“What about Markus?”
“Same treatment. Except that he was a bit farther down. In trying to run away, he’d fallen and cracked his head open. He had a nasty wound on his leg and shoulder, but it was the fall that killed him.”
“God . . .”
“God was looking in another direction, on April 28th.”
“What did you do?”
“All that horror had made us lose all sense of time and the storm had started up again, even stronger than before. It was seven in the evening.”
“Four hours? You stayed there four hours?”
“It went inside you, Jeremiah,” Werner whispered. “That horror went inside you and you couldn’t leave. I don’t want to seem morbid to you, but what we saw was so unnatural and bad, just that, bad, that we lost the light of reason. I’ve often thought about it over the years, you know. I think Max, Günther, Hannes, and I left part of our souls in the Bletterbach that day. That day and the following night.”
I almost choked. “Are you telling me you stayed there all night?”
“The spur provided excellent cover, the ground all around was sliding and melting like hot wax. There were so many bolts of lightning that it was a miracle none of us was roasted alive. We had no choice.”
“But the bodies . . .”
“We covered them with our spare oilskins. We anchored the tent with stones and tried to pile up those poor kids’ things to stop the wind and rain from taking them away. We knew we were at a crime scene, we were conscious that the more objects we managed to keep intact, the greater the likelihood that the Carabinieri could catch those who’d carried out that slaughter. But the real reason we stayed there was simpler. If we’d moved, we’d have died. The mountains follow rules all of their own, whether you like it or not.” He aimed his finger at me. “In some conditions, exceptional conditions, and these were more than exceptional conditions, all that matters . . .”
“. . . is to survive.”
Werner massaged one temple. “We waited all night, huddled together. With Hannes praying and screaming and Günther cursing and me trying to calm both of them. The next morning, as soon as there was a bit of light, we set off again. Hannes couldn’t have stayed on his feet if God himself had ordered him to, and my calf was gone, so Max and Günther took turns helping him. But even Günther wasn’t quite with it. Remember the stone that had smashed his helmet?”
He didn’t finish.
There was no need.
“We got back to the jeep. We hoisted Hannes on board and went back to the village. I took a shower and slept for ten hours straight. When I woke up, Herta didn’t ask me anything. She’d made my favorite dish and I wolfed it down. Only then did I take in what we’d been through, and I started crying as I hadn’t done even at my parents’ funeral.”
“Didn’t you call the police?”
“Siebenhoch was without telephone or electricity lines. The shortwave radio wasn’t working. The Civil Defense people took two days to open the road with bulldozers. They didn’t have the slightest idea of what had happened in the Bletterbach. They knew Siebenhoch could cope with emergencies and so they’d diverted their resources to places farther down the valley that had more people but were less well equipped than us. The Carabinieri arrived on May 4, when the storm was over. There was an investigation, but the killer was never found. In the end, the Carabinieri and the prosecutor said that the three kids had been unlucky to meet the wrong person at the wrong time.”
“Is that all?” I asked, shocked.
Werner opened his arms wide. “That’s all. I hope that bastard died somewhere in the Bletterbach. I hope that after he slaughtered those poor kids the mountains took him, and every time the stream overflows, I always hope it’ll bring to the surface a piece of that son of a bitch. But that’s just a hope.”
“Didn’t they investigate anyone in Siebenhoch?”
“What do you mean?” Werner said, lighting a match and raising it to the tip of his cigarette.
“Someone from the village. It strikes me as obvious.”
“You’re letting your imagination run away with you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re forgetting what Siebenhoch is. It’s a small community. Do you think what you’re telling me now never occurred to anyone? It was the first thing we thought of. But if anyone had followed those kids to the Bletterbach, we would have known. Believe me. Because everybody here knows everything about everybody. Minute by minute. Besides, with that storm, getting to the clearing, going so far into the Bletterbach, killing them, and then getting back without anyone suspecting, would have been impossible.”
“But—”
Werner stopped me. “You promised.”
I blinked.
“That’s the whole story of the killings. And it’s over. Don’t let yourself be devoured by it, Jeremiah. Don’t let yourself be devoured by this story as others have been.”
“Which others? People like Hannes?”
“People like me, Jeremiah.”
* * *
We were silent for a long time.
“Each of us reacted in a different way. The whole village was shocked, though some . . .”
“Some less than others,” I whispered, thinking of the comments on what had happened to Evi and Kurt that Werner had mentioned to me: after Annelise’s unpleasant encounter in Alois’s store, they seemed to me much more plausible now than the first time I’d heard them.
“We’d seen. We’d felt that . . . nastiness. So I made up my mind.”
“To leave?”
“I’d been thinking about it for a while. I already told you I went to work in a printing shop in Cles, didn’t I?”
“You told me you did it for Annelise.”
“She had a right to a father who didn’t spend his days risking his life. What I didn’t tell you is that I couldn’t stand it here anymore. I saw the people of Siebenhoch go back to normal and I couldn’t accept it. The electricity poles were straightened, the telephone lines restored, the roads patched up, and, where necessary, explosions were set off to produce controlled landslides. People wanted to forget, and the Bletterbach killings were forgotten in a hurry. I saw all of that and kept telling myself it wasn’t right.”
“You told me I mustn’t let myself be devoured like the others. Which others?”
“A few hours after we got back, when Siebenhoch was still cut off from the world, Hannes aimed his hunting rifle at Helene’s head and fired, killing her. They found him next to his wife’s body, with the weapon in his hand. He was catatonic. He was arrested and interned in Pergine until his death in 1997. He’s buried here, beside his wife and son. The people of Siebenhoch can be hard, and all too often they open their mouths without thinking, but everyone had understood what had happened to the Schaltzmann family. It wasn’t Hannes who killed Helene: it was the bastard who slaughtered Kurt, Evi, and Markus. Günther is also buried there. Every so often I take him flowers, and I know that if he were alive, the Günther I knew would be really pissed off. I can almost hear him. ‘Flowers? Get me a beer, du Arschloch!’”
“How did he die?”
“Even before, Günther was someone who could never say no to a drink, but after the Bletterbach it got him completely. He became the kind of alcoholic who picks fights. Often Max had to put him in the barracks overnight, to stop him hurting anyone. When he was drunk, all he could talk about was the killings. He was obsessed with them. He’d got it into his head to find the killer. All this they told me later. I was living outside Siebenhoch by then. In 1989, Günther had a car accident. He was blind drunk. He died instantly. Better for him, he’d suffered enough. You know why I go and put flowers on his grave? Because I feel guilty. Maybe if I’d stayed, Günther would have had someone to open up to. But I wasn’t there. And the others had no way of knowing. They couldn’t understand. They hadn’t seen.”
“There was Max.”
“True. But even Max was devoured by the Bletterba
ch. He married Verena, the girl with the birthday, took Chief Hubner’s place and does his work with dedication.”
Werner looked me in the eyes, emphasising his words.
“With too much dedication. It’s his way of making amends. To embody the protector of Siebenhoch, the one who breaks the balls of strangers and tourists because . . .”
“Because whoever killed Evi and the others could only have been an outsider.”
Lily’s Bar
I took Annelise and Clara to Bolzano to visit the archaeological museum where Ötzi, the oldest natural mummy ever found, was kept.
Ötzi was an old shepherd (or maybe a traveler, a shaman, a metal prospector, a . . . the theories about his identity were legion) from the Bronze Age, killed on the slopes of the Similaun, nobody knows why or by whom.
Seeing him, Clara burst into tears. She said that dried-up little man was a child elf who had lost his mamma. Annelise and I had our work cut out to calm her down.
I have to admit that I, too, was moved by that small, 5,000-year-old figure preserved in a kind of giant refrigerator, face contorted in a sad grimace, but for quite other reasons. I was thinking about the Bletterbach killings.
Like Evi, Kurt, and Markus, Ötzi hadn’t received justice. Or was I wrong? Maybe in 3,000 BC, there had been someone who had investigated enough to find the poor man’s killers. Had they mourned him?
And who had done it?
Ötzi had been a man of advanced years. The old had children and the children had grandchildren, I thought as I admired the skill with which that man, just over a meter and a half tall, had built the equipment that had allowed him to survive in a world without antibiotics or disinfectants, a world in which there was no Dolomite Mountain Rescue to call if you were in trouble. Had those children and grandchildren mourned him? Had they built him a funeral pyre? Sacrificed a few animals in his memory? To what gods had that ice man turned before the arrows shot him dead? Had God been looking away that day too, to quote Werner?
A lot was known about Ötzi. Modern technology had made it possible to scan his stomach to discover what he had eaten before he was killed. We knew the pathologies that affected him and thanks to this the reason, medical rather than aesthetic, why there were more than thirty tattoos on his body. Ötzi suffered from arthritis, and the tattoos allowed him to inject curative herbs under his skin. Archaeologists had reconstructed his equipment piece by piece: the bow, the quiver, the axe he carried on his belt, his poncho of dried grass, and his hide headdress. His techniques of construction had been revealed in detail. We even knew the color of his eyes (dark) thanks to DNA testing, and through computer graphics they had reconstructed what his face must have been like before he was buried in the ice for 5,000 years. And yet I couldn’t help but think that these details were trivial compared with the real questions the mummy aroused in my mind.
Had he dreamed?
Had he dreamed about hunting? Had he dreamed about wolves howling at the moon? Had he dreamed about the outline of the mountain on which he would meet his death? And what had he seen as he gazed at the stars at night? By what name did he know the Big Dipper?
But above all, why had he been killed?
And by whom?
* * *
We celebrated Halloween with the obligatory pumpkin in the window, orange lanterns, a plastic skeleton that glowed in the dark, bats on the ceiling, popcorn, and a nice horror movie. All according to tradition.
Clara didn’t like the movie, she said you could see the zombies were fake. She said it, though, as if she were asking a question. She wanted to be reassured.
Annelise gave me a glance as if to say, “I told you so, genius!” and I spent the rest of the evening showing Clara how they made blood in movies: blueberry juice and honey. With a touch of coffee to make it darker.
“And the zombies’ ugly faces?”
I put on my best zombie imitation, my tongue hanging out of my wide-open mouth and my eyes wild. Clara wrinkled her nose.
I kissed her.
A moment of zombie intimacy.
“And those nasty things on their faces? How do they make the nasty things on their faces?”
“Plasticine and cornflakes.”
“Cornflakes?”
I demonstrated this too.
Clara was in seventh heaven. We organized a game to trick Annelise, who pretended to be terrified by the miniature zombie (in polka-dot pajamas) advancing through the living room holding her arms out in front of her and muttering in a cavernous voice (in so far as the voice of a five-year-old girl can be cavernous), “I’m going to eat you! I’m going to eat you!”
It took us quite a while to get her to go to bed, and then we allowed ourselves a glass of wine.
“Your daughter,” I joked, as I sipped the excellent Marzemino, “used the word ‘brooding’ the other day. Eight letters, your honor.”
“And where did she hear a word like that?”
“From you.”
Annelise lifted the glass to her mouth. “Talking about what?”
“Try to guess.”
“Well, you are distracted. Admit it.”
“Do you want me to see the doctor again? Would that reassure you?”
Annelise took my hand and squeezed it tight. “You’re fine. You’re OK. I can see that. Do you still have . . .”—she bit her lip, a gesture I found extremely sexy—“. . . bad dreams?”
Of course I did, as she knew perfectly well. I appreciated her tact, though.
“Sometimes.” I bent down to kiss the tips of her fingers. “But don’t worry. I’m fine. And I’m not brooding.”
“Would you tell me?”
“Of course I would.”
* * *
I was lying.
If Annelise had decided to search on my laptop, which had once been white but had turned gray from all the cigarette ash that had fallen on it, she would have discovered that in the folder “Things” there was a file entitled B. B for “Bletterbach.”
And “bastard.”
* * *
One afternoon, a few days after my chat with Werner, I went to Trento on the pretext of acquiring a couple of DVDs for my collection.
What I actually did was spend two hours in the reading room of the university library.
No microfiches or digital copies, but a mountain of yellowing newspapers. Between one layer of dust and another, I found just a few references to the Bletterbach killings. The journalists’ attention at the time had been focused on the chaos caused by the storm. Interviews, articles that illustrated more or less what Werner had reconstructed for me. Experts explaining the kind of disaster that had afflicted the region and big black-and-white photographs showing the damage caused by that cataclysm of water and mud.
The final count of eleven dead had led to a brief burst of controversy that had soon burned out, overwhelmed by other events.
A mayor had to resign, and various councillors apologized and put in contrite appearances at the funerals of the victims. The Civil Defense were praised by the president of the Republic, a little pipe-smoking man named Sandro Pertini. I found him odd, but gifted with unusual charisma.
About the murders, little or nothing.
An aerial photograph of the gorge, devoid of the glass and aluminum outline of the Visitors’ Center, which had yet to be built. Evi’s face, maybe because it was more photogenic than those of her companions in misfortune. A curt “No comment” uttered by the men pursuing the case. An interview with Werner, more blond than white, with fewer wrinkles but just as many rings under his eyes, who talked about a “horrible slaughter.” A few days later, the obituary of Helene Schaltzmann. Nothing about Hannes’s madness.
I’d also have liked to look for the obituary of Günther Kagol in ’89, but by now I’d realized it would be a pointless task. Plus, it was late.
I thanked the staff and got home in time for dinner. Roast pork and potatoes. I kissed my wife, I kissed my daughter and asked them what they’d been doing
all day.
Before going to bed, I updated the file with what I had found out in the library.
I told myself I was doing it to keep in practice. To keep myself occupied.
Another lie.
* * *
Without realizing it, I was following the same method I had used for all my previous jobs. I was and remain a creature of routine.
After transcribing Werner’s testimony, trying to put down in digital form the emphasis and emotions that his words had conveyed to me, and compiling a dry list of the characteristic morphology, geology, flora, and fauna of the Bletterbach, I started searching for a few historical allusions that would give me a broader picture of the place.
My search started one afternoon when Annelise and Clara had gone to Bolzano to do shopping (“Women’s things, Papà.” “Expensive things?” “Pretty things.”) with a visit to the geological museum that was part of the Visitors’ Center in the Bletterbach.
There weren’t many books. Most of those there were had been put out by tiny publishers subsidized by the province, and they were often useless for my purpose, panegyrics on the good old days (with no mention of either the poverty that had gripped the area until not so long ago or the days of “Belfast with strudel”), but I read them avidly, noting down the paragraphs that most aroused my curiosity.
The best were the—sometimes ungrammatical—accounts of the most amazing feats of Dolomite Mountain Rescue. The names of Werner and Hannes cropped up frequently. Günther’s, too, a couple of times. In a long celebratory article, there was even a mention of Hermann Kagol, the man who’d had the idea for the Center.
A photograph showed a solemn Werner, posing by the recently purchased Alouette. The photograph of the flaming red EC135 made my stomach turn.
* * *
In the days that followed, I started frequenting one of the bars in Siebenhoch, Lily’s, a crummy place with terrible watery coffee, wooden crucifixes that glowered at you, and the heads of roe deer, stags, and ibex as an insult to animal rights people.
Beneath the Mountain Page 9