‘Try the blue one …’
_ _ _
We drink schnapps. Beethoven crackles.
I powder her face white. I add kohl with the little brush.
It is a mockery, intoxication.
‘Dance with me …’
_ _ _
Back to the chair.
She sits at the table, painting the nails of her broken hand.
A red rash has come up on her cheek and down her neck.
I go up and place a large hat on her head, decorated with imitation grapes and a trail of tulle, pins and faded ribbon.
It must have belonged to the professor’s wife.
I am drunk. Suddenly, desperately.
I spray her all over with perfume from the bottle in the upstairs bathroom.
Her smell.
Eline’s.
I lift her chin.
‘Say butterfly …’
‘Butterfly …’
Her French tongue, unable to manage the consonants.
My words, that struggle on her breath, my words in her throat. Two translucent lips, her small, French mouth.
I grow hard.
To own her.
Small, hungry butterfly.
_ _ _
The alcohol rouses me.
Sumptuous, fleshly words of German: Hagebutte, Alpenrose, Edelweiss, dickflüssig, Bruch, Ruhe.
I: in the armchair, with cognac and the semi-automatic pistol tapping out the beat on my thigh.
She: in the bathrobe, naked underneath.
I get up and tear open the knot of her belt.
Her starved features, lines and shadows; protruding ribs, bony feet.
On the gramophone: the Diabelli Variations still, from another world.
I close my hand around her breast.
Her soft, white flesh, nipple erect against my palm.
The scent.
My hand between her thighs.
‘Hold me!’ I yell at her.
‘Like this?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
I bury my face in the hollow of her throat, kissing, licking, biting, my hands all over her. She does not move.
I stop.
My coat has fallen away from Manfred’s head on the mantelpiece. His skull and glaring eye sockets. The shimmering hum of gold.
There we stand, arms around each other, awkward.
I pull away.
‘Put some clothes on,’ I tell her.
_ _ _
‘Come here.’
She stops in mid-movement, one leg inside one of Eline’s dresses.
‘Finish what you’re doing first.’
I go up to her and button the dress at the back.
‘You look wonderful.’
She turns, without daring to look me in the eye. I take Eline’s Kennkarte from my trouser pocket.
‘Here, take this.’
‘What is it?’ she says.
‘Just take it.’
I put it in her hand. She opens it and looks up at me. Looks at it again.
‘Is that her?’
‘Yes. That’s Eline.’
And then:
‘I want you to do it.’
I hand her the PPK. She takes it, hesitantly. She holds it pointed at the floor.
I put both hands around it and lift it to my mouth, curl her finger around the trigger.
‘When it’s done you can go,’ I tell her.
‘I don’t understand,’ she says.
‘I killed a child with this. Do it!’
She is startled.
‘Do it!’
I force the barrel into my mouth.
I close my eyes.
‘No,’ she says, and withdraws.
She tosses the pistol away, it spins across the floor, halted by the leg of a chair.
We stand looking at it.
‘I won’t help you,’ she says. ‘I want nothing to do with you.’
_ _ _
‘Come here.’
‘What now?’
I go over to the mantelpiece and pick up the lump of bone and gold.
‘You’re going to help me.’
‘Help you do what?’
‘Just come with me. I’m not going to hurt you.’
_ _ _
In the basement, the professor’s storeroom again.
Shelves of vessels, flasks and laboratory beakers.
‘Look for HNO3 and 3HCl.’
‘H-what?’
‘HNO3 … Is that all there is?’
‘Yes.’
‘And HCl … how much of that?’
She shakes the bottle in her hand. A bit more than a litre, perhaps.
I take the big six-litre crucible and two beakers, one-litre capacity each.
There are no tongs in the workshop, I look everywhere.
_ _ _
I get a fire going with some sticks in the professor’s little smokehouse in the garden.
I have erected a table on which I place the apparatus: crucible, beakers, two bottles, nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, a measuring cup.
I find a pair of gardening gloves in the shed. They are stiff, but will do.
She sits on the wooden veranda with her plastered hand in her lap.
I measure out four decilitres of nitric acid, twelve of hydrochloric and mix them together in a beaker. The colourless liquid turns orange within seconds. I lower Manfred’s head into the crucible, which I place on the hot stones of the smokehouse before adding the solution.
‘Come here and look at this,’ I say to her.
‘What is it?’
‘Aqua regia. Royal water. The only solution that can dissolve the noblest of metals: gold.’
I crouch down. She does likewise.
We can see the gold in the skull, the skull in the gold, immersed in the royal water, which after a moment turns dark purple and gives off a suffocating cloud of smoke.
‘Mind, it’s burning hot.’
‘What is that on the top?’
‘The calotte.’
‘Calotte?’
‘The uppermost part of the skull. It’s called the calotte.’
We watch as the gold separates, the brake pedal turning loose, oxidising and falling apart, garish green flakes descending to the bottom of the vessel.
Green and black, gold and fire.
‘Alchemy,’ she says.
The skull breaks up, the jawbone drops, the teeth of the mandible already a powder, chemical snow, the forehead collapsing, a seething and bubbling mass.
‘There we are, Manfred,’ I say when all that is left is sediment. ‘It’s over now …’
‘Did you know him?’ she asks.
‘Yes, he was my friend. My only one, I think.’
‘How did he end up here?’
‘It’s a long story. We need to filter this now.’
_ _ _
Gold chloride, dull, speckled flakes in their hundreds, swim in the beaker.
A film of perspiration covers my brow. I thrust the spade into the ground next to the pit I have dug. I fill it with firewood, which I then douse with petrol. I fetch the tongs from the fireplace and a pair of bellows. In the basement I find a small earthenware crucible but nothing in which to mould the ingots. After some rooting around I come across some bricks at the far end of the garden with core holes in them.
I strike a match on the sole of my boot and at once the fire leaps in the darkness.
I form a rectangle of twenty-four bricks, pull off the gloves, help her put one of them on and show her how to hold
