Amberville (18 page)

Father was offered Rector Owl’s position.

Father accepted.

The epilogue goes: Rector Owl disappeared and was not seen for several years. Later he was said to be at the university library in Lanceheim, where he was working in the archives. His cub, Nathan, is still driving bus number 6.

To summarize, in the autumn of age, a life consisting solely of good deeds is impossible. Apart from the fact that evil constantly tempts us, we are at some point placed in a situation of choice where goodness is not one of the alternatives.

My choice looked like this:

To injure the one I loved in order to remain true to myself. Or to rescue the beloved through false actions.

I could not marry Emma Rabbit.

I proposed to her in April. We set a date for the wedding at the end of August and thereby had time for the preparations. My love for Emma was stronger than ever.

The same applied to the insight that this marriage was insanity.

Both of our mothers were happy to excess about the upcoming wedding. They discussed what songs to sing, which guests to invite, and what flowers to order. Archdeacon Odenrick was spoken with, the band was booked, and
dresses were sewn. Mother would prepare the food herself.

Father was more levelheaded and only intermittently took part in the planning. This worked out well, as Emma Rabbit was fatherless. It had always been painful for her to talk about her father, and therefore we let it be. But I understood that she was devoting a lot of thought to him during the wedding preparations.

I held myself at a proper distance from the planning.

I ought to have stopped the whole thing, but I couldn’t.

It wasn’t a matter of will.

I wanted to love Emma for better or for worse. I wanted to share the rest of my life with her in love and truth.

But that wouldn’t be possible.

We were no more than stuffed animals. Against our will we would come to injure one another, quarrel, and perhaps even be unfaithful to each other. Young and inexperienced, we gave our promises because we relied on love. But wherever I looked, in literature and in reality, lifelong pairing was only possible through mutual forgiveness or a similarly mutual lack of interest.

Neither the one nor the other was possible for the one who has chosen goodness.

To enter into this marriage with the knowledge that in five, ten, or twenty years I could betray my own youthful self was impossible.

I ought to have told Emma about my thoughts. But she was just as excited about the impending wedding as her mother. I couldn’t break her heart.

Three weeks before the wedding the thought came to me in my sleep. It arrived as easily as a bur in your fur. It was just as hard to get rid of.

Three weeks before the wedding. I didn’t know how I would get Mother to understand that I had to back out. I
hadn’t paid any attention to Emma’s comments from the previous evening. She had said that it would be exciting to meet my brother Eric. She asked if he was older or younger.

I heard her ask the question.

I didn’t think any more about it.

But the idea came to me in my sleep.

B
lood-red Western Avenue continues all the way to Hillevie and the sea. When the developed areas thin out and the forest begins, blue South and yellow North Avenues change to small country roads which after a few miles turn into paths no one has walked on for many decades.

Mint-green Eastern Avenue leads, only a few hundred meters beyond the city limits, to a massive wooden gate. Above the gate hangs a four-meter-long board between two tall poles, and on the board someone has written “Garbage Dump” in tar. The wooden gate stands wide open from the start of the Morning Weather to the end of the Afternoon Weather. If you arrive earlier or later you’re forced to pound on the gate, or use your horn, to get someone to open it. But it’s far from certain that you’ll make yourself heard, and the garbagemen who drive the trucks are careful to keep to the open hours.

The Garbage Dump was
a terrifying area. The sun never reached down between the mountains of refuse that lined the streets. Inside the gate there were three roads to choose from. No
signs guided the visitor, but there was seldom anyone who came to the Garbage Dump who didn’t find their way on their own.

The garbage trucks that transported combustible refuse took the Right-hand Road. If the cargo consisted of worn-out apparatus made of steel or iron, you took the Left-hand Road. In both cases you drove along meandering roads toward a turnaround several kilometers into the garbage region. The garbagemen drove as fast as they could, as the stench became worse and worse the deeper in toward the heart of the Garbage Dump they came, but it was hard to maintain any speed to speak of on the curving roads, and there was always a risk of avalanche from the mountains of garbage.

Once at the turnaround for combustible refuse, the garbageman tipped the bed of the truck so that the garbage fell straight down into a gigantic hollow where tons of soot and ash couldn’t conceal the fact that the embers derived nourishment from new trash around the clock. At the corresponding turnaround for steel and iron was the Hole. Magnus’s own enormous outhouse, and no garbageman had ever stayed long enough after having tipped his load that he heard the scrap hit the bottom of the Hole.

The Middle Road inside the wooden gate led, via tunnels and unexplainable windings, the whole way up to the top of the dump and a shantytown consisting of a few dozen ramshackle hovels and shacks. Up there, with a view of the dump and the eastern parts of Lanceheim, lived the populace of the dump. Stuffed animals who knew how to run across the mountains of garbage without starting a landslide, those who no longer perceived the stench of decay, who keep the incinerator glowing and the roads drivable, and had forgotten how things looked in Mollisan Town.

In the middle of this settlement disguised as a Garbage Dump lived the Queen of the Garbage Dump, Rat Ruth. Her
residence was a veritable temple of refuse, built of pieces of wood, shards of glass, and compacted newspapers. On the roof stood a four-meter-tall plastic Christmas tree that Ruth had found many years ago, and which she’d become attached to. The tree’s hundreds of lights blinked red and white and green, day and night.

The garbagemen who thought they had something of value in their load took the Middle Road up to the dump’s settlement. On the square in front of the rat’s residence was a kind of parking lot, where they parked their cars and awaited the dump’s foreman and uncrowned prince, a hyena by the name of Bataille. He was the one they dealt with, a hard negotiator who knew that the alternative to his meager offers were the dump’s south or north waste stations. Nonetheless, Bataille was to be preferred before Ruth. The rat most often slept during the day, but on those few occasions when she awakened by mistake and received the terrified garbagemen, there were no negotiations at all. If they wanted to leave the Garbage Dump in one piece, the only thing to do was to turn over the small valuables they’d planned to sell, and then drive away as fast as they could. Hyena Bataille found a certain enjoyment in the actual negotiations; Rat Ruth thought it was more fun to scare the shit out of the garbagemen.

There were two reasons to live at the Garbage Dump. Animals who were driven out of society, on their own account or others’, moved here as a final outpost. And stuffed animals which had been produced with a defect were dumped along with other dross and refuse. Those newly produced animals who had never gotten to ride in the Deliverymen’s green pickup made up the majority in the dump city. There were discolored birds and gnawers without teeth, stuffed animals without whiskers, arms, legs, or tails, all of whom worked for Rat Ruth. The kind who made their way to the dump after first having lived in the city most often had a
hard time getting into the community. It often happened that these animals were forced to live alone somewhere in the wasteland around the burn piles, or else they were compelled at last to return to Mollisan Town.

Ruth was a discarded stuffed animal. She was missing her right paw as well as a left leg when she rolled out of the factory. Instead of being placed with some eagerly expectant couple on the Cub List, she was tossed up onto the bed of a garbage truck and tossed out at the dump.

Two things distinguished Ruth even in her early years. One was that she didn’t seem to miss her paw or her leg. She hopped along through life on the stump and on the legs she had, and she didn’t run much faster or slower than her friends her age. The other thing that was bewildering was her lack of a need for acknowledgment. Or, put more simply: she seemed not to give a damn about others. The young Rat Ruth turned her back on the world, not because deep down she feared it. She wasn’t interested; that was the whole thing.

Rather soon the grown-ups at the dump joked that Ruth’s leg and paw were the lesser amputations. Her lack of social needs was worse. She went her own way, and when she did go with others, she did so by coincidence. She wasn’t asocial, but everything she did, she did on her own terms and on her own account, and in that way, in time, she won respect.

It wasn’t Rat Ruth who asked to be crowned Queen of the Garbage Dump after the King of the Garbage Dump died. The title, like the ceremony, was something the animals at the dump thought up themselves, nothing that had been authorized by any department. A leader was needed from which a hierarchical system could proceed. In a place like the Garbage Dump it was important to know your place in order to fill out your life. And having a king or queen was ostentatious in a way that livened things up.

“Me?” a confounded Ruth had asked when they came to
see her after the Chauffeurs had picked the king up early one winter morning. “Well, why not?”

And thereby it was decided.

Rat Ruth was only twenty-six years old when she was named monarch of the dump, and the role made her visible to the garbagemen in the outside world as well. This forced her to take an active role in the life of the dump, which she did with the same nonexistent commitment that marked all of her endeavors. In the residence that the defective stuffed animals insisted on having built for her, the largest hall was set up for audiences. The animals understood that they had chosen a queen who would not eagerly seek out her subjects, and therefore set up a throne. With patches of jeans over the holes in the pink, flowered cloth of a discarded armchair, complemented with a footrest which in its previous life had been a vacuum cleaner, Ruth sat night after night dozing, drinking lukewarm beer, and letting herself be talked to by her foremen. They told about their duties, which was the everyday life of the Garbage Dump. She had reduced the number of foremen to three—during the old king’s time there had been eight. One of them kept watch over the road to the incinerator, another took care of the Hole and the road there. And a third, the one who was closest to her, Hyena Bataille, was responsible for the wooden gate and for the winding, treacherous road up to the queen’s residence and the dump city.

This was a prosperous kingdom Rat Ruth had inherited. The Environmental Ministry had calculated roughly how high the rent should be for the animals in the dump to be able to manage, and even manage nicely. The ministry had great respect for the work that was carried out at the Garbage Dump, and were aware of how quickly the situation in the city would degenerate if the dump didn’t function. What they didn’t know was that the trade in used goods was a secondary occupation.

The bigwigs in the city’s underworld had become accustomed to the fact that the King of the Garbage Dump was paid well for causing animals to disappear. Nonetheless they wished him back when the Queen of the Garbage Dump stated the new conditions. She understood that she could set any price she wanted; the Garbage Dump was one of the few places where the Chauffeurs lost the game. An animal that was torn apart could always be sewn together at the hospital. Even a torn-off head could be filled and replaced. But the animal that failed to pay its gambling debts, that didn’t respect the gangster kings or their gorillas, only needed to be reminded of the Garbage Dump and its incinerator and the Hole to meekly step back in line.

Rat Ruth was not a numbskull.

Hyena Bataille had appeared
as if out of nowhere. One morning he was sitting on top of an old Volga wreck that stood along the road toward the Hole. His paws were hanging nonchalantly out over the edge of the roof and his stained, black, narrow-brimmed hat was shoved back on his head. He was smoking a cigarette, squinting toward the sun that was coming up, and didn’t seem to be bothered by the collection of animals that in a few short moments gathered around him.

He was so haggard and his fur so matted that no one who saw him that morning was especially concerned. Perhaps you could sense that he was an aggressive type—he had presumably made his way to the Garbage Dump of his own free will—but it didn’t appear as though he was in a condition to win a fight. The animals didn’t bother to call a foreman over; they thought they would have a little fun on their own.

“Who are you?” asked a brave rooster.

He was sky blue with a cloud-white comb, aspired to a
foreman’s job in due time and therefore had a particular purpose in appearing cocky.

At first the hyena didn’t seem to have heard the question. He sat unmoving, smoking his cigarette and letting the tender rays of the sun stroke his whiskers.

“Who’s asking?” he said at last.

His voice was deep and harsh. Friendly, but commanding respect. When he turned his face toward the rooster it was the first time the animals saw the hyena’s eyes. They glistened like black mirrors, refusing entry to onlookers.

“It’s me who’s asking,” answered the rooster, without letting himself be concerned by the challenge that the hyena had assumed, and reciprocated, without hesitation, “and when I ask I’m used to getting an answer.”

“That sounds about right,” mumbled the hyena in his dark voice, as though he was mostly talking to himself, “I’ve heard that you all have a special way of treating strangers here.”

“And you came here anyway?” said the rooster ironically.

The hyena took a final drag from the cigarette and put it out by crushing the ember against the roof of the car where he was sitting. He furrowed his eyebrows, and his sudden displeasure made the animals standing in a semicircle around the car feel ill at ease.

“Lay off now,” he said, “and leave me in peace. I’m sure we’ll find some way to relate to each other in due course.”

“‘Relate to each other’?” the rooster imitated in a voice full of scorn. “Did you hear? He wants to ‘relate,’ in ‘due course.’ Listen, the only course you need to do is…is…”

But the rooster couldn’t think of any cogent irony because he was uncertain what the word meant.

“Leave me in peace,” said the hyena again.

This time it wasn’t a request, it was a direct order. And for a fraction of a second—a second that could have saved
the rooster’s life—the rooster actually considered doing as the stranger asked. But then the blue rooster realized that it was too late, that fate had already brought him here and that fate always knew what it was doing. He was forced to follow it to the end. He took a step forward and kicked at the car door. The sound that arose, an imposing boom, surprised him. It was the acoustics of the car’s empty compartment that caused the rooster to overcome his terror when he heard for himself what powerful legs he had.

“Beat it,” he said to the hyena. “There are already enough mouths to fill here.”

The rest happened in just a minute. Nonetheless, that minute would be talked about for several years.

The hyena jumped down from the roof of the car and in the same movement took out a bottle which he must have had concealed inside his worn-out jacket. The glass bottle reflected in the sun, and the rooster as well as the observers intuitively perceived the bottle as a weapon, something the hyena would strike with. But it was the hyena’s other paw that shot forth like a projectile and encircled the rooster’s neck in a merciless grip. In a moment the hyena screwed off the cap of the bottle with his teeth, and when the rooster opened his beak to gasp for breath—the grip on his neck hardly allowed him to get any air—the hyena forced the bottle down his throat instead. The animals stood bewildered at the sides of the fighters, watching how the contents of the bottle ran down into the rooster.

How many of them understood what was really going on? Some. Perhaps a few. But not many.

It took a while before the bottle was empty. To judge by the rooster’s heaving, flapping, and more and more frantic body, the liquid that was running down his throat was foul-tasting. But despite the fact that the rooster kicked in every direction and desperately tried to wriggle out of the hyena’s grasp, he had no chance. The scene even looked ridiculous,
because the rooster’s exertions didn’t seem to concern the much stronger hyena whatsoever.

It took perhaps half a minute before the bottle was empty. An endless time. When there were only a few gulps left, which the rooster apparently couldn’t get down, the hyena threw the bottle onto the ground and from the inside of his jacket conjured forth a lighter.