Lanceheim (10 page)

I
'm going to be completely frank,” said Vincent Tortoise. “I don't really know how we should handle this, I've never been involved in anything like it.”

The head of the Ministry of Culture was sitting with Reuben Walrus in one of the many restaurants along Grindelhof. They were sitting at a table where they could talk undisturbed. Tortoise knew the young chef at the place and, when he could, frequented the restaurant, which served a type of fusion that in the eyes of the minister seemed modern. Now it was lunch and the restaurant was full; from all directions there were surreptitious stares at the two distinguished guests. Both Tortoise and Walrus had become accustomed to these looks many years ago. Tortoise had also, contrary to his personality and character, developed a frightful taste in clothing. He was wearing a glistening bright red velvet jacket with a loud multicolored tie, and the stuffed animals who by chance did not know who he was looked anyway.

“What did you say?” asked Reuben, who as always was dressed in black and gray.

He was not sure that he had actually heard wrong, but because Margot Swan had told him that his hearing would get worse and worse, it was nearly impossible to distinguish imagination from reality.

“I said that we haven't decided yet, we have no plan,” Tortoise repeated in a somewhat louder voice and clearer articulation. “We've been deluged with letters and calls, from ordinary stuffed animals everywhere in the city, and everyone will in some way…I don't know…share your suffering…or at least declare and share their sorrow?”

Reuben Walrus did not know how he should answer. During the week that had passed he had made a follow-up visit, and Margot Swan had explained that now it was determined beyond all doubt that Drexler's syndrome was ravaging the composer's ear passages.

“What do you think, my friend?” wondered Tortoise. “Normally we would not get involved, but opinion is overwhelming. Would you be embarrassed if…we did some kind of recognition?”

“I don't know,” said Reuben. “In a way you hate being a poor wretch, but at the same time…” He laughed. A deep laugh, contagious, coming from his belly.

“It's wisdom that causes you to give in.” Vincent Tortoise smiled.

“It's age,” answered Reuben.

“It's the same thing.”

“What did you say?”

“It's the same thing,” repeated Tortoise. “Age and wisdom.”

“If it were only that easy,” sighed Walrus.

Vincent did not reply. His old friend was in the process of losing his hearing, losing the ability to compose, and if he did not want to maintain a light tone, it was understandable. Vincent had no need to gloss things over either. They
had known each other a long time. Their parents had been superficially acquainted, and they had gone to the same schools in Lanceheim long ago. Reuben was a few years older, and he had been one of the enviable ones, not only successful with the opposite sex but a model student besides. When Vincent got to know Reuben better, he saw that this perception did not hold up. Walrus's charisma was actually more convincing than his academic achievements, while with Tortoise it had been the opposite.

“A statue has been proposed,” said Vincent.

“What the hell?!” exclaimed Walrus, his mustache bristling. “You must be joking! A statue? Why that?”

“Someone talked about naming a street after you. Perhaps a square, even if the squares are more sought after because there are fewer of them.”

“Now you must be—”

“Easy,” said Vincent. “I know it seems like a bit much. But we have to do something. The pressure is…inconceivable. I mean, you know that I've always been one of your greatest admirers—”

“Bullshit,” said Reuben amiably. “You've never understood a note of what I've done.”

“Possibly. But I have always understood that it is wise to appear to be one of your greatest admirers.”

“It's not your political talents I'm talking about, it's the musical,” mumbled Reuben with a wry smile.

“However that may be, you're not exactly a national poet. And yet…I mean…no one has officially said that you are ill. Yet Mollisan Town appears terrified at the thought of never hearing a new Reuben Walrus composition again.”

Reuben did not reply. They had each ordered an endive salad with marinated quail egg, but neither of them had touched it. Perhaps because it reeked of vinegar, perhaps because they had no appetite.

“Personally I thought that perhaps we could get Radio Mollisan Town to devote Sunday afternoons to your works for some time to come? Until the worst has passed.”

“That will bring in a little cash anyway,” answered Reuben. “Sunday afternoons?”

“It was only an idea. But it would show the stuffed animals in the city that we're doing something.”

“Mm,” said Reuben. “Worth thinking about.”

“Just so you know, you're not the one who makes the decision in this matter,” Tortoise clarified sternly.

“Not you either, not without my approval,” grunted Walrus. “I'm not dead yet, you know?”

“I know.” Tortoise smiled.

But in a way Reuben Walrus felt dead, grieved for, and missed. As long as his concentration was focused on rehearsals and the problems with the unfinished symphony, things were going okay, but when discipline wavered…Despite the fact that part of his awareness knew how important it was to keep associations under tight rein, another part of him allowed his thoughts to roam freely. And this caused him pain and anxiety again and again.

 

“Listen, I have a
question,” said Reuben when lunch had advanced so far that the check was on the table, something the great composer showed no sign of caring about. “You must have heard about someone called…Maximilian?”

The reaction was immediate. Vincent, who had raised his glass to drink the last drops of water, remained sitting with his arm raised and mouth open. He stared distrustfully at his old friend, and in his gaze was a severity that he seldom showed.

“What about him?” he asked.

“No, I was just wondering,” said Reuben. “I got the suggestion of looking up this Maximilian, and it appears…a little ridiculous?”

“Who gave you this suggestion?” asked Tortoise.

“No, it comes from…various sources,” said Reuben truthfully.

“I would appreciate it if you could be more precise than that.”

“What did you say? More precise?”

Tortoise hesitated. He knew what he had to say, but he was not sure how Reuben would take it.

“Do you remember…the Night of the Flood?” he asked.

Reuben thought about it. He had a vague memory of something like that, a Night of the Flood, it must have been fifteen, twenty years ago.

“It was a riot, wasn't it?”

“It was a catastrophe,” asserted Tortoise. “And it was completely due to Maximilian. He arouses…emotions.”

“Now I remember,” said Reuben, whose memory worked slowly. “It was somewhere in east Lanceheim, wasn't it?”

“It was over the whole city, but it culminated there. It's a long time ago, but we still try to keep track of stuffed animals who…have anything to do with Maximilian. If you have any names…”

“Track?” asked Reuben, and he couldn't refrain from adding, “Yes, you're good at ‘keeping track.' And it sounds so exciting.”

“It's not particularly ‘exciting' at all,” snapped Tortoise. “There are stuffed animals who make use of this poor Maximilian to challenge…the structure of society…for their own purposes.”

On a different occasion Reuben would have made fun of this “challenge the structure of society,” but now he was more interested in the main subject.

“What is ‘poor' about Maximilian?”

“They are exploiting him!” exclaimed Tortoise. “He's a harmless lunatic. He's been in King's Cross, and from what I understand from the prison records, then—”

“Do you have access to the prisoners' records at King's Cross?”

“Don't be naive,” said Tortoise. “I am head of the ministry. I have access to whatever I want.”

“Now then, a quote to use in the next election campaign,” Reuben sneered.

“Maximilian could be anyone at all,” continued Tortoise, ignoring Walrus. “They spread their stories about him and get poor and sick stuffed animals to hope when no hope remains.”

“And you want to stop that?”

“There are underlying objectives.”

“Such as?”

“That I cannot go into, Reuben. Not even with you.”

“Because you don't know what they are?”

“I know about more than you want to know.”

“Hmm.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Hmm.”

“You're doing that to annoy me,” said Tortoise.

“Hmm,” repeated Reuben for the third time, just to annoy him, and he knew that he was doing it with success.

Vincent Tortoise seized the check and angrily counted bills from his wallet.

“Keep away from that,” he said. “That is my firm advice, Reuben. Keep away from Maximilian and the mob around him. You're going to regret it if you get involved in that game.”

“So you say,” answered Reuben, adding for the sake of peacekeeping, “And just so you know, I didn't think that thing about Sunday afternoons was a bad idea at all.”

Tortoise belched out a kind of coughing groan, and they both got up at the same time.

“It wasn't a promise,” said Vincent. “It was just an idea.”

“I realize that,” said Reuben. “But it was a nice idea.”

Under the hot sun they accompanied each other out onto Grindelhof before it was time to separate. They talked about meeting again in the coming week, but nothing was decided.

Reuben continued down toward Pfaffendorfer Tor, and he felt a certain relief. The idea of Maximilian had irritated him because he had not been able to decide, but now he had made his decision. This evening he would make a few calls.

It was time to act.

I
have no difficulty imagining that Sven Beaver and Eva Whippoorwill were, to put it mildly, surprised when Seal Pup Chiradello showed up together with Maximilian in Das Vorschutz the evening before confirmation. They were even more astonished when they heard what Chaffinch had offered.

I stayed at home that evening, and the rumor spread with the velocity of the wind between the houses. The church had offered Maximilian a place to live and a place at the high school. What had actually happened at the confirmation camp?

At the same time, I believe, there were many in the forest who nodded in affirmation to themselves and thought that this was right and proper. There was something about the cub that separated him from the rest of us. He was obviously academically gifted, he always had been, but still it was difficult to imagine an academic career for him; it was difficult to imagine any career at all, actually. The church? Yes, it might very well be there that he belonged.

This is speculation, of course, but I think that Maximil
ian's father immediately accepted the idea of sending his son off to Kerkeling High School. It was different of course with Eva, my once so beloved whippoorwill. Not even when summer was over and Maximilian went off with his father to his new school and a life at the boarding school would Eva accept that Maximilian had left home.

 

The church's gloomy little
apartment building on bark brown Leyergasse was squeezed between a pharmacy and a dance academy. The latter sounded glamorous, but the academy's heyday had been more than forty years earlier, and the dancers were the same then as now.

The entryway was dark and worn. The stairwell ceiling was low. The church had installed a beautiful stained-glass mosaic in the windows the whole way up to the fifth floor, but many pieces were cracked and broken, and no one had repaired them. Maximilian lived on the third floor, and considering it was a student residence and likewise the first apartment of his own, the two rooms were both comfortable and well utilized. It was not in Maximilian's nature, however, to take note of comforts, or to care about how he lived. When I moved in—that is a later story, which I will soon return to—he had been living at Leyergasse for almost three years, and the kitchen table and two chairs, a bed in the bedroom, and a shelf in the living room were still his only pieces of furniture.

In Kerkeling High School it was soon evident that the ease with which Maximilian made his way through elementary school had not been due to home instruction. While others agonized and were forced to devote afternoons, evenings, and weekends to their studies, Maximilian absorbed most of his knowledge during the lectures. On some isolated occasions he seemed to completely misinterpret the essay questions and give answers that were incomprehensible, but
as a rule he got all or almost all correct on all tests in all subjects, and without visible exertion at that.

His grades were not unimportant, but it was not due to them that Maximilian was soon perceived as an eccentric. He was really very quiet, and when he did speak, few or none understood the similes he used. In addition to that, he radiated what Chiradello identified as “goodness.” He never seemed to be irritated or angry; he seemed to understand and forgive everyone, and it is not strange that this appeared provocative. You do understand what I mean, don't you? Personally I cannot say that I am particularly aggressive, but when, in the midst of a traffic jam whose origin you do not understand and whose extent you only sense, and moreover on your way to something you have looked forward to for a long time and are planning to enjoy a great deal, swearing to yourself and at times with one paw on the horn, you see a strange driver in the car next to you who is smiling and waving amiably, this is provocative behavior.

It was the same thing with Maximilian.

Semester after semester he forgave cheaters and bullies, slackers and lazybones. He refused to judge the sadistic teachers who surprised their classes with unannounced tests or gave apparently unjust grades. After a few weeks in the new school, a puma in the second year designated Maximilian as his particular victim. As soon as the puma could, he started in on the younger pupil with taunts and calls, but also with shoves and sometimes a kick. Again and again he received Maximilian's forgiveness, which naturally annoyed the puma even more, and the bullying continued.

The last month during Maximilian's second year in Kerkeling High School, the puma snatched Maximilian's headcloth for what must have been the hundredth time. But instead of hiding or soiling it as before, he tied it around the history teacher's leg without the teacher noticing any
thing, whereupon Maximilian was forced to look for said teacher in the teachers' lounge and with a blush of shame on his cheeks ask to get the headcloth back in front of the whole faculty. Then the stuffed animals in Maximilian's class thought that the puma had gone too far. They gathered around Maximilian in the corridor where the class had their lockers, and explained that they were on his side. The puma had been harassing their classmate far too long; now the time for retribution had come. But Maximilian looked at them, smiled, and said, “The higher the height from which a ball falls, the higher it will bounce upward.”

As usual no one understood what he meant, and at last someone dared ask.

“At a table in a prosperous home a duck sat and ate,” Maximilian explained with customary patience. “It was in the evening, and there was an unexpected knock at the door. The duck was not expecting a visitor, but still he got up and let in the stranger. ‘I am hungry and poor,' said the stranger. ‘Can you help me?' The duck gave the stranger food and lodging. When he awoke the next morning, he was tied up in his bed. The stranger was standing before him. ‘I'm going to take everything I can find in your house,' said the stranger. ‘And I'm going to tape your mouth shut before I leave, so that no one can hear you cry for help. Only if fate wills it, will anyone find you here.'

“‘Why are you doing this?' asked the duck. ‘I invited you into my home, I gave you something to eat, I offered you a roof over your head.'

“‘Because I can never be you,' said the stranger.

“After that he taped the duck's mouth shut, and left the house forever.”

Maximilian fell silent.

His classmates stared at him in confusion. If the first simile was difficult to interpret, the longer parable struck them as completely incomprehensible.

 

It was during Maximilian's
second year at Kerkeling High School that I reestablished contact with him; after that I would never leave his side.

The visits to Das Vorschutz had become more and more sporadic on my part the last few years. I was living on banana yellow Hüxterdamm in an apartment building with an unpleasant stairwell that stank of urine and where the lighting never worked because the tenants stole the light-bulbs that the landlord replaced on rare occasions. I still had not concluded my legal studies. Uncertainty about my direction and future kept me at the department. I got by through tutoring first-year students and helping a couple of professors with research while I agonized over my remaining requirements. Life was waiting for me, but I was not ready to make myself known.

One of “my” students was a talented millipede who lived in a neighborhood of townhouses in northeast Lanceheim. We had a standing appointment on Sunday afternoons, but it took five weeks before I caught sight of Ulla Guinea Pig for the first time. I was completely distracted, probably gaping like a fool, and the poor millipede was forced to introduce us.

“This is my little sister, Ulla,” he said. “This is my tutor, Wolf Diaz.”

I extended my paw, she took it, and between our bodies an electrical charge arose that caused me to vibrate from my belly down to my knees. I saw that she felt the same. I had never experienced this before; this was love of a super-animalistic type. The following night I brooded for the first time about soul travel and reincarnation. If we had never met before, I asked myself, how was such an immediate contact possible?

She was younger than me. Considerably younger. And
in normal cases I would never have taken up with such a young stuffed animal. But I was helplessly in love and had no other choice than to adore her. When a few weeks later in the kitchen at home with Ulla Guinea Pig I heard Ulla talking about a terrifying recluse of a classmate who always wore a headcloth, I realized that she was in Maximilian's class at Kerkeling High School. I remembered that I had babysat for Maximilian, and I realized that I could have been a babysitter for Ulla.

This was a sobering occasion.

The story she told was astounding.

The day before, the class had a lecture with Schoolmaster Slovac. He was one of the oldest teachers at the school, but also one of the best. He taught mathematics and physics, and gave his subjects such a philosophical tinge that the mathematical topics appeared to be secondary matters in a larger context. He stood up at the blackboard and discussed the dilemma of infinity with a piece of chalk in his claw. In the middle of a sentence he fell silent, and sank down to the floor.

It took a few moments before the class reacted. Some kind of stroke, perhaps a heart attack, it was obvious. Half of the pupils ran up to see what was going on with the teacher; the other half rushed toward the door to escape. If Slovac really was about to die, the Chauffeurs could bang on the door to the class at any moment. The fear of encountering these henchmen of death could cause anyone to run for their life.

Maximilian, however, was not in a hurry.

He forced his way slowly through the circle of pupils and squatted down next to Slovac's unconscious body. Ulla had been among those who first approached the fallen teacher, but she explained that somehow everyone understood that they should make room for Maximilian.

“It was as though we knew,” she said, looking at me as if I would be able to answer her unspoken question.

Ulla had held Slovac's claw and thus been the only one in the room who knew that it had already happened. There was no pulse; it was too late.

“But I didn't dare say it,” she admitted to me and her brother. “I didn't dare say it, I hoped I was wrong.”

Maximilian sat next to the lifeless stuffed animal and placed his hand on Slovac's head. Then something happened that Ulla Guinea Pig could not describe. It was, she said, as if the expressions and gestures of her classmates were transformed into rigid looks and grimaces. As if time slowed down, everything stopped, life and reality. She noticed that she was breathing again at the same time she felt that the blood was flowing in Slovac's veins.

She let go of the claw in terror; it fell to the ground.

“He brought him back to life,” Ulla said quietly. “You won't believe me, but that was what happened.”

 

“Wolf Diaz!” exclaimed Maximilian.

I had waited for him on the sidewalk outside the school. When he came out, alone and long after the other pupils, I let myself be known.

“I will gladly help out,” I said.

“With what?” asked Maximilian amiably, at the same time starting to walk.

“With whatever your purpose is,” I replied, at once pretentious and self-occupied, and joined him.

Ever since Ulla Guinea Pig told me how Maximilian had saved his teacher from the Chauffeurs, I hadn't had a peaceful moment. I had suffered all the torment of doubt. I was probably late in my existential puberty—the testosterone had protected me from the tribulations of melancholy; females had occupied all my waking time. I was, as I already mentioned, twenty-six years old when I stood on the sidewalk and addressed Maximilian that day. I ought to
have made my peace with the meaninglessness of existence and accepted that a legal career was neither more nor less hopeless than anything else. But I matured late—I am still maturing—and for nights and solitary morning hours that week I came to see that there was meaning to the electrical jolt that Ulla Guinea Pig had given me. It had nothing to do with her; it was about Maximilian.

“I have some notes,” said Maximilian without looking at me or slowing his pace, “that perhaps you could make a clean copy of?”

I followed him home that afternoon, and found drifts of paper in his apartment. It would take me more than two months simply to organize the notes before I even started to write them out. During that time, I also understood how alone Maximilian was, and after the incident with Schoolmaster Slovac, it only got worse. If his classmates had already kept him at arm's length before, now the faculty was also suspicious. But Maximilian did not seem to suffer from this. He was a singular animal, and when one morning I found the following parable in a thick folder on his bookshelf, I knew that I had found my place in life.

In his childish handwriting he had written the following: