plays “Ol’ Man River” and “Stars and Stripes” and “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning”, which creates an atmosphere quite conducive to walking. Now the people are relaxing, laughing, gossiping and breaking rank, and Oliver starts sweeping the ground with his palm bush. “Stop it!” she says, and he flinches. Lara stops all of a sudden, sticks out her arm and feels for her hand. “I’m sad,” she says.
“Why are you sad?”
“Because Susi’s not here.”
“Susi? Was she your friend?”
“Yes, and Longbottom’s too.”
The dog is named after Neville Longbottom in Harry Potter, the gawky boy who all of a sudden can dance like nothing else and in the end becomes a hero. Most blind people use sticks and do not have a dog. It is different with Lara. Longbottom was around when she was only a few months old; he was small and she was even smaller. Since then he has completed his guide dog training, but the truth is that they are like brother and sister. If you ask Lara why she is blind, she says, “Too much goodness.” These are her parents’ words. She was a premature baby and because of a lung maturity problem had to be on a ventilator for quite a long time. The oxygen destroyed her eyes. These things happen, even nowadays. Lara says she has no idea of what sight is, and nor does she miss it. If someone says round or large or pointed she knows exactly what they mean, and she also has an idea of red or blonde or sky. The children treat her normally, although Kevin sometimes says, “You’re disabled.” Anybody who knows Kevin’s parents can guess where that comes from.
In truth it is less down to her lies about being averagely religious, and far more because of Lara and the fact that she herself completed a few courses in Braille that she ended up in Furth. “Did Longbottom like Susi?” she asks. “Yes,” Lara says, “and he protected her, too.” “Protected?” she asks. “From whom?”
“Everybody.”
No, she doesn’t know Susi from kindergarten, Susi wasn’t in kindergarten. Where she’s gone there aren’t any kindergartens. She asks Lara if she knows exactly where Susi has gone, and Lara says she only knows that she’s gone to India, to her real parents. “‘Collect’, she always said, ‘collect’. And she laughed.”
To the end of Abt-Reginaldstraße, then right into Weyrer Strasse, all the way along the library block, left and across the newly polished granite flagstones of the church courtyard. As they climb the steps something catches her eye. It tak
es her a while to work out what it is: police.
The organ, Bach to start with, or at least that is what she thinks, then “Praise the Lord”. Various readings about exultation and hosanna and green twigs in people’s hands, which is nonsense, taken literally, because the willow twigs with their catkins are anything but green. They move down to the third row. Their seats are on the right. Dienbacher is standing in the aisle, wearing a sort of benevolent headmaster’s expression and making sure that everything is going to plan.
The abbot addresses the children. He says that the story of Jesus’ suffering is very long, but also very exciting, and that normal things happen, too, such as having supper with friends or a cockerel crowing. He says that the story is also brutal and deals with treachery, with torture and murder, and then ends very sadly, so sadly that every laugh goes silent and all music, even the organ, stops playing and, according to popular belief, the bells of every church fly away to Rome, only to return on Easter night to celebrate the Resurrection. She listens and thinks that the abbot really is hovering, the entire congregation is hanging onto his every word; it is just as you would want a good school lesson to be. She imagines the crowing cockerel, a sad organ, and the traffic of bells in the air above St Peter’s Square, all landing, one bell after the other, forming rows, the congestion and the sound when they knock into each other. “Why are you laughing,” asks Lara, who is sitting beside her. She says, “You can’t see that,” and Lara says, “Yes I can.” She nudges her gently with her hip. Longbottom, sitting on the other side, feels it and protests.
Just so you know, I’m the Evangelist, he said. Now he really is standing by the microphone, reading the text from St Matthew’s Gospel. Wilhelm with his Marlboro voice reads the words of the Lord, and Thomas, who still looks like a schoolboy, but has a degree in theology and history, reads all the other parts.
Julia and Sophie whisper throughout, and Günseli says out loud, “That’s really horrible,” when the ear of the high priest’s servant is cut off. Longbottom starts singing quietly.
Wilhelm does not have many lines, and it seems as if he is trying to compensate for this by reading in a particularly dramatic tone of voice. For instance, when the traitor Judas says to him, “Hail, master,” he replies, “Friend, wherefore art thou come?” and it sounds as though he wants to thrust a hammer and some nails into Thomas’s hands straightaway.
She is aware that these pathetic tales of men – with nothing but high priests and elders and that cowardly arse Pilate – are making her feel increasingly tense. Her knees are twitching and something is compelling her to keep opening and closing her handbag. “Elisabeth Vock from 2A is sitting behind you,” Lara says when she turns round for the third time. “Thanks,” she whispers into Lara’s ear, “but I think I’ve got to go to the loo soon.” She tried to distract herself by picturing the flying bells, but it does not work. Something is breathing down her neck.
Bauer reads the “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani” quite beautifully, his delivery a touch casual and yet poignant, she can still hear this from the periphery. When Jesus finally dies and there is a short silence, she is already below the organ loft, and when the rocks are split apart and the curtain in the Temple of Jerusalem is torn in two, from top to bottom, she rushes out into the light, covered from head to toe in sweat. A young, uniformed policeman comes up to her in concern and asks whether he can help. She shakes her head. “Thank you,” she says, “it’s just the incense – it’s making me feel sick.”
She is sitting on the steps when Bauer comes out a little later in his chasuble, holding a chalice. “Are you crazy?” she says. “Yes,” he says, “you know I am.” He sits down next to her and asks whether her blood-sugar is a bit low; he could help her out with a couple of hundred grams of communion wafers. He’s mad, she thinks, but he looks after me. “Aren’t you going to be missed?” she asks. No, he says, communion’s just started, nobody will notice if he’s not there for a few minutes. He puts down the chalice, leans back, and sings softly: I’m pale as a ghost / Holding a blossom on a stem / You ever seen a ghost? No / But you have heard of them.
“Sometimes the old things come back again, just like that,” she says. “There’s nothing I can do to stop them.” He strokes her neck. “Right there,” she says, “I feel them right there, blowing cold at me”. “I know,” he says.
They are silent for a while, then she asks him whether church bells have landing flaps. He lets out a loud laugh and helps her to her feet. He stops just before he gets to the portal. He had a sort of déjà-vu in there, too, he says, much more harmless than hers. On the right-hand side, in the rearmost third of the congregation, he saw somebody who was in the monastery with him briefly. The man was soon booted out because he kept stealing things.
Great, she thinks, as she pushed herself past people in the aisle, one of them hears voices, another steals, and somewhere at the front there’s a dog singing.
FOURTEEN
In the staffroom the coffee machine was gurgling, there was the scent of vanilla, and Vessy was laughing. On the table was a bunch of bellflowers, yarrow and wild oats. It was strange how some things went together. “What is it?” Herbert asked. Vessy could not stop laughing. A Russian psychiatric nurse, usually as grumpy as a bear, is sitting there cackling with laughter. Horn thought, it looks as if it’s going to be a good morning. He sniffed and asked where the vanilla smell was coming from. Herbert sniffed too, and grinned: “What vanilla smell?” Frau Steininger’s daughter had just brought in a load of fresh puff pastry cream slices, as a thank you for having looked after her mother so well, but in actual fact it was probably just to compete with Frau Hrstic’s daughter, who was clearly not as talented at producing homemade cakes. “And?” Horn asked, looking around. Herbert patted his stomach and said he was sorry, but there had been eight of them at shift handover, Doctor Hrachovec was always hungry, and he himself usually left home in the mornings without having breakfast. “My department doesn’t give me anything to eat,” Horn moaned. “A psychiatrist demanding parentification, that’s not on,” said Leonie Wittmann, who had just come through the door. What did she mean? Horn asked, and she replied that parents should be looking after their children and not the other way round.
“It’s because of Frau Müllner,” said Vessy, who had now calmed down and was wiping her eyes. “But she’s not here,” Horn said. “Yes, she is,” Vessy said. “She’s always here.” Dorothea Müllner not only came dutifully to her outpatient appointments, she would also turn up again and again, silent and unnoticed, on the pretext of visiting one of the old ladies with dementia, but would then seek out the nursing staff, more specifically the men, Herbert, Raimund and Günther. “This morning she gave Günther a medal,” Vessy said.
“A what?”
“A medal.” She waited until after handover, then went up to him and asked where he had served. He clicked his heels and said, Leoben nursing home, wheelchair pushing, shit wiping, and she then opened her handbag, took out a medal, pinned it to his chest and said, “You’re my soldier now, Herr Günther.” Günther saluted, thanked her and then tried to give her the medal back, but at once she started weeping bitterly. “She was utterly serious,” Vessy said. Wittmann said, of course she was serious, what did she expect? and Vessy asked whether she ought to have a bad conscience about having laughed so much. “It’s your conscience and yours alone, Sister Vesselina,” Wittmann said, and Horn thought that it was probably only the deeply serious things that were truly funny.
He imagined this small, round woman trying as hard as she could after the death of her husband to venerate his memory, dusting the show cases with the butterflies and carefully storing the chemicals, and none of this worked; instead her overpowering father was resurrected, the soldier, and he took her by the hand, saying: Now look, wasn’t that ridiculous?
“Does this mean Günther’s now parading up and down the ward with a medal?” Horn asked, and Herbert said, yes, and whistling the Italian national anthem as he g
oes. It was pretty annoying.
“What’s he whistling?”
“The Italian national anthem,” repeated Herbert, “Fratelli d’Italia”, the only song he knew that sounded a bit martial. He also supported Juventus Torino which was an elderly lady, too, so everything came full circle.
Horn poured himself some coffee, to avoid any accusations of parentification, he said. Herbert said that Marcus was playing his guitar again occasionally, unplugged, even when he was there with him in the room. He had been talking about his training in timber construction, about how much theory was taught and how little sawing, cutting and planing, and once he said something about his mother: “I don’t know where she lives.” His care seemed to be working well, and yet Herbert had the feeling that something else was still to come out. “It’s always what remains unsaid that’s significant,” Wittmann said, stirring sugar into her coffee.
The day before, Friedrich Helm had been discharged with normal kidney values, Johanna Seidler, a depressive farmer from Sankt Christoph, was feeling less guilty about her mother’s cancer, and Leo Schaupp, a retired school caretaker from Furth had for the first time in ages gone to sleep without being convinced that he would suffer a night-time heart attack. Margot Frühwald’s attacks were now far less frequent, and Sabrina had refrained from bloodbaths for more than forty-eight hours. “What are you doing with her?” Horn asked. “We’re working on the structure,” Leonie Wittmann said.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 15