Amberville (23 page)

“Is there something in particular?” he asked.

I nodded; there was.

“And if it had been something simple, you would have already spit it out,” said Eric.

I nodded again. We were twins, we understood each other.
Eric called for more alcohol, I ordered a cup of coffee to have something to do. The attraction value of looking at twins receded. The table where we were sitting was isolated, and there was nothing to keep us from having a frank conversation.

I didn’t know where I should begin.

“There’s no difference between small crimes and great crimes,” I said. “It is said that you can overlook some but not others. But whose arbitrariness should apply?”

Eric shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and sipped his drink. I let my coffee cool in the cup.

“I refuse to compromise,” I said. “And, besides, that’s impossible. Walking against a red light and making a killer of a law-abiding driver can’t be less serious than stealing an orange at a Springergaast.”

Eric shrugged his shoulders.

“Is it so impossible to understand? It seems to be impossible to understand. They say I have to be reasonable. Even Mother thinks this is getting crazy. She says that I have to see the context. Making judgments is an art in itself, she says. I don’t need to make judgments. It’s a matter of courage. To have the strength to keep from compromising.”

“And you think I have problems,” said Eric.

“I’ve never said that,” I answered.

“No,” Eric quickly agreed. “No, Teddy, that’s right. You’ve never accused me of anything.”

And he smiled at me and took my paw over the table.

Then I wept. I couldn’t help it.

“Eric,” I said, “I’m not here to ask you for a favor.”

His gaze was sharp despite the alcohol.

“I’ve come to propose a businesslike agreement to you. Between brothers. Without papers and signatures. But no less binding for that.”

“An agreement?” asked Eric.

I nodded. Now I knew what I should say. It didn’t make the words easier to get out of me.

“I get something, and you get something in exchange,” I said.

“What do I get?” he wanted to know.

There was expectation in the air.

“Money,” I answered at last.

“You intend to pay me?” asked Eric.

“Yes I do,” I confirmed. “You’ll get paid.”

“I get paid at Casino Monokowski, too,” he said.

“You’re going to get more from me,” I said. “Lots more.”

“I don’t know if I want to hear the rest…”

“I have problems. With my life, Eric. It’s hard being good.”

This sounded pathetic. I couldn’t continue. But Eric understood me. He had always understood me. He nodded. I swallowed, collected myself, and continued.

“Being good and at the same time living an everyday life…it’s…I’m forced into situations that…where all the alternatives are equally impossible. And I cannot…Eric, I’m serious, I…”

Then I whispered.

“Either I die, Eric. Die now. Quickly. Before I fall for the temptations. Before I’m seduced by the sort of things that others regard as bagatelles. Little things. That’s how evil tries to lure me. With the little things. Or else…we find a way out.”

He remained sitting silently. I dried my tears. I cleared my throat and did my best to focus. What I had to say demanded a certain degree of dignity.

“Eric, the agreement I am proposing…I want you to take my place. When life forces me to make a decision…when life forces me to do things…that are not compatible with goodness.”

He met my gaze, and I looked down at the table.

Now it was said.

The silence that followed became a long one.

“Okay,” he said at last. “Okay, we’ll do it. Shall we go?”

And with that I left Casino Monokowski for the second, and final, time.

I couldn’t stay under the table.

As long I could see her brown boots with the suns on the calf I didn’t dare risk anything, but when they disappeared out of sight I assumed that she’d sat down with the dove and the gorillas. With a certain difficulty I wriggled myself back up onto the red seat. I didn’t want to risk Nick coming over to my booth and asking what I was doing. It would have been difficult to explain.

A single thought echoed in my head. I ought not to have been this close to Emma Rabbit. Not at Nick’s Café, right across the street from number 32 Uxbridge Street, that sober, brick-red street.

She had just arrived. I had to go.

I had to get out of there.

I evaluated my chances. Could I make my way from my booth and over to the door without Emma seeing me? It was likely that she was sitting on the outside of the booth behind mine. If she were seated facing in, the possibilities of succeeding were reasonable. But if she were seated facing the exit…

And if I remained sitting?

They were carrying on a conversation which I still could not hear, but Emma’s soft, clear voice went right into my heart. It was painful.

So near.

After a few minutes I’d had enough. I had to do something. It was impossible to remain sitting. I moved carefully along the table. I held on to the menu in order to conceal my face if that should be required.

It was required.

Suddenly the tone from the neighboring booth changed. Departure. Farewells. I ducked down behind the dessert menu. A few seconds later Emma Rabbit was standing right next to me. She stood with her back turned toward me. The dove placed himself alongside her. I peeked over the edge of my dessert menu. The dove and Emma were embracing each other. They were hugging. Thank goodness the dove closed his eyes as he hugged her, otherwise he would have seen me. I ducked down behind the menu again.

“Bye-bye, Papa,” said Emma Rabbit.

“Bye-bye, honey,” said the dove.

“And, Papa,” said Emma, “if you forget my birthday again this year I’ll never forgive you.”

The dove laughed a high-pitched laugh, and I heard how Emma turned and left the place.

I don’t know what I did then.

I remained sitting behind my menu until long after the dove and his gorillas had left the café.

I had just seen the fatherless Emma Rabbit’s father.

It was a lie. She was a lie. Thoughts raced through my head, like balloons bursting.

My Emma. Who was she really?

T
hey say that a stuffed animal can get used to anything, but each time he returned, Eric Bear found Yiala’s Arch just as repugnant. It had as much to do with the narrow alley, reeking of urine, as with Sam Gazelle’s claustrophobic apartment. Despite all that was at stake, Eric was forced to overcome the most intense revulsion each time he returned to Yok after having carried out an errand somewhere else in the city. When he passed Eastern Avenue and continued south, it was as though he were crossing a border. His identity was wiped out in a single stroke. In the rest of the city there was a surrounding world which reflected him as the sum of his actions. There animals understood how to interpret his ironic humility. In Yok he was nobody.

It was terrible.

And with heavy steps he turned into the grass-green alley and with bowed head went over to the entry to number 15. Eric Bear was so filled up with his dejection that he didn’t sense trouble. All his concentration was directed inward. Perhaps otherwise he would have noticed that someone had knocked over the large cactus—the one that bloomed with
small red flowers—that stood in a cement planter right inside the entryway.

Slowly Eric walked up the stairs. The memory of Snake Marek’s helpless cries caused him to stop on the first stairway landing.

Eric, Sam, and Tom-Tom had sneaked away across the Garbage Dump. Hyena Bataille had promised not to let himself down into the ravine before the three were out of sight and earshot. He had broken his promise. The memory of Snake’s desperate cries echoed in Eric’s head.

He sighed heavily and continued up the stairs. He was so occupied with his own pain that he didn’t perceive the smell of a cigar, or think about the fact that the door to Sam’s apartment was ajar.

After the night at
the Garbage Dump Eric Bear had devoted Friday morning to a stop by his office. He didn’t recall when he’d last slept, but fatigue had become a constant condition which no longer worried him. At Wolle & Wolle people came and went more or less as they pleased. You were often working on projects, and right before the appointed deadline it was not unusual that you practically lived at the office. And the other way around: after the assignment was delivered, you gladly took a few days’ well-earned vacation. Over the years, a work environment had been created where no one bothered keeping track of anyone else’s working hours, and therefore no one made a big deal of the fact that Eric hadn’t set his foot at Place Great Hoch in almost three weeks.

A massive pile of documents and folders that he was expected to sign and authorize were waiting on his desk; there were so many papers, he didn’t even try to understand what he was signing. When after a little more than half an hour he was finished with the authorizations, his calendar
awaited. In the neglected calendar that he and his secretary helped each other to update, the past weeks’ rescheduling and cancellations had created a chaos which the coming weeks’ rescheduling and cancellations would worsen. There was nothing, it appeared, that couldn’t be delayed or that someone else couldn’t take care of. Nevertheless, sooner or later most things seemed to return to his desk. In comparison to what he was up against, all these meetings were as paltry as the problems they aimed to solve. Yet he knew it was important to maintain the idea that life would go on as usual. Nothing was more valuable than hope; nothing else could give him the same strength.

One of Nicholas Dove’s
two gorillas took hold of Eric Bear at the same moment as the bear stepped over the threshold to Sam’s apartment. The gorilla placed his massive hand on just that place that the bats some ten hours earlier had so carelessly mistreated, and Eric moaned with pain.

“Finally,” said Nicholas Dove, getting up from the chair and putting down his cigar right on the kitchen table’s laminated top, where it continued to glow.

The cigar would leave a large, black mark on the tabletop before the dove’s visit was over.

“We were just talking about you, and wondered if you were intending to come back or not,” said Dove.

Eric didn’t hear him. In the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of Sam Gazelle, thrown onto one of the mattresses on the floor by the terrace door. In the kitchen, with his back against the kitchen sink, sat Tom-Tom Crow on one of the wobbly kitchen chairs. He was tied with black insulation tape that had been wound around his wings and legs. They had even taped his beak. On the floor around the chair were piles of black feathers.

They had plucked him. The crow’s belly shone white.
And on the diaphanous white cloth there were three or four burn marks that Eric immediately understood came from Dove’s cigar.

Tom-Tom’s gaze turned toward Eric. The humiliated entreaty, the pain and terror that shone in the crow’s otherwise friendly, peering eyes caused the bear to completely lose his head. With a growl he tore himself loose from the red gorilla that had been holding him and rushed across the room. At that moment he had the power to take on anyone whatsoever. He threw himself against the gorilla alongside Tom-Tom. The gorilla stumbled backwards a few steps, but his large ape body was caught by the sink, which kept him from falling. Then everything happened very quickly.

Eric managed to hit and roar and bellow a few more seconds. Then a massive gorilla hand took a firm grip on his neck and lifted him up into the air. Eric had forgotten the red ape on the other side of the room. Eric Bear was thrown through the air, over the kitchen table, striking against the hard metal of the refrigerator. He pulled himself up, dazed but not yet defeated. The gorilla who had thrown him was on him again before he regained his balance. He lifted him up again by the neck, then slammed him against the kitchen table. The table fell apart with a crash. One of the splinters was forced into the back side of the bear’s thigh and came out the front side.

The pain waited a few seconds before it reached his awareness.

Somewhere in the tumult Dove’s clear voice was heard, but Eric couldn’t make out any words. With a certain effort he got up, the adrenaline muting the pain in his thigh for the time being, and picked up a long, rough splinter of wood that he found on the floor. He staggered forward toward the nearest gorilla. The idea was to mercilessly drive the splinter right through the ape’s eye, but Eric was neither quick nor strong enough. The ape easily warded off the
attack, and with the back of his hand struck Eric across the face so that the bear fell backwards down onto the floor and finally came to rest.

When Eric Bear awoke, he saw Nicholas Dove’s worried face looking down at him.

“Have you…” said Dove, but the bear heard no more before he disappeared back down into unconsciousness.

In the following moment—which wasn’t the following moment at all but rather a few minutes later—the dove’s head was replaced by a gorilla face that was grinning happily.

“He’s alive now,” said the ape.

After that the bear was out.

B
ut that’s ridiculous,” said Emma. “You must go to the doctor.”

Eric Bear had made an attempt to go over to the kitchen island to get the red wine he’d uncorked shortly before, but he didn’t manage more than a few steps. The pain in his thigh prevented him from moving freely, and in shame he had to limp back to the chair and sit down.

“It’s not so bad,” he assured her again.

He’d maintained that it was a strained muscle he got when he tried to run a race with Teddy on the beach.

“Idiocy,” Emma had snorted. “Fifty-year-old bears shouldn’t run at all.”

Eric had been away from home for almost three weeks; he told Emma that there were only a few days left. A truth with an ominous import: it was still Friday when he granted himself this short leave in order to have dinner with Emma Rabbit.

On Sunday the Chauffeurs would pick up Teddy Bear and Nicholas Dove if Eric didn’t succeed in preventing it.

“I’ve never understood who you think you impress with
your suffering,” said Emma, letting all the city’s males be summarized in this “you.”

Eric threw out his hands.

“There’s nothing to do. I’ll take some painkillers and rest, then it’ll get better.”

Eric had taken Tom-Tom with him to Dr. Thompson when Dove had finally gone away and the bear and crow had recovered consciousness. The doctor had sewed a few stitches in the bear’s thigh, and then Eric exited the doctor’s office leaving the crow, who needed more extensive bandaging, behind. But instead of returning to Yok, Eric drove home.

Emma Rabbit carried the plates of
vitello tonnato
over to the table. Then she put out the salad, wine, and bread and lit the candles in the large candelabra they’d bought at an auction a year or two ago, one of A Helping Hand’s many events. She dimmed the ceiling light and sat down.

“I want you to come home,” she said with a tender smile, “because I’ll soon get tired of waiting.”

And then she lifted her wineglass in a toast. Feelings of melancholy caused Eric Bear to shiver, leaving behind a clump of anxiety in his throat. It grew so quickly that it closed up his esophagus before he’d even managed to bring the wineglass to his mouth. He wanted what she wanted. He, too, wanted to come home, more than anything else: home to her embrace, where time stood still and all there was, was the scent of her fur and the beating of her heart against his chest.

She fixed her eyes on him. Pretended to look stern. And he wanted so much to laugh at her little play-acting but instead felt how the tears were burning inside his eyelids and he knew that he couldn’t cry, couldn’t expose himself: he loved her and would never be able to lose her.

It was that simple.

“I don’t know exactly
who is writing the list,” said Bataille, “but I know how she gets the information.”

The large propeller was slowly set in motion as the light breeze picked up, but the horizon was still hidden by night. Eric sat rigid as a stick in his corduroy armchair, trying to control his facial features, the nervous twitches of his whiskers, and the indulgent smile that he knew made him weak. Across from him sat the fear-inducing hyena. True, it appeared unlikely that this whispering conversation they were carrying on would end with him getting up and torturing the bear to death. But nothing was impossible.

Eric Bear’s senses were on tenterhooks. At the Garbage Dump he saw not only the outlines of a discarded frying pan, a wheel-less baby buggy, and the prow of an old rowboat sticking up out of the gray-black mass of rubbish; in addition he could make out the odor of decaying coffee grounds from the stinking entirety, heard two horses neighing in the distance, and perceived the structure in the armchair’s fabric, as if it were braille.

It was clear that Bataille had overheard the conversation Eric had recently had with Rat Ruth. Perhaps the hyena had been sitting in the darkness along one of the walls and listened; it didn’t need to be any stranger than that.

“It wasn’t the idea that I should know,” hissed Bataille. “She doesn’t know that I know.”

The hyena was proud of his cunning and that he’d figured out how the one thing was connected to the other. The used clothes that the well-situated residents of the city donated to the church were gathered together and driven out to the dump once a month. Sometimes the deliveries were so extensive that a burly funeral director came with a whole truckload of clothes. Other months all you got was a package of coats that
had been wrapped in brown wrapping paper and placed on a wheelbarrow that was pushed by a creaky old doorman or some former cantor with rheumatism.

The clothes came to good use, the hyena assured him, fingering the short, worn leather jacket he himself was wearing. All the animals at the Garbage Dump had clothes that came from the church’s donations; there weren’t any others. And sometimes, when the shipments were especially large, Rat sold back some of them to the stores in the city that dealt in used goods.

“It took a while before I noticed it,” said Hyena. “But whether it was a delivery truck or a wheelbarrow, it was always the queen herself who took in the delivery.”

The breeze that had caused the large propeller to whirl like a mighty windmill presaged the arrival of dawn. If Hyena’s story had been disturbed earlier by creaking from the blades of the propeller, for a while now the sound had been a constant whine. Eric pushed the armchair closer to the table and leaned forward as well, whereupon he came so close that he could perceive the hyena’s musty breath. There was a burnt smell from the predator’s mouth. The dark of the night would remain dense for a while yet, but the starlight caused the hyena’s eyes to flash as he twisted around and stared out toward the dump. It was an ice-cold radiance.

“I already knew that we were involved with the Death List,” said Bataille. “When I came here I didn’t believe in the list, but…but even when I knew…I didn’t know more than that.”

From the very start Bataille had become one of the Cleaners at the dump. The Cleaners were divided into three teams of five animals each. Once a week, sometimes more often but never less often than that, Ruth gave them written orders. These were crumpled scraps of paper which she solemnly handed over inside the great hall, where, in her terri
ble handwriting, she had scribbled down a few addresses—she’d learned to write as an adult—and the assignment was always the same. Empty the apartment. Throw away what should be thrown away, bring back the valuables. Clean out everything. And leave the place as though no one had been there.

The first months, Bataille thought this was a matter of tips that Ruth had gotten from part of the criminal network she worked for. A kind of repayment for services rendered. They supplied her with information about when families went on vacation, stayed with relatives, wound up in the hospital, so that she could empty their abandoned houses. What the hyena didn’t understand was why they were forced to clean up after themselves so carefully. Perhaps, he thought, this was a manifestation of some sort of vanity? Ruth was not always easy to understand.

Bataille came onto the trail of the truth in the form of an old female cat whom they met in a stairwell one morning when Hyena and the Cleaners had been on their way up to the sixth floor in a newly built apartment house in Lanceheim.

“Are you going to Kohl’s?” the cat had asked, and Bataille had nodded since “Kohl” was one of the names that was on the week’s crumpled scrap of paper. “Poor devil, may his soul find peace now.”

And the cat had shaken her head and continued down the stairs.

Only the hyena had heard the cat’s comments, and he kept it to himself. Bataille knew that his reputation was growing, that the animals feared what was a fortunate combination of imagination and a lack of empathy. He also knew that the moment he lost the queen’s favor his hours were numbered. As soon as it was possible, the hyena gathered information which perhaps might prove valuable the day Ruth no longer shielded him.

During the following months he tried to get evidence for his hypothesis. When it was possible—and it wasn’t always—he strayed from the ongoing cleanup work in search of neighbors who could confirm that the apartment or the house they were going through belonged to an animal who had been carried away by the Chauffeurs the day before. Sometimes it was impossible to find anyone to ask, and the hyena had to return to the Cleaners with unfinished business. But he was not in a hurry, and often enough he got the answer he wanted. Finally he was certain.

The Cleaners were, without knowing it, the Chauffeurs’ rear guard.

Eric Bear loved to
listen when Emma Rabbit told stories.

After dinner they went in and sat in the oversized lounge suite of thick, beige cotton that dominated their living room on Uxbridge Street. The armchairs were so massive that it was impossible to sit normally in them. Involuntarily you ended up in a kind of half-lying position, with your legs under you on the chair or pointing straight out over the armrest, and it was in the latter manner that Eric Bear made himself comfortable and listened.

Emma was sitting on the couch. She had brought her wine with her, and she held her glass on her lap while she told about the past week. She spoke without gestures, without dramatizing her tone of voice, but her urgency was not to be missed. She had been working on a new project for the past few months, she told. It was a suite of memory tableaux from her early childhood; to be more exact, seven scenes which she repeated in various perspectives and techniques, sometimes all seven on the same canvas but more often one or two at a time. In the previous week she had worked exclusively in oils.

Eric listened and nodded. Never, he thought, was she any
where other than here. Not even when she devoted herself to her childhood, which she often did in her art. It had to do with her energy, thought Eric, the quiet, burning force that caused Emma Rabbit to follow through with all the projects she embarked on. Some with a certain success, others best forgotten.

“Now I’m coming over to you,” he said in the middle of a sentence, and she continued to talk as he—carefully, so that he wouldn’t bump her wineglass—rolled out of the armchair and crept over to her on the couch. He sat right next to her so that he could feel her warmth. With his head against her shoulder he continued to listen with closed eyes.

“Despite all my theories,
I never believed, not once, that it was Ruth who made the Death List,” said Bataille.

He suddenly fell silent.

Eric had heard it, too. A kind of clicking somewhere in the darkness out in the dump, and they both turned around, trying in vain to see something. A long way off the lights from the hovels of the Garbage Town could be glimpsed like a will-o’-the-wisp in the blackness, but otherwise the dump was concealed by the night. To be on the safe side, the hyena lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper as he continued.

He hadn’t connected the clothing deliveries with the Cleaners. There was no reason to make such a connection. But that Ruth took in the clothes on her own had aroused his curiosity, and he decided to find out why she didn’t let anyone else do the job.

This proved to be more difficult than he’d thought. Rat Ruth met the courier, wrote a receipt for the delivery, and took the packing slips back to her room while the clothes were being unloaded. There was no possibility of ferreting out anything at all. On a single occasion Bataille managed to catch a glimpse of Rat sitting in her room, bowed over
a massive binder where she apparently stored the papers having to do with the clothes. But why she, who otherwise preferred to sleep through the days, always remained awake for this delivery, remained a mystery. It certainly had nothing to do with Rat’s interest in clothes.

Bataille understood that the answers to his questions were in the binders that Ruth stored in her bedroom. Bataille didn’t relate to Eric Bear exactly how he’d managed to worm his way into the queen’s bedroom, but after a long period of purposeful efforts he’d finally gotten a friendly invitation.

The hyena leaned across the three-legged table and in a whisper described the scene with great care. How the queen rat had lain down on her back on the bed after they’d shared a bottle of calvados and was soon snoring audibly while Bataille snooped around in the room, which was filled to the brim with the rat’s valuables. That is to say, things that the rat considered valuable, which could be a diamond necklace or a half-eaten package of alphabet cookies. Bataille sneaked around, lifting up piles of clothes, rummaging through piles of papers and books that had to do with the administration of the Garbage Dump. He searched through clothes closets, which apparently functioned as some type of pantry. The binders were nowhere.

At regular intervals the rat sighed or moaned from the bed. Each time, the hyena was forced to break off his search and make certain she’d fallen asleep again before he could continue. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if she realized that he’d fooled her.

Finally he found her hiding place. Under a pair of loose floorboards by the window closest to the bed. But he’d only managed to start leafing through the binder when the rat awoke with a jerk. Bataille threw aside the binder and poked the loose floorboards back with his foot. All he’d seen were
pages filled with handwritten columns of names, dates, and the type of garments that had been donated.

It took almost half a year before he got a chance to inspect the binder a second time.

“But, you understand,” said Bataille and the icy cold in his eye glistened yet again in the light from the stars, “I am made of time.”

Eric nodded as though he understood what the hyena meant.

The next time it had gone better. Bataille had immediately gone to the hiding place by the window and so had significantly more time. What he’d thought was a single binder proved to be an entire little library. Lists of names, clothes, and dates. Page after page. The hyena didn’t know what he was looking for, he mostly sat and leafed through it at random in order to discover a pattern. He believed that he was looking for some kind of code when his glance fell on the name Kohl. Kohl had donated a shirt and a pair of pants. The date that stood next to the clothes was a little more than a year old. Bataille thought about it and realized that Kohl must have donated clothes right before the Cleaners had been up in Kohl’s apartment.