Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 122, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 745 & 746, September/October 2003

The Forest Forge by Beatrix Kramlovsky

Translated from the German by Mary Tannert and Beatrix M. Kramlovsky.

Author of five books (two crime novels, a drama, a surreal novel, and a collection of stories), Austrian Beatrix Kramlovsky had an artistic profession prior to writing. She began drawing and painting at the age of three and became an exhibited artist (despite a prohibition against the display of her work) during the several years in which she and her husband lived in East Berlin. Since the family’s return to Austria in 1991, she has worked as an artist, writer, and teacher.

The clear light was like a promise, magic in its tenderness. Decades ago she would have loved it, sure of a bright future. But all that was past.

Her swollen feet carried her to the kitchen window. She looked over the garden, her fields. The freshly planted pear trees did nothing to soften her anger; they merely added fuel to her mean-spirited moaning about the mistakes of the young. She wasn’t able to admit, even to herself, that when she had ordered it long ago, in her harshest voice, she was enthusiastic about the felling of her eighty-four cider-apple trees. And now, as a chorus of humming arose from the season’s first swarm of bees, hungry after the long winter, it was as if she were hearing the noise of the cider fermenting, the whispering and bubbling of the barrels. Disgusted, she shut the window with an emphatic bang.

The telephone rang. She shuffled slowly to the table, shooed the cat from the armchair, and picked up the receiver. An unfamiliar voice trickled into her ear, adding to her indignation, and she was on the point of hanging up when a question made her pause, make connections, draw upon memory to produce the correct face. Wasn’t he ashamed of himself after all this time? That little boy, sweet and far too loud, his dirty soft fingers in her hand...

But that would be fine, she told him, the door was never locked during the day, he should just make sure he was loud when he came in so that he didn’t startle her. What did he want, anyway?

His long-winded answer coaxed only a brittle bark from her. Not the deep, gobbling horse-laugh that had been her trademark for decades in those parts. Recording local history, he explained. Tracking their cultural heritage. A scientific inventory. Oh, these promising young men! Once he had been her favorite grandnephew, but he was a child no more.

She made her way laboriously down to the cellar to get a bottle and decant it in good time.

Wine to praise the Lord. Cider is for thirst and for closing a deal with the farmers. Remember that, Gussie.

Yes, Father, she had said. She was a good child.

She cut bread, set the table. From her kitchen window she could see the foothills of the Alps. It was spring, and behind the worn green of last year’s growth on the firs, the grayish-brown face of the cliff was visible. Its shadowy trenches were full of dark water now from the snow that had melted only a few days ago. Father had always called the rushing of the spring brooks his personal symphony of fate, and then Mother would laugh holes in his enthusiasm and pull him quickly back to reality. Water had monetary value, and a merchant had enough to do without getting lost in romantic fancies.

She crosshatched the butter and, hands trembling, cut slices of smoked pork that were much too thick. Would he be very hungry? Students always used to be hungry. All men were. Astonishing amounts of food were consumed at the legendary feasts at her office. But those feasts were good for her deals with the livestock traders and the traveling salesmen. People didn’t do business like that anymore. Today, an illuminated Spar supermarket sign hung over the door of her former office, and the many farm children who used to turn up every day in front of the round glass candy jars had become gray-haired adults who tried vainly to revive dead traditions against the will of an uncomprehending youth — adults who had succeeded brilliantly in forgetting the parts they played in building up Hitler’s Reich.

Since then, the countryside had changed, too. A half-million fruit trees had disappeared to free large swaths of land for new highways. It was a countryside cut into pieces so that people could move through it quickly, get ahead, get away. It was only in the dark valleys that the tempo had stayed the same. Making them reservations for childhood memories, the territory of fatherly dreams:

Gussie, tell me the capacity of the mill in April after a long winter, in a dry July. What’s the right mixture of metals for a swing knife, a saw, a thin blade, a thicker one? How much profit is left when you have to pay an ironsmith, an apprentice, a temporary worker, when you’ve sold this many scythes, knives, and shovels?

They were arithmetic games, played to the backdrop of running water, the clack-clack of the mill wheel’s paddles.

Pay attention, girl.

Yes, Father.

She grinned bitterly. Her mother had never understood why Augusta and her father were so fond of the mill noise, never realized that it was a kind of private room, a hidden stage for dreams and illusions. Mother, with her murderous talent to hurt with words.

When she ordered the felling of the cider-apple trees, her mother cried. It was not because Hitler wanted the cider gardens to disappear, as she justified it then, but to get back at her mother, who liked to compare their spreading splendor in spring to a priest’s feast-day robes, a panorama of blossoms to honor God that transformed itself into cold hard cash in the fall. Every felled tree a future loss.

She glanced at the beautiful plates on the table and went to look for the right glasses. There weren’t many pieces left from her wedding service. Oh, Karl! Did her nephew have any image at all of his great-uncle? What had his parents told him? Family lies, she hoped. She shook her head gruffly. What was the point of grubbing around in the past? The forest forge would divulge no secrets, and in her memories Karl’s face was just a pale yellow blur, indistinguishable under the clear eddies.

She looked out the window again. Father did not often allow her to accompany him on his deer hunts. Usually she had to stay close to the forge, even when hunting season wasn’t officially open, but away from the water, away from the vortex. She played with stones and sticks, practiced on a Jew’s harp that she always had with her, dreamed to the accompaniment of the ceaseless thumping. That was the best time at the forge, a time no one could take away from her, not her unhappy mother, and later, not even Karl. Once Father had returned he would take her with him to the nearest pub where she got to sit near him with her soft pretzel and her sweet cider, observing him silently, not unlike his favorite hunting dog.

Oh! The young man had arrived! She watched as he got out of the car. The clothing that muffled the contours of his body could not disguise the familiar shape, the family resemblance. She noticed that she had begun to cry. Ageing was a punishment. What quick gestures he had! His strong voice sounded like a poem that she had forgotten long ago. It was not the words, it was his youth, his power, his joy. His certain knowledge of a future lying ahead.

She listened to him, watched the way he angled the corners of the bread into his mouth, polished off huge amounts of smoked meat, and made notes continually even as the cassette player recorded their conversation.

“You really need to get the forge renovated,” he said when they’d talked for a while, told little family anecdotes.

He had been there! Had poked around among the crumbling walls, inspected the decaying wood. The paddles had cracked, but some of the tools were still usable for display, at least after a professional cleaning, he told her. The region needed it. A beautiful spot. Great marketing possibilities. It roused her business sense, her curiosity. So had he lied about his thesis topic? No, but it was more than that. He was interested, yes, but so was the community. The forge directly adjoined a new hiking trail and lay at just the right distance to the next mill, the next restaurant. There were possibilities there. The valleys had to be innovative these days to survive, as far away from the highway as they were, and without the cider-apple trees. All of a sudden, it seemed like a virtue that time had stood still here.

“Were you there alone?”

He shook his head, and wanted to know why she hadn’t looked after the place during the previous decades, why she’d let it go to ruin and still refused every offer for it. She didn’t answer. He asked whether she could imagine what might come of developing it.

Again she heard the insistent clack-clack of the paddles and the mighty hammering echoing beneath the massive roof. Had her father ever suspected that Karl would try to take the forge away from her? Just to hurt her?

“Yes, I can imagine it. But aren’t there enough ruins for the tourists?”

He smiled. Historic tourism was a big thing, and the area desperately needed every opportunity it could find to bring in money. Investing in the future. That was a language she could understand. She’d been an entrepreneur for decades. She remembered the sign on her former warehouse. Her name and her maiden name with a née in cursive. It looked so trustable. During the war and even afterwards it had protected her, put her above every suspicion, so that no one questioned her widowhood.

“By the way, we had to stop the water briefly to check the condition of the wheel. The millrace isn’t really as decayed as you’d think. The mechanism still works.”

She held her breath and looked directly into his eyes.

“And you know what we found?”

Time passed before her mind like a rushing flow, loud in her head.

“Under the mill wheel — I mean, he must have jumped right into it — we found a skeleton. It’s old and damaged and the clothes are in shreds. It must have been lying there for fifty years, the doctor said.”

Karl.

“And the ethnologist thought it might be a good idea to integrate it as a tourist attraction — ghost of the mill, that kind of thing. If you don’t have any objections, as the owner. Or think it’s irreverent.”

She started to laugh. At first it was just a tortured cough, right up in her throat. The boy looked up, startled. But then she felt it move lower, rumble in her still-mighty belly, and let loose, rolling out a trombone staccato just like years ago. Oh, Karl! You old skunk! You never could have imagined that they’d make money off you, you with your endless complaints about the financial loss! Especially right here, where all you could see was loss and hopelessness and the poverty of these dark valleys. The worries and troubles of the years between the wars. My troubles.

Her laughter broke new paths out of her body, rolled forth like thunder, wrapped itself around her dumbfounded visitor, and flickered through the room. It was a mighty echo of laughters of long ago, a great song about her past, her youth, her love, and, at long last, a fitting requiem. How surprisingly easy it had been to hit Karl and watch him fall down with his eyes wide open, not understanding anything. Now, after so many years, she had found the key to close the door on all those humiliations, fights, lost chances, and lies. A belly laugh.