“Christ Almighty! Christ Almighty!” Little Berta shouted and scratched her chin.
“She was very strict but very proper. My mother. A wise woman.”
“I like you better,” Rudolf purred, and laid his head in Berta’s lap. Little Berta growled, “Make a little room for me too! You always have to have everything just for yourself,” and Rudolf scooted reluctantly to the side, so Little Berta too could have the chance to put her head on her mother’s lap.
Berta laid her left arm around her daughter and her right arm around her son. She was kneeling in the bedroom on the marriage bed; Berta counted the chimes from the wall clock: it was eight in the evening, two days, or so she thought, before Wilhelm’s return from Felsenstein.
HURRY HOME TO YOUR WIFE
Berta Schrei did not know that the chauffeur and Come-hither-boy had lied to his employer for reasons that even he himself did not understand: “My wife is bedridden at home right now with a fever of 104. I hoped it would subside with the passing of time. But now I’ve just been informed that the fever refuses to go down.”
“But Wilhelm, why didn’t you say so earlier? I was already thinking to myself,” Johannes Mueller-Rickenberg said, “something’s not right with Wilhelm. So: how many days do you think your Dulcinea’s recovery will take?” Wilhelm declared it would be three days at most, then stressed his regret that they had fallen into this predicament. Two thin creases of displeasure emerged between the eyebrows of Johannes Mueller-Rickenberg’s forehead. The down-turned corners of his mouth, with the lower lip drawn over the upper, signaled to Wilhelm his employer’s inclination to put the chauffeur to a test.
“If you must rush off to your Dulcinea, you’ll also have to come up with some excuse to give the countess, because I’m staying put — don’t forget to report to her that my own health is in an extremely precarious state right now. That’ll make her stop fretting so much about my absence. And let’s not forget the most important thing of alclass="underline" the crime novels. Tell the countess I’ve brought them over with me personally from France. Just pick up a few French and English ones on the way home. She needs about two or three more weeks’ worth of crime-fodder. Keep that in mind when you do your shopping! And once your Dulcinea recovers, don’t neglect to tell her we’ll be busy for a little while longer in Felsenstein this year. That’s all.”
Johannes Mueller-Rickenberg nodded, turned around, and crossed the yard, with its shading of fall colors, his hands clasped behind his back and his shoulders bowed slightly forward. Wilhelm knew his master would be heading back to the house; he was in a hurry. His new conquest, Francesca, a fresh import from Brittany, needed attending to.
GRAVEDIGGER, THEN INFANTRYMAN, FOR A TIME
Berta answered Rudolf’s question for the umpteenth time.
“What was Grandpa again?”
“A gravedigger. An infantryman. A gravedigger. When he was an infantryman, he deserted,” Berta chuckled. “He hid out in the hayloft of a farmer named Zweifel in Gnom. Until the war was over. Zweifel’s daughter smuggled him bread and speck. The farmer could never know about it. And he never did find out.” Berta chuckled again. “Yes, yes. Old farmer Zweifel was a distinguished gentleman in those days.”
“That’s not what I mean! In October! What happened with Grandpa in October?” Rudolf asked. It was only this one story, the story about October, that managed to hold his attention and calm him down somewhat.
“Of course. It was in the newspaper. Someone found a body. In the Mueller-Rickenberg forest, in the vicinity of Gnom near St. Neiz am Grünbach. Under a mound of earth, neatly covered with spruce branches. A grave. Shot in the head. Buried three to four weeks before. The corpse was gagged and its hands were bound behind its back.”
“And the corpse was the gravedigger?”
Berta shrugged. “He went into the forest, and he never came back out.”
“But how do you know that that was Grandpa’s body?” Rudolf insisted.
“Well, you know, they notified me.”
“Why didn’t you go looking for Grandpa? Maybe that unidentified corpse wasn’t actually him?”
Berta said: “That’s just how it happened.”
“Did Grandma see the corpse? What did Uncle Wastl think, and Uncle Karl and Uncle Richard? Did they really all think the same thing, that the corpse was definitely the gravedigger’s?”
“It happened in October!” Little Berta said, shoving her brother with her elbow. “Are you stupid? They were all dead by then.”
“Aha,” said Rudolf at length, and then once again, “Aha.”
“Why was my grandpa a gravedigger?” Little Berta asked, and Berta shrugged:
“He just was. He got his job back without any difficulty as soon as the war was done. He had no reason to disappear. The war was already well over.”
Rudolf patted his sister several times on the back and said, “Nothing can kill the gravedigger — he always keeps his word. When he says he’s coming home from the war, then he’ll come. And you know why?”
His sister, bored, answered, “Of course!”
“Then say it! Say it, if you know why!”
Little Berta, insulted, remained silent. Berta answered in her stead: “‘Because I’m a gravedigger. And we must have gravediggers if order is to be kept. That means I have no choice but to survive. It may be I’m the last one who still knows this craft! What happens to a craft when none of its masters return from the front?’”
Berta chuckled and said, “He was just a devoted gravedigger. He just knew what his work meant to people. He loved what he did.”
Berta’s gaze fell on Rudolf’s profile, and her thoughts turned vaguely to her father, the gravedigger, who had been an infantryman for a time, and she said, “Yes. Yes. You really were a good gravedigger.”
Rudolf’s eyes closed, but he went on speaking: “Maybe a gravedigger is something I can be, too,” and Berta thought how very close she and her children had become over those past three days. She didn’t know exactly why, but somehow it seemed right to stay up through the rest of the night. Either to avoid the nightmares, or to sift through her own life and the lives of her children.
Maybe it was all of those things, maybe none of them.
PRECISE, CLEAR, WELL-ROUNDED LETTERS
Berta Schrei had given birth to a boy in the year 1945 and to a girl in the year 1950 and in the year 1958, before the beginning of the leafless season, she saw fit to impart a certain piece of information to Wilhelm, a thing it seemed essential to impart, precisely and without distortions, in very legible letters: precise, clear, and well-rounded. She had always gotten As in handwriting. Her last report card attested to the fact: a certain Berta Faust, resident of building 13, apartment 12 in Allerseelengasse, Donaublau, had graduated with a cumulative grade of A.
Solely for reasons of thrift, Berta conveyed her disclosure in the same blue envelope that had come from the school, an envelope that served to hide — with extraordinary tact — the substance of the letter inside it, just as when the teacher, from pure sympathy and the warmest sense of compassion, had taken pains — again, with great tact — to soften the substance of the school’s decision with regards to Little Bertha, a decision that now loomed all the more ominously before Berta’s eyes, implying that her daughter, who had always learned everything so easily, might be an even worse student than Rudolf. “So much compassion,” as Berta knew already on her way home, “means that her case is hopeless.”