The Sweetness of Life Read online

  She was playing the Sarabande from Bach’s “Suite in D Major.” When she played Bach, she was at one with herself. That is the way it had always been. Her look turned inward, the occasional hint of her tongue between her lips, the rims of her ears glowing red. In times gone by he would pounce on her in such moments. He did not do that anymore.

  He carefully closed the door to the stables. The building they had converted into a music room was at least fifty meters square; many years back it had housed cattle and sheep. That is why they had called it the stables from the start. Sometimes, visitors would sit inside on the long thin bench of unplaned fir; too seldom for Irene Horn’s liking.

  She seemed pleased with the bow; that made him happy. Through a viola player in her orchestra, he had bought it from an instrument maker in Hallein, near Salzburg. The bow had been crafted in Genoa 150 years ago, and had a very firm action; in the man’s opinion it was flawless. He had not said anything else about it so Horn was willing to believe him. Irene had not said anything either when she took the bow out of its case on Christmas Eve. She tightened the adjuster with three or four turns and then played the “Xerxes” Largo without any warm-up. They had all sat there silently, and Tobias, that ultracool incarnation of puberty, had tears in his eyes.

  Mimi crouched on the window sill, her teeth chattering. She wailed in indignation when he sat next to her. Two great tits sat on the platform of the bird box, cracking open sunflower seeds. “I’ll let you have them,” he said and stroked her neck. She just flicked her ear in his direction for a few seconds.

  The outside thermometer was showing minus eleven. The pale yellow of the rising sun appeared through the tops of the spruces. The northeastern part of town looked tangibly close. A veil of mist hung over the portion of the river visible from their house. A beautiful day, Horn thought, as if nothing could go wrong. He put some water on to boil. One of the sad facts of my life, he thought, is that during my ten years here, each Saturday morning has come and gone without a newspaper, and in ten years I haven’t gotten used to it. He fetched a can of cat food from the larder, spooned a portion into Mimi’s bowl, and mixed in a handful of cereal flakes. The cat leaped from the windowsill and rubbed up against his ankles in excitement. Either I’m too lazy or it’s not that important to me, he thought. He knew that he had only to get into the car, and that there was a newsstand right by the road into town. Ten minutes there, ten minutes back. But he never did it. He thought about their time in Vienna, about their apartment in the second district, and the old newsstand guy whose sight had become worse and worse each year. In the end he had to be told where the magazines and packets of cigarettes were on the shelves. But he always had Horn’s newspapers ready, right to the very end. On Saturdays, the Standard and the Presse, that is how it had been.

  He put rolls in the oven to warm up, and set the table for two. Tobias would tumble down around midday, pour himself to a double helping of Coco Pops, and mumble something like, “Life is an imposition.”

  After he had put two eggs in the boiler, he stood there for a moment and listened. He could hear very little: the bubbling of the water as it simmered in the kettle, and the cat munching at his feet.

  “But you’re the biggest townie in the world,” his friends had said back then. “How can you move to the country?” His reply was that Furth am See was not the country but a town with more than 35,000 inhabitants, a theater, a symphony orchestra, a marina, a polytechnic, and a general hospital that not only planned to set up its own psychiatric department but had also immediately agreed to his request to practice child psychiatry. “Admit it, it’s because of Frege,” some of them had said. He denied it, although, of course, it had been partly due to Frege. Frege was a psychopathic asshole who had systematically ruined his chance of succeeding Böhler as head of department. “Horn is an extremely competent colleague, you know. This indecisiveness of his does not come into it.” Or: “A mother took me aside yesterday and told me she didn’t dare talk to Doctor Horn because she felt so stupid in his presence.” Frege had gone a long time ago; two years after Horn left, he had moved to a clinic for addiction in Germany. But I still harbor the fantasy of smashing his teeth in, or driving a red-hot needle into his upper thigh, Horn thought. He spooned some coffee into the French press and poured over boiling water.

  “Bach and sex at the same time doesn’t work.”

  He turned around. Irene was standing in the doorway, grinning.

  “I didn’t hear you coming,” he said.

  “I know. I like you making breakfast.”

  “I always make it. How long have you been up?”

  “Two, three hours.” She came over to him and kissed him gently on the mouth. “Bach with sex afterward works fine,” she said.

  He took her right ear between his fingers. “You’ve got the sticky-outiest ears in the world,” he said.

  “I know,” she said and kissed him again.

  “Before or after breakfast?” he asked.

  “Before,” she said.

  “The eggs are hard-boiled,” Horn confirmed a while later. The egg boiler had buzzed just as they were getting to the fun part. He had yanked the plug out and the eggs had remained in the hot steam.

  “In winter you should eat hard-boiled eggs,” Irene said, placing a slice of salami between her teeth.

  Horn nodded. “They’re ballast for a snowstorm,” he said. She laughed and blew a strand of hair from her forehead. She has red cheeks like a little girl, he thought. He knew that she had never considered moving back to Vienna, not for a second. “What do you want?” she said when the conversation turned to this topic. “Everything has gotten better.” He had never tried to contest this. Michael had done that, and it had strained his relationship with his mother even more.

  They talked about the bow and the quality of musical instruments in general. “Now and then it defies you,” she said, “and that’s good.” For an instrument to be perfect for someone, it has to become an extension of their body. This was especially noticeable in the case of Yehudi Menuhin and his violin. “Or John McLaughlin,” he said.

  “Who’s John McLaughlin?”

  “Philistine!” It was a sort of game between them. John McLaughlin’s guitar was also like a part of his body. For the most part it was in complete unison with him; sometimes it did whatever it wanted.

  “I want honey next,” she said.

  “Eat your egg first.”

  She held her empty shell in front of him. “Yuk!”

  Horn stood up and shuffled off to the larder. “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m getting Frau Cello Soloist her honey.” She threw a scrunched-up napkin at him.

  Horn rummaged through the jars of jam and bottles of homemade fruit juice. Right at the back of the shelf he found a small jar of thyme honey that they had brought back from a vacation in Turkey years before. “We’re out of real honey,” he said. She tried her best to twist open the lid, but in the end gave him back the jar to open.

  “What was wrong with that little girl yesterday?” she asked.

  “After breakfast I’ll go to Joachim and Else’s and fetch some.”

  “I mean the girl with the grandfather.”

  He took another roll from the basket, sliced it open, and started spreading it with butter. “Nothing wrong,” he said.

  “What do you mean nothing wrong?”

  “Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Zilch.”

  “Didn’t she come?”

  “Yes, she came. Her mother brought her in, as arranged.” He put a small slice of Stilton on the buttered half of the roll and took a bite. He always said that at breakfast on Saturdays you had the newspaper types and the conversation types, as well as the blue cheese types and the honey types. Newspaper and blue cheese usually went hand in hand, like conversation and honey. All that Irene would say to that was: “moron.”

  “What do you mean it was nothing? Wasn’t she screaming her head off? Or were you called away to an emer
gency?”

  Horn felt a slight irritation welling up inside him, as he always did when Irene’s curiosity began to become intrusive. I’ve got to get out, he thought, otherwise we’ll start rowing, despite our intimacy just now. “No,” he said. “She just sat there silently.”

  “For a whole hour?”

  “For a whole hour.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “Waited. I waited, that’s all.”

  She shook her head angrily. “What was the use of that?”

  “None,” he said. “It was no use at all.”

  She frowned and pointed a finger at him. “I don’t believe a word you’re saying, Herr Analyst,” she objected. “You’re forever telling me there’s nothing more productive in therapy than silence, and suddenly the reverse is true?!”

  “With us psychos, there are no absolutes.” He dipped a piece of roll into the honey and offered it to her. She took it carefully between her lips. Then she bit his finger. “Shall we do it again after breakfast?” he asked, surprised.

  She laughed, shaking her head.

  Irene Horn dropped her husband off just past the large roundabout and drove on into the town center. They had agreed to meet in the Stiftscafé an hour and a half later.

  Horn started southward along the Severinstraße for a few hundred meters and then turned east. There were no clouds, the sun was at the midpoint in the sky, and in the distance he could see the peaks of the Limestone Alps shining above the town. Although the pavement outside the row of terraced houses had been cleared, it had not been gritted. Remnants of snow crunched under his shoes.

  The girl had turned up to his surgery in fur-lined boots and a green quilted jacket with a squirrel on it. She had backed over to the wall and stood there motionless for ten minutes. Then she started to move slowly along the wall. She had not once taken her eyes off him.

  Unusually for him, Horn had started after a while to talk. Remove the fear, he thought, you’ve got to take the fear away from her as quickly as possible. “Last time we met it was all pretty crazy,” he said. “The paramedics and the ambulance, plus the police and those other people you didn’t know.” The girl continued to slide along the wall, past the toy shelf, over to the narrow wardrobe. There she had sat on the ground, her knees pulled up to her chest, and her arms wrapped around them. Her right hand was clenched. “You’ve still got a secret in your hand, haven’t you?” he said, and the girl’s expression did not change. He spoke, stopped talking, and then played with the puppets. The policeman told the crocodile off because he always gobbled the others up, and the witch let out a triumphant laugh. The girl looked straight through the puppets; she ran her eyes over his desk, over the pictures on the wall, over the bookcase. From time to time she would scrutinize him. He explained that death was largely an incomprehensible thing, and that some children had nice grandparents and others did not. The whole time he had felt powerless and superfluous. When he said, “Our time is up,” the little girl arose. She looked out of the window for a few seconds, at the river, the banks of reeds, and the lake. “I wonder whether you can swim?” he asked, but thought it was a crazy thing to say. It was winter, after all: in this weather, the lake would surely freeze over soon, and fathers would be hurrying to sand the rust off their children’s ice skates. But the girl looked at him and, just for an instant, he noticed a quite different expression in her eyes from their previous session. Perhaps the two of them were the only people in the town who had been thinking of swimming at that moment.

  Sitting on top of a conifer, a nutcracker was making a din. Horn stopped and tried to pack together a snowball, but it crumbled in his hand. These birds had all been around when he was a child, too: nutcrackers, fieldfares, and hoopoes. He would sit for hours beneath the kitchen window and look over at the larches beyond the garden fence, at the birdhouse that had been fixed onto a wooden stake. Little by little his father had taught him the names: crested tit, bullfinch, waxwing. He thought of Heidemarie and how she sometimes felt as if all that was left of her was an empty sack. What people pompously referred to as identity was actually quite difficult to define; it was made up of everything that had been crammed into an individual over the course of their lifetime. In his case, for example, it even included a flock of waxwings that had landed in his parents’ garden—a long way to the west of their customary route—and stayed there for a day and a half. He could recall how his father, a biology teacher, had been beside himself with excitement. The birds had crested feathers, bright stripes on their wings, and were almost tame. He was eight or nine at the time, and he remembered daydreaming about catching one of the waxwings, tying a thread to its leg, and flying it like a kite.

  He wondered whether Heidemarie was sleeping better with the new pills, or whether she was still lying awake and being sucked into the emotional void of her parents as if into an enormous black funnel. He wondered why sons murdered their mothers and daughters did not, and why suicide fantasies were a huge relief to some people. People kill themselves on New Year’s Eve, he thought. New Year’s Eve was three days away.

  The end of the terrace was also the end of the pavement. The street narrowed at this point, but continued in the same direction. He was approached by a heavyset man with a pit bull on a leash. It was Konrad Seihs, the local secretary of the Business Party. They gave each other a polite greeting. “Fascist bastard,” Horn muttered when Seihs was far enough away. The man was tipped to be the next council officer in charge of internal administration and security. He had been in the army before he started working for the party. Among other things, he was calling for an increase in police patrols on the town’s council estates. Years before, he and Horn had clashed at a public meeting on the subject of care for the disabled. It was Irene who had prevented the matter from escalating. “Where’s your professional distance?” she whispered to him, giving his lower arm a firm squeeze. “He’s not my patient,” he answered. “Pretend he is,” she said, and so he ceased his verbal assault on Seihs. Later, when he had thought about it, he realized, of course, that calling the Chancellor a deranged narcissist, or the Finance Minister a compulsive neurotic stuck in the pregenital phase did not alter things one bit. But it had helped at the time. He thought of Schmidinger and pictured people like him and Seihs perched at the sports club bar, their conversation switching from banging Thai girls to problems with asylum seekers to how impossible it was to tell which elements of the so-called youth scene on the Walzwerk estate were involved in drug dealing and street prostitution. He felt pangs of guilt whenever he thought of Schmidinger, both on account of the latter’s wife and daughters, and due to his own strong desire to sedate the man and lock him away. “I’m a doctor,” he said to himself. But he also knew that made no difference at all.

  Joachim and Else Fux’s house was right by the Mühlaubach, so close in fact that the lower of the two barns was flooded every time there was high water. For this reason the barn was empty save for a pile of old bricks and roof tiles. Fux had shown it to him years ago. When Horn asked him why he had not torn it down he said, “because it’s always been there.” Horn leaned on the wooden railings of the bridge. There was little slope to the stream at this point. Tongues of ice lapped down at the water from the granite blocks that bolstered the stream’s banks. My whole life is a play between town and country, he thought. I go back and forth, but I don’t feel at home anywhere.

  When he opened the front door he was assailed by the scent of cinnamon. Whenever a special occasion was impending, you could be sure that Else would be baking. She had no doubt just made tons of biscuits and cakes for Christmas and was now preparing for New Year.

  The two of them were sitting at the dining table, sorting through photographs. Horn sniffed, wrinkling his nose.

  “Red wine cake with cinnamon,” Else said, getting up. “Are you out visiting patients?”

  Horn laughed. “Exactly, I’m going from house to house treating post-Christmas depression.” She fetched him a stool. She’s
seventy-five and still a beautiful woman, he thought.

  Fux gathered the photographs together.

  “Leave them, I’m not staying long,” Horn said. He reached for one of the pictures. A few soldiers: young men in badly fitting uniform. “It’s astonishing that photographs do actually turn yellow with age,” he said.

  “Our skin turns yellow and so do photographs,” Fux said tersely. The soldiers in the photograph all looked the same. “Who’s that?” Horn asked.

  “I was enlisted in 1945,” Fux said. Two of the soldiers looked very alike, as if twins. They all have the same unhappy expression, Horn thought. Right at the front was one whose face was no longer recognizable. In its place was a white mark, as if it had been fingered often. It’s him, Horn thought. He looks at the picture over and over again, and each time he taps his finger on his face, as if he has to make sure that he was there. Over the course of time he’s rubbing himself out.

  Horn pointed to the man. “And that’s you there, is it?” he asked.

  Fux promptly took the photographs and put them back in the box on the table. “It wasn’t nice back then,” he said. His hand was trembling. I’ve upset him and asked too much, Horn thought. He doesn’t want to talk or show me the pictures.

  “Does it go away with time?” he asked cautiously.

  Fux looked at him. He had turned pale and his jaw muscles had tensed. He gave an almost imperceptible nod.

  “I’m seventy-seven now. I was seventeen then.”

  Seventeen. A child. Sometimes there’s nothing you can say, Horn thought. He could well believe that it had not been nice then; he could understand Fux’s desire to erase himself from that era. He knew that post-traumatic symptoms could crop up decades later, quite severe ones too.

  Else passed him a plate of Christmas biscuits. He ran his eyes over them.

  “You don’t have to take one,” she said. “It’s just something I do automatically when visitors come.”

  “How’s your shoulder?” Horn asked. He wanted to get away from war stories. Fux slowly stretched out his right arm, clenched his fist, and then stretched again. “Better?”