Parallel Stories: A Novel (179 page)

Wait, he said when they both had their coats on, and he grabbed the poker again.

First, he had to find the cat and chase it out of the house.

Meanwhile it had grown dark outside.

It’s a stray cat, he explained.

He reached under the sofa with the poker. Sometimes it disappears for weeks or months, but it always turns up.

He can’t stand seeing the cat slyly scurrying around, sneaking in and out. He so can’t stand the sight of it that once he managed to hit it twice in a row with the poker, on the spine, right above the rump, ready to destroy it.

He saw the spine crack.

There was snow on the ground that day, and he threw the cat out into the snow. It made no sound, as if he had done it in his sleep. The body sank into the snow.

But the next day, in daylight, he could not find it.

He didn’t tell the policeman the whole story, though he wanted to, but he could not forgive himself for it. He doesn’t feel sorry for people; he wouldn’t feel sorry for their brats either. If he killed a child, it would be like carrying out a verdict of acquittal. Whenever he found himself near a small child, he was afraid he might do it. Regarding children, he felt ready to do anything to save them from the life awaiting them. The cat, however, reappeared after a few weeks, sneaking, scurrying, alive, and he found no joy in this.

The owl must have perched somewhere in the bare orchard, emitting a single sharp sound at regular intervals. It sounded like water drops plopping on metal.

Another owl responded from a great distance.

The car was still breathing warmly when they got in it. For a while they sat mutely side by side and actually had a cigarette. They did it so they could engage in at least this small activity without lying.

Pardon me for asking again, the young man said after a while in the dark. I’m still curious to know your possible answer. In your opinion is there a god in this world or the universe, not the Christians’ but anybody’s, and I mean any kind of god.

No.

And in that case one is permitted to do anything.

Yes.

But how can a person coexist with this knowledge, he asked, and then suddenly he let the question dwindle. Is it even possible.

Exactly the way you coexist with it, not any other way. Only people who are soft in the head can believe that freedom is a good thing that one should strive for. I’d say, instead, that freedom is necessary, you can’t get around it.

You can’t be serious, or else you are cynical to the marrow of your bones. Even if it was so, how can it be acceptable to strive consciously for evil and do premeditated harm.

Nobody accepts that, even when a person has done it. This is something everyone fears.

Then maybe I wasn’t wrong after all, maybe murder is better.

They would have liked to continue this, sitting in the dark; it would have been nice. To continue thinking about how they should mutually avoid the subject of murder, if for no other reason than that it didn’t get them anywhere. At best it would confirm their feeling of complete futility. But the detective, preferring to leave the question undecided, was willing to relinquish even the beauty of asking questions or engaging in a dialogue. As Humphrey Bogart would have, he stuck his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, turned on the ignition, and backed up, making the wheels screech as he turned his old car around and, pulverizing their intimacy with immense gusto, took off at great speed.

He would have been annoyed at, and for practical reasons could not have approved of, their surrender to the sentimental spirit of theological contemplation.

He wanted to talk about simpler things and did not want to stray from them. It was not so much hunger or thirst that urged him on; after all, he had had something to eat and drink and did not really care about the other man’s hunger or thirst, but now he simply had to find a restaurant that was open, since he had promised he’d find one. He thought a neutral location would be more appropriate for their conversation, which he had more or less planned out while driving to Döhring’s place, mapping out various possibilities, but until now he hadn’t even come close to sounding his themes in their natural tones. He had to get closer to the young man, to get even closer, to be dangerously close, and to obtain the most intimate pieces of information, and he could not afford to be taken in by the other’s playacting.

He was wise to that, though. He saw through Döhring’s role playing. He didn’t grade the young man’s insanity as more than average; however, unlike others with this kind of insanity, Döhring played not a normal person but, oddly enough, an insane one. This is how he defended his real insanity, the points of his outburst. Everything he had committed until now was a mere taste of what he might commit in the future. And it made no difference whether all this was unintentional, unpremeditated, whether he played his role not consciously, for he performed what his real schizophrenia made him perform.

His suffering could not absolve him. He might go completely berserk, this is what Kienast thought, but until that happened he could not legally be declared mentally unaccountable.

Kienast already knew what brand of cologne Döhring used, and that cologne in all probability matched the one smeared on the dead man’s belly and pubic hair. He knew that the brands of the two men’s special-quality underpants also matched, and he also knew that both these matches could be mere coincidence. He was grateful to Döhring for this information and would probably have called himself not only cynical but also perverse if he had admitted to himself that he had come here to express his gratitude. He felt the most humble gratitude toward criminals, because when he finally discovered something, when he managed to penetrate the details of details, he could not help enjoying his profession; he always drank the cup of poison to the last drop. There was a moment when his moral superiority and professional expertise met in the joy of crime. He had been to the special store where those tight underpants had been sold to both men; he had been to the bar adjacent to the store and in the infamous cellars under the bar where, with choice and expensive instruments of torture, men surrendered themselves to other men.

It was only a question of hours before he would obtain photographs of both men and then it would be possible to determine whether they had been seen together at this notorious place.

Had it not been for this case, if chance or his fate had been slightly different, if the young man had not behaved so peculiarly, then Kienast would not have met his sweetheart. This was now unimaginable, though he feared that his gratitude toward the young man might just as unexpectedly turn into profound hatred. He had dived into the pool of love too many times, for episodes that were all too brief, and he was therefore wary of sobering disappointments. Not to mention false trails. Or the painful realization that she might not be the one, again not the right one, and perhaps there was no such being. He already dreaded the moment when he’d have to move out of an apartment once again. Or start on a different trail because he had gone astray on this one. Or that somebody once again would leave the key on his table, throw it in the mailbox after having locked the door, and another one of his crazy hopes would go up in smoke.

Better not to start a relationship at all, but then it is very difficult to maintain human contact with anyone.

If it hadn’t occurred to him that the cologne he’d smelled on the corpse’s stomach and pubic hair might not be the dead man’s own; that on other parts, on the limbs and in the crooks of the body, he detected another very different cologne, and yet a third one, the banally intrusive fragrance of some aftershave on the shirt and underpants—he would not have remembered Annick van Bruck and her enormous collection piled up in her much-larger-than-average bathroom.

And that she could tell which one was which.

He had to forget this absurd idea quickly.

The moment he closed the file on the unknown corpse, he’d gone about his business.

But about ten minutes later he stopped absentmindedly in front of the decorated and illuminated window of a perfume store.

For good business reasons, the door of the establishment was left open not only to let fragrances emanate outward, but also because now and again an assistant, hair plastered down, would saunter out to arrange and rearrange the quality merchandise in the two baskets on either side of the door now being offered for sale at rock-bottom prices, and at the same time to spray a frightfully expensive fragrance into the air from an old-fashioned atomizer. For this purpose there were large bottles of Chanel and Guerlain lined up in a row. Strange as it may sound, vaporized perfume tends to intermingle with particles of steam and soot already in the air whose relatively greater weight means that the perfume rides on them, as it were, is carried into the currents of air that passersby produce.

With a made-up story that he had not bought any Christmas presents for his sister and mother, he entered the store.

He was looking for a fragrance that was familiar to him from somewhere.

It took only a glance at the shelves for him to realize he had undertaken an impossible task. The salesgirls, faces made up to the smoothness of porcelain, followed him as he moved among the other shoppers. He hesitated a long time about whether to search among the fragrances meant for women or for men. What the salesgirls were interested in was whether he was a sneak thief.

Döhring spoke after a while, to remind Kienast that soon they’d be at the border.

A salesgirl asked Kienast if he needed any help.

He was looking for a particular scent—not too surprising in a place like this.

They both had a good laugh, and she was already leading him toward the fragrances for men.

Do you have any specific idea of the scent.

Of course.

The salesgirl looked at him expectantly, but at this moment it became clear to Kienast that Annick was unavoidable; he didn’t have the words for characterizing the scent. To his surprise, when he telephoned he found Annick at home, and she eventually agreed that Kienast could pick her up and bring her into the city. He promised to take her home too. She had to help him identify a scent if such a thing was possible.

Why would it not be.

He did not reveal the circumstances in which she would have to carry out the identification, however, and then everything got complicated. He fumbled some of the official details. He had to go back to his car. To write an authorization for consulting an expert, which required a little cheating and fudging. To have it signed so he could bring Annick into the building.

Annick finally became very curious on their long ride in. He told her what she’d have to do, and she did not panic or wonder. When the corpse was pulled out of its compartment and lay there before her, she looked at it and said they had better wait until it warmed up a little. Then, looking around, she remarked that they surely did not heat the place much.

As if to say, let’s first look at this scent while it’s cold, she started to bend over each of the delicate parts of the body Kienast had named, one by one.

The flapping of the swinging doors could be heard again. Which meant that somebody had once again opened the fucking window in the hall.

Even though Kienast himself closed it several times a day.

If only he could catch the person doing it.

This was probably the moment when Kienast noticed the human being in her, the person he had not known until then. Which surprised him. He should have known her very intimately; after all, he had slept with her a few years before. If memory did not deceive him, they had both reached great heights of satisfaction. The mutual pleasure had its endearing little characteristics, as it were, which made both of them see and experience the other, and they could not have forgotten each other any more than they forgot other partners, but let’s say there was nothing more to it.

Occasionally one can very definitely feel something like this: unforgettable but nothing beyond that. And that’s enough for a pleasant memory. But not strong enough to make one go back. And the other one must feel the same way; after all, s/he’s not coming back either.

It was as if back then he had only seen something mechanical about her, and now he saw something essential, and there didn’t seem to be a direct connection between the two. He could not have told himself exactly what the nature of the mechanical pleasure may have been or, in contrast, what the nature of pleasure might be with this essential being. Or what her essential self would promise. But he saw clearly that the two were not the same.

Perhaps the essential in itself is beyond description, but seeing it enables one to describe the former experience as mechanical.

There’s no point in waiting to fall in love; one can’t resist surrendering to one’s own great mechanical pleasure, which may be the very thing that blocks falling in love.

Annick surprised him with her very fragile professional passion, though her manners were rather crude, like her voice and physique. In the brightly lit hall with its floor-to-ceiling tiles, she gave no sign of her passion. She may have swayed her head, pensively, raised her eyebrows a little, but even that she did cautiously. She must have captivated him with her professional objectivity, which in no way clashed with humility or devotion. As if he were saying to himself about the woman that he’d never seen anything so beautiful even though he could see she was not so beautiful. Just as one’s distance from and proximity to an object meet on the object, without which the object might perhaps not exist.

Conclusion, asked Kienast, impatient to know her findings.

We’d better wait a little more.

Kienast suggested they leave the corpse, go to his office, have coffee in the canteen or go anywhere, but out of here.

No, they’d better stay.

Just because they are staying Annick doesn’t have to look at the corpse, and out of politeness, he held her eyes.

Then he said that the scent had been properly applied, but it might also have been smeared on.