“My name’s Clara,” my daughter said, “and I want to see the giant ammonite.”
The woman turned to me in surprise. “Your daughter is very precocious.”
“I’m five years old,” Clara said sententiously. “I can read a little and I can count to a thousand. I like dinosaurs with long necks—brontosauruses—strawberry ice cream and Ops Werner’s speck. And I don’t want a pink helmet, I want a red one. That’s my favorite color, apart from blue and green,” she concluded, arousing Ilse’s incredulous laughter. “Papà,” she added immediately afterward, “ask her where we can find Yodi.”
“Who’s Yodi?” Ilse said, disorientated by that riot of words.
“Yodi,” I replied, “is the name of the giant ammonite. Where can we see it?”
Ilse regained her professional tone. “You’ll find it in the geological museum. Which tour do you prefer? Short or long?”
“Short tour, I’d say. I don’t like . . . enclosed spaces.”
Ilse tore off two tickets. “Do you suffer from claustrophobia?”
“It’s a recent thing.”
Ilse made us try on several helmets. Clara wanted me to take at least three different photographs of her, one with the pink helmet, one with the yellow helmet, and the third with the red helmet, the one she ultimately chose. Then, rucksacks on our backs, we began our excursion.
It was a nice walk, although more than once, thanks to a breeze that made the leaves on the trees rustle, I thought I heard that infernal hissing and felt a pressing need to scream. But I didn’t. Because there to show me the shells in the layers of Werfen, the seaweed of the Contrin, or the tracks of some pareiasaur that had made its way over the sandstone, was my daughter, and for Clara I had to be the nearest thing to a hero.
So: I was strong, I was cured. I was Superman. Don’t I deserve a standing ovation?
By the time we got to the end of the route, I was sweating and my nerves were on edge, but Clara was in seventh heaven. Seeing her so happy was one more step toward the end of my torment. After a well-deserved speck and pickled gherkin sandwich, we headed for the museum contained within the glass, aluminum, and wooden structure of the Visitors’ Center, to finally meet Yodi the giant ammonite.
Clara really loved the fossils. The stranger they were, the more she enjoyed them. She even made an effort to read out all those Latin names and woe to me if I tried to help her. “Papà, I’m big.” No need to point out that “big” was a three letter word, written in block capitals.
I wasn’t crazy about fossils; there was something disturbing about those pieces of rock that had retained the features of living organisms swept away millions of years ago.
Even the concept of millions of years was disturbing.
I preferred the last part of the museum. It was devoted to the old Bletterbach copper mine, which had been closed down after it collapsed in 1923. I was fascinated by the photographs of those big men, blackened by earth, holding antiquated tools. Those handlebar moustaches, those ogre-like beards, and those clothes that looked like they were from a cartoon were irresistible.
Of course, it wasn’t all Disney; the lists of miners engulfed by the rock were horrifying, but I was there with Clara and I had no intention of thinking about death and destruction, I had already had my fill of that: better to concentrate on the lederhosen and the haughty expressions of those men whose DNA ran in my daughter’s veins. “That’s why she likes fossils so much,” I thought, grinning to myself. “It’s the call of the rock.”
Eat your heart out, Jack London.
At last, Yodi. The 280 million-year-old ammonite. When we came to the star of the museum, Clara started telling me his story. You see, for Clara, the world was a big a, the beginning of a multitude of stories that went from a to b and then to c, but which almost never got to z because Clara didn’t force her stories to an ending, it would be like cutting off their wings. I could spend hours listening to her without getting tired of them because that’s the nature of love: listening to stories without ever getting tired of them. And I loved Clara more than myself.
When the moment came to return to Siebenhoch, I took out my camera and framed child and ammonite on the display screen. Clara granted me a smile that could wring your heart, then turned, said goodbye to Yodi with a skip that was also a kind of curtsey, and turned back to me, all the while talking, talking, talking. As I bent down to put the camera back in the rucksack, I caught a fragment of conversation between Ilse and two elderly villagers, legs uncovered, regulation Birkenstocks over dazzling white socks, varicose veins plainly in view. Just a few sentences, but sometimes that is all it takes for destiny to put the rope around your neck.
“It was 1985, signora.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was born that year. The year of the Bletterbach killings. My mother was always talking about it. ‘You were born the year of that terrible business, that’s why you behave the way you do.’ She was still traumatized by it. The Schaltzmanns were her distant relatives, you know.”
“Did they ever find the person responsible?”
A pause.
A sigh.
“No, never.”
Promises and Lies
There’s something you really need to know. On September 15, Annelise and I had made a pact.
* * *
When the doctors and nurses had left and Werner had gently taken Clara’s hand and gone with her to the hospital’s cafeteria, Annelise and I were finally alone. After a long silence, Annelise slapped me so hard the stitches on my eyebrow almost burst.
Then she started crying.
“You have to promise,” she said. “You have to promise you’ll never. Never. Never again make me . . .”
She broke off. I reached for her hand. She pulled it away.
That scared me. It scared me a lot.
“You could have died, Salinger,” she said. “Our daughter would have been without a father. Do you realize that?”
I nodded.
But it wasn’t true. I couldn’t think about anything but the hissing. That damned hissing.
The hissing of the Beast.
“You have to give up this work. And you have to promise me.”
“It’s my—”
“We’re your life.”
Everything was going round and round in my head. The effect of the tranquilizers and painkillers was starting to wear off and behind Annelise I could see the Beast, sneering.
“Mike. I—” I stammered.
“Mike?” she almost screamed, furious. “Mike?”
“Annelise—”
“You were dead, Salinger. Dead.”
“Anne—”
“When I opened the door and saw my father with that expression on his face, I knew . . . I knew you were dead. And I thought of Clara and I thought, God forgive me, I thought, serves you right. You’d asked for it, that was how you’d wanted to end up, and I . . . I hated myself for that.”
“Please . . .”
Annelise hugged me.
I felt her body shaking with sobs. “I know,” she said. “I know how much that life means to you. But Clara has a right to have a father. And I don’t want to be alone, I don’t deserve it, Salinger. I can’t live without you, you stupid idiot.” She pulled away from me, rubbed her nose, and tried to joke about it. “I don’t look good in black.”
Smiling gave me a sharp pain. I tried to sit up. I felt dizzy, with all the delicacy of a truck. “You’d be the sexiest widow in Siebenhoch,” I replied.
Annelise ruffled my hair. “And you’d be the handsomest corpse in the cemetery. I need a year, Salinger.”
“A year?”
In spite of the voice of the Beast, I felt this was an important moment. Whatever I said, or didn’t say, would affect my marriage.
My future.
“I can’t ask you to stop. That wouldn’t be fair. But you have to promise me you’ll take a year out . . . a sabbatical year. To decide what to do with your life. Then if
you want to get back to it, I’ll be with you. Just like before.”
“Just like before.”
“Promise?”
I was about to answer her when the door was flung open and Clara rushed in, with all the enthusiasm of her five years, followed by Werner, who was trying to apologize with his eyes. I signaled to him to drop it. Everything was fine.
I took Clara’s hand. “How many letters in the word ‘promise’?”
Clara counted. “Seven,” she said radiantly.
I looked Annelise in the eyes. “Seven letters.”
* * *
That October day, as I headed for Welshboden, I kept telling myself I wasn’t really doing it. I wasn’t violating the pact I had made with the woman I loved, a pact sealed by our daughter’s words. I told myself it was mere curiosity, nothing more. I’d promised Annelise a sabbatical year and I would keep that promise. I was just going to have a chat with my father-in-law because I needed to get out of the house. That was all.
I wasn’t working on any idea.
Ideas? Who?
Me?
Of course not.
Just a little chat by the fire. A cigarette. Coffee with a splash of alcohol. Maybe a couple of innocent questions about what Ilse at the Visitors’ Center had referred to as the Bletterbach killings. You couldn’t call that work. And anyway, I thought, continuing the imaginary dialogue with myself as I approached Werner’s property, supervising the documentary that Mike was editing was a kind of work, wasn’t it? And Annelise hadn’t objected to that.
You know something? I was a good liar.
I pretended to have forgotten that Annelise had only given her consent to that on condition that it wouldn’t have any repercussions on my mental state (she didn’t use the word “mental,” she said “emotional,” but we both knew what she was talking about) and that Mike would be working on it a long way away in New York. Almost as if even the hours spent editing were radioactive. I pretended to have forgotten that Annelise had accepted because Mike had pointed out to her that this footage was part of Mountain Angels, so technically it wasn’t a new idea, it was an old idea that needed to be reworked a bit “in light of what had happened.” Furthermore, “apart from a couple of hours discussing the narrative line, Salinger won’t have to do anything else except answer an occasional e-mail. You won’t even notice.”
Dear Mephistophelian Mike.
“Anyone at home?” I called out once I had slammed the car door.
Werner’s face appeared from behind the curtains. He let me in. We talked about this and that, had coffee and a smoke. I told him about Yodi and the excursion to the Bletterbach, trying to seem as natural as possible, while inside I was seething with curiosity.
Then I threw the bait.
“I heard a crazy story.”
“What story?”
“A hint, nothing else. But it struck me as strange.”
“The mountains are full of strange stories. And there’s the proof,” Werner said, indicating the scar beside my right eye. “Or am I wrong?”
I stroked it with my fingertips. Clara called it “the kiss of the bad fairy.” It reminded me of the photographs of the Bletterbach that I had looked for on Google, deleting the search history for fear that Annelise might ask me questions I wouldn’t be able to answer.
I didn’t want to lie to her.
Not directly, at least.
“No, you’re not wrong.”
Something in my voice persuaded Werner to change the subject. We had never talked about what had happened on September 15. It had happened and that was it. If he had to refer to the accident, Werner would say, “That nasty day.”
Mountain men’s natural reserve worked in my favor because Werner now stood up, almost embarrassed, opened the fridge and took out a bottle of gentian grappa. He filled two small glasses. We toasted in silence.
“You were saying . . .”
“I heard a story. Or rather, there were two quite elderly tourists talking about it to the woman who rented us our helmets at the Visitors’ Center. Ilse. Do you know her?”
“That must be Ilse Unterkircher. Here in Siebenhoch we all know each other, even though old people like me are almost extinct now and the new generations . . .” He took a sip of his grappa. “When you’re my age, you’ll realize something very funny. All faces look alike. Especially the faces of young people. But I bet that’s not what you wanted to talk about.”
“Ilse called it the Bletterbach killings. And I think she added a name: Schaltzmann.”
“I think,” my ass.
In the Google search history I’d deleted, there were at least twelve different responses with that name. Of course I remembered it. Except that not even the great oracle of the twenty-first century had given me an answer. I had discovered a Schaltzmann who was a professor at Yale, a hockey player, a photographer in Hamburg, two separate used-car dealers in Bavaria, and an infinite number of Schaltzmans, Saltzmanns, and so on. But about the Bletterbach killings? An absolute void. Instead of depressing me, this had rekindled my interest. Curiosity is fed by blank spaces on maps.
Werner poured himself some more grappa. “What did you hear?” he asked, curtly.
“That nobody was ever arrested.”
“Nobody. That’s correct.”
I lit a cigarette and held out the packet.
Werner refused with a distracted gesture. “April 28, 1985. As they say on TV, I was there.”
“You were there?”
It was impossible for me to hide my excitement. I had imagined that Werner would be a good source of information, not that he would be an eyewitness.
Werner met my gaze and sustained it for a few seconds.
He put his glass down on the table. My excitement faded in a flash.
“Jeremiah, I’ve never interfered in my daughter’s business. Herta used to say that children should be allowed to fly the nest and I always agreed with her. So I don’t like saying what I’m about to say, but I’m also doing it for your sake . . .”—he paused—“. . . and for Clara.”
I stopped him with a gesture of my hand. “I’m not planning to make a documentary about it, Werner,” I said. “I’ve given my word. I don’t want my marriage to break down because of my . . . shall we call it ‘ambition’?”
“Stupidity, Jeremiah. Destroying a marriage, and a family that works, a family like yours, is stupidity, nothing more, nothing less.”
“Amen.”
“Pass me one of those, will you?”
He lit the cigarette as he always did: using his thumbnail to strike the match. “So you want to hear an old story?”
“Werner . . .”
From my mouth emerged the kind of confession that came from the heart. Maybe that was why, precisely because I was sincere, I damned our souls.
“It’s a story I’d like to hear. But I don’t want to make a documentary about it. I’m too . . . tired. But I need to have something to play with. It’s like you with the mountains. When was the last time you had a proper climb?”
“At least twenty years ago, maybe more.”
“But you continue to go on excursions, right?”
“If you want to call them excursions,” Werner replied bitterly, “Yes, of course. But they’re walks fit only for arthritic tourists.”
“I’d like this story to be my mental version of your walks. I need an idea to kill time with. I need to get out of . . . this state.”
An alarmed expression on Werner’s face. “You mean you’re sick again?”
“No,” I reassured him, “nothing like that. Annelise and Clara are fantastic medicine. I’ve stopped having nightmares.” Faced with his skeptical expression, I corrected myself. “I’ve basically stopped having nightmares and the ones I do have are . . . manageable. Physically, I’ve never been better. Clara is tiring me out with all our walks, and I can’t wait for it to start snowing to teach her how to sled. Mentally, though . . .”
“You can’t just sit twiddling your
thumbs.”
“Exactly.”
Werner dropped a little ash on the floor. “Annelise told me you’re working with your friend Mike . . .”
“Actually, all I’m doing is making a few suggestions from time to time. Nothing more. And I won’t hide from you the fact that I’m fine with that.”
“Remembering hurts?”
“It hurts a lot,” I replied, trying to get rid of the lump at the back of my throat. “It’s like a wild animal that’s hidden inside me, Werner. And it bites. All the time. Maybe one day I’ll manage to put a muzzle on it. To master it. To go back to having only good days. But now I need a new . . . toy to keep this thing up here in shape,” I concluded, pressing my index finger to my temple.
I didn’t add anything more. I was in Werner’s hands. Whatever his answer, I would accept it. Even if he kicked me out of the house. I felt drained. But it was a pleasant sensation. Maybe how a religious person feels after confessing his sins to his spiritual guide.
Werner absolved me.
And started telling the story.
The Bletterbach Killings
“The story starts in the Tyrrhenian.”
“The sea?”
Werner nodded. “Do you know what a multicellular cluster with windward regeneration is?”
“You might as well be speaking Arabic.”
“It’s a meteorological definition. ‘Multicellular cluster with windward regeneration,’ more commonly known as a ‘self-regenerating storm.’ Imagine a hot, humid current coming in from the sea. In our case, from the Tyrrhenian. Very hot and very humid. It moves up the coast, but instead of breaking over the Gulf of Genoa it keeps moving northwards.”
I tried to imagine the map of Italy. “Over the Po Valley?”
“Without encountering any obstacle. On the contrary, it gathers even more heat and humidity. Are you with me?”
“I’m with you.”
“Imagine this current as humid and hot as the tropics slamming into the Alps.”
“A snowstorm.”
“Genau. But just as the humid current is about to collide with the Alps, an icy current comes down from the north, also incredibly heavy with water. When the two currents meet, it’s a real mess. A perfect self-regenerating storm. You know why ‘self-regenerating’? Because the collision between the two masses of air doesn’t diminish the intensity of the storm, but makes it even stronger. Violence that breeds more violence. We’re talking about more than three thousand lightning flashes an hour.”
Beneath the Mountain Page 5