I spent the last days of March in bed, brought low by a fever that reduced me to a shadow of my former self. The pills I took were no use: my condition was only partly physical. My descent into the bowels of the Bletterbach had wiped me out, and I needed time to recharge my batteries and start over again.
I didn’t sleep much, and then only fitfully. In those brief periods of sleep, I would return to those caves. I would see again the dark eye, Grünwald’s body, and the monster that emerged from the water wasn’t a block of ice: it had a mouth, claws, and a Latin name. I would wake up disorientated and scared, but safe.
At home.
Home was Clara who would put her worried little face ’round the bedroom door, bringing me a fruit juice that tasted disgusting in my sick state, but which I drank to the last drop to make her happy.
“Is it good, Papà?”
“It’s wonderful, sweetheart,” I said, struggling not to throw up.
“Would you like me to take your temperature?”
“I’d like a kiss, honeybun.”
I always got plenty of those.
Every now and again, when Annelise went shopping, Clara would tiptoe in and sit down on the edge of the bed. She would tell me fairy stories and stroke my hair, almost as if she was the grown-up now and I was the child to be looked after. Lots of times, she’d just sit there and look at me.
Can you imagine a nicer picture of love?
Annelise never asked me anything. She was caring, attentive, and anxious. I knew the questions were only being postponed, I could see it in her eyes, but first I had to get better.
And that’s what I did.
* * *
The fever passed. I still had dizzy spells, still felt as I’d been driven over by a steamroller. But my eyes no longer filled with tears whenever I tried to read a newspaper, and the headache wasn’t much more than a dull ache at the back of my neck. I began to get my appetite back. Annelise would provoke me with incredible quantities of food I simply couldn’t refuse. It was so good to feel something that wasn’t pain.
After a couple of days spent wandering around the house in my pajamas, I decided to venture into the outside world. I needed fresh air. And don’t be angry with me, I also needed a Marlboro.
I put on thick jeans, a sweater, a scarf, and my padded winter jacket and walked out, as determined as Harrison Ford in pursuit of the Holy Grail.
With unsteady steps, I reached the garden gate. I touched it with my fingertips. Satisfied with my achievement, I turned back, sat down on the front steps, and granted myself a cigarette.
The sun was high, brighter than I had seen it in months, and I let the wind waft the smell of the woods to my nostrils. Spring was finally coming. There were still patches of snow on the ground, above all at the sides of the roads, where the snowploughs had heaped it in dark dirty piles, but nature was waking up again.
And so was I.
Suddenly I became aware of Annelise standing behind me.
“I think I owe you an explanation,” I said.
She gracefully slid her skirt under her legs, sat down next to me, and leaned her head on my shoulder.
The off-key call of a blackbird could be heard, then a rustling of wings. A bird of prey was flying high in a sky dotted with slow-moving snow-white clouds.
“Tell me just one thing, Salinger,” Annelise said. “Is it over?”
I turned.
I looked her in the eyes.
“It’s over.”
She burst into tears. She hugged me. I looked up at the clouds.
I could have touched them with my finger.
* * *
Two days later, I had a consultation with the same specialist who’d put me back on my feet after the accident of September 15. When I confessed to him that I hadn’t taken the drugs he’d prescribed for me, he was furious.
I suffered his anger in silence, with my usual hangdog expression, until he calmed down, then I told him I’d decided to resume the treatment I’d actually never begun: that’s what I was there for.
I had to pull myself together, I told him. So far, I’d gone my own way and it hadn’t worked.
I had no intention of taking drugs that would make me a happy idiot (and here his face turned red), but now it was time to say farewell to nightmares and panic attacks.
You could say we bargained, and it’s almost funny to think about it that way, because he wasn’t trying to sell me a used car or a cable TV subscription, he only wanted to make my life better.
He prescribed some mild tranquilizers and new sleeping pills to make my nights less restless. When he said goodbye, he had a big question mark on his face.
I understood his doubts, but I couldn’t tell him the real reason for my determination. It was because the story of the Bletterbach, the story of the Bletterbach killings, was now just a file in the recycle bin on my laptop. A finished document.
I had succeeded.
I had told the story of Evi, Markus, and Kurt. And of Werner, Hannes, Günther, Max, Verena, Brigitte, Hermann, Luis, and Elmar. The biography of Siebenhoch.
Nobody would ever read it and I would never make a documentary about that ill-fated excursion, but what did it matter? I had proved to myself that I was still able to do what I loved most: tell stories.
Now it was time to turn the page.
* * *
“Frau Gertraud will look after you,” Werner said. “You like Frau Gertraud, don’t you, Clara?”
Clara looked first at me then at Annelise, then nodded shyly. “She’s read every book in the world.”
Werner opened his arms wide. “You see? No problem. So, are you coming to dinner at my place?”
Annelise tried to hide her surprise at the invitation with a “Why not?”
“Good girl,” he said and gave her a hug.
Then he drove off in his jeep.
“What do you think that was all about?” Annelise asked me when we were back inside the house.
“I have no idea.”
“You’ve spent a lot of time together.”
“That’s true.”
“I thought you talked.”
I put my arm ’round her shoulders. “How many times do I have to tell you, darling? Men don’t talk. Men grunt and drink beer. Sorry, they drink grappa.”
She didn’t laugh. “He loves being with Clara. It strikes me as strange that—”
“Instead of asking yourself so many questions,” I cut in, “why not just look forward to an evening off?”
Werner hadn’t told me anything, but I had a pretty good idea what he was planning to do that evening, and I admit I was scared. But I pretended I had other things on my mind.
I was cheerful and talkative. I helped Clara choose the dress she would wear during the time Frau Gertraud, Siebenhoch’s librarian, would act as her babysitter. By the time the loden-clad woman arrived, at around seven in the evening, my daughter had changed her mind at least three hundred times (jeans and T-shirt were too casual, the green skirt was for having dinner out, maybe the red one . . .) and I, in spite of my affable facade, was as tense as a violin string.
What Annelise and I were going to wasn’t a simple dinner, it was a farewell that would add a couple of lines to the face of the woman I loved.
I held firm.
* * *
Werner opened the door to us and shook our hands. He searched for my eyes and I avoided his.
We chatted about New York and Siebenhoch. We talked about Clara, who would start school in September. About Frau Gertraud.
I was my normal self.
Werner had lost weight, that was obvious, and yet, when he went to the kitchen to fetch the dessert from the refrigerator, I pretended to be surprised by my wife’s comments.
“Werner?” I said. “I think he looks very well.”
As lively as the broken zombies in the photographs in the heart-shaped box.
I only thought it, but I did think it.
Once dessert was finished, Werner handed Annelise a little gift-wrapped package. “This is for you. From me and Herta.”
She batted her eyelids in embarrassment. “What is it?”
“Open it.”
Annelise looked at me, clearly wondering if I was aware of the contents of the package. I knew nothing about it: Werner’s move had caught me by surprise, too.
Annelise undid first the ribbon, then the tissue paper, to reveal a little box. Inside it was a pocket watch with a simple ’round white dial. The casing was silver, scratched in places. The hours were in Roman numerals, the hands were Gothic arrows.
Annelise stared at it in bewilderment. “What am I supposed to do with this, Papà?”
“It’s yours,” Werner said gravely.
“Thank you, but . . .” At last, Annelise noticed her father’s solemn expression.
It’s starting, I thought.
I felt a touch of relief. My part in this play was over. I could leave the stage, withdraw to the wings, and prepare to collect the pieces of my wife’s shattered heart.
“This watch has been in our family for more than a century. Look at the casing.”
Annelise read aloud. It was a date. “February 12, 1848.”
Werner nodded. “It was a wedding present. Since then it’s been passed from father to child. And now I’m giving it to you.”
“It’s beautiful, Papà, but . . .”
“You have to take good care of it, the mechanism is fragile. You have to wind it every evening, as the Mairs have always done, otherwise it might be damaged.”
“Papà . . .” Annelise was pale.
Werner gave her a sad and infinitely painful smile. “I’m dying, my girl.”
Annelise put the watch down on the table as if all at once she was afraid of it.
“My time is coming to an end. That’s why I want you to have this watch. You know why you have to wind it every evening? Because that way you appreciate more the passing of the minutes. Those were my father’s very words the day he gave it to me. God knows where he’d read a sentence like that. Maybe it was his, who knows? We’ve always been a bit strange, we Mairs. A bit crazy and a bit innocent. What I meant to say was that you always have to take care of time.”
“Papà,” Annelise murmured, her eyes swollen with tears. “You’re not really dying. You’re Werner Mair, you can’t die. Everybody in Siebenhoch knows that. You . . . you . . .”
Werner nodded. “You remember when I fell in the attic and went to see a doctor? He did what doctors always do in these cases, he sent me to see a colleague, and so on. Except that each time, the face of the doctor I was seeing grew as long as a mule’s. In the end, the last one standing had the bother of telling me the diagnosis. I have bone cancer. It’s inoperable and incurable.”
It was as if an invisible vampire had sucked every drop of blood from Annelise. “You can’t leave me alone,” she said in a low voice.
“I’m not leaving you alone, my girl. You have your husband and your daughter. You have your life.” He picked up the watch and placed it in her palm, then squeezed her hand. “You still have a lot to do, mountains to climb, battles to win—or maybe to lose just enough to acquire a little bit more wisdom. And I’m sure destiny has a couple of sunny days in store for you to warm your bones when you reach the age when time is counted, not in years but in minutes. Then, at the end, you’ll take this watch, you’ll make a package more beautiful than mine, and you’ll give it to Clara.”
“But I . . .” Annelise said, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to say to her. I . . .” She spoke as if she was hoping to persuade the cancer to leave Werner more time.
“When the day comes, you’ll know,” he replied.
Annelise threw her arms around his neck, as Clara did with me when she was scared. Except that the person crying on her father’s shoulder wasn’t a child, it was an adult woman, the woman I loved, the woman I’d sworn to protect from all harm.
A promise that couldn’t be kept.
The devil always has the last laugh, as the Krampusmeister said.
I stood up, feeling like a deep-sea diver at the bottom of the ocean.
Father and daughter had words to say, secrets to reveal, and tears to share. I prayed, as I left them alone, that one day, facing Clara, I’d be able to find the same serenity with which Werner was explaining the ultimate mystery to Annelise.
* * *
For the whole of the following week, Annelise wandered around the house with red eyes and a bleary expression. It was like living with a ghost. It was torture seeing her like that.
Especially for Clara, who couldn’t figure out her mother’s behavior.
“Is Mamma ill?”
“A bit of flu, maybe.”
“Shall we make her some fruit juice?”
“I don’t think she wants fruit juice.”
“Then what does she want?”
“To be alone for a while.”
“Why?”
“Because sometimes grown-ups need to be alone. To think.”
To cut off that cascade of questions, I tried to distract her. I invented some new games, a tongue twister, I challenged her as to which of us could find the longest word in the world, just to shield her from all that bitterness. I knew how Annelise was feeling, but I didn’t want her to withdraw into her grief and exclude the world.
There wasn’t time.
One evening, after putting Clara to bed, I took Annelise aside. “You have to react, darling.”
“I am reacting,” she said irritably, as if I had distracted her from her thoughts.
“No, you’re mourning your father,” I said gently.
“Of course I’m mourning my father, Salinger!” she cried. “He has cancer!”
“But he isn’t dead yet. You remember what he said? The drugs are doing their job right now, the pain is almost non-existent. You should be taking advantage of that.”
Annelise looked at me as if I had cursed in church. “To do what?”
“To be with him,” I said. “Because the most important thing we can do for our parents is make sure they leave us with happy memories.”