The path ends at a railway line. The other side of the line is the soccer field. The humming of the mower blows across, and the damp air carries the smell of freshly mown grass. Anja sits down on the field and watches the passing trains. She lies down and shuts her eyes. She has one more hour before she has to pick up the kids from school.
SHE IS STANDING in front of a staircase that leads straight up. She runs up it, encounters a heavy, battered steel door. She hurls herself against it, the door swings open, and she is standing in a back courtyard. Quickly, but without haste, she walks on. She has never been here before, but it feels familiar, she doesn’t hesitate for a moment. The hunter is close behind her, she doesn’t turn around, but she can feel his presence, his nearness. It’s early in the morning, there’s no one out. Only now does it dawn on Anja that she can’t hear anything, not a sound, it’s as though she were deaf. The road leads through a tangle of alleyways. Eventually Anja comes out on a large square. She walks to the middle of it, then stops and looks around. At this point she sees the hunter. He has emerged from one of the alleys and is standing quite still. Slowly he takes his rifle down from his shoulder, goes down on one knee, and takes aim. His face is rigid with concentration, his eyes expressionless. Even though they must be twenty yards apart, Anja can see his finger slowly curling round the trigger, and then the flash of flame in the muzzle, and at the same instant she feels a great exquisite pain in her breast and a warm dribble of blood—it feels a bit as though she has stepped into a hot bath. Then she is lying on the ground, and the hunter is kneeling at her side. He strokes the hair back from her brow. There are tears in his eyes. He makes to speak, but she shakes her head and smiles. It’s all right.
Ice Moon
IT WASN’T UNTIL I locked my bicycle that I registered there was something different from usual. I walked back to the entrance of the industrial park and saw the lowered blinds in the porter’s lodge. With the annual Christmas whirl, I had forgotten that Biefer and Sandoz were both retiring at the end of the year. A month before, someone had organized a collection to buy them each a retirement present. I had contributed, signed a couple of cards, and then not given the matter any more thought. Now I felt sorry I hadn’t said good-bye to them.
On the glass door of the little porter’s house was a map of the premises. Below it was a list of numbers in case of emergency: fire, police, ambulance, and a number for the administration. In a transparent document wallet next to that was a letter from the administrator. He wrote to wish all the tenants a happy holiday, with many happy returns for the New Year. The letter was decorated with an illustration of a fir twig and a candle.
Time was, hundreds of people had worked in the factory, but after production and development had been contracted out abroad, the industrial park emptied, until there were only the two porters left. The manufacturing company had transformed itself into a shell, and moved into offices near the station. The old brick buildings on the lakeshore were left deserted for a while, and then rented out piecemeal. Artists, graphic designers, and architects were now working in the labs. An ex-employee opened a little bar in the weighing room, where we sometimes met at lunchtime, for coffee or a sandwich. A violin maker and a furniture maker set up their workshops in the old production halls. A couple of start-ups that no one knew what they did had leased space. There were rooms that people moved into and then vacated almost immediately.
The lakeside location was nothing short of spectacular, and every couple of months the newspapers would run stories about ambitious redevelopment plans for luxury apartments or a casino or a shopping center. But the necessary investors never came through. We were all on short-term leases, which were regularly extended each time one of these projects went down the tubes. Sometimes the administrator would show up with a bunch of men in dark suits. We’d see them standing around outside, and with sweeping gestures tear down the buildings and run up new ones. Whichever porter happened to be on duty followed them at a distance across the site, and only stepped up when there was a door that needed unlocking. To begin with, these tours had given rise to wild, panicky rumors and speculations, but by now no one seemed to think anything would ever change.
When I got to the office in the morning, one of the porters was always there. Biefer generally sat in the lodge—which was glazed on three sides—smoking his pipe and reading the paper. Sandoz preferred to stand outside—even when it was well below freezing—with his hands in his coat pockets.
Earlier, they had both delivered the mail, but since we now all had mail boxes, all they did was take in occasional parcels or tell the bicycle messengers where our studios were. They took down the numbers of illegally parked cars, and sometimes you could see one or the other of them walking around the site with a huge bunch of keys in one hand and a pointed stick in the other, to scrape the litter away from the disused rails. Mostly, though, they would be at the main entrance, which was now always open, quietly overseeing the comings and goings on the site.
Biefer and Sandoz were never there together. There was a shift change at noon, and they seemed to be at pains never to meet. In the beginning, I couldn’t tell them apart, even though they could hardly have been more different. It was only superficially that there were similarities, both of them being short and squat and thinning on top. They wore blue coveralls, and in bad weather Sandoz added a black coat and a leather hat. He came from the French part of Switzerland, and—even though he’d been working here for over thirty years—spoke in heavily accented German. He was a moody fellow, there were days when he’d chatter away, and others when he’d barely get a word out, and would act as though he’d never seen you before when you said hello. Biefer, by contrast, was a local and almost exaggeratedly friendly. Whenever I ran into him, he would ask about my children, whom he’d seen once or twice, no more. We would talk about the weather and football and communal politics—not often about himself or his family. Biefer occasionally referred to his wife, but only once did he tell me about his two sons, who were both living abroad.
One cold foggy morning, maybe two months ago, Biefer stopped me. From a distance I could make out a fuzzy outline beside the porter’s lodge, and I assumed it was Sandoz. When I was a lot closer, I saw it was actually Biefer. I waved to him, but he held up his hand like a traffic policeman. I pulled over in front of him, and he asked me if I could help him with something. I asked what it was about. Not here, he said, oddly conspiratorial, and turned around.
I had never seen inside the porter’s lodge. In spite of the large windows that seemed to bulge outward, the room was cozy enough. A small oil stove produced a dry heat, and there was a sweet smell of pipe smoke. Biefer sat down at his desk and opened a drawer. He pulled out a worn-looking folder and placed it, closed, in front of himself. Then he got up and brought, not asking, two cups of watery coffee. He gave one to me, and pointed to a plate with cake on his desk.
Gingerbread, he said. If you like that kind of thing.
There was only one chair. Biefer had sat down, and I stood behind him in the shadow, looking down at his rather squat head and the strands of gray hair between which one could see plenty of pinkish scalp. He filled his pipe but didn’t light it. He didn’t seem to know where to begin. He made a couple of false starts, got tangled up, coughed. Perhaps he was distracted by having to wave to people who were arriving on the site. He said he had once upon a time been a baker, but was forced to switch jobs because he developed an allergy to flour. He had always enjoyed travel, whereas sport held no interest for him. Except for soccer, that is. He said he had married young, which had been the way, back then. He didn’t regret anything. He said that several times. He didn’t regret anything.