Читать книгу TheodoraLand - Malcolm James Thomson - Страница 13

The turret bedroom that old Frau Steinemann had prepared pleased what the housekeeper took to be the engaged couple, although she did give a young people nowadays sigh. Their balcony had room for a small table and four chairs.

From the elevation at which Aunt Ursel’s house stood the view when the Föhn wind blew was breathtaking. Under a blue sky of unbelievable clarity distant peaks seemed miles closer than they were. I pointed out Säntis, rising two-and-a-half kilometres above sea level. Bea nodded, shading her eyes with her hand to admire the stupendous vista.

Closer there was a lawn below and to one side of the house, bisected by a driveway big enough for cars to turn round to face the tall gates. At the top of the upper lawn were three beehives.

“What’s that?” Bea asked, pointing to a quirky landscaping feature, a low box hedge. It was cruciform, the planting outlining a nave, chancel and transepts, although it took up little more space on the lawn than a decent sized summer house might have required.

“My grandfather never got round to building the chapel he had in mind…”

Dirk was not to be distracted from his Kindle. How many thrillers and crime stories were held in the digital archive of the device I did not know. But I knew he was currently collating examples of beatings inflicted as ‘warnings to people not to meddle in things which were not their concern’. Did he seek kinship with fictional figures thus horribly maltreated, their suffering described sometimes in graphic detail by Child or Deaver or Harvey, Brookmyre or Jardine or Rankin, Larsson or Larsson or Larsson and God knows how many others? If warning it had been, he had got off lightly. A tooth was chipped but only his face had been punched. The bruising on his hip had been the result of his fall from his bike. Had his assailants known what splendour lurked there, his crotch might have been deemed worthy of a kick or two out of pure envy. What a dreadful pity that would have been.

“Of course, after such a thrashing the resolve of the protagonist is always reinforced in his resolve!” Dirk suggested.

“Provided he survives his ordeal,” Bea added.

“Hah!” said Aunt Ursel, when she returned after spending the day in Zurich (her charitable committee supporting musical education) and was confronted by a Bea Schell who did not at all correspond to my description.

Dirk’s blessures she overlooked as if they were the normal scrapes and scratches of an adventurous schoolboy. And at times he did have a kind of goofy, juvenile thing about him. He was not quite as tall as his fiancée (if that she still was), wiry in build, unruly hair often held in the seminal fixie-riding hipster accessory, a snood.. Earnestly boyish, with something of that Formula One racing driver of whom we Germans were expecting so much again this season. It might have been the second thing that attracted me last year.

Since it was Ursel Lange’s weekly bridge evening the three of us would be left to our own devices although we were commanded to be ready for a hike the next day.

There was no mention of books of any kind.

Weinfelden may have a historic centre, always depicted in the tourist guides, but it is not the pulsating heart of the town. Nor indeed is the Marktplatz. Opposite Brunnenbach Bücher and Wystübli is an example of the kind of ugly civic renewal which was prevalent in the sixties and seventies. The architecture was without merit and the complex tried to be a destination shopping centre in spite of one supermarket and then another failing to prosper in its precincts. The town’s young people used to gather in the shade of the tree in the middle of Marktplatz although recently the Swiss kids had moved on and those who remained tended to speak in Balkan tongues.

“Already in the year 124 AD there was a Roman bridge over the river Thur here in Weinfelden… Quivelda, they called the settlement,” I pointed out as we entered Wystübli. Frederico’s welcoming smile for Bea two-pont-zero was broader than the one I had been given on my last visit.

“It might have been more lively then than it is now. I would have thought it a bit too sleepy and provincial for someone like you, Thea,” said Dirk, ignoring the expression on the face of Frederico who looked askance at his battered visage.

“Maybe I never told the two of you that I’m supposed to inherit the bookstore next door.”

I made this sound like a fate worse than death.

“That big house, too?” Bea Schell wondered, always conscious of matters financial, not infrequently complaining that her job was underpaid.

Säntisblick with its turrets; few private houses were more imposing other than Schloß Bachtobel further along the ridge overlooking the town.

“Doesn’t sound like you at all,” said Dirk.

“Oh, I don’t know. Zack could cover the walls with obscene graffiti and I could hold court and repeatedly tell the tale of how we solved the case of the three burned books!”

Both Dirk and Bea gave me a long, almost pitying look.

Frederico recommended the quiche.

I insisted that the locally brewed effervescent Zwickelbier was very good.

“So… ‘grave goods’! What were you thinking of, Dirk?”

“It was a story I had drafted. All it needed was to be given a current ‘hook’. Lessinger’s Agnes was easy to find. She put a condolence announcement in our newspaper. I had a brief chat with her. She assumed that three of his fifteenth century manuscripts were what Lessinger had chose to take with him to… the other side.”

“And then you reckoned that a bit of disinformation could do no harm… pointing at books very different from the three we identified.”

“It seemed like a good idea…”

“At the time,” Bea concluded, throwing me a look which begged me to be merciful.

“Did I ever say how I met Rudiger Reiß?” I asked Dirk.

“Sure! You promised us at dinner that you don’t make a habit of picking up men at funerals.”

“But there was no mention of details about the damn books until after he had left, right?”

Bea gave an exaggerated shrug.

“No. Foremost in his mind was the question of whether you were flashing your lovely lady-bits with intent or not. ”

My smile took some effort, my sigh was one of resignation.

“About the books… I guess there could be people who want no further questions asked at all. But others also quizzed the strange but helpful Transylvanian at the undertaker’s place. To satisfy themselves that the books are gone for ever? Or, suspecting a trick, to trace the ones that are the real thing?”

Bea and Dirk exchanged a look.

“Yes, some serious effort was made to… give the impression that three specific books had gone up in smoke,” said Bea.

“So it must appear,” said I, choosing the way Aunt Ursel had put it.

“Lessinger must have found a bookbinder willing and able to replicate the covers. And the inside pages would have had to be good enough to satisfy the passing curiosity of a mortician,” Dirk said, wincing either from a twinge of conscience or from the discomfort of his wounds.

“Brain functioning once more. Reassuring, that!”

Bea Schell bristled.

“Dirk’s story wasn’t such a blunder. It spread the news that three books were consumed by fire. Period. Your Rudiger has an inkling of what books they were. But more important… he and anyone else will now presume them to have been destroyed.”

“One interpretation, Bea. Another is that some could suspect that a cunning cover-up is being attempted… like some Italians made aware of my Google search for the cryptic title of the Swiss file.”

“So what is so important about three old books anyway?”

Dirk’s question I found naïve. And it was not his question to ask. It was mine, to ask of Aunt Ursel.

Would it make a difference if Aunt Ursel and her partner had emerged as winners after their card playing evening? I gave that some thought as I waited for her to return. It was only after Bea and Dirk went up to their turret that I took the books from my rucksack (with a longboard attached by ballistic rip-stop nylon proclaiming my hipster innocence of anything remotely conspiratorial) and placed them, as if on museal display, on the ledge below the big television set in the Bauernstube.

Before Ursel Lange showed up I was able to discover that she had not just archived all the matches played by Borussia Dortmund during the previous season on her Sky box. She also had every episode of the series Dirk watched over and over again, Veronica Mars.

My great-aunt said nothing when she came in and saw the books lined up and begging for a reaction.

She poured a measure of Pflümli to go with her Ovomaltine.

I rolled a spliff. Bea had at first felt slighted when I insisted on taking a taxi home. But Fairouz was also one of the local suppliers of weed and he could spare me the makings of a few small joints. No, I strictly do not carry any hash or grass with me on a train which passes through three countries.

What I didn’t know is how I was supposed to have found out about what Herr Lessinger had chosen to take with him for what was, after all, a very short journey. Yes, it was predictable that I would attend the funeral. I was fond of the vain and often cantankerous old man who had once been Ursel Lange’s lover, who had at her bidding found that the Bookshop needed another trainee.

But had it not been by accident that I’d learned that the coffin contained more than just fleshly remains? Had I not overheard Vera and Agnes I would have been none the wiser.

Although I guess I would have become inquisitive about the nature of the three books which, in my guardianship, safe in my second oven, were in something of a bibliophile limbo. They were quite unrelated, with their obvious age and the German language the sole common attributes. How probable was it that I should share my awakened curiosity at some point with close friends who happened to be, for one, an ardent if erratic investigative journalist and, for the other, no longer ghostly greige but, with ever diminishing doubt in this respect, a spook of another kind.

“So they’re back again, I see. Forty years ago we decided to stop looking for answers. For a while we had become obsessed. I had a tiny black-and-white television set in 1972, but I had missed a lot of the live broadcasting of the Olympic Games in Munich. The coverage of the killings by the Palestinians… that I saw. I was almost fifty at the time. I thought that was very, very old.”

“Not old at all,” I exclaimed, for a moment concerned at my aunt’s forlorn, almost fearful look.

“Louie… Herr Lessinger… had just turned forty. We both reckoned that we were nevertheless far too young to die. Enough lives had been lost, you know.”

I didn’t think she meant the unfortunate Israeli athletes.

Aunt Ursel played with the remote control. I saw her features relax when the big screen was filled with yellow-and-black jerseys as a goal was celebrated with a boisterous homoerotic group hug. Well, maybe the strapping lads were just cold. There was snow on the ground around the pitch; it must have been the recording of a mid-winter game.

I shivered.

Every now and then, not looking away from the television, Ursel divulged disjointed fragments of forty year old memories. Later, when I wished her goodnight, there was no reply. Maybe she had fallen asleep.

SATURDAY 9 JUNE 2012

Two days of foul weather discouraged us from venturing beyond Säntisblick. I was fascinated by the way that Bea Schell, in spite of her new persona, seemed to fit in well with the lifestyle implied by staying in a grand mansion. Frau Steinemann treated her with deference, in contrast to her ill-concealed distaste for the man she could hardly accept as a fitting fiancée.

Dirk kept himself busy speculating with biting sarcasm on the news from Spain. His blog post would assert half-seriously that the huge bailouts of Hispanic financial institutions could mean that certain regions of the Costas should be annexed as German extra-territorial states, given that the financial aid was coming via Frankfurt.

Over meals Aunt Ursel had nuggets of background information for us.

In the early seventies Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been a travelling man, often absent from his tiny one-room flat in Munich for long periods. In pursuit of his incunabulae he was often in Paris where there were many collectors among the bouquinistes who shared his passion.

“Everybody knows about Gutenberg’s Bible, but many, many of the first printed books were not only secular but bawdy, lewd, scurrilous and… as far as Louie was concerned… the more licentious they were, the better.”

At the time his commercial dealings in antiquarian books were very profitable as a result of his bold forays into countries of the Eastern Block. Cracow proved very lucrative, as did Prague.

“He was quite daring, you know. Daring and dashing. Didn’t care much for niceties such as export restrictions, customs formalities or things of that sort.”

And he spent a lot of time in Weinfelden.

I pictured Lessinger translating from the Latin juicy passages of fifteen-century purple prose, stanzas of coarse erotic verse, reading them to Ursel Lange. A bit like spending an evening nowadays watching amateur porn on the internet with a special friend or two.

Although they corresponded and even had the occasional telephone conversation, Lessinger never came to Weinfelden again after 1972.

“We spoke on the cellphone for the last time just after he had been given… the bad news of his prognosis. He was sorry he could not join you to celebrate the completion of your training.”

Bad timing in every sense. Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau a month or so prior to redundancy. We did celebrate after the final oral examination, almost a dozen of us and several from other Manduvel branches in Munich. There was a lot of sympathy expressed for my predicament, suggestions that a transfer to another branch would be the ideal solution.

Trinity Place had been my home for three years. But the Bookshop closure should not weigh too much on my mind, I was told.

We all got quite drunk. There were three girls for every boy in our little group. But I chose to ignore the possibility of a quickie with Christian, whose apprenticeship had been at a strait-laced Christian book store and who had detected an absence of anything of note underneath my Stella McCartney shift. Not that I was in a bad mood; I am Teutonic enough to appreciate having a qualification rather more useful in the real world than my degree in Amerikanistik.

But our training had not given me the slightest clue about dealing with books like the three lined up under Aunt Ursel’s television.

Dirk’s shoulders were deemed broad enough to carry the heaviest rucksack, the one loaded with all that would be needed for a copious Brotzyt picnic which would mark the half-way point of the day’s hike. Knowing Ursel, the way back would not re-trace our earlier steps. She preferred tours which involved no repetition but constant new discoveries.

Nor would we be heading south to the more serious mountain trails. The Seerücken is a range of gentle hills between the valley of the River Thur and Lake Constance to the north. Dirk and Bea would not be over-taxed, Aunt Ursel promised. I suspected that we would take the route would which included the former gravel pit, now full of rain water, where skinny-dipping was forbidden but practiced by young and old, nonagenarians not excluded.

Aunt Ursel and I practiced a kind of reciprocal respect when it came to direct questions. If interrogated she would go off on a tangent and expound at length on something to do with football or tell some tale of the activities of the music charity which was her other pet theme.

“We had the Amriswiler Stadtmusik playing Smoke On The Water with the guitar parts played on alphorns. Quite memorable, and a wonderful way of getting young people to take a second look at our musical tradition…”

This flummoxed Dirk, who thought of himself as a passing good interviewer. He had only asked how Ursel Lange first became involved with our three books.

“Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple, released in 1972,” Bea interjected to my astonishment. She went on to add that the college band had played it at football games.

1972, I thought.

“College band? American football?” Ursel asked with a small frown.

The Fightin’ Aggies Marching Band, composed of over three hundred men and women from the Corps of Cadets of the Texas A&M University, is the largest military marching band in the world. Although I was no longer sure what to believe when Bea Schell was generous with information. Had she studied in America before joining Segirtad GmbH, the software firm in Munich’s south? At a college where, as I discovered later, military training is part of the curriculum?

Bea had been assigned a slouchy sun-hat, found on a shelf in the Säntisblick cloakroom, which advertised a Swiss discount supermarket. In hiking shorts with multiple pockets and an old sweatshirt which shouted ‘A&M’ rather than ‘A&F’ Bea two-pont-zero cut a good figure. Her legs, previously never revealed above the knee, were slim but well muscled.

Dirk’s baseball cap was emblazoned with the initials LAPD. He was not often without some sartorial allusion to his fascination with the netherworld in which thrillers are set.

“It was the tune the German defence minister Karl Theodor zu Guttenberg requested for his military farewell from office, played by the brass band of Berlin’s guard battalion,” said Ursel, warming to her theme.

“Well played, too, considering that they had only two days to practice it!”

Bea sang the riff a couple of times at the top of her voice, to the consternation of a pair of walkers who were descending the path we were climbing and who likely expected a companionable Gruezi rather than strident seventies heavy metal.

I happen to be unable to carry a tune with any accuracy. I have, however, been known to sing at the top of my voice when bombing downhill on my board from Säntisblick to the valley floor a kilometre below.

We Are The Champions!

That had been my choice for my once-only just-after-midnight naked run, an excruciating rendition. Hans-Peter Danner was a local admirer of long standing. When we had both been just thirteen or fourteen he had turned my head with his obvious and precocious ‘bad boy’ posturing. With him his moronic but loyal best friend Rico Bley last year I had that night drunk far too much Obstler. Hans-Peter had captured my exploit on his camcorder, leaning over the boot of his Golf GTI convertible while Rico drove the car down the hill ahead of me. I was told afterwards that we had reached a speed of eighty kilometres an hour. A tumble would have had serious consequences. It had been unforgivable recklessness, but also tremendously sexy. YouTube found the graphic documentation of my mesonoxian madness too explicit but it was present on a few other video sites, fortunately with my dire singing replaced with some dismal Swiss synthy-pop. I thought I might ask Bea if she could take the clip down.

That was within her capability, I was certain.

“The firm has a policy which is inspired by Google. Segirtad allows us to devote a percentage of our time to projects of our own. So I thought… hey, maybe there’s stuff I can do with those books… I can call on tools which didn’t exist forty years ago, use analytical models which are still in beta.”

Ursel nodded as if she understood what being in beta meant and then moved on from the alphorn to the Schwyzerorgeli (a Swiss accordion with a diatonic right-handed keyboard and a chromatic left-handed one) and its suitability for the playing of Alpine melodies in the Lydian mode.

Poor Dirk! He might have given up and decided to find a story idea in the nexus between football and musicology.