Schell bristled.
“Dirk’s story wasn’t such a blunder. It spread the news that three books were consumed by fire. Period. Your Rudiger has an inkling of what books they were. But more important… he and anyone else will now presume them to have been destroyed.”
“One interpretation, Bea. Another is that some could suspect that a cunning cover-up is being attempted… like some Italians made aware of my Google search for the cryptic title of the Swiss file.”
“So what is so important about three old books anyway?”
Dirk’s question I found naïve. And it was not his question to ask. It was mine, to ask of Aunt Ursel.
Would it make a difference if Aunt Ursel and her partner had emerged as winners after their card playing evening? I gave that some thought as I waited for her to return. It was only after Bea and Dirk went up to their turret that I took the books from my rucksack (with a longboard attached by ballistic rip-stop nylon proclaiming my hipster innocence of anything remotely conspiratorial) and placed them, as if on museal display, on the ledge below the big television set in the Bauernstube.
Before Ursel Lange showed up I was able to discover that she had not just archived all the matches played by Borussia Dortmund during the previous season on her Sky box. She also had every episode of the series Dirk watched over and over again, Veronica Mars.
My great-aunt said nothing when she came in and saw the books lined up and begging for a reaction.
She poured a measure of Pflümli to go with her Ovomaltine.
I rolled a spliff. Bea had at first felt slighted when I insisted on taking a taxi home. But Fairouz was also one of the local suppliers of weed and he could spare me the makings of a few small joints. No, I strictly do not carry any hash or grass with me on a train which passes through three countries.
What I didn’t know is how I was supposed to have found out about what Herr Lessinger had chosen to take with him for what was, after all, a very short journey. Yes, it was predictable that I would attend the funeral. I was fond of the vain and often cantankerous old man who had once been Ursel Lange’s lover, who had at her bidding found that the Bookshop needed another trainee.
But had it not been by accident that I’d learned that the coffin contained more than just fleshly remains? Had I not overheard Vera and Agnes I would have been none the wiser.
Although I guess I would have become inquisitive about the nature of the three books which, in my guardianship, safe in my second oven, were in something of a bibliophile limbo. They were quite unrelated, with their obvious age and the German language the sole common attributes. How probable was it that I should share my awakened curiosity at some point with close friends who happened to be, for one, an ardent if erratic investigative journalist and, for the other, no longer ghostly greige but, with ever diminishing doubt in this respect, a spook of another kind.
“So they’re back again, I see. Forty years ago we decided to stop looking for answers. For a while we had become obsessed. I had a tiny black-and-white television set in 1972, but I had missed a lot of the live broadcasting of the Olympic Games in Munich. The coverage of the killings by the Palestinians… that I saw. I was almost fifty at the time. I thought that was very, very old.”
“Not old at all,” I exclaimed, for a moment concerned at my aunt’s forlorn, almost fearful look.
“Louie… Herr Lessinger… had just turned forty. We both reckoned that we were nevertheless far too young to die. Enough lives had been lost, you know.”
I didn’t think she meant the unfortunate Israeli athletes.
Aunt Ursel played with the remote control. I saw her features relax when the big screen was filled with yellow-and-black jerseys as a goal was celebrated with a boisterous homoerotic group hug. Well, maybe the strapping lads were just cold. There was snow on the ground around the pitch; it must have been the recording of a mid-winter game.
I shivered.
Every now and then, not looking away from the television, Ursel divulged disjointed fragments of forty year old memories. Later, when I wished her goodnight, there was no reply. Maybe she had fallen asleep.
SATURDAY 9 JUNE 2012
Two days of foul weather discouraged us from venturing beyond Säntisblick. I was fascinated by the way that Bea Schell, in spite of her new persona, seemed to fit in well with the lifestyle implied by staying in a grand mansion. Frau Steinemann treated her with deference, in contrast to her ill-concealed distaste for the man she could hardly accept as a fitting fiancée.
Dirk kept himself busy speculating with biting sarcasm on the news from Spain. His blog post would assert half-seriously that the huge bailouts of Hispanic financial institutions could mean that certain regions of the Costas should be annexed as German extra-territorial states, given that the financial aid was coming via Frankfurt.
Over meals Aunt Ursel had nuggets of background information for us.
In the early seventies Ludwig-Viktor Lessinger had been a travelling man, often absent from his tiny one-room flat in Munich for long periods. In pursuit of his incunabulae he was often in Paris where there were many collectors among the bouquinistes who shared his passion.
“Everybody knows about Gutenberg’s Bible, but many, many of the first printed books were not only secular but bawdy, lewd, scurrilous and… as far as Louie was concerned… the more licentious they were, the better.”
At the time his commercial dealings in antiquarian books were very profitable as a result of his bold forays into countries of the Eastern Block. Cracow proved very lucrative, as did Prague.
“He was quite daring, you know. Daring and dashing. Didn’t care much for niceties such as export restrictions, customs formalities or things of that sort.”
And he spent a lot of time in Weinfelden.
I pictured Lessinger translating from the Latin juicy passages of fifteen-century purple prose, stanzas of coarse erotic verse, reading them to Ursel Lange. A bit like spending an evening nowadays watching amateur porn on the internet with a special friend or two.
Although they corresponded and even had the occasional telephone conversation, Lessinger never came to Weinfelden again after 1972.
“We spoke on the cellphone for the last time just after he had been given… the bad news of his prognosis. He was sorry he could not join you to celebrate the completion of your training.”
Bad timing in every sense. Gelernte Buchhandelskauffrau a month or so prior to redundancy. We did celebrate after the final oral examination, almost a dozen of us and several from other Manduvel branches in Munich. There was a lot of sympathy expressed for my predicament, suggestions that a transfer to another branch would be the ideal solution.
Trinity Place had been my home for three years. But the Bookshop closure should not weigh too much on my mind, I was told.
We all got quite drunk. There were three girls for every boy in our little group. But I chose to ignore the possibility of a quickie with Christian, whose apprenticeship had been at a strait-laced Christian book store and who had detected an absence of anything of note underneath my Stella McCartney shift. Not that I was in a bad mood; I am Teutonic enough to appreciate having a qualification rather more useful in the real world than my degree in Amerikanistik.
But our training had not given me the slightest clue about dealing with books like the three lined up under Aunt Ursel’s television.
Dirk’s shoulders were deemed broad enough to carry the heaviest rucksack, the one loaded with all that would be needed for a copious Brotzyt picnic which would mark the half-way point of the day’s hike. Knowing Ursel, the way back would not re-trace our earlier steps. She preferred tours which involved no repetition but constant new discoveries.
Nor would we be heading south to the more