Felix felt no more awake after a third cup of coffee, but at least now, with the thought of Gebhart’s wary gaze, he had some kind of direction to follow.
Occasionally he heard Speckbauer’s voice from the hall. Along with a tone of disbelief, or impatience, or both, but there was more often a steady metronomic ‘Ja’ that Speckbauer seemed to employ to speed up a conversation.
“Mein Gott but he is a different man on the phone,” Felix’s oma whispered. She nodded toward her husband. “I thought I’d heard them all from the count here.”
“I keep reinforcements,” said Felix’s opa. “Don’t worry. For when I am too feeble to chase you about.”
“And he is speaking foreign too.”
“It’ll be a hell of a phone bill,” said his grandfather.
“He will pay,” Felix heard himself say.
“They will pay,” said his grandfather. “The state.”
“He writes a lot of things down,” said Oma Nagl behind her hand.
“The Franzi is a character I can tell you, Felix,” added Opa Nagl, also with his hand to the side of his mouth. “He went out to see the pigs. To talk to them, he said. Where do you find such people? You were a bit wild, naturlich. But these are special.”
Felix made a greater effort to appear relaxed.
“An accident with chemicals,” his grandfather whispered. “Lieber Gott imagine the pain. He must be very dedicated to go on.”
Felix realized he had been thinking of the pair, this odd couple of cops, in the same apartment. One, damaged and close to blowing his lid all the time, the other, an amiable pro on the outside but really, as cunning as they come, and impossible to read. But even Speckbauer could not quite cover up the signs that he was also full of some kind of a ferocity. Maybe he was just as messed up in his head as the other.
“‘Kripo,’” his grandmother repeated, softly. “Kriminal Polizei.
It’s like those police shows on the TV.”
“Shows?” his grandfather said, almost indignantly. “The American dreck that half the country watches? But Felix: this has to be good for you, no? They see you work, they see how settled you are now… ”
Opa Nagl paused, with an awkward smile.
“When your people, our good old Gendarmerie that we know so well, our fellows — or boys when your team gets together with the Polizei, boy, that’ll be the perfect situation for you. Unbeatable, I say.”
Oma Nagl put her hand over his.
“You have it good, thank God,” she said to Felix.
“Do you know if you’ll keep the uniform though?” asked his grandfather. “The tellerkappe? Christ, if that goes, all is lost.”
“Lieber Gott,” said Oma Nagl. “Why is a little beret like that important? The tradition? Ask the boy about promotions and suchlike.”
“It is important. A symbol is important to ordinary people. I mean, when I see a Gendarme, and there he is under that cap, I can relax. Yes! I know I am dealing with a normal fellow. But Lord Jesus, when I see the Polizei there in Graz, I do not relax. No.”
“It’s just city life,” whispered Oma Nagl. “Bus conductor uniforms scare you.”
Felix’s grandfather gave his wife a long look.
“You,” he said. “You are the same. Remember on the TV the other night? The early news, the seven-thirty?”
“Those police talking in Vienna?” she asked.
“You said something about them. You did! ‘Too many police uniforms in one place,’ I think you said or ‘too much uniform’?”
“Ach, don’t be silly. With you it is your conscience, what little is left, and the naughty things of your youth. Or it’s just political you think uniforms are for the bad times, for trouble.”
Opa Nagl’s face took on a contented expression. He eyed Felix.
“This is Mrs. Law and Order, a woman who liked a wild one, once upon a time?”
“You were a naughty kid, Opa?”
“Of course I”
Oma Nagl held up her hand. She tilted her head to hear Speckbauer’s voice growing louder in the hall. Words were clear now.
“Jesus and Mary,” Felix heard, as Speckbauer’s irritation broke over something. He watched his grandparents’ eyes grow bigger.
“For Christ’s sake, what’s the goddamned delay? This is the digital age!”
A soft smile settled on his grandfather’s face now.
“Army,” he whispered. “Must have been. Listen to all that bad language.”
“Damn it, Martin! Step on it, will you? We need to move on this!”
Oma Nagl rolled her eyes. Her husband shook his head, half in admiration.
“Ah we were all a bit naughty then,” he said. It took a moment for Felix’s addled brain to pick up the thread.
“Those little Puch motorbikes we’d ‘borrow.’ Beer of course.
Practical jokes. All fun. But those days, who knows.”
“They all want cars, now, the kids,” Oma Nagl added. “For you-know-what.”
“Nature studies.”
“You don’t miss those annoying whiny two-strokes though,” his grandfather added. “The Japs beat them into the ground with their motorbikes. Just like their little rice cookers beat up NSU and Audi and Merc and”
“Rice cookers is not polite thing to say these days,” said Oma Nagl.
“Rudolf Diesel is a saint,” he retorted. “No rice cooked in a diesel engine, girl.”
“Not so many motorbikes now?” Felix asked.
“Right. But older guys like them still I think, a few anyways.
‘The old days’ kind of thing perhaps. They’ll come back, I tell you.”
“Ach,” said Oma Nagl, and brushed away his opinion. “They are still dangerous. Even with grown men on them. Not dangerous to me, no, I am in a car, but what chance do you have? Remember that crackpot there, not long back? There were still patches of snow even, and he comes out of nowhere. A madman.”
“Yes,” said Felix’s opa. “I remember that. Like a pirate or something. It was on the bend down the far side of the church. He must have been bottled to be out in the cold like that. Big red face no, a beard on him. A Viking or something.”
“A red beard? Red hair?”
“I suppose. He had goggles. Like a Scotsman, I thought later.
Like I was saying, he must have been pretty well drunk to drive like that… ”
The conversation ebbed. Felix’s mind kept backpedalling, spiralling, coming up empty. He made a long, aching stretch.
Yawning, he missed half of his opa’s words.
“God, that guy Speckbauer knows them all,” he said.
“He will surely apologize,” said Oma Nagl. “He must be under a lot of pressure but I still think he is a gentleman underneath. It’s his manner. He’s not a city type.”
Opa Nagl groaned.
“Like he never did any mischief, this Horst? Right, Felix?”
Oma Nagl waved away her husband’s observation.
“Right Felix? A man should have mischief, no?”
Felix rubbed more at his eyes.
“Every road in life should have its scenic routes. The autobahn is direct and fast of course, but it is on the byroads up in God’s country that one can savour real life.”
“Mein Gott, will you listen to that,” said Oma Nagl.
“Rossegger has come back from the dead.”
Felix eyed the shy smile his grandfather had now, the turning motion he made with his finger as though winding up a toy.
Oma Nagl began filling the sink. Felix took in the wooden table where they sat. It was hundreds of years old. His gaze wandered from chair to kacheloffen, back over the geraniums on the window sill, and then to the cats’ dishes licked clean next to a pair of boots.
Nothing should change here, he felt.
“Yes,” his grandfather murmured, an ear cocked again to the more subdued tones of Speckbauer’s voice in the hall yet. “One must make one’s own map for a full life.”
“Opa, I want to ask you something about this.”
“Advice? Of course. You have come to the right man.”
“No not joking. It’s about maps.”
“You need one? I think we have some. Oh, I know. It’s that stuff from the shed. I forgot. Yes, your dad asked me about them, I remember.”
“They were his, weren’t they?”
“No. That’s the thing, I remember now. I think he said he got them up at his father’s place. The old house.”
There was something in the way his grandfather said it, ‘the old house,’ that stayed with Felix.
“He dug them up, I think. Not literally. They were up there somewhere. But they’re old, aren’t they? They’re not antiques, I don’t think. Are they? No.”
Felix’s mind went back to the map with the marks on it.
“They were not his?”
“No. They were his father’s. Or the father collected maps or something. And that’s what sort of struck me then, when he left them here. He said he’d be back to look at them later, that he didn’t have time. “ “Later?”
“Well, we know what that meant,” said Opa Nagl. “Maybe it’s funny now, but I was thinking at the time that your grandfather, the old bas, well I thought he might come to the house here and accuse me of stealing them or something.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. That’s the way he is, the way he was. God forgive me.”
Felix said nothing, and for a few moments imagined his father driving off from the farmyard here in a hurry, waving as he went out of sight.
“Your dad left them here in a big plastic bag somewhere. He said he wanted to show them to me. He said he had some questions about them for me. Sometime.”
“May God and his angels be good to him,” said Felix’s grandmother softly, in the quiet that followed.
Speckbauer’s voice was barely audible now. Felix saw that his oma seemed to be distracted in her dishwashing.
Felix heard the receiver being returned to its cradle in the hall.
Pages were turned, and Speckbauer cleared his throat. Then he was in the open doorway after a polite single tap on the door.
“Many thanks,” he said. “Most helpful. I have left something under the phone to cover the call.”
“Not necessary,” said Opa Nagl, a little too quickly.
“Still,” said Speckbauer with a show of reluctance.
“Really. Graz is nothing these days.”
“It is farther, I am afraid Herr Nagl. Vienna. But you will see on your bill. A mobile phone is useless here. So much for progress.
But again I thank you.”
“Ah, Graz is not enough for you fellows,” said Opa Nagl. “See Felix? Stick with these guys and you’ll go places.”
Speckbauer offered a noncommittal smile. Felix wondered if he’d pretend he wasn’t picking up the signal from his wily, inquisitive opa.
“Vienna,” Speckbauer murmured. “Big shots my eye. They can be as slow as anywhere else.”
“Coffee?” from his grandmother.
“No thank you, Frau Nagl. But how kind. We must do a little work.”
He nodded at Felix.
“If I may use the klo before we leave?”
Felix waited until he heard the door close. He stood slowly.
“Opa. Was Opa Kimmel much for ‘mischief,’ the kind you were on about there?”
Felix’s grandfather made a grimace that was half bewilderment, half suspicion.
“You have strange questions in your head today.”
“A good fellow then,” said Felix.
“Don’t kid yourself,” said his opa sharply. “We kept out of his way. Such a
“Walter!”
Felix looked over at his oma. How rarely she said her husband’s first name, he realized. A dish poised in her hand with suds sliding down, she stared at her husband.
“I know,” said Felix’s opa, with a dismissive gesture of his hand.
“I know.”
Water running in the pipes made Felix’s grandmother turn back.
“Oops,” she said then. “I forgot! I must put proper towels there.”
She wiped her hands as she scurried across the floor, and down the hall.
“Tell me now,” said Felix. “About Opa Kimmel.”
“No way! We are related, Felix. It’s not proper. Your oma is right, damn her. Of course I don’t mean that. God help my clumsy words.”
“Political?”
“Christ no that’s easy enough in Austria, boy. No. Don’t you know what he was up to, the SS thing?”
“I know they found his age. Something about a fake name.”
“But he was the man of the house at sixteen. His father?”
“Stalingrad, I heard.”
“Ach,” said Felix’s grandfather. “So they say. No one knows.
He disappeared, a casualty. God only knows.”
“Did you not approve of the marriage or something?”
“At first, no. But then your father came out, and bit by bit, he won us over. So much different from your granddad. Life is strange that way. It was your oma, I say.”
“Farming, then his own garage too. What else did he do for a living?”
“He had other things, I think. Christ, I’m like an old woman, gossiping! Ach, it’s ancient crap.”
“Tell me.”
“Gossip? We heard rumours he was in business of course gasoline, coffee, cigarettes. But that was what a lot of people did.
And it died out.”
“I only found out he was in the Gendarmerie recently.”
“Hah. They’d take any fellow then. So many men hadn’t come back. There were still ‘operatives,’ guys up in the hills or loading trucks with things they didn’t own.”
“That was it? All of it?”
Felix’s grandfather narrowed his eyes and stared at the door to the hallway. There were voices, Felix’s oma and Speckbauer, and the intonations of polite and elaborate demurrals and assurances and appreciation.
“I heard years ago that he used to run messages for people. He had one of those motorbikes. But he was up and down a lot with it.
Someone, I forgot, who told me.”
“To Viktring? The DP camp there?”
“I heard Viktring too,” said his opa, but with a cautious look at Felix now. “And other camps. Hey, don’t kid yourself now, not all those people in the camps after the war were refugees. Believe me.”
“Nobody talks about that stuff here,” Felix said after a pause.
“Do they?”
His opa didn’t seem to hear the question. His face lit up with some recollection.
“There were DP camps right in Graz too, the city?”
His grandfather stopped as though frozen.
“Sure there were,” he said quietly. His eyes settled on Felix.
“Other places too. Over in Carinthia as well.”
“For refugees coming in from the east? The ones who had settled up the Danube and all that? Jugoslavian Germans, Swabians?”
His grandfather nodded.
“Guys on the losing side too,” he murmured. “Nothing German to them at all.”
“Grandfather Kimmel was smuggling too, right?”
His grandfather darted a quick glare at him.
“Don’t make my sins worse, Felix.”
“Sorry. I just never heard, never knew this.”
“Are you crazy? Why would a parent burden the next generation with the load of the past? Who knows what he was doing. But the DPs were Yugos, Slovenians a lot of them. I only remember that fact because I couldn’t figure out what the hell Slovenes were in a ‘jail’ for. Okay, not a jail but it didn’t make sense.”
“Like Slovenes who were Austrian maybe before the war?”
His grandfather waved his hand.
“All that history and empire crap. You see? There you are: history confusion.”
“But he made his rounds, visits to these places?
“Just a rumour, Felix. I mean no one would ever ask him.
Christ! Around here? Look. He was a sour, tough fellow. People kept out of his way. ‘Mustard in his arse’ they used to say. But his father had been taken from him. So, who can preach? Cruel stuff, this damned history.”
“But it ended, that stuff.”
“Did it? It wasn’t just Slovenes in those camps you know.
Maybe you were thinking, it’s okay to help out, say, people who are from your own side. A sausage, a crust of bread, a letter? But there were others in those places who got by the Tommys. Yes, we were really relieved when the Russkis left and the Englander took over. Christ, yes! But they were nice men. Naive though but what am I saying? I’ve never been beyond Munich, or that lousy ‘holiday’ in Italy. Italy. You’re a gypsy though, the zigeune of the family. Are they all like that in England, all nice and fair with you, but boring?”
“Food’s bad,” said Felix. “Everything costs a million.”
“‘Dull but decent,’ eh? You’re in no hurry to go back there.”
Felix’s mind was adrift now again, cluttered and sliding, turning back on itself. He watched his oma lift a statue of Mary from the mantel, and dust it. She crossed herself after she replaced it. His opa rolled his eyes, and leaned in. He gestured for Felix him to come closer.
“Did you see that? Best to keep the church at arm’s-length too, I tell you. It’s part of that mess too, you know but don’t tell your oma I said that.”
“Mess?”
“Ach,” he whispered. “It’s years since I heard anyone talk about those times. Even then, it was just like a story, or a fairy-tale, like the old ones up in the forest.”
“What stories.”
“I’ll do you a big favour and say nothing. That is what I will do.”
“Nothing, about what?”
“Ach, you are like a badger, Felix. What I’m saying is just common sense. The leopard never loses his spots. That’s all.”
But his opa was getting up now, making the sighs and groans he used as a way to escape conversation. From the hall Felix heard Speckbauer thank Oma Nagl again. There were chuckles, and he caught most of the words: hospitable, splendid, hearty.
“Just like your dad,” Opa Nagl murmured, half listening to the talk in the hall.
“They are?”
“You are.”
“He talked about this?”
“Talked? He bent my ear, how many times. But it was much later. This was only shortly before, well, you know. I think people get to an age and they look over their shoulder, and they get curious. If you ask me, that’s useless. I am a farmer. I get older, slower, stupider, happier. Then comes ‘freedom.’ I used to worry when I was a kid, about hell and that, but I know different now. God could be a woman. And a fine one too! That fear shit they threw at us, to keep us in line.. a crime.”
He made a sharp gesture as though lopping a branch.
“When I saw what they did back then… It all comes back to the same thing. Them and their stupid politics.”
“Around here, Opa?”
“Here? I don’t know. But the priest here is a nice fellow. Still, he must do what he is told. Tell you the truth, I feel sorry for him.
And you know, he probably hasn’t a clue himself. If he did, he doesn’t believe any of it.”
“Politics?”
“No, no. You know when rats leave a sinking ship? A rat line?
Rats are infernal bastards. Christ, they’re smarter than a room full of Jesuits. They’ll eat through anything. They can climb like frigging monkeys too. Yes, the ‘ratline.’”
“Rats,” said Felix. “What do rats have to do with anything there?”
“Not those rats, boy don’t be a depp. It’s people I’m talking about. The ‘ratline’ is how a lot of the bastards got away. You know who I mean — the higherups.”
“I don’t. Who?”
“Oh come on. The bad guys.
“The war?”
“Of course! But not just here in humble little Styria. I’m talking about ones from all over, and other guys, in the DP camps.
Look, is Yugo a bad word in the city?”
Felix nodded.
“Okay. Well call them what you like. I am not referring to the ordinary ones, the ordinary decent folk. No these were the higherups. What did they call them, the ones down there, the ones who loved Hitler? Ustashi? Yes! That’s their name. But it wasn’t just them hiding in those camps. It was some of the ones from close to Berlin, the really black bastards. They had their escape plans ready for years. Some of them went to places like South America, can you believe it?”
“Where did you learn all this, Opa?”
“I forget.”
“You read it?”
“I said, I forget.”
“But you know a lot.”
“I forget a lot too. A happy man does both equally well.”
There was something sharp in the retort. Then his grandfather’s face softened.
“Look,” he said. “There were ‘ratlines’ everywhere.
Switzerland, Italy, here. Some of them went right to the Vatican, they say. That’s what I’m talking about. Along with loot they’d stolen off Jews, that went with them, some of it anyway. That’s never going to see the light of day, now, is it?”
“Up here?”
“Why not? You ask where I heard this. It was years ago. That’s why I am ashamed to tell you. I went to Grade Six, Felix, but look at you, and Lisi Uni. Fantastic.”
“You heard rumours, gossip?”
“That’s it. People back then believed anything. Remember, this was after the war, when one potato was a feast. People make up stories here in the hills, it’s natural: a giant deer, or a wolf with red eyes, a giant, a mountain of gold anything.”
“Who could tell me?”
His grandfather leaned against the countertop and massaged his knuckles.
“Who?”
“Niemand,” his grandfather said. “No one.”
The door opened and Felix’s grandmother came in giggling at something Speckbauer had said in a low voice.
“Such kindness, I will not forget this. Truly.”
Felix’s opa nodded at Speckbauer in return for his compliment.
There was a sardonic glint in his eye, Felix noticed. He remembered his opa mock-grumbling about her falling for anything in uniform after Felix had shown them his Gendarmerie uniform.
“I have asked your wife’s kind indulgence, Herr Nagl,”
Speckbauer said. “If I might leave Franzi here a little while so that Felix and I may continue with some business that needs attending to.”
As though on cue, Franzi appeared by the window and nodded.
“I hope that is not an imposition.”
“He’ll be put to work.”
“I’m sure that will be a joy to him, Herr Nagl.”