“Sir?”
The soldier handed him the boots. The Standartenführer tested the soles. They were soft and sturdy. He handed them to the boy.
A gift.
13 February 1944: the boy accepted it. It cost him no effort.
“These will be much more useful to you than a piece of chocolate, don’t you think, my little . . .” Inspiration came at last. The Standartenführer smiled, delighted with his own wit. “My little Kobold?”
That was it: Kobold.
Just like in the fairy tales, Marlene had said when Wegener (in love? Yes, in love) had told her the story. Kobold. Like the cruel creatures who lived in metal and in the ground. With blue eyes that turned the light into the essence of hatred and terror. Marlene knew about the Standartenführer, she knew about Kobold. But she did not know everything. She did not know about the Standartenführer’s gift.
The boots.
Boots so warm that Robert could barely hold back his tears.
“Who’s Siegfried?”
“Don’t you know?”
Robert shook his head.
The Standartenführer took him outside. Night had fallen by now, but the boy’s feet were warm. The officer took off the gold watch he wore on his wrist and showed him the engraving on the case: a knight holding a spear.
“This is Siegfried. A true Aryan. The greatest hero of them all. He climbed a mountain and killed a dragon.”
“There’s no such thing as dragons.”
The Standartenführer smiled. “Not anymore. But in the past? Who knows? The Bogeyman was real enough, you showed him to me. He ended up just like the dragon. And kobolds? I thought they were a legend, but now I’ve got one right in front of me.”
He touched the boy’s forehead with his index finger and smiled, then went back to barking orders at his men.
The nickname stuck.
“Informer Kobold” was what it said on the Standartenführer’s dispatches. Not “Robert Weg-e-ner,” just “Informer Kobold.” Robert Wegener could be tracked down and killed. But Kobold? It was impossible to kill a Kobold.
The boy had been a great discovery of the Standartenführer’s. Kobold had talent. He was clever. He knew the most hidden paths and mountain passes. He was a skinny boy with strange boots and nobody paid any attention to him. And so he would listen and take note. Who sold bread on the black market, who was trying to evade conscription, who was hiding weapons or tuning in to forbidden radio stations.
Shortly before Christmas 1944, Kobold changed sides. The Americans, the British and the partisans had broken through; and the Reich was on the verge of surrender.
In 1945, the war came to an end, but hunger didn’t. Kobold learned that, for those who are born barefoot, war never ends. So he carried on with his activities.
Men fleeing south and goods going north.
After a while, there were no more fleeing men, but there was still hunger. By now, Kobold had grown stronger. He was barefoot no longer, he carried a gun concealed in his jacket and could eat with no risk of running into debt, but he was under no illusions.
There was still a war on.
Over a new word now: respect.
Kobold wanted people to take off their hats to him as he walked past, the way they used to do with the Standartenführer. He wanted men like his father to whisper warnings to their children and cross the street. He hated these men. They weren’t heroes. They were wretched cowards. In a word: idiots.
Kobold realised he needed to enlist help, but knew that fully grown men would never agree to be ordered about by a teenager. So he roped in barefoot boys whose eyes were shiny with hunger. He taught them discipline, obedience and perseverance. Not violence, because these callow youths had learned that a long time ago.
It worked. It worked really well. The volume of business increased, and Kobold decided it was time to use more reliable methods of transport than strong backs or bicycles. He acquired a van, then a couple of lorries, which grew to five, six, ten. It was never enough.
Kobold wanted more.
He realised that if he wanted to expand his business, he would have to study, and he did. Mathematics, economics. But not only that. He discovered that he enjoyed reading. Especially history books and biographies of famous people. He found them enthralling.
He read a lot and learned a lot.
About the same year his future wife was born, 1952, Kobold, nineteen now and already with quite a reputation in some quarters, was approached by an accountant looking for easy money.
He didn’t beat about the bush. Now was a good time, he said. Italy needed to get back on its feet, and the State turned a blind eye to anyone who helped money circulate. But soon this fun would come to an end, and the State would revert to its old role as a damned watchdog.
And when that happened, the dog would bite him.
In order to avoid this, you had to learn to stroke it. That’s where he came in, he said. In exchange for a small slice of the proceeds, he would set up dummy companies (for which he would have to pay his taxes like an upright citizen, which amused Kobold greatly), put figureheads in charge of them and make sure the accounts were open and aboveboard.
Kobold approved of this plan.
His activities prospered.
When the wave of terrorism came, job offers increased to astonishing levels, but Kobold turned them all down. No TNT. No weapons. He had learned that the watchdog could be tamed in just about every way, except one.
Violence. The State was jealous of its own power.
It was alright to get rid of someone by tossing him into the Passer or the Adige. Fights were fine, so was knifing somebody in the dark. Even setting competitors’ warehouses on fire was tolerated, as was the occasional shoot-out – but terrorism? That was going too far.
Kobold also refused proposals to move men from one side of the border to the other. That was something he had not done for a long time, for decades, and he had never told anyone the real reason. Not even Marlene. Some secrets had to remain secret. For his good and for hers. It all went way back.
To September 1945.
The last fugitive Kobold had agreed to help was the Standartenführer. He had a long beard and was emaciated, unrecognisable without his uniform, a shadow of the man who had offered him Belgian chocolate. The best in the world.
“Kobold,” he’d said to him in a trembling voice, “you have to get me out of here.”
There was no need to ask him why. The newspapers were full of pictures of what the Jews, the Americans, the British and the Russians were doing to former S.S. officers.
Kobold had led him to the woods of the Ulten Valley, telling him they would meet up with “patriots” there who would get him out of Italy and then put him on a ship to Argentina, where he would be able to make a new life for himself, or else plot to revive the defunct Reich.
It was a lie.
Once they had reached the middle of the forest, Kobold had taken out his revolver, made the Standartenführer kneel amid the roots of a yew tree, pinned his father’s Iron Cross to his chest and shot him in the forehead.
He had turned the body over with his foot, slipped off the gold watch and put it on his own wrist. He had returned to Merano before dawn and, that same morning, had made his mother change his surname from Wegner to Wegener.
He still wore the gold watch.
It had never missed a second.
8
He was sitting in the Stube, his wide-brimmed black hat next to him on the wooden bench, his broad forehead furrowed. His sparse grey hair was cut short. Every so often, he would sigh and run the palm of his hand over the back of his neck.
He had spread a threadbare linen cloth, frayed at the edges, on the table. Carefully, because waste was an insult to work, he had emptied the contents of a small wooden box onto the small tablecloth. A cascade of small black seeds.
With the help of his thumb and a tablespoon, squinting in the light of the oil lamp, the hollow-cheeked man examined them one b
y one, then dropped them into a cotton pouch the size of a packet of cigarettes.
A pan was simmering on the stove.
The man’s name was Simon Keller, and his father, Voter Luis, had been a Kräutermandl. Many people owed their lives to Voter Luis. There wasn’t a single herb, berry or root in the whole of South Tyrol whose properties Voter Luis had not known.
Voter Luis had been a father, a Kräutermandl and, above all, a man of faith. He knew that life was like the warmth of the Föhn wind, an illusion, and had made sure his knowledge would not die with him. Voter Luis could read and write. He had read a lot and written a lot. His notes were Simon Keller’s most prized possession.
After the maso, of course.
Simon Keller had learned from him the secrets of the herbs and the mountains, and the knowledge of the ancients who had lived there.
The ancients were a mystery. Why had they chosen to live in such rugged terrain, perched high over the valley, above the forest, clinging to pastures that were as steep and sterile as overhanging rocks, so close to the sky that they might be blinded by it? And when had they arrived there?
At the time of the Flood, Voter Luis would say, the waters rose and they came up here to escape His wrath. Voter Luis always had an answer to his son’s questions. He was a man of faith.
Simon Keller didn’t know how long ago the Flood had taken place, just as he did not know who the ancient peoples really were, but thanks to Voter Luis he knew that there were herbs for sleeping, soothing toothache, making blood coagulate and keeping pain under control. The seeds, small and dark as fleas, which he was in the process of selecting belonged to that extraordinary category.
They were poppy seeds, from which you could extract opium to drive away pain.
It was incredible that such power could be contained in these almost invisible grains. As Voter Luis used to say, “The world teems with miracles and mysteries.”
Like his father, and his father before him, Simon Keller was a Bau’r.
A Bau’r was a peasant but also a Kräutermandl, a hunter, a woodsman, a cook, a carpenter, a farmer, a doctor, sometimes an athlete and even a priest. Above all, a priest. Without faith, you could die of loneliness and silence up here. Faith filled the blank spaces of the long, endless winters with answers.
A Bau’r was the lord of the mountain.
It was right at the foot of the mountain that Keller had found the young woman. It had been pure chance. Or perhaps fate. Keller did not usually stray so far from his maso. There was no point. But a sky that promised the first blizzard of the season had compelled him to go down the mountain to retrieve the traps he used for obtaining fresh meat during the winter. The task had taken him all afternoon and well past sunset, until, cold and tired, he had decided to return home.
He had seen her on his way back. Motionless in the crumpled Mercedes. He had thought it unlikely there was any hope for her. It was not uncommon in these parts, in winter especially, to come across dead bodies. Most had died from exposure: smugglers, poachers, travellers. Keller never refused them a blessing and a prayer. That was the reason he had come down the slope. But much to his surprise, the young woman was alive. He had dropped his traps and done what he could to help her.
He had pulled her out of the car, rubbed her body to bring back the circulation, heaved her over his shoulder and carried her up to the maso. There, by the light of a candle, he had checked the reaction of her pupils, washed her injuries with soap and stitched the worst cut, the one on her forehead, and bandaged it in linen strips he had first boiled in water. Then he had given her an infusion to alleviate the pain.
Once she was awake, the young woman would ask a whole lot of questions (Where am I? Who are you? What happened?), and that worried him. Voter Luis had composed magnificent sermons. He had a way with words. Simon Keller did not. Voter Luis knew how to stir people’s hearts, while Simon approached them only when he had to, when he needed to sell what little surplus he produced and buy what he could not make himself. He hoped he could at least reassure her that here she was safe. There was food, wood for the Stube, opium for the pain and a large number of Bibles upon which to meditate.
After weighing the pouch, Keller replaced the leftover poppy in the wooden box, folded the cloth in four and put it in a drawer whose brass handle had been darkened by time. The box went on a shelf.
From the sideboard he took out a ceramic cup (chipped and cracked, but the best he owned), blew on it and placed it on the table. He bent over the fireplace, lifted the pan with a rag so as not to burn his fingers and poured the boiling water into the cup. He immersed the pouch with the poppy in it and stared at the colours the infusion was taking on.
There were no clocks in the maso. All you needed to determine the time of day was the sun. Keller had learned patience from an early age. “Time,” Voter Luis would say, “belongs to the stars, not to men. What are you in comparison with the stars, my son? They were shining when Terah begat Abraham and they will still be shining when you are long forgotten. The stars own time, while men are crushed by it. Not being able to wait is a sin of arrogance.”
Keller waited until the infusion was ready.
Oil for the lamp was expensive, and he turned it off. He could move around his maso in the dark without fear of tripping over. This was his home. He was born here.
People said that sooner or later there would be electricity even in the highest masi, but he did not believe it. He would not even be able to buy a generator, as others had done, because he would never be able to afford one. Generators and fuel cost too much. Besides, why light up the night when the night was made for sleeping?
He went upstairs. He did not knock, there was no point. The young woman was unconscious and would not wake up until tomorrow. He put the cup down on the bedside table next to a candle stub, which he lit with a match.
By the light of the flame, he studied the young woman’s features. She was in pain, and he felt sorry for her. Pain, though, as Voter Luis had taught him, was a good sign. It meant the heart was still beating.
Was the beating of the heart not a miracle full of mystery? Indeed it was.
Keller lifted the young woman into a sitting position, holding the pillows behind her back and head with his left hand. With his right, he poured the hot infusion between her lips in such a way that she would swallow it by reflex, in small sips. Gradually, her face relaxed. Keller was glad.
When he had emptied the cup, he pulled the blankets back over the young woman and studied her face.
Especially that peculiar beauty spot.
“The world is a sign of His existence, and He conceals signs in the world for men of faith to see. The world teems with signs, miracles and mysteries.”
Especially mysteries. Yes, indeed.
He stood up and checked that the window was firmly shut. Beneath it, he had put dried moss to stop the cold draught coming in. Not that it made much difference, he was sorry to see. Outside, the blizzard was still wailing.
In Simon Keller’s mind, there was only silence.
9
The man with the goatee was waiting.
The parking lot of the scrapyard was deserted, and he was alone, his only company two crows circling gloomily over heaps of demolished cars.
He was smoking one MS after the other. He would light them, take a couple of drags then toss them far away. Heedless of the snow and the wind, he stood there in full sight, shivering, smoking and smiling.
He was happy. He found the circling of the crows appropriate.
He was waiting.
The man with the goatee was plagued by a recurring nightmare. He did not have it every night or he would have gone mad, but often enough for him to be certain it would follow him until the day he died.
In the nightmare he was a child again and had done something very naughty. It did not matter what exactly. That was a detail that changed each time. He had done something naughty, and to escape his parents’ wrath he was hiding in their bedroo
m wardrobe. Once he had closed the doors, he discovered to his horror that he was naked, stark naked and trapped, since in the meantime he could hear the room filling with voices, footsteps, words.
As the voices gradually increased in volume, he started groping in the dark, searching for something to cover himself with, panic pressing on his bladder, until his hands found a soft, warm piece of cloth: a blanket. He immediately crawled under it, aware of the air diminishing, the heat increasing and the discomfort in his bladder turning to pain. His certainty grew that somebody would fling open the wardrobe doors and tear the blanket off him just when he was no longer able to hold it in. The crowd would see him, stark naked and soiled with piss. He clenched his teeth, bit his lips and held on.
When the urge to urinate became unbearable, the man with the goatee, knowing that he was asleep next to his wife in his bed at home, did everything he could to wake up. Hard as he tried, though, he could not. All he could do was tremble, hold on and hope that, just this once, the nightmare would change.
It never did.
His bladder relaxed, the wardrobe was flung open, the blanket was snatched away and the crowd pointed at him, shouting and laughing in disgust.
The final image – before, bathed in sweat, his heart pounding, he started biting his pillow to stop himself from waking his wife with his cries – was the face of the man who had exposed him in front of everybody. The face of Herr Wegener.
You did not need a psychiatrist to interpret this nightmare. It summed up the whole life of the man with the goatee: Captain Giacomo Carbone.
As a boy he had been skinny, with deep-set, elusive eyes. At seventeen, he smoked German cigarettes and was terrified of being drafted. He was very bright and had found a way to be useful to the Germans without having to face lead and shrapnel on the front line. Just like Kobold.
By spying, informing, collaborating.
Unlike Kobold, though, Carbone had insisted on wearing a balaclava. That was why the Standartenführer showed contempt towards him and called him a coward. Still, his cowardice had saved his life during the post-war reprisals.
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