Lanceheim (19 page)

F
or me the prison was like a place taken right out of my nightmares. I had grown up in the forest; I was used to a sky that opened over my head and the feeling of infinity right around the corner. I would not describe myself as claustrophobic, but to be put in a cell…

Once a month I visited him; I did not dare go more often than that. I still did not know what had preceded Duck Johnson's sudden appearance in our lives, and I did not make the connection with the Ministry of Culture; how could I have? I understood that forces were in motion, powerful forces, but I understood no more than that, and that made me slightly paranoid.

We sat on either side of a thick glass window, Maximilian and I, and talked to each other through telephone receivers. He never said much. I was forced to control myself so as not to say too much. He was pale, horridly dark around the eyes, and the pain that pounded inside his temples caused him to squint in daylight. I suffered when I saw him.

At the same time I could not keep myself away.

From what I understood about Maximilian, it was a
matter of surviving. The prisoners struggled against the destructive monotony. Every day looked like the one before; after the first year at King's Cross, Maximilian had woven a hundred and thirty-four baskets. He had grown tired of the three types of fish that were served at lunch and dinner: fish with rice and carrots, fish with potatoes and broccoli, and fish with pasta and ketchup. He knew the structure of the plaster on the wall of the cell in detail, and he knew exactly how the morning, noon, and evening scolding of the guards sounded; they constantly repeated the same invectives.

In addition, like all prisoners, he was living with a feeling of physical fear that overshadowed everything else. The days seemed to me, both when Maximilian described them and when I listened to conversations among former internees, like a sort of obstacle course where it was a matter of avoiding, to the greatest degree possible, those individuals and gangs who mistreated and degraded others to pass the time. It's not possible to describe the anxiety that the majority experience at King's Cross: Chance directs their fate, there is nowhere to flee, nothing to do to escape.

Despite a charisma that kept stuffed animals at a distance—this applied both outside as well as inside the walls—Maximilian sometimes had difficulties. For him everything changed the day when Conny Hippopotamus offered him protection—on his own initiative and without a promise of anything in return. It was something that happened; Maximilian hardly reacted anymore. With Hippopotamus as a bodyguard, life in prison became easier.

Every time I came to visit, I was reminded that he had exposed himself to a self-inflicted martyrdom. If he only spoke up about Duck Johnson's involvement, his own punishment would be mitigated. This was not a matter of betrayal or informing, I explained patiently, it was only about telling the truth. And every time I tried to get him to listen to reason, Maximilian looked at me as if I didn't under
stand a thing. In reality, of course, at the time I did not know with certainty that Duck was involved.

 

It would be almost
ten months before Maximilian caught sight of Dennis Coral a second time. This happened during the lunch hour, when the prisoners were in the dining room. Conny Hippopotamus was sitting at Maximilian's right side. Hippopotamus pointed over toward the food line and nodded.

“There's the snake slave,” whispered the hippopotamus. “If you need help, you can always take him.”

Perhaps this conversation was once again about headaches and the helplessness of the bewildered doctors? There were pain pills that relieved the pain for short periods, but distribution was not in proportion to need.

“Snake slave?”

“Dennis Coral,” whispered Hippopotamus. “His cell's not far from mine. He's in here for the rest of his life.”

The dining hall was as large as a hangar and lacked windows. There was room for a thousand prisoners to sit; meals were in four shifts, thirty-five minutes per sitting. If anyone got the idea of raising his voice, even to a normal conversational level, the animal in question was punished with a baton across the neck or back of the head. Discipline was absolute.

“Coral fell in love,” whispered the hippopotamus, just as a fly sat down to the left of Maximilian, poking at his lukewarm rice with distaste. “A real romance, great passion, but the husband found out about it. He followed one night when his wife went to the hotel where she used to meet Dennis Coral. He made his way into the hotel room; the snake had not yet arrived, and the husband's anger knew no bounds. It ended with him cutting her up, emptying out her cotton, just as Dennis Coral came in the door to his appointed love
meeting. How it happened I don't know—if I understood correctly, the husband was some type of mammal—but the snake found his weak spot and beat him unconscious. Then Dennis Coral took his victim with him out to the forest and buried him alive. Disgusting story. Dennis Coral still maintains that he's innocent.”

“He is a snake slave?” Maximilian repeated.

“Shh,” Hippopotamus hissed, because Maximilian always spoke in a normal conversational tone. “Coral is a Slave. He has lost his soul in here. You can do whatever you want with him, he can't say anything. You can demand whatever you want from him, he can't protest. He may be useful.”

“Leave Dennis Coral alone,” said Maximilian.

But he said this somewhat too loudly, and behind his head he heard the swoosh of a baton before he collapsed with his face right down in the fish.

 

Dennis Coral lived with
a secret. He had done so as long as he could recall, and this had marked his life. The secret was part of his makeup, and he could think of it as though he were carrying a time bomb sewn into his body, as if someone at the factory had played a deadly joke on him. Why—and this was the question he asked himself over and over again during his youth—was he forced to discover it? Why couldn't the secret simply rest in the dark shadows that could be called his soul?

He knew exactly when it happened, when he discovered it. He had been fifteen years old. He had been standing in the schoolyard in Tourquai talking with one of his classmates, a whale who played on the same curling team as Dennis. The school was in the center of that part of the city, an asphalt landscape where the schoolyard resembled
a deep, empty well in a giant's stone-paved garden; the sun never found its way to the bottom.

Dennis had met the whale a few months earlier, but suddenly this day, in the middle of a sentence, he knew. The insight was as inescapable as a wad of gum in your fur; never again would he be able to talk with the whale without getting that hollow feeling in his belly and the fear and the shame that followed so quickly after. Later he thought he must have known about it much longer without admitting it.

What struck Dennis on the schoolyard was love. But the whale was a male, just like Dennis.

His parents could not be called conservative, other than in the sense that they were old-fashioned. They lived a secure, comfortable life rooted in routines and humility. While he was growing up, Dennis Coral had never heard them say a single degrading word about anyone—other than sometimes about Mayor Sara Lion, but then with a clear factual issue as a starting point—and he had never heard them sit in judgment over the lifestyles of others.

What Dennis did know was that no one in his parents' circle of friends was homosexual, but of course you couldn't be sure about such things. Without there being any homosexuals in the school or on TV that Dennis could remember or disapprove of, he nonetheless decided from that first moment of insight never to tell anyone how he felt.

 

Sometimes in life it
is the case—and I am speaking from my own experience—that intuitively you make incorrect decisions. No one chooses, with open eyes, a path in life that leads into incomprehensible labyrinths or dead ends. Dennis Coral became, like so many of us, panic-stricken at not being the stuffed animal he wanted to be. And he
chose—you must remember that he was only fifteen years old at the time—not to accept himself.

Ever since that day on the schoolyard there was a shadow over Dennis Coral. He was weighed down by the knowledge that he carried, knowledge that strengthened with the years. In secret he had devoted himself to an experiment or two, and the conclusions were always the same. Females exercised no attraction whatsoever for him; males did.

Living a life of secrets and lies can, I have been able to observe at close hand, create a certain energy. This energy often goes to the more destructive aspects of the same life. But exceedingly few are able to live a life based on denying who they are. Shame was like a wet rag over Dennis's character and personality, and indifference became his attitude.

When, due to circumstances so laughably accidental that I do not even intend to go into them, he landed in a situation that singled him out as involved in a drama of passion, it was as if fate were laughing right in his face. In his own absurd manner, Dennis realized that the punishment to which the court sentenced him was no more than right, even if his crime was a completely different one.

Self-denial.

And why did he search out Maximilian that day on the exercise yard? Obviously he could not explain it, but somewhere in Maximilian's charisma was a promise of atonement, and Dennis Coral must have sensed this.

I
t's over,” said Adam Chaffinch.

He had been silent since we came, and only now did he look up from the table. He observed each and every one of us searchingly for a long time.

“It's over,” he repeated. “But that is my decision. You all have to make your own conclusions. For my part, I know. It's over, but I think it is now that it begins.”

We were sitting at Der Lachen Hunde at Krönkenhagen on the Dondau, and darkness had fallen over our city. Along the river there was a whole battery of restaurants, some miserable pizza dives, others seven-star gourmet restaurants. Der Lachen Hunde was neither nor. Fritz Polar Bear ran his little place as if it were a personal neighborhood tavern; the stuffed animals who weren't regulars had to put up with the fact that Fritz knew the majority by name and preferred exchanging a few words to filling orders.

“I've given notice,” said Adam. “I do not intend to be a deacon any longer in the service of the church.”

We almost always had the same window table. Sitting there, with the water outside and the old-fashioned lanterns
on the pier on the other side of the river, was like finding yourself on another planet. The odor of food, smoke, and community. The murmur from the guests, the clinking of glass and porcelain from the bar, created a special sort of coziness. That evening I seem to recall there were five of us, and I know that Missy was along. We used to linger until late, and often Fritz sat down at our table and counted the till after midnight.

I was living with the star-eyed, talented, and seductive Missy Starling at that time. She had a long theater career behind her, and with a blush that mixes pride with shame, I admit that the first time I saw her, she was on a stage. For once I had decided to celebrate my birthday—it was my thirty-third—together with a few friends, and go see a cabaret that had received fantastic reviews. That was why we ended up in a disreputable place in, I must say, the less scrupulous blocks on Pfaffendorfer Tor.

She made her entry after a quarter of an hour, but only seconds later I was enchanted. The harsh, dark, melodic singing voice that came out of the slender, feminine, and captivating body; oh yes, it is such things that males are fascinated by. That Missy Starling, when I knocked on the door to her dressing room afterward, let me enter still seems unbelievable. And it was of course no less remarkable that only a few days later she moved in on Schwartauer Avenue. But her impulsiveness in combination with a faintly despotic feature—which I believe she has in common with many theatrical workers, at least those I have met—was part of her charm.

I will not maintain that day-to-day life with Missy Starling was pain-free or…pleasant, but it was a time of passions and catastrophes, of drama and betrayal, of heaven-storming love and unfathomable contempt, and this suited me fine, afraid as I was of solidifying into the conformity of early middle age.

“Gave notice?” Missy now asked with all the drama of which her dark voice was capable. “You're not an official at the ministry…”

“Gave notice?” repeated a bream who worked at the telephone company.

“Can you give notice, Adam?” I asked.

The general murmur around the table indicated that we were all equally astounded, as much over the decision as over the fact that a deacon could quit, as if this were any old job.

“I can't do it anymore,” Adam explained, and we fell silent. “I preach the words of the Proclamations at the same time as I think about your Book of Similes, Wolf. I talk about Magnus, but I think about Maximilian. There is no other way; the church is no longer my place.”

Coming from Adam Chaffinch, these were big words: massive words, even. I was taken by the moment, and it felt strange that the murmur from the stuffed animals at the tables around us went on with unaltered strength. I almost asked them to quiet down.

“This is an end,” said Adam, “but it is also a beginning. There is a meaning in everything that Magnus does. It was no accident that Maximilian sought me out in Sagrada Bastante once many years ago. And what has happened now is no accident either. Maximilian has been wrongly convicted. There is a reason for that. But we must not let this happen in vain. I have made my decision; you have to make your own.”

“Adam,” I replied, “we others made the same decision many years ago. We have just been waiting for you.”

And carefully we laughed. Then the chaffinch smiled, raised his glass, and toasted with us. It was a moment I recall with warmth.

“But what will you do now?” asked the bream.

“Now I will evangelize for real,” Chaffinch answered with a smile.

“Good!” said Missy with theatrical confidence in her voice. “I will gladly help, if I can!”

No one paid her any mind, this was just the sort of thing Missy said; she was not the helpful type.

We ordered food, and while we ate, Adam told us about his plans. I must admit that he did not impress any of us, but we put on a good face.

It was not about starting a new church, he explained. It was not about a sect. On the contrary, Maximilian's message was that rituals of that type were not required; it was only about believing, hoping, and feeling love, and that would be difficult enough.

He would start at home, at his kitchen table, he explained. And when it got too cramped there, he intended to find somewhere else equally humble. The word of Magnus had been preached far too long among gilded ornaments and expensive embroidery.

“I intend to create a Retinue,” said Chaffinch, “which is neither afraid to believe nor to listen. The stuffed animals in this city are suffering. You know that, Wolf, you know it well—the terrified pursuit of success and material happiness that never has an end. Weighed down by the dogmas of the church. The thought of the Chauffeurs, and that they might come any day whatsoever. Stuffed animals are to be pitied. And if we can give them solace, we must do so. If ten stuffed animals can repeat what I say, what Maximilian has taught us, we are ten times more effective.”

The evening belonged to Adam, and we were already his Retinue. His decision and his action had been braver than his words, but I sensed that there would be more than ten animals gathered around his kitchen table.

Not even I understood what Adam Chaffinch was starting that evening at Der Lachen Hunde.

 

After having described the
evening when Adam told us about his life-changing decision, which soon enough would trans
form my life as well, I am forced to back up a few months. I recently mentioned my new apartment on Schwartauer Avenue. At that time you could borrow up to ninety-five percent of the investment, if you purchased a residence in an attractive part of the city. Taking out a loan was a new experience for me, and I had put on my best clothes when I left to go to the bank that morning: dark gray suit, white shirt, and dark blue tie. I had borrowed Father's black leather shoes, and even allowed myself a splash of his eau de cologne.

At the bank I was led into a small room that, in its gloomy seriousness, reminded me somewhat of the classroom in our house at home in Das Vorschutz. Dark paneled walls, dark green carpet, and a table whose varnish glistened in the glow from discreet ceiling lamps.

On the other side of the shiny polished table sat four bank officials in identical black suits. Three of them each had a fiercely knotted tie in various shades of red, while the fourth—a female—wore a reddish scarf around her neck instead. I was so nervous that I did not notice what kind of animals they were. I sat on a chair that was clearly the borrower's place, with my back stiff as an unused pipe cleaner.

Right before I got the first question, for that was what this was about—I was undergoing a regular interrogation in there—I thought it looked as if the bank official with the scarf was crying. Large tears fell as if from her eyes. But neither she nor her three colleagues seemed to notice that, so I thought perhaps I must have imagined it, and when she asked her first question to me, her eyes were just as dry as mine.

“Wolf Diaz,” she said, “on the question about occupation you have indicated ‘Writer.' What exactly do you mean by that?”

I'd been asked that question many times before, and I had learned to answer it evasively. I knew that no one asked out of genuine interest; there was always an ulterior motive.
Was I famous? Was I a journalist? And in this case, did my writing lead to a steady income? Because Adam Chaffinch was still paying me, I could answer somewhat fuzzily about the writing but more clearly about the monthly payments that were made to my account.

One of the other bank officials took over the lead and began to ask questions about the apartment that I was about to purchase, and it was while we were talking about drainage and pipe replacement that I thought I saw it again from the corner of my eye. The female on the other side of the table, sitting there in her strict suit and her white blouse, observed me with unchanged acuity at the same time as tears again began rolling down to her lap.

This was highly unusual.

I looked at the other three, but none of them reacted. And I kept to the subject, of course; the loan was much too important to risk it by saying something about those tears. Before the meeting was over—we sat for perhaps half an hour in the bank's sober interrogation room—it happened two more times, and when I left I was sure I had not been mistaken. Perhaps, I thought, it was some type of disease? There were so many ailments that you weren't aware of.

 

One week later I
was called to the bank again, to sign the actual loan papers. I had been informed by telephone that they had decided to grant me the loan, and therefore I was more relaxed this time. I was received by one of the four official animals I had met the last time, now in his regular office, and while he instructed me on where I should write my initials and my name, I asked in complete goodwill what the reason was for his colleague's tears the other day. Personally, I admitted, I always cried when I was slicing onions.

“Yes,” he replied, “Maria is…a little special.”

There was a discomfort in his voice that made me imme
diately regret it. I should not have asked. I hurried to sign where he had made little pencil marks in the loan documents, but he continued talking.

“She is rather new here, Maria,” he said. “A real rising star. Won't stay long in our department. Valedictorian, scholarships, all of that. And then there are the tears…”

He sounded bitter, and I tried to distract him by asking questions about the interest rates that were in the document, but this did not get him to stop. He obviously needed to talk about his new colleague. He thought she was at least as peculiar as I had thought.

“She maintains that it's about…injustices,” he explained with an obvious repudiation in his voice. “Or animals to feel sorry for. She weeps when she happens to think about something that…something she has seen or read. Do you understand?”

“No,” I answered honestly. “I must say that I do not really understand.”

“She's nuts,” he stated simply. “She says that she cries because she happens to think of someone to feel sorry for. She can't avoid it, she says.”

He shook his head. I shook my head too, giving back the signed papers.

“And when might the money be in my account?” I asked.

“She's out of her mind,” he continued. “If I understand the matter correctly, all the directors have their eyes on her. Last week I heard that she had three job offers, both here and at Banque Mollisan—all at salaries I am never going to see. And then she sits and cries because it's a shame about some lizard who can't make it across the street. Do you get it?”

“No,” I answered. “It sounds unbelievable. Hmm. Back to my loan…I was wondering when the money might be in my account?”

“The loan, yes,” he answered slowly. “The loan. Tomorrow. You'll have the money tomorrow.”

I stood up, thanked him, and left the bank.

It is not strange that I related this story to Adam Chaffinch the same evening when we met. In part I was exhilarated by the loan that I had been granted and the apartment on Schwartauer Avenue that was no longer just a dream; besides, the story was funny. One of the bank's management trainees who sat there in her strict bank clothing and wept over the injustices of the city.

Adam was interested, but I never sensed the extent of his interest.

 

Adam and I were
working day and night on how his Retinue should be built up, but even more on what to focus on from the Book of Similes. Most often we were at my place on lime green Schwartauer Avenue, but sometimes up at his place on orange yellow rue d'Oran. It was there too that to my undeserved surprise I encountered the crying animal from the bank the next time. Adam had not mentioned this to me in advance, so I was completely unprepared. Because she had her black suit on, I recognized her immediately. I entered Adam's bare, boring living room—he was good at many things, but home decor was not one of them—and she quickly got up from the couch.

“Diaz,” she said curtly, “we meet again.”

I of course went up to greet her.

“You didn't recognize me at the bank,” she said, smiling broadly. “And not now either. But I was the stuffed animal that was standing up at the altar that afternoon when the angels in the ceiling at Kerkeling's church wept for Maximilian.”

And then I recognized her. Maria Mink.

Unknown to me, Adam Chaffinch had made contact with the weeping bank official, and unknown to me he had—after a single long conversation with her—been able
to confirm what he had already suspected when I told him about Maria Mink's tears.

That evening at home with Adam he made it easy for me to understand what a unique stuffed animal Maria was.

“I want us to gather a Retinue for Maria too, Wolf,” he said. “She has something to say to Mollisan Town, something that Maximilian has taught her.”