“Don’t open it until you’re sitting on the bus,” he cautioned me, and swallowed hard; he looked as dismal as a Segendorf gravedigger. He glanced mistrustfully at the bus. “You’ll come back?”
“Of course I will.”
“My lovely rascal,” Wickenhäuser said, laughing through his tears, “and what if I told you that I never delivered any of your letters to her?”
I dug my fingernails deep into the skin of my scarred elbow. “Anni doesn’t know anything?”
“Suppose she doesn’t?”
“Then,” I said, “then that would change everything.”
I gave Wickenhäuser a short, cold handshake, nodded, and took a seat at the back of the bus. The engine banged like a rifle shot. We lurched off down the road.
Third Love
On a windy Indian summer evening in September, I walked past the triple-horned cow skull (the result of a highly questionable breeding experiment) that marked the northernmost border of the village. The first barnyards I passed seemed much smaller than I remembered. In my memories, the houses were massive skyscraping structures, but now my impression was that Segendorf consisted largely of flat, skewed buildings that you could watch sinking gradually into the swampy ground. Even the church, which had instilled such respect in me as a child, now seemed to resemble nothing so much as a poorly maintained mausoleum. I felt amazed that anyone could spend his whole life here. It wasn’t melancholy I was feeling, but surprise that I’d actually grown up in such a place.
To remain incognito, I steered clear of people on the street and made straight for the tavern, where I took a seat at a shaky wooden table. The air was full of rancid odors, the taproom empty, apart from the busty innkeeper.
“You from around here?” she bleated.
“Bring me something,” I bleated back.
“A pint?”
I nodded. With a filthy rag, the innkeeper spread a puddle of beer around on my table. I sat there till late at night, bolting down reams of red cabbage, dumplings, and leathery cuts of roast pork. After a trip as long as mine, anything tasted good. And the more often I bent deep over my beer stein, the more often the innkeeper looked across at me, asking whether I wanted anything else, making little detours past my table. After she’d put up the last of the chairs, she planted herself before me.
“You’re not from around here.”
“No.”
“Then you won’t know my barn.”
“No.”
“It’s out on the moor.”
I looked up at her.
“I’ll show it to you, it’s very comfortable.”
She showed me a couple of other things, too, before returning, in the gray dawn, across the labyrinth of rotting wooden planks that crisscrossed the moor, to her husband, who hadn’t kissed her with that kind of abandon in years. Like a kitten lapping up milk for the first time, she’d said.
I spent those first days after my arrival out on the moor. It was still too soon, I needed some time to figure out how I could meet my sister, from whom I’d been separated for six years. Almost every day the innkeeper came looking for me, bringing me horse knockwurst, freshly baked poppy-seed rolls, cracklings, Moosinger — a variety of cheese produced exclusively in Segendorf, which ripened only after an exceedingly long and damp storage — tepid milk, poppy-seed cakes, pickled frogs’ legs, poppy-seed buns, mushrooms, and eggs. In return, I deployed such knowledge as I’d acquired from the widows of Schweretsried, and hoped that her screams wouldn’t disturb anyone but blindworms, storks, and toads. It seemed to me as though, with every thrust that sent flabby waves rolling across the innkeeper’s backside, I was plunging deeper and deeper into my native town. I thrust, and she screamed. Soon, I was airing my own first screams as well. On those nights that the innkeeper couldn’t manage to slip from her husband’s bed, I explored the village. Behind every window I peeped through, someone was screaming. Screaming was part and parcel of Segendorf, like the Sacrificial Festival. Children in the dark screamed for light, husbands screamed for their wives, and the wives screamed because of their violent husbands. But nobody screamed as untiringly as the innkeeper.
“Can you go a third time?” she asked me, drizzling rose-hip marmalade on her heavy, pale upper thigh.
The better I got at imitating her screams, the louder and more piercing the innkeeper became.
One night, when I believed that I’d become familiar with every possible variety of scream, the sound of singing drew me to a greenish glowing window. The house lay at the edge of the village, not far from Wolf Hill, precisely where my parents’ house had once stood. Someone was carelessly (and tunelessly) singing a song. Unfortunately, bilious green vines behind the window and rank ivy in front of it obscured my view; I could make out only tessellated pieces of a plump female shape dancing in the room. There was a pink elbow, there beige ruffles, there a snatch of white skin, there the rounded tip of a nose, there a lock of hair. This girl, the third love in my life, of which I knew nothing at that moment, accompanied her swaying dance with a breathy voice, and in spite of its unpolished tone it was so serene and artless that I felt an urge to shatter the window and study her décolletage and throat and lips as they shaped a kind of music so beautiful it made you feel as if there were no such thing as right or wrong.
I fell to my knees and pressed my hot face into the dewy grass. A moment later I was running toward the cliff and standing at the edge of the abyss, where the monk had sacrificed his Most Beloved Possession 405 years before. In contrast to the monk, however, it wasn’t an object I hurled away from me. My own scream, which told of polished leather boots and a gleaming bridal gown, of lentils and walks around a log cabin, of homemade verses, lonely widows, tailored suits, and an undertaker’s melancholy, pierced through the whole village, tore Blacksmith Schwaiger from his uneasy sleep, drove the residual ashes of the Sacrificial Festival before it, burrowed into the soil, plucked at the leaves of the oak on Wolf Hill, and brought a brief pause to the dancing of a girl named Anni Habom. And as I turned my back to the abyss, the latter returned an echo — soft and delicate, but so unambiguously clear that there could be no doubt whatsoever that this place was my home.
It went: pling.
PART V. Objects in Mirror
Violet
Albert crossed the main street. By the town hall he hung a left, following a narrow, tarred footpath downhill, past a playground and a meadow where he and Fred had often gone sledding. Before long he’d leave the last farmhouse behind and reach the glider airfield. The thought of it made him nervous. During their conversation three days ago, Sister Alfonsa had refused to tell him over the telephone what she knew about his mother. So he’d just have to come to Saint Helena — those were her last words before Albert hung up, immediately regretting it. Since then, every attempt he’d made to reach her had failed. Fearful of missing her call, he hadn’t left the phone for a moment. Under normal circumstances he would have been well on the road to Saint Helena by now; to ferret out something about his mother, he would gladly have undertaken a much longer journey. There was one thing holding him back: panic gripped Fred whenever he had to board a bus. Albert traced it back to the traumatic experience of the bus accident. And Albert himself had neither car nor driver’s license. So he’d dialed Violet’s number, the only number that could help get the two of them swiftly to Saint Helena.