Paul did as he was told. He tiptoed down to the study, scared that he might meet someone on the way, but the party was still in full swing. The drawer was locked, and it took him a few moments to find the key. It wasn’t where Eduard had said, but finally he found it in a little wooden box. The drawer was filled with papers. Paul found a piece of black felt at the back, with a strange symbol etched in gold. A square and a compass, with a letter G inside. The leather bag lay underneath.
The boy put it under his shirt and returned to Eduard’s room. He could feel the weight of the bag against his stomach, and trembled just imagining what would happen if someone were to find him with this object that wasn’t his hidden beneath his clothes. He felt immense relief as he entered the room.
“Have you got it?”
Paul took out the leather bag and walked toward the bed, but on the way he tripped over one of the piles of books strewn across the room. The books scattered and the bag fell onto the floor.
“No!” cried Eduard and Paul at the same time.
The bag had fallen between a copy of May’s The Blood Revenge and Hoffman’s The Devil’s Elixirs, revealing its contents: a pearl-colored handle.
It was a pistol.
“Why do you want a gun, Cousin?” said Paul, his voice trembling.
“You know what I want it for.” He raised the stump of his arm in case Paul was in any doubt.
“Well, I won’t give it to you.”
“Listen carefully, Paul. Sooner or later I’ll manage, because the only thing I want to do in this world is to leave it. You can turn your back on me today, put it back where you got it, and force me to go through the terrible indignity of having to drag myself on this ruined arm in the dead of night to my father’s study. But then you’d never find out what I have to tell you.”
“No!”
“Or you can leave it on the bed, listen to what I have to say, then give me the dignity of choosing how I’m to go. You decide, Paul, but whatever happens, I will get what I want. What I need.”
Paul sat on the floor, or rather collapsed onto it, clutching the leather bag. For a long while the only sound in the room was the metallic tick of Eduard’s alarm clock. Eduard closed his eyes until he felt a movement on his bed.
His cousin had dropped the leather bag within reach of his hand.
“God forgive me,” said Paul. He was standing at Eduard’s bedside, crying, but not daring to look at him directly.
“Oh, He doesn’t give a damn what we do,” said Eduard, caressing the delicate leather with his fingers. “Thank you, Cousin.”
“Tell me, Eduard. Tell me what you know.”
The wounded man cleared his throat before beginning. He talked slowly, as though each of the words had to be dragged out of his lungs rather than spoken.
“It happened in 1905, which is what they’ve told you, and up to that point what you know is not so far from the truth. I remember clearly that Uncle Hans was on a mission in South-West Africa, because I loved the sound of that word and used to say it again and again as I tried to find the place on the map. One night, when I was ten years old, I heard shouting in the library and went down to see what was happening. I was very surprised that your father had called on us at that time of night. He was in discussion with my father, the two of them sitting at a round table. There were two other people in the room. I could see one of them, a short man with delicate features like a girl’s, who was saying nothing. I couldn’t see the other one from the door but I could hear him. I was about to go in and greet your father-he always brought me presents from his travels-but just before I entered, my mother grabbed me by the ear and dragged me to my room. ‘Did they see you?’ she asked. And I said no, over and over. ‘Well, you’re not to say a word about this, not ever, do you hear me?’ And I
… I swore I’d never tell…”
Eduard’s voice trailed off. Paul grabbed his arm. He wanted him to continue the story, whatever it took, though he was aware of the suffering that it was causing his cousin.
“You and your mother came to live with us two weeks later. You weren’t much more than a baby, and I was pleased, because that meant I had my own platoon of brave soldiers to play with. I didn’t even think about the obvious lie my parents told me: that Uncle Hans’s frigate had gone down. People were saying other things, spreading rumors that your father was a deserter who’d gambled everything away and had disappeared in Africa. Those rumors were just as untrue, but I didn’t think about them, either, and eventually I forgot. Just as I forgot what I heard soon after my mother left my bedroom. Or rather, I pretended that I’d made a mistake, in spite of the fact that no mistake was possible, given the excellent acoustics in this house. Watching you grow up was easy, watching your happy smile as we played hide-and-seek, and I lied to myself. Then you started getting older-old enough to understand. Soon you were as old as I’d been that night. And I went off to war.”
“So tell me what you heard,” said Paul in a whisper.
“That night, Cousin, I heard a shot.”
7
Paul’s understanding of himself and his place in the world had been teetering on the edge for some time, like a porcelain vase at the top of a ladder. That last sentence was the final kick, and the imaginary vase tumbled, shattering into pieces. Paul heard the crash it made as it broke, and Eduard saw it in his face too.
“Forgive me, Paul. Christ help me. You should go now.”
Paul got up and leaned over the bed. His cousin’s skin was cold, and when Paul kissed his forehead, it was like kissing a mirror. He walked to the door, not quite in control of his own legs, only vaguely aware of having left the bedroom door open and of having slumped down on the floor outside.
When the shot rang out, he barely heard it.
But as Eduard had said, the mansion’s acoustics were excellent. The first guests to leave the party, busy exchanging farewells and empty promises as they collected their overcoats, heard a bang that was muffled but unmistakable. They’d heard too many in the preceding weeks to fail to recognize the sound. Their conversations had all ceased by the time the second and third echoes of the report rebounded through the stairwell.
In her role as the perfect hostess, Brunhilda had been saying goodbye to a doctor and his wife whom she couldn’t stand. She identified the sound but automatically activated her defense mechanism.
“The boys must be playing with firecrackers.”
Disbelieving faces popped up around her like mushrooms after a rainstorm. At first there were only a dozen people, but soon more emerged into the hallway. It wouldn’t be long before all the guests knew that something had happened in her house.
In my house!
Within two hours it would be the talk of all Munich if she didn’t do something about it.
“Stay here. I’m sure it’s nothing.”
Brunhilda picked up the pace when she began to smell gunpowder halfway up the stairs. Some of the braver guests were looking up, perhaps hoping she would confirm that they had been mistaken, but not one set foot on the staircase: the social taboo against entering a bedroom during a party was too strong. The murmuring grew, however, and the baroness hoped Otto would not be so foolish as to follow her, as someone would inevitably want to accompany him.
When she reached the top and saw Paul sobbing in the corridor, she knew what had happened without putting her head around Eduard’s door.
But she did anyway.
A spasm of bile rose to her throat. She was gripped by horror and by another incongruous feeling that she would recognize only later, with self-disgust, as relief. Or at least the disappearance of the oppressive feeling she’d been carrying in her breast ever since her son had returned, maimed, from the war.
“What have you done?” she cried, looking at Paul. “I’m asking you: What have you done?”
The boy didn’t raise his head from his hands.
