The Passport

THE CARRION LOFT

“Schools don’t make any difference either,” said Windisch’s wife. Windisch looked at Amalie and said: “Rudi’s an engineer, but schools don’t make any difference either.” Amalie laughed. “Rudi doesn’t just know the sanatorium from the outside. He was interned,” says Windisch’s wife. “The postwoman told me.”

Windisch pushed a glass back and forward across the table. He looked into the glass and said: “It’s in the family. They have children, and they’re crazy too.”

Rudi’s great-grandmother was called “the caterpillar” in the village. She always had a thin plait hanging down her back. She couldn’t bear a comb. Her husband died young, without falling ill.

After the burial, the caterpillar went looking for her husband. She went to the inn. She looked each man in the face. “It’s not you,” she said from one table to the next. The landlord went up to her and said: “But your husband is dead.” She held her thin plait in her hand. She wept and ran out into the street.

Every day the caterpillar went looking for her husband. She went into every house and asked if he had been there.

One winter’s day, when the fog was driving white hoops across the village, the caterpillar went out into the fields. She was wearing a summer dress and no stockings. Only her hands were dressed for snow. She was wearing thick woollen gloves. She walked through the bare thickets. It was late afternoon. The forester saw her. He sent her back to the village.

The next day the forester came into the village. The caterpillar had lain down on a blackthorn bush. She had frozen to death. He brought her into the village across his shoulder. She was as stiff as a board.

“That’s how irresponsible she was,” said Windisch’s wife. “She left her three-year-old child alone in the world.” The three-year-old child was Rudi’s grandfather. He was a joiner. He didn’t care about his fields. “He let burdock grow on that good soil,” said Windisch.

All Rudi’s grandfather thought about was wood. He spent all his money on wood. “He made figures out of wood,” said Windisch’s wife. “He carved faces out of every piece of wood — they were quite monstrous.”

“Then came the expropriation,” said Windisch. Amalie was painting red nail varnish on her finger nails. “All the farmers were shaking with fear. Some men came from town. They surveyed the fields. They wrote down the names of the people and said: Anyone who doesn’t sign, will be imprisoned. All the gates on the lane were locked,” said Windisch. “The old skinner didn’t lock his gate. He left it wide open. When the men had come, he said: I’m glad you’re taking it. Take the horses too, then I’m rid of them.”

Windisch’s wife snatched the bottle of nail varnish out of Amalie’s hand. “No one else said that,” she said. In her anger, a small blue vein swelled up behind her ear. “Are you listening at all,” she had shouted.

The old skinner had carved a naked woman out of the lime tree in the garden. He put it in the yard in front of the window. His wife wept. She took the child. She laid it in a wicker basket. “She took the child and the few things she could carry and moved into an empty house at the edge of the village,” said Windisch.

“The child already had a deep hole in its head from all the wood,” said Windisch’s wife.

The child is the skinner. As soon as he could walk, he went into the fields every day. He caught lizards and toads. When he was bigger, he crept up the church tower at night. He took the owls that couldn’t fly out of their nests. He carried them home under his shirt. He fed the owls with lizards and toads. When they were fully grown, he killed them. He hollowed them out. He put them in slaked lime. He dried them and stuffed them.

“Before the war,” said Windisch, “the skinner won a goat at the fair. He skinned the goat alive in the middle of the village. Everyone ran away. The women were sick.”

“Even today no grass grows on the spot,” said Windisch’s wife, “where the goat bled to death.”

Windisch leant against the cupboard. “He was never a hero,” sighed Windisch. “He just knackered animals. We weren’t fighting lizards and toads in the war.”

Amalie was combing her hair in the mirror.

“He was never in the SS,” said Windisch’s wife, “only in the army. After the war he started hunting owls and storks and blackbirds again and stuffing them. And he slaughtered all the sick sheep and hares in the district. And tanned the hides. His whole loft is full of carrion.”

Amalie reached out for the small bottle of nail varnish. Windisch felt a grain of sand behind his forehead; it moved from one temple to the other. A red drop fell onto the tablecloth from the small bottle. “You were a whore in Russia,” said Amalie to her mother, looking at her fingernail.