Eternal Life (9 page)

That was, like I said, two and a half years ago. But, the fact that the ceremony at the church there in Zell seemed so familiar to Brenner now—because he could practically predict the priest’s every move—that had nothing to do with Schmeller’s funeral. No, because, as a boy, he’d been an altar boy. Back in his elementary school days in Puntigam, Brenner, always the diligent server—often every day, even—and so on account of that, of course, he still remembered everything, because in church, things don’t exactly change with the seasons.

Even the sexton in Zell was every bit as withered and ageless a little man as they’d had in Puntigam. And just like in Puntigam, he would float soundlessly through the
sanctuary shortly before the mass was to begin so that he could light the candles. That hadn’t changed one bit—technological revolution or no technological revolution, the Zell sexton did it exactly like the Puntigam sexton had did it forty years ago. A two-meter-long pole with a wick at the end so that he could get to everywhere, and next to the wick was this little helmet-like thing—cone-shaped, I mean—and after mass he’d put the candles out with it.

Now, there were reforms, of course, sixties, let’s say, under Johannes, that was the pope at the time, the twenty-third, and he brought about a lot of these reforms, a real butchers’ council. But, thirty years later, you still wouldn’t have noticed them much in Zell. Take women. It used to be that the women sat on the left and the men on the right. When Brenner was just a wee pip of an altar boy, this was still totally normal. In Zell, though, this was still normal, more or less.

On the women’s side, at least, Brenner didn’t see a single man. Conversely, on the men’s side, it was almost completely empty. A few boys, and two, three old men, nothing else. Brenner stayed in the back and stood by the entrance, just like the men used to like to do, because, that way, during the sermon, they could sneak out to the bar.

But once the mass began, Brenner knelt in the last empty pew on the men’s side. He was struck by the fact that the two altar boys were girls, in other words, against the rules, and that the priest, flanked by the two altar girls, walked out of the sacristy way too fast. He was more like your small spry type, the Zell priest, and it really did look
as if he ran, more or less, out of the sacristy—you’d have thought you could hear the chasuble flapping, but that’s the way he always did it.

The congregation rises, but Brenner doesn’t stand up, no, the opposite, hunkers right down into his pew. Maybe you’re familiar with this: half-sitting, half-kneeling, head buried in hands. And at the same time, of course, in your head, somewhere else completely, just not at church.

For months he’d been gathering everything, the most trivial facts, all of it compiled with conscientiousness. And now, for the first time, he actually had something substantial. Vergolder’s false alibi, right in Brenner’s hands all the sudden. Success, you’d like to believe. But no, everything inside Brenner was resisting him taking it too seriously.

Maybe it was the smell of the candles in the church, the incense. And the prayers that the congregation recited in chorus, and the pictures of the saints, and the church hymnals, and the voice of the priest echoing out of the tinny church loudspeaker. Say what you will, but it had a certain something to it. Maybe that’s why Brenner started feeling twinges of a more or less moral nature now.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Because, these days, a lot of talk about methods gets bandied around all the time. Brenner, of course, his method was to devote himself to all of the details, and so he didn’t make any distinctions along the lines of important or un-. But that’s not really a method. That was just because—that’s just how Brenner was and didn’t know any different.

And now, as he noticed how out-of-place it felt for him
to be served such an enormous piece of evidence all the sudden, Brenner took stock of himself—you’d have thought, Old Testament.

Had this not always been his biggest failing? Was this not why his life had gotten onto the wrong track? Everything always too complicated. Always getting everything from god knows how far. Not like a normal person simply does, with whatever’s closest at hand.

“Sex, and I’ll say it again, sex!” the priest said into the microphone now, because the Zell priest liked to preach about topics like this, and it startled Brenner a moment, surprised him that the priest was already on the sermon now—practically half an hour gone by, and here he’d thought, five minutes.

While he was loafing there with his head in his hands, you might’ve thought, a proper believer, you know, praying or suffering. And somehow, that’s how it was, too. It wasn’t really the case of the two Americans that had him preoccupied, but his own case. His own inability. That he’s always so unable to tell the essential apart from the inessential.

“People today worship at the altar of sex.”

He used to think maybe it was an asset. Not as much judgment, as it were. Until at some point he realized that it just made him utterly, I don’t know. Unable to cope with life. By that point it was more or less too late already. When he noticed that people like Nemec aren’t interested in the truth at all.

“Even in kindergarten, the teachers are talking about sex already.”

People like Nemec are only looking for solutions, Brenner thought. And often enough they’ll find one. This wasn’t the first time that Brenner thought this. But this time it wasn’t Nemec but himself who he was taking to task. Because everything within him was struggling against the thought of Vergolder.

Then he heard the church pews creaking, and he knew that the sermon was over. The believers rose for the Creed, because he still knew that after the sermon comes the Creed, you don’t forget a thing like that. But Brenner stayed huddled in his sufferer’s stance; it seemed comfortable to him somehow. And it was cold in the church, too, still warm outside, but inside, cold as hell, and if you’re huddled up like that, needless to say, it’s warmer.

“I believe in God,” the priest began chanting, and then, the believers, too, in chorus:

There weren’t all that many believers, just a pitiful little band of old, spent voices, rattling out the prayer:

And that’s when it started in on Brenner again. He knew it from puberty, but it was still that way now. Now, this shouldn’t sound somehow, you know. But he was seized by this incredible friskiness now, just like he always used to get—he barely had to see the inside of a church.

Back then, he believed it was connected to him having to go to mass—with the requiredness of it. But now, even though he was there voluntarily, nevertheless. Or sometimes, too, he thought, it was connected more to the body, you know, feeling confined, immobile, just unnatural, because a church pew like that, you’re in there kneeling like you’re in a vise. Or, more psychological, he thought, as in, the church wants to suppress sex, so now nature’s fighting back.

Anyway, it had gotten to that point again. Thirty years later, and not the slightest bit of change. This had Brenner not quite wanting to believe it, but that’s how it was. Before the priest even got started on the transubstantiation. And how, right at the transubstantiation, the altar girl on the left was ringing her handbell—it was like with those dog experiments, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard about this, so, a bell rings when the dog gets a sausage, and soon it’s gotten to the point that the ringing alone is enough, and the dog comes running with his mouth watering. Russian dogs, that’s it.

And at that moment, where the altar girl’s ring-a-linging and the priest’s raising the chalice up in the air, who should
pop up before Brenner’s third eye, so to speak, the young schoolteacher, Kati Engljähringer.

Now, you should know—and so that you don’t go thinking god knows what about Brenner—after all, it’d been three-quarters of a year that he’d been living alone in Zell. A man in his prime, you might say. And that thing with Betty, with the American insurance agent, that’d been a few weeks ago already. Besides, it surprised him, too, but for some reason he’d never quite coveted Betty. Maybe just because it was all too easy, what with their rooms right next door to each other. And if he was honest with himself, it was only in retrospect that he’d taken any real delight in it, once he realized that Mandl the reporter had been after her.

“This is my body,” the priest was saying now, and maybe it was his sex sermon, too, that had Brenner unable to think about anything else. All of the sudden, Engljähringer seemed like the prettiest woman he’d ever seen in his whole life. But just between us: he thought that about just about any woman who had dark brown hair but skin so milky white, so translucent, that you don’t see the freckles until you’re two centimeters away.

But, then again, maybe it was only because this investigation had Brenner in a bit of a pickle. That he didn’t know where to begin with Vergolder’s false alibi. Maybe that was the reason why Brenner was feeling like a fifteen-year-old, I mean, where life’s just about worn you down with its crap. And so it was the warm white skin of schoolteacher Kati Engljähringer that occurred to him. She first started out just doing her student-teaching here, and then she stuck around,
or the school board wouldn’t let her go anymore, so she must’ve been about twenty-seven already.

Right next to the church entrance are two phone booths, and that’s where he was looking up Kati Engljähringer’s number now. Then he almost didn’t dare dial, but then he did after all. He was just glad that Lorenz had delivered this pretext right to him. Like I said, he was a bit of a coward in this regard, queasy in the stomach, you know, as he listened to it ring for the first time.

“This is Kati.”

Her voice sounded so chummy that Brenner immediately feared she’d been waiting for a different call.

“This is Brenner. I’m a private detective working on the Parson case.”

Now, normally, you’d expect some kind of reaction. But some people simply have this impossible habit. They fall silent on the phone exactly like if you were having a conversation with them face to face, as if it were the same thing. Needless to say, Brenner was getting a little frantic, and he noticed right away, too, how nervous his voice was sounding as he prattled on:

“I might have a few questions about a student. I can’t explain it to you in any detail at the moment. I’ve received a tip about a student of yours. Maybe you could help me further. It doesn’t concern the student herself. It’s just—it would be great if I could speak with someone about her.”

“Which student is it, then?”

“Clare Corrigan. I believe she goes by a different name, though.”

“Yes, Elfi. She’s not one of my students, though.”

“Oh.”

He was hoping she hadn’t heard that just now. The disappointment in his voice. Through the phone booth window he looked out onto the church square. It was Saturday afternoon. End of the season. This time the pause in the conversation was on his dime. But just as he was about to end the conversation, she says:

“I had her last year in German. Maybe I can be helpful to you. Just come by.”

“You mean—right now?”

“If you have time.”

The schoolteacher lived in a
garçonnière
between the Schüttdorferstrasse and the lake. If you walk along the lake, it’s only ten minutes from the church. The lake and the air and everything was so still now that you’d have thought the Saturday mood had infected even the weather.

Except Brenner. Needless to say, he was the exact opposite now. Mood, practically euphoric.

“I didn’t realize you were a doctor,” he said, when she opened the apartment door to him, because on the bell it said, “Dr. Engljähringer.”

Her smile got under his skin, boy, I don’t need to tell you. She had on a dark red knit dress, but it stopped a good half a meter above the knee. Brenner had to watch out that he didn’t start breathing too heavily now.

“Have a seat,” Engljähringer says, and points to the sectional, which faced not the lake but the Schüttdorferstrasse. The noise-reduction windows were an absolute necessity
because the through-traffic never let up, not even on a Saturday.

On the coffee table was a composition book, and Brenner read the name off it:

“Elfi Lohninger. German. Sixth grade.”

Engljähringer says, “You do know that Clare Corrigan’s real name is actually Elfi Lohninger.”

“What?”

Brenner’s real thoughts were actually somewhere else. He was only looking at the schoolbook to keep from gawking at the red knit dress.

“Ah, yes, of course,” Brenner says now. That was true, too. He really did know that already. But did Engljähringer the schoolteacher actually believe that that’s why he’d come here.

“Would you like something to drink?”

“Are you having something?”

“If you’ll have something.”

The schoolteacher only had amaretto. Now, you should know, Brenner’s grandmother back in Puntigam had always told him this story about sweet schnapps. Namely, how it was responsible for her bringing an illegitimate child into the world. Which, of course, was Brenner’s mother. Because the master carpenter, her, a couple of sweet schnapps. Dispensed, as it were. Needless to say, this was seeming like a good sign to Brenner now, an auspicious beginning. And she had music, too, Engljähringer the schoolteacher. Adriano Celentano. Greatest Hits.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything, of course.

Maybe she just loved Italy, they’re all the same when it comes to that. Even looked a little Italian. Dark hair, light skin. Translucent freckles.

The schoolteacher told him stories about Elfi, i.e. Clare, that were more or less interesting for a good hour’s worth. More or less interesting because Brenner didn’t exactly know how interesting—watching her mouth while she talked, but like I said.