“Albert!” Fred drew the cassette from the tin box, which Albert had set beside the sink. “You have a cassette, too!” His grin twitched. “A totally similar cassette.”
Albert emptied his glass so hastily that milk ran over his chin. “That’s your cassette.”
Fred held his breath. Silence. Then his grin returned: “You couldn’t sleep, Albert?”
“How did you know?”
“That tape makes an ambrosial noise, like water. And Mama said you always sleep best by the water.”
“Where did you get the tape?”
Fred bit his lips.
“Did somebody give it to you?”
“No.”
“Let me guess: you found it.”
“Yes.”
Albert rolled his eyes. “Where did you find it?”
This time Fred licked his lips like a contestant on a quiz show, confident of his answer, and even before he replied, Albert knew what that answer would be.
“The same place the gold came from!”
“Oh, there,” said Albert, and set the glass down so heavily that the sound of it shocked even him. “Listen, Frederick, this is very important to me. I absolutely have to know.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“What’s dangerous?”
“Everything!”
Albert thought for a moment. “And what if we keep an eye out for each other? I take care of you, and you take care of me. Wouldn’t that be better? Wouldn’t that be less dangerous?”
Fred looked thoughtfully at the gold.
“The two of us on a quest for gold,” said Albert, sensing that this was his chance. “That would certainly be something.”
“It’s dangerous,” Fred softly repeated.
“Would it be a long trip?” asked Albert.
Fred wobbled his head. “It’s deep.”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s a long way below us.”
“Well, that much I understood.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Because … forget it,” said Albert. His gaze fell on the HA scratched into the kitchen window, and he fought down the urgent desire to hurl something through it. Trying to hold a conversation with Fred, one that actually amounted to anything, was the most terrible, Sisyphean labor he knew.
He was about to flee the kitchen, in order to smoke a cigarette somewhere in secret, when Fred said, “You’ll have to dress yourself really well, though.”
Albert stood still. “Does that mean you’re actually going to show me?”
“It’s going to be soaking wet,” warned Fred. “From below and above!”
Albert nearly embraced Fred in relief, but held himself back, examining him. As always, Fred’s face wore an expression of childishly self-important seriousness, yet if Albert wasn’t mistaken, he could detect behind it an air of genuine worry, one so perturbing that he quickly looked away, and said, “Let’s go.”
PART II. Siblings, 1912–1924
The Sacrificial Festival
On a hot August night at the height of the summer of 1912, the village of Segendorf celebrated its three-hundred eighty-sixth Sacrificial Festival.
Three hundred and eighty-seven years earlier, a wandering monk, expelled from his monastery, had paused for a rest at the highest point of the very same hill. He’d dozed off in the shade of a little grove of spruce trees. God had appeared to the monk in his dream, demanding he prove his devotion to his creator by sacrificing his Most Beloved Possession. A princely reward awaited him. So it happened that, after awakening, the desperate monk, banished to this thinly populated region of the alpine foothills, approached the rocky bluff on the south side of the hill, drew out a bronze chalice (which he’d purloined from his former monastery as compensation, so to speak, for his exile), and, after a brief hesitation, allowed it to tumble down into the abyss. He waited. For a sign. Waited. And doubted. Then, at last, a delicate, tinny pling came echoing up over the lip of the cliff. There should have been a plong, bronze against stone, a plong, absolutely — but instead, there followed a pling-pling. It was mocking him, that pling-pling, calling: Come look for me! Come on down! Come to me! And the monk heeded its call.
Down below, gleaming metal ran like a jagged scar through the stone. The monk caressed every inch of it, as if he were kissing the Holy Father’s Piscatory Ring. The newly uncovered vein of gold considerably eased his ascent from destitute drifter to bishop. He consecrated the spot, calling it Segenhügel, the Blessed Hill; and soon, thanks to the exploitation of its gold deposits, the village of Segendorf sprang up nearby. Before it had time to develop into a thriving community, however, Segendorf began to wither. On the one hand, the mine petered out within months; on the other, the landscape itself significantly contributed to the settlement’s ruin. Hereabouts there was little but fields scattered with scarlet corn poppies; the Moorbach, a piddling tributary that wound its way around the Segenhügel; lean game; and hostile grasses that sliced at your hands if you tried to pluck them. When the villagers decamped, the old, the sick, and the idiotic were left behind. Along with the tradition. At first the remaining Segendorfers celebrated the discovery of the gold mine each summer by flinging their Most Beloved Possessions over the edge of the cliff. But as too many animal cadavers had begun to pile up at the foot of the hill, contaminating the drinking water, they decided instead to kindle a sacrificial bonfire each year on the market square, so as to celebrate the ritual in a more civilized fashion.
Back then the population of Segendorf numbered no more than three hundred souls. Of course, there were barns and cowsheds and cesspits, the cobbler right next to the general store, the butcher just behind, and the smithy not much farther off; of course, Segendorf had a moor to the east and the west, and the sheer rock walls of the Alps to the south, and to the north, the sole road that led into the village (and ended there as well); and, of course, just beyond the town limits there was Wolf Hill, atop which an oak tree spread its limbs, and beneath which local women were knocked up every year when spring rolled around. But for anyone who took the map as gospel, Segendorf didn’t exist at all. The place had barely changed since its founding. Light was still generated with sulfur matchsticks, candles, or torches, the people still scrubbed their clothes in the Moorbach, and the next parish was a ten-day march away. The residents first heard about World War I only after it had been lost.
In 1912 all the villagers gathered in the market square, as they did every year, formed a spiraling line, and, one by one, hurled something dear to their hearts onto the flaming pyre of high-piled brushwood. The flames swallowed them noisily, rewarding those assembled with warmth and light.
That same night, in the granary — Segendorf’s largest structure, after the church — a secret was conceived. Among sacks bursting with oats, wheat, poppy seeds, and barley, sacks that in the gloom resembled limbless torsos, fourteen-year-old Josfer Habom explored the body of his sister, Jasfe, with his lips; and although both felt unbearably hot, they trembled as if there were a killing frost.
It was said that no Segendorfer could compete with my parents’ beauty. So tantalizing was Jasfe’s glance, so striking Josfer’s dimpled chin, that the pair were never invited to weddings, lest the bride or groom begin to have second thoughts about the business at hand.