It was Speckbauer who spoke first.
“Does that help, at all?”
”A little, I suppose.”
“‘Pull a thread, you get a coat.’ So it sort of pains me to admit that I am not on top of this. It’s embarrassing. And it makes me angry, as you can see. You might ask why.”
“Okay. Why?”
“Because we, the great experts, are useless here. It’s like starting from scratch.”
“Oh this is where I come in,” said Felix. “You think because I grew up around here that this gives you some kind of a head start?
Better yet, get a probationer, a guy will be too awed to ask questions, a guy who’ll do what he’s told?”
Speckbauer continued to frown at the table. It was as if he was trying to absorb a new threat in a game of chess there, one that only he could see.
“I can tell you are impressed,” he said. “But I will finish. Back to the two in the forest hell, it’s always the forest, isn’t it, in the old stories? I know it’s a stupid thing I keep repeating. These two men should not have been there. I have a theory, and I will tell it to you.
These two were trying to conduct business that their bosses would not have known about, and would not have been too happy about.”
“A side deal.”
“You’re getting it. But greed is always greed. It never ends. You can never predict how far it’ll go, how greedy people will get. It is the strangest thing. So these two were not ambushed, let us say, by people outside their normal course of business. They were disposed of ‘taken care of.’ That’s because they did something stupid.
Something against the rules, this gschaftl, this little effort.”
He looked up abruptly from the tabletop.
“Stanzen, as the gangsters call it,” he said. “‘Fired.’ ‘Let go.’”
Morning sunlight was carving its way high up into the woods.
The deeper greens gave way to glowing patches made almost phosphorescent from the sun’s slanting rays.
“These people didn’t belong up here,” Speckbauer went on. “I don’t mean racist crap. I mean they broke some rule. They came up here for someone, or something. Now, you spoke about trust earlier on. Your grandparents are ‘trusting people.’”
“They are you see for yourself. Why bring that up?”
“Trust? Ah, your generation what am I talking about? My generation. Nobody trusts. Look where it got us not so long ago, right? We were poisoned by our own.”
Speckbauer looked around the kitchen.
“You know what I’m talking about?”
“I do,” Felix said, cautiously. “I think.”
“What I am blathering on about here is an open secret. About how everything went to scheisse sixty years ago. So things were bad for years after the war. All this guilt and silence, on top of all the missing men. There was rape. No one talks about that. Fires, murder. Wondering if Stalin was going to pull something. But things picked up, and moved on. Today we are polite members of the EU.
Pretty good, eh? Soon we’ll have our brothers, the Turks. No more Austrian nightmares then. We’ll all sleep soundly.”
Felix said nothing. Shafts of sunlight had broken through the treetops and were tearing into the window now, as steadily as a brightening orange glare.
“Different story here in God’s country, huh. Anybody talk to you about that?”
“No.”
“There’s my point right there, then. You probably never asked either. Let me tell you, in those years you found whatever you could and you did whatever you did to survive. You went back in time, to what worked before. ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell.’ ‘Fall back,’ they say in the army.”
“I don’t see the point of this talk.”
“My point was that this is how humans work under pressure.
They go back to old ways. So when you were short of something or you wanted something, you found the ways that worked. The line between criminality and the law was gone. You knew the wegs and paths of the forest. You knew where you could stay, or rest, or wait.
In fact, if you were a man, one of the lucky ones that survived the Eastern Front or labour camps, you found your way back here. And you soon got the picture. You were on your own. ‘They’ had won.
But you had your bits of farm, maybe an animal or two. And you had your training, didn’t you?”
“You mean army?”
“Naturlich. After a few years soldiering you’d be ten times better at bringing home a rabbit, or a deer.”
“I suppose.”
“By and by, you needed things, and you got things. You swapped, and you bartered, and you shared. And you did without too. But if you weren’t an idiot, you saw how others had done it during the war while you were away getting your arse shot off for your leader. Now you wanted something better than turnips. So, what do you say?”
Felix waited until Speckbauer had finished his stretch and yawn.
“But that was fifty years ago. More. It’s ancient history.”
“Hah,” said Speckbauer. “I won.” He repeated it again, louder for Franzi.“I’ll buy you a beer with my winnings, Franzi.
Puntigamer or Gosser?”
“Yes,” said Franzi. Had he been dozing, standing there by the kachelofen?
Speckbauer turned back to Felix.
“I bet myself five Euro you’d come up with the ‘It’s history’ bit.”
Felix heard footsteps upstairs and the tones of his grandfather resonating down to him through the floorboards. Franzi stood away from the kachelofen and slowly tilted his head up to where a door was opening.
“Ask your opa how they got gasoline then,” said Speckbauer.
“Medicine. Pesticide. Spare parts. Cement. Bullets even, to take down a deer. Or will I ask him?”
“Leave them alone,” said Felix, rising.
“Gruss an alle,” came the greeting from the head of the stairs.
“Hello everyone. I am back, with news of the duchess above. She will join us shortly.”
Speckbauer smiled.
“I’ve got to tell them something,” Felix whispered. “The Gendarmerie-”
“Shut up with that,” Speckbauer snapped. “I told you: we need time.”
Felix’s grandfather called out again. By the squeaks he knew so well, Felix could imagine him pausing halfway on the landing.
“Here we are, Herr Nagl,” Speckbauer called out. His accent and tone had changed instantly again, Felix realized. “The rabbit is skinned and cooking in the pot.”
“Ah a master hunter,” Opa Nagl called out, chuckling. “Quick work, my friends.”
Felix was stunned at how quickly Speckbauer could switch to the friendly son-of-the-soil here again. Felix waved back at the pantomime appearance of his opa peering around the end of the wall from the bottom of the stairs. Speckbauer leaned toward him.
“Before you decide; two things. Listening?”
Felix nodded.
“When did your grandfather leave the Gendarmerie?
Speckbauer whispered.
“Gendarmerie? He wasn’t one.”
“Your Opa Kimmel, I’m talking about, not your opa here.”
“He wasn’t either”
“He certainly was. It lasted nineteen months. They let him walk, too. That’s how strong it was then.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The second question is this: what was your father doing the day he passed?”
THIRTY-FOUR
Later, in the giddy goodwill that filled the kitchen after his grandparents had arrived, Felix’s thoughts dangled, spinning endlessly, only to race up to some precipice where they vanished. Several times in this sunlit kitchen where Oma Nagl bustled about he believed he was dreaming, or in a fever.
Oma was delighted with guests, keen to spoil them with more food and coffee, and even schnapps. Almost flirtatious with Speckbauer, she treated Franzi like a very old man, constantly asking if he wanted more of anything, giving him a routine smile to show he was included in spite of his silence. Felix eyed him occasionally making the slow, minute stretches that seemed to be his routine in all his waking hours.