I sit beside the bed, on the spot where she always lies. “Just be glad you weren’t on the language trip,” I say. I talk about the couple I stayed with who walk hunched over, the smell of celery in the house, the dog which has to wear a frilly dress, and about the fact that they kept on calling me “our little brown girl”. I talk about Selina, who says my skin’s like the surface of the moon, that I smell funny, and that I speak more Indian than English, and about Verena Steinmetz who gazed at Cedric, the long-haired bloke from the language school, as if he were God. Finally I tell her about the morning when the lady gave me a telling off because she said my hair had blocked the shower. That lunchtime one of my delightful classmates stole the manicure set from my bag, and on the coach trip to Canterbury that afternoon, Philip Denck got his thing out next to me – I think it was for a bet. I imagine Switi repeating her phrase, “One time I’ll bite it, so hard that it’ll come off,” and laughing a little while scowling like an old woman. Anyway, that was the best day of my wonderful language trip.
When I come back downstairs, the man I call Bill is there. I say, “Switi’s gone,” and again, I shout it: “Switi’s gone.” He asks, “What do you call her?” I say I can call my sister what I like, and he says, “We’ve sent her back. It wasn’t working out any more.” He drinks water from a glass which has a slice of lemon swimming in it, and suddenly it seems as if those two things go together: sending Switi back and having a slice of lemon in his glass. I listen to the two of them talk in strange voices, high-pitched and as if they were speaking through cotton wool. For a moment I think I’m going to laugh out loud, then I have to compose myself so I don’t fall over.
I walk slowly to my room. I lie on my bed and try to go to sleep. It doesn’t work.
After a while I hear the front door being locked. He’s got important clients, she’s going for a drive. I lie there quite still for a few more minutes, staring at the ceiling. Then I get the key from the sugar jar.
The picture with the hedgehog and the owl is still there, the keyhole too. The mattresses are still in the rooms. I count them, they’re all there. They’re stacked a little differently from usual, the flowery ones two on top of two, but sometimes it’s like that. The cameras are in the stripy room, pointing to the wall. It looks a bit funny. I take a sniff. The air smells very fresh, as if taken and blown in from the waterfall. Occasionally you see small birds sitting on branches there, with black heads and yellow and red spots on their wings. I think about them.
Out of habit I hold my breath when I go into their bedroom. I can’t do it for long. I lie on my stomach and look under the bed. The dusty fluff in front of my face reminds me of the balls of tumbleweed in the film about American landscapes. Under the small red rug at the end of the bed I find a fifty cent coin. I leave it there.
The right side of the walk-in cupboard belongs to him, the left to her. The dresses in her hanging space are yellow, black or grey; one is brightly coloured with a large flower pattern, another is purple with metal bits sewn into it. A moth flies from a grey woollen jacket with black specks when I push it to one side. All her tights are tied in knots, which is stupid. He’s got lots of pairs of jeans and jackets and shirts with button-down collars. Switi isn’t anywhere, not on the right side and not on the left.
I find the cuculla between his two pinstripe suits. I remembered the name because I think it sounds like a nest full of baby hedgehogs. He showed it to us years ago. It’s the gown monks wear on feast days. He said he was once a member of one of those societies for a short while. He just took it with him because he liked it. “I take what I like” – he still says this sometimes. And now I’m taking it. I like it, too, because of all the folds.
I go down into the basement, into the garage, into the shed, then I do another tour of the ground floor. I look behind every door, in every chest, on every shelf, as if she’d suddenly shrunk and was now lying hidden somewhere, behind the teacups, for example, or between the rolls of wrapping paper.
In the study I open the cabinet and take out the hanging files. Nothing but application letters. Photographs of people who all look the same. The desk drawers are locked apart from the middle one, but all I find in it are stamps, paperclips, rubbers, things like that. I push back the swivel chair and crawl under the desk as far as the wall. That’s where the safe is. Two letters and three numbers – it’s so primitive I’m almost embarrassed. She’s not in the safe either, ha ha. A file with documents I don’t understand, bank and legal stuff, deeds, a casket with a pearl necklace, several rings and two small gold bars, an envelope with fifteen thousand euros in notes, and two bank books. Forty-three thousand euros on one of them, on the other one hundred and twelve thousand. A slim folder with only four sheets of paper; on each of these are some names, addresses and telephone numbers. A pile of D.V.D. covers, eight in all, the same words on each one: “Eating Sweet Brownie”. I think about England, the porridge for breakfast, the dog with the frilly dress and the smell of celery. I’m getting that cotton wool feeling again. Things are beginning to spin.
Escape route number four, the opposite direction. Out through the garage, on Fürstenaustraße towards the Walzwerk estate, Hakan and the school ghost are sitting by Block B, she calls out to me me, I look at the ground, she leaves me alone. Down to the railway line, under the barriers and across the tracks, someone shouts “That’s dangerous” from a Fiat, right into Stiftsallee, over to the other side, along past the visitors’ car park to the garden entrance, between the pruned conifers, past the fountain with the pseudo-Greek statues, behind the greenhouse. The double door to the utility corridor, you just have to push the fixed side slightly inwards, it’s best to walk in your socks along the corridor because it echoes so loudly, the narrow staircase beside the stationery store, up to the first floor.
It’s dark in the classroom. If I turn sideways in my seat and look at the map of Europe hanging on the wall, I can still make out a few words: Gibraltar, Ceuta, Tangier, Rabat, everything at the bottom. On the board are the equations that Altmann put up in the last maths lesson before our language trip. No-one’s wiped them off. It feels strange.
I take the double D.V.D. box from my rucksack. One disc is red, the other yellow. There is another D.V.D. under the red one. I boot up the computer and put in the disc. I know immediately where we are. Broad blue stripes and narrow yellow ones. 160 × 200. Someone’s breathing.
SEVENTEEN
Skis, sticks, rucksack and shoes – she takes the things into the hallway and puts them by the front door. At the same time she ticks off items from her mental checklist: sun cream, apple juice, gloves, cap, sunglasses, avalanche transceiver. She goes into the bathroom, stands by the mirror briefly and pulls a face. Then she opens the cupboard, feels behind a pile of towels, takes out a multipack of razor blades, fifty of them, and puts them in. Then she goes.
He is waiting in Severinstraße, a few metres from the abbey entrance. He is wearing dark-grey salopettes and a fleece jacket which is completely felted. “Did it get washed on hot?” He nods. Irma, the housekeeper, refuses to have an operation on her cataract, which is why these things happen. “Sun cream on?” she asks. He laughs. “Orderliness personified,” he says. You haven’t got a clue, she thinks.
They drive along the northern edge of the lake, past Waiern, and shortly afterwards turn left towards Moosheim, through the village and up into the Lassach valley which heads south-west in the direction of Niedere Tauen. He has his elbow hanging out of the open window and is obviously enjoying it. “Like the old days,” he says. She asks what he means by the old days, and he says, the time when he used to think nothing of driving a bit on the left, a bit on the right or weaving from one side to the other. “And now?” she asks. Now he drives only on the right, he says – at least that’s what he tells the medical officer in his driving fitness assessment.
The car park is very full. Viennese, visitors from Graz, cars with Bavarian number plates. “Easter holidays,” he says. “Probably just tea
chers.” She puts on her ski boots. “No teachers, please!” she says, attempting a smile and realising that she is trembling. This happens sometimes. “You don’t like the holidays,” he says. “You don’t either,” she says.
The track takes them through open larch woods, past several towering, isolated boulders to a steep drop which they negotiate with some short traverses. At this point the valley widens into a trough, collecting the warmth like a parabolic reflector. The crust on the snow is holding up well, but in places the surface is starting to melt. Most of the time he is in front of her, sometimes he speeds up and sometimes he falls back, remaining beside her for a while to tell a story. She likes the ease with which he moves, never getting out of breath, the sound of his heels hitting the skis, and how naturally he talks about monastic poetry, the fear of dismemberment, and the smell that comes from between her earlobes and collarbone when she sweats – all in the same sentence.
There are patchy clouds in the sky. The light washes over the surface of the snow in waves. She listens to the scraping of the climbing skins and tries to stay in a steady rhythm. Gradually she starts to relax. He is singing away to himself. “Ain’t talkin’, just walkin’”, over and over again. Another one from God’s penultimate album; the final song.
The track veers to the right, to a flat col. Some way above them she can see a couple in yellow soft shell jackets. She remembers having to wear the same clothes as Nora, her younger sister. It was her mother who made her. “I need something to drink,” she says suddenly and stops.
She looks across the foothills to the lake. He says how much he misses the children during the holidays, the sounds they make, their words, their rapid movements, how he can’t resist talking to them when he bumps into them in the street, and how he begins to fall apart by the beginning of August at the latest. He talks about the routes he takes when he runs at night, sometimes under a starry sky, sometimes through rain and storms, and how he loves it most of all when bolts of lightning strike the lake and thunder crashes from the ridges of the Kammwand. That is far more likely to keep him in one piece than endless weeks of fine weather. At the beginning of the school year he is usually stuffed full of neuroleptics and yet all over the place like an asteroid swarm, in a frenzy and shattered into a thousand fragments. He takes a bar of chocolate from his rucksack, breaks it in two and gives her half. “Chocolate helps as well,” she says. “Not with everything,” he says. “Yes it does,” she says, although she knows that he is right.
When the yellow jackets have vanished they proceed. She thinks of Natalie with her old-fashioned plaits, who has told her how expensive eggs are a number of times, and her mother, who wears woollen, pleated trousers and pushes Natalie’s little brother around town in a pram with spoked wheels which must be forty years old. She thinks of Britta and Günseli, who are serious girls, too, and chubby Vanessa, who at least laughs once in a while. Then she thinks of Roswitha, her niece, who carried her train and scattered peony petals outside the church after the marriage ceremony. She was five at the time, dark blonde, in a white dress, and he had lifted her onto his arm, smiling for the photographer. That smile is imprinted on her memory, his eyebrows, his broad fingers and the question he asked her afterwards: “Whose is this little girl?”
“Some people are scary when they’re thinking,” he says, out of the blue. She gets a fright. He claims that there are people who hover a hand’s width above the ground, she thinks, silently, as if on an air cushion, and in fact he’s one of them. “You wander around like a ghost,” she says. He laughs and pulls his shirt over his head. “Spirit on the water,” he sings. “Pull your shirt back down,” she says.
“Why?”
“I want to see your face.”
“What are you frightened of?” he says. She shakes her head, says nothing, and speeds up. “You won’t keep that up,” he says. “Wanna bet?” she says. She knows she can be quick if she needs to be. Start by increasing the frequency, and only then the length of your strides, never the other way round. He keeps up with her easily. At the third sharp bend she slides back a little. “What are you running away from?” he says. “Not from you,” she pants.
“What then?”
“I can’t tell you.” She gets to a certain point where everything just blurs, what is her and what is not, she can no longer distinguish between herself, the children and the people around her, and all of a sudden the whole of the world is at her back, an army of large, dark men.
“Him?”
She nods. She was far too young, she says, far too trusting, still a child, and he had this smile and these large, smooth hands.
She enjoys the moment when the view suddenly extends over the ridge and drops down to the south, to the limestone mountains of Upper Styria and the Tauern. The wind hits her full blast. She likes that too, having to brace her shoulders forward, the burning feeling on her chin and the cold which shoots up her nose like two icicles. They climb straight up the narrow spine, past an outcrop, bypass a cornice to the south, then they are at the top.
“Some people are like that”, the psychiatrist had told her, and when she replied that she knew that, he said: “So why did you marry him?” She said she’d send him along, maybe he’d understand then, and at this the psychiatrist had apparently taken fright and said it wasn’t necessary, he could imagine him well enough. She doubted that, she said, and the psychiatrist, offended, had replied, “You don’t trust me one bit.”
“Whack,” she said. “There are a number of words for it. But whack seems to describe most accurately what he did to me: the slapping sound made when a sharply directed hand or leather belt meets bare flesh.” “He whacked you?” he says. “That’s what I call it,” she says. “How badly?” he asks. She says nothing. When she screws up her eyes the glint of the snow crystals becomes multi-coloured. It is the small, childish things that make the world bearable, she thinks, like screwing up your eyes in the snow, monks who can’t keep still, and certain phrases such as “You don’t like holidays” or, “The sun makes the moon shine”. He removes the climbing skins from his skis, adjusts the bindings into the downhill position, and checks that the screws on the telescopic sticks are tightly fixed. “Why do you always have to be doing something?” she asks. “Because the bells have flown away,” he says, “and it’s all so dreadfully quiet.” She taps her head. And yet something is unsettling her. She does not know what it is. Sometimes there are things you just miss, she thinks.
Ten short thrusts, four long ones – the firm snow on the first slope beyond the end of the ridge is barely ankle deep. He skis ahead of her, pushing extremely close to the edge while singing “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” at the top of his voice. When her thighs start to burn she does a downhill turn and yells that he’s a lunatic. He does not seem to hear a thing and skis on. She slips the rucksack off her shoulders, reaches into the lower of the two external pockets, pulls out the small pack of razorblades and sends it flying off into the distance, even though she knows this will not help.
The crusted snow is starting to melt at the spot where he is waiting. “Watch out for your bones,” he says. “Something’s annoying me,” she says, gasping, “and it has to do with bells.” He laughs: “Are you surprised?”
*
He is driving. She is clinging on in the passenger seat, shivering, and her lungs are burning. Racing down through refrozen snow over an altitude of three hundred metres, several falls, ending up on a goods path where the snow had melted away altogether. He is the same as he is after a run. “I run,” he says, as if needing to apologise, “all the time, every day.” She nods and says nothing.
They take the southerly route, the avalanche protection gallery between Moosheim and Sankt Christoph, the Kammwand tunnel. Somewhere in the bends that lead up to the western entrance she falls asleep. She dreams of her mother, in duplicate, standing beside a huge wardrobe, trying on clothes and chatting to herself. When something dark steps out of the wardrobe she starts awake and thinks that he
r mobile has rung. He says it might have been the brakes squeaking, “Where are we?” she asks. “I’ve got an idea,” he says.
“Weren’t we going to my place?”
“This won’t take long.”
He helps her out of the car. “You can leave everything here,” he says. He walks in front of her, taking large springy strides. Her shoulders are aching, as are her calves and lower back. The iron gate, ajar, the plane trees beside it, the secret path, the opposite direction this time. Up the steps, the metal door with frosted glass. The flowerpots along the passage of the cloister wing, Christmas cacti, azaleas, a lemon tree. Twenty-seven paces, she knows that now. The window is wide open. One of his obsessions is to get a pair of birds to build a nest in his room, preferably swallows, he says.
He leads her into the middle of the room. “Stay there,” he says. He kneels and opens the belt and zip of her salopettes. She can feel the anxiety welling up inside her. “What are you doing?” she asks, trying to push him away. “Not what you’re afraid I’m doing,” he says. “Promise.” He pulls her trousers down to her knees, then her tights. “I’m cold,” she says, putting her hands on her bare thighs. “Almost done,” he says, pulling up one of the two chairs in the room. “Now sit.” He takes all her clothes off, ski socks, trousers, tights. “One sec,” he says, disappearing into the bathroom. She looks out of the window and suddenly the image of bells with wings appears before her, moving across the sky in formation like migratory birds. Then she tries to remember which coats her mother actually wore. She recalls a grey woollen one, coarse weave with large black buttons.
The enamelled washbasin he is carrying is white with a narrow, dark-blue rim. When he puts it down, soap bubbles slosh over the wooden floor. “What are you doing?” she says. He laughs, lifts her legs with one hand, pushing the basin towards the chair with the other, and gently puts her feet into the warm water. He pulls a bath sponge from his armpit, soaks it, and presses it against her calves. He used to have a wife who existed only in his mind, he says, “and now I’ve got one whose feet I wash on Maundy Thursday”. She closes her eyes and imagines two small bells with wings building a nest in the corner between the wall and ceiling. “Why are you laughing?” he asks. “Because sometimes you can be seriously bonkers,” she says.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 19