The Sweetness of Life Page 14

  Thirteen

  It is as if he were running inside a room. The snowflakes are thick and falling straight downward, and the sky begins a few arm lengths above his head. The wind is quite still. The noise of the waterfall coming from below to the left is muted. The cliff face, which towers up vertically on the other side, fades to gray in the void. Here and there a branch deposits its load.

  Number nine. The longest one of all.

  They’re sellin’ postcards of the hanging, they’re painting the passports brown.

  Every morning one of the council workers drives here with the snowcat and turns half of the path into a track for cross-country skiers. The rest is flattened for those who walk here. There is now five centimeters of new snow on the compacted base. This makes the run a bit awkward. Nonetheless, he manages the long climb without reducing his speed. The elders and willows become denser. In clear weather one would be able to see the gleaming chimneys of the woodworking factory between the trees and, a little farther to the west, the steeples of the abbey church. Now he notices a flock of blue tits flying past him from the hazelnut bushes.

  He can just about make out his footprints from the way there, but nothing else. Since he left the road he has not met a soul. Other people would be afraid to be alone in this winter wood, on the edge of a town where people have their throats slit. His fear always comes from within, from the fissure where he is ripped apart. Whenever he tries to explain it, nobody understands. People are too accustomed to identifying only with their own feelings.

  The boy will sit on the toboggan and demand to be pulled up the hill. At first the woman will say no, and then she will do it after all. Her frizzy black hair will flow out from under her headband. There will be a soft layer of snow on her hair and shoulders. She will throw snowballs at the boy. He will laugh out loud and topple over backward from the toboggan.

  Sometimes he has the feeling that his entire body is artificial: joints, bones, teeth, skin, eyeballs. His windpipe becomes a flexible hose and his lungs two semitransparent sacks divided into tiny cube-shaped chambers. He cannot picture his brain. At any rate, it is the place where the thoughts are generated.

  A fresh set of tracks crosses his path. Some hoofed game, most likely a young hind. She has probably not yet had any young, and she is on her own. That happens.

  Down to the left now, on the other side of the bank, the rafting center. Both its jetties are covered in a thick layer of snow. The river waltzes languidly in front of it. Not a single rafting or canyoning accident in their eight years; they make quite a show of broadcasting this fact. One of the safest outdoor activity firms in Europe. Robert went with them once last year; he did the four kilometers below the rapids, the standard option for beginners. He was so excited about it afterward and spouted all sorts of pathetic nonsense—“An experience that expands your horizons,” etc.

  Left over the footbridge. The planks under the new snow are frozen over. He slips and curses. Along Imhofstraße. The tanning studio. A man with a precision-trimmed mustache walks onto the street. The studio manager is a platinum-blond Slovak woman who is said to have once been a well-known model. One day a persistent fan attacked her with an ice pick, and that was the end of her career.

  Up on the cemetery wall two crows are fighting over something that looks like a piece of skin. They move toward each other in a weird symmetry, then away from each other, then toward each other again, not making a sound all the while. The occasional spray of snow.

  His favorite bit: Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains, they’re getting ready for the feast, The phantom of the opera, A perfect image of a priest. Casanova is poisoned with words, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound fight in the captain’s tower of the Titanic, and then the end. More than eleven minutes. He feels for his waistband and turns off his iPod.

  Wilfert’s body has been released. Given that the affair has caused such a stir, a lot of people will come to the funeral; the television cameras might be there too. Clemens will insist on leading the ceremony. He will find some comforting words and, as always, will quote St. Augustine. Everything will appear in the newspaper the following day.

  West into Weyrer Straße. The headlights of the cars grope their way along the ground through the snowfall. Kurt Neulinger, the head of IT at the district authority, is clearing his drive with a mechanical tiller. Since it got out that his wife would sometimes bring a student back to their apartment, he comes home from work earlier, and everything is kept even tidier than usual. Although he looks as if he would freeze to death, he does not wear gloves while pushing the tiller. The machine makes a hell of a din. It occurs to him that on the night Wilfert died there was also some sort of noise.

  He turns left into Orangerie-Straße, runs along the wall of the abbey park for about a couple of hundred meters, and then takes the east gate. The round conifers on either side of the path, the stone giant with the club, the nymphs in the middle of the mussel-shaped fountain. The glass panels of the greenhouse are covered all over with ice flowers. Not even right at the top, where the gable is flat, does the snow seem to be settling. It must be due to the warm air rising inside. The image of Clemens strutting through the greenhouse with Sterck, the gardener, peering into hidden corners, and being taught about palms and orchids. You take a stone, and another one, throw them as hard as you can, and you hit them both in the temple, right by the ear. They collapse, and the holes in the panes are so small that nobody notices them. He speeds up until the end of the greenhouse. The cold burns his lungs. People take holy orders for different reasons, he thinks. Some because they need security; some because the idea of lots of men in one place makes them excited; and some because they would otherwise kill their mothers and sisters sooner or later.

  Wilhelm, who is sitting by the gate reading a motorcycle magazine, tells him that the team of cleaners are doing the floors in the school, which is why the key is not hanging up on the board. He takes the corridor to the left, walks to the main stairwell, goes up to the first floor and through the frosted glass door, which is open. His classroom is the first after the bend in the corridor. The strong stench of floor polish hangs in the air.

  He closes the door behind him. On the wall to the left are twenty-three photographic portraits of children; at the back of the room a board with the basic laws of mathematics on it, and another showing a school project in Ethiopia. He goes over to the window. In the beam of the floodlights that illuminate the abbey courtyard the snow looks completely artificial.

  He sits down on the teacher’s table, his legs dangling over the edge. From here he has a view of all of them. Directly in front of him is Lisa, who is afraid of many things such as squirrels and PE. Next to her is Veronika, the only real kiss-up in the class. Some of them like her nevertheless. Michael Streiter, and next to him, Konstantin, who by the time he reaches the fifth year will probably be three meters tall. Hans-Peter; Leo; Markus, who never says anything. Ewald, the cellist; Rudolf, who always asks if he can bring his rat into class; Katharina Jordak, who has the breasts of an eighteen-year-old; little, thin Jaqueline; Jennifer, who is always scratching her arms; Günseli and Leyla, the two Turkish girls; Nora; red-haired Johanna with her translucent skin; Benedikt; Michael Wontok, who everybody calls “piggy” because of his rosy, moonlike face; Katharina Scheffberger; the hyperactive Annabelle; Björn; tiny Anatolij from Georgia, who can work out complicated multiplication sums in his head; and Dominik, who only has one arm because he reached into a straw cutter when he was a small child.

  Two children were missing before the holidays: Jennifer, because of an inflammation of the appendix; and Leo, who overestimated his snowboard jumping skills, and bruised his ribs. They did not do any math in the last lesson; instead they sang Christmas carols. Ewald played his cello and Jaqueline an alto recorder. Björn sat there the whole time staring at the floor. He spotted the change in him at once. Afterward he took Björn aside and asked him what Christmas would be like at home. All he said was, “Daniel’s back.”<
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  He thinks of the couple of years that he taught Björn’s brother divinity, of the small, hard fists, of the thin scar on his left upper lip, and of those empty eyes that sparkled only when somebody else in the class was crying. He thinks of the ripped-up books belonging to Daniel’s classmates, of the cupboard door that was kicked in, and how relieved his colleagues were when the headmaster managed to persuade the boy’s parents to remove him from their school and put him in the less academic Hauptschule. Finally, he thinks of that morning when the twelve-year-old boy came right up to him, looked up into his eyes, and said very softly, “Priests ought to be nailed to a cross—that’s what my dad says, and I think so too.” He has no ideas for the rest of the lesson; he can hear a squeaking in his right ear that gets louder and softer, and the children go haywire.

  Loud laughter from outside the classroom. The cleaners. He slides off the desk, takes off his shoes, and goes to the door in his socks. He does not open it. He stands flat against the wall right next to the door. He stays like that for some time.

  Fourteen

  Madeleine Peyroux. He had never heard the name before. The cover photo shows a young woman in a baggy dress. She is lounging about and looking defiantly into the camera. An unaffected, somewhat smoky soul voice, reminiscent of Billie Holiday. Track four was his favorite by far: “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” This was the second time he had listened to the CD.

  Irene sometimes claimed that there was a slight echo in the stables, particularly with middle notes. Horn did not notice it at all, but there were lots of things Irene heard that he could not. He sat in the old, wine-colored velvet armchair, stared at the ceiling, and wondered what sort of people Heidemarie mixed with. He imagined her inviting some fellow students to her small Viennese apartment and cooking them pasta, everyone very jolly and having a good old laugh.

  The cat came meowing over to him and rubbed the side of her head against his calf. He patted his thigh to invite her up. She jumped into his lap, made herself comfortable, and began to purr like a small engine. He had never had a pet as a child and felt his mother was probably to blame for this. She had grown up on a large farm in the Innviertel where everything had revolved around livestock. Roland, his childhood friend, had a dachshund that they used to make sit up and beg and play at hunting rabbits with. Once they had tied the dog’s ears together with a string of cooked spaghetti. They were caught by Margit, Roland’s big sister, who had belted her brother one without saying anything. Horn escaped with a ferocious stare.

  “Just heavenly!” Irene was standing by the door, her arms crossed. Once again he had not heard her coming. “What is that music?” she asked.

  “Madeleine Peyroux.”

  “Since when have you liked that sort of stuff?”

  He raised his hands to silence her.

  “Got it as a present,” he said.

  “I see. So what’s her name?”

  “I told you, Madeleine Peyroux.”

  “No, I mean the woman who gave it to you.”

  He sat up straight. The cat purred again, very loudly. “Don’t be silly,” he said. Irene took the case. “Careless Love,” she read out, “I see . . .”

  “A patient!”

  “Very nice dress.”

  “A rather depressive patient.”

  “Extremely pretty!”

  “For God’s sake!” He placed the cat on the floor and stood up.

  “Poor Mimi,” Irene said. He went over and tried to put his arms around her, but she started to back away. “Is that the reason people become psychiatrists?” she asked.

  “What reason?”

  “So they can accept love tokens from depressive patients.”

  “Goofy cow,” he said, grabbing her butt. She laughed and pulled herself away from him.

  “Why are you here, anyway?” she said.

  “I’d just had enough,” he said. “Come on, let’s go and cook.” She came into the room and picked up the cat.

  “We’ll take Mimi with us,” she said. She hardly ever did that.

  They agreed on an omelet. Two days before, Marianne Schwarz had brought over forty fresh eggs, so it was an obvious choice. Irene cleaned some spring onions, Horn cut crosses in the skins of some tomatoes and waited for the water in the pan to come to a boil. He began talking about his morning. It had started with Leithner having a fit, because Melitta Steinböck, the Bürgermeister’s wife, had complained about the timing and quality of the evening meal, as well as about how long she had to wait for the computer tomography. It had been one of Leithner’s rather unpleasant fits, which were not actually fits but endless, superfluous tirades, delivered in a nerve-shatteringly baleful tone. As expected, Prinz retaliated: they could not stop the world spinning around, not even for the Bürgermeister’s wife; in any case the whole team was already attending to her every whim. His protest did not improve the situation. On the contrary, Leithner hit them all with a general ban on leave.

  “He always does that,” Irene said.

  “Yes,” Horn said. “He always does that because he doesn’t know what else to do; and nobody takes him seriously anymore when he talks like this. The fact that he realizes it himself doesn’t make him any less tense.”

  Horn dropped the tomatoes into the boiling water, waited twenty seconds, and scooped them out again with a slotted spoon.

  “Not long enough,” Irene said.

  “No, it’s definitely long enough,” he said. It was one of those rituals whose only function was to prove that cooking together was an impossibility. Irene never peeled the tomatoes, so how did she know the amount of time they needed in boiling water? But in these situations she liked to play the pig-headed dilettante. Horn speared the tomatoes onto a skewer and removed the skin with a small, sharp knife. “You see?” he said.

  “It’s still wrong,” she said, chopping up the spring onion stalks. He laughed, and put the peeled tomatoes next to each other on a board.

  “Five naked Indians,” he said.

  Irene had not yet calmed down. “You psychoanalysts with your smug metaphors.”

  “That’s why we do what we do,” he said, and began chopping the tomatoes into large chunks. The only positive thing about the morning had been Caroline Weber’s condition, he went on. Either the neuroleptic drug had worked, or her paranoia had diminished by itself. In any case, according to the duty sister’s report she had held her daughter for a quarter of an hour the evening before, without any negative reaction. Since the last incident they had kept a closer watch on the husband, and they had indeed observed an increased level of nasty, subtle aggression.

  “I also think my child’s the Devil sometimes, and you’re always full of subtle aggression,” Irene said. He did not react; he just tilted the pan and watched as the olive oil slowly coated the surface. On the instruction of the voices he had started to hear again, Reisinger, the early retired electrician, had tried to drink a bottle of concentrated cleaner, badly scorching his esophagus and gullet. Liu Pjong, the Korean partner of Jurowetz the hauler, was writing about twenty daily letters of complaint in her manic state. As these letters were also being posted, the situation had got quite unpleasant. The patient support office had been making endless calls to the ward over the past few days. During her four-day stay, moreover, she had managed to turn even the most amicable members of the nursing staff against her. “She goes over to Herbert, pulls up her sweater and says, ‘I saw your wife recently in the café, Herbert—pure coincidence—and now I understand why you don’t want to fuck her anymore. Have me instead.’” Herbert had stood there staring at the first pair of Korean breasts he had seen in his life. There were worse things in life than staring at those breasts, but he was already so paralyzed with pent-up aggression that they had to lead him out of the room by his arm.

  “Outside he grabbed me and screamed that if I didn’t give her an injection right away he would resign and then wring her neck.”

  “So what did you do?”

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nbsp; Horn took the chopping board from her and pushed the sliced onions into the pan with the back of his knife.

  “What would you have done if you were me?” he said.

  “I’d have given Herbert an injection,” Irene said, closing a half-open drawer with a shove of her hip.

  “The female solution.”

  “And yours? The male one?”

  “The pragmatic solution,” Horn said, shrugging his shoulders. “What else could I do?”

  Breasts plus aggression versus helplessness and responsibility—it’s somehow a classic dilemma, Irene said, and now she also understood why he had chosen to go home through the ice and snow. She violently whisked some eggs in a medium-size plastic bowl. Then she tipped the tomato chunks onto the fried onions, which were now translucent, and gave a good stir. Horn sat at the table watching her. He noticed that her movements were more hurried than usual. Of course she was right about the classic dilemma. Sex drive and cultural achievement—the old cliché. A psychiatrist is nothing more than a policeman who pretends that he isn’t one, he thought.

  “Exactly,” Irene said.

  “What do you mean ‘exactly’?”

  “You’re a policeman who pretends that he’s not one.”

  Horn felt himself turning red. “Did I say that out loud?”

  Irene laughed. “You’re always doing it,” she said.

  Things happen to me that I can’t control, he thought, and other people laugh at me.

  He looked over toward the window. The snow was falling even more heavily. The day before, Tobias had gone to Obertauern on a school ski course. “Who needs ski courses?” he said when he left, kicking his suitcase into the luggage compartment of the bus. Tobias hated his gym teacher, he hated some of his fellow pupils, and he struggled in deep snow.