AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL GRAZ BART MOEYAERT TRANSLATION DAVID COLMER 1
I saw the bicycle first and then the girl. She was lying on her back with her arms up on either side of her head, as if she had surrendered while falling, and her legs were ready to walk away from her, like a cartoon character s. There was a kink in her neck. Her face was turned to Hürlimann s, but her eyes were shut. She was dead, I was sure of it. I raised my hands to my mouth. To my horror, someone had already laid a bunch of roses there for her. Then I could have kicked myself, because spread around her was also a net of oranges, a carton of milk, a cake wrapped in cellophane, a box of doughnuts and a nylon shopping bag that didn t blow away because there was something heavy in it. The roses were Grand Prixs from Pammer s stall opposite the Opera House; I recognised the wrapping. The accident must have happened in the minutes it took me to get up from my desk, pull on my coat and go downstairs. I left to go for a walk; she fell. A life can change in the click of a finger. I turned around and started going through the pockets of my short coat for my front door key. I was on my way back inside to call an ambulance. I thought I was reacting quickly, but once inside I didn t even need to turn on the light in the hall, someone else in the street had already dialled the right number. I heard the distant siren swell as it approached. Across the road people were coming out of their houses, in the Park Hotel guests were leaning out over the window ledges, and through the cellar windows of number fourteen I saw the tops of the heads of the Hürlimann children, standing on their toes on the sides of their beds so that they too could catch a glimpse. Their silhouettes showed black. I gripped the doorjamb and blinked. It was too much for me to take in all at once. I saw the fallen girl as the other people now saw her. From far away, from above, from the side and from nearby, and finally I tried to imagine how the orphans saw her through the cellar window, lying in front of them like that, at eye level, with her face turned towards them. The ambulance stopped across the tram tracks. A police van parked just in front of it with two wheels on the pavement. From my doorstep I checked whether any cars were approaching as if I was suddenly responsible for the traffic. I looked left and right down the street and shook 2
my head, because I thought I was seeing things: further along a dog seemed too scared to step forward or go back. It was quivering on its legs and holding its snout in the wind uncertainly, watching like a person as a policewoman put the things back in the shopping bag and a policeman righted the bicycle and carried it over to a tree. The wheel was bent, the handlebars twisted. When the ambulance men lifted the girl onto a stretcher and slid her into the back of the ambulance, the dog took a few steps forward, as cautious as a very old lady. It sniffed the ground in front of it to see whether it was safe. From under its brows it watched the departing ambulance, turning its head to follow the vehicle around the corner. I got into the police van. On the street people s interest waned. They walked on, discussed what had happened and gestured at my chemist s shop. The windows of the Park Hotel banged shut. I heard the curtains closing. The play was over; it could have been better. The tram tracks hummed. The One was approaching. Even before the tram rang its bell the dog had stepped off the tracks, but by the looks of it the tram still only missed its backside by a whisker. The tram went ting-a-ling, which was the same as screaming, but the dog wasn t bothered and skipped up onto the traffic island. The tram stopped. The passengers who were getting off seemed to step out of the way for the dog or look back at it. Some of them smiled. After the tram had carried on around the corner in the direction of Mariatrost, there was no sign of the dog anywhere. Both street and stop were deserted. I told the policeman that I just saw a dog catch a tram. The policeman didn t even raise an eyebrow. He said, I believe you. It was probably the same dog as the one that directs the traffic sometimes on the corner of Annen Strasse and Eggenberger Gürtel. When that dog is there, accidents happen. It s terrible. The policeman tensed his lips, as if to show that he had no sense of humour but did his best, then bent over his notes again. He was left-handed and smudged. He read through what he had already written and nodded once. He said, But you didn t hear anything? No, I said. I m not the kind of person who can pay attention to different things at once. When I m doing the bookkeeping, for instance, I only hear the adding 3
machine. When I m putting on my coat, I look for the armholes. When I m going downstairs, I concentrate on the steps. I believe you, the policeman said again, and for a moment it looked like he was going to give his particular kind of grin again. Instead he pursed his lips and closed one eye. You didn t see anything? No, I repeated. My thoughts climbed Schloss Berg. On a low wall near the clock tower there is a statue of a dog facing south. Years ago it saved a woman. I don t know when that was or whether the woman was important. I don t know who put the statue on the garden wall either. I felt like telling the policeman about that stone dog, but didn t, because it wasn t relevant. The dog on the wall had rescued a woman by barking, that was what I remembered from the story. The dog I had just seen hadn t barked. After the policeman had read my statement back to me I was free to go. It was the Hertz girls turn. They worked at Hürlimann s, maybe they had seen something. I went for a walk as I had intended. I held my hands behind my back to make walking feel like strolling, but didn t hit the rhythm I normally kept, that particular tempo of mine that s slightly slower than walking pace and perfect for seeing a lot without taking too much in, so that my heart is at rest before I go to bed. I realised that I was leaning back on the wind with my upper body and that my feet were hurrying forward as a result. I kept having to restrain myself. I sought the song I often sang, the song that fitted the beat of my slow evening walks, but my humming was off key. I kept to the house side of Glacis Strasse, wary of the darkness under the trees across the road. I was once accosted there by a man who said he lived behind the fake rocks at the Burghof and asked me for money. I fished the small coins out from between the big ones in my pockets, then lied, Here, that s all I have. But you can smell fear, and I ve never learnt to lie, and the man who said he lived behind the rocks saw right through me. He bent towards me and said, with his face close to mine, that he thought it was a pity that that was all I owned. I wasn t very rich then, was I? Did I come here often? Did I have a family? Where perhaps did I live? And he brought the cupped hand with the money in it up between our faces and flicked 4
through the coins with his thumb. Poor, searching soul, he said or something like that. His remark made me shrink with misery, because of course I am much richer than those few coins, I have a chemist s shop that was founded almost a century ago, Apotheke Eichler, better known as Zum Guten Hirten, on the corner of Maifreddy Gasse and Leonhard Strasse. I slowed down and glanced over my shoulder, despite being convinced that I wouldn t see anyone walking or anything moving on the other side of the road; the part of the park that borders Opern Ring is safe until late at night. Now that I had looked, my imagination began to play tricks on me: a simple branch was a man, a shadow was a man, a streetlight reflecting off the bonnet of a car was a man. Everything was restless in the wind. Poor searching soul, I said to myself, burying my hands in my pockets and keeping my head low behind my collar. Good soul, decent soul, I said, checking that no cars were approaching and crossing the road. I passed the lane where the motor coaches stop in summer, disgorging entire busloads of the lazy variety of tourist, who flood through the gates, in and out of the Mausoleum and then, with a guide, past the fresco with the three plagues and into the cathedral, emerging again from the west wing to ascend the hill, sighing up the path and trailing along behind each other like ants carrying eggs. They follow the arrows to the lift that will whiz them up to the panorama on top of Schloss Berg for next to nothing. They could walk it for nothing at all, climbing Krieg Steig s two hundred and sixty steps, but they don t do that. When they get to the top they turn their bags around to hang in front of their stomachs and take out their cameras. The things click like old-fashioned mechanical models, but they re brand new and cheap and automatically focus on anything they get their sights on: the new Slovenian girlfriends, passers-by, the view, the city s red roofs, and later the door opening of the motor coach just before they get back on. I m not the kind of man who gets wound up about things easily. I ve been dispensing advice for years. I can see from the prescriptions which season it is. I do my bookkeeping when it needs doing. I go for a walk before turning in for the night. In the darkness of the park I found it hard to breathe. I stopped, pulled my hands out of my pockets and let my arms dangle next to my body. I tried to breathe more slowly and closed my eyes for a moment to concentrate, then opened them 5
quickly again and sucked in a lot of air all in one go because I didn t trust the darkness neither around me nor behind my eyes. As if the rush of air had made me think of life and my thoughts had immediately reminded me of the opposite, the girl was suddenly lying at my feet again with her bicycle a little further along. I thought the girl was Death himself, but shook my head: they d laid her on a stretcher and driven her off in an ambulance. She wasn t dead. They would save her. Of course, they would save her. For a few seconds I felt like the dog that had hesitated in the street, but because I could see legs moving further up under the trees, I turned back. There are fears I d rather keep unnamed. I took a small detour under the gallery that connects the opera house with the theatre and strode resolutely through Kaiser-Josef Platz and into Maifreddy Gasse. I felt like I was following a straight line. I crossed Maifreddy Gasse at number fourteen. Stepping up onto the traffic island, I thought of the girl and the shopping that had lain around her. Who had she bought the doughnuts for? Who was waiting for the milk? How empty was the vase? When I looked around to make sure there wasn t any traffic, I was blinded by a flash of white light. For a moment I saw spots before my eyes and thought that a streetlight had flickered, flaring up for a split second. I thought of a camera or reflecting glass but around me the windows were dark. The streetlights buzzed. Above my chemist s shop my lights were on: my standard lamp, my reading lamp and, on the windowsill, the lamp in the form of a woman holding up a globe of light. I took a step back to see how cosy my apartment looked from a distance. Again I was startled. The light was playing tricks on me. The white flash was branded on my retina and only gradually faded. When I raised my head again and peered through my lashes, I realised that the two busybodies next to one of my windows were reflecting a streetlight. I hadn t used those mirrors for years and every time the window-cleaner I had taken to employing came, he left them pointing in different directions. Sometimes I had even seen the sky from inside. Yes, I said out loud. 6
I stepped off the traffic island, glad to know where the blinding light was coming from. I like to understand things. I nodded at the place where the girl had lain and tried to picture the street as I saw it when sitting at my desk on the first floor. I slowed down and looked at the ground behind me: at the concrete paving that marked the tram track, the strip of asphalt for the cars, the pavement with its sheets of concrete. I went to walk on but my eyes kept returning to something dark by the curb, I thought it was a cigar box or a piece of cardboard. To my surprise it was a black, relatively new wallet. A Greenpeace sticker was stuck to the inside. I found a compartment with a card in it, a pass for a jazz club in Linz. There was a colour photo on it. I turned the pass to the streetlight to get a better look at the photo and tilted it to cut the gloss. I froze when I recognised the face. In the photo the girl had short hair. I read that she came from Graz and was born in March. The jazz club was called Count Davis. The girl s membership was valid until next year. That was when I caught my breath. I brought the card closer to my face to assure myself that I had truly read what I had read. The girl was called Erhart. Jochen Jonathan Erhart. I am aware that there are boys who look like girls and girls who look like boys. That doesn t bother me. Nothing shocks me. More than once I ve had to mop up blood. My bell rings because another sick person has come in. For myself, I m scared of pain, but illnesses of every kind are regulars at my place of business, especially the chronic ones. In that area I am a very old hand. I detect. I analyse. I slot things in between healthy and unhealthy. That is my nature. I slipped the card back into the wallet as if trying to convince myself that I hadn t noticed anything, but a few seconds later I looked at it again from close-by and couldn t believe my eyes. There are boys who buy roses and doughnuts and oranges and look like extraordinarily beautiful girls. 7