Cover

I think, however, that on a beautiful winter day, immediately after a snowstorm, when millions of coniferæ, bowed down beneath their crystal burdens, render the mountains dazzling with silver-powdered forests and pyramids of prisms, this journey offers one of the most glorious sights I have ever looked upon … For this old thoroughfare is a thread on which are strung the souvenirs of two thousand years.

JOHN L. STODDARD, Lectures: South Tyrol

Eduard Severin Maria, one of the elder princes of Auersperg, led a hunt that day in the valley. His horse fell and was later found beheaded in the grass.

But Eduard gave little thought to his horses. The Auerspergs took greater pride in their hunting dogs. They were Weimaraners, direct descendants of the Chiens Gris de Saint Louis, the unicorn hunters of medieval tapestry, and they had for centuries guarded over the meadows and moraine of western Austria and lower Germany. Their colorless eyes reflected the mountain wastes like white amulets.

The prince had in fact personally overseen his dogs’ breeding in order to meet the standards of the German Weimaraner Club. Doing so wasn’t hard with animals of such pure stock. One had only to look out for the longhair trait, forbidden by the club’s studbook. Eduard was convinced that careful breeders like himself would soon eradicate the flaw from the hounds of Bavaria and Austria.

Yet only that morning of the hunt, he’d discovered two drowsy dun-colored pups who, not needing the warmth of their brothers and sisters, lay apart on the rug in the drafty minstrel’s hall. Longhairs among his own dogs! If word got out, the club could expel him, or sterilize his dogs. And worse, the source was almost certainly Mars: Freya had littered sixteen pups with short coats before mating with Mars, and Mars had never sired before. Prince von Auersperg would prefer not to shoot the animal; he was the best hunting dog the prince had ever had. He never failed to bring back the quarry, each time laying the marmot or grouse at the prince’s feet and turning right around to watch the mountain again with those eyes still and pale as an old moon. But the dog’s breeding was a problem that remained unsolved, and it worried the prince all that day.

The prince tested the air with a wave of his palm. A warm and dry Föhn had blown down from the mountaintops in the last days, bringing clear weather and turning the mountains cobalt blue, but the dust now hovering on the roads portended rain. Well, he was not yet too old to hunt the Zillertal in September, whatever the weather.

The hounds ran, and patches of morning mist rolled over the cracked limestone, so that the dogs’ wild barking seemed at times to come up out of the ground itself. The horses sailed the riders over the mist with loud clopping on the stone and quick thuds on the turf like a pelting of gunfire. The rifles creaked against the leather saddles. The horns echoed from the Kammë and ravines loomed up so suddenly in the hazy morning light, one had to be very skilled on a horse to avoid a nasty fall. By the time the sun had burned away the mist, a fox was caught, but the prince’s horse tumbled down the brook leading to the Zamserbach. The prince was unhurt. He ordered the horse shot through the brain, and it was done under a midday sun. The hunters headed off to the inn at Breitlahner for lunch.

When the prince had gone, carrying his fox by the neck, the steed was beheaded, washing the grass in blood.

2. The Zamserschinder

Tell me, have you ever dreamt you were flying?

PHILIPP HALSMANN, letter to Ruth Römer, Innsbruck Prison, 30 July 1929

In the beginning, on the path through the mountains that was called the Zamserschinder, all he wanted was to get away from his father.

‘Philja! Wait!’ his father commanded. Papa was not so tall with strong short arms and legs and a big head. His hair was short and white and slick like the coat of an otter. He ran his thumb over the wet hair and then flung the water and sweat onto the path. He started up the rocks as though he were not in the least tired and kicked and climbed all the way up to the tall iron cross standing in the sun. There was a boy in the shade of the rusted cross with a goat on a leader, another one of these boys selling garnets from a tin can.

‘I do,’ Papa shouted back. Papa would not buy gems from a tin can, but a whim had once again moved him.

Philipp sat on a rock to rest. A stitch had been burning in his left side off and on since the Schwarzsee, where Papa had challenged him to a swim across the lake. His mouth was dry. His feet hurt and his skin was chafed with layers of dried-sweat salt.

Where did these boys come from? Where did they get their garnets? You could go a day without seeing another person up here in the lonely green hills, the sun shining down on the dumb goats and wildflowers, then you’d come upon a lone figure, like the boy under the cross, standing there as if on the spot where he’d been born, like a gnome or spirit of the hills.

The boy said nothing as he poured the stones out into the palm of his hand. Papa said nothing as he pointed at them. Even with the water falling everywhere over this green land in rills and rushing brooks, what prevailed up here was quiet. The great unpeopled silence of the hills dwarfed human voices and the glacial Eiswelt presided above the hills like a span of gods. You were somehow too small to speak before the vastness, as in a temple or a church.

‘Do you know the distance to Mayrhofen?’ Papa said loudly to the boy under the cross, who didn’t answer. Papa held one of the garnets up to the sun, then placed it back in the boy’s palm. The goat was nibbling the petals of a purple flower, and the boy jerked on the rope around its neck. Then he held out his hand again with the garnets in it.

Philipp got up and wearily climbed the pile of rocks. ‘Let’s go then!’ he said. He touched his father’s back and could feel the heat of his father’s body through the cold, wet shirt.

‘All right,’ Papa said. He turned to the mute boy again, shrugged and laughed. ‘What will I do with my heir, here? I think he would like to be rid of me.’

They trudged down the ridge to the path, Papa’s feet falling loudly on the earth, buckles on his rucksack jingling like bells.

‘You haven’t soaked my pack have you?’ Philipp said. ‘My diary is inside.’ Papa had been drinking from the stream below the footbridge.

‘What? No,’ Papa said. He then dragged Philipp’s pack up from the ground and fished his arms through the leather straps. He slapped the pack on his chest with both hands, puffing up a small cloud of dust from the dusty canvas, and heaved it up higher on his chest. He looked at his son then with sage amusement, gold crowns gleaming in his open mouth.

‘I should get out the camera,’ Philipp said. ‘You look very striking there, with the footbridge in the background.’

‘Let me carry my pack the rest of the way at least,’ Philipp said. ‘Mama will be angry with me.’

‘I should listen?’ Philipp said. ‘What about you? You’ll never listen to a doctor in your life!’

‘Why are you standing around?’ Papa said. And he strode ahead on the trail with both packs. Philipp felt so light by comparison, he thought he would float into the sky. ‘Next year, when you pay your own bills, you can do as you like,’ Papa called over his shoulder.

It had been this way since they got lost on Monte Generoso. There had been a woman atop the scree and Papa called to her and started up the sunny steep rocks three times in three different places, but each time he tilted backward off the scree and had to backpedal to the trail. Once, he got his foot stuck. But Philipp stretched himself for a foothold that was the obvious key to the operation, and he made it up with ease on the first try. At the top he spoke to the little woman having lunch on the rocks. She advised they double back. But when he got back down, his father was annoyed with him for wasting time and pretended he had never wanted to ask directions in the first place. He said he’d already figured out the right way. And he’d proceeded onward at a furious pace as if he meant to leave Philipp behind on the mountain. In the morning, when they set out again, he went charging on at the same furious pace and now, by Philipp’s estimation, they were hiking thirty-five kilometers a day. They would scour the entire Alps with the Halsmann family eyeballs, personally testify to everything in the guidebook and a few more places besides, and then discard the guidebook like the rind of a squeezed lemon. They’d been up at 5:30 that very morning and vaulted up the Schönbichlerhorn into its frigid airless winds, had their retinas oxidized in the ether, and their hands seared on the snow and the flint rocks, hot as sunburned metal. They had broken themselves on the mountain and been baptized there above the timber line at the top of the world, where the river of air meets the river of fire. And Papa still insisted on making the evening train at Mayrhofen.

They pushed on over the trodden grass to the Zamserschinder, below which the Zamserbach roared through the leaning pine trees in a torrent of mud between sun-bronzed rocks. Philipp hurt his ankle and they argued again about the pace and the train. ‘It’s not healthy for you,’ Philipp said.

‘Senna leaves?’ his father yelled above the roar of the water. ‘Does a doctor treat a serious heart condition with senna leaves?’

Two young men came up over the hill on the trail. Philipp fell silent. The sound of rushing water closed over everything that had been said, as though it had not been said at all. His father shouted to them in his loud Yiddish-tinged German – ‘Guten Tag! Do you know the distance to Mayrhofen?’ – and his mouth hung open, showing the gold teeth. But the two boys didn’t stop. One of them cupped his hand behind his ear as though he couldn’t hear, and they walked on and laughed when they had passed.

‘No,’ Papa said, in a tone that warned, Do not go any further with this irrelevancy. He hurried on.

‘They said, “It’s the two Jews from the Berlinerhütte.” Remember? We saw them up there.’

Papa could not be embarrassed. But just today at the Furtschagelhaus the Austrians, staring unashamed and blowing at their coffee mugs with red cheeks, had studied him and his father as though they were insects.

‘Ach,’ Papa said. ‘Nature calls, I’m afraid. You go on ahead, Philja, and I’ll catch up to you.’ Papa took Philipp by the arm, raised the bare skin to his mouth, and kissed it.

‘You may be staying in Breitlahner tonight,’ Papa said, ‘but I have to get all the way to Jenbach.’

‘What’s so important in Jenbach?’ Philipp said. He knew. Papa would teach the rocks of Monte Generoso a lesson and break these mountains like a horse.

‘Mama,’ Papa said quietly. The only time his father’s voice quieted was when he was cornered into a confession. It was like that time when the boat had capsized in the Aa – Papa was not good in the stern – and Papa had lost the watch that Mama had inscribed for him. When they’d righted themselves, Philipp kept trying to push off, and Papa kept saying, ‘Wait,’ and Philipp kept dipping his paddle, and Papa said, ‘Wait,’ and Philipp dipped the paddle, until Papa lowered his voice and said, ‘I need a minute.’

His father dropped the first rucksack to the ground and Philipp went over the stone footbridge and down the winding path between the alder bushes, where the mountain rose up steeply above the path and cast it in shadow.

He felt something almost like peace then. It had become a lovely day. Crisp pure air, newly minted by the wind gods of the Eiswelt, blew down over the trembling grass. The sound of the rushing water and the damp pine smell enveloped him. What would be truly lovely would be to have Ruth there beside him. Why was it that he loved her so much more when they were apart? Love – there was that word again. Lugano. Love. Does it mean you’re ‘in love’ if that’s what comes to your mind? How many times should it come before you can say you’re ‘in love’?

Philipp heard a sound of barking dogs and stopped. The sound was so faint, he couldn’t be sure if it were real. But then a louder sound: a sharp cry from behind him on the trail. Just one cry and then nothing but the ceaseless roar of the Zamserbach. He thought it might have been a trick of the Zamser’s waters on his ears, but when he turned it seemed that he saw through the leaves a flash of movement: his father, falling. It was pictorial and still, like an image on a photographic plate – his father tilting backward off the trail at an incredible angle, hands clutching the straps of his rucksack.

He rushed back toward the stone footbridge, and even before he got there, what he suddenly wanted to do was to rush back in time instead of space: to the deck of the Furtschagelhaus, where they’d together looked up at the glacier, the icy firn like massive shining stairs from the rocks of the grassy moraine up into the heavens; to go back before that, to the Schwarzsee, the Black Lake, with its shrunken trees and supralunary mirror that inverted the heavens. His father, who couldn’t swim, had challenged him to a race across the lake. He clung to those memories, though they had not until now been good ones, like a child, suddenly homesick and clinging to the memory of home.

When he reached the footbridge, he saw his father lying below on his back, murmuring.

3. Dr Pessler

That is why I cite the saying backwards: ‘Dum spero, spiro.’
[‘While I hope, I breathe’]

PHILIPP HALSMANN, letter to Ruth Römer, Innsbruck Prison, 1929

They’d been let out of their cages. It was the first time Philipp had breathed the open night air in months and it was so caustic, alpine, and pure it stabbed his lungs. But someone had started a fire in the cigarette bin, so Philipp stood shivering in a corner of the courtyard. He remembered the sound of a real fire, of hot wood coals ticking and popping like needle raindrops tapping on the roof, but dry – like a twinkling of snow crystals slowly packing into themselves.

Horst came back, big boots stomping through the snow puddles. ‘Nein,’ he said. He dumped a bucket of water on the fire and herded them back in. ‘Von jetzt an sind Zigaretten verboten.’

Snow blanketed the Innsbruck Prison. The dungeon doors were locked one by one in a long and echoing recession of bolts clanking in rusted holsters. Horst was angry. But Philipp hadn’t seen a fire since he had been free, in the Gasthaus Stern at Jenbach, with Mama and Papa.

He lay down on the paillasse, blowing on his frozen fingers. He wouldn’t sleep tonight as he hadn’t the night before, because in the morning the new lawyer was coming. So he lay awake, thinking about fire. It was nice, in a way, to be near a fire. Papa used to light a fire on Friday nights in Riga, when the men played pinochle. That one night, the vodka bottle had sat in the snow by the firewood and left puddles among the cards, which stuck to the water, like bugs dragging along a table with wet wings. Mama had baked an apple pie, and Philipp had seen up Esya’s dress. It was after the dog died.

Mama had been able to stand death then. If Papa were here, he would tell her to buy herself a new sweater, a whole new wardrobe. He would stuff the crumpled bills into her hand.

Thpough the high window in his cell, if he stood on the chair, clung to the ledge, and dragged himself up, Philipp could see the tops of three of the limestone peaks north of Innsbruck: the Brandjoch, the one they called ‘Frau Hitt,’ and the Sattelspitzen. From the ceiling, maybe he could have seen down to the green Inn River at the foot of the mountains, but there was no way to climb up so high. So he stared out at the mountains, which had killed his father. They were, he imagined, three people very much like the Innsbruck prisoners, malformed of conscience and immune to regret. But no person had killed his father, only rocks and thin air. His father had fought the mountains heroically and had lost only because of the moral flaw there among the mute rocks and snow and goats. Today clouds were boiling up like steam from the mountaintops into the empty blue stratosphere over Tyrol.

The new lawyer did not understand this. He believed that it was a murder, like these other fools of the Tyrol.

The pass-through on the door slid open. Horst poked through a heel of yellow bread, pinched between two chapped and hairy knuckles. ‘Sie haben einen Besucher,’ the guard said. Philipp took the bread and put it on his stack of books. Friends again.

Then he pulled the chair away from the wall, switched on the light bulb, and placed the chair in what he imagined was a welcoming position. He couldn’t help but take ownership now of the cell with its cracked, dingy white paint, piles of books, newspapers, and parcels, the stack of writing paper on the floor beside the metal bedpan, the paillasse and the little sewing kit on the blanket, the orange with its scarred rind. And he was determined, this time, to be calm so he would not have any more nightmares and so he would not have to discipline himself with push-ups or by skipping another meal. He turned over the picture of his father so it lay face down and pulled his sleeve down to cover the scar, then called out, ‘Kommen Sie herein!’ At the last minute, he tried to pat down his hair. He was skinnier than ever now, and pale, with spectacles that seemed too big and an unkempt and bushy dark beard and coarse brown hair standing up tall on his head. He hated to see his face in the bathroom mirror most of all because he looked so weak.

The door opened, and in came Franz Pessler, short but fit and handsome. He didn’t even look around, just dropped his attaché case on the concrete floor, lifted the chair, and slung it under himself, quite at home. ‘Sit,’ he said.

Philipp held out his hand, but Pessler pulled the attaché case up onto his knees and flipped it open immediately. The attorney had light sea-blue eyes, somewhat narrowly spaced and deeply recessed under a serious blond brow, and they were creased at the outside corners as if from many years gazing at the brightness of the ocean or the desert. The face was slightly round – not in a corpulent way, but substantial like the face of an Argentine race-car driver whose photograph Philipp had once seen. A faint scar slanted on the right cheek: a healthy Aryan face, accustomed to the weather of the mountain. Though his voice was high and staccato, like a sound made in the body of a bird, he was strong, at least in a rude Tyrol sense, not like the cross-eyed Vienna Jew who had screwed everything up already. But Pessler didn’t understand what had happened and this had caused Philipp to fly into a rage.

Pessler looked up from his papers and stared quizzically for a moment. ‘Sit,’ he said again, and Philipp immediately lowered himself onto the paillasse, the prickly sack of straw on the concrete floor where he slept. He would obey at any cost to his dignity; the prison food had once again filled his bowel with air. He drew his thighs tightly together.

‘Our new republic is a worrisome place, isn’t it?’ Pessler said. ‘Let’s hope there’ll be no riots when the decision is reversed.’ Pessler opened up a folder in his case and began reading: ‘“While the father struck me as a very open and agreeable fellow, the son immediately struck me as suspicious and cold.”’ He looked at Philipp inquisitively. Then he continued reading: ‘“The father was friendly, laughed loudly, liked to tell jokes. The son was unfriendly and sullen.” Hans Bauer. “I immediately thought that there is something dangerous about him.” Maria Rauch. “He seemed uncomfortable in the society of other people.” Another witness.’

‘Yes, those are quotations from the transcripts. Then there are the newspapers. “The accused makes a most unfavorable impression.” “Philipp Halsmann is strange in appearance, with a truculent personality. His testimony is marked by aggressive outbursts.” “Vorsitzende Larcher is only trying to help the grumpy little man, who comes across as disagreeable and unlikable.” A Jew, even, who wrote that in Die Wahrheit! “The accused is argumentative and hostile.”’

‘A Jew, even? In Die Wahrheit? You mean a fellow member of the worldwide Jewish banking conspiracy has broken ranks? Ha! And I thought you were educated by Jesuits.’

Pessler did not respond with so much as a twitch of his blond mustache. ‘This is Tyrol,’ he said. ‘The Jewish race is unfamiliar to the people here. Not like in Vienna. And, to be frank, your hair and lips do have a Negroid look.’ Pessler swept his hand through the air as if the point were irrelevant. ‘But let me ask you, are you disagreeable?’

‘I would be less disagreeable if I were not in prison because of a bunch of Heimwehr goatherds who think due process of law means asking the opinion of the local innkeeper’s dog,’ Philipp said.

Pessler again was perfectly still. Everyone who came into the cell always looked up to the high windows as if they themselves were imprisoned, but Pessler was staring straight at him with his sea-bright eyes, examining him like a doctor. Philipp looked out the window at the clear patch of blue.

‘My father had a heart condition,’ Philipp said. By an act of supreme self-control, he did not raise his voice, though they were now back on that ground which had caused him to pound his fists against the wall and break the chair. ‘He fell.’

Pessler shook his head. He cast his eyes around then, as if he might find some evidence to prove his point there in the room. He pointed to the picture frame turned face down on the bench. ‘May I see?’ Pessler said.

Philipp handed him the photograph. It showed Papa sitting in a meadow, looking out at a lake.

Philipp said nothing. These were the coarse terms in which the Tyrolean mind worked – murder, blood libel, race, Jewish perfidy.

Philipp said nothing still. He would not yell, because if he yelled he would have to skip lunch and he was too hungry.

Pessler held up his hands in a calming gesture. ‘Things were hidden from you. Listen to me if you want to get out of here.’

‘You think I want to get out of here?’ Philipp said hotly. ‘I’ll stay in prison a hundred years. No one killed my father but the mountain. All that stupid ice and rock you call your home. And I’ll stay right here until it’s proved!’ He had gone ahead and shouted. He rubbed his empty belly.

‘I didn’t say you killed him,’ Pessler said. ‘I said he was murdered.’

‘You didn’t know my father. He was too strong for anyone to kill. I once saw him get into a fight with a horse and win. A mountain could kill him, but not a man.’ Philipp breathed in the stale air of the cell for a while. It was cold in the cell. Pessler’s hands were white on the attaché case, though he’d left his suit jacket unbuttoned and looked perfectly comfortable. He was steady, clean, blond, impervious to the cold because he was raised on glacier water and pure Alpine wind. And he was impervious to the filth of the cell because he was free and would take with him only what stuck to the soles of his shoes.

‘Your story has to change,’ Pessler said. ‘And the beard makes you look like a criminal.’

Philipp pulled back his left sleeve and held up his wrist. On the underside, which was clear and thin and white, there were two small scar lines. ‘You didn’t read about it in the paper?’ The warden said he would never see another pencil sharpener.

‘I seldom read about trials in the newspapers,’ Pessler said, still leaning back, unmoved as though he hadn’t understood the meaning of the scars.

‘Well,’ Pessler said, standing up, ‘we have more to discuss.’ He placed his foot on a rung of the chair, which Horst had screwed back together, and pushed it against the wall. ‘Is there anything I can bring you when I come back?’

Philipp flipped his father’s picture face down again and watched Pessler with the rage and humiliation still rising like a vapor from his ears. He pulled off his spectacles and washed away the sight of the attorney. He would now have to read Corinne, by Madame de Staël, instead of eat, or maybe he would do a hundred push-ups.

Pessler rapped ceremonially on the doorjamb and was already out in the hallway when Philipp blurted out, in a voice that was hoarse with sudden tears, ‘Apple pie.’

4. Dr Meixner

Great danger lies ahead. There is a sour mood at the Institute of Juridical Medicine and among the medical faculty. Grave danger.

FRANZ PESSLER, ‘Ein Bild des Prozesses,’
Der Fall Halsmann

His mother didn’t understand why he’d attempted suicide. It was because the guilty verdict had forever sealed for him The Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals by Immanuel Kant. When the boys in school made fun of the old Russian’s limp, he had not. He’d attuned his will to the angels as on a pitch pipe, and calibrated his every action against a rational principle of universal good. But what he’d learned in the Alps was the supreme irrelevance of a ‘good will’ in this world. Whatever harmonies resided in his soul, and in that of his father, they resonated nowhere in the cold crevasses and goat skulls of the mountain. Here, law was a ritual carried out in the hearts of goat men, and the lawyers were the minions of the goat men and chased after them in order to decorate their rituals in casuistries. The only rational moral action, then, the only brave action, had been to absent himself from this irrational and untruthful world. But he had by now revised this position somewhat, and he made sure no one knew that he starved himself for punishment, especially not his mother.

It took a long time for Pessler to return. But it may have been a short time. Ten minutes passed like an hour and an hour like an afternoon. You couldn’t see to the end of a month. That was like a schoolchild in Russia trying to see across a Russian winter.

He spent a few hours (minutes) thinking about Horst. Horst needs gratitude, so he’s probably lonely too, he probably lives alone, he probably drinks Obstler Schnapps by himself in a room with no telephone. He calls me Philja and I’ve never mentioned my childhood nickname, so he must read my letters. He probably reads other people’s mail and peeks at ladies’ underclothes in the Hofgarten.

When Pessler entered the cell, he did not say hello and he did not have any apple pie. All he said was, ‘I’m going to have to show you the autopsy photos.’

His excursions, as Horst called them, were another vagary of Austrian justice. It was as though they were aping the Western courts of law without really getting the point or much wanting to. So the prosecution brought him back to the ‘crime’ scene and examined him there in the field, and the defense argued about it, and they all pointed to sticks and rocks and he was given his turn to argue too. It was like a science experiment performed without controls, wild, contaminated, a farce. Pessler said that Karl Meixner, the forensic pathologist who wore his hat indoors, would not permit him to take the autopsy photos. And so they would have to go to Meixner if they wanted to see them. ‘But don’t worry,’ Pessler said. ‘I won’t let him torture you.’

From the Dürkopp, they walked up shady, cold Müllerstrasse, where the windowsills were lined with empty flower boxes. No one seemed to be at home. At the end of the street, just beyond the quiet tombstones of the Friedhof, sat the Institute for Juridical Medicine, still and quiet as if it were another of the grave buildings in the cemetery. The sun lit the entire amphitheater of blue mountains above and shone individually on each of the polished gravestones, one of which, perhaps, belonged to his father.

Meixner was waiting for them inside, but nothing stirred behind the Institute’s dark demilune window high above. They stopped there before the door.

‘Now, you must address him as Herr Doktor,’ Pessler said, steam pluming from his nose. Two bird shadows crossed the bright square sandstone pillars, entombed in their Egyptian silence, and disappeared. ‘Never say “you.” Say “Herr Doktor.”’

Then the gendarme – what they called in German a Polizist – pushed Philipp inside into a musty, unlit hallway, and on after that into a bright room of steel butcher tables that stunk of formaldehyde. There, lying naked to the air, was a corpse, bloated, wet, and white, horny yellow toes pointing at each wall, face compressed and corrugated on one side like a plucked chicken in an icebox. The Polizist pinched his nose shut, then dropped his arm again. Pessler strode past the body and the tables, which had drains in the center for the blood. Philipp strode after him and looked directly at the body and did not pinch his nose shut.

In the adjoining hall, the Polizist stopped by an open doorway and Pessler and Philipp went on into a room full of bell jars. There was no one there. At the base of the tall window facing the door was a row of skulls, a huge one in the middle with a cracked forehead. An enormous stuffed eagle, wings spread in flight, thrust its beak at Philipp from a wicker stand, and in a bell jar by a little writing desk sat a submerged human fetus, its large head bowed over a body thin and curled as if it had been cursed with some disease. In another jar was a bizarre animal, perhaps a mollusk, shelled and pluming with torn inner tissues. It was labeled HERMAPHRODITISMUS VERUS. Or maybe it was a jellyfish. A view camera on a tripod leaned against the wall, and above the camera hung several watercolors of mountain meadows, which were signed ‘K. Meixner.’

No answer came, but beyond the doorway by the black marble laboratory bench someone pushed back a chair, and then Herr Dr Meixner emerged. He didn’t acknowledge either Pessler or Philipp but simply opened a dossier on the bench and began sifting through photographs. Philipp wouldn’t say a word, no matter what they showed him, he wouldn’t move, and he certainly wouldn’t cry. If he cried or acted nervous, he would fast for a hundred days.

Meixner wore a long white lab coat over a taupe suit and black tie. He had on his queer yellow-brown alpine hat, with its high and unpinched crown and its wide slanting brim, like that on a pith helmet. One of the doctor’s dark brows was hitched up higher than the other, as he looked down at the dossier in silence, flicking his crocodile eyes around. His head appeared to be shaved up under the hat and his falling cheeks weighted his big bald head like a pineapple. He had long pendulous earlobes and, amazingly, he wore a wedding ring.

Philipp was debating whether the doctor or his wife were the more insane when Herr Dr Meixner said loudly, ‘You are interested in Hermaphroditismus verus?’ Meixner kept looking at the photographs, but pointed right at the bell jar with the jellyfish. ‘Those are the genitalia of a juvenile human hermaphrodite,’ he said.

Meixner snapped his head up and looked at Philipp fiercely. ‘To you.’ Then Meixner said, ‘Look here,’ and pointed to the dossier. ‘Come, Herr Halsmann, and look! This boy was hit with a shovel.’

Philipp did as he was told so as to avoid future punishments on Madame de Staël’s chopping block. The photograph was taken from directly above and it showed a boy of fourteen or fifteen lying on his back. No blood. The mouth hung open and the fly of his pants was undone.

‘And here a son has killed his parents and stored the bodies together for three weeks,’ Meixner said, looking at Philipp’s face for the first time. It was a mask of perfect calm. Meixner flipped a photograph of an unhappy looking young man on a country road and pulled out another picture showing two corpses, one bloated, the other thin. Philipp kept his spine ramrod straight, and his face completely still. He didn’t turn away. ‘What is fascinating is that the obese mother is relatively preserved,’ Herr Dr Meixner said. ‘The eyeballs have been destroyed by maggots, as you can see, but the internal organs are completely preserved, with no maggots present inside the integument and subdermal fat apart from the Schädelhöhle, the cranial cavity, where many maggots were found in liquefied brain matter.’ He pulled out another picture. ‘The mother was shot just once through the heart. Now the skinny father was shot and stabbed multiple times. The flies laid their eggs not only in the natural openings of the face, but also in the many wounds, and, by contrast, all his body cavities were occupied with maggots with the internal organs thoroughly destroyed.’ Meixner now stared at Philipp for a good long time.

‘It’s interesting work Herr Doktor performs here,’ Pessler interjected. ‘Can we see the Max Halsmann photos now, please?’

Meixner grunted and went through the doorway by the bench. Moments later he returned carrying a large glass bell jar like those that held the fetus and the hermaphrodite genitals. This one contained in the clear fluid a white organ the size of a pot roast, and many floaters, which swayed in unison in the tippy water.

Pessler grabbed Philipp by the shoulders and spun him around, so that he faced the stuffed eagle.

‘Herr Halsmann shows no reaction,’ Meixner said. ‘Only a prison sentence can stir him from his apathy, it appears.’

‘What is that?’ Philipp said, with his eyes still fixed on the beak of the eagle. ‘In the jar.’

‘It’s your father’s head,’ Meixner said loudly. His voice said he was a man who liked for people to hear the truth no matter how weak or ashamed they were before it. Because he was not weak. A good rude truth is like milk to a real Austrian man!

‘Herr Doktor wishes to embarrass me, Philipp,’ Pessler said. ‘I have already informed him that the Institute’s handling of the remains constitutes a criminal act.’

‘No one has violated the little laws of this pygmy state, except der Vatermörder,’ Meixner said. ‘Anyway, the remains were released. We only require the head as a specimen.’

‘I needed to show you the photos, Philipp,’ Pessler said in his ear, ‘to show you that your father was murdered.’

‘A fact of which Herr Halsmann is no doubt aware,’ Meixner said. ‘This case has consumed enough of the faculty’s time already, mein Herr, at great cost to its reputation. I believe I’ve been overly gracious, as have many others, in acceding to the demands of Jews and Viennese mercenaries.’ He added contemptuously, ‘The demands of this sacrosanct … Halsmann family.’

Pessler was pushing him almost into the eagle’s beak, but Philipp wouldn’t turn his head. If the beak touched his face or cut his flesh, he would not cry out.

‘No,’ Meixner said. ‘A proper demonstration should be made on the specimen itself.’

Philipp heard the lid of the jar come off with a ping, and a wet noise and then plum, plum, plum, plum, plum a heavy rain of formaldehyde into the steel basin. ‘Let me turn it this way,’ Meixner said, and there was a sound like someone tossing and catching a cabbage. ‘As the examiners have said repeatedly in court, a fall is impossible. The wound you see here above the root of the nose is seven centimeters across and penetrates the forehead of the skull into the Schädelhöhle, the cranial cavity. See this in the wound? Das ist Gehirn. Brain.’ Again came the sound of Meixner tossing the heavy wet head. ‘Here, above the right ear, an egg-shaped cavity on the skull. The bone is zersplittert to a degree that indicates eight to ten repeated blows with a blunt object. The skin is macerated from repeated bludgeoning.’ Meixner enumerated many other wounds all around the head, while Philipp stared into the beak of the eagle. ‘Beaten, ja?’

There was a thump and a clank of metal. ‘Okay, we are finished then. You can uncover your eyes, Herr Halsmann,’ Meixner said.

But when Philipp turned around, there was the head in a puddle, eyes and mouth closed, like the head of John the Baptist on a platter. It did bear some resemblance to his father, but it had no hair and no eyeglasses and there was a deep hole in the forehead. The professor wiped his hands on a towel, and with a scissor forceps he lifted a stone from another tray. ‘One more thing,’ Meixner said. He held the stone to another wound over the right ear, where a piece of yellow fat was hanging on the white pinna. ‘The stone is from the crime scene. Same exact size as the wound. Now look.’ He held the rock under a magnifying glass on a stand. He turned it back and forth with the glinting pincers. ‘You see? Skin. Blood. Hair. It matches Max Halsmann’s hair. He was beaten to death with a stone.’ Meixner then set the stone down and with the forceps pulled a flap of skin down from high on the bald pate of the head, covering its eyes. ‘Der Knochen ist so klein zersplittert, dass sich die Splitter gar nicht mehr zusammensetzen. Like Humpty Dumpty.’ Philipp’s German had begun to abandon him, as if he were still at the Tiedeböhl Gymnasium, but he held fast and scarcely blinked.

Meixner left the room, and Pessler stepped in front of the head. Die Wunde. The wound. The wound. Um den Schädel fand man eine grosse, tiefe Wunde an der Stirn, oberhalb der Nasenwurzel, durch welche die Schädelhöhle eröffnet wurde. There was no time to work it out.

Meixner came right back with the pictures and spread them on the marble. Another corpse.

Philipp looked at the man in the first picture. There was something very gentle and docile about this body in the photograph lying peacefully on its back, eyes closed, lips just barely drawn together. The man was big and thick like his father, and the nose was like his father’s. But the spectacles were missing.

‘Die Wunde,’ Meixner was saying again. There was talk of centimeters and angles again. Especially the deep wound on the forehead did look like the result of violence. But not by a stone – rather by something sharp – as if someone had hammered a piton down into the forehead.

In both the supine and prone photographs, the head of the man appeared to be resting on the edge of a wooden board. In the photo where the man lay on his front, the neck was extended, chin lifted like a Christmas goose, arms aligned obediently at his sides, palms up.

Philipp reached past his attorney to the head on the platter as if he would touch it. ‘Could I see inside the mouth please?’ he said loudly.

AUSTIN RATNER

The Jump Artist

Table of Contents

1. The Hunters

2. The Zamserschinder

3. Dr Pessler

4. Dr Meixner