Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 136, No. 5. Whole No. 831, November 2010

Death on the Mountain by Nessa Altura

Nessa Altura, who lives in Southern Germany, began writing fiction in 2000. Her publications since then have included two volumes of short fiction, many stories for anthologies, and the novel Die 13 Klasse (Grade 13). She is a recipient of the Friedrich Glauser prize for short crime fiction and the short story prize of Historica, the annual meeting of Quo Vadis, a group of historical writers. Since 2009 she has also authored a popular blog featuring observations and commentary on the literary market.

Translated from the German by Mary Tannert.

Death on the mountain. Good grief, I can think of all kinds of things! You could freeze in a ski lift that someone shut down too soon, starve in a crevasse. Maybe someone cuts your mountaineering rope by accident. Or you drown in a dead-ice hole or get struck by lightning, or torn apart by a Canadian grizzly…

I racked my brains wondering how to get rid of Anton, or maybe I should say Bud, because that’s what everybody calls him. He and his jealousy were driving me crazy. But I couldn’t think of anything that was workable. He’s too fat to climb mountains, too lazy to ski, he’s afraid of thunderstorms, and we don’t have grizzlies here. Nothing dangerous wandering around this valley as far as you can see.

At least it’s winter, winter in the mountains. For the tourists that means skiing and dancing, for Bud it means schnapps and beer and schnapps and television — and questions: Where’ve you been? Why are you so late? Where were you, exactly? Why? and Who else was there? I tell you, I can’t take it anymore.

Death on the mountain. It’d be the right way to go, but how? I mean, I don’t want to get caught.

I’ll kill you, I tell him as we’re walking home from the pub. It’s snowing a little and my new boots are getting an ugly watermark from the slush. Bud’s humming the latest winter hit, a pop song you’d have to be stupid to like. But he doesn’t notice things like that.

Yeah? he just says. Now how are you gonna do that?

Wait and see, I answer.

He nods. Doesn’t give it a second thought. Doesn’t take me seriously. It’s always been like that. Ever since our parents decided we’re a couple, he’s treated me as if we were already married. Just another cow in the barn. One to worry about when she moos, but not before. Or after.

I’ll kill him, I tell Elli. She’s my best friend, Elli from Hagnerhof. She colors her hair this brassy red, because in the village they all say that red hair is a sign of passion. I wonder whether that’s true.

Not much of a loss there, she just says. She had better luck with her Karl, I have to admit.

What I want most is to kill him, I tell my mother, but she just grins and says she’d like to do that to my dad sometimes too. Not really, of course, just in her mind.

You see how it is, nobody here takes me seriously. Out there in the world it might be different, but I’ll never get there if it’s up to Bud and my parents. And I want to leave, so Bud’s gotta go. Listening to the tourists, you can tell where things are happening: Munich, Berlin, Hamburg. You know, where what counts is cities, action, electric lights day and night. Not just stars and old mountains like here.

You just wait, something’s gonna happen around here, I tell Alfons. He’s our village policeman. We went to school together.

Like what? he asks, curious.

Bud, I say in a meaningful voice. Bud’s number is up. Soon.

But he just laughs and laughs, pounds on my shoulder and says, You’d like that, huh?

Yeah, I would. A Murder Is Announced, right? That’s the name of a book I read once and really liked. Sometimes I remember expressions because they’re so good. Or true. But how do I do it?

All of a sudden, I know how. I’m not sure it’ll work, but it’s worth a try. If it doesn’t work, I’ll think of something else. I mean, I’ve got plenty of time. Winters are long here in the valley even though the afternoon sun’s already warm. It melts the snow on the roof and makes the ice water drip. The water collects in the gutters and spills over the edge, a little at a time, and at night, when the temperature falls, icicles form over the door. Long ones.

I take a look at a huge stalactite and all of a sudden it looks like a sword to me. A sword that could ram itself into Bud’s neck. Or the neck of a bull. Like with the toreros in Spain. One, two, you’re dead! And then they drag the bull through the sawdust out of the arena. Well, okay, we don’t have to go that far, I’d be satisfied with a big zinc coffin for Bud.

And while I’m sitting there imagining that, the man himself comes home with a bunch of brochures from the travel agent.

Taking a trip? I ask.

Africa, he says, Africa’d be nice. Get outta this valley for once, go see some natives, that’d be about right. When winter’s over and the tourists are gone, I can be a tourist myself.

I don’t know what to say. Bud a tourist? Bud and natives? That’d be something new. But he probably doesn’t mean native men, he probably means native women, the kind who’ve got twice as much cleavage as me, or more. I’ve seen the wildest photos. But I like the idea anyway. It’d be something completely different: sun, palm trees, and beaches instead of mountain pines and rocks and snow. So I say I think that’s fine. So does my mother, who’s already worried we’ll never make it to the altar. She’s probably thinking that a vacation — even if it’s the kind she’s only ever heard about — will fix things.

What I really want is to go alone. We book the trip, then he dies, and I leave right after the funeral. Nobody’d understand, but I’d just act like I’m crazy with grief, you know. I don’t think they’d hold it against me. Well, maybe Bud’s parents, but I don’t care about them. The others would say, Poor girl, she needs a change of scenery after a loss like that. Change of scenery? Change of universe is more like it! For good! I’d practice in Africa, far away, I’d work on it until I could do it. Be a city girl. Who just takes ski trips now and then to villages like the one we live in.

That week I work on the icicle, pouring water on it from the attic window, a little at a time. It gets bigger and bigger. There’s a whole row of them, big ones and little ones, and one big fat one. That’ll be the one. Underneath it, in the snow, I bury a bottle of champagne. That’ll be a surprise for Bud. He usually only drinks beer and schnapps. And when he bends over… I just have to work out how to get the icicle to break off when I want it to. I’m not sure yet how to manage that, but it’s been fun all the same just making it — it’s a nice change from foremilking a cow, even if the form’s pretty much the same.

But it all went wrong, I should have known it would. The moon was bright and I do the romantic bit, Bud’s already had a few. I wore this sweater I can push down over one shoulder, I mean, you can’t skimp on the skin with a plan like mine. I’d already loosened the icicle, then I put on some music and Bud staggers out and bends over for the champagne I promised him, and I grab the broom I left next to the door and poke at the icicle and it breaks off with a big crack and takes half the rusty old gutter with it — and whizzes down into the snow right next to Bud.

As clean as a sword, it was. Except it hit the wrong target. Instead of Bud’s fat, warm body, it speared the cold white ground, damn it all.

That coulda killed me, said Bud, more amazed than scared.

Don’t I know it! I think, and bite my fist in sheer rage.

The next morning, it snows. The really deep snow gets here late, too late, the season’s almost over. Wasn’t much this year, or last year either. It makes us mad: Nature never gives us a break and all the technology in the world never helps. First we got that new ski lift that can transport sixty people a minute, and then the snow never came. Then they brought in snow cannons, and now it never gets cold enough. And we’re left holding the bag. Always the losers. The ones who added new guest rooms, they’re scared stiff they can’t pay their mortgages.

And I’m longing for the light, for color, for the pace of life to pick up, for, for… for the lightness of being. You can’t say that here, but you can think it. I read a lot, see, my library card’s already all creased and gray.

Creased and gray like the landscape out there. Old snow, new snow, stupid snow that comes much too late. Snow, that’s the first thing I think when I wake up in the morning, hungover and with a big hickey on my neck. Very embarrassing, but that’s Bud’s idea of passion.

The snow’ll do it. Rescue all of us, and me in particular. It’s gotta be good for something if it turns up so late.

You just have to pack it right. Snow’s got a lot of mass, it doesn’t have to hit a target like an icicle. It’s gotta be simpler than that. If it keeps on snowing… Everybody knows there are avalanches sometimes from our old roof. There’s even a sign up to warn people, but nobody looks at it, Bud least of all. But now, now that a piece of the gutter’s gone… Because that gutter held it back, all the snow.

I’ll rake it all down tomorrow, Bud promises Dad, playing the son-in-law he wants to be. That’s because we’ve got a big farm and I’m an only child. Yes, fine, says Dad, and I think, No you won’t, I’ll make sure you don’t. It’s easy to distract Bud if you know how. So the day goes by and it keeps on snowing. In April!

There’s a hatch in the roof. I go up there at night, beat the snow down till it’s packed, carefully so no one hears me, and add to it from the other side of the roof, behind the house where nobody’ll miss it. The next night, it snows on top of the pile. It looks like a big hump, but you can only see it from up on the hill, and no one’ll look up at the roof, I hope. People here in the valley just stare at the ground, that’s another thing I can’t stand.

And then I send the snow down on top of Bud when he’s chopping wood down below. I do it with the old electric heater we’ve got for when the heating goes out. I take it up to the attic early in the morning, up where you can see the sky through the cracks in the roof tiles when there’s no snow on the roof. I think to myself, it’ll take a couple of hours until the roof tiles are warm and the snow melts from underneath and then that packed snow will take off, maybe not all the way to Africa, but at least down the slope. With a firm push from behind, through the roof hatch. And it works! There’s a really loud crack when the snow breaks loose, and then Bud’s gone. I jump into the shower and pretend I haven’t heard a thing. I hope no one else did either — Mom’s down in the valley and Dad’s at the mayor’s office. It takes a little while to breathe your last, I think to myself, and put a heavy-duty conditioner on my hair. You’re supposed to leave it on and let it sink in if you want it to work, that’s what it says on the bottle.

When I come down, the neighbor’s digging away. The axe is lying there, it’s not hard to guess who’s under the avalanche.

Quick! hollers the neighbor. Someone could be buried! Get a shovel and help me!

Nobody else is here, I say. Dad’s not home and Mom’s down in the valley. But then I go and get a shovel out of the shed, slowly. I don’t want them talking about me, after all. We shovel and shovel, but it’s a lot of snow and it won’t be fast enough for Bud.

But then the neighbor uncovers an arm, and everything happens really fast. I start screaming, That’s my Bud! My Bud’s in there! And people come from all around and finally he’s out and the ambulance takes him to the hospital in Oberstadt where he spends three days being spoiled like a baby. I bring him bananas and beer that I hide under my clothes and everything’s just like before except that Bud gets on my nerves and everybody else is telling the story of his miraculous rescue over and over.

Death on the mountain, I think, damn it all, doesn’t anything work the way it’s supposed to? I give up. He wants to go to Africa and I want to go too and when we’re back it will be spring in the valley and who knows, maybe it’ll help, maybe I’ll like Bud better when we get home. And then we plan the wedding and I go along with it, the way everybody wants me to, everybody down in the village and God in his heaven too, it looks like.

And Africa is really incredible. They’ve even got mountains there, which I didn’t know at all. You could see them from the airplane. Travel educates you, that’s what they say. The cities are horrible, I learn things there that they don’t put in books. And Bud doesn’t seem so bad either; he’s tanned and the women all look at him, the way he lies on the beach with his legs and his big beer belly in the sand, emptying bottle after bottle. And if they think he’s a good catch, and after all they’ve got a choice, then he ought to be good enough for me, I think, and chase away the thoughts of murder with cocktails and drumming for the tourists. We’re tourists now too. You can’t think thoughts like that under this sun, I discover, thoughts like that belong in a dark valley, in the winter. Down here, they seem absurd. I tell myself I didn’t really mean any of it, but I know that’s not true.

Once we take a jeep ride up into those mountains. They’re so green, not gray like ours. And then we drive into a valley, flat and full of coconut palms — they call it a plantation. They give us kaba, a plantation drink with cocoa in it. I remember it from long ago, from the mom-and-pop grocery shop near the church. It’s closed now, of course. Kaba was pretty much the only thing in the valley that was exotic, and even that was just a word to us.

And now I’m colossally colonial myself, I’m visiting a plantation. Bud loves riding in the Jeep and I love the warm wind and the foreignness. Maybe we really can… it was better last night than it usually is. I found my tanned body tempting and Bud did too. Here, nobody cares who’s married, some people even do it on the beach, I’ve seen them. At home they’d be shocked, but they don’t even know what a warm tropical night is, or how you drink a fresh green coconut. How could they? People don’t broaden their horizons in a narrow little valley full of mortgages.

Bud wants a photo of the two of us under a palm tree to show everybody back home, and we ask our native guide to take the picture. I’m showing him how to use the camera when Bud goes and stands under the tree, legs planted wide apart in his safari pants. And then — I’m still having to tell the story back home — then a coconut falls and hits Bud right on the head, and he drops on the spot. And I run to him and see that it’s split open, not just the coconut, but Bud’s head, too, everything’s white and red and jelly-like and dripping. And water and blood, and under the hot sun it starts to smell right away, the way it smells on the farm when we butcher a hog.

That coconut weighs more than eight pounds. For a coconut, it wasn’t so heavy, they tell me, but from that height it was traveling eighty kilometers an hour when it hit, says the doctor. When he talks I can tell right away that he’s from Vienna like my dad’s brother. That makes a ton of pressure, he says, not even the strongest skull can survive that. And Bud wasn’t the strongest upstairs anyway, I think sadly, and nod, and that’s when they tell me that this kind of accident is pretty common down here in Africa. Some people fall out of the tree when they’re picking coconuts, and some people get caught down below. Sometimes even kids, and when you look at it like that, Bud ought to be glad he got to live so long. And while they’re putting him in the zinc coffin — just like the one I always imagined — I can’t stop crying and sobbing. I’m surprised at myself, but the crying’s all real.

“Died in foreign lands” — That’s what they put on Bud’s gravestone. He’s the only one in the cemetery who died somewhere other than Tyrolia, and that’s rare enough. Bud. Sometimes I cry for him, when nobody’s looking. They don’t want us, out there in the wide world, that’s for sure. If he’d never left… that’s what they’re saying in the village, and they’re probably right. They all feel sorry for me.

Except Alfons. Ever since, he looks sideways at me. But who cares? I’ve been to Africa and he hasn’t and besides, now I’m seeing Karl, and as the only daughter and the heir to the farm, I can have anybody I want. Now that Bud’s gone.

Death on the mountain or death down in the valley. It all amounts to the same thing. It’s the way people always say: Man proposes, but God disposes.