Brenner and God

CHAPTER 1

My grandmother always used to say to me, when you die, they’re gonna give that mouth of yours its own funeral. So you see, a person can change. Because today I am the epitome of silence. And it’d take something out of the ordinary to get me started. The days when everything used to set me off are over. Listen, why should every bloodbath wind up in my pint of beer? Like I’ve been saying for some time now, it’s up to the boys to take care of. My motto, as it were.

Personally, I prefer to look on the positive side of life these days. Not just Murder He Wrote all the time, and who-got-who with a bullet, a knife, an extension cord, or what all else I don’t know. Me, I’m far more interested in the nice people now, the quiet ones, the normals, the ones who you’d say-they lead their regular lives, abide by the law, don’t mistake themselves for the good lord when they get up in the morning, just nice tidy lives. Propriety and all.

Look at Kressdorf’s chauffeur, for example. Kressdorf, Lion of Construction, surely you know his trucks with the green letters KREBA, short for Kressdorf Bau. They’ve done a lot of work in Munich, you may have seen it, here, here, and there. And then there’s this MegaLand we’re getting now. But this isn’t about Kressdorf, it’s about his chauffeur. Because naturally a man like Kressdorf has got a chauffeur; he can’t drive himself everywhere, not a chance. Certainly not since he got married-the young bride in Vienna, the KREBA headquarters in Munich, and now a two-year-old child-simplest for them all to meet in the middle, say, in Kitzbuhel. Because in Kitzbuhel, of course, you’ve got the businesses, the contacts, you get the idea. For a child this can’t be good either, back and forth all the time, and I reckon Kressdorf’s daughter already thinks the autobahn is her nursery. But I have to admit she’s a nice kid. Not like kids today usually are-no please, no thank you, no hello, no good-bye. Then again, it’s a good thing they do behave like that, because at least that way you can tell them apart from the adults. It used to be more by size that you could tell-a small one was a child and a big one was an adult. But today the kids grow so fast that you can’t use size as a point of reference anymore-is that the chief physician striding out of the maternity ward, or is it the newborn itself? And even then it’s the exact opposite of how it used to be-rule of thumb, the less arrogant one’s the physician.

So I was just saying, the maternity ward. Kressdorf’s wife was a doctor who had her own practice, a small clinic in an office suite right downtown. A good doctor, but unfortunately a lot of problems lately with the churchgoers in front of the building, by which I mean demonstrators. They were against abortion because that was just their conviction, it shouldn’t exist, a thousand reasons, the good lord, the virgin Mary and, and, and.

It’s lucky the driver was such a robust man, because there were some days when a lankier driver would’ve been a lost cause. He had to smuggle the doctor’s baby past those rosary-slinging rowdies like a stadium security guard who narrowly saves the referee from the lynch mob.

Now, the father’s under a great deal of stress because with contractors there’s always stress, and so of course the kid’s got stress, too. Because today when you have two parents who don’t have any time, but who do have three hundred miles of autobahn between them, then as their child, you can never escape the autobahn completely. And so you can’t be angry with the child if she appoints her driver as her guardian. Believe it or not, the Kressdorf kid’s first word-not “Mama,” not “Papa”-“Driver.” But that was at least six months ago because, in the meantime, little Helena has already started chattering so much from her car seat that the driver barely has use for the radio anymore. And above all she’s good at understanding. Herr Simon’s had the feeling that this child understands him better than most adults he’s had anything to do with in his life. He can tell Helena the most difficult things, problems, all of it, and that two-year-old girl in the backseat understands. In return, she gives him a full report, every detail down to the hair, when he picks her up from her nanny, and Herr Simon, always the attentive listener. There was simply a kindred connection between them. Like-minded souls: understatement.

Overall, Herr Simon was quite content with his new life, which is a way of saying, he hadn’t always been a chauffeur. He’d tried out different professions-more than fifty, in fact-before he found his thing. Whereas others his age were already thinking about retirement and pensions, Herr Simon was only just beginning a regular professional life. First, the five hours from Vienna to Munich, then back five hours from Munich to Vienna, sometimes with the mother in tow, rarely with the father, but always with the amiable kid who understood him so well. Unless you were born to be a chauffeur, you can hardly imagine how much it suited him. And one thing you can’t forget: Kressdorf didn’t pay badly. Plagued by a guilty conscience over his child, he compensated the chauffeur exceedingly well. Or maybe it wasn’t so much a guilty conscience as it was basic concern for the kid. There was never a riotous crowd in front of the abortion clinic, but somehow that silent threat from the church-types was even more menacing, because there’s nothing worse than a sighing aggressor. A well-known fact: behind every mass murderer there’s a mass sigher.

The Frau Doctor was thrilled about her dependable driver. That he took his job seriously goes without saying. If there was even the slightest noise somewhere, a squeal from the air-conditioning, or a faint streak left by the windshield wiper, or if a floor mat wasn’t placed just so-it would have been unthinkable for him to subject the child to such a thing. Sure, he could’ve just said, Helena can’t see the floor mat from her car seat anyway, but no, as a matter of principle, everything was always picobello, meticulous.

So, the chauffeur gets annoyed at himself for having forgotten to gas up yesterday just because it’s never happened to him before. Five minutes into the drive out of Vienna, he glances at the gas gauge, and believe it or not, he didn’t gas up last night, i.e., nothing but vapors to coast on for 190 kilometers!

Then again, maybe this was on account of the pills. Because not all the effects were positive. A certain absentmindedness. It’s possible the pills caused this, the chauffeur thought, while keeping an eye out for the next gas station. He actually gave a great deal of thought to the effects of the pills. On the one hand, he wasn’t sleeping so well anymore, but on the other, he was doing better since they’d been prescribed to him-where you find yourself saying, the sun is shining a little brighter for me today. You should know, there wasn’t much wrong with him before, especially since he’d left his last girlfriend. Although in the woman’s defense I should add-and, frankly, I think she left him-that she’d been at her wits’ end with him. And it was his girlfriend who’d managed to get him to even go to the doctor, because all his life Herr Simon had been a crank about doctors.

But then he didn’t take the pills, naysaying not only doctors but drugs, too. And just when his girlfriend had left for good, and one day the refrigerator was completely empty, the kitchen cabinets bare, canned goods and so on, pasta, rice, every last bit, so only the pills were left-only then did he take the pills. And since then-like a new man! More positive! You might have noticed it earlier today, for example, when once again the pro-life soldiers of prayer had formed a standing guard in front of the clinic. And he’d barely been able to get past them with little Helena because they were pushing from the right and the left, rosaries and embryo photos shoved right under his nose like in holy Sicily. Now, before, this would’ve guaranteed his hand flying out, and those plastic embryos and rosary beads would’ve gone scattering. But because of the pills, much calmer. And with composure you get a lot farther.

He was already twisting things around in his head at the gas station, telling himself that a minor mistake like this can happen to anyone once. And anyway, for a two-year-old even the goings-on at a gas station are interesting. She can look out the window, there are people to watch, hoses, nozzles, disposable gloves, everything. Plus, one thing you can’t forget-those tizzying numbers, nothing’s more beautiful to a child’s soul.

So he slips out of the car as quickly as possible and closes the door behind him-you would’ve thought he was about to hold up the gas station-because he wants to prevent any fumes from wafting in to Helena. Because those noxious fumes, well, a little’s a lot for a child. Well, I don’t want to say absolutely harmful, but good, certainly not. On second thought, the driver says to himself-and here maybe the pills were already at work a little- maybe a healthy child should be able to withstand a few fumes.

While he gassed up, he made faces at Helena through the window. But to no effect; she just stared placidly back at him. And the chauffeur thought, you see, Helena knows that at heart I’m not one to mug around, so he assumed a normal expression, and get a load of this: then Helena smiled. You see what kind of understanding the two of them have? No wonder, when they spend so many hours together on the autobahn. Then came the window washing, though. You wouldn’t believe what kind of Hello! that was for Helena. The chauffeur actually got nervous that the alarm would go off, what with the child giggling and pedaling her legs in the car seat as the sponge ran over the windshield, and when he squeegeed the water off, she liked that even better. So the chauffeur declared to himself, I will always gas up on the way if she likes it so much, and he even gave the clean passenger-side windows an extra wash, and the rear window, too, although by that point Helena wasn’t getting so much out of it anymore since she couldn’t turn around in her car seat.

Before he went into the shop to pay, he moved the car a few feet over to the side to where the air-pressure pump was and away from the fumes.

“I’ll bring you a chocolate bar,” he said as he got out of the car, because it was never baby wanna bonbon? or any of that other baby talk. Rather, the driver always insisted on correct German with Helena, out of principle. Chocolate wasn’t entirely correct though, because the Frau Doctor had in fact impressed upon him, “No chocolate, Herr Simon. Absolutely no sugar!”

Herr Simon had explained to her a thousand times that they were just baby teeth, only there for the time being, a second pair would grow in anyway, well, not a pair, but a second crew, as it were, and when that happened, then you could always say, less chocolate. Or just don’t bite all the way into it. The Frau Doctor always knew better, of course, even though it wasn’t like she was a dentist, and in a private moment, the chauffeur sometimes thought to himself, with those abortions of hers, just think how many teeth will never even find accommodations. But arguments are useless, since she even went on to claim that chocolate was bad for the rash on Helena’s hands. Otherwise, a downright nice woman. Nice, intelligent, perky figure, the works. The chauffeur even envied Kressdorf a little, but it was no mean-spirited envy, no I’d almost like to call it a positive envy, and that, too, must’ve been attributable to the pills. Because he said to himself, why would a woman like the Frau Doctor seek someone like me when she can have someone like Kressdorf? Maybe he would have thought that before, too. But before, that same thought would have railed against the wife first, the husband second, himself third, and fourth, the world at large. And today we’re very much on the side of forgiveness, meaning, Kressdorf: not such a bad guy. Maybe the pills even exaggerated this positive perspective a bit, but one thing I should add: Kressdorf was always courteous with his chauffeur, never a crass word, never addressing him informally as du, but always respectfully as Sie and Herr Simon.

Otherwise, the KREBA chief had enemies, of course, more than enough. I don’t want to sugarcoat anything now just because. But if it’s about enemies, then it’s his wife who’s got him beat by a long shot. Because, a routine question, do you have enemies? As an abortion doctor you simply have a lot of people against you, it doesn’t work any other way. Which is why the two of them were so happy that their daughter was in such good hands with their new chauffeur. Otherwise, they could have just hired a regular driver. But with him being a former police officer, they simply felt safer.

That they’d been so angry with him about a bar of chocolate of all things can be explained only in psychological terms. All told, his blunder with the chocolate never even would’ve been exposed if it hadn’t been so plainly visible on the surveillance video. And when, as a parent, you look at something a hundred times, you play it a hundred times forward and backward, a hundred times over, you stop being able to see anything-except for a driver who can’t make up his mind between the different kinds of chocolate bars at a gas station. And then, all of a sudden, you see the chocolate as being the culprit.

Haas, Wolf

Brenner and God