Little Hands Clapping Page 6

  Self-poisoning had become somewhat old-fashioned, but they still had to be careful. One man passed on to him from the museum had apparently overdosed, probably on a narcotic or a commercial painkiller, but he couldn’t be sure that he hadn’t taken weedkiller or rat poison. The doctor’s garden was often visited by cats, and he had lured one into the garage and fed it morsels of the suspect flesh. The animal had started to exhibit a combination of listlessness and nausea, and the doctor had panicked, grabbed the cat by the scruff of the neck and thrown it into the nearest freezer. With a heavy heart he wrote off the man as inedible, and disposed of all but his liver and a hand, meaning to carry out tests on them. He had kept the cat’s body for the same reason, but he found he never quite had the time to conduct his investigation, and it remained in the freezer, its body contorted, stuck in the position in which it had finally given up its struggle.

  One of the doctor’s worries was of dying without having a chance to cover his tracks, and he shivered at the thought of the garage being searched and people concluding that he must have enjoyed having sex with frozen cats. To ensure that this would not happen, he had written I do not have sex with frozen cats on a piece of paper, and left it in a drawer in his study. Sometimes he wondered whether this would be enough to combat speculation.

  He felt remorseful about what he had done to the cat, even more so when posters went up around the neighbourhood, appealing for its safe return. The doctor knew the family, and one evening he knocked on their door and after a few gentle words of sympathy for their loss he presented them with a kitten. Within hours this act of kindness had entered into legend.

  He opened the freezer next to the one with the cat in it, to see if his new acquisition would fit. Inside was the body of a black man, curled up like an apostrophe. He had collected it from the museum some months earlier, and it had made him a little apprehensive. He had never eaten such dark flesh before, and he couldn’t help wondering whether it would taste any different from white. Smokier, perhaps. He had been down to the last few steaks of the woman, and before the phone call that morning he had been thinking about preparing the man for consumption, a little angry with himself for feeling so wary. He was a doctor after all, and he knew he ought not to think this way. Now though, he was able to put these thoughts aside. He could leave this leap into the unknown for another day.

  He stripped his new body. ‘Fortunately, Hans,’ he said, ‘because of my profession, I am quite accustomed to bad smells.’ He turned the man’s pockets inside out and found a note, which he put aside to dry. He would read it another time, if it was legible. He put the man’s clothes in a bin bag, then unwound his hose and washed off the worst of the mess. The body would just about fit in with the other one. ‘The fuller the freezer,’ he said to his dog, ‘the more energy efficient it is. And as you know, Hans, it would be wrong of us to use more electricity than is necessary.’ He braced himself, and lifted the body.

  ‘In you go,’ he said. ‘In you go with your coloured friend.’

  He slammed the freezer shut and went through to the kitchen, where he made himself a fresh mug of coffee and, at last, ate his breakfast.

  IV

  On his way downstairs the old man went into the room where he had found the body, and checked that the smell had gone away. Satisfied that it had, he closed the windows. At eight fifty-nine he stood in the hallway. He looked at the second hand on his watch, and when the time came he opened the front door.

  ‘Good morning,’ said Hulda. ‘What a pleasant day.’

  He said nothing, and as she carried on he went upstairs to spend some time with the K section of a Danish–German dictionary. He had arrived at the museum with two cases, one full of clothes and the other full of dictionaries. On asking him whether he had made arrangements to have his other belongings sent on, Pavarotti’s wife was surprised to hear that these cases contained everything he owned. She had been impressed by his devotion to his continuing studies, and was not to know that the only reason he read these books was because they sent him to sleep. He was impatient to spend as many hours as possible asleep, or rather not being awake, and any language skills he acquired as he pursued this ambition were incidental.

  When he reached the kitchen he sat in a stiff-backed wooden chair, and opened the book on his knee. Krapyl. Kras. Krat. It wouldn’t be long before the proprietor and her husband arrived, but he was hoping to fit in a short nap. Kremlolog. Kremte. Kreneleret. It was not their usual visiting day. Today they would be making a special appearance, to oversee the delivery and assembly of a human skeleton. Kringle. Kringlet. Halfway through Krinkelkroge the old man fell asleep, still bolt upright and with his eyes wide open. A rattle came from deep inside him, and a long, grey finger marked the point on the page where his mind had shut down.

  When all this is over and she finds out what has been going on in her museum, Pavarotti’s wife will not be available for comment. Confined to her room, she will be unable to speak for several weeks. Every afternoon at four o’clock Liesl, Chloris, Dagmar and Swanhilde will be marched in by a nanny, and one by one they will offer their hands, and she will squeeze them, and look into their eyes, wishing she could say something, anything, to explain what had happened, why she had become this way. In spite of her condition she will offer the police her full cooperation. Every day four officers, one of them a police musicologist, will carry her to the grand piano in the corner of the room, and she will sit on the stool in her nightdress, staring straight ahead and playing C sharp minor for yes, G flat diminished 7th for no, and giving a light flourish on the three highest keys for I don’t know. As time goes on she will begin to spell out words for them, but only if they contain letters no further into the alphabet than G. In this way the investigation will manage to elicit all the information it needs from her, and at no point will she be under suspicion.

  In her absence it is her husband who will field the interview requests from the press. The many reporters who speak to him will make note of his gentle manner, his tactful choice of words and his sense of bemusement and dismay at the events that had taken place, and without exception they will notice that he bears a close resemblance to the late tenor. Most of them, keen to make up a word count in a hurry, will mention this likeness in their copy, though one or two will be restrained enough not to refer to it, believing it to be irrelevant to the story. This high-mindedness will be for nothing, as their readers point at the article’s accompanying photograph and say to whoever is within earshot, Look at him. Look at this man. He looks just like Pavarotti. At first I thought it was Pavarotti, but it’s not. They will spend the rest of the day singing ear-splitting approximations of ‘Nessun Dorma’, and for a few weeks sales of the real Pavarotti’s CDs will soar.

  The skeleton expert was no different. On arriving at the museum and being introduced to its proprietor and her husband, he was struck by the resemblance, and from that moment he could think of him only as Pavarotti, and of his wife only as Pavarotti’s wife. Her name had been eclipsed, to the point of being all but erased, by the extraordinary appearance of her husband.

  On being shown the spot where the exhibit was to go, the skeleton expert began to assemble the curtain that the museum had provided. The rail, which stood on casters, was similar to the kind found on hospital wards, but the fabric was thick and, in keeping with the task, black. Pavarotti’s wife asked him the usual polite questions about his occupation – How does one become a skeleton expert? and Is it not frightfully harrowing work? but soon she was stuck for things to say. After a long silence she asked, ‘And when will the . . .’ She searched for the right thing to say. ‘When will the unfortunate materials arrive?’

  The skeleton expert gestured towards a blue plastic crate by his feet.

  Pavarotti’s wife had envisaged the bones being brought separately, inside a large wooden box borne by several solemn-countenanced gentlemen. She had assumed that the crate, casually carried in by the skeleton expert, had contained tools, and she was shoc
ked to think that somebody who until the age of twenty-nine had been a person could end up stacked inside a modestly sized plastic box with freight stickers on the side. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Of course.’

  She wanted to turn and go, to find somewhere she could be alone and quiet, where she could remember the skeleton in happier times. Even though she had never known him she could invent these memories, and they would be real enough to her. She knew, though, that she would have to wait before she did this, that first she must be welcoming to her guest. She offered him a tour of the museum so he could find out more about the bones’ final resting place. She took him along the suggested route, gravely pointing out certain exhibits along the way. He had no idea what to think or what to say as she sat him down in the Tell Tale Signs room and played the short film that informed him of behavioural patterns to look out for in his friends and family (sighing, looking unhappy, talking in a quiet voice, listening over and over again to sad songs), and showed him around Room Six, Statistics, where he looked in silence at the scale model of Golden Gate Bridge, complete with its frequently updated neon display showing how many people had ended their lives there.

  When they got to Room Nine, Cults and Pacts, the old man was standing sentry in the far corner, something he only ever bothered to do when he knew he was likely to be observed by his employer. Pavarotti’s wife was electrified by his professionalism, and swelled with admiration as she saw in him the same qualities that had made such an impression on her the first time they had met, in the corner of the Concourse Exhibition Unit of Bremen International Airport.

  V

  Lotte Meier was well-known in her home town for her red hair, her blue eyes and the freckles on her face. But more than anything she was known for her cheerful disposition. Everybody who came into contact with her felt their spirits soar, and found themselves smiling with her. That girl is a ray of sunshine, they said to one another. She even smiled as she did her homework, as she tidied her room, and as she made her way around the lawn every morning before school, scooping up her three pet Papillon dogs’ latest tiny piles of mess. Whenever her hockey team lost a match she would smile her way back to the changing room, thinking how much fun it had been and hoping they would do a little better next time.

  What a shame that this won’t last, people would think, that her infectious joie de vivre will diminish as she reaches adolescence, but when her first period arrived, halfway through a Chemistry class, she greeted it with a chuckle as she carefully put down her pipette and made a sprightly dash to the girls’ toilet. In the years that followed she faced all the changes in her body and mind with just such a buoyant manner.

  When she was fifteen, Lotte was hit by a car. The driver of a BMW failed to stop as she walked over a pedestrian crossing, and the impact hurled her high into the air in an arc of several metres. She landed hard on the tarmac, and as she lay in a heap in the middle of the road, twisted into an unnatural shape, a crowd gathered around her. As they waited for assistance to arrive she made light of her injuries. Her cries of pain were leavened with smiles and laughter, and she told the onlookers that it was nothing, that the doctors would soon make her better, and in the scheme of things there were people far worse off than she was. And besides, she went on, apart from a few scrapes and bruises here and there, and maybe a few broken ribs and a fractured collarbone, her serious injuries were confined only to one of her legs. What if she had landed differently and hurt her head? If you were to look at it that way, she jauntily explained in between yelps of agony, she was the luckiest girl in the world.

  Minutes later the ambulance arrived, and a new wave of passers-by supposed the paramedics had taken leave of their senses as they smiled and joked with their patient. But on drawing closer and seeing the face of the girl who was being tended to, the onlookers also began to smile, even as they noticed that her left shin had snapped and the leg was bent at a horrifying angle, and a long, jagged shaft of raw bone was sticking out from a fist-size wound below her knee.

  As she lay in her hospital bed she was surprised and delighted by the stream of chocolates, flowers and cards that arrived. It seemed as if the whole town wished her a full and speedy recovery. She was particularly taken aback by the amount of cards from boys, some of whom she had barely spoken to, in which they said all the usual things about how they hoped to see her up and about before too long, but also things she hadn’t expected, like, I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t made it through.

  That’s interesting, she thought.

  Her shattered bones fused as well as the doctors could have hoped, and shortly after starting back at school, with the slight limp that would never leave her, Lotte discovered she enjoyed kissing very much. She often found herself in the arms of a boy, and these boys would return her smiles and arrive at her door with flowers in their hands and dreams in their hearts. While she found their attentions delightful, they didn’t set her heart aflame, and she could see that none of them was going to grow into the man she was sure was out there waiting for her. Whenever she decided that the time had come for them to part company she would tell the boy in such a way that in the moment it seemed to make perfect sense, as if they really had come to the end of the line, that it would be best for both of them if they were to just be friends, and that he would find somebody to replace her, somebody he would love more than he had ever thought possible. It wouldn’t be until he got home that he would wonder why he was smiling, and realise that this really was the end, that he would never hold her small, pale hand again, or kiss those freckled lips.

  On occasions when she knew a smile would be inappropriate, Lotte’s face would go into a state of repose, but she still radiated joy. Even in bereavement her belief in heaven, and in the inherent goodness of the departed, kept her shining as she grieved. And thus she smiled her way though childhood, through university and out into the world, and at the age of just twenty-four she smiled her way into a job as the Head of Concourse Relations at Bremen International Airport.

  Lotte’s disposition came across not only in person, but also on paper. In her application she said it would be her intention to ensure that the departure area of Bremen International Airport became known not just as a hub of transportation, but also as a hub of cultural activity, a pleasurable and enlightening experience rather than just a waiting room. Although she was by no means alone in this approach, something about her application sent it straight to the top of the pile. The recruitment panel looked at it, then at one another, and nodded. She was called in for an interview, and before she even opened her mouth she had secured the position.

  Two weeks later she started work, and by her first coffee break she had got to know her colleagues and organised her desk, and begun to implement her plan. A press release was sent out, announcing that an art gallery was to be established inside the departure area. Everybody who read it found themselves thinking, What a wonderful idea.

  She spent her days sending letters to various public galleries and private collectors with the intention of securing loans of paintings. Until these letters arrived none of the recipients had any idea that they would be interested in helping to consolidate the already healthy reputation of Bremen International Airport, or showing the world that Bremen is more than just the home of Beck’s beer and the birthplace of Hans-Joachim Kulenkampff, but something made them want to do their bit. Everybody who was able to responded with offers of loans, but even so they would only part with works that they wouldn’t miss. Across the land curators scratched their heads and said, Well, we do have that early Mühlberg in storage, the one he painted before he really found his feet, or, We could send her that Rohlfs – the one he disowned because he didn’t deem it up to scratch. In large private houses a typical conversation between husband and wife would find them agreeing that the faint sketches by Ernst Deger that had been hanging in their downstairs lavatory for some years had attracted very little comment from their guests, and that it would be nice to let other people enjoy t
hem for a while.

  As each piece arrived Lotte would see only the good in it, and her face would be a picture of delight. And so it was that the Concourse Gallery of Bremen International Airport amassed a collection of pieces of quite stultifying mediocrity.

  At the press launch the critics found themselves smiling back at Lotte, and telling her how much they were enjoying the exhibition. In the moment this had not been a lie, but once they had returned to their apartments and switched on their computers they were unable to recall a single point of merit in anything they had seen, and they stared for hours at blank screens. They tried to write down their feelings, but every time they were about to begin, Lotte appeared in their minds’ eyes. Across the city, and farther afield, fingers froze on keyboards. They knew they couldn’t commend such an exhibition, that to do so would damage their reputations, possibly beyond repair, but at the same time even the hardest-nosed among them knew that they could never live with themselves knowing they had brought even a moment’s sadness to that smiling face.

  Planned double-page spreads were abandoned, and mentions of the exhibition were relegated to short entries on listings pages, saying things like, Bremen International Airport will be displaying various artworks inside its terminal building. Lotte overlooked the bland neutrality of these pieces, and was delighted with the coverage. Once the ribbon had been cut by the mayor, people with time to spare before boarding would see the sign, and go in, and wonder what it was in these pictures that they were supposed to be looking at. And while they were doing this they would be watched by a pair of eyes belonging to an old man, his face a deathly grey.

  The pieces, for all their absence of life, were old and unique, and some were the work of artists whose more successful efforts had afforded them some standing; as a result the exhibition had to be insured for a significant sum. After many phone calls, it had become apparent to Lotte that in order to keep the premiums at an affordable level the exhibition would have to be overseen at all times. Even though the paintings were to be hung behind glass screens, the companies still insisted that a minimum of one human being (extant) would be required to be on hand whenever the exhibition was open to the public. The airport was as secure as any other (every morning on the way to her office the pins in Lotte’s leg set off the metal detector and she smilingly yielded to the formality of the frisking), but even so it was impossible to find a policy, which did not include such a stipulation.