Wolf Haas - Eternal Life

She’d stubbornly insisted to everybody that it was from smoking, because she’d been a heavy smoker, and she imagined, when you take a drag on a cigarette, these concertina folds form on your upper lip. But, then, her half-sister got the exact same wrinkles in old age, too, and that was Brenner’s mother, and her whole life long she never smoked.

And Brenner says to Handless now:

“I always thought it was from the eye surgery. Your brother’s eyes were always so squinty like he was looking at the sun. And millions of crow’s feet around the eyes. I automatically thought it was from the surgery.”

“No, no, it’s not because of the surgery,” Vergolder’s sister said, completely calm now, “it runs in our family. Our mother also had a kind of wreath around her eyes, not just in old age-started when she was forty. A leathery, wrinkly skin, like a dried-up leather apple. Are you familiar with leather apples?”

“Fifty years after you disappeared from Zell, you return. Only to take revenge on your brother.”

Brenner even surprised himself when his voice trembled there. As if he was afraid that the obvious similarity between Handless and her brother, Vergolder, might suddenly dissolve.

“Leather apples have a thick, leathery skin. Often people call them cooking apples, because you cook them and use them for apple sauce. Or for apple strudel. But if you peel them, they taste good raw, too.”

“Weren’t you worried that somebody in Zell would recognize you again?”

Now Handless got up and went over to the TV. Above the TV was a bookshelf, and on it was a small picture frame.

Now, maybe you’re familiar with this, when you go to an old person’s apartment, hanging all over the place are these ancient black-and-white photos: the grandfather of the grandfather, from the First World War or even earlier, or these retouched portraits that make you think, centuries old.

“That’s what I looked like, you see, when they chased me away. Do you see any similarity?”

Brenner didn’t know what he should say. But Handless sure knew what to say:

“Nobody in Zell would’ve recognized me, even if I weren’t fifty years older and fifty kilos heavier. Even if I looked exactly like I did back then, still not a soul would’ve recognized me again. Forgetting is a kind of mercy, you have to know that. And God showed mercy upon the Zellers-in spades.”

“And your own brother? You had to run into him.”

“Like I said: mercy.”

“But you know no mercy. That community theater of yours-you didn’t perform in a theater.”

“No, but we did perform in the community,” Vergolder’s sister says, as if she were saying the most normal thing in the world.

“And you put it on with real people. Lorenz and Clare and Andi were your marionettes. They didn’t realize at all that you’d been playing out your own drama with them for some time. That you only needed a couple of dummies that could be useful-that could be turned against Vergolder, easy.”

“At first I only wanted to mess with him a little. I gave Elfi the book about the dial painters to read. Very interesting. She identified quite strongly by then with Clare Corrigan, the dial painter who died. And then the idea with the community theater. Lorenz and Andi were completely wild about the idea of sticking it to Vergolder.”

“At the theater. Except that you actually approached Vergolder’s stepfather.”

“No, no, it was the American who approached me.”

Brenner didn’t understand how he was making it rain just now, I mean, why now, you’ve got to picture it like an ATM that suddenly starts spitting out coins. Like his brain was spitting out explanations all at once now, after being here three-quarters of a year for nothing. Well, isn’t this just the way it always goes for me, Brenner thought. Now, where it’s too late, where Handless’s eyes have told me everything anyhow, it’s now that I notice the things that somebody else would’ve noticed much sooner.

But he was being unfair to himself there. Because, who knows if he would’ve noticed that bit about the eyes if he didn’t already have the other things somewhere in the back of his mind? And he says to Handless now:

“I thought as much: the binoculars that the American bought from Perterer Jr., they couldn’t be the whole surprise for their sixtieth anniversary. And even before then I thought, there’s just no two ways about it, they must’ve got on the lift willingly.”

In three-quarters of a year, though, you get to thinking quite a bit. And he himself wasn’t even certain now if he’d come up with the bit about the Vormachen . It seemed to him as if it’d been going around in his head the whole time. He knew that the Americans had met while skiing. Now, of course, he could make sense of it quite easily:

“The American buys the binoculars because, for their anniversary, he wants to give his wife a nighttime Vormachen in the ski lift. He commissions you to perform with your would-be theater group. And in order for the two of them to be able to sit next to each other in a single-chair lift, she gets on at the top and him at the bottom so that they can meet in the middle. Except that you and your Vormachen group don’t show up. No, the two eighty-year-olds are left sitting in their box seats, twenty meters in the air.”

But Handless, now, quite insistent:

“Lorenz, Clare, and Andi didn’t do anything. I persuaded the American that it would be the greatest show if his wife rode the lift down and watched through the binoculars as he rode up to her. And the moment they were at a certain height, the lift would stay put. As if by magic.”

“And then it just sat there, the lift. And then you really didn’t do anything, either.”

“Nothing at all,” Handless smiled.

Now, end of September, almost thirty degrees Celsius. Brenner gets a slight chill. The question momentarily escapes him, why the Americans of all people got the kiss of death. Why not the despised brother himself. There are these moments, though, where things occur to you that don’t otherwise occur to you over the course of weeks and months, not until now, at these moments. And now Brenner says:

“That’s why the Americans were so excited about this Vormachen , because they’d liked it so much back then, after the war, at their daughter’s wedding to Vergolder. You told me that Vergolder had been offended at the time. Because of the story with the nurse. But this nurse that the Vormachen had hinted at-”

“-wasn’t a nurse at all, of course. But just a sister,” Vergolder’s sister finished, perfectly calm now. And then she said:

“The Americans had impressed upon me: it has to be every bit as amusing as the story about the sister was back then. And how else was I supposed to make it every bit as amusing?”

Needless to say, Brenner was glad that he wasn’t expected to give an answer now. Vergolder’s handless sister sat back down on the couch again. She set the photo on the glass coffee table in front of her and looked at it so intently that you’d have thought she was seeing it for the first time.

“Have you ever noticed how many melancholiacs there are in Zell? In nearly every family, there’s either an imbecile or a melancholiac. And more often than not, both.”

People often say, I’m shocked, but it goes without saying, they’re just saying that, and really they only mean that something’s come as a shock to them, no talk of actual shocking. But if the doctor were to place a couple of electrodes on the side of your head and give you a dose of electricity, that’s roughly how Brenner felt right now. As Vergolder’s handless sister suddenly dispensed with her perfect High German. And instead lapsed into her obsolete dialect, full of old-fashioned words: