Wolf Haas - Brenner and God

He was already twisting things around in his head at the gas station, telling himself that a minor mistake like this can happen to anyone once. And anyway, for a two-year-old even the goings-on at a gas station are interesting. She can look out the window, there are people to watch, hoses, nozzles, disposable gloves, everything. Plus, one thing you can’t forget-those tizzying numbers, nothing’s more beautiful to a child’s soul.

So he slips out of the car as quickly as possible and closes the door behind him-you would’ve thought he was about to hold up the gas station-because he wants to prevent any fumes from wafting in to Helena. Because those noxious fumes, well, a little’s a lot for a child. Well, I don’t want to say absolutely harmful, but good, certainly not. On second thought, the driver says to himself-and here maybe the pills were already at work a little- maybe a healthy child should be able to withstand a few fumes.

While he gassed up, he made faces at Helena through the window. But to no effect; she just stared placidly back at him. And the chauffeur thought, you see, Helena knows that at heart I’m not one to mug around, so he assumed a normal expression, and get a load of this: then Helena smiled. You see what kind of understanding the two of them have? No wonder, when they spend so many hours together on the autobahn. Then came the window washing, though. You wouldn’t believe what kind of Hello! that was for Helena. The chauffeur actually got nervous that the alarm would go off, what with the child giggling and pedaling her legs in the car seat as the sponge ran over the windshield, and when he squeegeed the water off, she liked that even better. So the chauffeur declared to himself, I will always gas up on the way if she likes it so much, and he even gave the clean passenger-side windows an extra wash, and the rear window, too, although by that point Helena wasn’t getting so much out of it anymore since she couldn’t turn around in her car seat.

Before he went into the shop to pay, he moved the car a few feet over to the side to where the air-pressure pump was and away from the fumes.

“I’ll bring you a chocolate bar,” he said as he got out of the car, because it was never baby wanna bonbon? or any of that other baby talk. Rather, the driver always insisted on correct German with Helena, out of principle. Chocolate wasn’t entirely correct though, because the Frau Doctor had in fact impressed upon him, “No chocolate, Herr Simon. Absolutely no sugar!”

Herr Simon had explained to her a thousand times that they were just baby teeth, only there for the time being, a second pair would grow in anyway, well, not a pair, but a second crew, as it were, and when that happened, then you could always say, less chocolate. Or just don’t bite all the way into it. The Frau Doctor always knew better, of course, even though it wasn’t like she was a dentist, and in a private moment, the chauffeur sometimes thought to himself, with those abortions of hers, just think how many teeth will never even find accommodations. But arguments are useless, since she even went on to claim that chocolate was bad for the rash on Helena’s hands. Otherwise, a downright nice woman. Nice, intelligent, perky figure, the works. The chauffeur even envied Kressdorf a little, but it was no mean-spirited envy, no I’d almost like to call it a positive envy, and that, too, must’ve been attributable to the pills. Because he said to himself, why would a woman like the Frau Doctor seek someone like me when she can have someone like Kressdorf? Maybe he would have thought that before, too. But before, that same thought would have railed against the wife first, the husband second, himself third, and fourth, the world at large. And today we’re very much on the side of forgiveness, meaning, Kressdorf: not such a bad guy. Maybe the pills even exaggerated this positive perspective a bit, but one thing I should add: Kressdorf was always courteous with his chauffeur, never a crass word, never addressing him informally as du, but always respectfully as Sie and Herr Simon.

Otherwise, the KREBA chief had enemies, of course, more than enough. I don’t want to sugarcoat anything now just because. But if it’s about enemies, then it’s his wife who’s got him beat by a long shot. Because, a routine question, do you have enemies? As an abortion doctor you simply have a lot of people against you, it doesn’t work any other way. Which is why the two of them were so happy that their daughter was in such good hands with their new chauffeur. Otherwise, they could have just hired a regular driver. But with him being a former police officer, they simply felt safer.

That they’d been so angry with him about a bar of chocolate of all things can be explained only in psychological terms. All told, his blunder with the chocolate never even would’ve been exposed if it hadn’t been so plainly visible on the surveillance video. And when, as a parent, you look at something a hundred times, you play it a hundred times forward and backward, a hundred times over, you stop being able to see anything-except for a driver who can’t make up his mind between the different kinds of chocolate bars at a gas station. And then, all of a sudden, you see the chocolate as being the culprit.

Haas, Wolf

Brenner and God

It was an especially strange morning because something happened at the clinic, too. It began when the first patient on the morning’s scheduled surgeries turned out to be an old acquaintance. You’re going to say a male patient in an abortion clinic is a rare thing, but that’s not the case, because family planning’s a complete package, and vasectomies are performed there, too. Perfectly routine at a clinic like this.

As a matter of principle, Frau Doctor Kressdorf had great sympathy for the men who came in for vasectomies. Because men tend to leave everything else up to women, the vasectomy candidates were practically minor saints to her. However, the way she saw it, as a woman and as the director of the clinic, she was content to let the urologist perform the procedure. An exception was today’s candidate, who happened to have a thing for her. You should know, Detective Peinhaupt used to know the Frau Doctor a little, back when he was starting out as a patrol officer and would always get assigned to the anti-abortionists making a racket out in front of the clinic. Since he joined the Criminal Investigation Bureau, or CRIB for short, the smaller scuffles didn’t concern him anymore, and since the clinic started hiring its own private security guards, it had gotten a little quieter on the street anyway. The demonstrators had limited themselves to praying their rosaries and weren’t accosting the patients anymore. You’ve got to picture this for yourself: to the right of the entrance is a rosary-praying anti-abortionist standing with a picture of an embryo, and to the left of the entrance-and every bit as imposing-is a bull-necked female security guard with her hair buzzed like a mowed lawn. And there between those two holy columns, the patients would get shooed through. Back when Peinhaupt was on patrol, Sykora once said to him, “pro-life versus pro-dyke,” because Sykora was always joking, and Peinhaupt had made a special note of this one, but when he tried telling it to Alpha II as if he’d just come up with it himself, he didn’t even crack a smile. But, okay, Alpha II was the kind of guy who couldn’t be coaxed out of his shell that easily. Maybe he would’ve loosened up more if on his last vacation he hadn’t been struck by that lightning.

It proved to be just a temporary lull for the police, because the ruckus on the street only managed to move inside the building. Believe it or not, the pro-lifers bought up, one by one, the offices surrounding the clinic. Main question: where did they get so much money from? And since the pro-lifers were the majority of the building’s tenants and tried every means of getting the clinic to terminate its lease, they racked up so many power outages that the police were right back in there for the long haul.