“Like me,” I replied, still stroking Clara’s waxy face. “Do you have a hard head, sweetheart?”
“I did a bad thing, Papà.”
“What?”
“I broke the sled,” she said. Then she burst into tears.
“We’ll build a new one. You and I.”
“Together, Papà?”
“Of course. And it’ll be even more beautiful than the last one.”
“It was already beautiful.”
“That doesn’t matter. What color would you like the new sled?”
Clara broke away from me again, smiling. “Red.”
“Aren’t you fed up with red? What about pink?”
“I like pink.”
For a moment she looked as if she wanted to add something else, but she must have had second thoughts because she shook her head and lay back on the pillow, with a moan of pain that didn’t escape me.
“When will they discharge her?”
“In a few days,” Werner replied. “They want to keep her under observation for a little while longer.”
“I think that’s sensible.”
Clara half closed her eyes. She moved her hand. I took it in both of mine. It was cold. I blew on it. Clara smiled. Her breathing slowed.
At last she fell asleep.
I stood looking at her. And let my tears flow.
“How’s Annelise?”
“She doesn’t want to go home. She’s very tired. But she’s fighting like a tigress.”
My Annelise.
“What about you?”
Werner didn’t reply immediately. “I need your help, Jeremiah.”
I turned, puzzled.
Werner was a ghost of himself.
“Whatever you want.”
* * *
I didn’t understand until the last minute. Not even when Werner took a very sharp axe, tried the point with his thumb, and lifted it. He went out into the snow and I followed him.
When we got to the bottom of the east side of Welshboden, I felt faint.
Even though it had snowed, you could still glimpse Clara’s blood beneath the layer of fresh snow. All that red, Annelise had said.
I had to make an effort not to vomit.
Werner knelt, the axe propped next to him. He put his hands together and bowed his head. He was praying. Then he grabbed a handful of snow, snow dirty with my daughter’s blood, and flung it at the trunk of a fir tree. Not just any fir tree.
The fir tree that had tried to kill my daughter.
I approached it. About four centimeters from the bottom, you could see the point of impact. The scraped bark, a dark stain that could only be blood. And a clump of hair. I tore it off and gently rolled it around my finger, next to my wedding band. I exchanged a sign with Werner. I had understood why he had brought me here. Werner passed me the axe.
“The first blow is yours by right.”
I held it in both hands. The weight was well distributed. “Where?”
“Hit it here,” Werner said, expertly. “We need to give the direction of the fall.”
When I struck the trunk, the reverberation went up from my wrists to my neck. I groaned. But I didn’t let go. I waited for the pain to pass, then struck again.
Werner stopped me. “Now the other side. Let’s knock this son of a bitch down.”
We went around the fir.
And I struck.
Chips flew everywhere, some almost ending up in my eyes. It didn’t matter. I struck again. And again. Werner stopped me. He pointed to the cut, which was oozing resin.
I found the smell disgusting.
“It’s my turn.”
Werner took the axe from my hands. His feet well planted on the ground. The fluid movements of someone who had performed this operation thousands of times. He lifted the axe. The blade glittered in a sinister fashion. Then he yelled with all the breath he had in his body.
And struck.
And struck.
And struck.
* * *
The tree fell to the ground in a swirl of snow. A chip as sharp as a razor, perhaps the fir’s last attempt to defend itself, whistled past me, a few millimeters from my ear.
The snow settled. A mountain chough emitted its lugubrious cry. Then all was still.
I looked at Werner. He was sweating and he had a cruel, desperate gleam in his eyes.
I planted the axe in the trunk and took out my packet of cigarettes. “Would you like one?”
Werner shook his head. “I’m dying to smoke, but in this condition I’d be risking a heart attack. Maybe I should quit.”
“Right,” I said, taking my first long drag.
In my nostrils, the smell of resin.
“We should protect our loved ones,” Werner said. “Always.”
I looked at him. “You’re right.”
“Are you doing that?”
I shook my head. “I’m . . .”
For a moment I felt the impulse to tell him everything. My suspicions about Hermann. The turbulent history of the Visitors’ Center. The reports, including Evi’s. I thought of blurting out everything about Grünwald, too. His wild theories, the connection with Evi. And Brigitte. Yes, I would have liked to tell him how, in my madness, I’d used that woman’s alcoholism to dig into the past of Siebenhoch. Just to confide in someone. Because the story of the Bletterbach killings was tearing me away from my loved ones. To use the guide’s words, the Bletterbach was forcing me to descend into the deep.
I would even have liked to tell him about the Beast. To explain to him what had happened in the supermarket parking lot. All that damned whiteness. And the hissing.
I almost did so.
I was stopped by his reddened face, his breathlessness. His weary arms dangling by his sides, the lines around his eagle eyes.
Werner looked like an old man. A weak old man.
He wouldn’t have understood.
Some Die and Some Cry
“It’s wrong,” I murmured as I sank into her sweetness.
Annelise raised her fingers to my lips. I licked them. They were salty. My excitement grew. With it grew the sense of unease.
Something wasn’t right. I tried to tell her. Annelise silenced me with a kiss. Her tongue was dry and rough. It didn’t stop moving.
I lightly touched her breast. Annelise arched her back.
I pushed farther in.
“It’s wrong,” I repeated.
Annelise stopped. She looked at me with eyes full of accusation. “Look what you’ve done.”
And at last I saw it.
The wound. It was horrible. A gash from the throat to the stomach.
I could see the throbbing of her heart, covered by a spider’s web of light blue veins.
From Annelise’s lips came a scream that was the cry of a tree as it fell.
* * *
The sleeping pills had stopped working. I threw them in the garbage.
* * *
At five in the morning, bathed in sweat, I slipped under the boiling jet of the shower. I was hoping that the water could chase away the cold I felt in my bones.
I tidied the house, swept the ice from the drive in spite of the pain in my back muscles, and by seven thirty I was ready to go to the hospital.
I had two objectives for that day. To buy the biggest teddy bear I could find and persuade Annelise to come back to Siebenhoch.
She’d now been in Clara’s hospital room for two days. She needed to get out of there or she would collapse. The warning signs were all there. Trembling hands, red eyes. When she spoke it was in a shrill voice I found hard to recognize. She expressed herself in monosyllables, without ever focusing on the person she was speaking to. I had no doubt it was partly my fault. We still had a lot to talk over, Annelise and I.
Would I tell her the truth? I asked myself.
Yes.
But only once I’d written the words “the end” at the bottom of the Word document that was saved in my laptop and now numbered several s
ingle-spaced pages. Only then would I take her aside and reveal the outcome of my inquiries. She would be angry, of course, but she would understand.
That’s why I loved her.
Nor did I doubt for an instant that this interpretation of mine was totally wrong. Because Annelise wasn’t stupid and what I was telling myself as I grabbed my jacket and went out to get the car wasn’t the truth. It was a partial (and stupid) version of the truth.
In other words: “Shit.”
Four letters.
Add two and you’ll have “square.”
Put on it a good thirty centimeters of snow now turned to ice, the tall thin bell tower and a crossroads: “Siebenhoch.” Add lots of confusion. Words that fly from mouth to mouth, contrite faces, some dazed, others that simply shake their heads. And a car coming from the north.
Mine.
Eight letters: “Salinger.”
* * *
I saw the flashing lights of a Carabinieri patrol car. And those of an ambulance. My throat went dry.
The ambulance was parked, its siren off, outside Brigitte’s house.
I parked where I shouldn’t.
“What happened?” I asked a woman tourist buried in a gaudy woolen scarf.
The woman lowered herself to the height of my open car window. “Apparently there was a gunshot.”
“Who . . .?”
“A woman. They say she killed herself.”
I barely heard the last part of her sentence. I was already out of the car. The onlookers had formed a small crowd. I made my way through it until a carabiniere pushed me away.
I took no notice, stood my ground. There was a paramedic outside Brigitte’s door, talking on his cell phone. I could see his breath condense in light blue clouds. The crowd pushed me forward. I just kept staring at the paramedic, dazed, until he put his phone in his pocket and went back inside.
I tried to peek in.
I couldn’t see anything.
When the paramedics, their phosphorescent overalls gleaming in the ghostly February light, came out pushing a stretcher with a sheet under which the outline of a body could be glimpsed, the crowd fell silent, holding its breath.
I had to take my eyes away from the stretcher as it was shoved into the back of the ambulance. I clenched my fists, digging my nails into the flesh.
“You.”
A voice I recognized instantly.
Hermann. He looked shaken. His camelhair coat hung open over a rumpled shirt half in and half out of his trousers. He wasn’t wearing a tie and he had a day’s growth of beard.
He raised his arm and pointed at me. “You!” he roared.
Everyone turned in my direction.
It took Hermann a moment to reach me. He stopped less than two meters away. From the inside pocket of his coat he took out a wallet.
He didn’t take his eyes off me. There was hate in them.
He took out a banknote, crumpled it, and threw it at me. I felt it slide to the ground.
“Here’s your money, Salinger.”
A second banknote landed in my face.
“Isn’t that what you want? That’s what films are for. To make money. Do you want some more?”
The third hit my chest. Finally, Hermann, shaking, flung his wallet at me.
Stunned by his attack, I didn’t react.
“I saw you leaving her house, Salinger. Yesterday.”
The carabiniere looked first at me then at Hermann, unsure what to do. We both ignored him. A void had been created around us.
Hermann took a step forward. “You killed her, you lousy worm.”
He made to rush at me, but the carabiniere held him back. A gray-green uniform appeared. Chief Krün.
He took me by the arm.
“It wasn’t me who killed Brigitte, Hermann,” I screamed, before Max could drag me away. “It was you, you fucking asshole. And we both know why.”
Max dragged me into a side street from which I could see neither the house nor Hermann. Only the gleam of the flashing lights on a barber’s sign.
I closed my eyes. “Is she really dead?”
“Suicide.”
“Are you sure?”
Max nodded. “She used a hunting rifle. She shot herself.”
“When?”
“The neighbors heard a shot just before dawn. They were the ones who alerted me. The door was ajar. I saw her and called the Carabinieri and the ambulance.”
“It wasn’t a suicide.”
Max looked me up and down. “That’s a very serious accusation, Salinger.”
“Hermann killed her.”
“She killed herself.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“She was drunk . . .”—a slight hesitation, as if he’d wanted to add “as usual,” but had had second thoughts—“. . . and there were bottles everywhere. Signora Unterkircher met her last night. Brigitte was already out of her head then.”
“And what did Signora Unterkircher do for Brigitte?” I asked bitterly.
“What we all did for years, Salinger. Nothing.”
I couldn’t sustain his gaze. “Brigitte didn’t kill herself. She was murdered. By Hermann.”
“I repeat: these are serious accusations.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“Do you have any proof?”
I lit a cigarette. I offered him one. “No.”
“Then keep your mouth shut. This is hard enough as it is.”
“Tell me the truth, Max, did you notice anything strange? Anything that could—”
“Nothing at all.”
“You said the door was open.”
“Brigitte was a drunk, Salinger. Drunks leave children in cars in July, they forget to switch off the gas and then light one of those.”
He was right.
But I knew he was also wrong.
“Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,” Max said, “but Brigitte was holding a photograph in her hand.”
“A photograph of Evi?”
“Of Günther.”
“You think that’s a clue?”
“I think it’s a suicide note, Salinger. Nothing more, nothing less.”
We exchanged a few more words, then said goodbye. He went back to the scene of the suicide and I walked back to my car. When I sat down behind the driving wheel, I realized I had a crumpled fifty-euro banknote inside my jacket.
I threw it out the window.
I started the engine and drove away.
* * *
I got to Bolzano at nine o’clock. I couldn’t find the biggest teddy bear in the world, but the one that made its appearance in Clara’s room halfway through the morning was close enough.
“How are you, sweetheart?”
“My head hurts.”
“But not as much as yesterday?”
“Oh, no, not as much as yesterday.”
Clara stroked the hairy muzzle of the teddy bear and turned serious. It was the same expression I had seen the day before. As if she had something important to tell me but couldn’t find the courage to spit it out.
I smiled.
I stroked her chin, forcing her to look at me. “What is it, sweetheart?”
“Nothing.”
“Five letters,” I said.
“Mamma?”
“No.”
“Heart?”
I shook my head.
Clara shrugged. “Then I don’t know.”
“Truth,” I said.
She passed a hand over her head, looking for a hair to twist round her finger, the same gesture Annelise made when she felt under pressure.
She didn’t find anything, because her head was still wrapped in a heavy layer of bandages. Her hand fell back in her lap. She had again shifted her gaze away from me.
“You know you can tell me everything?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I’m angry about the sled?”
“A little.”
“But there’s something else, isn’t there?”
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Clara again made to touch her hair, but I took her hand and kissed it. Then I tickled her. Clara laughed, burying her face in the belly of the teddy bear.
“When you want to, you’ll tell me,” I said.
Clara seemed relieved by that proposition. With a solemn expression, she held out her hand. “It’s a deal.”
“What are you two up to?”
It was Annelise, accompanied by Werner. I stood up and hugged her. Annelise returned the gesture, but in a cold, detached manner. Beneath the scent of soap, I could smell the sweat on her skin.
“You should get some rest.”
“Did you buy that bear?” she asked. “It wasn’t here before.”
That was her tactic. Changing the subject.
“Yes, it’s a present. And you need to sleep in a real bed.”
“I’ll stay here until Clara has finished her treatment. Then we’ll go home. Together.”
She walked past me and sat down on Clara’s bed.
“OK,” I said.
We played together for a while.
I made an effort not to think about Brigitte’s death and concentrated on Clara. She was weak and pale, but at least she could see us. Soon, I would put her in the car and take her home.
To safety.
Never again, I swore, would I allow anything bad to happen to her.
It was a vow destined to be broken. That’s always the way it is when we swear that nothing will ever spoil the lives of our loved ones.
All I could do for Clara was give her good memories.
Werner’s words echoed loudly in my head. Just like the crash of the red fir tree brought down by the pain of two broken men.
Around eleven, along with the male nurse who brought Clara her food, the doctor also made his entrance. He recognized me and held out his hand. I shook it, embarrassed.
“You were right, Signor Salinger,” he began, after greeting Annelise.
“It was only a ladybug,” I murmured, turning red.
“Seven letters aren’t so many, when it comes down to it,” he said, bursting into a loud laugh that included both me and Annelise.
Clara, he told us, was reacting well. They had administered drugs that would ease the reabsorption of the hematoma. It had been touch and go, but the danger had passed.
“We’ll give her a CT scan, and on the basis of the results we’ll decide whether to discharge or keep her in a little longer.”
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