Someone had taken great care with putting together stone walls near where the lane approached the farmyard. His mind rebelled at thinking how long it had taken to gather these rocks from the fields. By hand? And what could you grow up here anyway? A couple of the cattle looked up and toward the gently bouncing and now muddy police car. A sheepdog came trotting out to the laneway.
“Here’s the story,” Gebhart said. “Listen.”
Felix looked over.
“There’s a kid. But he’s not a kid, that’s the first thing. Just pretend he is.”
“Do you mean handicapped?”
The farmhouse came in sight beyond one of the walls. The wood had weathered into a grey but the whitewash on the bumpy stone walls was fresh. A collection of smaller buildings, some with fresh wooden shingles, took up a different side of the near rectangle that was the yard proper.
“Our job here is to humour this boy,” said Gebhart then. “Got that?”
A woman was walking slowly from the door of the farmhouse, her headscarf and floral housecoat reminding Felix of somewhere in Yugoslavia, or somewhere east.
“So he’s not going to make a ton of sense, this boy.”
“You want to interview him?”
“Interview? I want you to just, what do your bunch say now?
‘Hang with him’? Just listen. Let him relax.”
“Should I give him a massage maybe?”
“That’s good, Professor. Now: you’ve had your fun.”
“But what’s he got for us?”
The distaste had returned to Gebhart’s voice now.
“Are you listening to me at all? Don’t they teach listening at Gendarmerieschule anymore?”
“Gebi, you’re not telling me things. That’s why I’m asking you.”
“What do you think police work is? You ask, they answer, everybody goes home?”
Felix’s reply was interrupted by the car’s lurch deeper into a puddle. The Opel’s shocks bottomed out on it, and the car rolled back a little.
“Jesus and Mary,” said Gebhart, and quickly put it into first.
Felix heard the water move under the car. He looked down to see if any had come in.
A Mitsubishi four-wheeler was parked near a tractor. Gebi parked near what looked like a storehouse and yanked up the handbrake. The woman had already called the dog and was holding its collar as she led it away.
“Put on your hat,” said Gebhart. “And spare me the look, will you? Remember. Number one: your job is to listen. Number two: everything goes slow up here. Slow and polite and serious. People like this don’t call the Gendarmerie just for the heck of it.”
The woman pulled the door of a shed behind her, and tied it up with a loop of rope. Felix still saw the snout in a gap at the bottom. She folded her arms, and returned Gebhart’s quiet greeting.
“Gruss Gott.”
Felix noted the high-pitched accent. He did not want to stare at her lined face. She waited for Felix to come around from his side of the Opel. There was stiff leathery feel to her hand.
“You are close to heaven here, Frau Himmelfarb” said Gebhart. “Thank God.”
She nodded, but did not smile. Felix wondered if she even got the lousy pun: Himmelfarb the colour of heaven. She was probably shy more than slow-witted, he decided. Who wouldn’t be, living up here. Except for the four-wheel pickup, this was a place out of time. He adjusted his beret and took in a narrow piece of a view that had not been visible from the laneway in. To the side of a barn, there was a prospect clear over the hills toward Carinthia.
Frau Himmelfarb had high cheekbones and the ruddy face he’d seen in travel books, belonging to peasants in Andalusia and Bavaria and Holland and the Crimea and pretty well anywhere else east of China. Her husband appeared from a shed then. Stocky with hooded eyes that suggested Hungarian or peoples farther east in the family tree somewhere. He was a little shorter than the missus. He took off his hat, with its depleted feather and one small metal pin, and scratched at his forehead as he came over.
Gebhart was right, Felix had to admit. These people wanted their police to be people they took their hats off to. And this bandylegged farmer who had the same rolling walk as Opa Nagl, the same deep-set eyes topped by wiry, grey eyebrows he didn’t trim. The same delta of minute veins on his cheeks, more so on his nose, from a life in the open. All the bone buttons were intact on the faded green lapels of his lodenjanker, the traditional Styrian jacket that stubbornly found its way into each generation’s wardrobe. A hand like a swollen ham hock extended to shake Gebhart’s, and then Felix’s hand.
Introductions made, Gebhart fell easily into a slow and polite parade of pleasantries and chitchat. Wild mushrooms, a passion of many yet, were first.
“They’ll be whoppers,” said Gebhart. “The snow stayed so late.”
Himmelfarb did a lot of nodding and made gentle, noncommittal flicks of his head, but said very little. Wild mushrooms were not to be discussed with those who might come back later looking for such delicacies. Felix and Frau Himmelfarb waited. The talk came to cattle, and mad cows.
Finally, in a lull after a comment about dangers to the hoofs for cattle up here, Frau Himmelfarb came to life: would the gentlemen like coffee? Gebhart said he did not wish to put her to any trouble.
It was none, according to her, of course.
“Then most certainly, gnadige frau,” said Gebhart. “A kindness indeed.”
Felix followed them into the kitchen. The scent of ashes and a fainter scent of the ham, or sausage, that hung somewhere being cured, came to him as he reached the door. Felix began to recall pieces of something his father had related a long time back, about when he was a small kid visiting relatives. Yes: they actually had spoons and knives tied to the table, these ancient relatives, in the old style, where you wiped them with a fetzen, a rag, when you were finished.
Surprise: the kitchen was all modern convenience. There were even IKEA-ishlooking blue and yellow napkins covering plates of something on the table. But the old tiled kachelofen had been kept, and still used, along with the wood panelling on the walls and door frames.
“Now,” said Herr Himmelfarb.
For the first time Felix believed he saw some expression on the weather-tightened face a little pride at this modern surprise, he suspected. He tugged at and wiped his nose in one clutch of finger and thumb. Then he sat heavily down at the head of the table.
“Hansi won’t talk.”
Behind him a feral-looking cat lay against the kachelofen staring at Felix. Herr Himmelfarb took the napkins off and began folding them. There was strudel, another pie with red berries, a jug of cream. Felix eyed the big eyebrows moving around as Herr Himmelfarb seemed to be looking for a way to say something further.
“We get that too,” said Gebhart. “Days, even.”
It was several long moments before Himmelfarb spoke.
“Yours is, what, fifteen?”
Gebhart nodded. Felix found that he was staring at Gebhart.
He suddenly seemed very different. Even his voice had changed.
And in the back of Felix’s mind something had burst remorse, some anger too, spiralling into itself. How had he not known? Why had Gebhart not told him?
The only sounds now were Frau Himmelfarb’s careful arranging of things over near the sink.
“Is he not able?” Felix asked.
Himmelfarb exchanged a quick look with Gebhart before turning to him.
“Oh he’s able, all right. We can’t shut him up some nights. Isn’t that so, Mutti? The junge, how he’ll talk?”
“He likes to talk, it’s true,” Frau Himmelfarb said.
“He talks to himself,” she went on. “He talks to the dog. He talks to the cows.”
“That’s often a wise move,” said Gebhart.
Frau Himmelfarb’s face seemed to ease a little. You take your humour as you find it up here, Felix thought. The Himmelfarbs had an accent stronger than any he could remember in a long time. The half-finished words, some
