Poachers Road Read online

  But his friendships from Uni had become awkward acquaintances, and rare phone calls. Seven months travelling from beaches in Spain to a squat in Copenhagen had not really settled him much. Giuliana had remained constant, however, but lately there had been something in the air there too. He did not want to think about that.

  The woods ended. Ahead of them the narrow, winding ribbon of road twisted around another hairpin before its final run into the village.

  “You won’t want to hear this,” said Lisi, “but I’ll say it anyway. You look good in that uniform.”

  She glanced over after he made no reply.

  “You lost your brain in some pub, some stübe, the night before Dad’s memorial?”

  “It wasn’t that much,” he said. “Maybe it was an unconscious thing anyway.”

  “Don’t try that Freudian crap on me. I’ve read it, you know.”

  She left the car in second now. He began to think, dimly, if anyone had studied the effects of high mountain air on a hangover. Frische luft, his oma his mother’s mother called it. Frische luft macht frisches herz! Fresh air makes the heart anew!

  “Well, how’s Giuli then.”

  This was conciliatory, he knew, but still he felt like asking her how her boyfriend Karl was, or Superbore, as he called him. Still as exciting as cold Baïschel? The thought of that sliced meat lying cold in its greasy sauce made his mouth taste chalky and sour.

  “She’s fine.”

  A lie, he wondered: a white lie? Maybe it was a hope, more than a statement of fact. No: she was fine. Truly. She’d get over it. “It” was this thing that neither of them wanted to put a name on. If it had a name, it might be “commitment” or something like that. “The future,” maybe “our future,” to be precise.

  “It was nice of her to come to the blessing.”

  For a moment, Felix did not understand.

  “She knows a lot about that stuff,” said Lisi. “I didn’t realize.”

  “Religion?”

  “Not religion exactly: taferls and things.”

  Felix got it now. His sister meant the roadside monument to his father. It was a hand-carved one of Jesus on the cross, paid for by the Association. A local carpenter had made it, not “an artist.” As with so many other of these traditional shrines and statues, it stood by the roadside where the accident had happened.

  “So tell me about your boys’ night out. Where do cops go to unwind?”

  “There’s no one at the post I want to unwind with. It was Viktor and a few guys.”

  She grasped the wheel with both hands and turned to him.

  “Watch the road, will you,” he said.

  “‘Viktor and a few guys’? Jesus, Felix.”

  “I don’t see them that often anymore.”

  He steeled himself for her to say: since you dropped out, and they didn’t.

  “We all know the Gendarmerie are more ‘relaxed’ than the Polizei.”

  She had spoken in the slow tone of a teacher delivering a gem of wisdom. “But associating with Viktor and those other professional students? Really.”

  “Who says I can’t?”

  She laughed a teacher’s laugh.

  “Oh I get it,” she said. “You’re undercover infiltrating them now. Good work.”

  He glanced over and saw that her mouth was set to fire another comment his way. Instead, her attention was taken by an older man standing next to a Skoda parked half in the ditch. He was unloading fence wire from a trailer.

  She waved and he smiled.

  “You know everybody still,” said Felix.

  “He was a friend of Dad’s.”

  Who wasn’t, Felix almost said. Even the poor truck driver that Felix Senior had clipped, sending himself down the gorge in the Weizklamm, battering and flattening it with every crunching slam, end over end, until it stopped a hundred-odd metres . . .

  “Are you going to throw up?”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  He could feel her disapproval like a mantle of cold air over him. He tried harder to keep the images from returning. The driver, yes: a hulking, big, wall-eyed guy, full of regret and awkwardness and apology, had come to the funeral, Felix remembered, and had shed tears. Apparently he’d met Felix Senior before, and this had made him feel even worse.

  “Anyway,” she said, and gave his uniform a quick once-over. “You’ll make a fine impression at the service. Really. I’m not being sarcastic. I mean it.”

  He followed the line of the wall that enclosed the church and graveyard. The grounds within had risen over the centuries, and the wall had been raised to match it as though it were a dam, or a dike, in rising waters. When Giuliana had visited the village first and walked down the lane here, it had freaked her out to be walking at the same height as the coffins on the far side of the wall.

  “I think I see Mom’s car,” Lisi said.

  Felix spotted the yellow Polo parked near Gasthaus Ederer. There were a half-dozen others there too. He didn’t see any Gendarmerie patrol cars. This was good.

  Lisi looked at her watch, and she let the car down the narrow gasse, the lane that led to the side of the church. She turned the wheel sharply for an unexpected space next to a Nissan. Felix tried to ignore the sudden listing in his intestines. To distract himself while she straightened the car out, he looked out at a slice of view by the end of the wall. It was one of so many walls, and lanes, and views of distant mountains and valleys, that he’d known so well in this village where he’d grown up. It had also been a place he couldn’t wait to get out of, and go to the city.

  “Damn,” she said, and rolled her eyes. “Look: it’s Opa’s car, I think. We’re late.”

  “He still drives?”

  “It looks like his ancient heap,” she said.

  They stepped out. Felix tugged at his uniform and looked at the cars jammed into the confines of the lanes.

  “No tellerkappe, Inspektor?”

  Felix knew earlier on that he had left the traditional Gendarmerie duty cap in his own car, his mother’s old Polo, that was going to be fixed by this evening. The getaway car: it had to be ready and reliable for his and Giuliana’s week down in Italy the big escape, they’d taken to calling it.

  As for the Inspektor bit, he let himself believe that Lisi hadn’t meant it sarcastically. It was the correct term, of course, but he’d never get used to it. It just sounded too self-important. He preferred the old names: Gendarme, or Grenzgendarme, the term for a probationary policeman in this old rural Austrian police.

  And then Felix felt the first relief from his crushing hangover at the thought of their week ahead. It would be his first break for nearly a year. He still wasn’t sure how he had managed to stick it out in Gendarmerieschule.

  “No,” he said. He even managed a smile for his elder sister. “Forgot it.”

  Somebody was playing the church organ, quiet and slow. It was likely his mother would cry. A dignified crier, he would have to say of her. If he had to sing, he’d need a week to get over what it’d do to the tender remainders of his brain not ruined with the hangover.

  He took a deep breath and looked over the valley below. Some of the early-morning haze still clung to the deeper valleys far off. It was probably a 50-kilometre view he had to the south. How come he didn’t know exactly, and he a native son? And there were more still behind that light, faded horizon. Das grune Herz von Öesterreich: The Green Heart of Austria.

  Something moved around in his guts again. He should try to walk off a bit before going in the churchyard gates. Down by the war memorials with their ever fresh bouquets and meticulous plantings, where there always seemed to be at least one candle lit, his child’s eyes had run along the names, the families of the soldiers, ever since he could remember.

  Could he? Yes: Seiser family, six men, or boys, in two wars. Oberhummers, five, two in WWI.The Seidls, his father’s neighbours when he was growing up, were next. They had two sons killed. One had not returned from the Eastern Front. He tried
to figure out how old one would be were he alive today.

  “Come on,” Lisi called out.

  He let his gaze run up the road, saw the beginning of the track where Maier had nearly mired his truck. The put-put of a tractor brought him back. Coming down the laneway toward him was a Kubota, driven by an old man. The face was ruddy, nearly leather, and the battered-looking traditional green jacket, the lodenjanker.

  “Grüss Gött!”

  “Servus,” Felix called after him. In from the high meadows near the village, he guessed.

  Lisi held out peppermints.

  “Believe me,” she said. “You need these. Take a lot.”

  His heart suddenly ached.

  “You’re bothered,” she said. “That’s why you were out last night. I know.”

  He wanted to argue but it would be useless. He wondered if it would always be this way. She didn’t mean to smother, anymore than their mother did. It just ran in the family. Like wooden legs, his Opa Nagl might say.

  The thought of his irreverent grandfather brought him some relief from the gloom now pressing down on him. The same Opa Nagl had a saying for everything, from genetics to stupidity. He held the farm still, even though it was only admitted recently that Theo, the eldest, would not return to farm at all. Opa Nagl had been philosophical: well, why would a tool-and-die man want to come back to farming? It had been leased out the next year.

  Felix took two mints and walked with Lisi to the gate, his mind still on his grandfather. A short man, was Opa Nagl, and a huber bauer through and through, a real farmer, a countryman forever. Too young himself to be directly mauled by the war, he was almost proud to still remember some Russian curse-words he had picked up from playing with the occupiers who’d taken over here. Opa Nagl had farmed ambitiously, got drunk several times a year, and voted Sozi. This was even if he despised a leader of the same Social Democratic Party. He had a saying to paper over any inconsistency. How many times had Felix heard over the years from Opa Nagl that he’d prefer to be wrong with the Sozis than right with the brownshirt bastards in the Freedom Party?

  As funny as his Opa could be, he was no pushover, however.

  Felix still remembered how Opa Nagl got his message across years ago. It had been when Felix had snuck through the yard and then up the pastures to throw clods of earth at the cows. The bells had been heard back at the farm. When he returned, there was Opa holding out a brush. It had been a monstrous brush, twice the size of the nine-year-old hellion Felix. Cleaning the farmyard something Felix had never seen done before, and never again had taken until abendessen.

  “Der kleine Kimmel nicht aus Himmel,” Opa had muttered later, with a hint of a mischief flickering around his mouth. The Kimmels didn’t arrive from the heavens.

  “I miss Dad,” Lisi said, and she dabbed at her eyes. “I have to say it.”

  Felix put his arm around her shoulder.

  “Me too,” he said, and wondered.

  She blew her nose and composed herself. Then she took an envelope from her pocket. She handed it to Felix.

  “I want them back,” she said. “Scan them, if you want. They’re from Uncle Leo. He found them.”

  Felix took out a few. Here was Dad hoisting him into the air by the water in Stubensee. A big hairy chest a Turk, Felix’s mother used to joke. There might have been some truth to it, due to a halfacknowledged illegitimacy back a hundred years or so. And there was the chain he always wore, that chain from his army days. His dad’s get-togethers with his former comrades from the battalion used to be riotous, but they’d toned down in recent years. Felix’s mother had been able to prevail on him to take her to a hotel on one of those weekends.

  One year it had been just outside Klagenfurt, in the adjoining province, up in the mountains where his battalion had done many of its exercises. Dodl Korps, he called it the idiot corps, after some of the scrapes and blundering that several well-liked thick heads had led them into. There had been huntin’ and shootin’ reunions on the high plateaus over Sommersalm. One, a decade or more ago, resulted in three of the Dodl Korps, podgy middle-aged characters now to a man, being brought to hospital after the VW jeep one of them had painstakingly rebuilt had flipped. “On manoeuvres” his father had called it. Felix remembered him laughing every day for a week at the snapshots.

  “Aber scheisse,” said Lisi, slowing. “Look who.”

  Sure enough, here was Edelbacher. A tall man whose nickname had been Elli, for Elephant, Gendarmerie Major Richard Edelbacher always had some of the ungulate about him. This was a semi-cruel fate for a man who took good care of himself. He was an assiduous, if slowing, sportsman still. He managed a kid’s soccer team in Voitsberg, the town where he worked. He was clearly a man born to be a caretaker. Edelbacher waved, yanked open his door of the unmarked police VW, and flung himself out from behind the wheel in one fluid motion. He even had his hat, Felix saw.

  “No need, Felix,” Edelbacher called out. “No rank today, uniform or not. Oh no.”

  Felix wondered yet again how, or when, he would ever tell Edelbacher that he never felt obliged or inclined to salute him. Unlike the anal Bundespolizei who would soon be the equally unwilling partner in this shotgun wedding that the Interior Ministry had decided just had to happen, Gendarmes had always been firstname people. That was all the way up the ranks. Why would a veteran Gendarme like Edelbacher suggest otherwise?

  Well, it was simple enough, Felix had glumly concluded long ago. It was not so much that Edelbacher was just a moron who pushed his rank, his office, his uniform a bit too much. It was that Edelbacher was trying to insinuate some authority over Felix Kimmel, or subtly insist on some respect from him, this son of the attractive, and well-provided-for, widow of his boyhood friend.

  In an emotional speech after the funeral, Edelbacher had pledged to take care of the bereaved Kimmels. It had been so out there that Felix could remember what he’d said almost word-forword for days afterwards:

  “Felix told me, if anything ever happened, to take care of you and, by God, I will do my duty, and my privilege, yes I will!”

  And now he was upon them, all big teeth and high forehead, towering.

  “You look good, Felix,” Edelbacher said. “So good.”

  This much cologne would have appalled Felix, hangover or not.

  He held his breath while his foggy brain, still crippled from the drinking that he hadn’t planned last night, curdled again at the sight of Edelbacher’s expression: this idiot thinks that one day soon their mother will marry him. It didn’t improve his mood much to see then that he’d gotten off easy here, when he saw Lisi accept an airkiss from Edelbacher.

  God knows, Felix thought as the Major rolled out every platitude available, Edelbacher was a trier. But he just didn’t get it. He probably considered himself a gently persistent and undemanding suitor, well versed in the needs of a working woman of a certain age.

  A modern no, a contemporary woman, he’d say. Their mother, however, had been hinting more and more to Edelbacher that he had a misplaced sympathy for her. There were moments when Felix felt almost sorry for Edelbacher. He’d never understand that Greti Kimmel didn’t want to be protected, or taken care of, or that she would not remarry. She did not want to let him down hard, but neither could she get through to him.

  Had some part of Edelbacher’s brain picked up on this, and this only magnified her attractiveness even more? Or was it, as Opa Nagl had muttered, that he simply saw a woman not yet 50, a fine woman with a paid-up house, an insurance windfall, a good pension, and a job? Smitten, huh? How about a gold digger? There was nothing funny about it at all. In his cynical moments, Felix had thought it might make a good reality TV show, like the Lugners and their idiotic lives.

  But like the church door ahead of him, and this day itself, here he was, in front of Felix, this gormless bachelor, as sincere as he was possibly calculating too, but also a superior officer. Felix tried to look alert.

  “Thank you, Major,” he said.

&nbs
p; For which observance, Felix received Edelbacher’s signature greeting, a sizeable knuckle on his upper arm.

  Then he leaned forward toward Lisi again.

  “Dad would be proud of his boy today, right, Lisi?”

  He raised his eyes quickly to the sky and nodded.

  “Wouldn’t he just,” he added. “Felix’s boy has found his own path.”

  Felix boy’s stomach lurched. He concentrated on his own steps leading him to the doors of the church. An hour, he thought, and both his mind and guts seem to reel in unison when Edelbacher gave him a manly clap on the shoulder. The longest hour he could imagine.

  TWO

  FELIX AND HIS MOTHER STROLLED DOWN THE LANE ARM-IN-ARM afterwards. There was relief amongst them, and it was awkwardly concealed. It was a memorial service after all, but now that Opa Kimmel was gone home, the meal promised to be something they could actually enjoy. There would be a few more smiles and tears over the stories that would come out again, of course.

  Oma Nagl walked beside him. Opa Nagl walked beside Felix’s mother on the valley side, explaining something about turnips. Lisi was stuck with Edelbacher behind. Felix was pleased by that.

  Well, he had made it. There had been tears and some his own because he hated to see his mother sad. As expected, he had sat beside his Opa Kimmel and two aunts of his father’s. He had been attentive to his grandfather’s rising and sitting, to his finding the hymn, and to guiding him down the steps afterwards, walking stick and all. Naturally, he made sure to not let it look like he was helping.

  Felix had felt eyes on him during the service. He had concluded that they had been his mother’s. It was as though by staring at his back she could encourage him, or maybe to remind him that it would be over soon, this task of being his grandfather’s male heir here beside him for this hour.

  From time to time during the service, he’d managed to steal glances at his grandfather’s profile. Now in old age his white hair seemed to make him look almost benign, sometimes even fragile.