Sanctuary

by Luca D'Andrea

Alex approached to compliment him, but also to have a chat. He had been wandering alone for hours, and he liked the idea of exchanging a few words with a stranger. He was already holding his flask of grappa, ready to offer it, when he saw the old man in the greatcoat do something truly unusual.

  Alex had seen quite a few crazy people in his time, but never one like this.

  The old man was hugging the deer, getting his dark clothes smeared with blood. He was rocking it and muttering heaven knows what.

  “Hey!” Alex said, emerging from the woods.

  The old man turned to him. He had pale eyes, his face was white and he was crying.

  “A soft heart, I see,” Alex said jokingly. He showed him the small bottle of grappa. “I’m joking. It happens to me, too. I feel sorry for these poor animals. Still, we have to live somehow. I’m Alex. What’s your name?”

  The old man muttered something.

  Alex went closer. “I saw the shot. Where did you learn to shoot like that? Were you in the war? I bet you were. How far was it, two hundred metres? I’ve never seen a shot like that. Tell me the truth. You’re a marksman, aren’t you? I didn’t catch your name.”

  The old man laid the carcass of the deer down and traced a circle in the snow with his finger.

  “Great. What is it? You’re not dumb, are you?”

  But then the old man spoke. Strange words, uttered in a tone Alex was unable to interpret. Gentle, yet at the same time menacing. “Lissy is hungry.”

  Then they both heard her calling.

  A young woman emerged from the woods, out of breath.

  72

  It was the fault of the wind.

  After Keller had put his rifle over his shoulder and gone hunting, Marlene prepared the slop for the pigs and went down to the sty. She fed the sows and the boars, then got the silver bowl ready, put on the steel glove and opened the little grille.

  Lissy approached. It was the first time she had done that. Usually, this huge black animal would retreat into the shadows as soon as Marlene came in and stay there until she left. But not today.

  Puzzled by this unusual behaviour, Marlene kept still, hearing the sow’s deep breathing, smiling at her, ready to bolt at the first sign of aggression. Keller had warned her often enough about Lissy. She was dangerous. Never lower your guard. With those fangs . . .

  The sow stopped less than half a metre away, her fat hips moving like bellows. She turned her head to one side and studied Marlene with her right eye. The pupil narrowed and widened, depending on the swaying of the oil lamp hanging from the beam. The jangling of the little bell around the sow’s broad, powerful neck, on the other hand, followed the rhythm of her breathing. Marlene reached out with her steel-covered hand. Lissy snorted but did not move. Marlene bent down a little.

  Lissy stood motionless.

  Marlene stroked the silky tuft between her ears. Lissy cocked her head towards the steel glove, which was motionless in mid-air. Marlene held her breath.

  Lissy licked her fingers.

  Marlene reached out with her other hand. She felt the animal’s hard bristle beneath her fingertips. She smoothed it until she found the base of her ears, then scratched.

  The sow emitted a sound which Marlene could not figure out at first. It was almost as if she were purring. What was it Simon Keller always said?

  Sweet Lissy, little Lissy.

  The sow shifted to the side, and Marlene pulled her hand away. Lissy flicked her tail, whipping the air, then came back towards her.

  “Do you want to be cuddled?”

  Lissy grunted.

  Marlene giggled and stroked her again. “We’re becoming friends, aren’t we?”

  Lissy opened her jaws, her eyes rolled back and she fell on her side.

  Marlene leaped to her feet.

  The sow was moving her legs about, kicking. Foam started coming out of her mouth. Her eyes had rolled up in their sockets, her legs stiffened. She was shaking, foaming at the mouth.

  “Lissy?”

  The sow emitted a frightful moan. She was dying. Marlene ran out and set off for the woods, screaming Simon Keller’s name at the top of her voice.

  73

  It was not because of the deer. Well, partly. But mainly it was because of the woman. Even dressed the way she was, her face flushed from running (or perhaps it was precisely because of her flushed face), Alex was unable to resist. She was his type. Petite, well proportioned, with big blue eyes.

  But when he saw her disappear with the strange old man (who the hell was Lissy?) he told himself he had to go after them because of the deer. They had forgotten all about it. It was a waste just leaving it there.

  Of course, the idea of heaving it over his shoulder and getting away did cross his mind, but he was no thief. If Alex ever stole anything (he had done it a couple of times), he would always choose people who would not feel the loss very much. He had his moral code. The man and the woman were poor wretches like him. So it was out of the question.

  Calling them but getting no response, Alex collected the deer and followed the tracks of the princess and the strange old man. It was not hard to catch up with them.

  Alex had seen some dumps in his time, but this one beat them all by a long stretch.

  For a moment, he even considered dropping the old man’s prey and legging it. The maso, surrounded by snow, its timber planks darkened by time and glistening with ice, sent a chill through him such as he had seldom felt before. Honestly. Still, those blue eyes . . .

  He did not leave. All because of the girl. He wanted to know her name. Perhaps she was looking for a boyfriend. Never put limitations on Providence. What a laugh that would be. He had come out to catch something to get his teeth into and instead ended up with a girlfriend. Funny how things work out.

  Alex dropped the deer at the bottom of the steps leading to the main door of the maso and followed the footprints of the old man and the girl round to the back of the house. A small door stood wide open and through it came agitated voices and a nauseating smell.

  A pigsty.

  “Lissy! Lissy!” the old man was shouting.

  Alex looked inside. “Hello there!”

  No answer.

  Alex went down the steps. The stench was dreadful. Really disgusting, he thought. “Hey, there!”

  There was a dim light coming from an oil lamp that hung from a beam. The old man was kneeling in the muck and hugging the head of a big black sow. Alex had never seen such a big sow before. It must weigh at least four hundred kilos. And look at those fangs! And the stripes under its eyes! What kind of creature was this?

  Alois, at the sawmill, had told him how, back in the good old days, he had gone boar hunting. Once had been more than enough. Nasty business, he had said. Boars were capable of ripping your guts apart in a second. Alex had thought Alois was exaggerating. He would never think that again.

  The strange old man did not seem at all scared. He was shaking the sow and stroking its head, talking to it as if it were a little girl, not a four-hundred-kilo sow.

  Crazy, Alex thought. Mad as a hatter.

  The girl was in a corner, wringing her hands, white as a ghost. Alex walked up to her. “What’s going on?” he said, assuming a knight-in-shining-armour voice.

  She did not reply.

  The old man turned to her and practically tore a large metal key from his greatcoat. “The cellar. Go. Run. It’s a fit, she needs medicine. Directly on your right, next to the stairs. It’s a red-and-white box. It says ‘sodium pentothal’ on it! Run!”

  The girl did not need to be asked twice. She all but knocked Alex over.

  74

  Seizing a candle and running to the cellar door, Marlene twice missed the lock.

  The air that assaulted her was putrid, worse almost than the pigsty. She lit the candle and went down the steps, counting them as she went. Nine. Just like those leading to the sty. And, just like the sty, the cellar was much larger than she had imagined. It had the same walls of dark brick a
nd smelled of lime and dung.

  She saw it immediately. You couldn’t miss it.

  In the middle of the cellar, almost touching the cobwebbed ceiling, stood a kind of monolith covered with a sheet. It was at least three metres high, almost two metres wide and just as deep. An imposing, enigmatic monolith that seemed to be daring her to take a peek at what was hidden beneath the sheet. Marlene took a step forward.

  The sheet was not cloth but leather, leather made dark and shiny by time. Holding the candle out in front of her, she went closer. The leather was covered in tiny notches. By the light of the candle flame, they looked like scales. Marlene shuddered. She hated snakes. Usually, scales would have made her run away.

  But the monolith was luring her in, and Marlene stepped forward to take a closer look.

  They were not scales (how could they be? there were no snakes as big as that). They were incisions, burned in with a scalding iron or something similar.

  Perfect circles.

  She reached out, ready to pull off the cover and see what it concealed, but then she stepped on something that squeaked, stopping her in her tracks. She lowered the flame.

  Rags. Except that rags did not squeak. With the tip of her boot, she lifted what remained of a check shirt and kicked it aside. Beneath the rags were bones.

  The bones of mice, squirrels, marmots. She pushed away some wrapping paper and found more.

  Slightly larger ones, like rabbit bones, or light ones, like birds of prey. Stag bones, deer, ibex. Bones scattered all over the floor.

  Vulpendingen, she thought.

  But that was not what she was here for. Nor was the monolith, although she was immensely curious.

  Sodium pentothal, remember?

  With difficulty, Marlene looked away. All around her was chaos. Clothes of all sizes thrown in the corners, mostly men’s clothes – boots, windcheaters – but women’s clothes, too, some reduced to shreds by time and insects. There were shelves, some ramshackle, others reinforced with wooden beams bristling with nails. All sorts of objects were stacked up on these shelves. Chipped cups, broken rucksacks, flasks. And books. Dozens, if not hundreds, of books. On the floor, a pair of small, round glasses glittered in the candlelight. What the hell was a pair of glasses doing here? She did not wonder for long, her attention drawn instead to the skulls hanging on the walls.

  They were pig skulls. She counted six of them. Skulls covered in spider’s webs, which looked as if they were ready to pounce on her, maul her like—

  Stop it.

  She saw it on a shelf. A large box with a cross. Sodium pentothal. Red and white, as Keller had said.

  Marlene took it from the shelf and turned it over in her hand. A pile of chemical substances, a pile of warnings printed on the outside. Inside, phials.

  Anti-epileptic.

  Epilepsy? Did pigs suffer from epilepsy? Still she did not go up the steps. With unprecedented violence, a thought took hold of her: Let that damned sow die.

  Marlene could not do it.

  She closed the door behind her, blew out the candle and ran to the pigsty.

  75

  After they said goodbye, it struck Alex that he had never seen anything like this.

  A sow having an epileptic seizure. Fancy that!

  It also struck him that those two weren’t telling him the whole truth. They had said they were father and daughter, but they didn’t look at all alike. They had said Marlene was married and her husband was working in town, but there was no wedding ring on her finger. They had insisted he stay for dinner and then spend the night with them because it was getting dark and it was a long way back to the village, but Alex did not like the idea of spending the night in this place.

  He did not like it at all.

  There was something in the strange old man’s eyes (and in the way he had said “Lissy is hungry”) that had sent chills up his spine. And something wasn’t quite right with the girl, either.

  She seemed to be hiding something, a terrible secret. Alex just wanted a quiet life, and those two reeked of trouble.

  They might even be criminals. Not criminals like him. Nasty criminals, wanted for serious stuff. Otherwise, why hide up in a place like this?

  There was nothing here.

  Except for the pigs. And the sow. The epileptic sow. He would probably laugh about this encounter in a few days’ time. An epileptic sow, for Christ’s sake.

  Still . . .

  No, they were just a couple of oddballs, and he was nothing but a coward.

  He had accepted a small glass of their grappa as a pick-me-up and because it would have been rude to refuse. He had chatted about this and that for ten minutes or so, warming himself in the heated Stube, then had wished them luck and left.

  Quickly, down through the meadows and into the woods.

  It was not until he reached the clearing where the old man had killed the deer with that masterly shot that Alex realised he had left his gloves in the Stube. Shit. They were almost new, they were warm and it was bitterly cold out here. What was he thinking?

  He stopped. Should he turn back? No way. Was he scared?

  Damn right he was.

  To hell with the cold, to hell with the Bau’r, to hell with the sow. And to hell with the blue-eyed girl. He wasn’t going back there.

  It was almost dark, the sun casting its last rays, when he heard the noise. A kind of cough above him, behind the rocks. Or maybe just a rolling stone.

  In winter? With all that ice?

  Alex squinted at the cluster of shadows from where the noise had come. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. As he took his hands out of his pockets, he thought he heard a stifled voice. He grabbed his rifle and put it to his shoulder.

  “Who’s there?”

  He aimed the rifle.

  76

  Everything was fine with the first three, but not with the fourth. With the fourth Lissy, Keller began to realise that something was not right with the sows. When the fourth had her first fit, foaming at the mouth, eyes rolling up, legs going stiff, he thought he would go mad. It only lasted a minute or two, but to him it felt like an eternity.

  The following day, he took his holdall, went down to the village and caught a bus to San Valentino, where there was a vet.

  Dr. Kaser – that was his name – listened to his story, then reassured him. It was nothing dangerous. Some animals did suffer from epilepsy. It was rare but it was not unknown. Epilepsy? Keller had never even heard the word.

  Dr. Kaser explained that it was a problem with the brain: every so often it would short-circuit. Epileptic fits, he said, were not risky per se. Epilepsy was almost never deadly, and the person actually suffering the fit did not even remember it. There were two kinds of problems. One was if the sufferer fell and hit his head. The other was if he swallowed his tongue, which might lead to his choking to death.

  In any case, the doctor concluded with a broad smile, he had nothing to worry about. “Epilepsy has no effect on the quality of the meat.”

  “The quality of the meat?”

  “If your sow had an epileptic seizure, you could still slaughter it and sell it.”

  Keller’s eyes opened wide. “Slaughter Lissy?”

  “Lissy?”

  “That’s the sow’s name.”

  “I see,” Dr. Kaser said, even though he didn’t.

  “How can she be cured?”

  The vet put his hands together on the desk. “You can’t cure epilepsy. It’s a genetic condition.”

  “Aren’t there drugs?”

  The vet laughed. “Of course there are, to keep the condition under control. Not for animals, though.”

  “But for people, yes?”

  “Yes. Epilepsy is a condition that’s been known for a long time. People used to say that epileptic seizures were a sign of benevolence on the part of the gods.”

  “Can you give me these drugs?”

  “I’m a vet, not a neurologist.”

  “Can you gi
ve me the name of a neurologist?”

  The doctor shook his head in disbelief. “Trust me, not for a pig. You’d be wasting your time.”

  All the same, Keller insisted so much that Dr. Kaser wrote the name of a drug on a piece of paper. Sodium pentothal.

  Keller approached a smuggler. They haggled a little. Keller slaughtered three boars and a sow and sold the meat at market. With the money he made, he bought the phials of sodium pentothal.

  They were not enough to provide a cure, but they did keep the seizures under control and avoid serious damage.

  Lissy number five and Lissy number six did not need the drug. Lissy number seven, though, had a fit every three months or so. The one that had come on a few hours earlier was the longest to date. He really did think she was going to die, and if that happened, what would he do? He did not want to think about that, so he picked up his pace.

  Lissy was hungry. That was all. All he had to do was get her food. Then she would get better. Much better.

  “Sweet Lissy, little Lissy . . .”

  It did not take him long to catch up with Alex, the young poacher whose disappearance would not cause a stir. That was what the Voice had told him. Lissy’s Voice.

  Nobody will miss him, Sim’l . . .

  The Voice was right, as usual.

  Keller stopped behind some snow-covered rocks, watching him.

  The young man was walking a little crookedly, his hands in his pockets. He was in a rush. Maybe he was scared. For sure, he was cold. Keller slipped the rifle off his shoulder, lay down flat and aimed at the poacher’s heart.

  Less than seventy metres. He could have hit him with his eyes closed.

  “Lissy is . . .”

  He did not finish.

  His finger failed to obey his command. He tried but it was no use. The rifle remained silent. The hand holding the weapon shook. The barrel of the rifle collided with the heap of snow behind which he was lying. Keller tried to shoot, but he could not pull the trigger.

  He ducked down behind the rocks, panting.

  He should have felt startled, bewildered. Instead, he felt at peace. Keller thought about Wegener’s smile of gratitude when he had killed him in the villa on the Passer. He thought about sledges and eyes carved into the wood. He thought about a little boy with blue eyes and a beauty spot at the end of his smile. He thought about Elisabeth and how she had trembled as her life drained out of her along with all that blood.