David's Revenge

by Hans Werner Kettenbach

  About the Author

  Hans Werner Kettenbach was born near Cologne. He is the author of several highly acclaimed novels, including David's Revenge and Black Ice, also published by Bitter Lemon Press. He came to writing late in life, publishing his first book at the age of fifty. Previous jobs he has held include construction worker, court stenographer, football journalist, foreign correspondent in New York and, most recently, newspaper editor. His thrillers have won the Jerry-Cotton Prize and the Deutscher-Krimi Prize; five of them have been made into successful films.

  Also available from Bitter Lemon Press by Hans Werner Kettenbach:

  Black Ice

  DAVID’S REVENGE

  Hans Werner Kettenbach

  • • •

  Translated from the German by Anthea Bell

  BITTER LEMON PRESS

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  First published in German as Davids Rache by Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich, 1994.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 2009 by

  Bitter Lemon Press, 37 Arundel Gardens, London W11 2LW

  www.bitterlemonpress.com

  First published in German as Davids Rache by Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich, 1994

  Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England.

  © Diogenes Verlag AG Zurich, 1994

  English translation © Anthea Bell, 2009

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher.

  The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978–1–904738–39–8

  Typeset by Alma Books Limited

  Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire

  Chapter 1

  Ninoshvili’s letter has made me curiously uneasy. It’s ridiculous, but I felt something like a presentiment of disaster at the mere sight of the dingy grey envelope when I came home today after teaching five tedious lessons and found it lying on the hall table. I stared at the stamp, with its colourful picture of King David the Builder swinging his sword against the Mussulmen. I deciphered the postmark as Tbilisi, removed an imaginary speck of dust from my coat sleeve, and began to feel afraid.

  Ninoshvili writes to say he is very happy to tell me that, after persistent efforts, he can travel to my country at last. The Cultural Ministry of the Republic of Georgia has officially commissioned him to visit the Federal Republic of Germany, where he is to get in touch with publishing houses interested in bringing out Georgian literature in German translation. Unfortunately, he adds, Matassi can’t come with him, but he looks forward to picking up our friendship again, seven years after we first met.

  The letter has taken a good four weeks to get here from Tbilisi, and since Ninoshvili says that “all being well” he will be “making my final preparations in about a month’s time”, he could turn up on my doorstep at any moment.

  I actually rose immediately from the desk where, with a stifled groan, I had just sat down, lifted the net curtain and looked out. The street lay deserted in the midday sun. No taxi in sight.

  Or perhaps he’s coming from the bus stop on foot to save money, bringing only a small, well-worn case with him? Perhaps he’s already walked past the house, sizing it up. Perhaps he’s on his way now, stepping quietly, coming through the garden, looking around with those inscrutable dark eyes.

  Oh, that’s enough of such absurdities! I have no real reason to be afraid of this visitor. He’ll mean a certain amount of inconvenience for me, of course, I can see that in advance. The postscript to his letter, in which he hopes that I can help him “to find inexpensive accommodation”, is clear enough. He probably thinks it will be only natural for me to ask him to stay here. Every other toast we drank in Tbilisi was to the hospitality of the Georgian people, and now, seven years later, I have to suffer the consequences of that admirable quality.

  But what’s our spare room for, after all? It can’t be permanently reserved for Julia’s old school friend, Erika, who likes her pleasures and uses it as a base for her excursions to the West every six months, leaving it impregnated with her aggressive perfume. Or for Ralf’s friends, a couple of whom have already slept off their hangovers in the bed under the sloping roof, after having too many beers to ride their mopeds home. They probably didn’t even remove their trainers. David Ninoshvili will appreciate being asked to stay in our spare room. Let him have it.

  Chapter 2

  I‘m only trying to fool myself. It remains to be seen whether this visitor from Georgia is really as harmless as he seems.

  Matassi. That evening in the bar of the Hotel Iveria. The next afternoon, when Ninoshvili invited me to his apartment.

  And last but not least, the middle of the following day, when Matassi knocked at the door of my hotel room, bringing me the article she’d photocopied for me in the library.

  Matassi wore pale blouses and skirts in plain colours, and once I saw her in a bright summer dress with a white collar. No tall circular cap, no laced bodice, no strings of beads dangling from her temples. No long, plaited braids lying on her breast; she wore her black hair cut short. Yet she had the same exotic charm as the women in Georgian national costume smiling at visitors from the posters at the Tbilisi branch of the state-run Inturist travel agency. Round cheeks, dark thick eyebrows and lashes, shadows around her eyes. Full lips.

  On the evening when Ninoshvili brought her to the hotel bar with him and introduced her as his wife, Dautzenbacher and the bearded Slavonic lecturer from Heidelberg—I forget his name—immediately sat up and took notice. Dr Bender, the only woman in our party, went to her room in a fit of pique on finding herself increasingly left out of the conversation. She pleaded a headache, but didn’t bother to make it sound plausible. I had stayed in the background, and found myself rewarded by the intriguing impression that Matassi was casting me glances of much greater interest than those she gave the other two, who went on tirelessly posturing. I even received a dazzling smile now and then.

  Next day, Ninoshvili didn’t tell me that she’d be expecting both of us at his apartment. Instead he asked casually, after our group had all lunched together, whether I would like to visit a Georgian home, and I instantly decided to skip the afternoon’s study programme. I followed our interpreter through the winding streets of the Old Town, immersing myself in a food of strange smells and sounds. I thought, with growing alarm, that if I were to lose sight of my guide I’d never find my way back through this teeming labyrinth.

  When Ninoshvili, with an inviting gesture, opened a small gate in a high wall, I found myself in a quiet courtyard surrounded on three sides by balconies. I saw wooden balustrades, elaborately carved and painted sky blue. Washing lines crossed the courtyard up to the second floor. On the wall of the house there was a large stone tank with a tap above it. Two children, sitting in the shade on the trodden mud of the courtyard floor, inspected me with dark eyes.

  The round table in Ninoshvili’s living room was laid with three cups and three plates, and the aroma of fresh coffee hung in the air. As I looked around me, Matassi appeared in the doorway leading to the kitchen. She was wearing the summer dress with the white collar. She smiled at me and said, in English, “Good afternoon, Mr Kestner. How are you?”

  Ninoshvili said he would just go out to the confectioner’s for something to nibble with our coffee, and when I protested that I couldn’t possibly eat anything else after our
lavish lunch, he waved the objection away with both hands, smiling, and went off. Matassi brought the coffee. I asked her if she didn’t have to go to work. No, she said, not today. And how, I asked, had she known that I’d be coming? She hadn’t known, she replied, but she had hoped I would. Hoped I would? Why? A silent glance and a smile were her only response to that.

  Perhaps it was the wine and vodka freely dispensed by our hosts at lunch, when toast after toast was drunk, and anyone who didn’t empty his glass every time was offending the sacrosanct table manners of the Georgians. But be that as it may, as soon as Ninoshvili had set off for the confectioner’s I embarked on a determined flirtation with his wife, threw my ideas of a guest’s proper conduct overboard, and began to feel I was hovering under the blue sky, in the summer wind wafting in through the balcony door.

  When Matassi showed me a little book written by Ninoshvili, and leaned over my shoulder to translate the Georgian print of its title for me, moving her pale brown forefinger along the line, I turned my face to her. The tip of my nose touched her cheek, and I breathed in a perfume that I had never smelled before. The Orient and myrrh sprang to mind and remained lodged in my memory, although to this day I don’t know what myrrh really smells like. I kissed Matassi’s cheek. She did not draw back. I took her in my arms and kissed her on the mouth. She returned the kiss before, smiling, she freed herself.

  I felt no scruples about deceiving my host. If I did feel a little sorry for anything afterwards, it was only that when Matassi showed me first the kitchen and then the small, shady bedroom, I didn’t pull her straight down on the bed, which was covered with a woven spread and provided with plump pillows. I was afraid that Ninoshvili, swinging a bag of pastries, might surprise us in a situation that couldn’t be satisfactorily explained in a hurry, my trousers around my feet, her summer dress pushed up to her armpits. At that point I imagined him dropping the bag and reaching for a knife, washing away the shame with blood, Matassi’s blood, but also, and fatally, mine.

  As I thought later, with annoyance, I need not have feared the Georgian’s revenge, or at least not that he would catch us in the act. Ninoshvili didn’t come back for a full hour. He said he had been held up.

  Chapter 3

  Only later, when we had left Georgia and were travelling on through the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic, did I begin to wonder about the division of labour between Ninoshvili and Matassi when they entertained a guest. We were sitting in a bus on our way from Yerevan to Ejmiadzin, where we were to have the honour of an audience with the Catholicos, when Dautzenbacher, for whom no joke was too tasteless, grabbed the woman interpreter’s microphone and bellowed into it, in his beery bass voice, “Attention, everyone, please, here is an important announcement!”

  He cleared his throat, making the diaphragm of the microphone crackle, and went on. “Don’t forget the bugs! We may be on our way to a monastery, but don’t you go thinking the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church despises those dear little creatures, not him. So no hostile questions, please, and most important of all no negative criticism of Soviet power! It’ll all be recorded, and then you’ll be sorry. Thank you for your kind attention.”

  And with that he handed the microphone back to the interpreter, some Irina or Natasha from Inturist, who took it with a rather forced smile. Dautzenbacher dropped back into his seat, very pleased with his performance—his broad shoulders were shaking.

  I suddenly thought of the memo that had been handed out at home along with the programme for the trip. I’d just shaken my head and thrown it into the waste-paper basket. Our study group, this memo told us, could expect a friendly reception, but nonetheless we must not forget that the Soviet Union had a highly developed intelligence system which took a particular interest in foreign visitors.

  I don’t remember the details, but this document warned participants in the study tour against bugging devices in not only our own rooms but also those of the people we’d be meeting, all of them “top professionals from the educational institutions”, although that did not, unfortunately, mean that some of them might not also work “for the intelligence services”. There followed several categorical imperatives for unsuspecting participants in study trips, which as far as I remember ran: Do not go out alone! Beware of incriminating situations! And the crowning injunction, with three exclamation marks, was: Do not give your hosts the chance to put you under pressure in any way whatsoever!!!

  I had thought this list of banalities was mere pomposity on the part of the Federal German authorities financing our study tour, who were obviously not too happy with its stated aim, i.e. to foster cultural exchange between Germany and the Soviet Union. But at the same moment as I remembered these infantile rules of conduct, I thought I saw the writing on the wall in them, an awful warning of something I’d only just escaped. I felt hot, I began to shift restlessly in my seat as my memories of Tbilisi inexorably turned into an embarrassing and alarming nightmare. Why hadn’t I put two and two together?

  Matassi, who worked at the university library, and Ninoshvili, the writer, translator and interpreter, now appeared to me in a new and ominous light. Two pleasant people, forthcoming, frank and open? What a wicked deception! Behind that hospitable façade, the couple were really a pair of agents in the Soviet secret service. And now I had a plausible explanation for Ninoshvili’s hour-long absence at the confectioner’s.

  The trap had been set when he invited me to his apartment. A bug in the bedroom, not a permanent installation, of course, but specially fitted by Ninoshvili for my visit, perhaps with help from some kind of KGB technician. Ninoshvili leaves the house after handing me over to Matassi, tells the children in the courtyard to go and buy him some pastries in the shop next door, immediately takes himself off to a windowless room near his apartment and switches on the listening apparatus. He waits there for Matassi to call for help, removing his headphones only once, when the children knock on the door and deliver the bag of pastries.

  After an hour, when nothing useful for his purposes has happened, he calls the whole thing off, comes back to have coffee, carrying his purchases, and explains that he was held up. But they are already planning the next attempt. Matassi, her white teeth biting into a crisp croissant, brings the conversation round to a French ethnologist’s account of his visit to Tbilisi at the turn of the century, and when I show interest says she’ll photocopy his article from the journals archive in the library and leave it at my hotel tomorrow.

  And shouldn’t I have smelled a rat, at the very latest, when the next day came?

  Matassi wasn’t content just to leave the photocopy at the hotel reception desk. Instead, she appeared on the twelfth floor, unannounced, and knocked at the door of my room when I’d gone up there after yet another tiring lunch, meaning to take a nap before the next excursion on the study programme.

  When she explained this delightful surprise—unfortunately, she said, the hotel service wasn’t very reliable, even letters from abroad were lost now and then—I didn’t stop to think of anything that might have aroused my suspicions. I went to the bathroom, brushed my hair, rinsed out my mouth, did up my shirt buttons. When I came out she was sitting on the bed, leafing through my bedtime reading, a Simenon crime story.

  I offered her some of the duty-free bourbon I’d bought at the airport, stocking up for the journey, and she didn’t hesitate for a second. “Oh, wonderful, thank you! Just a little bit, please,” she said, again in English. I sat down beside her with both glasses, drank to her, and as her dark brown eyes gazed at me over the rim of the glass I jettisoned the prelude I’d been contemplating, some idle chatter about Georges Simenon and the erotic component of his work. Waste of time. Throw it out, unnecessary.

  I took her glass from her, drew closer, putting one arm on the bed on the other side of her thighs, said I really had to breathe in the scent of her skin again, just once more. She laughed. I ran my nose gently over her cheek, her eyebrows, then down over her nose, her mouth, her throat. I kisse
d her throat and then her lips. She responded to the kiss, so I never got around to asking her whether she used myrrh as a perfume. We sank on the bed; I put a hand between her thighs. The skin there was smooth and cool. Matassi didn’t object. She closed her eyes.

  There were three sharp knocks at the door, a short pause, and then they were repeated. David Ninoshvili with the knife in his hand! Matassi opened her eyes, but she lay where she was. I fear my reaction made her doubt my virility. I snatched my hand out from under her skirt as if a vicious insect had stung me, jumped up and stared at the door.

  It wasn’t David the Avenger, it was Karl-Heinz Dautzenbacher. “Open up in there, Kestner!” he called. “Or are you going to sleep the whole afternoon away?”

  Matassi rose, put the Simenon that had fallen to the floor back on the bedside table, picked up her glass and sat down in an armchair. When I didn’t move from the spot, she smiled and asked, “Why don’t you open it?” I opened the door. Dautzenbacher raised his eyebrows when he saw Matassi, grinned, said, “Why, hello, Mrs Ninoshvili!” and apologized for disturbing me, still grinning. He’d only come, he said, to tell me that the bus for the sightseeing trip to Narikala Fortress was leaving half an hour earlier than originally planned.

  I could have murdered that smirking troublemaker, I could have rammed King David the Builder’s hunting spear through his thick skin—to think of that great elephant trampling all over my little oriental garden! On the way to Ejmiadzin later, when I thought I saw the facts of the matter, I reluctantly began to do him justice: Karl-Heinz Dautzenbacher, an uncouth fool of a guardian angel who, unwittingly but reliably following the dictates of Fate, had saved me from the honeytrap.

  Once again I picture David Ninoshvili sitting next door, in a hotel room booked by the KGB, headphones on his ears. Waiting beside him stands a militiaman: calf-length boots, round peaked cap with a red band and a gold star. Ninoshvili is listening in, raises his head as he hears me mention the scent of Matassi’s skin. Then, unexpectedly, he hears the knock on the door, recognizes Dautzenbacher’s voice. Cursing, he takes off his headphones and slams them down on the desk.