When I was a child, I spent more time with my head in the clouds than my feet on the ground. My father always told me that. He was the perfect example of a man with his feet on the ground. At the age of eighteen, he had escaped a destiny that was all laid out for him.
For two hundred years, the Salinger family had been born and died in the same village of some two thousand souls, in Mississippi. My grandfather had been a peasant, my great-grandfather had done the same work and so on back to the obscure ancestor who had decided he’d had his fill of Europe and set sail for the New World.
Just like that Salinger two centuries earlier, my father had dreams of something better for himself. He dreamed of the thousand lights of New York City. But he wasn’t the kind to have crazy ideas. He didn’t want to become a Wall Street broker or a Broadway actor.
He had simply heard that in the Big Apple people didn’t have time to make lunch or dinner for themselves, and so it had occurred to him that the best way to wipe the soil of Mississippi off his shoes was to open a hamburger stand and erase the southern drawl from his speech.
With time and sweat, the stand had turned into a little snack bar in Brooklyn, a place where you got a lot of food for not much money, but the accent stuck to him like chewing gum to the soles of the orthopedic shoes his doctor forced him to wear at work.
In 1972, he had met a young German immigrant, my mother; they liked each other, they married, they set up house, and in 1975 I was born, the first and only child in the Salinger family of Red Hook, Brooklyn.
Among the neighbors, there were those who made fun of me. They said I was the son of a redneck, but it didn’t upset me. The nice thing about the United States is that in one way or another we’re all the children or grandchildren of immigrants. The snack bar was a snug little world that kept my father and mother busy fourteen hours a day, and I had a lot of free time to lose myself in my daydreams. Above all, I loved reading and walking around the neighborhood.
At the time, Red Hook was in a bad way. There was heroin everywhere, along with the violence that came with it, and at night even police cars didn’t venture into the harbor area. A little boy who was all skin and bones could be a target for junkies and crazy people in general.
My Mutti (she, too, never lost her German accent, something she often regretted) would beg me to stop my walks. Why couldn’t I stay home and watch TV like all good boys my age? Then she would give me a kiss on my head and rush off to work.
What else could she do?
And anyway, I was very careful, I wasn’t a stupid boy. Curious, yes, but stupid? Never. I read lots and lots of books, for heaven’s sake. Nothing bad could happen to me. I believed that up there, in heaven, there existed a deity that protected book lovers from the ugliness of earthly life. My mother was a Protestant with Marxist tendencies, as she liked to say, my father a Baptist whose only tendency was the as-long-as-there-are-no-priests-bothering-me kind, and the neighbors were Lutherans, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists. There were even a few Catholics.
My idea of heaven was vague and democratic.
So, feeling the hand of the God of readers on my head, I would reassure my Mutti, wait to see her walk out the front door of the red brick apartment block in which I’d been raised, then slip out and resume my wanderings. “This boy wears out more shoes than a team of marathon runners,” my father would mutter whenever my mother informed him that it was time to buy a new pair, brandishing what remained of the last All-Stars purchased. I was obsessed with All-Stars.
Anyway, I liked walking.
I was especially drawn to the older part of Red Hook, the harbor, the grain warehouses. Sigourney Street, Halleck Street, and Columbia, where Puerto Ricans glowered at you, an area that ended in the ocean, like the curled tail of a scorpion.
Or of a hook, of course.
Walking meant imagining. Every corner a mystery, every building an adventure. In my head, everything became as glamorous as in a movie.
Nothing scared me, I had the God of readers on my side, right? Wrong.
I was ten years old, the best age to enjoy freedom without realizing the weight it carries with it. The warm air coming in from the ocean had blown away a lot of the smog and I was walking in the area around Prospect Park, delighting in the rays of the sun. I sat down on a bench, a burrito in one hand and an ice-cold Coke in the other.
I was the master of the world until I heard the noise. A buzzing. Deep, cavernous.
I raised my head to heaven.
I didn’t see any deity intent on reading some novel between the branches of the maple tree above me. I didn’t even see the spring sky. I saw a nest. Ugly, square, and as gnarled as a potato. And dozens of wasps buzzing around it, looking at me. The sensation I felt, when one of them detached itself from what looked like a paper fruit (the image that had come into my mind as soon as I had seen it), came to rest on my hand, and sucked a little of the grease from the burrito, was horrible. That thing that was moving was real, it was bad. And soon it would hurt me.
It would hurt me a lot.
And it did.
Like the stupid boy I was, instead of letting it be, keeping my nerve, waiting for it to finish its lunch and then running off, I started waving my hand and threw myself on the ground. It stung me three times. Twice on the hand and once on the neck. The sting on the neck swelled so much that my Mutti thought she needed to take me to the hospital. It didn’t get to that, but from that day on I stopped believing in the God of readers. I started fearing any insect that happened to be in my vicinity, and the memory of the hate-filled looks of all those wasps comes back into my mind every time I realize I’ve done something stupid.
Like that day in March.
It was the wasps I was thinking about as I opened the heart-shaped box.
* * *
I staggered back, letting out a cry.
No wasps. Only a heap of dust and yellowed photographs. Photographs of broken zombies. The zombies were Markus. Evi. Kurt.
The broken zombies of the Bletterbach.
Pure horror.
Those photographs must have come from the rolls taken by the forensics team at the crime scene. Presumably Werner had stolen them, and not even Max had noticed . . . Or maybe Max knew? The question occurred to me and quickly went away, as the adrenaline rushed into my veins.
Close-ups of gashed flesh. Muscles severed like offal. Amputated limbs lying in the mud. Those pictures were a branding iron plunged into my guts. And yet I couldn’t stop looking at them.
The faces.
The faces assailed me with particular ferocity.
The face of Markus, slashed by the brambles into which he had fallen, with deep furrows that seemed to bear the nail marks of some animal. The terrified expression of someone who knows he is facing death.
The face of Kurt, twisted into an expression that was the quintessence of despair.
Evi.
The headless body thrown amid the knotted roots of a chestnut tree. And the dark mud all around, like a demonic halo.
“Hello, Evi,” I heard myself saying. “I’m sorry for all this,” I sighed. “I haven’t told you this before, but I’m really sorry.”
There were two more objects in the heart-shaped box.
The doll. It was a rag doll, stuffed with cotton. The doll Clara had told me about. The kind that are made at home using old cloths and a lot of patience. It had no face. Maybe the face had been drawn on with a felt-tip pen and time had erased it. The blonde hair was gathered in two plaits. I stroked them. It looked like my daughter.
Then I noticed a detail. It was stained. The doll was wearing a kind of long ballerina’s dress, a white apron in the Tyrolean style. The apron was stained. Big, revolting stains. The color was dark, like tan. I knew instinctively what it was. I let it slip from my hands.
When it fell, it produced no sound.
I was already shuddering, but now I felt nauseous. I rubbed my fingers on my jeans, trying to rid myself of the sense that I had touched something infected. I started breathing through my mouth, panting like an animal. The other object was something I couldn’t bring myself to touch.
An axe.
The handle was broken into two pieces tied together with frayed string. The edge of the blade shone in the light of the naked bulb hanging over my head. I took off my shirt and used it as a glove to move the axe. I would burn that shirt, I thought. The idea of putting it on again disgusted me as much as the thought of admitting what the stains on the faceless doll were.
At the bottom of the box, packed in under all the rest, was an envelope that must once have been yellow, but which was now the color of a fish’s belly.
I took a deep breath and picked it up. I turned it over in my hands, unable to make even the simple gesture of opening it and looking at the contents. It was light. I took an eternity to make up my mind.
Two photographs, a small rectangle of paper, and a sheet folded in four.
It was then, I think, that I lost all sense of time.
* * *
Once—it was right at the beginning of our relationship but I was already madly in love with her—I took Annelise to see the neighborhood in which I had grown up. I did it with a certain trepidation and only because she insisted.
It was no longer the Red Hook of the ’80s, with junkies in the doorways of the apartment blocks and dealers leaning on the lamp posts smoking, but I was still a little ashamed of those peeling walls and dirty sidewalks.
I showed her the harbor, the warehouses dating back to the nineteenth century, what remained of the bars my mother had forbidden me from entering, and bought her a scorching hot coffee from the Mexican from whom I’d purchased at least half the snacks of my childhood and many of those in my teenage years.
Annelise loved the neighborhood to bits. Just as she loved my Mutti when, that same evening, I took her to the old apartment for dinner.
She had done things in style, my Mutti. When she opened the door to us I noticed she had put on her best skirt. She had even made herself up.
My father was dead by now, killed by a heart attack as he was preparing one of his fantastic hamburgers with onions, and she’d found herself a widow, having to handle both the running of an eatery and the artistic ambitions of a reckless son.
The day I had told her that I had a girlfriend, she’d been unable to contain her joy. Naturally, she wanted to know everything about her. Naturally, I had to bring her to dinner. To introduce her. Was she really so beautiful? Was she really so sensitive? Was she really a good girl? Naturally she would prepare that dinner weeks in advance. And so she had.
Annelise had been more than happy to converse with her in her mother tongue, and it was nice to hear my mother laughing as she hadn’t done in a very long time.
She submitted Annelise to a polite interrogation.
I was fascinated by my beloved’s stories. The Krampus with their whips, the snow-capped peaks of the Dolomites. The refuge at Cles, made entirely of wood, the elementary school with the windows that looked out on vineyards as far as the eye could see, the vacations in Siebenhoch and the excursions in the mountains with Werner, the decision to move back there, to the place where her parents had grown up and where Werner was not only her father, but Werner Mair, the great man who had started Dolomite Mountain Rescue. Christmas with the snow so high as to force them to stay home all day, the friends she went shopping with in Bolzano, and the decision to leave for the United States.
Above all, my Mutti was delighted to hear her talk about the landscapes. She asked her to describe them so many times, I began to feel embarrassed. Maybe she had reached the age when migrants dream of settling again in their country of origin, even though they know that what they want to go back to no longer exists.
Annelise talked about her parents, how they had spoiled her, as the only child of a couple who, because of their age, had given up hope of having children and for that very reason had been especially protective toward her.
She talked about the time her father quarreled with the schoolmistress about a punishment that in his opinion his daughter didn’t deserve (actually she had deserved it, Annelise said, pigeons don’t drop firecrackers on someone’s head, right?), and she went into great detail about all the recipes that her mother had tried to teach her.
“It must have been wonderful to grow up in a place like that, Annelise.”
“I had the most beautiful childhood in the world, Mrs. Salinger.”
And how to contradict her?
The snow, the meadows. The sparkling air. Two loving parents.
Siebenhoch.
A pity it was all lies.
* * *
I didn’t hear him coming. I had lost all sense of time, and maybe not only that. I didn’t hear the car parking in the drive and I didn’t hear his steps coming up the stairs. I felt only his hand grabbing me.
I screamed.
“You,” I said.
I tried to articulate something sensible. Nothing came out.
Werner waited.
He got down on one knee with a moan of pain and grabbed the doll. He blew on it and stroked it. Finally he put it back in the heart-shaped box.
I followed each of his gestures.
He took the two photographs out of my hands. He did so gently, without looking me in the eyes, wiped them on the sweater he was wearing and put them back in the envelope. Then he also put back the two pieces of yellowed paper, the large one and the small one.
He laid the envelope, the blade of the axe, and the broken handle in the heart-shaped box. Finally he closed it, took it in his hands and stood up.
“Turn off the lamp when you come down, will you?”
“Where . . . where are you going?” I asked, as a shudder went through my body.
“To the kitchen. We have to talk and this isn’t the most suitable place.”
He disappeared, leaving me alone.
I went down the stairs, clutching the handrail. I was afraid my legs wouldn’t support me.
I found him sitting in his usual chair. He had even lit the fire. He motioned to me to sit down. He had put the ashtray on the table, next to two small glasses and a bottle of grappa. A picture of normality. If it hadn’t been for the box in his lap, I would have thought it had all been a hallucination.
The axe. The doll.
The photographs . . .
A figment of my imagination.
“Is that all?” I asked.
Werner seemed at least as surprised by my reaction as I was by his. “Sit down and drink.”
I obeyed.
“I think you have a good few questions, right?”
Once again I was struck by his tone of voice. He didn’t seem agitated or frightened.
It was the usual Werner telling me an old story. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly not all that normality: two glasses of grappa and the fire crackling.
Werner looking at me, his expression unreadable.
He held out the glass to me.
“I need answers, Werner, or as God is my witness, the first thing I’ll do when I walk out that door is call the police.”
He withdrew his hand. He put the glass down on the table and stroked the box. “It isn’t that simple.”
“Talk.”
Werner sat back in his chair. “You have to know that I loved her. We all loved her.”
“You’re a liar. A murderer.”
Werner worked at a hangnail on his thumb until it started to bleed. He lifted it to his lips.
“We loved her as if she were our daughter,” he said after an eternity.
The contents of the envelope. The photographs of Kurt and Evi embracing. Kurt and Evi waving. In both, in Evi’s arms, a baby.
A baby girl.
Blonde.
The name of that baby was written on the sheet of paper folded in four. Annelise Schaltzmann, it said. Mother: Evi Tognon, unmarried, January 3, 1985. A birth certificate issued by the Austrian Republic. A birth certificate that said the unthinkable.
“Evi and Kurt had a daughter.”
“Yes.”
“You kept her.”
“Yes.”
“Annelise?”
“Yes.”
I passed my hand over my face. Then, from a distance, I heard my voice formulate the most horrendous of questions.
“Is that why you killed them?”