Lanceheim Read online

  This was a sobering occasion.

  The story she told was astounding.

  The day before, the class had a lecture with Schoolmaster Slovac. He was one of the oldest teachers at the school, but also one of the best. He taught mathematics and physics, and gave his subjects such a philosophical tinge that the mathematical topics appeared to be secondary matters in a larger context. He stood up at the blackboard and discussed the dilemma of infinity with a piece of chalk in his claw. In the middle of a sentence he fell silent, and sank down to the floor.

  It took a few moments before the class reacted. Some kind of stroke, perhaps a heart attack, it was obvious. Half of the pupils ran up to see what was going on with the teacher; the other half rushed toward the door to escape. If Slovac really was about to die, the Chauffeurs could bang on the door to the class at any moment. The fear of encountering these henchmen of death could cause anyone to run for their life.

  Maximilian, however, was not in a hurry.

  He forced his way slowly through the circle of pupils and squatted down next to Slovac’s unconscious body. Ulla had been among those who first approached the fallen teacher, but she explained that somehow everyone understood that they should make room for Maximilian.

  “It was as though we knew,” she said, looking at me as if I would be able to answer her unspoken question.

  Ulla had held Slovac’s claw and thus been the only one in the room who knew that it had already happened. There was no pulse; it was too late.

  “But I didn’t dare say it,” she admitted to me and her brother. “I didn’t dare say it, I hoped I was wrong.”

  Maximilian sat next to the lifeless stuffed animal and placed his hand on Slovac’s head. Then something happened that Ulla Guinea Pig could not describe. It was, she said, as if the expressions and gestures of her classmates were transformed into rigid looks and grimaces. As if time slowed down, everything stopped, life and reality. She noticed that she was breathing again at the same time she felt that the blood was flowing in Slovac’s veins.

  She let go of the claw in terror; it fell to the ground.

  “He brought him back to life,” Ulla said quietly. “You won’t believe me, but that was what happened.”

  “Wolf Diaz!” exclaimed Maximilian.

  I had waited for him on the sidewalk outside the school. When he came out, alone and long after the other pupils, I let myself be known.

  “I will gladly help out,” I said.

  “With what?” asked Maximilian amiably, at the same time starting to walk.

  “With whatever your purpose is,” I replied, at once pretentious and self-occupied, and joined him.

  Ever since Ulla Guinea Pig told me how Maximilian had saved his teacher from the Chauffeurs, I hadn’t had a peaceful moment. I had suffered all the torment of doubt. I was probably late in my existential puberty—the testosterone had protected me from the tribulations of melancholy; females had occupied all my waking time. I was, as I already mentioned, twenty-six years old when I stood on the sidewalk and addressed Maximilian that day. I ought to have made my peace with the meaninglessness of existence and accepted that a legal career was neither more nor less hopeless than anything else. But I matured late—I am still maturing—and for nights and solitary morning hours that week I came to see that there was meaning to the electrical jolt that Ulla Guinea Pig had given me. It had nothing to do with her; it was about Maximilian.

  “I have some notes,” said Maximilian without looking at me or slowing his pace, “that perhaps you could make a clean copy of?”

  I followed him home that afternoon, and found drifts of paper in his apartment. It would take me more than two months simply to organize the notes before I even started to write them out. During that time, I also understood how alone Maximilian was, and after the incident with Schoolmaster Slovac, it only got worse. If his classmates had already kept him at arm’s length before, now the faculty was also suspicious. But Maximilian did not seem to suffer from this. He was a singular animal, and when one morning I found the following parable in a thick folder on his bookshelf, I knew that I had found my place in life.

  In his childish handwriting he had written the following:

  Once upon a time there was a miller who had three daughters. The first one was beautiful, the second was prudent, and the third daughter was sly. The miller tried to treat all three of them the same. Being just was a virtue. But the years passed, and this became more and more difficult. He gladly smiled at the beautiful daughter, he gladly conversed with the prudent daughter, but he preferred to keep away from the sly daughter. This tormented him. The miller therefore tried to smile at the sly daughter, converse with the beautiful daughter, and keep away from the prudent daughter. He kept a notebook, and there he made note of how many smiles, conversations, and evasive maneuvers he executed during the day in order to be certain of his irreproachability.

  When the prudent daughter fell one day and hurt herself, the miller wept tears of sympathy for her. At once he became afraid that he had treated his other daughters unfairly, and therefore he sought them out as soon as he could and sat down with them and wept corresponding tears. When he laughed at something the beautiful daughter did, he ran off, dismayed, and laughed at the other daughters in the same way.

  One day a wise lion came to visit the miller. The lion observed in silence how the miller exercised his fairness, and in the evening he asked the miller to sit down for a talk.

  “You are a just father, aren’t you?” asked the lion.

  “I do my best,” answered the miller, who was more than a little proud about how just he actually was.

  “But when you laugh with the daughters who haven’t done anything funny, how do you think they feel?”

  “They feel content that they haven’t been wronged,” replied the miller.

  “And you yourself?” asked the lion craftily.

  “I feel content at being fair,” replied the miller.

  “Fool!” said the lion, getting up and pointing at the miller with one of his powerful claws. “What you call fairness is dishonesty. What you think are feelings, are calculation and envy. You are afraid that you cannot love your sly daughter the way you love the other two. But I will tell you one thing, Miller: Love is just as strong as bamboo, and just as pliant. If you learn to lavish it, it will find ways to reach all of your daughters. You have squandered your time up until now.”

  Every afternoon I went home to Maximilian at Leyergasse and helped with household tasks: he did not seem to care about either dishwashing or laundry. We conversed, on his special terms, of course, and I wrote down the things he said as well as things deciphered from his own fastidious notes.

  The thought of leaving my legal studies had been on my mind for several semesters. At the time of these events, Maximilian was fifteen years old going on sixteen, and I was ten years older. If I had had a genuine interest, I would already have finished my law degree, and the reason for my continued uphill struggle—with deferred exams, requirements postponed, and more and more pressure—was that I did not dare tell Mother and Father about my decision. I had my own small apartment on Hüxterdamm; I was living on student loans and the money I earned as a tutor. The law program felt less and less urgent as my fascination with Maximilian grew.

  At last I gathered my courage and drove out to Das Vorschutz and Mother and Father. My life was about to take a different direction, and I felt content. That ought to be enough for them too. But there I deceived myself; it was a terrible evening that did not flatter any of us, and I would rather let it remain sealed up in my memory.

  I do not have a confessional nature, but this I admit: without Maximilian, my own life would hardly be worth anything. I became his biographer, his permanent secretary and clerk, long before Adam Chaffinch appointed me as the Recorder. I found meaning in an existence that otherwise would have remained a mystery to me.

  The church in Mollisan Town talked about love. Each and every one of the three
preachers wrote, in different ways, about the all-encompassing love of Magnus for us stuffed animals, and how we were unworthy but nonetheless compelled, according to our pitiable capability, to repay it. Like all other messages that the church had interpreted from the Proclamations, there was an underlying threat in this talk about love. No promises were given to the one who could love, but clear threats were whispered to the one who loved wrongly. There were elements of obligation and compulsion in Magnus’s love for his creation, and thereby our love for Magnus should have a similar makeup.

  Maximilian’s message was a different one. Personally, I believe that it was one of the contributing factors to the fact that, over time, he came to have such a large following. The faith he preached was free from threats. All-deacon Chiradello saw “goodness” in him, but that should not be mixed up with “niceness.” Maximilian’s morality was absolute and his ideas a clear guide.

  The story of the miller and his daughters had a clear moral for me. It was about being able to lavish love so that it extended to everyone. And this was exactly my nature; something I had been ashamed of until then. Growing up in an environment where you stayed together, where love between a he and a she was something absolute and irrevocable, I had always felt deviant. When passion struck me—and that happened several times a month—I was so ashamed that I didn’t dare talk about it with anyone. In every beautiful, mysterious, and fascinating female I met, I seemed to see an opportunity. But until then my happy, aching, and double-beating heart had been my dark secret. I too lavished my love—my love for females, anyway—and through his story, Maximilian freed me from guilt.

  From that moment my place was with Maximilian, and nowhere else.

  Maria Mink pressed herself closer against the brick wall.

  Her long coat dragged on the sidewalk, and just moments ago the first drops of the Afternoon Rain had fallen on her coat sleeves. The thick tweed fabric immediately soaked up the liquid, and Maria regretted that she hadn’t put on a raincoat. At the same time she assumed that they never would have let her stand here in a coat that shone bright red or festive blue. There were no written instructions, no rules that she had heard mentioned; and yet she knew. Those who were getting in line on the cramped, dark turquoise Herzoger Strasse right before the Afternoon Rain were all wearing dark, anonymous clothing. And the tweed-patterned gray coat she had inherited from her mother was the gloomiest piece of clothing Maria Mink owned. In addition it smelled of mothballs, and every time she put it on she started to sweat.

  Of the four streets that surrounded the church in Kerkeling, Herzoger Strasse to the east was decidedly the narrowest and least traveled. In that direction the facade of the church was windowless, and apart from a small door used by the church caretaker to take out garbage, the dark stone wall rose lifeless and without openings straight up to the sky. The building opposite housed the long-defunct Halz-bank Verlag book printers, and even if the well-formed windows were large and lovely, no one was ever seen at the large machines and conveyor belts.

  Down on Herzoger Strasse, squeezed between its hefty office buildings, the alley was so narrow that a car could not drive through it. There was no room for either lampposts or hanging streetlamps, which meant that when the sky darkened, as it did now, a merciful dimness fell over the stuffed animals assiduously lining up along the street. This was not the first time for Maria Mink. She had made an attempt the week before, and a few times last month. But if you arrived too late, the line was much too long. And if you arrived too early, you were shooed away by one of the church caretakers.

  Today she was in luck. There were only two animals ahead of her.

  “What’s a beautiful mink like you doing in a place like this?”

  The ox in front of Maria turned around and addressed her. She gave an involuntary start. She did not talk to strange males; she was scared to death of this sort of confrontation. For that reason she lowered her gaze toward the street and acted as if nothing had happened.

  “Yeah, yeah,” said the ox, obviously annoyed. “I don’t look that freaking dangerous, do I?”

  “No, no,” the worried Maria hurried to reassure him, “not at all. It was just that I—”

  “You uptight females are the freaking biggest downers I know,” the ox spat out, as if he belonged to a different decade.

  To this Maria had no reply, and she looked down at the street again.

  “What are you standing here for?” asked the ox in a somewhat friendlier tone, and added with a nod at the grasshopper at the head of the line, “You hardly need to ask him.”

  The grasshopper was standing upright with the help of a pair of crutches, and pretended not to hear. His right leg was bent at an incomprehensible angle and stood straight out from his green body. Maria could not even guess what had happened.

  “I…,” she began carefully, “have a little pain…”

  “A little pain?” repeated the ox.

  “Pain,” she nodded. “I have pain. Lots of pain.”

  “Where does it hurt?”

  “Here and there,” she said, but corrected herself when she saw his stern look. “I have pain in my shoulders. Most often in my shoulders.”

  “I can massage you a little, sweetie pie,” the ox suggested, licking his mouth with a long, dark red tongue. “Pending a miracle, may I massage you a little? At my place?”

  “No, thanks,” Maria replied politely and turned away from the ox.

  She was scared to death.

  “Are you turning your back on me, you stuck-up little—”

  “No, no,” said Maria, turning back again. “It wasn’t my intention to—”

  “Oh, what the hell,” sighed the ox, turning so that Maria Mink was staring at his broad back.

  They were called in at the same time: the grasshopper with the broken leg, the unpleasant ox, and Maria Mink, all rescued from the rain when the modest door at the back side of the church was opened from within.

  I can imagine how they experienced it, because I was the one who opened the door. I had opened it every day for several months at that time, always equally uneasy that someone might see me. With a pounding heart and alarming buzzing in my ears, I whispered, “Come in, come in,” to the one who stood first in line.

  On this day it was a grasshopper.

  There was always the risk that one of the all-deacons in Kerkeling’s church would pass by, even if I had never seen them walking on gloomy Herzoger Strasse. Perhaps I sensed the danger because deep inside I wanted to be revealed? The subconscious can play those kinds of tricks on us; if we knew our own soul as well as we know our desires, we would all be happier stuffed animals. I had a continual bad conscience over the fact that we were doing this to Adam Chaffinch. He was our friend and protector.

  “Come in, come in,” I whispered.

  I took in three animals on this day; we had only half an hour at our disposal during the afternoon sabbath.

  “Wait here,” I told the visitors, and ran off into the church to see if Maximilian was ready.

  Maria Mink looked around. I had asked them to wait in a storage room, small as a cubbyhole and dark as a cellar.

  “What the hell is this?” roared the ox, but he no longer sounded as impudent.

  Maria made no reply, nor did the grasshopper. There was a faint odor of cumin in the room, and Maria noticed that the ox smelled of alcohol. She had never had any dealings with drunken stuffed animals. She stared straight at the light that seeped in through the cracks in the doorway. She did not like darkness. Her shoulders ached even more, but she did not make her torment audible; the ox would only make fun of her. Then the cramped room became completely dark, and in the following second the door opened.

  “Grasshopper,” I said, “we’ll start with you.”

  The grasshopper made his way out bravely on his crutches, and while he was hopping away into the church I quickly explained to the ox and mink, “You have to keep quiet. Stay here and remain quiet. I will get you when it is time.
If anyone hears you, that will be the end of it. They would…I do not even want to think about what they would do.”

  “Aw, what kind of melodramatic crap is that?” the ox protested without using the low, almost whispering tone I myself had used, and which was usually contagious. “No one’s going to do a damn thing.”

  I admit that his attitude made me feel embarrassed. I could not recall anyone questioning my rules up to that time.

  “I have a buddy,” continued the ox, “who has done this. He didn’t say a thing about you, Wolf. You’re not the one we came to see.”

  “I am merely a humble—”

  “Where’s the magic animal?” asked the ox.

  “There is no magic animal here,” I replied.

  “Aw, but lay off,” said the ox.

  He was a normal-sized animal, but his broad shoulders gave his form a certain physical advantage and inspired respect.

  Maria Mink had squeezed herself as far into the cubbyhole as she could get. She was whimpering in a way that made me realize how scared she was, or else it was the rheumatism that attacked her with its cutting pain.

  “No wizardry goes on here,” I said in a valiant attempt to cheer myself up and regain control. “And if you remain calm, you will see it with your own eyes. This is a matter of believing.”

  “I don’t believe shit,” announced the ox. “And least of all you.”

  “It’s not what you think that you believe,” I explained. “This is for real.”

  A sound was heard from within the church, a kind of thump, and it made me nervous. Outside the Afternoon Rain was pouring down. The church was empty, all activity in abeyance. I was in constant fear that someone would come upon us. We were borrowing the church without permission, and during the sacred sabbath besides.