The Facades: A Novel (17 page)

As the snowstorm continued, the architect’s condition deteriorated—if it is possible to speak of deterioration at this point,
Vollstrom said with a laugh. Bernhard’s monologues turned from his hatred of Trude to his early life in the Austrian Alps
and the village he had been forced to leave by “the Mustache,” as he now called Hitler. In Bernhard’s final hours, he shouted
about snowmen. His lifelong fascination with snowmen is well-known. A famous passage from his
Memoirs
recounts the moment when Bernhard and a friend stood admiring the figure they had just crafted from fresh Alpine snow. The
friend ran off to join a snowball fight down the street, but Bernhard was unsatisfied. He stared at the snowman. “Where is
his house?” Bernhard asked to no one. A moment later he began constructing that house from ice and packed snow. The snowman,
for Bernhard, was inextricably bound up with architecture itself, with his entire life’s work. Now that he was at death’s
door, as they say, Bernhard spoke of nothing but snowmen. His circular rant zeroed in on a single
point, which he repeated endlessly.
Sie müssen Schneemänner bauen
, said the sallow architect who was pickling in his own urine. They must build snowmen, they must build snowmen, they must
build snowmen, he repeated with an urgency that left no doubt this was his final request, said Vollstrom. Again he began to
sort of sing the words in his deep baritone voice. The orderlies ignored him at first, as they had disregarded claims of detaching
body parts and his various abuses of Trude. They had become so used to tuning out the voice with the German accent that it
took a real effort for them to understand his words. When they could no longer tolerate the loud singing,
sie müssen Schneemänner bauuen
, the orderlies consulted among themselves. The request was highly irregular and certainly dangerous. But despite his horrible
smell and incoherence, despite his profanity-laced attacks on each of them in the past days, there was still a certain reverence
for Bernhard at the Traumhaus. Indeed there still is, Vollstrom said, tapping ash on the grave. The orderlies informed the
most able patients that they would need to get their coats, hats, and mittens on, because they were going out to the grounds.
Vollstrom was one of these patients. By this time, it was dark.

An unlucky staffer, holding his breath, went into the Schreber Suite and wheeled the dying architect to the window. The reeking
and irascible German kept shouting. My nose is freezing, my ears are freezing, my toes and fingers are freezing, now my ankles
are freezing, my knee feels frozen, the architect cried, as if he were a child trying to fall asleep. Mummified in his foul
blanket, he had a direct view of the bewildered patients who stumbled out in the snow. Vollstrom described the extreme disorientation
of the motion lights that tripped and flashed, the thick and swirling snow, the putrid Bernhard hunched like a
shrunken grandmother at the window. Many of the Traumhaus patients did not remember how to build a snowman. They became confused,
drawing stick figures in the snow with their canes or falling backward to make snow angels. Vollstrom and the other veterans
showed the rest what to do. They all began building snowmen for Bernhard’s benefit. Their efforts were strange and disfigured.
Some collapsed, others did not resemble human beings at all.

“I sometimes think that I am insane myself,” Bernhard writes on the last page of his memoir, “but perhaps if I were sane I
would never have built anything.” The spectacle on the hill seemed to calm him, said Vollstrom. As the fumbling, uncertain
patients worked on their snowmen, and Bernhard watched them from the best seat in the house, he suddenly began to laugh. The
laugh started low in his chest and rose from there, perhaps the way a spirit might leave a body, with a certain buoyancy.
According to Vollstrom, the architect’s laughter had a chilling quality as it carried on the wind over the snowy grounds outside,
where Traumhaus patients were now slipping and falling on the hill. They buried their faces in their mittens and batted at
their abortive snowmen. The situation had become unbearable, said Vollstrom, the cold and the snow and the architect’s laughter.
It was at this moment that Bernhard spoke his last words. “It is my own Ulli who is buried under that labyrinth,” he cried,
and according to Vollstrom, his laughter turned to a howl of despair as he said this, though others at the scene disagreed.
“My own Ulli is buried there, under the labyrinth,” he repeated, and having disburdened himself of this information, he slumped
to the side, his wasted body covered with snowflakes. Out on the hill, the patients stood silently for a moment, next to their
half-built
snowmen. They observed a moment of silence for the dead architect. It was an extended moment of silence—they had not had quiet
for days. At last the orderlies called everyone in and the motion lights snapped off.

There was an excavation of sorts done at Bernhard’s shopping mall a few weeks after his death, said Vollstrom. The authorities
poked around under the labyrinth for a while to see if there was any truth to Bernhard’s last words. A thorough excavation
of the labyrinth would have taken months, however, and would have cost the current owners of the mall many thousands of tourist
dollars. The superficial search was inconclusive, leaving Vollstrom to wonder if Bernhard really had “revealed the secret
of the labyrinth” after all, or if the dying man simply had one last joke in him before he died, on the coldest day of the
coldest winter on record. Who knows what that laughter meant, if one can even speak of meaning, Vollstrom said. He held out
the possibility that the laughter was only a cover, that Bernhard was, in fact, being as painfully, nakedly earnest as he
had ever been in his life. After all, Vollstrom said with a slow smile, when the same excavators went to Ulli von Hartsig’s
grave, where the profit motive did not prevent them from making a thorough search, they found her half of the tomb empty.

T
EDDY
W
AYNE HAS BEEN A TIRELESS ADVOCATE AND A TRUE
friend. This book would not exist without him.

I am grateful to my mentors all along the way: Myrna Klobuchar, Annie Dawid, James Wilcox, and particularly Kathryn Davis,
who helped me raise the scaffolding of this book.

For their insightful early readings of the manuscript, thanks to Jessica Baran, Stefan Block, Sarah Bruni, Deborah Eisenberg,
Beth Parada, and Kellie Wells.

Liese Mayer, editor extraordinaire, found all the things I missed—her grace and discernment imbue these pages. To Peter Mayer,
Michael Goldsmith, Mark Krotov, and everyone else at the Overlook Press, thanks for believing in my work and presenting it
with such style. Thank you to my agent, Renee Zuckerbrot, and to my first friend in the business, Rosalie Siegel.

To my parents, Arlene and Paul, and my brother, Mark, for your patience and love.

Eleanor, you know who you are.