Little Hands Clapping (14 page)

The next difficulty for the editors will be its scale, or rather its lack of scale. The early front page cries of
One Hundred Dead in House of Horrors?
will turn out to have been optimistic. Finding that the shards of bone and scraps of clothing correspond with the evidence in the doctor’s extensive diaries and painstakingly filed photograph albums, the police will announce the official tally to be a little over a quarter of that. The initial glee at adding a new name to the list of notorious German cannibals will soon fade, leaving them unsure in which direction they should take the story. While it was clear to everybody that the old man and the doctor ought to have behaved differently, there was no reason to believe that in their final moments these people had been victims of anybody but themselves. The faces that look out of the pages of the newspapers had belonged to people who had made their own choices.

And then the stories behind the faces will begin to emerge, tangling things further still. Most will be heartbreaking: the young woman who had seemed so happy with her life and had given no sign of even the slightest turmoil in her mind; the man who had been unable to recover from the loss of his wife; the woman who had been suffering from an agonising and incurable illness. But then there will be the sex attacker, the fraudster, the serial bigamist and others who make it seem as if the old man and the doctor had provided a useful service to help rid the world of unsavoury characters.

As announcements from the investigation become fewer and farther between, the editors will be glad of the opportunity to relegate the story to the inside pages. With no serial killer to vilify and no trial to look forward to it will soon fade away, returning only occasionally, in ever-decreasing column inches, whenever a batch of evidence slots together and a new identification is announced.

Months into the investigation such an item will appear. Most people will pay it very little attention, but around the world, in cities where the streets are lined with rails and cables, from Changchun to Helsinki, from Sofia to San Francisco, a thousand lonely boys will be unable to look away. They will read the words over and over again, and stare at the accompanying picture until it is locked in their memory.

She is slightly out of focus, as if her image had been cropped from the back row of a group photograph, and her dark eyes are looking away to the side. Her hair, brown and straight, falls a little past her shoulders, and her lips are parted, revealing slightly crooked teeth. They had never been to her city, but even so the thousand boys feel they have seen her before, at night in an almost-empty tramcar, and as they stare at the photograph it is as if they can hear the soft whirr and clunk of wheels on rails, and the glide of a pole against an overhead power line.

In every language in which it is reported the article will be just a few sentences long, a repetition or slight reworking of the information released by the police. Her name had been Élodie Laroche, she had lived in Lyon, and she was thought to have been nineteen or twenty years old at the time of her disappearance. Her childhood had seen her drift from one foster home to the next, and in her mid teens she had left school without qualifications, after which it was thought that she had started living with men, moving from job to job and from one short relationship to the next.

She had not been reported missing, and had it not been for a dogged landlord’s pursuit of a missed rent payment the connection might never have been made. The police had released this information and the photograph, the only recent one they could find, in the hope that they would be able to track down a relative, somebody to whom they could pass on what little of hers they had recovered – a scarf, a copper bracelet and not quite enough bone fragments to fill a shoebox.

The thousand boys cannot understand why nobody had wanted her. They close their eyes, and in their minds they have conversations with her lovers, these Jean-Pierres and Fabrices, Azizes and Jean-Lucs, who recall her fondly enough, saying things like,
She was slim, and I like that
, but when asked why they had let her go, they shrug
. She was a bit strange, I suppose. A bit quiet.

Did you love her?
the boys ask.

The men almost laugh, and shake their heads.
No,
they say,
it was only ever a casual thing.

The boys picture the final scenes of these brief affairs: the man telling Élodie that he needs some time alone, and Élodie silently packing her belongings into a single case and walking through the streets, getting on the first tram she sees and riding up and down the line, wondering what she will do this time, where she will go. It gets so late that the tram stops running, and she has no choice but to get off. Once again she finds herself unpacking her case in a small room near a terminus, and finding a job in a café or a cheap hotel, where she will meet somebody who, for a while, will let her into his life.

The thousand boys are overcome by an urge to track these men down and put them in headlocks until they explain why they had not taken better care of her, but as they rise to their feet they realise that these Jean-Pierres and Fabrices, Azizes and Jean-Lucs are not to blame: the fault lies instead with boys just like them, boys who would have sat across from her in almost-empty tramcars late at night. Mute and inept, they would have listed reason after reason why they couldn’t approach her:

As they carried on adding items to this list they would reach their stop and go away, and they would never see her again. They had let her drift into the arms and beds of men too stupid to realise what they had.

The thousand boys close their eyes again, and other details from her life appear before them – the unknown father, the alcoholic mother, the siblings she had never met, the disappointment in the eyes of the foster parents as they wished they hadn’t been assigned such a withdrawn child, and the girls who had made her every schoolday a misery. They will see how easily somebody just like them could have reached out to her, and made things better, but they had let the opportunity pass. They feel the weight of responsibility, but at the same time they feel something they had never felt before. They feel ready.

They put the newspaper away and return to their lives, knowing it won’t be long before they fall in love with a sad-eyed girl in a tramcar, and that this time they will not just sit there making excuses to themselves. The next day they see her, and when she looks up and their eyes meet, they smile.

Instead of returning this smile, the girl turns her head in a way that makes it clear the attention had not been welcome. They wait for the familiar burn of humiliation, but it doesn’t come. Instead they realise their judgement had been clouded by impatience; the girl’s sadness had been nowhere near as deep as Élodie’s, and was probably no more than the mild and transient melancholy that follows a dull day at work. They wait for the next pair of unhappy eyes, and if necessary the next, and sooner or later it happens.

On trams around the world the girl will look back at the boy, and for a fraction of a second her eyes will return his smile, and he will say something to her, and sit beside her, and she will start talking too, and they will lose track of where they are, riding around the city until the sound of metal on metal stops and they get out and look up and down a dark street, with no idea which way to go.

Wearing an exceptionally comfortable pair of pyjamas, Doctor Ernst Fröhlicher was lying in bed. When he had finished reading his latest medical journal, he wrote his daily diary entry, then he opened his bedside drawer and took out a small pile of pieces of paper torn from newspapers and magazines, each one carrying a charity appeal. One by one he went through them, and one by one he wrote cheques proportionate to how sad each plea made him feel. By the time he was finished he had planted several trees, bought a well for an African village, funded eye operations for a dozen Indians and housed a dog. When all the envelopes were addressed and sealed he took some time to relax, flipping through a large album of photographs of all the bodies he had received from the museum. He looked at the overweight man, who had been such a struggle to lift but who had seen him through a whole winter. Then came the woman with the unbearable line of dark fuzz above her upper lip, and on the next page, lying on the garage floor with her eyes closed, was the girl he had kissed.

As he had laid her out, stripped her and sponged her down, he had been unable to stop himself from wanting her. He had leaned in towards her, and waited for Ute to appear, to glare at him and make him stop, but no vision came, and gently he kissed the girl’s lips, which, despite being still and cold, had an irresistible softness to them. He knew at once that he had to feel this softness again, and he moved in for another kiss. This time he parted her lips with his tongue, and felt her slightly crooked teeth. With his mouth still pressed against hers, his breath trembling, he ran his fingers through her hair, then he squeezed her small breasts and licked her belly, and trying hard not to think about what he was doing, he mounted her, all the time whispering words of love.

When it was over he wept, and told himself again and again that he was
not like that
, that he had only tried it once to see what it was like, and besides he had been so lonely and he had thought that it would be like being back with Ute. But it hadn’t been. He finished cleaning her up, and put her in the freezer.

From then on he tried his best to treat her body as he would any other. He made no mention of this episode in his diaries, and whenever the memory reared up before him he told himself he had made a mistake, that was all, and he was
not like that
. He ate her more hurriedly than usual, and for once he was not transported by the meat. Instead of the delicious taste that he had come to expect, it seemed to have no flavour, and to be difficult to chew and swallow, and not once did it take him to a world without pain. With every mouthful came a reminder of what he had done, and Ute’s continuing absence was more damning than any appearance would have been.
She meant nothing to me, Ute
, he said out loud, as he stuffed the meat in his mouth. He wished he could tell her that he hadn’t even known her name, but he had done. He had seen it in her passport. It had been a French passport, and he had burned it until there had been nothing left but a pile of ash, which he had hoed into a flower-bed.

Over the following weeks, knowing it was wrong to waste food, he hurried to finish her and his patients shook their heads, and said to one another,
I do hope Doctor Fröhlicher is taking care of himself. He appears to be gaining weight.
It was around this time that he bought a bicycle, and since then, on dry days, he would ride it to work.

He closed the album, and looked at the ceiling. He hoped Ute would understand, and forgive him.

A thousand babies will be born, each one a girl, and when the parents have the conversation about what to call her, the fathers will suggest Élodie.

Although it is unusual in Zagreb and Odessa, and in Melbourne, Buenos Aires and Alexandria, the mothers will nod.
Yes,
they will say
, it does sound nice
.

Pavarotti’s wife had engaged a press cuttings service to look through newspapers and magazines for mentions of the museum, and their findings were sent directly to the old man. The first item to arrive had been a feature about short breaks in the city. The article opened with rapturous descriptions of the castle, the river, the shops and the galleries, and went on to devote a short paragraph to the museum, calling it
incoherent and insensitive
, and saying that at points it came across as
a handy advice shop for the emotionally fragile
. The old man thought this to be quite a reasonable appraisal, but he knew that if Pavarotti’s wife was to read it she would decide that sweeping and tiresome changes would have to be made. With his long, grey fingers he rolled the clipping into a ball, and threw it into the bin.

The next mention had also been buried within a larger piece. This time, though, it had been broadly positive, so at the start of the next meeting he had handed it over to the proprietor, whose eyes widened as she stood up to read it aloud. ‘
This unusual museum,’
she said,
‘should be commended for bravely confronting a difficult topic
.’ That week she didn’t propose any changes.

The old man wasn’t always able to intercept bad news. Towards the end of one meeting Pavarotti’s wife, who had seemed agitated throughout, held up a copy of an English language guidebook she had found in a shop. Her face was white as she opened it at a marked page and stood up. She cleared her throat, and in heavily accented English she read. The author began innocuously enough, writing that it was an unusual way to spend a rainy half hour, and suggesting that the more psychologically robust reader might like to give it a try, particularly as admission was free and its toilets were kept nice and clean. Her voice got higher and higher in pitch and volume, building into an almost operatic crescendo as she read the concluding sentence: ‘
A curious mixture of stark, disturbing realism and high camp.
’

‘My English is quite proficient,’ she said, catching her breath, ‘but I was unfamiliar with the phrase
high camp
. I made an enquiry, and I have been informed that this expression means . . .’ She sat down, and fanned herself with a folder. ‘. . . it means
extreme homosexuality
.’