Toymaker, The (21 page)

‘There’s hundreds,’ she said.

‘We go different ways,’ said Koenig. ‘We each take a row. And we look.’

‘I’ll go with him,’ said Katta quickly. She put her
arm through Mathias’s. ‘He might need help.’

‘All right,’ said Koenig. ‘Call out if you find it.’

Holding onto him, Katta led Mathias between the graves. She broke sticks of ivy from a headstone and used them to brush the snow away from the letters.

‘You’ll have to read it,’ she said.

Mathias carefully traced the words with his fingertips, his lips moving slowly as he did so, but it wasn’t the one. Nor was the next. Nor the next. Nor the next.

Mathias felt as though they’d been looking for hours. He was cold and sick. He looked around at all
the graves. It was hopeless. He could see Koenig far away amongst the tombs close by the wall. Stefan was sitting on a headstone, tapping a stick on his boots.

‘It could be anywhere,’ said Mathias, and there was despair in his voice. ‘It might not even be here.’

But Katta was sure it was. The only thing she could think of now was finding it.

‘All we gotta do is look,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is, he’d have hid it in the nearest place, and that’s here.’ She took his arm again and drew him along the path to where the next row of graves began. ‘Come on,’ she said.

And she was right.

Gelein Merlevede had been buried without fuss. A simple stone. It had fallen sideways and was half grown over. It could have been any grave. And that perhaps was the point. It didn’t stand out as special. You would have to look for it to find it. Katta brushed the snow from it, as she had done a hundred times already. Her fingers were cold and raw. She was already walking on to the next stone when she realized that Mathias hadn’t followed her. She looked back at him and saw at once from the way that he was standing, staring at the stone, that they’d found the one they were looking for. She ran
back towards him. He glanced up at her, then back at the stone. Her heart was pounding. Running his finger along the line of frost-worn letters, he said each word slowly so as to be quite sure he hadn’t made a mistake.

‘
My loving wife Gelein Merlevede
. It’s her,’ he said. ‘This is the one.’

Then he looked at Katta and she knew what he meant without him saying a word. Whatever the secret was, they’d found it – and they didn’t have to tell.

Koenig was still searching. They could see him, moving among the stones far away to their left. If he looked up now, he’d know straight away that they’d found it.

Mathias couldn’t see where Stefan was. He turned one way then the other, but Stefan had been bending down reading a stone only a dozen rows away. As he stood up, he happened to look straight at Mathias and the expression on his face told him everything. He started shouting, ‘Koenig! Koenig!’ and began to run towards Mathias, pointing and beckoning to Koenig as he ran.

When Koenig reached the place where they stood, he moved Mathias to one side and roughly brushed
the last of the frost from the inscription with his hand. His breath left cold clouds in the air.

‘
Gelein Merlevede
,’ he said.

He ran his hand around the edges of the stone, feeling for any crack or crevice where something might be hidden. But there was nothing there. Standing up, he kicked the snow away, clearing the grave, but there was just bare, frozen earth and yellowed grass.

‘It must be in it,’ he said.

He cast his eyes around. Beside the cemetery gates was a small stone hut.

Newly dead bodies were valuable things. The medical schools paid well for them. They didn’t always ask too carefully where they had come from. That’s why the hut was there. It stopped people from digging up the fresh body. Family or friends could shelter there and watch over the grave. After a few days a body was no use to anyone any more. Then they could go home, knowing that it wouldn’t end up on a medical school’s slab. The gravedigger used it as well, for his tools, and that was what Koenig was looking for. He began walking towards the hut.

‘What are you going to do?’ said Katta.

There was a tremor in her voice. Stefan heard it
and grinned. About them, the shadows were deepening, the sky beginning to redden as the day closed.

‘We wait until it’s dark,’ said Koenig.

‘Then what?’

Stefan pushed his face close to hers. ‘
Leje tel lankos
,’ he whispered.

She looked at Koenig but she already knew what the words meant.

‘We dig it up.’

The stone floor of the hut was raised higher than the cemetery it looked out upon. This made it easier for people to watch over the graves. There were three steps up. A shutter served as a window. Inside, against one wall, the gravedigger had propped his pick and long-handled spade. His ropes and boards were there too. There was a bench, a stool, and the stub of a candle in a niche, but nothing else. It was colder inside than out.

Katta and Mathias sat on the bench, pressed against each other for warmth. They watched the sky through the shuttered window as it steadily deepened in colour. Stefan sat at the bottom of the steps. As it grew darker, he came back in. He lifted the pick from the wall and began chipping holes in the stone floor with it. It made a hollow, empty thump.

Thump.

‘Tell him to stop doing that,’ said Katta.

Stefan looked up at her and said something to Koenig in Burner. Koenig glanced at Katta, then away.

‘What did he say?’ she said.

‘It does not matter,’ said Koenig.

Stefan grinned at her. It made her want to slap his face.

‘I want to know,’ she said.

Koenig didn’t answer. He went down the steps and stood looking out into the frosty air as the last of the light dwindled and faded. Mathias put his hand on Katta’s sleeve – she knew what he meant. She took a deep breath and turned her back on Stefan.

Thump, went the pick again.

She tried to shut her ears to it, but she couldn’t. It only made what she was thinking worse. It was wrong to open a grave, she knew that. If you did, you let dead things come out – rotting and eyeless – and they would creep after you for ever; even if you hid in a church, they’d scratch at the door outside. She’d been told once by someone who knew. She could feel her palms damp, her mouth like ash. She wiped her hands on her coat. What if the paper were
right in the coffin? What if Gelein Merlevede were holding it in her hand? She looked at Koenig, standing in the fading light. It wouldn’t stop him, she thought; he’d dig it up all the same. But maybe, if she didn’t stand too close, it wouldn’t come after her.

Koenig came back up the steps. ‘The moon is rising,’ he said, taking the spade from the wall.

They walked through the dark cemetery. Koenig went in front, Katta and Mathias followed. Stefan came behind. Katta didn’t like the feeling of him being there, behind her. She tried walking more slowly so that he might go past, but Stefan slowed too. He made sure that he was always behind her.

The moon cast dark shadows amongst the tombs. There was no sound. Only the dead could make quiet like that. Katta pulled the collar of her coat high up around her chin and closed her eyes as she walked between the graves. Then Koenig stopped. They had come to the stone. She tried not to think of the long-dead woman wrapped in her shroud only feet below them. She tried not to think of what was going to happen next.

Koenig kicked the frost from the grass, spat on his hands and lifted the heavy pick. He said something
to Stefan, then in one long curve he swung the pick into the ice-hard ground. It made barely a mark. He lifted it and swung again; this time it bit in, and he worked the point backwards and forwards until an icy scab of earth lifted away. Then he swung again. The sound of the pick carried on the cold air. He stopped to listen, but if anyone had heard, no one came.

Koenig and Stefan took the digging turn and turn about. The ground was frozen so hard that they might as well have tried to chip away at stone. But, scab by scab, the ground gave under the pick, and what was first a shallow scrape became deeper, then
wider and deeper. They began to lift earth away with the shovel. Katta wondered what it must be like for Gelein Merlevede in the cold dark of her soundless coffin, hearing the scrape of the shovel and the scuff of the pick digging down towards her. She tried not to think, but the picture in her head would not go away. The dead woman was waiting for them down in the dark, cold ground. Koenig climbed out of the hole, and Stefan got in, lifted the pick and started again.

Mathias began to shake. ‘I’m so cold,’ he said.

Katta put her arms around him. It gave her something to do and took her eyes away from the digging.

Stefan was almost up to his waist in the hole when, with a thump, the pick hit something wooden and hollow.

It was the coffin.

The lid had long since rotted. As Stefan shovelled the earth clear, the wood suddenly gave way under his weight. His foot went straight through and into the coffin beneath. He must have thought that something had grabbed him. He gave a yell and scrambled, whimpering, out of the grave, trying to brush away the shreds of shroud that clung to his leg. Koenig caught hold of him and shook him hard.

‘
Shtahl!
’ he hissed.

The cold air was thick with a stale stink from the broken coffin. Crumbs of soil were rolling like peppercorns down into the gaping black hole that Stefan’s foot had made in the lid.

Koenig let go of him and jumped down into the grave. Standing astride the lid, he began to lever at it with the pick. Katta couldn’t bear it any more. She could feel the last shreds of her nerve going. Mathias had already turned away. He couldn’t look. Koenig was pulling slivers of wood away.

‘Don’t!’ she cried.

He looked up at her.

‘It won’t be in the coffin! How could he have put it in the coffin? She’s been dead for years!’

All she had been trying to do was stop him pulling the shroud away from that awful face, but even as she said the words, she realized that she was right.

‘How could he have dug up a whole grave?’ she said.

Koenig realized it too. He looked down into the hole, then up again at her. ‘It has to be in the ground,’ he said. ‘Not in the coffin.’

He climbed out of the grave and, taking the shovel from where Stefan had thrown it, began to
sift through the pile of earth they had already emptied from the hole, but there was nothing there. He got down into the hole again and, with the edge of the shovel, began to scrape the sides of it clean, running his fingers through each fresh shower of earth that fell away. He had been doing it for only a moment when he dropped the shovel and stood brushing earth away from something that he was holding in his hand. It was a small box, not much bigger than his palm, but it was heavy, made of lead. He climbed out of the grave.

‘We need light,’ he said, and began to walk back towards the hut.

Katta looked at the dark, gaping hole. ‘You can’t leave it like this,’ she said.

But Koenig didn’t answer. He carried on walking.

‘Koenig!’

Stefan pushed his face close to hers and swore at her – she didn’t need to know the words to understand what they meant. He put his arm though Mathias’s and, pulling him along, followed after Koenig.

They couldn’t leave it like this. Something would climb out. Katta picked up the shovel; it was heavy and the handle was ice-cold. She started to tip earth
back in. It rattled down onto the coffin lid. In the dark, all around, she could feel the silence waiting.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

She kept saying the words quickly, over and over again, as she tipped more earth in.

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’

Then something moved in the bottom of the grave. It was only the broken lid falling into the coffin under the weight of the earth, but it was enough. The last of Katta’s nerve gave way and she screamed. Dropping the shovel, she fled, running blindly through the dark, not sure which way the others had gone, tripping and falling as she went.

Stefan had lit the candle stub. She saw the flickering light and ran towards it, falling up the steps into the hut, then standing breathless in the doorway, staring back out into the dark, but there was nothing moving, nothing coming after her. Maybe she had done enough. She could feel her racing heart skipping beats. When she turned round, Koenig was crouching in the candlelight, prising the box open with the tip of his knife. He glanced up at her, and even as he did so, the box opened like two halves of an oyster shell and something dropped through his fingers onto the floor.
Mathias picked it up and held it to the light of the candle.