The Sweetness of Life Read online

  There was nothing particularly wrong with the other three, either. After a reduction in his neuroleptic drugs, Stefan Reisinger, the early retired electrician with schizoaffective psychosis, was exhibiting less inhibition in his movement than before; Friedrich Helm, the court usher with bipolar disorder, seemed to be on a nice, gradual path toward a level tolerable for both him and those around him; and Liane Bäuerle, the chronically presuicidal Latin and Greek schoolteacher, had received sufficient distraction from the back-to-back visits her relatives made. There had been no new admissions or transfers. Horn knew he could clear up the Caroline Weber incident without the need for the public health officer or a compulsory transfer to the clinic in Vienna. So he could conclude his visits with a good conscience and turn his attentions to the chicken curry.

  When Horn arrived on the pediatric ward at ten to two, the girl was sitting next to her mother in the visitors’ corner. As before, she was wearing the green quilted jacket, fur boots, and her right hand was still clenched. Her mother stood up to greet Horn. “We can’t get her to take the things off,” she said, giving a helpless shrug of her shoulders.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll straighten that out soon enough.” The woman directed a long, doubting glance at her daughter. Horn said, “Shall we go?” and gestured to her to go in. The girl put her left hand around her right fist, stood, and followed him. Something interests her, Horn thought, that’s a start at least. He remembered the paralysis of their previous session and how his professional reasoning had only been of partial assistance: inhibition is a phenomenon that results from unconquered ambivalence or fear. Take the inhibition right inside you; only then can you feel its cause. In children fear manifests itself in many different ways, but rarely in eyes opened wide with horror. Etc., etc. He had been least troubled by the idea of himself standing in front of an old man whose head had been run over by a tractor, and feeling temporarily speechless. I’m forty-eight, and the truth is that I’m still too impatient, he thought. I’ve got two sons, one of whom has already left home, and when a child says nothing the first words that spring to mind are “petulant” and “stubborn.”

  After Horn had closed the door behind them, the girl remained in the doorframe as if in a picture. She let her gaze wander slowly around the room.

  “Last time, Katharina, I asked you whether you could swim,” he said. “And then I thought to myself, look, it’s winter. At this time of year people are interested in skiing and ice skating, and we might be the only ones talking about swimming.” Something flickered in the girl’s face, the hint of a change in expression but nothing more, just like the last time.

  “If you’d like to talk about swimming, it might be smart to take off your thick jacket and fur boots first.”

  The girl did not react.

  “Shall I help you take them off?”

  Katharina Maywald made it quite plain that Horn should not attempt this; she threw her arms around her own body as if to protect herself, and froze. She did not relax until Horn moved away and sat behind his desk. Her arms slipped down and she started to move along the wall again, past the toy shelf, as far as the wardrobe. With her back pressed up against the wardrobe door, she slowly slid to the floor, not letting Horn out of her sight for a second. She can’t gauge me, he thought, she doesn’t know who I really am. She knows that I work here in the hospital, and she knows that people die in hospital. Perhaps I’m the one who let her grandfather die, and it’s her turn next.

  Horn looked at the rack with the Kasperl puppets and wondered who it would be best to let die. The policeman? The robber? Kasperl or Seppel? The magician? There were no other male figures in his collection. It’s a disgrace, he thought, that there’s always a grandmother in the Kasperl theater, whereas you never find a grandfather. There were no mothers, nor fathers, and certainly no grandfathers. The robber was closest in terms of age, but he was a very unsympathetic figure. The same was true of the magician. There was no way that Kasperl or Sepperl could be allowed to die and, in view of the events of the last few days, the police had to be ruled out. I’m already feeling quite inhibited, Horn thought. I’m completely incapable of making a decision. He took the five figures from the rack and laid them side by side on the floor. I’ll leave it up to her, he thought. I’ll ask her, “Which of the five should we let die?” and she’ll point to one of them.

  As it happened, Horn did not have to do anything else at that point; he was spared the dilemma when Katharina began to slide across the room on her backside, straight over to the bookshelf. Books, he thought, and picked up the hand puppets off the floor. First year at primary school—she’ll be able to read a bit; and he remembered what a struggle the whole notion of school and learning to read had been for him since Michael’s disastrous experiences.

  Michael suffered from a serious perception disorder, which in the early days meant he had never been able to put the letters of the alphabet in the correct order. Fate decreed that his disorder would converge with a teacher whose saccharine manner was the product of pedagogic cluelessness and hidden aggression. Irene had staggered from one crisis to the next; when the teacher refused to stop marking Michael’s exercise book with a thick red pen, she offloaded her anger first in the headmaster’s office, and then—when the latter proved to be a nervous, coughing wimp—in that of the district school inspector. The upshot of this was that the teacher used to call Irene before each assessment and ask her to suggest the grade she should assign to Michael’s work. They arranged for Michael to change schools for the third year, which had led to bucketfuls of tears, as he was leaving behind a number of friends. By the end of the fourth year, on the other hand, he was halfway to being able to read. Writing was, of course, still a disaster, and the irreparable rift in his relationship with Irene must have already begun to develop. Horn had not been aware of the problem until Michael himself articulated it to his mother a few years later: “Who I am has never been good enough for you!” There and then Horn had understood that he couldn’t have done anything—indeed, nothing could have been done at all—to prevent this rupture. Michael had slogged his way through secondary school; over time he became a shy, ill-adjusted boy. It was only when he left school—if they were honest they would have to admit that it was only after he realized it was possible to escape some of the pressures of family life—that things had taken a turn for the better. Michael’s employer, the owner of a small carpentry firm in Mooshaim, had liked his new apprentice from day one and could not care less if “rafter” was written with two fs. Michael had since become a foreman, he was content, well paid, and had met Gabriele. She was the other piece of fortune in Michael’s life besides his work, although Irene had a different opinion on this. She blames Gabriele for Michael’s having moved out of the house, Horn thought. It’s the same old story: Irene has a highly ambivalent relationship with her difficult son and holds it against her rival that it is not any better. Moreover, a Viennese-born symphony orchestra player manqué had little in common with a farmer’s daughter from a tiny village in the upper Styrian Ennsthal. The fact that the farmer’s daughter taught at the town’s agricultural college and had all the academic qualifications seemed to exacerbate matters. Cows’ udders—even from a scientific perspective—and Genoese cello bows are quite incompatible, he thought. Gabriele was also seven years older than Michael, and Irene was not happy about that, either.

  Katharina sat on the ground in front of the bookshelves and looked back and forth between her clenched right fist and the book spines. If she were to take what she wants, and do this in the way she’d like to, she would reveal something valuable to her, Horn thought. In other words: she’s right-handed and there’s no way she’s going to swap what she’s clutching from one hand to the other. The mother had said it was two Ludo pieces: one yellow and one blue. He stood up, crouched down next to the girl, took a handful of books from the shelf, and placed them in a row on the floor. They included Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen, Astrid Lindgr
en’s Rasmus and the Vagabond, a Winnie the Pooh collection, and two volumes of Christine Nöstlinger’s Franz stories. After a little hesitation, Katharina took hold of the books with her left hand, placed one on top of the other, very neatly, with My First Animal Dictionary on top, and pushed the pile to one side. Then she flicked Mira Lobe’s The Geggis off the shelf, glanced at the cover, and placed it on the pile. She did the same with Otfried Preußler’s The Little Ghost, Donald Duck books 29, 30, and 41, a volume of Tales from Iceland with a horrible troll on the cover, and Lindgren’s The Children of Noisy Village. Then there was a Donauland book club edition of German Heroic Legends, a good forty years old, which Horn’s mother had given him for Christmas one year because she believed that nine-year-olds ought to be interested in knights. Horn had always been more of the Red Indian persuasion and had preferred tomahawks and bowie knives to lances and swords. That is why he had never liked the book much; the only reason he had not thrown it away was because it was a present from his mother. In his early days as a child psychiatrist he was happy to be able to put the book to good use and also get it out of his house. It was not just in psychoanalytical theory but in real life, too, that there were boys who got excited about knights and their weapons. A knight in silver armor swished his mighty sword from the book’s cover toward the reader through a transparent protective sheet. He crouched behind a shield decorated with a midnight-blue dragon, his head protected by a tufted helmet with closed visor. Katharina stroked the figure with the index and middle fingers of her left hand, as if she were checking how real it was, and then pushed the book next to her. One by one, she carefully put the other books back onto the shelf with her left hand. She’s going to open the book, thought Horn, and see that there’s a lot of text, and I’ll ask her if she can read such small type. She would shake her head and he would offer to read to her. She would not know what to think, freeze, and he would just start reading to her. There was something lovely about the idea of reading to this girl, and Horn did not mind in the slightest that he would be doing it from a book that he did not like.

  The telephone was not supposed to ring during a therapy session, so Horn got a big fright. Katharina looked up, but only for a second. Dressler, the blind operator, who usually knew Horn’s timetable by heart, made profuse apologies and said that this time there was no way he could have blown the caller off. Horn thought first of Irene and Michael, then of Heidemarie, and felt his throat tightening. Something had happened.

  When he heard the voice of Ludwig Kovacs, the head of the serious crime unit in Furth’s Kriminalpolizei, he did not relax. He grabbed at his neck. After some throat-clearing, Kovacs said, “How’s it going with the little girl?” Perhaps nothing had happened after all. Horn started to breathe more easily again.

  “I’m in the middle of a session.”

  “I only need a second of your time, and I shouldn’t be telling you this, really, but I think it might be important: Wilfert’s murder was premeditated.”

  They’re wrong, Horn thought at first. Nobody kills someone on purpose by driving over his head. People shoot other people, batter each other to death, or hold each other underwater until the weaker one dies, but like that? No.

  Katharina had started to look through the book and had gotten to the first illustration. Sigmund with the gray horse. It did not appear to interest her much.

  “Are you sure?” Horn said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “I can’t ask any questions now, I hope you understand.”

  “Of course. Just call me if there’s anything you want to know, and call me if the girl says anything.”

  “Does that mean you don’t know anything? I mean, who did it.”

  “No, we know nothing yet,” Kovacs said. Then he hung up.

  Katharina was looking the picture in which Siegfried is face to face with Kriemhild. Out of good manners he has removed his helmet and carries it on his arm. He bows to Kriemhild. Katharina placed the index finger of her left hand first on the lady’s head, then on that of the hero. She looked very concentrated. It’s all about the heads, Horn thought. By touching them she’s making sure that they’re still OK—like a small child. She’s worried that the same might happen to their heads as to her grandfather’s; this fear makes her silent. Perhaps there would be no reason to call Kovacs, and that was fine. Psychotherapy worked best without police involvement.

  Horn watched the girl turn the page illustrating Siegfried’s battle with the dragon. The next one was the picture in which Hagen sinks his spear between Siegfried’s shoulders. This one did not arouse much interest either. Horn knew how consistent traumatized people could be in their denial, and so he was not that surprised. Hagen is a murderer, he thought, and Wilfert was murdered. There is a logical connection there, but nothing more. Looking at the girl, a thought sparked in his mind, and he wrote the word “accident” on the yellow notepad on his desk. He suddenly felt very hungry.

  The knight Katharina was now looking at was similar to the one on the cover: huge sword, shield with coat of arms, closed visor, a plume on the helmet. He was from the story “The Tournament in King Laurin’s Rose Garden.” Horn was not certain who this knight was. Perhaps Dietrich of Bern, or Ilsan, the militant monk. The only thing that he could remember was that the prize for the victor was a kiss from the princess.

  “Our time is up,” Horn said at last. Katharina shut the book and put it back on the shelf. She’s going to leave the heads with me, Horn thought. That’s good.

  The mother wore exactly the same skeptical expression as fifty minutes previously. Again, she stood up. “Is she talking yet?” she asked.

  “Of course she’s talking,” Horn said. “She’s talking through her actions.”

  As they left he saw that the girl must have at some point unzipped her squirrel jacket. He had not noticed her doing it.

  There’s a murderer in town, Horn thought after a while. He scrunched up the yellow note and grabbed the phone.

  Accident and Emergency. Mike, the ward orderly, answered in U14.

  “Leuweritz told me he operated on a five-year-old girl last night, comminuted fractures of both lower legs. A road accident, I think,” Horn said. “Can you find out her name for me?”

  “I know it already.”

  “And?”

  “Birgit Schmidinger.”

  Horn felt unable to breathe. Then his chest swelled with anger.

  “Are you still there?” Mike asked.

  “Yes, I’m here. I think I’ll come over your way.”

  “There’s huge amounts of herring salad,” Mike said. “A sort of early New Year’s celebration.”

  I’d like to stay here by the window and watch the lake freeze over, Horn thought. I’d like not to have to contemplate who might kill an old man. And I’d like the Schmidinger case to be over, I don’t care how. He’d call Kovacs; that was the first thing he decided to do. And he’d do it right away.

  Eleven

  Aldebaran, the reddish star in the eye of Taurus, was low down in the V-shaped gap that defined the contour of the mountains over the western end of the lake. A little farther south, Sirius was just touching the horizon, and Betelgeuse, Orion’s shoulder, was approaching it.

  Freezing, Kovacs paced up and down on the flat roof of his apartment block. His telescope was focused on Gamma Leonis, a double star that made up the neck of Leo. He had only looked through the lens once, and then he gazed, lost in his thoughts, at a thin, wispy sheet of fog that crept over the lake toward Furth. It was just before half-past five, and time passed even more slowly in the cold of an early morning. Over the course of the night, Kovacs had spent perhaps two hours in his bed. He felt as if he had not slept a wink. I can’t see anything, he thought, no pattern, no motive, no clue. I can’t extract any meaning from this case.

  After Patrizia Fleurin’s phone call on Saturday evening, he had gotten into the car and driven to the hospital. When an ambulance had flashed him several times as he turned into the parki
ng lot, he realized that he only had his sidelights on. Herr Kommissar is driving through the town without his lights on—none of his colleagues were around, but he still felt bad.

  Viktor Groh, the colossal pathology assistant, had opened the door for him. With his piggy eyes he looked down at Kovacs rather disparagingly and said, “Today me good friend, Commissario.” Once, several years previously, Kovacs had arrested Groh after he had rammed a broken tequila bottle into the shoulder of a Dutch tourist during a scuffle in a pub. In the end Groh had gotten away with a suspended sentence because there were ample witnesses to the fact that he had been provoked by his victim. “Yes, today good friend,” Kovacs said, and he followed Groh, who looked like a run-down sumo wrestler in his stained, sandy work outfit, through the corridors.

  Fleurin was wearing a white doctor’s coat under a transparent plastic apron that reached down to her calves, and disposable gloves. She was in the middle of labeling different-size specimen containers. She must already have finished the rougher work. Her red hair was tied into a bun, and she looked devastating with her freckles and the little bunches of laughter lines at the corners of her eyes. I have a satisfying sexual relationship on a contractual basis, thought Kovacs, and yet I can’t help imagining what it would be like to get my hands on this woman.

  “Don’t beam at me like that, Kommissar,” she said. “First, there’s no way I’m going to spend New Year with you, and second, you’ve got work to do, I believe.” She pointed to the autopsy table. There lay the body of Sebastian Wilfert under some washed-out green cloths.

  Kovacs bowed his head, put on the apron that Fleurin handed to him, and slipped some artificial blue footlets over his boots. He declined the gloves. “Don’t touch anything if you’re a stranger! That’s what my mom always used to say.”