Lanceheim Read online

  With a cub’s intuition I realized, as I lay quivering with excitement and nervousness behind my root, that Eva’s song had a religious significance. The falling tones sounded like a kind of lamentation. It was so beautiful, and at the same time infinitely mournful. She sat quite still and executed precise movements in fast-forward with her wings. The first time I thought she was in a trance, that the movements were unconscious, but soon I discovered that she was following a well-rehearsed pattern. It was a matter of turning her wings at angles against one another and against her body in a long series of positions that probably had significance beyond my comprehension. I have not seen these types of movements since either, although my life by now has been both long and eventful.

  If I had already been enchanted by Eva Whippoorwill before, these mornings deepened my feelings, and they were etched in my memory for all time—the forest that stood densely around the bottomless lake, the dew that still lingered in the spiderwebs that had been spun over the tree roots during the night, and the whispering reeds only a few meters from my hiding place. And on the branch of the willow tree, this apparition, my love, who executed her mysterious and complicated ritual.

  The twenty-fourth day was different.

  I lay as usual peering between the roots. High above us the dark clouds were forming in the sky, but there was still more than half an hour remaining until the rain. About halfway through the song Eva Whippoorwill fell silent. It happened suddenly, without warning.

  I realized immediately that something was wrong. She sat completely still on the branch, and I feared for a few seconds that she had discovered me. She turned her beak up in the air, drew her wings next to her body. It was as if she was holding her breath, or else it was just me who was doing so.

  Then everything happened very quickly. Without my even seeing how it happened, she was out of the tree and down on the ground in seconds, and had started running up toward the forest glade.

  Confused, I remained in my hiding place for a few short moments, but then curiosity got the upper hand. As fast as I could, I followed Eva Whippoorwill back up toward the forest glade.

  I heard the commotion at a distance. The forest guards were usually soft-spoken; they were a taciturn breed. Now their voices were heard through the forest at a great distance.

  When I came up, I saw all of our small population gathered on the circular lawn between the five houses of the forest guards. Mother discovered me as soon as I came out of the edge of the forest, and she ran up and took hold of me.

  “Where have you been?” she asked.

  But she did not wait for a reply; she was not interested. Instead she dragged me with her into a circle of stuffed animals on the lawn. I immediately joined up with Weasel and Buzzard, who stood next to their older siblings a little apart from the others.

  “What’s happening?” I asked.

  “It’s Sven,” Buzzard began. “He—”

  “He found something in the forest,” Weasel filled in.

  “Rolled up in a sheet. It was in a magpie’s nest that had fallen down out of a tree.”

  “It was pure luck.”

  “It’s something that’s alive,” said Buzzard.

  Round about us I heard the grown-ups talk about Sven Beaver and what he had found, but here and there I perceived an agitated tone of voice, even an individual angry word; there seemed to be differences of opinion on the lawn.

  “Something that’s alive?” I asked Buzzard.

  “They don’t know what it is,” said Weasel.

  “Not a stuffed animal,” said Buzzard.

  “But not a forest animal either,” said Weasel.

  “Shut up now!” Buzzard’s big brother roared at us, and we fell silent.

  But not only us. The silence settled in a dignified manner over everyone on the lawn, just as darkness settles over the treetops in the evening, and our glances were turned toward Sven and Eva’s house.

  I too turned around, and saw Eva Whippoorwill come out on the stoop. She was carrying a peculiar bundle in her wings. I understood immediately that this was what everyone was talking about, what Sven Beaver had found in the forest. Eva looked down at the bundle in her arms, and then turned toward us.

  “His name is Maximilian,” she said loudly. “And he is Sven’s and my cub. Be happy for us.”

  Her voice was tense, hollow, and the words were astounding. I think we all perceived her as stark raving mad at that moment. But at the same time she made us all embarrassed; her pride was unshakable, and her will so powerful that no one dared utter a word. We were staring at her. She stared back at us from up on the porch. Sven Beaver was not to be seen. When the silence had just about become unbearable, she turned around and went back into the house with the bundle in her arms.

  Immediately the whispering started again.

  “But what kind of thing is it?” Buzzard wondered in a low voice.

  It was the question we were all asking ourselves, but no one could answer. When the first raindrops fell, everyone disappeared into their houses. Mother again took hold of my arm and pulled me away, but I heard Hans Beaver whisper to the forest guards to meet him for a deliberation as soon as the rain dispersed.

  The forest guards’ deliberation was held at the home of Jonas Beaver. A few years earlier, Buzzard and Weasel and I had discovered that in the closet in the guestroom on the upper floor at Jonas and Magpie Tagashawa’s, one of the floor planks could be loosened. The closet was situated above the room where the deliberation was held, and without the floor plank it was almost like sitting at the table. It was always exciting to eavesdrop on the grown-ups, even if it was seldom that anything secret was said.

  Raccoon Olsen—Jonas and Magpie’s oldest son—had been our partner in crime from the start, but then grew away from us. He was a well-behaved sort who had begun his studies in economics in the city and would soon move from Das Vorschutz. The morning when the deliberation about Maximilian was held, however, Raccoon Olsen was standing with us inside the darkness of the closet, smelling the odor of mothballs and laundry soap and listening to the forest guards’ harsh voices one floor below.

  The prelude was cautious.

  The beavers talked about the day ahead, about the week that had passed, about a spring they had discovered a few months earlier that could still not be traced to the Dondau, the river that ran inside the mountains and was only visible for a few kilometers inside Lanceheim.

  Up in the closet we were getting impatient, and Weasel Tukovsky—who always had a hard time standing still—began drumming nervously against the floor with his paw. I silenced him with a sharp glance, and then we finally heard Jonas Beaver clear his throat down at the table and address the question of the day.

  “Well, then,” he said, “we all realize what this is really about, don’t we?”

  “She can’t keep it,” I heard my own father declare in his gruff way.

  His voice always had a different ring when he was talking with his colleagues, at the same time gentler and more definite.

  “Of course not,” Anders, Weasel’s dad, concurred. “On that point the regulations are crystal clear. Things that are found in the forest, which can be assumed to possess a certain value, must be turned in to the ministry, without exception.”

  “I’m sorry, Sven,” said Jonas.

  It became silent, and the silence went on for a time. As if to soften the significance of his regret, Jonas said at last, “But tell us, where did you find…Maximilian?”

  Sven Beaver had been sitting silently until then, but now he began to speak.

  “I was on my way home,” he said.

  His voice was flat. It was as though he was exerting himself not to betray any feelings.

  “I’d been out since the day before yesterday. To the north. I’d been told that there was a fox, a forest animal, with an injured paw. I found the tracks, but never found the animal, and finally I was forced to give up. Yesterday evening, after the storm, I was on my way toward a Sle
eping Place. I think it was you, Anders, who showed it to me. That was a long time ago. Where the mountain slopes in toward the bog, west of the spruce forest?”

  “I know which one you mean,” said Anders.

  Several concurring hums were heard.

  “Right before I got there, I heard the scream,” Sven continued. “It was a call that I had never heard before, and I readily admit that it…made me worried. I can’t say that I was scared, the call was…too little…for you to get scared. But I seldom hear a sound in the forest that I don’t recognize. I waited awhile, and then I heard it again. This time more like a wailing. It was coming only a few meters from where I stood, and he wasn’t hard to find. He was wrapped up in a blanket, which in turn was carefully placed on top of the ferns. When I picked him up…I knew that he was the one we had waited for. The one Eva and I had waited for.”

  No one said a word. Up in our closet we hardly dared breathe. Before me in the darkness I saw the image of Eva Whippoorwill in the willow tree, and how she abruptly stopped singing.

  “But what kind of thing is it?” Hans Beaver finally asked. “I mean, it is naturally as you say, Anders, that things of value that are found have to be turned in.”

  “So it is,” confirmed Anders.

  “But it seems to me that in this case we don’t know the value,” Hans continued, “because we don’t know what it is. And so we can’t put it back either.”

  “It’s something that’s alive,” my father declared.

  “It’s a kind of animal,” said Anders.

  After that, silence again fell around the table. Up in the closet we realized why, and we held our breath in excitement. The forest guard who looked after the forest animals, and had the deepest insights into the subject, was Sven himself. It was easy to imagine that all gazes now rested on him.

  “It is a prayer that’s been answered,” he said at last. “That’s exactly what it is. A prayer that has been accepted, and a cub has been granted to us.”

  “But, Sven—” Anders began.

  “Sven, listen—” said my father in the same breath.

  “We know how you feel, Sven, but—” interrupted Hans.

  “We have rules to follow,” Jonas almost whispered.

  Silence again. Then we could all hear the scraping of a chair being pulled out from the table.

  “Dear friends and colleagues,” said Sven Beaver with a certain authority, and in the closet we understood that he had stood up, “I ask you, let me handle this in my own way. Just as you would let me treat an injured deer, or an eagle chick that fell from its nest. I promise you, I am not going to break any of the rules, I will follow every paragraph of the law that we forest guards have to follow.”

  The silence that ensued was solid.

  “It’s about trust,” Sven added in a somewhat lower voice. “By granting your consent, you show that you rely on me. And we forest guards have to rely on each other.”

  “Sven,” said my father at last, “don’t do anything stupid.”

  I recognized the tone of voice; I knew that Father had just given his assent.

  Without any further words we heard steps across the floor and then the door being shut. There was no doubt that it was Sven Beaver who had left the deliberation.

  “If only we don’t come to regret this,” said Jonas Beaver quietly.

  No one answered him.

  During the months that followed, Eva Whippoorwill and Sven Beaver would adopt the little bundle that we all came to call Maximilian, just as Eva had said we should. The adoption occurred after a series of processes of both a moral and legal nature. Sven reported his find to the police, and was first forced to await the court’s decision that no one else had a claim on Maximilian. Subsequently they went through the meticulous adoption process, where one of the more surprising problems had been to define Maximilian’s type. That the bundle was not an ordinary stuffed animal was easy to ascertain; it was only necessary to take a look at him. Despite the fact that he had eyes, nose, and mouth, he was different in an—remember, I was only ten years old at the occasion in question—unpleasant way. Above all it had to do with the structure of his light beige fabric: like silk without the sheen, and the seams could scarcely be seen.

  Eva and Sven had first sent in the papers without filling in the information about Maximilian’s attributes, but they were rebuffed. Then they had to write “imaginary animal” instead, without specifying that further. Most of the imaginary animals in Mollisan Town could be categorized as “dragons,” “prehistoric animals,” or “fairy-tale animals.” But some, a very few, were impossible to trace to a breed or a category, and it was among those that Maximilian was counted. The Ministry of Finance finally sent a dog out to Das Vorschutz, who with his own eyes could ascertain that the lack of a category was correct. The dog stared down into the crib and saw there a bundle, as small as a cricket bat, but with highly peculiar ears and without any similarity whatsoever to any of the known types of stuffed animals.

  When the adoption went through, the commotion around Maximilian subsided somewhat. I will not go so far as to maintain that everything returned to normal, but it was well on its way. During the weeks that followed my love paled, and Eva Whippoorwill was transformed: in my eyes she became Maximilian’s mother. The mystical shimmer around her remained, however. Again and again I saw in my inward eye how she interrupted her morning ritual by the lake that morning. As if she had known. She must have known.

  How was that possible?

  REUBEN WALRUS 2

  Reuben Walrus sat down in row 15, seat 354, in the middle of the orchestra. He had little use for superstition. At the very most he might accept that faith was a balancing factor during a long life. Yet he always picked the same seat on the parquet when he rehearsed with the Lanceheim Philharmonic. He pretended that it had something to do with the acoustics. In an empty concert hall it was easy to mistake the tonal colors. The gilded, arched box seats along both edges of the stage gaped like greedy mouths above each other. True, the red velvet on the hundreds of chair seats and backs in the parquet did dampen the sound, but not in the same way as when the hall was filled with the cloth bodies of many hundreds of stuffed animals. This seat, in the middle of the parquet, was, for lack of a better, the most representative, Walrus reasoned. Here the tone remained intact.

  The fact that he had sat in seat 354 when he directed his Piano Concerto in D Major, which got an exuberant reception ten years ago, had nothing to do with it. The fact that he had sat in seat 354 when he rehearsed the successful one-act opera Sarcophagus, which had been playing on one of the city’s stages without interruption for at least fifteen years, had equally slight significance. And it was of no interest that out of sheer cussedness he had refrained from sitting on seat 354 when he suffered the fiasco with the Sonata for Violin and Harpsichord five years ago.

  Despite the fact that the evidence was overwhelming, Reuben stubbornly refused to see himself as a victim of superstition. He had reached a mature age, he was en route to his sixty-fifth birthday at a furious pace, and yet he was still struggling with his self-image. Every morning he got up and wished that it were a different face that met him in the bathroom mirror. Someone whose forehead was not as high, whose eyebrows were not quite as grandly white and bushy, someone whose nose was less moist and who did not have mustaches that were quite so long and dense. He hated his large, heavy body, and he suffered from being nearsighted, even if he refused to wear eyeglasses in public. His egocentricity had made him a miserable spouse and a blind parent, and his friends had abandoned him long ago, because he always prioritized his work. He had unintentionally become something of a recluse, a type he despised, but he could not decide what he should sacrifice to become part of the community. The only thing he appreciated in his mirror image on certain mornings were the large, glossy eyes whose luster revealed talented melancholy. Reuben Walrus’s vanity—for this was a matter of vanity and nothing else—was only one of many signs of his unfathomable
need for acknowledgment. The maturity he had reached with the years meant that nowadays he knew that this need for acknowledgment would never be satisfied. But he also knew that it could never be ignored.

  Walrus was latently dissatisfied, but also with dissatisfaction itself, which saved him from being impossible. Instead the surrounding world often seemed to appreciate his blunt cynicism and cutting irony, which in nine cases out of ten was aimed at himself.

  The words that Dr. Margot Swan had spoken refused to become comprehensible during the afternoon. Reuben Walrus pretended as if nothing had happened. He positioned himself up in row 15, clapped his hands, and the musicians returned from their long break. Patiently he let them slowly take their seats, and then it was time. They started playing again, and Reuben concentrated on the music, closing out everything else…then he heard it again.

  Seven minutes into the first movement of the symphony was a passage where the cellos along with the violins should build up to a successive, violent crescendo. It didn’t work. It didn’t work at all. Instead of creating interest in the variation on the theme that awaited in the following movement, it led the insistent cellos up to an anticlimax. It hesitated too long. The theme had to return sooner. Perhaps not completely, but in some form. The dissonances and chromatic changes that Reuben usually exploited were not enough in this passage.

  Reuben stood up and waved deprecatingly. Frustration was pounding in his temples. When no one saw him, he began jumping up and down in the row of seats, waving his fins and shouting. The chastened philharmonic stopped playing.

  “Damn!” shouted Walrus, but he knew that Malitte, the lord of evil, could not help him. “Damn, damn, damn.”

  He made his way out along the empty row of seats, hurried along the middle aisle of the concert hall, and ascended the stage via the short staircase on the right side. He ran past the violinists over to the cellists and grabbed hold of the score. He held it up in the air, staring at the notes and closing his eyes.