A twelfth was lying on the ground. The rope had snapped.
His legs were numb by the time he hurried back to the truck. He was breathing heavily. The stitch in his side was growing more painful by the second. Now and then he heard himself cry out. His voice sounded hoarse and strange.
*
Jonas got to Kapfenberg late in the afternoon. He still had time, so he drank a coffee in the garden of a café in the main square. He relaxed and stretched his legs, looking around like a visitor checking out his holiday resort. He had passed through Kapfenberg in the train a few times. Apart from that, he hadn’t been there since he was a boy.
He went in search of a gun shop. After walking around fruitlessly for half an hour, he went into a phone booth and consulted the directory. There was a gun shop on his route. He returned to the truck.
The shop catered exclusively for sportsmen. He couldn’t see a pump-action, and there weren’t even any ordinary small-bore shotguns on display. On the other hand, he couldn’t complain of the selection of sporting rifles. He helped himself to a Steyr 96 — he seemed to recall reading about its ease of operation somewhere — and filled his pockets with ammunition. Then left the shop in double-quick time. He had to get there before sunset at all costs.
From Krieglach onwards he followed the map. He hadn’t been there for twenty years. Besides, never having driven there himself, he’d paid little attention to the route.
Beyond Krieglach the road began to wind and climb. Just as he began to worry that the truck would be too wide for the steadily narrowing road, he came to an intersection. After that the road widened again.
Jonas had estimated that his destination would come into view after half an hour, but forty minutes went by before he thought he recognised a particular bend in the road. He had a feeling his goal lay just beyond it, and this time he wasn’t mistaken. Almost obscured by the long grass bordering the road was a wooden sign welcoming him to Kanzelstein. The sign was unfamiliar, but not the view that met his eyes when he rounded the long bend. On the left stood the inn run by Herr and Frau Löhneberger, which only attracted customers from the surrounding villages on Sundays. On the right was the holiday house. Between these two buildings the strip of asphalt petered out into a narrow, dusty track that disappeared into the forest. This was as far as you could go, at least by car. Jonas had found it surprising, even as a boy, that a village could consist of only two buildings, the more so since one of them was occupied only at certain times of the year: at Christmas, New Year and Easter, and during the summer.
Where it came from he didn’t know, but the sight of the two lonely buildings filled him with a vague sense of dread. It was as if something was wrong with the place. As if something had been waiting for him and had hidden itself just before he arrived.
That was nonsense, though.
His ears popped. He pinched his nose and breathed out with his lips compressed to equalise the pressure. Kanzelstein was 900 metres above sea level. ‘The healthiest altitude of all,’ his mother had never failed to mention when they got there, ignoring the look of impatience on his father’s face.
Jonas sounded his horn. Once he had satisfied himself that a light flashing in one of the windows of the inn was just the reflection of the sun, he jumped down from the cab. He breathed deeply. The air smelt of forest scents and grass. A pleasant aroma, but fainter than he’d expected.
Parked outside the holiday house was a brightly painted Volkswagen Beetle, and beside it a motorbike. Jonas checked the number plates. The holidaymakers came from Saxony. He peered into the car but could see nothing of importance.
With the rifle under his arm he plodded along the path to the garden gate in front of the holiday house. His heart was beating faster. He couldn’t help reflecting, at every step, how often he’d trodden this path, but as an entirely different person leading an entirely different life. Twenty or more years had gone by. The surrounding fields, the forest looming darkly beyond the house, he’d seen them all as a boy. He remembered the house well. Did the house remember him? He had eaten meals, watched TV and slept within its walls. That lay far in the past, but to him it was all still valid.
The front door wasn’t locked. That came as no surprise to him. The locals never locked their doors for fear of being thought needlessly suspicious. His parents had also observed this convention and given him many an uneasy night as a child.
There were two rooms on the ground floor: a storeroom and the games room. He glanced inside. The ping-pong table was still there. He even remembered the view from the window.
The first floor was approached by a winding, creaking flight of stairs. There Jonas was confronted by five doors. Three led to bedrooms, the fourth to the bathroom, the fifth to the kitchen-cum-living-room. He went into the first bedroom. The bed had not been made, nor had the suitcase on the table been unpacked. It contained clothes, toilet articles and books. The room smelt stuffy. He opened the window and looked back down the road he’d come by.
In the second bedroom, whose window faced the Löhnebergers’ inn, the bed was made up but had not been slept in. An alarm clock was ticking on the rickety bedside table. Startled, Jonas picked it up, but it was a battery-powered model.
He looked around the room once more. The red-and-white-checked bedspread. The faux baroque wooden panelling. The crucifix in the corner. He himself had never slept in this room. It had usually been allocated to Uncle Reinhard and Aunt Lena.
The last and largest bedroom was a regular dormitory. The balcony blinds were lowered. They rose with a familiar rumble when he pulled them up. He looked at the décor. The room resembled a hospital ward. Six single beds stood facing one another in two rows of three. At the foot of each iron bedstead was a bar of the kind a patient’s medical record might have hung from. Jonas tapped the metal with his fingernails. He and his parents had slept in this room several times.
He went out onto the balcony and rested his hands on the balustrade. The wood beneath his fingers was warm. In many places it was encrusted with blobs of bird shit the rain had failed to wash off.
The forest stretched away below him. Mountains and hills, wooded slopes and alpine pastures were visible on the skyline. He remembered this view well. This was where his father had sat in a deck chair with his crossword puzzle, and where he himself had hidden from his mother when she wanted to show him something in the garden. They both stood firm to begin with, but his father had sent him downstairs when her voice became steadily shriller.
From the living room he looked out at the garden. The redcurrant bushes were still there. The vine arbour, the benches, the crude wooden table on which they’d played cards, the garden fence, the fruit trees, the rabbit hutch, all were still there. The grass needed cutting and the fence needed repairing, but in other respects the garden was in reasonable condition.
The view triggered a memory. He had dreamt of this garden some years ago. Here among the apple trees he’d seen a man-sized badger cavorting on two legs. The creature, whose face looked like Grandpa Petz from the children’s TV programme, came prancing across the garden in a series of strangely rhythmical movements. It bobbed up and down instead of swaying to and fro. After a while, Jonas joined in. He was frightened of the huge beast, which was twice his size, but it showed no hostility towards him. They had danced together, and he’d felt good.
Having carried his gear into the room whose bed had been slept in, he stripped off the duvet cover and sheet and fetched some clean ones from the biggest bedroom. By the time he’d finished he had to turn on the light. He was growing jittery.