He had half promised. Anything to prevent her from going on about how they ought to get together again. They had been living apart for almost three years now, and if there was 5 5
one thing in this life that he didn’t regret, it was the separation from Renate.
Maybe that was sufficient reason to claim that their marriage hadn’t been such a bad thing after all, it suddenly struck him. As a means to an end, that is.
Depressive people should be wary of one another, Reinhart had announced on some occasion or other. The sum often becomes greater than the parts. Much greater.
Then there was Mahler. No sooner had he put the phone down after the first call than he had the old poet on the line.
He must have let slip something about what was in store for him at the club, of course. Presumably while playing chess last Saturday, or the Saturday before. In any case, it was a surprise. Mahler was not exactly a close friend-whatever that means-but it could be that there was more to their compan-ionship in the smoke-filled vaults than he had imagined. Or dared to imagine. He hadn’t thought very deeply about it, needless to say, but the call was a genuine surprise.
“I suppose you’ll have to miss a few matches,” he said.
Mahler, that is.
“I’ll soon be back,” Van Veeteren had countered. “Nothing boosts your potency better than a few weeks’ abstinence.”
And Mahler had laughed in that deep voice of his and wished him the best of luck.
Last of all, Jess, of course.
She gave him a big daughterly hug over the miles, but promised to visit him in a few days with grapes, chocolate and grandchildren.
“Not on your life,” he protested. “Drag the kids a couple of hundred miles to gape at a doddery old bastard? I’d frighten the life out of them!”
“Balderdash,” said Jess. “I’ll treat them to an ice cream afterward and they’ll get over it. I know you’re frightened to death of this operation even if you flatly deny it when anybody says so.”
“I flatly deny it,” said Van Veeteren.
She laughed, just like Mahler had done, and then he’d spoken to two three-year-olds in his schoolboy French, and they also threatened to come and gape at him shortly. If he’d understood them rightly. And they seemed to know all about it, he had to admit.
“You’ll get an injection; then you’ll fall asleep,” said one of them.
“They put the dead bodies in the basement,” added the other.
When he had survived that call, it was high time to set off.
He left a key with Mrs. Grambowska, two floors down, as usual, and tonight even this white-haired, faithful old servant seemed to exude a strange sort of glow full of sympathy and reconciliation. She took his hand and stroked it tenderly, a ges-ture the likes of which he had never seen from her in all the years he had known her.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Take care.”
I’ll disappoint them all if I pull through this, he thought as he got into the taxi. Not a bad tip to send him on his way, in fact. Take care! When he was lying on the table, drugged and carved up, he should avoid getting carried away and doing something silly. He must remember that.
He was aware that the only one who hadn’t been in touch was Erich, but of course it was possible that he’d tried earlier in the afternoon. The match with Munster and the visit to Adenaar’s had taken a lot of time, and he’d been at home for only a couple of hours or so. No doubt there were restric-5 7
tions even on such things as telephone calls when you were in prison.
There were two beds in the pale yellow room that the nurse ushered him into, but the other one was empty and so he was able to lie alone and think his thoughts without distraction.
And they were many and varied. And sufficiently urgent to keep sleep at bay. He used the phone calls to grope his way back through time: It was not a mapped out journey, but his thoughts dragged him along in their wake and before long he had started to remember all the pains and delights his life had afforded him, and he tried to understand what had made him what he had become, and what he was. . If he could be excused such an infantile way of putting it. But in any case, the time seemed to be ripe for reflection; like writing his own epi-taph, it struck him-his own obituary, written in advance, with authentic facts. Or questions.
From memory, not in.
Ex memoriam.
Who am I? Who have I been?
Needless to say, no answers came to him, apart from a realization that quite a lot seemed to have followed a pattern.
Piloted him in the same inexorable direction in some mysterious way.
His father: that deeply tragic figure (but children are blind to great tragedies, of course), who had such a significant influ-ence on him. Unswervingly and inexorably he had inculcated into his son a certainty that we can never expect the least favor from life. Nothing is permanent; all is transient, arbitrary, coincidental and obscure.
Well, something like that, if he’d understood his father rightly.
His marriage: twenty-five years with Renate. To be sure, it had produced two children and that was the important out-come. One of them was in prison and likely to continue along that path; but there again, Jess and the grandchildren were an unexpectedly healthy branch on the old, sickly tree. There was no denying that.
They put the dead bodies in the basement!
His job: If nothing else had pointed in that direction, thirty-five years of Sisyphean labor in the shady side of life and society must have presented him with the occasional indication that something positive can be achieved.
Yes, there was after all a trace of a pattern.
He thrust his hand down under the stiff blanket and fingered his stomach. There. . Somewhere around there is where it was, to the right of his navel, if he had understood it rightly. That was where they were going to cut into him.
He squeezed tentatively. Suddenly felt hungry, as if he had been pressing a button. He had been forbidden to eat anything after six p.m., and it struck him that in fact he hadn’t eaten since twelve. At this very moment his intestine was doubtless locked in a vain struggle to suck the last drop of nutrition from the beer he had drunk at Adenaar’s. . He tried to conjure up the process in his mind’s eye, but the images that shim-mered into view were blurred and abstract, way beyond the limits of comprehension.
It must have been at some point in this flickering sequence of incomprehensible images that he lost consciousness. No doubt the dim film show emanating from his intestines lasted for a while longer, but soon things started to become clearer.
All at once the images sharpened. The stage was well lit and crystal clear. The operating theater peopled with mysterious figures in green, flitting around without a sound, their concentration hypnotic in its intensity. Only the faint, shrill clang of sharp instruments being whetted or dropped into 5 9
metal dishes occasionally disturbed the dense, conspiratorial silence.
He lay there, naked and exposed on the cold marble table, and it struck him that it was all over. This wasn’t an operation.
This was taking place in the familiar and rather chilly autopsy theater at the Forensic Institute where he’d watched Meusse and his colleagues at work many a time.
He approached the table and the group of enthusiastically cutting and carving figures, and it occurred to him that he couldn’t be the one lying there, that it must be some other poor, unfortunate and totally unknown soul. But there again, maybe not so unknown. . There was something familiar about that headless body. It didn’t seem to have any hands either, and no feet, and when he finally managed to force his way past Meusse and that pale, fat assistant whose name he could never remember, it dawned on him that it wasn’t a table they were working at, but a piece of very ordinary woodland, a ditch in fact; and what they were busy with was not an operation or an autopsy-they had just rolled up the body in a big, dirty piece of carpet and were hurrying to force it down into the overgrown ditch where it belonged. Where everything belonged. Now and forevermore.