The Dark Meadow (8 page)

At some time in the night he woke up. It was dark, and he was alone in the bar of the inn. Even the landlord had left. He must have dropped off to sleep; the beer mat and his bill were still on the table. His arm hurt because it had been lying at an awkward angle. In fact he hurt right up to his shoulders, his whole body had seized up. His hand had gone to sleep, and he had to massage it for a while with the other hand before he could use it again. At first he couldn't remember where he was when he woke up, or what he was doing here. But then it came back to him. He'd stayed on here in the Baitz area yesterday evening. At first he came into the inn only to buy something to eat. Out and about all
day, going from house to house. Ringing bells. Towards seven he'd had enough of it, he'd thought he deserved his hard-earned supper.

Sharpening knives didn't bring in much money these days. People didn't value his craft any more. Even ten years ago he'd made a decent living, but now? People these days bought mass-made implements, knives with plastic handles, available for the price of a sandwich. All cheap, all easy to come by; if you needed something new you went to Woolworth's, where they sold their customers rubbish. You couldn't sharpen a knife like that, its blade would bend the moment you so much as looked at it, and if he put it on the whetstone he could expect it to break, it was such poor quality.

‘The good old days are over,' he said to himself under his breath, holding on to the table to help him get to his feet. He'd been on the road as long as he could remember. He wasn't a gypsy; his family belonged to the continental travelling people known as the Yenish. They had been pedlars, knife-grinders and basket-weavers for generations, all of them decent folk with a licence to trade on the road and a small house in the Unterlichtenwald area. In the bad times of the Third Reich, when even the licence to trade wasn't valid any more and his father had been forced to go and work in the munitions factory, that little house
had saved their lives, even if the other Yenish looked down on them for having a fixed address.

‘If you live in a house you're not a Yenish any more, you're one of the Gachi people.'

But the fact was that without a fixed address they'd all have been bound for Dachau.

A man like Karrer couldn't stay in one place, and after the war he was off again. It's in your blood, you can't change that, he told himself.

Two or three times a year he came to these parts, so he knew the inn. He had his usual routes. It was two years after the war he'd been here for the first time, and after that every year apart from a few interruptions.

‘Damn it all, that's long ago!' he said to himself under his breath, and getting unsteadily to his feet he patted his jacket in search of cigarettes and his lighter. However, as he couldn't find either he sat down on the chair again.

He'd been in Einhausen again yesterday, so he'd come in here. He had ordered brawn. As usual. They made the best brawn in the whole region here in the Baitz area. The waitress had a sharp tongue, but the food was good and you got value for your money.

A couple of guests at the next table had started talking politics. He listened for a while, and then joined in their
dispute over the table, until finally he picked up his beer and sat down with them.

Later, when the room was emptying, the talk became more and more heated. Stories from the ‘old times' went back and forth, and comments on how with someone like Adolf in charge, this or that wouldn't happen.

He hadn't noticed how much he had drunk. Normally he was moderate in his drinking, but yesterday … well, he must have had a few too many beers with schnapps as chasers.

Once again, he searched his pockets in vain for a cigarette.

‘Damn it, where the hell did I put them?'

If the others hadn't left, he would have gone on arguing and drinking, and that on a day when business had been slow. When the last at his table got tired of the dispute and went home, he had ordered a final half of beer and a snifter of fruit spirits as a chaser.

‘No point in standing on one leg.'

And as always when he'd been drinking, and was discontented with the stupidity and injustice of the world, the whole wretched story came back into his mind. What still annoyed him was that they'd never caught the real murderer. Worse, they hadn't even looked for him. The man who'd fucked the young woman back then and was
probably leading a merry life now, maybe with a wife and child. The man who certainly didn't have to toil like him day after day; could be he had a good, secure income. While he, Matthias? He'd never really done anything very bad, and yet it was downhill all the way with him. To this lot he was only a knife-grinder, a good-for-nothing, a gypsy, and who bothered to know that he'd usually tried to be honest?

They just won't let you get anywhere, he said to himself.

Still dazed with alcohol, he tried getting up from the chair again. Finally he was standing on both feet, although his legs were still shaky. Slowly and carefully, he felt his way in the dark over to the door. It was bolted. From there he made his way to the bench under the window.

On many days it would simply have been better to stay in bed in the morning and not get up at all, and yesterday had been one of those days. Everything had gone wrong from the morning onwards, even as he was still on the way from Einhausen to Finsterau. Some bastard had left a board with nails in it lying in the road. He hadn't seen it and had driven his Lloyd 600 over it. Result, a flat tyre. After he had changed the wheel and looked around him, slowly smoking a cigarette, he had noticed it. He and his car were at the very place in Finsterau where the road forked, and
if you took one way you reached the place where the young woman had been murdered not long after the war.

He opened the window.

He ought to have turned back there and then. Such places were never good news. It hadn't been a coincidence: it couldn't have been.

She's still haunting the place, he thought. Out there the poor soul can't find peace. No wonder I got a flat tyre at that very place yesterday. Oh, Lord God and all the holy sacraments, now my jacket's caught on something.

He tried at length to get his jacket free. He pulled and tugged, and as he did so the cigarettes and lighter he'd been looking for fell out onto the windowsill. He picked up both and scrambled through the window frame into the open air, where he lit himself a cigarette and inhaled the smoke deeply. He had a stale taste in his mouth, and his throat was sore.

God, he thought, what a thirst I have. Even tobacco tastes bad.

He flicked the cigarette away, and left.

‘Johann's lawyer called the priest. He said I was to tell you it's urgent, and could you come over here to the telephone? He said he'd ring again in an hour's time.'

The priest's housekeeper was still out of breath as she stood at the door. Theres took off her overall, got her jacket, slipped into the shoes standing ready and hurried over to the presbytery with the housekeeper.

Over the phone, the defence lawyer told her that they had moved Johann from prison and sent him to the mental hospital. It was better for him that way, said the lawyer. He had been going downhill more and more with every passing day, until finally the doctor in the prison infirmary said he couldn't be responsible for the outcome if he stayed there any longer.

‘This is a prison, not a madhouse,' he had said. The infirmary simply was not designed for cases like Johann, which made his stay there unreasonable both for Johann himself and for his fellow prisoners. The doctor had spoken to the public prosecutor and the judge, and all three had already had their doubts about Johann and whether he was right in the head. In all the conversations they'd held with him they hadn't come a step closer to the actual course of events during the crime. For him personally, as his defence counsel, said the lawyer, that meant that the case had never been easy. After further discussion they had come to the conclusion that no one with all his wits about him could murder his daughter and grandson in such a barbaric manner. And in all the weeks and months that had now passed only a madman would never show remorse. Even with an ice-cold murderer, sooner or later a motive would be seen, and then the case could be explained.

‘Believe me, Frau Zauner, transferring him to a mental hospital will surely be easier for him to bear in his present state of mind than staying in prison. There can be no question of reopening proceedings; no new evidence has turned up. I'm very sorry, but that's all I can still do for you.'

And with that he hung up.

Theres stood there for a moment longer, and then she
put the receiver back on its stand. All she said to the housekeeper, who was looking at her enquiringly and curiously, was, ‘They've taken him to the Carthusian hospital.'

Then she left.

It had begun drizzling outside. Theres took no notice of the rain. It began raining harder and harder, but that made no difference to her. She finally got home drenched to the skin.

Two days later the official letter came. It said where exactly Johann had been taken, and that now he wasn't in prison but in the closed section of the psychiatric hospital she would be able to visit him more often if she liked. The very next week she went to see him and stayed as long as the doctors would let her.

In the hospital there were four or six of them to a room, in contrast to his prison cell. The light never went entirely out even by night; there was dim illumination all the time. As soon as it got dark outside the barred windows he became restless. He couldn't stay in his bed; he walked around or sat very close to the other patients and stared at them. If he was taken back to his own bed by the nursing staff and tied to the bedstead by his arms and legs, to keep him from wandering around again, he began screaming. Usually he calmed down after a while; sometimes, when he didn't, he was taken out of the room and brought back next morning, still upset and exhausted by the night he had passed.

He spent his days sitting on his bed in the room or
walking up and down the long corridor, hour after hour. At first he counted his footsteps, counted the number of times he went along the corridor, but gradually he forgot the numbers. Other wretched figures like him sat in the whitewashed corridors. Sometimes he babbled to himself, screamed or wept. Every mood could change to the next within a second. He was living in his own little world, separated from everyone else, incapable of speaking to the others or showing interest in anyone – like the toothless old woman who always waited for him to pass her room. Then she would hurry towards him, grab his face, try to get her fingers in his mouth, his nostrils. She was not to be shaken off, she thrust her dry forefingers into his eyes. He defended himself as well as he could, shouted for help until the male nurses came and took the old woman away.

On many days he could not bear to feel his shirt next to his skin. However often the male nurses tried to dress him he tore it off. If they tied his hands behind his back he rolled on the floor, trying to get an end of the fabric in his teeth so as to pull it away, get rid of it, like a lizard shedding its old, dry skin.

In the rooms with doors on the other side of the corridor patients sat disentangling wool for hours on end. If they had freed a strand of any length from the bundle,
they would tie it to the other strands and roll them up into brightly coloured balls.

The doctor told him to join in the work in this room, and Johann, who wasn't used to being indoors all day, obeyed, sat with the others and disentangled woollen threads.

In time, he saw only a fragmentary view of all around him. The days were like each other, broken only by visits from the doctors. The one thing he noticed was that his thoughts were wandering more and more, and even his faith was no comfort to him. He tried to resist the loss of it, he wanted to write down his tormenting thoughts to be rid of them, but his hands would no longer obey him, so he began to put his memories into empty bottles, filling them to the brim with words and then carefully closing them. If he held the bottles to his ear, he thought he could hear his own voice inside. When he opened a bottle the words slipped out again. But the nurses and doctors didn't understand what he was doing, and thought him totally deranged now. Yet how else could he have protected his memories? He had to shut them away before they were lost for ever, for he seemed to forget more with every sentence he spoke. And they never stopped tormenting him here, always asking him the same thing over and over again, until finally all that was left of him was an empty husk.

Afra closes the window and bolts it firmly down. She shakes it again once, then takes the preserved sausage that hangs in the pantry, cuts another piece off the smoked meat, puts it all in her apron and goes into the kitchen.

Meanwhile, Albert has got up and gone over to the cubbyhole in the kitchen, leaving the crust of bread in the middle of the room. Afra puts the meat and sausage on a wooden platter, places it on the table with a jug of water and two glasses. She bends down, picks up the bread from the floor and puts it back in Albert's hand.

‘There, dear, you'll need good teeth, but don't chew on that piece of wood, you'd better leave it alone or you'll hurt yourself.'

Afra tries to make her voice sound cheerful; she doesn't want to show that she is still worn out by her argument with Hetsch. How does he manage to pester her so much? He must have passed her father – if he were in the house Hetsch would have had to hold back. Always keeping up appearances. So she's a tavern girl, is she, available to all comers?

‘Oh, leave me alone, you lying lot!' she mutters to herself.

Albert looks enquiringly at his mother.

‘Not you, darling, I didn't mean you.'