Chapter 22
But that’s ridiculous,” said Emma. “You must go to the doctor.”
Eric Bear had made an attempt to go over to the kitchen island to get the red wine he’d uncorked shortly before, but he didn’t manage more than a few steps. The pain in his thigh prevented him from moving freely, and in shame he had to limp back to the chair and sit down.
“It’s not so bad,” he assured her again.
He’d maintained that it was a strained muscle he got when he tried to run a race with Teddy on the beach.
“Idiocy,” Emma had snorted. “Fifty-year-old bears shouldn’t run at all.”
Eric had been away from home for almost three weeks; he told Emma that there were only a few days left. A truth with an ominous import: it was still Friday when he granted himself this short leave in order to have dinner with Emma Rabbit.
On Sunday the Chauffeurs would pick up Teddy Bear and Nicholas Dove if Eric didn’t succeed in preventing it.
“I’ve never understood who you think you impress with your suffering,” said Emma, letting all the city’s males be summarized in this “you.”
Eric threw out his hands.
“There’s nothing to do. I’ll take some painkillers and rest, then it’ll get better.”
Eric had taken Tom-Tom with him to Dr. Thompson when Dove had finally gone away and the bear and crow had recovered consciousness. The doctor had sewed a few stitches in the bear’s thigh, and then Eric exited the doctor’s office leaving the crow, who needed more extensive bandaging, behind. But instead of returning to Yok, Eric drove home.
Emma Rabbit carried the plates of vitello tonnato over to the table. Then she put out the salad, wine, and bread and lit the candles in the large candelabra they’d bought at an auction a year or two ago, one of A Helping Hand’s many events. She dimmed the ceiling light and sat down.
“I want you to come home,” she said with a tender smile, “because I’ll soon get tired of waiting.”
And then she lifted her wineglass in a toast. Feelings of melancholy caused Eric Bear to shiver, leaving behind a clump of anxiety in his throat. It grew so quickly that it closed up his esophagus before he’d even managed to bring the wineglass to his mouth. He wanted what she wanted. He, too, wanted to come home, more than anything else: home to her embrace, where time stood still and all there was, was the scent of her fur and the beating of her heart against his chest.
She fixed her eyes on him. Pretended to look stern. And he wanted so much to laugh at her little play-acting but instead felt how the tears were burning inside his eyelids and he knew that he couldn’t cry, couldn’t expose himself: he loved her and would never be able to lose her.
It was that simple.
“I don’t know exactly who is writing the list,” said Bataille, “but I know how she gets the information.”
The large propeller was slowly set in motion as the light breeze picked up, but the horizon was still hidden by night. Eric sat rigid as a stick in his corduroy armchair, trying to control his facial features, the nervous twitches of his whiskers, and the indulgent smile that he knew made him weak. Across from him sat the fear-inducing hyena. True, it appeared unlikely that this whispering conversation they were carrying on would end with him getting up and torturing the bear to death. But nothing was impossible.
Eric Bear’s senses were on tenterhooks. At the Garbage Dump he saw not only the outlines of a discarded frying pan, a wheel-less baby buggy, and the prow of an old rowboat sticking up out of the gray-black mass of rubbish; in addition he could make out the odor of decaying coffee grounds from the stinking entirety, heard two horses neighing in the distance, and perceived the structure in the armchair’s fabric, as if it were braille.
It was clear that Bataille had overheard the conversation Eric had recently had with Rat Ruth. Perhaps the hyena had been sitting in the darkness along one of the walls and listened; it didn’t need to be any stranger than that.
“It wasn’t the idea that I should know,” hissed Bataille. “She doesn’t know that I know.”
The hyena was proud of his cunning and that he’d figured out how the one thing was connected to the other. The used clothes that the well-situated residents of the city donated to the church were gathered together and driven out to the dump once a month. Sometimes the deliveries were so extensive that a burly funeral director came with a whole truckload of clothes. Other months all you got was a package of coats that had been wrapped in brown wrapping paper and placed on a wheelbarrow that was pushed by a creaky old doorman or some former cantor with rheumatism.
The clothes came to good use, the hyena assured him, fingering the short, worn leather jacket he himself was wearing. All the animals at the Garbage Dump had clothes that came from the church’s donations; there weren’t any others. And sometimes, when the shipments were especially large, Rat sold back some of them to the stores in the city that dealt in used goods.
“It took a while before I noticed it,” said Hyena. “But whether it was a delivery truck or a wheelbarrow, it was always the queen herself who took in the delivery.”
The breeze that had caused the large propeller to whirl like a mighty windmill presaged the arrival of dawn. If Hyena’s story had been disturbed earlier by creaking from the blades of the propeller, for a while now the sound had been a constant whine. Eric pushed the armchair closer to the table and leaned forward as well, whereupon he came so close that he could perceive the hyena’s musty breath. There was a burnt smell from the predator’s mouth. The dark of the night would remain dense for a while yet, but the starlight caused the hyena’s eyes to flash as he twisted around and stared out toward the dump. It was an ice-cold radiance.
“I already knew that we were involved with the Death List,” said Bataille. “When I came here I didn’t believe in the list, but…but even when I knew…I didn’t know more than that.”
From the very start Bataille had become one of the Cleaners at the dump. The Cleaners were divided into three teams of five animals each. Once a week, sometimes more often but never less often than that, Ruth gave them written orders. These were crumpled scraps of paper which she solemnly handed over inside the great hall, where, in her terrible handwriting, she had scribbled down a few addresses—she’d learned to write as an adult—and the assignment was always the same. Empty the apartment. Throw away what should be thrown away, bring back the valuables. Clean out everything. And leave the place as though no one had been there.
The first months, Bataille thought this was a matter of tips that Ruth had gotten from part of the criminal network she worked for. A kind of repayment for services rendered. They supplied her with information about when families went on vacation, stayed with relatives, wound up in the hospital, so that she could empty their abandoned houses. What the hyena didn’t understand was why they were forced to clean up after themselves so carefully. Perhaps, he thought, this was a manifestation of some sort of vanity? Ruth was not always easy to understand.
Bataille came onto the trail of the truth in the form of an old female cat whom they met in a stairwell one morning when Hyena and the Cleaners had been on their way up to the sixth floor in a newly built apartment house in Lanceheim.
“Are you going to Kohl’s?” the cat had asked, and Bataille had nodded since “Kohl” was one of the names that was on the week’s crumpled scrap of paper. “Poor devil, may his soul find peace now.”
And the cat had shaken her head and continued down the stairs.
Only the hyena had heard the cat’s comments, and he kept it to himself. Bataille knew that his reputation was growing, that the animals feared what was a fortunate combination of imagination and a lack of empathy. He also knew that the moment he lost the queen’s favor his hours were numbered. As soon as it was possible, the hyena gathered information which perhaps might prove valuable the day Ruth no longer shielded him.
During the following months he tried to get evidence for his hypothesis. When it was possible—and it wasn’t always—he strayed from the ongoing cleanup work in search of neighbors who could confirm that the apartment or the house they were going through belonged to an animal who had been carried away by the Chauffeurs the day before. Sometimes it was impossible to find anyone to ask, and the hyena had to return to the Cleaners with unfinished business. But he was not in a hurry, and often enough he got the answer he wanted. Finally he was certain.
The Cleaners were, without knowing it, the Chauffeurs’ rear guard.
Eric Bear loved to listen when Emma Rabbit told stories.
After dinner they went in and sat in the oversized lounge suite of thick, beige cotton that dominated their living room on Uxbridge Street. The armchairs were so massive that it was impossible to sit normally in them. Involuntarily you ended up in a kind of half-lying position, with your legs under you on the chair or pointing straight out over the armrest, and it was in the latter manner that Eric Bear made himself comfortable and listened.
Emma was sitting on the couch. She had brought her wine with her, and she held her glass on her lap while she told about the past week. She spoke without gestures, without dramatizing her tone of voice, but her urgency was not to be missed. She had been working on a new project for the past few months, she told. It was a suite of memory tableaux from her early childhood; to be more exact, seven scenes which she repeated in various perspectives and techniques, sometimes all seven on the same canvas but more often one or two at a time. In the previous week she had worked exclusively in oils.
Eric listened and nodded. Never, he thought, was she anywhere other than here. Not even when she devoted herself to her childhood, which she often did in her art. It had to do with her energy, thought Eric, the quiet, burning force that caused Emma Rabbit to follow through with all the projects she embarked on. Some with a certain success, others best forgotten.
“Now I’m coming over to you,” he said in the middle of a sentence, and she continued to talk as he—carefully, so that he wouldn’t bump her wineglass—rolled out of the armchair and crept over to her on the couch. He sat right next to her so that he could feel her warmth. With his head against her shoulder he continued to listen with closed eyes.
“Despite all my theories, I never believed, not once, that it was Ruth who made the Death List,” said Bataille.
He suddenly fell silent.
Eric had heard it, too. A kind of clicking somewhere in the darkness out in the dump, and they both turned around, trying in vain to see something. A long way off the lights from the hovels of the Garbage Town could be glimpsed like a will-o’-the-wisp in the blackness, but otherwise the dump was concealed by the night. To be on the safe side, the hyena lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper as he continued.
He hadn’t connected the clothing deliveries with the Cleaners. There was no reason to make such a connection. But that Ruth took in the clothes on her own had aroused his curiosity, and he decided to find out why she didn’t let anyone else do the job.
This proved to be more difficult than he’d thought. Rat Ruth met the courier, wrote a receipt for the delivery, and took the packing slips back to her room while the clothes were being unloaded. There was no possibility of ferreting out anything at all. On a single occasion Bataille managed to catch a glimpse of Rat sitting in her room, bowed over a massive binder where she apparently stored the papers having to do with the clothes. But why she, who otherwise preferred to sleep through the days, always remained awake for this delivery, remained a mystery. It certainly had nothing to do with Rat’s interest in clothes.
Bataille understood that the answers to his questions were in the binders that Ruth stored in her bedroom. Bataille didn’t relate to Eric Bear exactly how he’d managed to worm his way into the queen’s bedroom, but after a long period of purposeful efforts he’d finally gotten a friendly invitation.
The hyena leaned across the three-legged table and in a whisper described the scene with great care. How the queen rat had lain down on her back on the bed after they’d shared a bottle of calvados and was soon snoring audibly while Bataille snooped around in the room, which was filled to the brim with the rat’s valuables. That is to say, things that the rat considered valuable, which could be a diamond necklace or a half-eaten package of alphabet cookies. Bataille sneaked around, lifting up piles of clothes, rummaging through piles of papers and books that had to do with the administration of the Garbage Dump. He searched through clothes closets, which apparently functioned as some type of pantry. The binders were nowhere.
At regular intervals the rat sighed or moaned from the bed. Each time, the hyena was forced to break off his search and make certain she’d fallen asleep again before he could continue. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if she realized that he’d fooled her.
Finally he found her hiding place. Under a pair of loose floorboards by the window closest to the bed. But he’d only managed to start leafing through the binder when the rat awoke with a jerk. Bataille threw aside the binder and poked the loose floorboards back with his foot. All he’d seen were pages filled with handwritten columns of names, dates, and the type of garments that had been donated.
It took almost half a year before he got a chance to inspect the binder a second time.
“But, you understand,” said Bataille and the icy cold in his eye glistened yet again in the light from the stars, “I am made of time.”
Eric nodded as though he understood what the hyena meant.
The next time it had gone better. Bataille had immediately gone to the hiding place by the window and so had significantly more time. What he’d thought was a single binder proved to be an entire little library. Lists of names, clothes, and dates. Page after page. The hyena didn’t know what he was looking for, he mostly sat and leafed through it at random in order to discover a pattern. He believed that he was looking for some kind of code when his glance fell on the name Kohl. Kohl had donated a shirt and a pair of pants. The date that stood next to the clothes was a little more than a year old. Bataille thought about it and realized that Kohl must have donated clothes right before the Cleaners had been up in Kohl’s apartment.
He started searching for more familiar names. And there they were. One by one he ran across them. The animals in whose homes he and the Cleaners had been those past months, the animals who had been picked up by the Chauffeurs the day before.
It was asserted that all of them had donated clothing on their dying day.
When Emma Rabbit finally fell silent, he hadn’t heard a word of what she’d said the last ten minutes, despite the fact that she spoke without interruption.
“You haven’t heard a word of what I’ve said the last ten minutes,” she complained to him.
“Sure I have,” lied Eric Bear. “Test me.”
They were still sitting next to each other on the couch, he with his head against her shoulder. He put a paw on her leg and experienced how her warmth went right into his body.
“I’m not asking any test questions. Never have,” she lied.
“You don’t dare,” he declared triumphantly and slowly lowered his head down onto her lap. “That’s the whole thing.”
“I don’t want to embarrass you,” she answered, stroking him across the ears.
“It’s true,” he said. “Not being able to conceal my superiority would truly have embarrassed me.”
“What you just said you didn’t even understand yourself,” she laughed.
“I’ve never maintained that I was smarter than you.”
“But that’s what you think, isn’t it?”
She looked down at him, and her entire face smiled. She was teasing. Seen from this perspective, upside down and from below, her eyes were even larger. There was his whole future.
“Never,” he answered.
“Liar.”
“And not that, either. You and I have one of the few equal relationships that I know of.”
“Bullshit,” she smiled.
“I think I’m smarter than you, you know it’s the other way around. And I would have exposed you long ago, but I prove how much smarter I am by not saying anything,” said Eric. “It can’t get any more equal than that.”
“You’re a deeply deranged bear…”
“Which, naturally, is further evidence of my smartness,” he smiled.
And he lifted his paws and pulled her down onto the couch in a heartfelt embrace.
When Bataille gave Eric the last piece of the puzzle, a feeling of euphoria passed through Eric. An insight so revolutionary that it caused him to feel dizzy.
They got up from the wobbly table at the same time, the bear and the hyena, and walked with silent, determined steps back west toward the ravine where the snake, the crow, and the gazelle still were.
Eric tried to take in what the Hyena had actually said: the donated, used clothing was really a way of sending a list of names—the Death List, to put it bluntly—to Rat Ruth. From the packing slip she wrote out two lists. One she sent by courier to the Environmental Ministry and the Chauffeurs. The other she gave to the Cleaners.
All stuffed animals have asked themselves questions of life and death, at some point, when young or old. Why must the factories manufacture new animals? Why must those who were already living in the city be carried away by the Chauffeurs? Why did they all live in open or concealed terror of what would happen in the next life? And who had established a system so cruel?
This day had been the longest in the bear’s life. He had seen the day dawn from the stinking mountaintops of the Garbage Dump, spent the morning in his old reality at Wolle & Wolle, and then been half torn apart by Dove’s gorillas in the afternoon. After that, this evening together with Emma. Home on Uxbridge Street where time stood still and where security dwelled.
But it would never be like before.
Now Eric Bear understood.
Everything functioned as it did for a reason.
In the same way that Rat Ruth always took in the shipments of used clothing that came to the Garbage Dump, Hyena Bataille had found out that the same conditions applied in a corresponding way on the other side. It was always the same person who drew up the packing slips and saw to it that the clothes were packed the right way.
Archdeacon Odenrick.
The archdeacon sat in his beautiful cathedral, untouchable and above suspicion, writing down names and dates for the animals that the Chauffeurs would pick up the following month.
So simple.
Eric should have figured it out earlier.
TWILIGHT, 5
He seldom lost his concentration during a sermon. When he climbed up to the pulpit it was as though the everyday world turned pale, the words he’d chosen to proceed from seemed more significant than anything else, and his powerful voice carried unwaveringly throughout Sagrada Bastante, out to the very last row. He filled the cathedral with his presence. He didn’t leave even a possibility for doubt. In that moment his voice, even every single word, was all that meant anything. His preaching had come to be widely talked about; the pews were, as usual, filled to capacity. A feeling of calm rested over the congregation. To be able to turn yourself, and your faith, over to someone as resolute as he, was a flight from everyday demands that was not only innocent but even purifying.
Therefore a discreet sigh passed through the church when on this late afternoon he suddenly hesitated between two words. He left a pause which must have been unintentional, a pause which suggested that he didn’t really know which word should follow the one he had just spoken. When in the following second he again took up the sermon, uncertainty spread along the rows of pews. Had they all imagined this hesitation? The memory of the collective sigh was soon clearer than the archdeacon’s momentary mental pause, and he still brought an unctuous sermon to a successful close.
But he had hesitated.
He had lost his concentration.
Accursed Eric Bear.
Afterward he walked slowly back to the office from the sacristy. He made use of the seldom-exploited corridors that ran in all directions through the massive building. There were grand colonnades and halls in a long row which connected all the more important parts of the cathedral with one another. Why the architects had once upon a time insisted on constructing these ant tunnels alongside the main corridors remained a mystery to him.
Perhaps, he thought, it was for occasions such as this: when the world weighed like a yoke across his shoulders, and the mere thought of encountering a colleague and smiling amiably was the worst kind of torture.
He was certain that Rat Ruth had followed his instructions. Nonetheless, something had happened at the Garbage Dump which he didn’t know how to analyze. No one seemed to know where Snake Marek had gone. Without Marek he no longer had control over events, he didn’t know what the bear was planning or how he was reasoning. This was not at all satisfactory. Not at all.
What was the worst thing that could happen? he asked himself.
That the stubborn bear finds me, he answered himself in the following moment.
The worst thing that could happen was that the bear, in some unfathomable way, worked out that the trail led straight into Sagrada Bastante. True, he didn’t understand how that would be possible; he had refined the system he’d inherited from his predecessors and no one had ever revealed it before.
But someone has to be the first, he thought.
And what am I worrying for? he asked himself. If the bear comes here, then I can take care of him.
If the bear comes here, thought Archdeacon Odenrick, he’ll never walk out again. There’s room for yet another animal alongside the cat down in the catacombs.