I took Annelise and Clara to Bolzano to visit the archaeological museum where Ötzi, the oldest natural mummy ever found, was kept.
Ötzi was an old shepherd (or maybe a traveler, a shaman, a metal prospector, a . . . the theories about his identity were legion) from the Bronze Age, killed on the slopes of the Similaun, nobody knows why or by whom.
Seeing him, Clara burst into tears. She said that dried-up little man was a child elf who had lost his mamma. Annelise and I had our work cut out to calm her down.
I have to admit that I, too, was moved by that small, 5,000-year-old figure preserved in a kind of giant refrigerator, face contorted in a sad grimace, but for quite other reasons. I was thinking about the Bletterbach killings.
Like Evi, Kurt, and Markus, Ötzi hadn’t received justice. Or was I wrong? Maybe in 3,000 BC, there had been someone who had investigated enough to find the poor man’s killers. Had they mourned him?
And who had done it?
Ötzi had been a man of advanced years. The old had children and the children had grandchildren, I thought as I admired the skill with which that man, just over a meter and a half tall, had built the equipment that had allowed him to survive in a world without antibiotics or disinfectants, a world in which there was no Dolomite Mountain Rescue to call if you were in trouble. Had those children and grandchildren mourned him? Had they built him a funeral pyre? Sacrificed a few animals in his memory? To what gods had that ice man turned before the arrows shot him dead? Had God been looking away that day too, to quote Werner?
A lot was known about Ötzi. Modern technology had made it possible to scan his stomach to discover what he had eaten before he was killed. We knew the pathologies that affected him and thanks to this the reason, medical rather than aesthetic, why there were more than thirty tattoos on his body. Ötzi suffered from arthritis, and the tattoos allowed him to inject curative herbs under his skin. Archaeologists had reconstructed his equipment piece by piece: the bow, the quiver, the axe he carried on his belt, his poncho of dried grass, and his hide headdress. His techniques of construction had been revealed in detail. We even knew the color of his eyes (dark) thanks to DNA testing, and through computer graphics they had reconstructed what his face must have been like before he was buried in the ice for 5,000 years. And yet I couldn’t help but think that these details were trivial compared with the real questions the mummy aroused in my mind.
Had he dreamed?
Had he dreamed about hunting? Had he dreamed about wolves howling at the moon? Had he dreamed about the outline of the mountain on which he would meet his death? And what had he seen as he gazed at the stars at night? By what name did he know the Big Dipper?
But above all, why had he been killed?
And by whom?
* * *
We celebrated Halloween with the obligatory pumpkin in the window, orange lanterns, a plastic skeleton that glowed in the dark, bats on the ceiling, popcorn, and a nice horror movie. All according to tradition.
Clara didn’t like the movie, she said you could see the zombies were fake. She said it, though, as if she were asking a question. She wanted to be reassured.
Annelise gave me a glance as if to say, “I told you so, genius!” and I spent the rest of the evening showing Clara how they made blood in movies: blueberry juice and honey. With a touch of coffee to make it darker.
“And the zombies’ ugly faces?”
I put on my best zombie imitation, my tongue hanging out of my wide-open mouth and my eyes wild. Clara wrinkled her nose.
I kissed her.
A moment of zombie intimacy.
“And those nasty things on their faces? How do they make the nasty things on their faces?”
“Plasticine and cornflakes.”
“Cornflakes?”
I demonstrated this too.
Clara was in seventh heaven. We organized a game to trick Annelise, who pretended to be terrified by the miniature zombie (in polka-dot pajamas) advancing through the living room holding her arms out in front of her and muttering in a cavernous voice (in so far as the voice of a five-year-old girl can be cavernous), “I’m going to eat you! I’m going to eat you!”
It took us quite a while to get her to go to bed, and then we allowed ourselves a glass of wine.
“Your daughter,” I joked, as I sipped the excellent Marzemino, “used the word ‘brooding’ the other day. Eight letters, your honor.”
“And where did she hear a word like that?”
“From you.”
Annelise lifted the glass to her mouth. “Talking about what?”
“Try to guess.”
“Well, you are distracted. Admit it.”
“Do you want me to see the doctor again? Would that reassure you?”
Annelise took my hand and squeezed it tight. “You’re fine. You’re OK. I can see that. Do you still have . . .”—she bit her lip, a gesture I found extremely sexy—“. . . bad dreams?”
Of course I did, as she knew perfectly well. I appreciated her tact, though.
“Sometimes.” I bent down to kiss the tips of her fingers. “But don’t worry. I’m fine. And I’m not brooding.”
“Would you tell me?”
“Of course I would.”
* * *
I was lying.
If Annelise had decided to search on my laptop, which had once been white but had turned gray from all the cigarette ash that had fallen on it, she would have discovered that in the folder “Things” there was a file entitled B. B for “Bletterbach.”
And “bastard.”
* * *
One afternoon, a few days after my chat with Werner, I went to Trento on the pretext of acquiring a couple of DVDs for my collection.
What I actually did was spend two hours in the reading room of the university library.
No microfiches or digital copies, but a mountain of yellowing newspapers. Between one layer of dust and another, I found just a few references to the Bletterbach killings. The journalists’ attention at the time had been focused on the chaos caused by the storm. Interviews, articles that illustrated more or less what Werner had reconstructed for me. Experts explaining the kind of disaster that had afflicted the region and big black-and-white photographs showing the damage caused by that cataclysm of water and mud.
The final count of eleven dead had led to a brief burst of controversy that had soon burned out, overwhelmed by other events.
A mayor had to resign, and various councillors apologized and put in contrite appearances at the funerals of the victims. The Civil Defense were praised by the president of the Republic, a little pipe-smoking man named Sandro Pertini. I found him odd, but gifted with unusual charisma.
About the murders, little or nothing.
An aerial photograph of the gorge, devoid of the glass and aluminum outline of the Visitors’ Center, which had yet to be built. Evi’s face, maybe because it was more photogenic than those of her companions in misfortune. A curt “No comment” uttered by the men pursuing the case. An interview with Werner, more blond than white, with fewer wrinkles but just as many rings under his eyes, who talked about a “horrible slaughter.” A few days later, the obituary of Helene Schaltzmann. Nothing about Hannes’s madness.
I’d also have liked to look for the obituary of Günther Kagol in ’89, but by now I’d realized it would be a pointless task. Plus, it was late.
I thanked the staff and got home in time for dinner. Roast pork and potatoes. I kissed my wife, I kissed my daughter and asked them what they’d been doing all day.
Before going to bed, I updated the file with what I had found out in the library.
I told myself I was doing it to keep in practice. To keep myself occupied.
Another lie.
* * *
Without realizing it, I was following the same method I had used for all my previous jobs. I was and remain a creature of routine.
After transcribing Werner’s testimony, trying to put down in digital form the emphasis and emotions that his words had conveyed to me, and compiling a dry list of the characteristic morphology, geology, flora, and fauna of the Bletterbach, I started searching for a few historical allusions that would give me a broader picture of the place.
My search started one afternoon when Annelise and Clara had gone to Bolzano to do shopping (“Women’s things, Papà.” “Expensive things?” “Pretty things.”) with a visit to the geological museum that was part of the Visitors’ Center in the Bletterbach.
There weren’t many books. Most of those there were had been put out by tiny publishers subsidized by the province, and they were often useless for my purpose, panegyrics on the good old days (with no mention of either the poverty that had gripped the area until not so long ago or the days of “Belfast with strudel”), but I read them avidly, noting down the paragraphs that most aroused my curiosity.
The best were the—sometimes ungrammatical—accounts of the most amazing feats of Dolomite Mountain Rescue. The names of Werner and Hannes cropped up frequently. Günther’s, too, a couple of times. In a long celebratory article, there was even a mention of Hermann Kagol, the man who’d had the idea for the Center.
A photograph showed a solemn Werner, posing by the recently purchased Alouette. The photograph of the flaming red EC135 made my stomach turn.
* * *
In the days that followed, I started frequenting one of the bars in Siebenhoch, Lily’s, a crummy place with terrible watery coffee, wooden crucifixes that glowered at you, and the heads of roe deer, stags, and ibex as an insult to animal rights people.
Lily’s was a meeting place for Alpine guides and mountain people who wanted a bit of peace and quiet. They served a Bauerntoast that satisfied you for days and the beer was always cold. In addition, nobody squawked into a cell phone or burst into raptures about how quaint this hole in the wall was.
Most of the customers were retired, but you mustn’t think of it as a kind of old people’s home. There were lots of young people there, too, even very young people, all united by mountain life. In short, Lily’s was a place where the locals could read the Dolomiten, have a few drinks, and curse in two languages without having to worry about offending the tourists.
I was a hit. My jokes about my countrymen made them split their sides. I learned to play Watten. I had them teach me the local dialokt. I bought rounds of beers as if it were water and did everything I could to gain the customers’ confidence. Above all, I was very discreet about my true intentions.
I was under no illusions, though. That bunch of mountain people were as pleasant to me as I was to them, but that didn’t mean we had become friends. I was nice, funny, maybe a bit odd, and lent a touch of color to their evenings, but nothing more.
I was a welcome guest, a bit more than a tourist, much less than a local, as Chief Krün had said.
These average Joes—their hands rarely had all ten fingers, either because they’d been lost in the course of some climb (as had happened to Werner) or because they had been mangled by the teeth of a chainsaw or sawn off with a chisel in order to avoid military service—accepted my presence only because of my connection with old Mair, and I was sure that some, if not all, of them reported back to him more or less everything we said to each other. But I was crafty. I had prepared a cover for myself. As Mike would have said: I had a plan.
After the first week spent talking about this and that and losing at cards, I happened to mention that I intended to build a wooden sled for my daughter. A Christmas present, I said. Was there anyone who could give me a few tips? I knew that many of them were skillful woodcarvers, and I assumed that it would be a way of getting into their good graces and diverting suspicion as much as possible.
It worked.
Two in particular threw themselves body and soul into the enterprise of turning me into an artisan: a friendly nonagenarian named Elmar and his inseparable drinking companion, a seventy-five-year-old with one leg missing (an accident in the woods: a chainsaw that had gone zag instead of zig) named Luis.
Elmar and Luis explained to me what kind of tools I would have to acquire, how to avoid being cheated by the assistants at the hardware store, and what type of wood to get for each part of the sled. We sketched various designs on napkins that I then left in my pockets and that ended up in the washing machine, a fact that made them laugh.
I was just a stupid city dweller, after all, wasn’t I?
Every now and again, with studied casualness, I would ask a few questions.
Elmar and Luis were more than happy to tell me stories that everyone in Lily’s Bar had already heard too many times.
I discovered what the books in the museum hadn’t had the courage to tell me.
Accidents. Deaths. Absurd deaths, sad deaths, pointless deaths, deaths from a hundred years ago. Deaths from centuries ago. And legends that started out making us laugh but always ended up very badly.
There was one in particular that struck me. It was about the mysterious people of Fanes, and both Elmar and Luis swore it was just a story.
The people of Fanes were an ancient tribe that, according to the legend, lived in peace and harmony. They didn’t start wars, and their kings dispensed justice intelligently. Everything went wonderfully until, all at once, they vanished without a trace. Overnight. Fanes was about ten kilometers north of the nature reserve, but Elmar and Luis said they were convinced that whatever had swept that ancient people away came from the Bletterbach. A bad place, Luis had called it. It was there that the blade of the chainsaw had gone zag.
That evening, I checked on Wikipedia what the odd couple in Lily’s had told me. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the two of them hadn’t been lying. The late Bronze Age population of Fanes had indeed disappeared as if by some conjuring trick. Now you see them, now you don’t.
Poof!
The most plausible hypothesis was that there had been an invasion by tribes from the south, maybe from the Veneto, who were more advanced and aggressive. But wars leave traces, and nothing had been found to bear witness to such an event. No skeletons, no arrowheads, no broken shields or mass graves. Just legends. Elmar and Luis had earned their Forst.
* * *
Halfway through November, two things happened.
First: Luis brought me a cake that tasted of nothing.
Second: the cake that tasted of nothing acquired a vague taste of blood.