The Sweetness of Life Read online

  “Be nice to her,” she said.

  “To who?”

  “Frau Weber. She thinks her child’s the Devil.”

  She kissed him on the cheek before he climbed out of bed, groaning. She notices everything, he thought, and I tell her far too much.

  The thermometer in the Volvo said it was minus thirteen outside. The sky was cloudless. Steady high pressure. According to the weather forecast it would not change much over the coming days. Caroline Weber’s crisis could not be explained from a purely psycho-meteorological perspective. Horn was careful to take the bends to the highway slowly. It’s five o’clock in the morning and I’m taking into consideration the possibility that deer may cross the road, he thought. I’m getting old. A shooting star flashed across the sky in a shallow arc and disappeared behind the ridge of the Kammwand. He knew he ought to make a wish, but apart from bed nothing entered his head.

  The gas station by the western slip road was bathed in a green night light. It looked to him as if a figure was moving between the gas pumps. I’m seeing ghosts, he thought, I keep on dreaming of railways, and I’m incapable of wishing for something useful.

  On his arrival the porter momentarily turned his gaze from the television set to wave hello. “The locksmith will be here soon,” he said. Why do porters always have to know everything? Horn asked himself. I should have taken the side entrance, as usual. Two ambulance men came out of the elevator with an empty stretcher on wheels. He entered the compartment and pressed the button. He was too tired to climb the stairs and, anyway, at this time of the day he could shelve all his compulsive rituals, thank goodness.

  Hrachovec, a tall, thin trainee doctor, was sitting outside the door to the kitchen, keeping watch. He stood up when he saw Horn enter the ward. “She’s not doing anything in there,” he said. Sometimes it was when there was nothing to be heard outside that the critical things were happening on the inside. But Horn did not tell Hrachovec that because, on the whole, he was all right.

  The others were sitting in the staffroom. Brunner was smoking, Lydia was holding an ice pack to her right eye, and Christina, who also looked like she had been called in out of hours, was sorting the day medication into pill dispensers. Lydia attempted a smile when Horn examined her face. “The elbow, I gather,” he said. She nodded. It had hit her right in the cheekbone. The swelling extended to her lower eyelid and the purple bruising was already showing. At the morning meeting Leithner would say, “That’s why people on I23 get their hardship allowance.” Horn could already hear his voice and picture his stupid grin. “Go home,” he said.

  Lydia shook her head. “I want to see what happens.”

  Once again Horn started imagining Lydia’s past life: she was the oldest of five or six siblings, her mother had to go out to work, and from an early age she had to look after the little ones. All this had taken place in a suburb of Santiago. The heroism of this story is so beguiling, he thought, that it prevents me from asking her what it was really like.

  Brunner handed him Frau Weber’s medical notes and said the whole thing must have started when her husband came to visit in the afternoon, accompanied by their daughter. Throughout the visit Frau Weber refused to hold the child. Her husband cradled the little girl in his arms, said a few things to his wife, and at the end he just blubbered helplessly. Frau Weber gave the impression of feeling more and more threatened by the minute. At the start she spent short periods sitting opposite her husband, in between which she would jump up again and run to the door. By the end she was making large circles around the two of them, her eyes wide open, and saying nothing. When her husband finally left with their daughter, it was clearly too late to start calming her down.

  The door to the ward was pushed open. Lydia winced in pain.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to go home?” Horn asked.

  “I’m going,” she said. She was trembling.

  The locksmith was stocky, red-faced, and short of breath. He put down his tool bag with a gesture that suggested that he was not at all pleased to have been called out at this time of day. Christina stood up. “One of the reasons we all earn our money is that unexpected things happen from time to time. This includes you, I believe,” she said. Sometimes her words were as spiky as her physiognomy. Horn was full of admiration.

  “We’ll have to break it open,” the locksmith said when they explained the situation to him. If the key really was inside the room then there was no other solution. He could not do it now, however, as he needed some heavy-duty tools—a crowbar at least—and he had none of these on him. “You’re best off calling the fire department,” he said.

  Once, more than six years earlier, they had been forced to break open a door. Willy Röder, a long-term junkie with a personality disorder, had stolen the master key off Martha, the duty casualty sister, and had locked himself in the orthopedic examination room. There he had screamed “I’m going to kill myself!” a number of times, and gave himself a jab that could have easily done the job. Horn had always hated breaking things; he could not even stand the term “break open.” After this episode he swore never again to use a crowbar, especially since Röder died of hepatitis soon afterward.

  “Who was the last person to try talking to her?” he said.

  Hrachovec put up his hand. “Me,” he said.

  “And?”

  “I said, ‘What’s the point in doing this, Frau Weber?’ and things like that, but she didn’t answer me.”

  “When was that, roughly?”

  Hrachovec looked at the clock. “Half an hour ago, perhaps,” he said.

  Horn leaned against the wall and gazed along the corridor. The far end of the ward was in total darkness. He tried to gather his thoughts together. A little girl who was barely two months old was certainly not the Devil. The most likely explanation was that the mother was trying to get rid of the negative elements inside her by detaching them and projecting them onto her daughter. The Catholic technique—so popular in this country—of uprooting what is bad in oneself and planting it on another person. The problem with detaching things from yourself, thought Horn, is that they always come in through the back door.

  “What comes in through the back door?” Christina asked. Horn was startled.

  “Did I say something?”

  She laughed and grabbed his arm. “You’re always doing it,” she said.

  I’m thinking aloud without realizing it, Horn thought. I’m doing things I’m not even aware of. That’s not good.

  “The Devil comes in the back door,” he said. “I meant it.” But you couldn’t phrase it like that, as nobody knew what the Devil was or looked like. For a while nobody said anything. Then Lydia said, “Basically I believe that the Devil’s bad. He looks nice, but he’s bad. It can’t be any other way.”

  Brunner shook her head. “The Devil isn’t nice,” she said.

  Horn looked right through her. Perhaps Lydia was right, perhaps it was a case of displacement; and the Devil that Caroline Weber had planted into her daughter had its origins in a different person altogether: someone who seemed nice, but was bad.

  Horn raised his hand. “Wait a moment,” he said. He went over to the kitchen door and knocked twice. “Frau Weber,” he said in a loud voice. “It’s Doctor Horn here. I know you’re in a bad way, and I know that because you feel all alone you want to be on your own at the moment. But I’m worried that your desire to be alone is now getting quite extreme, so I can’t let it to go any further. In any case, I don’t like it when the fire department comes and smashes down the door, and everybody on the ward wakes up and then the next day they’re talking about it all around the hospital. Please open the door. I also know that the root of your problem is not your daughter but your husband, at least that’s what I think.”

  Brunner looked at him in surprise. Horn raised his shoulders and put his finger to his lips.

  After about twenty seconds the key turned in the lock. Caroline Weber stood in the doorway, her arms hanging by her side
. Horn tried to work out what had happened. Out of the corner of his eye he could see that the locksmith next to him had turned as white as a sheet. The first person to say something was Christina, and it was a single word: “Casualty.”

  An hour and a half later the drama was over. The cuts on both Caroline Weber’s lower arms and on the left-hand side of her neck, which she had made with a shard from a broken side plate, had been seen to, and the patient was in a sleep that they reckoned would last at least twenty-four hours. Leuweritz, the duty casualty surgeon, had not grumbled because he was awake anyway. In fact he had stitched and stuck with patience and commitment. He said that the whole thing was a sort of relaxation; he had just operated on a five-year-old girl whose lower legs had both been shattered by a car. According to the girl’s father, the driver had just put his foot down and disappeared. Obviously, in his state of agitation he had not noted the registration number, but he knew it was a dark-blue station wagon.

  Horn lay on the sofa in his office. There was still an hour to go until the morning meeting. The year is really not ending well, he thought. People are driving into children’s legs and then vanishing; other people are running over old men’s heads; young mothers are cutting themselves; and my wife is having the most destructive arguments with my son. His gaze fell on the Kasperl puppets on the shelf opposite him. Those were the days—the time in his life when nobody questioned anything: Seppel was good, because he was Kasperl’s best friend; the Robber was bad, because robbers are bad; and the Constable with the spiked helmet was good, because constables are the arm of the law. And that was that. Deep down he knew he had become a child psychiatrist in order to salvage some of this simplicity for himself. That people by and large did not conform to it was another thing entirely.

  For the most part the morning passed peacefully. Leithner had spent the weekend at his house in Kitzbühel and had gotten sunburned on his forehead and nose while skiing. During the staff meeting he said nothing about hardship allowance on I23 but spoke only about Melitta Steinböck, the Bürgermeister’s wife, who would be admitted at some point that morning with unidentified respiratory problems. Prinz, the consultant on the private ward, made a few smutty comments, a symptom of the persistent battle between him and Leithner over the allocation of special fees. It was a quarrel that everybody else had lost interest in a long time ago. Brunner produced several loud yawns, and Broschek was somewhat bad tempered, as she was most Mondays.

  Although it was the start of the week there was not much happening in the outpatient department. Most of those waiting had come to see Cejpek for a check-up on their blood clots. Among them Horn could see Marianne Schwarz, the wife of his neighbor, Martin. She had recently had a deep-vein thrombosis in her leg, as a result of which she suffered several pulmonary infarctions, and so had been put on blood-thinning medication. It was the usual combination: pills plus cigarettes plus being overweight. Even afterward, neither of them had understood just how serious it could have been.

  Horn had called in two patients for check-ups: an elderly man with Alzheimer’s-related dementia who had started seeing strange people in his garden; and Elena Weitbrecht, a supermarket manager who had been a long-term sufferer from complex motor tics. Just before Christmas she had decided against psychotherapy in favor of treatment by medication. Both were feeling well: the man said that, apart from a young lady with glasses, the people in his garden had disappeared; and the only side effect Elena Weitbrecht had had from the pills was a reduction in her appetite, and that was fine by her. She also had the impression that the eye-twitching and shoulder spasms had already gotten a bit better. Horn did not share that impression.

  Linda was on vacation; Ingeborg, her stand-in, was a skeletal, humorless individual with a gray crew cut. It was said that she used to work as a housekeeper in a rectory. Everybody could picture her in the role, and nobody dared ask whether it was the truth. As Horn was leaving to begin his round of the wards she handed him a bright-blue envelope. “This was left for you,” she said. Inside there was a card with a Mondrian picture on the front and a few lines on the back: “I tried to leave early. It didn’t work out. I imagine I’m going to sleep as badly in Vienna as I do here, but it won’t bother me as much. I hope you enjoy the music. H.” Heidemarie. He remembered the package: dark blue with small, bright stars. He must have taken it out of his jacket pocket at home and put it down somewhere. Dvořák, he thought, or Tchaikovsky—something Slavic, at any rate. Music that does not end well. Like life. Life never ends well. In truth, all I do as a psychiatrist is to kid people that it isn’t like that. I’m a fraud, he thought. The fact that life never ends well is reason enough to go insane, slash your wrists, or pump heroin into your veins; but you can’t say that aloud. “Do you know what’s sometimes quite difficult?” he asked Ingeborg. She looked at him, at a loss. “Trying to hide just how big a cynic you are.”

  She shrugged. “Whatever,” she said.

  The young mother in obstetrics who had recently showed signs of becoming depressive was sitting beside the bed, breastfeeding her child and complaining in great detail that the baby’s father had not looked in since the day before. Horn said that young fathers sometimes felt very threatened by their newborn children; he got the feeling that this was not what the lady wanted to hear just now. She talked of her boyfriend’s continual unreliability and of his tendency to jump into the car and drive away at the first sign of stress. With each sentence Horn was more assured that the danger of depression had passed. As he left he wondered what name the woman would give to her son. An answer eluded him.

  I22 had admitted a man from the old people’s home in Waiern who, as a result of huge circulation problems in his legs, was no longer capable of taking even a single step without serious pain. The man used to work as a roofer, and after he retired his favorite activity was to walk in the local woods. He had never smoked; on the contrary, he had always tried to lead a healthy life, and the vascular damage was due to diabetes that had been diagnosed too late. Anyhow, the man’s desperation was totally understandable, as was the fact that he refused outright to take antidepressants. Horn talked to him about the demise of medium-size businesses in the region, and about how politicians over the years had turned from people with an idea of how the population lived into soulless robots. At the end he asked him whether he had known Sebastian Wilfert, and the man said no, he had not known him personally. Then the man looked him in the eyes for a second and said, “His head was crushed to nothing and my lower leg’s going to be amputated, maybe even both of them.” Horn said that justice was problematic, and the man nodded.

  Horn resisted the strong impulse to perform an unscheduled check-up on the official from the highways agency in the room next door. Sometimes it was hard not to be a sadist.

  Nobody objected when Horn declared that he was going to keep the visits short. Only five of Horn’s twelve beds were occupied, and he also believed that the team had every right to work in low gear around New Year. What is more, Herbert, a former chef, had brought in a large pot of chicken curry that everybody was looking forward to.

  Caroline Weber lay there, quite relaxed in a pharmacogenic sleep. Horn had ordered two liters of electrolyte solution to be infused into her, and Verena, the most circumspect nurse on the team, had insisted that her vital functions be observed by monitor. As expected, everything was working optimally: 76 per minute, 115 over 70, 97 percent oxygen saturation.

  “By the way, what did you mean when you said that her husband was the root of the problem?” Brunner asked.

  “It was more intuition than anything else,” Horn said. “The husband plants the child inside the woman; at the same time he is planting something evil in her. Perhaps she didn’t want a baby; perhaps she didn’t want one by this man.”

  “And you think it’s more difficult for her to direct her anger at her husband than her child?”

  “Or more dangerous.”

  “But he seems like such a harmless type.”

&n
bsp; “So do I,” Horn said.

  Benedikt Ley was much better. He lay on his bed, playing with his cell. “Can I get out for New Year?” he asked.

  Horn nodded. “If you promise me you won’t take any narcotic substances.”

  The thin, dark-haired boy winked. “You always speak so pompously, Dottore.”

  “I prize the fact that I do not belong to your crowd, not even linguistically.” I can’t bear people who try to get me on their side, he thought. I can’t bear Marilyn Manson T-shirts, and I really can’t bear it when he calls me “Dottore.”

  “OK. I won’t take anything.”

  Horn looked at him doubtfully.

  “One or two beers at most. I don’t like sparkling wine anyway.”

  Horn shrugged. As Ley had now come of age, there was no legal way of keeping him here against his will. If he insisted on it, he could go right away. He just had to sign a declaration that it was against medical advice. The young man looked a little confused. “What does that mean?”

  “From a medical point of view it means that the probability of having flashbacks in two days’ time is lower than for tomorrow. For this reason it would be more prudent to stay for a while longer. But you’re no longer in such serious danger.”

  “And who’s responsible then, Dottore?”

  “You are, you alone.”

  Ley shut his eyes. Like a little child who thinks that if they can’t see anybody then there’s nobody there, Horn thought.

  “Is he staying or going?” Herbert asked from outside the room. “He’s staying,” said Verena. “He doesn’t know what he took, and he’s worried he’ll end up in the same mess as last time.” Herbert was not so sure, but was inclined to think that Ley would leave. “He doesn’t have any notion of responsibility, so he thinks it’s outrageous he should be expected to take any.” All Horn said was, “There’s some truth in that.” He did not add that he was pretty sure Ley would call his mother right away and pester her to pick him up as soon as possible. The woman would arrive at the ward soon afterward in her purple dress, stare at the ground, and say, “But if he really wants to go.” Horn would ask whether his father would beat him up, and the woman would go on staring at the ground, shaking her head.