A Sense of the Beginning

by Norbert Gstrein, Julian Evans

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

A bomb threat is made at a provincial Austrian village station. A teacher in the village thinks he recognises his favourite pupil, Daniel, on a wanted notice. For his teacher, this marks the start of a spiral of introspection, reinforced by his inability to feel at home anywhere after spending several years in Istanbul. He is suddenly swamped by memories of his own adolescence. Could it have been the complex relationship between the two of them that led the boy astray?

Release date: September 8, 2016

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE SUMMER I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT, ALONG WITH EVERYTHING that came before and after it, is ten years ago now, but even though I must have forgotten a good deal of it, I feel I can still trust my memory. For a long time afterwards I didn’t go out to the house by the river which I associate so vividly with Daniel and those weeks we spent there as if no other world existed. It’s my house, but to call it that is something of a euphemism. The truth is that it’s just the remains of an old watermill that had belonged to my extended family for generations – a ruin, no more, that I acquired in a flight of sentimentality because suddenly, one day, it was offered to me and otherwise would have been auctioned off. Despite the fact that I’m still paying off the loan, it was, with the land that came with it, practically a gift, as the saying goes, albeit one of very modest proportions – remote from any built-up area, a long way from town, and far enough too from the nearest village, not far upstream, which started encroaching on the Au with its new housing estate a long while ago, that when you sit out on the veranda on a summer’s day, let your mind wander and picture a steamer panting upstream against the current, coming into view around the bend downriver and slipping past you like a ghost ship, with its passengers standing waving at the rail, you do feel you’re in a different world, or at least on a different continent.

I thought I would never use the building, or even get as far as restoring it so that, though not actually habitable, it could at least offer me a roof over my head, and it went against the grain with me to buy anything just for the sake of acquiring it; but the thought that it might fall into someone else’s hands clinched it. I wanted it, and my justification was that all I was doing was “holding things together”, although when I thought about what lay hidden behind those “things”, the only “thing” I felt clear about was that they might mean anything, and not just material things. About the place itself I had hardly any memories, except for one: I had been there once as a child when the hay was brought in and had sat high up and proudly with my cousins on top of the hay cart’s load, looking out over the wide fields jolting sluggishly beneath me as the cow pulled it home. Apart from that there was very little that connected me to the place, even though it’s the part of the country my mother’s side of the family comes from. From the house it’s a short walk to the spot where, before I was born, my grandfather was hit by a motorcycle and killed, and further down the river, accessible through the gorge when the water level drops, is the cavern where Robert, my brother, took his own life, and also, although no-one knows exactly where it might have been, where my uncle walked into the river. If I climb the low, forested slope behind the house I can also see the meadows which once belonged to my family and where, in the second to last year of the war, an American bomber that had been shot down crash-landed in flames. As soon as I glimpse them I have my mother’s story about the event in my head again. She was eight years old and had run with the other schoolchildren to the place where the plane had gone down. They had seen it on fire, circling the mountain over to the east – a natural navigation point – and the teacher hadn’t been able to keep them in the classroom: they had all dashed out together as the bomber came gliding in, its engines droning, low over the ground. I have a clear image of my mother as a girl, although there are hardly any photos of her from that time and it’s only since she died that I have developed an obsession with looking for her in every image that could possibly date from the thirties and forties of the last century. The other weird thing is that I always see myself in those pictures, as if I were the same age as her, still a small boy, and somehow at her side in the summer of 1944, perhaps even unwillingly holding her hand and pulling her along, stumbling behind me.

Since the last stretch of the autobahn opened I have taken to driving out occasionally to the service area, which was built at almost exactly the spot where the plane must have come to a stop when it crash-landed. The autobahn disappears into the mountain directly behind it, so that the village is spared the traffic noise; you can watch endlessly how the tunnel swallows up car after car like some great mouth. I sit there and drink a beer or two at the bar before setting out for home, a drive that I cannot make last longer than a quarter of an hour without the greatest difficulty, which is why the same idea occurs to me every time – why don’t I take a room at the motel there and stay the night? I’ve even got to the point of thinking up an answer, if anyone were ever to ask me why I was staying, but as I make my way to the front desk my courage always deserts me. Nearly everyone who works at the services is from the village, most of them so young they hardly know who I am, but because I don’t want to be noticed I tread carefully. One week I’ll drive out there on a Monday, the following week on a Thursday, and I’ll make sure that one time it’s before the evening shift finishes and the next time after, so I can hope with some certainty that I won’t come face to face with the same people too often. It’s no more than a couple of kilometres from the service area to the place where I leave my car when I want to go out to the house by the river – I don’t even have to get back onto the autobahn, there’s a separate exit – but in normal circumstances I might only once every six months or so have the thought that I should stop by to check everything is O.K., or simply to sit outside the front door for half an hour and watch the river flow by.

Which is to say that not having had much to do with the house and everything for a very long time was probably partly why I thought I had seen Daniel’s picture in the newspaper. I had gone to dinner at Bruckner’s, as I did every Tuesday and Friday in term time, and unusually for me had flicked through the papers that were left out there; I’m certain it was only my casualness that made me think it might be him. There must be some research that explains this “recognition by cursory glance” so I don’t need to worry that I can’t say why, on closer inspection, I did think so. A particular inclination of the neck? Something in his eyes? The slightly open mouth? The truth is, I don’t know. It was a very grainy photo, probably taken by C.C.T.V., his head picked out in a crowd of other people by being circled and brightened. He looked unshaven and was wearing a hoodie too, as though he didn’t want to be identified, which would turn out to be one of the reasons why the investigation had put him under scrutiny from the outset.

Three days earlier there had been a bomb threat at the station, and the person in the photograph, the caption said, was being sought in connection with it. The tense atmosphere in the town had already subsided; I couldn’t get over how quickly people’s lives had returned to normal. A few hours in which a sense of a state of emergency had taken hold, a brief blip of excitement after the first news in the newspaper, then the old lethargy had returned again, the conviction that things – good and bad – did not happen in our town but somewhere else. I was left staring at the newspaper image with a persistent feeling of unreality. It was him, I said to myself, and yet the next second I could have sworn that I was making it up. After an anonymous phone call had been received and an unattended bag discovered in one of the toilets, the whole building, ticket offices, waiting room and all, had been sealed off for hours, with train services brought to a standstill. In the event the bag contained only a dented car battery with a jumble of wiring, which looked far more menacing than it was in reality. Next to the bag there had also been found a piece of paper with cut-out letters of different sizes glued to it, saying, “Repent!”, “First and final warning!” and “Next time it will be for real!”, followed by an indecipherable scrawl as some sort of would-be signature.

I waited till Agata came to my table. When she did, I asked her to have a look at the photo, because I thought she was the person most likely to understand my suspicions. After all, she had been working at Bruckner’s – it would have been her first or second season at the pub – when Daniel had spent every weekend of his last year at school there playing cards.

She put the tray of empty glasses that she was holding down on the next table and sat facing me, leaning on her elbows. Her boss did not like her fraternising excessively with the customers, and in exchange for the privilege of her making an exception for me, I let her treat me like a child when she felt like it. From the way she was sitting I expected as much this time and waited as she reached for the paper. I hardly needed to look at her expression as she peered at me over the top of it: I could picture that mixture of mockery and irritation that enabled her to suffer even the most pathetic show-off in his own parallel universe for a moment or two, before she was called away or decided she had had enough. She was from a small village in Hungary, just across the Burgenland border, and derived a paradoxical pride in being, as a result of that fact, so wholly ready for everything life threw at her subsequently that nothing could surprise her. She tolerated the most extreme oddities in her regular customers, and perhaps it was having to listen to the clientele of single men who turned up at her bar night after night that caused her to develop this particular way of looking at you. It was a look that conveyed a wordless request to get a grip on yourself when you had definitely had a beer too many and were threatening to get abusive, or when your pearls of wisdom started to get on her nerves, or when you decided to tell her the story of your failed marriage one more time, taking out as you did so some crumpled snapshots dating from happier days and assuring her how terrific your kids had turned out to be. She had this absent-minded way of pulling a cigarette out of the pack and lighting it as if she was unaware she was doing it, which was somehow, at the same time, an expression of the most intense concentration. I watched her as she once more accomplished this with one hand and, after her first drag, stared at the photograph again.

“You’re not seriously asking me to tell you who that is,” she said, narrowing her eyes comically and making a vertical line appear at the bridge of her nose which she then pressed with her thumb as if to smooth it away. “I wouldn’t recognise my own brother in such an awful photograph.”

She stifled a yawn when I asked her if she wanted me to give her a clue. Then she nodded. I hesitated and she started to get up and go, and simultaneously I saw a trace of amazement and fright pass across her face and knew she had understood.

“You don’t even think that yourself.”

She was clearly, out of sheer superstition, not going to say the name, and I gave her time to get used to the shock while I thought back to how much she had liked having Daniel around, how she used to become unusually flustered when he came into the pub and how she sometimes sat down with the card players at closing time and let them play their last hands without hassling them, just to be close to him. He had not had to make any effort at all to attract her and she was by no means the only one to be attracted to him. I had stayed the night with her twice, and both times I had spent half the night talking about him, which had seemed quite normal to me then but now, and not just because of her defensiveness, felt like a particularly weird thing to have done.

“If you ask me, you’re seeing ghosts,” she said, having glanced around as if she was afraid that someone might hear us. “You should get out more.”

This was her usual recommendation when a situation became too uncomfortable for her, when she wanted to put some distance between you or remind you that she was in charge. But merely because her accent had become more pronounced – when usually it didn’t occur to anyone that she had an accent – I sensed how hyper she was. Something in our conversation had got under her skin, and she made no effort to hide her displeasure.

“So when was he last here?”

“I don’t know,” I said, even though I knew precisely when, and looked past her at the big tear-off calendar next to the counter, which showed a Sunday in April but was inevitably a couple of days out of date because the staff never took the trouble to tear off each day as it happened. “It’s definitely been a while.”

“If I’m not wrong, it must be nearly two years,” she said. “Wasn’t it at Judith’s wedding?”

I didn’t answer, and she laughed.

“I know you don’t want to remember it, but I happen to like imagining him there.”

She said it had been a gruesome occasion. I made no comment, although I could barely stop myself from telling her to keep it to herself.

“He was even supposed to be a witness, wasn’t he? But he bailed out at the last minute,” she said. “And he still came to the reception.”

It was an old story, but it still fascinated her. We had often discussed it, and it came as no surprise that she still had a bee in her bonnet about it. It also didn’t matter whether I told her she was wrong or not, it ended, as always, with her complaining about it.

“A witness at the wedding of the woman he’d made a fool of himself over for so long. Just the thought of it is in bad taste! The whole town had seen him running after her like an over-excited puppy. With all due respect to his fantasies, I need someone to explain that part to me. He just didn’t need something like that. And my God, a boy like him. If he’d been just a tiny bit smarter, he could have had three women dangling off each finger.”

Again, there was nothing for me to say. I decided to say nothing, also, about the brief visit he had paid me almost six months before: our last actual encounter. It had been in early November, evening and already dark outside, when he had appeared at the door out of the blue. He couldn’t be persuaded to come in at first but ended up staying the night. I was not surprised – he had turned up at my place like that plenty of times in the years after he left school, at first pretty often and then less frequently. Nor did the fact that he had asked me to lend him some money, no questions asked, particularly bother me. I asked him how much, and when he said everything I had there, I looked at him in surprise but went into the bedroom and fetched it. It was not a big sum, but not small either – 2,500 euros that I kept casually tucked under a few shirts along with the passport I had reported as stolen, to maintain the romantic idea I had of being able to disappear at any moment – and he took the bills, all in hundreds, folded them with a wary glance and put them in his trouser pocket. He had borrowed money from me before and repaid it, without explanation and without me having to remind him. So it didn’t occur to me then that he might be in trouble, and in fact the thing that most irritated me was when we sat down together at the kitchen table later and he asked about my house and whether I still sometimes drove out to the river. He started talking about it during a lull in the conversation, out of a sudden sense of awkwardness, and I couldn’t shake off the feeling that he was only saying it for my sake, offering me some precisely measured dose of sentiment in return for my kindness. His words sounded like a consolation, although for what I couldn’t have said, except that time had passed and I was still sitting there as his former teacher while he was moving up and onwards and hadn’t been my pupil for a long time.

My having kept this secret from Agata, and still keeping it secret, was unlike me. I felt she had genuinely cared about Daniel over the years. She regularly enquired whether I had heard anything from him, and he had become, quite deliberately, a constant in our conversations whenever I walked into Bruckner’s. She’d sit down with me and ask about him with a dreamy “Where’s Daniel these days?” or a skittish “What’s Daniel up to these days then?” She was curious for herself, but it had not escaped her notice that they were questions that preoccupied me too, and so we wondered together when he started not showing up as often as he had in the months after he finished school. We wondered if he was still in Bosnia, where he had gone after dropping out of university to help rebuild a war-damaged village, if it was true that he was crewing on a cargo ship, or if he had actually won a Green Card in the annual lottery and gone to try his luck in America, or – one of the last possibilities – there was always Israel, because he had been there once when he was still at school and had raved about it ever since. Then again, he was also said to have been seen working as a labourer on a village construction site twenty kilometres downstream; he was working December to March or April in one of the valleys as a ski instructor and somehow making ends meet for the rest of the year; he was driving for a trucking company, shipping new cars from Germany to Turkey or even Iran or Iraq, or living hand to mouth when he couldn’t find anything else or didn’t feel like working.

I had described him to Agata more than once as one of my best students, and that was what I said again now. I think “most promising” were the words I used, adding “smartest and most talented”, and then I felt cross with myself for my nostalgia. I had not considered what course the conversation might take if I was not careful, and when I saw how she immediately sat up and took notice I realised that with those words I had taken it in the direction I was least comfortable with.

“You’re a fine one, Anton,” she said, laughing, although the heaviness in her voice could not be ignored. “If you keep this up, you’re going to find yourself retiring and still missing him.”

Apart from Agata, there was no-one among my friends who addressed me by my name, and I preferred them not to. With her it was something different: it wasn’t a warning, a formal instruction kindly to be the person I’d always been up till then, but astonishment at what I might come out with next, and right at that moment that resonated with me. I watched as she ran her tongue from one corner of her lips to the other, and while I thought about how to extricate myself, she sucked her breath in sharply between her teeth and cleared her throat.

“A teacher who can’t say goodbye to his students.”

“You can talk,” I said. “What is it with you?”

I had never quite understood her attachment to Daniel. I could not imagine that she had had anything other than brief conversations with him on any more than a few occasions during the months when he had regularly gone to Bruckner’s, and in the years that followed she could not have seen him very often. I didn’t want to ask her, but I expressed my astonishment by reminding her of her persistence.

“ ‘Where’s Daniel these days?’ Remember, Agata? If you asked me once, you must have asked me a thousand times. ‘What’s Daniel up to these days then?’ ”

As I said it I regretted having talked to her at all. I watched her, in the silence that followed, pick up the newspaper again and look as though she was studying the picture more closely. Something hard had come into her face, and as she turned back to me it seemed to affect her voice too.

“It’s weird how we’ve all let ourselves get a bit carried away by him. I’m not saying it because of the photo, but strictly speaking he never once came across as good-looking. And no-one could say he was sociable. It must have been something else about him that hypnotised us.”

I said it was because of his manner, his utterly earnest way of taking things, but she just retorted that a bit more friendliness wouldn’t have done him any harm. Then suddenly she seemed to remember what we were actually talking about.

“Shouldn’t you be jumping up and going to the police to give them a statement if you really think you recognise him and believe he’s the one they want?”

I didn’t say anything but was relieved that someone called her over just then. I don’t know if I would have told her that I wouldn’t be going to the police, but it was pretty clear in any case, and the ironic look she gave me as she got to her feet was intended to make it clear that she had understood. There was no complicity in the look, just a slightly assumed amazement at the game I was playing, and when she looked over her shoulder at me as she walked away I knew I could trust her not to give anything away, if only because she didn’t take any of it seriously. She was wearing the work clothes she had been wearing all these years, black skirt, white blouse, and I thought, idiotically, that they gave her a reliable quality. I wondered though whether I should specifically ask her to forget the conversation, and then when she came back a few minutes later with faintly flushed cheeks I felt reassured that she wanted to pick up the conversation exactly where we had left off.

“Your best pupil, then,” she said, as if to sum everything up in a word. “Shouldn’t he have done something with it in the end?”

There was a sudden sarcasm in her voice that was never usually there when she talked about him, and then, as I remember it, out of nowhere, she asked me about the house.

“Do you still drive out there sometimes?”

I shook my head and she said something about a “retreat”, saying that Daniel had once described it as his real home.

“He used to go on and on about the days you spent by the river. He called you the most important person in his life. You must have been very close to each other.”

I couldn’t think that she meant anything by it, but I looked at her with alarm. Back then the whole town had gossiped, and the first hikers who had heard that a teacher was spending whole days out in the wilds with two of his students quickly found their way to us. They would venture as far as the boundary of the property, greet us officiously and make small talk while they looked discreetly around them. She must have known about the gossip, but whatever her motive was in bringing it up, a frivolousness in her wilful way of reminding me of it made me distrust her.

“You know the story,” I said. “If you like I’ll happily tell it to you all over again, but it won’t change a thing.”

When another customer called her, I took advantage of the interruption to say my goodbye. I had not wanted to say anything else about the photo but I ended up doing just that, even though I was merely underlining my concern. I asked Agata if I could take the cutting with me and she looked at me with a smile and said I was welcome to go over it with a magnifying glass quietly at home but it wouldn’t tell me any more because it was all in my head. She walked off and I gazed after her before I too got to my feet. She was still young, not yet thirty, and in some ways still the mysterious stranger who comes from afar and hears everything but says nothing. She could almost never be persuaded to reveal anything of the life she led when she went back home for a few weeks every spring and autumn. I had asked her about it more than once but she always ducked the question, saying that she could tell me everything about herself but at the end of it I still wouldn’t understand anything about her world. I didn’t press her because I was very careful in those days not to let myself feel rejected, but now I felt I knew what she was talking about. It wasn’t just about her, and it wasn’t just about me. What she had wanted to say was simply that no-one knows anything about anybody when it comes down to it, and I couldn’t fault her on that.

BACK THAN, I HAD BEEN GOING OUT TO THE RIVER ALMOST EVERY day, despite its still being the last week of school, to sit myself down in the sun with a book. There was nothing more specific behind it than a desire to escape from the world of teaching as quickly as possible, nor any plan when increasingly often I began to put my book aside and clean up the property, which until then I had left just as it had been when I took it over. I made a start on clearing the meadow of the stones that lay there, gathering them all together and wondering if I should take them down to the river bed, or to the gravel bar directly in front of the house, but then piling them next to the mill’s walls or rather the ruins of its remaining walls. Perhaps I had already subliminally had the idea of using them as building material, but I had not thought of it consciously, and the reality was that after months in the classroom I was so happy to be working outdoors, with all its pointlessness and apparent futility, that I felt for the first time that I’d grasped why people imagined Sisyphus to be the happiest of men because I caught myself wishing that someone would come along after me and undo everything I’d done so that I could start all over again, or perhaps extend my stone-collecting and weeding beyond the boundaries of my property and into the surrounding fields and the Au and then move gradually up to the village and beyond it. I had already carried out the less pleasant tasks, had cleared the inside of the mill of beer and cola bottles, broken glass, tin foil, an old shoe, a couple of broken badminton rackets without strings and the excrement in the corners – human excrement or animal excrement, I didn’t know. I had carried the half-charred tree stumps from an apparently well-used fireplace down to the water, thrown them in and watched as they drifted, swinging sluggishly, and got caught in a whirlpool before being picked up and snatched away by the strong current in the middle of the river. I spent half an afternoon trying to roll away the last stump, which lay there like a boulder, but having heaved with all my might and, panting and sweating, rotated it around its centre of gravity, I gave up after the first three revolut. . .