I started thinking again about the Bletterbach around December 28. I read through my notes and once again began pondering what I had discovered at the courthouse in Bolzano.
On the evening of the 30th I made my move.
* * *
The woman who opened the door was tiny, with dark bobbed hair and big luminous eyes.
“Verena?” I said.
She immediately had me pegged. “You’re the film director everyone’s talking about, aren’t you? Werner’s son-in-law.”
“Salinger. Not director, screenwriter.” I showed her the bottle of Blauburgunder I had bought for the occasion. “May I come in?”
The wind was strong enough to freeze your bones, but it was only now that Verena seemed to realize. She apologized, stood aside to let me in and closed the door behind me.
“I imagine you’re looking for Max.”
“Isn’t he here?”
“He has a meeting in Bolzano. You’re out of luck, but take a seat anyway. Would you like a drink?”
“Yes, please.”
I hung up my jacket, scarf, and hat and followed her into the kitchen. Verena seated me at a table on which stood a hamper crammed with goodies. Fruit, jars of sauce, pickles, jam. All homemade.
“They look delicious.”
“The people of Siebenhoch,” she explained. “Either they want to say thank you, or they want to apologize. It’s fifty-fifty.”
I laughed with her. “Werner has also had his fill of Christmas baskets. And I’m at risk of indigestion.”
“A pity,” the woman said. “I thought I could offload some of ours onto you.”
We both laughed.
The tea was scalding hot and I had to blow on it. Verena had made herself a cup, too. I tried to imagine her in ’85, which wasn’t difficult. She couldn’t have been so different from the woman I saw now. Chief Krün’s wife looked not much more than thirty, even though she must have been pushing fifty.
“Is that bottle a thank-you or an apology?”
“Both, to tell the truth. I wanted to thank Max for not fining me and—”
Verena interrupted me, raising her eyes to heaven. “So he did his favorite number on you, too.”
“What number?”
Verena imitated her husband’s severe expression (his bad cop look). “Hey, stranger, make sure you don’t stick your fingers in your nose, around here we hate people who stick their fingers in their nose, we hang them in front of the town hall and then we practice clay pigeon shooting with their heads . . .”
The tea went down the wrong way.
“. . . using a nail gun,” she finished, winking at me.
“Yes, that number. Except in my case it was for speeding.”
“So half the bottle is a thank-you, and the other half?” she asked.
I hadn’t forgotten that Werner had his eye on me. But nor did I want to miss the opportunity to ask a few questions. So I said, half seriously and half facetiously, “We’re friends, right?”
“We’ve been friends for more than ten minutes.”
“Where I come from that’s time enough to build empires.”
“Then let’s say we’re friends. So spit it out.”
I sipped at my tea. “I’d like to ask Max about the Bletterbach.”
Verena’s smile turned sour, and a deep furrow appeared in the space between her eyebrows. This all happened in a second, then her face relaxed again.
“Didn’t they give you enough brochures at the Visitors’ Center?”
“They were wonderful,” I replied cautiously, “but I wanted to know something more specific about the killings in ’85. Simple curiosity,” I added after a pause.
“Simple curiosity,” she repeated, playing with her teacup. “Simple curiosity about one of the nastiest things that ever happened in Siebenhoch, Salinger?”
“It’s second nature to me,” I said, trying to give the words a light tone.
“Reopening old wounds? Is that also second nature to you?”
“I don’t want to seem—”
“You don’t seem, you are,” she interrupted. “Now take your bottle and get out.”
“But why?” I said, surprised by such vehemence.
“Because I haven’t been able to celebrate my birthday since 1985, is that a good enough reason for you?”
“I don’t—”
April 28. The birthday party.
Everything was clear to me now. I turned red.
I took a deep breath. “Maybe Max doesn’t agree with you. Maybe he’d like to tell me the—”
I stopped.
Hatred and pain. That was what I read on her features.
A huge amount of pain.
“It’s not up for discussion.”
“Why?”
Verena clenched her fists. “Because . . .” she replied in a low voice, wiping away a tear. “Please, Salinger. Don’t talk to him about it. I don’t want him to suffer.”
“Then why don’t you talk to me about it?”
Judging by the emotions crowding onto her face, a bloody and hard-fought battle was being waged in Verena’s mind.
I waited in silence for the outcome of the conflict.
“Promise you won’t tell him afterward?”
“I promise.”
L for liar.
B for bastard.
S for smile.
“You can be sure of it.”
“This isn’t for a film, right?”
“No, it’s a kind of hobby.”
It was an unfortunate choice of words, I admit. But if I’d told her the truth, she would have kicked me out. Not to mention that, by this point, I no longer knew what the truth was.
Was it simple curiosity that was leading me to ask all these questions? Or had the story of the Bletterbach become an obsession for me, too?
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything you know,” I replied avidly.
“What I know is that I hate that place. I haven’t set foot there since ’85.”
“Why?”
“Do you love your wife, Salinger?”
“Yes.”
“What would you feel toward a place where your wife lost a part of herself?”
“Hatred.”
“There you are. I hate the Bletterbach. And I hate the work my husband does. I hate that uniform. I hate it when he goes in search of poachers, I hate it when he does his number on the new arrivals . . .”—she looked around—“. . . and I hate these damned baskets.” She passed her hand under her nose and recovered her breath. “Max is a good person. The best. But that business has marked him, and I’d so much like to get away from here. Let the Forest Rangers, Siebenhoch, and this house go to hell. But it’s impossible. It’s like a scar . . .”—she pointed to the half moon around my eye—“. . . except that Max’s scar is here.” She placed a hand over her heart. “You can leave a place, but a scar you carry with you forever. It’s part of you.”
“I can understand that.”
“No,” Verena replied, “you can’t.”
But I could. The Beast was my witness.
“It must have been hard,” I said.
“Hard?” Verena snorted. “Hard, you say? I had to build him back up piece by piece. There were days when I wanted to leave him. To get away from here, to drop everything. To give up.”
“But you didn’t.”
“Would you have abandoned your wife?”
“I would have stayed.”
“At first he didn’t want to talk about it. I begged him to see a psychologist, but he always replied the same way. He didn’t need a doctor, he just needed a bit of time. Time, he’d say,” she whispered, shaking her head, “it was only a matter of time.”
“They say it’s the best medicine.”
“Until it kills you,” was Verena’s bitter reply. “And the story of the Bletterbach killings is a curse. Do you know about the others? Hannes killed Helene, Werner left without saying goodbye to anybody. He p
acked his bags and disappeared. And even before he left, there were more days when you didn’t see him around than days when you could say hello to him. He’d become another person. He was grumpy, hardly said a word. It was obvious he couldn’t stand being here anymore. Then there was Günther.”
Verena passed her hands over her arms, almost as if a shudder had run through her.
“It almost scared me, seeing him and Max sitting talking. They’d sit here for hours and hours, right here, talking and talking, with the door closed. They didn’t drink, thank God for that, but when Günther left, Max had a strange light in his eyes . . .” Verena searched for the words. “They were the eyes of a corpse, Salinger. Would you like your wife to have the eyes of a corpse?”
There was only one reply to that question. “No.”
“Then the visits grew few and far between. Günther had a girlfriend, someone local, Brigitte, and they started to get serious. He spent less time with Max, and I was happy that he was out of our way. Without Günther around, Max seemed to be better. But every year, toward the end of April . . .”
Verena started fiddling with her wedding ring.
“When it happened the first time, in ’86, I was nineteen. When you’re nineteen, death is something that happens to your grandparents or to mountaineers who slip and fall. I even thought that a party might do him good. You know, distract him.”
“You were wrong?”
“It was the first and only time I’ve seen him in a rage. No,” she cor-rected herself, “‘rage’ doesn’t do it justice. I got scared and wondered if it was worth fighting for a person who seemed out of his mind. Did I really want to spend the rest of my days with a madman? But then I realized that it wasn’t anger he was feeling, it was grief. Evi, Kurt, and Markus were his only friends and he’d found them torn to pieces. I forgave him, but I never again celebrated my birthday. Not with Max. The following year, the day before my birthday, he loaded the car and went off to his family’s old maso, to get plastered and wait for it to pass. Since then it’s become a habit, even a ritual. It’s a good compromise, and at least Max hasn’t ended up like Günther and Hannes.”
“Werner also saved himself.”
Verena made a face. “Werner’s older than Max, and he’s a different kind of person. As head of the rescue team, he’d seen all sorts. Max at the time was little more than a boy, although to me, innocent as I was, he seemed like a grown-up. Plus, Max had the telegram to keep the wound open.”
Seeing the bewildered look on my face she laughed.
“You don’t know about that, do you?”
“A telegram?”
“Do you want to see it?”
“Of course.”
Verena left the kitchen and came back with a photograph: Kurt, Max, Markus, and Evi with the wind in their hair. She took it out of its frame, and a yellowed telegram slipped out with it. Verena put the telegram on the table and smoothed it with her hands.
“This is the reason Max can’t resign himself.”
“What does it say?”
Verena showed it to me.
Geht nicht dorthin!
“Don’t go down there,” I murmured.
The date at the bottom was April 28, 1985.
“Who sent it?”
Verena sighed, as if she’d heard that question many times before. She turned the telegram over. “Oscar Grünwald. He was a colleague of Evi’s, a scientist.”
“And how . . .?”
“One of the first duties that Chief Hubner was only too happy to hand over to Max was going to get the telegrams and the urgent mail down there in Aldino. Siebenhoch was too small to have its own post office, and the postman was an old man who had to go back and forth on a pre-war moped. Max hated having to do it, he said it wasn’t suited to his role.” Her expression became distant. “The uniform meant a lot to him. And he was right. It gave him a lot . . .” She dismissed the thought with a gesture of her hand. “It was a kind of informal agreement between Chief Hubner and the postal service. Whenever something important arrived, a member of the Forest Rangers would go down to Aldino to collect it and then deliver it.”
“Isn’t that illegal?”
Verena snorted. “People trusted Chief Hubner, and Max, too, for that matter, so what was the problem?”
“No problem,” I replied, while all my concentration was focused on that rectangle of paper.
Don’t go down there!
“That morning, Max went down to Aldino to fetch the mail. Evi had already left for the Bletterbach, and Max slipped the telegram into his pocket and almost immediately forgot about it. That day was a real mess, even before the killings. Max had a lot on his plate.”
“Such as?”
“It was raining, and there were a couple of landslides. Max had to check them out. He was on his own, Chief Hubner had had a heart attack and was in the San Maurizio hospital in Bolzano. Then, toward evening, there was that truck that overturned and Max had his work cut out. It was a nasty accident and Max was afraid he wouldn’t get to my birthday party in time. He managed, though, because when he promises something, you can be sure he’ll do everything he can to keep his word.”
“What about the telegram?”
“I found it in his jacket pocket when he got back from the Bletterbach. If I’d known what the consequences would be, I’d have burned it. Instead, I showed it to him and Max made a face I’ll never forget. It was as if I’d stabbed him in the heart. He looked at me and said only, ‘I could have.’ Nothing else, but it was clear what he meant. He could have saved them. That was how his obsession began.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know that, and you know that. But Max? In that situation? After he’d seen the bodies of the only friends he had here in Siebenhoch cut to pieces like that? I told you, he changed. He started pissing off the Carabinieri, bombarding them with phone calls night and day. He even came to blows with that captain . . .”
“Alfieri.”
“Who never lodged a complaint, but there you are. Max kept saying that nobody was doing anything to find the person who’d killed his friends. It wasn’t true, but if you told him that he’d lose his temper. When he realized that the investigation had come to a standstill and would soon be shelved, he started investigating by himself. He’s never stopped since.”
“I heard that the case file is in the barracks in Siebenhoch.”
“No. Max has it, in his grandparents’ house. The old Krün family home, where he grew up. He has everything there.”
By now the tea was cold. I drank it anyway, because I felt the need to smoke and that seemed like the one way to get rid of the craving. It didn’t work.
“Have you ever asked him about this Oscar Grünwald?”
“He’s never wanted to let me see his records, those he keeps locked up in the family home, but I’m convinced that Max has a file on every single inhabitant of Siebenhoch.”
I shuddered.
“It’s the only way he has of keeping going,” Verena said. “Keeping the anger alive. Max is an orphan. His parents died in a car accident when he was just a few months old. He grew up with his grandmother. Frau Krün. A hard woman. She was nearly a hundred when she died. Her husband was killed in the mine collapse in ’23, and from that day on Frau Krün never wore any color except black. With the death of her husband, she’d lost everything, there was no insurance at the time. They were very poor, maybe the poorest people in thewhole area. Max was a shy, gentle child. He was very good at school, but Frau Krün wouldn’t have accepted anything other than the best marks anyway. The only friends Max had were Kurt, Markus, and Evi. With them, Max didn’t have to be the toy soldier Frau Krün was trying to bring up, he could let himself go. Their deaths condemned him to solitude.”
“Thirty years of anger. Isn’t that self-destructive?”
“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”
We fell silent, lost in thought.
“What about you?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“What’s your idea about what happened?”
Verena toyed with the photograph, drawing small circles with her fingers around the face of a beardless, carefree Max. “You’re going to think me just a superstitious mountain woman, but I’m not. I trained as a nurse, and I consider myself a good one. Conscientious, well prepared. As many people here in the village can testify. I like reading, I was the one who insisted with the local council on getting broadband installed in Siebenhoch. I don’t believe in fairy stories, in monsters under the bed, or that the earth is flat. But I’m certain that the Bletterbach is a cursed place, just as I’m certain that smoking is bad for your health. There have been too many deaths down there. Shepherds who vanished into thin air. Woodcutters who’ve told stories about strange lights and even stranger footprints. Legends, myths, will-o’-the-wisps. Look at it however you want, but behind even the most absurd legend there’s a small element of truth.”
I thought about the people of Fanes.
“I bet,” Verena continued, “that after hearing all the nasty things said about you, it won’t be hard for you to believe me if I tell you that in the past there were a good few summary trials in this area. Witches above all, but no burnings. Siebenhoch had its own system of administering justice. Those poor women were taken and left alone in the Bletterbach. None of them ever returned. There are tons of Rumors about that place. And not even one that the people in the Visitors’ Center would like.”
“Horror attracts,” I said.
“Not that kind of horror. Have you been there?”
“I took my daughter.”
“And did you like it?”
“Clara enjoyed it a lot.”
“I asked you.”
I thought about it for a few moments. “No, I didn’t enjoy it. And I know it’s crazy to say this, everything in the world is old, but you feel the weight of time down there.”
Verena nodded. “The weight of time, yes. The Bletterbach is one huge graveyard. All those fossils, they’re bones. Corpses. Corpses of creatures that . . . I’m not a fundamentalist, Salinger. And I’m not a bigot either. I know that Darwin was right. Species evolve, and if they don’t evolve when their habitat changes they become extinct. But I believe in God. Not a God with a white beard sitting up there in the sky, that’s a vision I find reductive, but I believe in God and in his way of running the machine that we call the universe.”
Beneath the Mountain Page 14