THE MÉTROPOLE IS only a short walk from the bus terminal on Station Square. It’s cold, too cold to snow even, though yesterday’s clouds have left a new blanket of white – turned slush turned ice, not exactly inviting. Celia hurries along the discreetly lit façade of Casino Mall. She dodges a few late-night shoppers with bulky Migros bags, then a straggle of young soldiers in uniform who have emerged reeling from the restaurant-bar up ahead. One of them is standing hugging a dwarf cypress tree by the entrance and, on seeing Celia, lurches heavily towards her, pleading for a ‘Kissie, kissie’. She swerves past him, round the casino into the side street … and straight into the arms of something – a huge lion on its hindlegs. She shrieks. Realising at the same instant it’s not a lion, of course, and apologising, feeling a right fool.
‘S’all right, love. That’s the fun of Carnival,’ the man in the costume growls back at her with a boisterous drunken laugh, tossing his shaggy mane before loping off after a small slinky catwoman whom Celia, in her shock-and-embarrassment, had quite overlooked.
The roars and whoops and firework-bangs drifting down from the town centre begin to make sense now. She’d totally forgotten about the Fasnacht, the annual Carnival.
At the bottom of the Old Town Steps opposite Blumenliebe, her mother’s favourite florist’s, Celia pauses for a moment. Over to her left, enclosed by a wall with two ornamental corner turrets at street level, is a terraced rose garden that sweeps down the incline in four wide segments. The garden used to belong to her grandparents, and she and Lily would come here when they wanted privacy. Celia still feels a tug at her heartstrings every time she passes by. Usually she ignores it but she can’t tonight, not after meeting the man in his lion costume.
The iron railings are freezing to the touch, like tiny sharp teeth they nip into the flesh of her palm as she starts to climb the steps.
The garden games with Lily had been harmless enough initially: tig, skipping, badminton, ‘circus acts’ of juggling and tightrope walking, even some ‘lion taming’ which involved diving through hula hoops and was inspired by the Big Cat Show they’d seen at Plättli Zoo on Cemetery Hill. Later they had devised a course of beauty treatments for animals. Any neighbourhood pets were eligible and dealt with free of charge – but none of them could ever be enticed back, and they soon ran out of clients.
Finally they decided on a bear. A fantasy bear. Fat, hairy, and male. In the guises of Snow White and Rose Red they would play tricks on him, tease him with a stick, roll him to and fro. Then tend to his needs. They’d comb and trim his thick rampant fur, clip his nails, file and paint them; they’d tickle his feet, massage him. They’d imagine him grunting with pleasure, writhing on his lair of fresh-gathered leaves, grass and rose petals, belly up. Smiling, they’d converge over his crotch, palms slick with special depilatory oils …
Celia blows on her blue-chilled hands, rubs them better. Perhaps it was for the very reason the fantasies felt so real that she hadn’t taken Lily’s ‘true stories’ seriously at first, They were all to do with a great old curly bear that kept hanging around her parents’ house, lurking in the bushes and sometimes in the branches of the cherry tree and, on exceptionally dark and windy nights, skulking like a blacker darkness under her bedroom window.
The following year, though, the stories became undeniable reality. One evening as they sat listening to the radio Top Ten in the open archway of their turret, sheltering from a downpour of summer rain, Lily suddenly punched the off-button and announced: ‘Saw him again yesterday, Cel, after my piano lesson. He seemed as tame as a dancing bear so I let him catch up with me under the bridge by the canal.’ She giggled and leant forward to pull some wet petals from a cluster of overblown white roses. ‘But then he kissed me, just like that. And I … I kissed him back.’
Celia focused on the rain drip-dropping, through the trellised vines outside and sliding like mercury down the stems of the roses, swelling a little as it slipped over the thorns. The grass blades bent and bounced under its weight.
Lily gestured with the wad of petals, defiantly. ‘I enjoyed kissing him. He’s good at it.’
Celia looked at the strings of silver beads falling all around them.
‘Much better than any of you. And so grown up, even his tongue’s bigger.’ Lily brought the rose petals up to her mouth and nuzzled them, smiling to herself.
That’s when Celia knew. Knew beyond a doubt. She was stunned, numb.
Lily began shredding the rose petals into minute fragments and added, ‘I’m only sorry he hasn’t got a younger brother, Cel. For you. But that wouldn’t work, would it?’ Then she flung out both arms in an embrace, bits of petal whirling round them like confetti, and cried, ‘Oh, what should I do, Cel? What should I do?’
For a long while they sat in their turret, damp and silent, holding each other.
That was almost twenty-five years ago. And now the flower-beds are frozen, the scattered snow on them like chapped skin, with long whitish scars where ice has formed. The garden lies deserted, a scrawny late-winter wilderness of twigs and thorns and empty vines clutching at the walls, concealing no one.
Whatever her advice then, it would have counted for nothing anyway. Walter had made his choice, and that was that.
Celia puts her hands into her pockets, tries to keep her balance on the remaining few Old Town Steps.
* * *
The café is buzzing with life. People are psyching themselves up for the Maskenball at the Festhütte. Celia had no idea the ball was today. Laughter squirts round her, voices somersault and chase each other. Cigarette smoke eddies about the coloured paper festoons, the streamers and lanterns dangling from the ceiling beams. At least she’ll be safe in here. Turbans, headscarves, stetsons, wigs nod and bob, toppling off occasionally to reveal baby-soft ringlets, bald patches or a mildewy fuzz. Safe from memories of the dead. Masks everywhere. Some soldiers, incongruous in their black berets and grey-green uniforms. A mixture of earsplitting Guggenmusik and techno-rock booming from the back room. The perfect exorcism.
She is sitting cramped in the corner – to her right a radiator that makes her back slide with sweat, to her left a plate-glass window and the car park. In front of her is a Cüpli of red Crimean champagne, her third within less than an hour. There’s one solitary chair at her small round table of snowy Carrara marble: hers. The other four have been claimed and carried off in rapid succession by a witch, two pirates and a ghost, with an ‘Is-this-chair-free-please?’ parrot politeness varied only by the degree of stiffness of their plastic grins.
But now that she’s here she might as well enjoy herself. Glancing around, breathing with her mouth half open in expectation, Celia attracts the attention of a young woman decked out exclusively in gold – gold-spangled hair, gold-painted face, shoulders, arms and legs, gold lamé dress, gold-lacquered hand-bag and court shoes – who’s just detached herself from a not very suave-looking 007. The Golden Girl stares over quite openly, shamelessly, then winks and blows a kiss from a golden palm.
Celia twists away at once. The woman has reminded her of Angelina, the apprentice at the office. She’ll be around here somewhere. Celia can almost picture her: waistcoated to bursting point, with a monocle and stick-on beard, her long hair coiled inside the crown of a straw hat – done up as a dandy to mislead her various boyfriends.
Celia’s thumb and forefinger have begun to glide up and down the delicately fluted champagne glass. Up and down. This is the first time in months she’s gone out for the night. She takes a lingering sip, letting the champagne prickle the roof of her mouth. Then she lays her cheek against the window pane and closes her eyes.
When she opens them again, a few heartbeats later, there’s Henry, weaving his way through the cars parked outside. Handsome Henry, the courier – as if she’d dreamt him up. She’s sure it’s him, despite the monk’s habit. No one else moves like that, sluggish yet springy. She raises her hand in a wave. But already he’s been captured by a group of emancipated squaws, trussed up in their streamers. In the days before Angelina started spicing up work at the office, Celia had a bit of a soft spot for Henry. Just motherly feelings, of course. He’s too young for her, early thirties at most. And he’s got a wife and kid. Briefly Celia touches her cheek; the skin has gone all clammy where it rested against the window.
The noise level is rising. She’ll have to stand up soon to keep herself from drowning – unlike the group of pirates at the next table, who’re happily afloat by now. They slap each other’s shoulders, bang fists, practise sea shanties, smoke cigarettes and gurgle beer straight from the bottle, tilting up their masks to disclose tidemarks of soreness along their jaws, nostrils dark and weedy as the insides of dead razor-shells and, in one case, a seal’s moustache. Not a pleasant sight.
Celia turns away too hastily and almost knocks her glass over. Raking her fingers through her hair, smoothing it down her face and shoulders, she makes a show of gazing out of the window. But doesn’t get beyond a rather intriguing reflection further along: a buxom gypsy girl is adjusting her suspenders, seemingly oblivious of the dark shadow with horns and Tyrolean hat that’s watching her, leaning right into her cleavage. Then, just as a second shadow with even bigger horns joins the first, she whips a fistful of confetti from under her skirts and, in a swirl of multi-coloured snow, pulls down the front of her top.
‘A pair of real devils, no?’ she shouts loudly.
From behind her curtain of hair Celia sees the pirates shove aside their masks and eyepatches for a better look.
She has another sip of champagne. A few more drinks, she knows, and they’ll all be ready. Ready to be reckless. Once they’re inside the Festhütte and the Carnival Ball is in full-flaring swing, the men will swagger up to the women with moist dribbling lips. They’ll kiss and suck at the naked flesh of their shoulders, lick off the sweat along the collarbones, their tongues like strips of raw meat poking through the holes in their masks. The women will ease back their heads, expose the silky underbellies of their throats. Their fingers will get entangled in the tunics of Roman emperors and Greek philosophers, squashed up against the paunches of grass-skirted cannibals or lured into cowboys’ trouser pockets for a quick grope. Some women, though, will clamp their chins down on their décolletés, push the men away and, lips moist and quivering, walk off in search of other women …
Celia shifts in her chair; it’s a metal imitation of rattan and stylishly uncomfortable. Made for squirming, as it were.
‘So you did come, after all.’ A gravelly voice, subtly familiar.
Celia spins round. Stares.
The mask is arresting in its repulsiveness. Not a face but the absence of it; no lips, nose or cheekbones, just an oval shape coarsely speckled black and white like granite, with mere slits for eyes, nostrils and mouth, too small to give anything away. She can’t tell if it’s a man or a woman; black mittens cover the hands, a black balaclava throat and hair, and the boots, big, black and clumpy, might be oversized. The rest of the outfit consists of an almost jaunty-looking carmine robe with padded shoulders, loose enough to hide even the widest hips, fullest breasts, a weightlifter’s torso and biceps, prosthetic limbs, whatever.
Celia has taken one–two–three–four swallows of her drink but now the glass is empty and her hand flies up to clutch the opal pendant. She doesn’t believe in that old wives’ tale of opals bringing bad luck, does she?
‘Abracadabra,’ the apparition says, flourishing a new Cüpli as if from out of nowhere and placing it in front of her.
Celia jerks aside. The back of her chair clangs against the radiator and a sound escapes from her throat, a panting gasp like she’s being strangled.
‘You don’t recognise me? No?’
For a moment the mask is almost touching her face. Underneath the slits, the eyes flash white; perhaps she only imagines the wriggle of a tiny red snake next to the left iris. There’s a whiff of what seems like the sharp hot dust-smell of stone, the echo of a low menacing laugh, then the stranger begins to back off, whispering, ‘Well, next time, I hope …’ and is gone. Swallowed whole by the cannibals or spirited away by the witches and gypsies, tossed overboard by the pirates, argued into shreds and thin air by the philosophers.
Celia is still clutching the pendant, the leather band taut against her neck. Her mouth is panting open. Was this a threat? A silly prank? Noise and smoke surge round her, engulfing her. Home, sweet, sweet home; even the huddled unfinished silence of her lounge is preferable to this. Then a sudden thought: the decorator – could it have been him? Or that assistant of his, with the sneaky hooded eyes?
The table’s iron base shrieks as she propels herself up out of the chair, snatching the empty glass away from the edge, just. She doesn’t give a damn about the full one – some of the liquid has fizzled over its rim and gathered in a thin red pool. Heavenknows what Granite Mask might have concocted for her.
The Carnival throng is at its most riotous near the door and Celia feels rather conspicuous in her ordinary clothes. Over by the coat rack she glimpses her tree-hugging soldier again, his face smeared with lipstick. Ducking her head, wishing she hadn’t put on that glitter-bright eye shadow, she tries to sidestep the rattles and streamers and false noses, the hot greedy hands.
‘Hey! Where’re you off to, darling?’ A sheik makes a grab at her, his fat red lips all puckered and wet.
Confetti trickles down her neck, sticks to her sweaty back.
‘Going to get changed? Let me help, haha!’
‘Wow-ow-ow!’ an Apache howls, ‘Give us a kiss or –’ and he brandishes his tomahawk, messing up her hair.
Roll tongues shrill past her ears. Then she’s over the threshold and out on to the pavement.
Someone blocks her path. She trembles inside and for an instant can’t see a thing; not Granite Mask again, pleasegod-please. But no, it’s only a harlequin wearing pink-tinted wide-winged glasses.
He pats her on the shoulder in a friendly way. ‘No need to look so scared, lady.’ His huge mulberry mouth stretches into a grin.
Celia is too nervous to give him a smile in return and buttons up her coat instead. Nodding goodbye she strides off briskly – she’s had enough of people for the moment – when the harlequin is at her elbow again. He bows: ‘To escort you through the unruly night.’
‘Oh no, that’s not necessary, thank you. I can take care of myself.’ Celia breaks into a run. Laughter echoes behind her, ricocheting off walls and Carnival decorations. Coming after her. Her heels scrunch up humps of frozen slush and coloured paper. Along the short promenade of chestnut trees, half-tripping over the kerb … into a lane of shuttered windows, rigid-hanging flags and pennants, and out again … skidding across the red cobbles of the pedestrian precinct close to Eric’s, the bunting overhead like the strung-up rags of madmen … almost smashing into the potted shrub by the. Confiserie … past more soldiers, more masks who whistle after her … down a narrow back alley congested with waste containers … towards the baroque shadows of St Nikolaus’s.
She must have thrown him off; there’s no one behind her now. Halfway round the side of the church she slows to listen. Nothing apart from some indistinct shouts battered by buildings and distance.
On her right a dozen or so steps lead below ground to a pool of blackness bounded by a wooden door and a window whose metal bars gleam feebly in the moonlight. She doesn’t bother to go down to test the handle but moves on – crypts have a nasty habit of trapping not just the dead, she’s heard.
The cobbled path circling the church is mossy and slippery with frost. The black iron railings along the back where the plateau of the Old Town drops steeply towards the former military barracks and Anders Railway Station have a forlorn and insignificant look, as if they’ve shrunk in the cold. At the foot of the tower with its onion dome, pigeon feathers have got stuck to the ice like tiny tattered sails.
There are portals here, set in an elaborate porch. Locked. Of course they are. And anyway, she isn’t the least bit religious. That was one of the sore points in her relationship with her mother, who during the last few years of her active life had taken to attending the Sunday service to say prayers ‘for the Soul of your poor lost father’. Never ‘my poor lost husband’. And never to light a votive candle either – no doubt she thought that too blasphemous under the circumstances, with him having gone missing while he was exploring the Hölloch, Hell Cave, near Lake Lucerne.
Instinctively Celia has retreated to one of the corners behind the church porch. She still can’t muster up any true feelings of sorrow, or pity. It happened so long ago she can hardly remember her father. Better to let him rest in the dripstone peace of his cave forever. She shivers. It’s freezing out here, especially after the body heat of the crowded Métropole.
All at once she starts shaking, flushes hot and cold, hot and cold. That harlequin. The voice had reminded her of someone … As if to jolt her memory, the slabs of stone in the porch wall have begun to sway, pressing into her, then sliding away in a stumble. She tries to steady them with her head, her shoulders. With both hands. The stone feels coarse and sharp and grainy; there’s a silvery glint just above her thumbs, the glint of mica – and she hears herself say ‘Granite Mask?’ in a wondering tone.
Afterwards the questions won’t stop. What if the two had been one and the same person? The diamond-patterned costume concealed under the carmine robe, the greasepaint under the hideous facelessness? Was this how the stranger had managed to vanish without trace?
But why the elaborate disguise? Why pursue her like this? Forgodsake why?
Celia’s hand is at her pendant again, clasping it till the opal seems to throb alive against her skin. Then, breath by breath, she relaxes. Surely she’s overreacting. People enjoy playing games, especially this time of year. No rhyme or reason. She’s just not used to it. And she did have several Cüpli …
It might even have been one of Eric’s more eccentric clients, one of the stone-crazy ones. Saw her sitting there and wanted to test her reaction – the voice had sounded kind of familiar. Celia is convinced that’s all it was: a chance encounter, a coincidence.
A wind has sprung up. It carries the stuttering rush of a train towards her, then the cries of more Carnival-goers, raucous and bone shrill. The crane that juts up into the darkness from among the rooftops, heralding the final stages of the millennium building project at the station, seems to rattle very faintly, like the skeleton of some prehistoric beast. Not enough for them to tunnel into the earth, dislodging tens of thousands of cubic metres for their novelty underground roundabout – they’re striving to fill up the sky as well.
Celia turns away. The shaking isn’t so bad now. In a little while she’ll come out from under the shadows and set off home.
With the window covered up so her bedroom’s pitch-dark, and a mere smell of port left in the tumbler on the night table, Celia is about to drop off. When all of a sudden she has the impression of something hovering above her in the black stillness … something palely phosphorescent … an oval form, purplish and parted across the middle, like a mouth blown up out of all proportion. It seems to be talking to her, only she can’t make out what it is saying, even after the message has been repeated twice. She is fuzzily aware she must be asleep already, and dreaming.
Celia had been nine the winter Lily’s mother and her own went to the Maskenball together. All excited, she’d begged to see the fancy dress beforehand. Had begged and begged, on her knees eventually, in helpless childish supplication.
Her mother had laughed, brushed off her lilac linen suit where Celia’s head had left a crease and possibly a hair or two, and said, ‘Nonsense, dear. You’re too young for this sort of thing. I’ve promised Margaret to do her face and I’ll get changed there. It’s all arranged. Now would you please be a good girl and let me get ready? Have something to eat if you’re hungry.’ And she went into the Beauty Room to pack her vanity case while Celia looked on from the corridor.
A little later Walter’s door opened. ‘Have fun, both of you,’ he called out. ‘I’m off to a tree-house party.’ His blue sleeping bag rolled under one arm, he fastened some straps on his rucksack which was crammed with Coke bottles, Bürli rolls, Cervelat sausages and a carbide lamp from his potholing days with their father (Celia had done a little snooping earlier, when Walter was in the bathroom washing his curls).
‘Oh, a party,’ their mother mimicked, emerging from the Beauty Room. She sauntered right up to him, reached out a hand, ‘No need for this then, is there?’ and tried pulling the sleeping bag away from him.
‘Christ, Gabrielle, it’s damn cold out. Trees don’t have central heating, you know.’ He straightened up, flung on his fleece-lined leather jacket and walked out, banging the door.
Celia glanced at her mother furtively. At only fourteen Walter seemed so much more grown up than herself. His behaviour had awakened a vague memory in her of a series of doors slamming shut like a line of dominoes toppling over – her parents’ bedroom door, the kitchen door, their front door, the cellar door, the garage door, the car doors – and her father driving off with Walter and a whole bootful of provisions and caving equipment. Exactly like then her mother now stood glowering into space, ignoring Celia, who’d sidled up to her and was doing her best to be nice and make amends by default. Walter had won a minor victory – from that day on, the blue sleeping bag travelled to and from the tree house with him unchallenged.
Having realised there was no hope of ever being shown her mother’s fancy dress, Celia decided on action.
Lily was spending the night because her father was away somewhere with the chamber orchestra he conducted, and old Frau Gehrig had been asked to keep an eye on them. Frau Geriatric, as they’d nicknamed her, playing the syllables round their mouths like pinballs, was easily duped.
By bicycle it wasn’t too far to the casino where the ball was held in those days. The streets were dry, most of the snow having melted during the week. They raced each other over the level crossing just as the barriers were coming down, then put the bicycles into the stand at the station. There was no Casino Mall yet, no late-night shopping, and the train passengers had soon dispersed. Out of sight from the casino’s main entrance they found a ground-floor window which was slightly ajar and conveniently fringed by shrubbery. A few lumps of snow crunched under their boots as they hunkered down. Heavy plum-coloured curtains were drawn across a small recess, almost joining in the middle. Close to, Johnny’s Carnival Band sounded fast and brash but slipshod somehow, as if all those feet they could hear stamping, tripping, shuffling and clattering about were treading the music to bits. There were giggles, shrapnels of laughter. The air wafting through was warm and clotted with smoke, alcohol fumes, scents and sweat.
Lily was freezing, and getting impatient; they needed a larger gap to see anything really. She nudged Celia and pointed to a slash of light from a window further up to their left. ‘Let’s try that one.’
They were about to move when an arm appeared between the curtains. The leafless thicket of twigs thrashed their faces like a Santa Claus birch rod, and ice crystals rained down on them. With bated breath they cowered in chandelier brightness. Then the curtains flapped once more and they were back in the soft plum-coloured dark.
Though not quite. There was a shadowy glow now from above: someone veiled in white layers of chiffon was leaning against the window. Pretending to be a ghost – at least that’s what Celia assumed at the time. She shrugged at Lily, who’d put a gloved finger to her lips and was gesturing with her other hand. Slowly, stealthily they hoisted themselves up.
A woman. The Carnival ghost was a woman. She had her back to them and was gripping the sill. Her face – or the little of it that wasn’t obscured by a half-mask – shimmered like mother-of-pearl.
Abruptly, as if she’d been waiting for their arrival before she could begin, the ghost woman started to moan, slipping into her role free and easy. Small low moans to spook people, drive them away. Her head had fallen lolling against her shoulder in an uncanny imitation of death. Just as it should be, Celia told herself. But her spine was tingling – whether with cold or fear or disgust or something else entirely she couldn’t have said. Then Lily beckoned and smiled in that loose lazy way she had, smiling and beckoning until Celia crept nearer, bent forward beside her.
The woman wasn’t alone. Certainly wasn’t interested in them. Someone three-quarters invisible was kneeling on the floor in front of her. Someone in black knife-edge trousers and narrow shoes with unworn soles was hiding under the filmy whiteness of her dress. And the fabric seemed to be shifting and billowing and dancing to the music all by itself.
Several days later Celia had thrown out some bubble-gum wrappers by mistake, forgetting to peel off the collectable pictures she’d meant to swap at school, and ended up having to sift through the rubbish. Instead of the wrappers, she discovered a mysterious-looking little ceramic pot. It was squarish and matt black, with a silvery lid and silvery writing that curled like a ribbon all round, saying: LOVEly LUSTre: Shine – at your Own Peril.
The entry under ‘peril’ in the dictionary warned: ‘serious danger’. But Celia still daubed some of the leftover cream on her hands. And it was only when she saw the skin turn as rainbow silky as the inside of a seashell that she finally let the sob rip out of her. The sob she’d been holding in for days now, stifled to a mere whimper. Seeing that seashell gleam on her own skin, she couldn’t deceive herself any longer. Yes, she had recognised the woman in the plum-curtained window recess. Had recognised her from the start. Despite the half-mask, the veil and the make-up. As for the person under the dress, well, it didn’t matter who it was. It could have been anyone, absolutely anyone.