So Giuliana had noticed changes in him. Sure, it was possible.
Everybody did the denial thing, and he’d be the first to admit it. But somehow decided it was better to wait until their holiday to have a “talk”? Well for the love of Jesus, as Gebhart might say in pious, controlled exasperation. So she had noticed something, changes he had not. Well why hadn’t she said something earlier? With the running jokes about the insensitive males, and womanly intuition, or inspiration or whatever they wanted to call it? She had given up, was why, she held out no hope. Was that fair?
He tried again and the key turned. He loaded in the beer and the cake and the newspapers and slammed the hatch shut. What had he done so wrong anyway? Before he knew it, Felix had reclined his seat and was reaching over the back seat to get at the beer. He gave the parked cars a quick once-over, opened one with the penknife he kept in the glove compartment, and took a long, long draught of warm beer. It was just fine. He held it down on the floor as a shopper pushed a trolley close by.
On his second, shorter drink from the bottle, he saw it was snobbery, Giuliana’s thing that had come out of nowhere tonight.
Or a day late, he had learned. She didn’t want her boyfriend being a cop; she wanted the fun-loving-student-headed-for-respectability back, the one she had started with two years ago. And maybe she was right. She had graduated and was teaching already. He had worn out some shoes and lost brain cells drifting around Europe and working for the year. Pretty simple decision for her then, no?
With the bottle emptying on his fifth or sixth sip, it was all coming together. It was like one of the accordions that always showed up at a Maifest outside the church walls in St. Kristoff, when the beer started to flow finally, but the wrong notes, or no notes at all, were coming out of it. He shook the bottle to be sure it was really empty. So fast? He slid it under the seat, and wondered if this was how going mad actually started. Yes, maybe this was what if felt like to go over the edge. He stared at the top of the steering wheel, a gassy burp escaping between his lips and the giddiness starting in his head. He’d make it, he knew, up to St. Kristoff and his grandparents’ place. The guilt at drinking one bottle of beer here in a car park wouldn’t cripple him.
Parts of the steering wheel were worn smooth. He ran his hand along from axle to axle. Giuliana was right.
He ran his fingers around the whole wheel now, and felt the parts that had received little wear. His father had driven this car as little as possible: it dies on the hills, he had said? Yes. And, you’d nearly have to get out and push it up to the village, was another.
He had shut things out. So? Couldn’t she understand that he’d had to shut things out? Hadn’t he even told her once, a year afterwards, that he couldn’t stop thinking what his father’s last moments had been like, maybe that second or two it was still in the air, spiralling down to the rocks? Maybe it had all just brought out something maternal in her, or a pity, and he had been too dumb to spot it growing, until now, even she knew it wasn’t enough to get over what he had become.
The scent of the freesias was winning out over his beery breath.
He remembered what the woman wrapping them had said. Any other day it might have been funny.
“Your liebchen will love these,” she had told him in accented German she had not grown up with. “After freesias comes diamonds, the engagement. Ever heard that?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
Berndt, the Nagls’ ancient Weimaraner, was neither so blind nor deaf that he did not know Felix. Little enough of the dog could wag now. He did not try to get into the car when Felix opened the door, but was content to stand there and receive attentions. The lumps on the joints of his hind legs looked bigger than Felix remembered. Berndt didn’t push for more pats when Felix stopped.
There was a smell of fresh paint coming from the house. The windows were still open. Felix gathered the straps of his sports bag tighter, anxious to avoid crushing the flowers he was trying to hold aside from the straps, or the stuff from the supermarket. The dog moved on slowly and crookedly to the door without him, and then turned with a look of short-sighted curiosity and an awkward shrug of sorts.
Felix took in the deep overhanging eaves and the window boxes, and the stacked wood that ran in a line back up the vegetable garden toward the orchard. Behind the washing stirring slowly on the clothesline were the hills that lay between here and the highlands of the Teichalm.
Oma Nagl’s mania for washing clothes remained as strong as ever. She particularly liked to whack carpets and rugs, and heartily too, and had initiated Felix into the rug-whacker world when he was very small. It had always been so. Other memories eddied back to him now as he closed in on the doorway: Oma Nagl with her own sisters and neighbours in the yard on benches, like some African tribe, peeling and slicing turnips. It didn’t matter if it were gooseberries, apples, potatoes, turnips: she needed to be busy, to be in rhythm. She could as easily have lived the same ways of centuries ago.
In the yard was their old Opel, a vehicle that was rarely seen without a trailer or a roof-rack loaded with something. The need to replace parts only seemed to intensify Opa Nagl’s stubborn attachment to it, and the brand generally. Some years ago, Opa Nagl had made a run at Vienna with it, but had given up when the traffic began to surround him more and more approaching the city.
“That car has been to Vienna,” he would say. “Almost. But it knew when to stop. Better than any of those electronic things they put all over the cars now.”
A cat new to Felix was prowling in the yard, but the stationary fat one, Mitzi, was in her usual spot. She had always looked malignant, perhaps because she so seldom moved but merely glared with that negligent but somehow lethal detachment Felix had always read into her expression.
He saw tools on the ground near the tractor. Opa Nagl stepped out of the shed with a hesitant step, examining something, and looked over at the dog’s slowing antics.
“A senile dog,” he called out. “He won’t even bark. Servus Felix and how are you?”
Felix smiled and laid down his bags. His grandfather’s knuckles seemed to be even more misshapen by the arthritis.
“You look worn out,” said Felix’s opa. “Mein Gott, what the hell kind of shitty life are you leading now?”
It had always been so with Opa Nagl’s language, and Felix’s mother had long tired of trying to explain it. Farm talk, she used to call it, when Felix and Lisi were small. As they grew, she said it was perhaps psychological, or maybe a need to embarrass others.
“Who knows,” said Felix. “But they call it a job.”
Opa Nagl narrowed his glance.
“Hmm. I could guess,” he said, and winked. “A row. But don’t tell me. It’s great you’re here and you’ll get peace and quiet up here, I can tell you that.”
“You should have been a psychiatrist, Opa.”
Felix looked over pieces of the power-take-off assembly that his grandfather had taken apart, and then around the yard.
“Your oma is visiting down in the village. She’ll be along.”
His grandfather let his glasses back down from the top of his head, and with a soft sigh went down on one knee to examine the gearing.
“Only a couple of pigs now, Felix,” he said. “We rent out the fields again.”
“You’ll always have the speck. Nonnegotiable.”
“I wonder,” Opa Nagl grunted. “They’ll have that coming in from Bulgaria or Romania, or China, next. And you know what? It’ll be one tenth of the price, and it’ll taste better. You’ll see.”
“Aber geh weg: get out of here, Opa. You’re talking treason there.”
His grandfather squinted up at him. For a few moments Felix wondered if he had actually annoyed him.