• • •
“This is a hearse, right?”
“Yes.”
“That’s cool.”
“You get used to it, believe me.”
“Why do you drive a hearse?”
“Do you like it?”
“I asked, why do you drive a hearse?”
“Because I think it’s cool too. I got it on the Internet.”
“Who buys a hearse by choice?”
“I do. I bought it in the States. Apparently President Kennedy was driven from Dallas to Washington in this vehicle. I had to have it.”
“You don’t have anything to do with funeral parlors, do you?”
“What?”
“Taking dead bodies for a nice drive?”
“Are you crazy?”
“Well, it’s the obvious conclusion, isn’t it?”
“The only person going for a drive in this car is me. I’ve come straight from Sardinia. It’s really comfortable sleeping in here.”
“I’d like to try it myself.”
“I can’t understand why everyone is so freaked out by the dead.”
“I’m not.”
“It’s only a car. And you can wash a car.”
“So it doesn’t bother you that dead bodies used to lie in it?”
“Does it bother you?”
“No, it’s a great car.”
• • •
Blum dismisses whatever is going through Schönborn’s mind. She drives to Igls, a suburb of Innsbruck, and waits for his head to drop back at last. But his head doesn’t drop. Schönborn goes on talking, goes on indulging in tawdry jokes, says how he’s looking forward to what is going to happen next. Blum counts the seconds, wonders whether to turn round or stop right there in the middle of Igls. The last thing she wants is to be alone with this man in the forest. She has to come to a decision; they are already on the road between Igls and Patsch, with the forest looming in on both sides. Schönborn asks where she is going to undress. He is wide awake. He is not losing consciousness, he is not dropping off to sleep, he is still very much there. Not far now, says Blum. She doesn’t know what to do, whether to risk driving on, stopping, getting out of the Cadillac. It can’t be much longer now, but all the same, images are tumbling through her head. She sees herself trying to stall, she sees him getting impatient and pushing her to the ground, getting on top of her, tearing down her trousers. Blum sees all that in her mind’s eye, but still she turns off the road. She can’t help it, she must do it, she drives along the narrow forest path and thinks of Mark. Thinks of him sitting beside her and smiling. Stroking her cheek with his dear fingers. It will be all right, he says. She doesn’t know yet that this time he is going to be wrong. It is not going to be all right. It is going to be far worse than she imagined.
“It’s so good of you to come.”
“What about the children?”
“Asleep. Come in.”
“How are you doing, Blum?”
“Not so well.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I just don’t want to be alone tonight.”
“How can I help?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re shivering. Please tell me how to help you.”
“You’re here, and that helps.”
“Please, Blum. You phoned me. I’m here, and whatever the matter is we can deal with it together.”
“Could you hold me close?”
“Now?”
“Lie down on the sofa with me and just hold me close.”
“Yes, of course.”
“That’s the only thing that will help.”
“Like this?”
“Yes.”
“It will get better, you’ll see.”
“That’s what he always used to say.”
“Mark?”
“Yes.”
“I’m here for you now.”
“Thank you, Massimo. And Massimo?”
“What?”
“Could you make love to me?”
“What?”
“Could you?”
“Yes.”
• • •
Massimo follows her. Blum takes his hand and leads him through the house. Past the bedroom and into Mark’s study. Massimo says nothing, he just follows her, does what she wants him to do. He watches as she undresses, then stands naked in front of him. Blum wants to feel something, she wants to take her mind off Schönborn. She lies down on Mark’s sofa and tells Massimo to undress too. He hesitates, it is almost as if he doubts her, as if he isn’t sure whether Blum is joking. She draws him close, and he lies down beside her. He is quiet, careful, affectionate. Blum takes his hand and places it on her breasts. They don’t talk. Blum’s eyes are closed. She wants his mouth, his skin, his hands, everything. He is lying on her, kissing her, and she lets him. He is making Schönborn disappear for a little while, everything he has done and everything she has done. Blum embraces Massimo, holds him close, presses him to her. Blum wants her husband’s best friend to stay, to warm her, touch her everywhere, she wants him to protect and help her. But no one must know that he is here, lying beside her, holding her in his arms.
• • •
For a long time they do not say a word. Blum wants to keep her eyes closed, she doesn’t want to open them and see what she has done. She senses that he is inside her, her tongue has disappeared into his mouth. She doesn’t want to see his skin, smell him, talk to him. She can’t. Whatever she has planned in advance, she won’t follow through, won’t tell him what has happened. She wouldn’t know how to explain it to him, and she doesn’t know whether he can help her at all. His hands are tied, he has to keep the rules, there’s nothing he can do for her. The photographer Edwin Schönborn is lying in my cellar, Massimo. Please could you get me out of this? I anesthetized him and abducted him, and he’s lying in the preparation room. Come on, Massimo, turn a blind eye and make things all right again. I’m in a fix. Maybe I overreacted, maybe it didn’t have to turn out like this, but it’s happened now. So you must help me. You know I have children, I can’t go to prison now. So please, my dear, see to all this. Thank you, very kind of you. No, that won’t do. Everything has changed. She will take Massimo to the door now. He will get dressed and drive home, and then she will go down to the cellar to see Schönborn. She can’t depend on anyone but herself, she will find a way out of her fix, something will occur to her. She will get the ship back on course. Never mind how good his skin feels, never mind whether she hates herself for this, she cannot waste any more time. Blum kisses him and jumps up. You must go now, she says. And he asks, Can I come back?
Three hours earlier. Blum opens the door to the cool room. He is lying on the aluminum table between two caskets. She tied him up like a parcel and left him among the caskets. She was afraid he might come round before she returned; she had to hide him in case Karl or one of the children accidentally wandered in. Now Blum is alone with him.
• • •
And there he lies, the monster she has caught. She struck him down, and piled him out of the car like a piece of meat. There’s nothing dangerous about him now. She got him into the preparation room unseen, raised him to the aluminum table without any difficulty and wheeled it into the cool room. It was child’s play. He is lying between two bodies. Two caskets and Schönborn, at forty-one degrees. She closes the door and leaves him alone. He can wait. Until the children are asleep and she can be with him undisturbed.
But the children weren’t sleepy and wouldn’t let her go. Blum had to read aloud to them, tell them one story then another. And just one more. While Schönborn slumbered in the refrigerator, Blum was upstairs with Uma and Nela. Please stay, Mama. We’re scared, Mama. Stay until we’re asleep. Please. Even though Blum was impatient to bring Schönborn round and hear what he had to say, she had to stay with the children. Nothing was more important than that. Only when they were lying side by side peacefully, fast asleep, did she return.
• • •
<
br /> How green the moss was. Schönborn waited for her to undress. Everything was out of control, she was panic-stricken, she had overreacted. Blum knew she had to do something. He simply had not gone to sleep, he was full of energy, the solvent didn’t seem to affect him at all. So she would have to undress. She didn’t want to let things get that far; the game had to end, she must make a decision. She wanted to see him unconscious on the ground; she would ask him questions later and insist on answers. She wanted to know who the others were. Where that cellar was. What had happened to Youn.
• • •
She couldn’t run away, so she acted quickly. When Schönborn bent down to take something out of the camera case, she struck. The stone had been there, lying on the ground beside her, and it hit Schönborn on the back of the head. The scene was just as she had pictured it, but with less blood. He didn’t fall gently asleep, he dropped to the ground with a thud. He fell over forward and collapsed almost without a sound, as if the air had been let out of the monster. He lay there motionless, and without hesitating she began to tie him up. Hands, feet, she rendered him defenseless as she trussed the pig up for roasting.
• • •
She got the stretcher out of the hearse and set it up beside him. She pushed with all her might, bracing her body against his. Blum cursed, shouted, spat at him. It was no good; Schönborn was too heavy, and she felt her strength drain away. She had thought it would be easier; in her mind it had been simple enough, but reality was an uneven ground full of roots, and ten meters away from the hearse. Blum was on the point of giving up, leaving him where he was and phoning Massimo. There were tears in her eyes. She spat at him once more, and then she managed to get him on the stretcher. She put one end of it on the loading area of the hearse, raised the other side, and then the bastard disappeared into the vehicle. She loaded him up as best she could, his limbs sprawling and hidden under a blanket. Edwin Schönborn was on his way to the Funerary Institute. Blum was sure that this was the right thing to do, that she had no other option.
• • •
She cuddles the children as they fall asleep. Looks at their contented faces before going back to him. Down the stairs, over to the cool room. Over to the door, which she slowly opens. She just stands there for a long time, staring at him. She doesn’t move, she only looks. Because she knows she has waited too long, that she ought to have come back sooner to bring him round, to get his circulation going. Blum knew as soon as she opened the cool room door that he would not have survived for over four hours at forty-one degrees under the influence of the drugs and with the head wound. He is like all the other dead bodies she has seen in her life, cold flesh, skin and bones. No heart is beating in the cool room now, there is no sign of life, all she can hear is the engine regulating the temperature. All she sees is his face, his mouth gaping open. Open, but wordless, because he is dead.
• • •
Blum doesn’t know how long she stood there, as if paralyzed. Perhaps half an hour, perhaps longer. Desperately, she tries to grasp the fact that she is responsible for this. For his silence, for the fact that he is dead. She calls Massimo’s number. Please come to me, she says. I’ll be with you in twenty minutes, he replies.
It’s the middle of the night and Massimo has left. There is blood everywhere. The hydroaspirator sucks and sucks. Blum has opened his stomach cavity and removes the intestines, then puts them in a blue garbage bag. Kidneys, liver, everything she finds goes into the bag. She fixes the aspirator in the cavity with a clamp. Large quantities of blood and other bodily fluids disappear through the tube into the canalization. She opens the chest cavity with diagonal pliers, removes the heart and lungs, and empties the torso before sawing it into small pieces. She cuts through the bones with Hagen’s power saw; blood spurts and runs into the tub. She sucks out his flesh and his fat, saws off his horrible head. Without pity or hesitation she takes him apart, cuts him into pieces and packs them up, neatly and hygienically, soaked in a formalin solution. Blum is preserving him; she doesn’t want people to notice the smell.
• • •
She cleans up until dawn. In a few hours Reza will be back from Bosnia, and there will be two funeral services and two burials this afternoon. He mustn’t suspect a thing, she must leave everything the way it was before he left. Blum gets out the caskets in the cool room. The idea had suddenly occurred to her as she was lying naked beside Massimo. Blum saw it all before her eyes while Massimo caressed her. She would put Schönborn’s legs, organs, and head into the casket with the old lady. The pieces of his torso and his arms in the casket with the man who died in a mountain-climbing accident. Edwin Schönborn, packed up and preserved, hidden under white blankets with baroque trim. It is the idea that will save her, the only way to escape prison and be there for her girls. She had to do it.
• • •
Blum takes the packages and stows them in the caskets. She wedges the body parts between the corpses’ legs, ties them in place and hides them. He will be concealed forever. Blum closes the lids of the caskets and screws them down. No one will ever find him; it was a stroke of genius. There’s no better place for a corpse than a casket in a graveyard. No one will look for him in the grave of a former teacher or an old lady. No one will suspect a thing. Blum smiles. Exhausted but happy, she pushes the two caskets back into the cool room. Nothing has happened. Everything is all right.
No one has noticed a thing. No one knows that Massimo lay naked beside her. That they kissed each other. The children have no idea, and nor does Karl, who was fast asleep in his armchair. Blum covered him up before going back to the children. She lies down beside them, and smiles when they open their eyes. Mama will look after you. Mama loves you. Now Mama is going to make breakfast for her little mousies. Blum puts her arms round them and gives them a hug. How innocent they are. How small. How far away Schönborn’s body seems. She thinks of the scalpel cutting through his fat.
• • •
In a few hours’ time he will disappear underground. In a few hours’ time she and Reza will drive to the cemetery and see him off with all due form: wreaths, candles, eulogies for the two dead people sharing their caskets with that bastard. Reza has written the eulogies and Blum will deliver them. She will speak solemnly about the lives of the departed, but she will be thinking of Schönborn. She will accompany him to the grave and watch the bearers lower the casket. His legs and his head at two in the afternoon, his torso and his arms at four. Two burials and then Schönborn will be history.
• • •
Blum will burn his clothes and go to his studio. In the evening, when the children are asleep, she will unlock the studio with the key she found in his jacket pocket and wipe away any traces, cleaning everything she touched. And she will look for the photographs, for the evidence that she still doesn’t have, for the photos telling her what Schönborn couldn’t tell her now. Blum must find them and make sure that justice is done. For Mark. For Dunya.
• • •
Dunya doesn’t ask what Blum is going to do, what her plans are now that she has found the man. Dunya doesn’t want to know. When Blum brings up the subject she dismisses it. Blum wants to tell her that she can’t do anything, that she doesn’t know how to help, that her hands are tied. She wants to lie, but Dunya waves her lies away, puts her forefinger to her lips and shakes her head. No, please no. Her fear is in her eyes, she has no more words for it, they have all been spoken. Blum is glad not to have to explain. Dunya is grateful too. She offers to go shopping, she wants to make herself useful. With her head lowered, she takes the money that Blum gives her and leaves the house. Bread for breakfast, eggs, orange juice. Everything seems to be in order; the storm is over.
• • •
Bread, eggs, orange juice. Blum is still waiting. The children had some yogurt and then went upstairs to Karl. Blum stays where she is, holding the fort, waiting for Dunya. She has been waiting for two hours now. It doesn’t cross her mind that Dunya might not come back. She knows th
at Dunya feels happy here, that she wants to accept Blum’s help. Blum will make sure that she can stay in the country, she’ll manage it somehow, she’ll pull all the strings she can. But Dunya does not come back.
• • •
Dunya has hidden under a stone, thinks Blum, found the most remote cranny of this city. She will go somewhere else, a place where she doesn’t know anyone. She wants to be safe, she wants to get away from that voice on Blum’s cell phone. With a fifty-euro note in her pocket. Blum stops looking out the window. Dunya has gone. She is only a voice now. A voice telling that story about the cellar. Blum hears it in her head. The story of Ilena, Dunya, and Youn. A photographer, a priest, a huntsman, a chef, a clown. Men in masks. A priest, a huntsman, a chef, a clown. Blum is going to find them.
Everything is the same as it always is: the funeral service, the tears, the casket being lowered into the ground. Blum is back at work for the first time in weeks. Reza is glad of that; he’s been struggling with a temporary assistant who irritated him. He gives Blum a hug and thanks her. Blum is glad too. He says, It’s good to have you back. This place is nothing without you. Like water without flowers. Reza is standing there in his dark suit. He drove all night so that he could be back here in time. Blum doesn’t know what he was doing in Bosnia; he doesn’t talk about that, about anyone who is left or whether he was taking money back to his old home. Reza doesn’t say, and Blum doesn’t ask. Reza smiles at her while the priest gives the blessing, a small, almost invisible smile. We’ll make it together, we’re a team. She thinks of all the funerals they’ve arranged together, all the bodies they have prepared, all the burials they have behind them. Reza is a gift. They will wait until all the roses have been dropped into the grave, until all the mourners have said good-bye and the last of them has left the cemetery. They stand there listening to the music, a wind quintet, the chatter of old friends saying good-bye. Blum is looking down at the casket. At Schönborn. And then back at Reza.
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