Tretjak (7 page)

She never talked about the old days. Especially not about what might have been the hardest time the hotel had experienced. The owner had suddenly become very ill and could not work any longer. Her husband had not been there; had abandoned her overnight. One could see that the hotel was leaderless. The crisis had ended with the death of the owner. That was now over 30 years ago. When the hotel had organised a party on the occasion of Maria's 80th birthday they had wanted to invite the little boy, who back then had lived with his sick mother in the hotel. His name was Gabriel Tretjak. Maybe Maria would have enjoyed seeing the now grown-up boy again, if he had come to the party. It had not been easy to find his address: St-Anna-Platz, Munich. Twice the invitation had been sent. But Tretjak had not reacted, had not even politely declined.

 

On this day, like every other day, Maria started her late shift with a short chat at the reception desk. She always asked whether any of the guests were titled, who was a doctor, a Professor X or a Magistrate Y. Or nowadays more and more often the guest was a Frau Professor or Frau Dr Z. Maria loved titles, and she loved to address the guests properly when she met them. Between 5:30 and 6pm she would turn down the beds in the rooms for the night. She liked doing this and gave it her very special touch: the crisp white linen was folded back in a sharp corner. A guest once told her that it looked a little bit like the floppy ear of a big white rabbit.

Maria knew that a professor had checked into room 242, a new guest, who had never stayed at the Blauen Mondschein before. Just before 6pm, Maria knocked on the door and entered when there was no reply. The first thing she noticed was the huge bunch of flowers standing next to the television. Different kinds of roses, and lots of them, in all sorts of colours. The flowers definitely were not compliments of the hotel, that much Maria knew. It only placed small bunches in the rooms, flowers from the garden. And in the garden, they only grew yellow roses and a few orange ones.

Only then did Maria notice that the professor was in fact in the room. He was lying on the bed, covered with a white sheet, which was not white anymore, but drenched in deep red. Maria now saw that the whole of room 242 was covered with blood, the floor, the ceiling, blood everywhere. Maria did not scream. She just left the room, closed the door, and ran down the hall to the stairs, maybe just a tiny little bit faster than normal. She flew down two flights of stairs and told the receptionist what had happened.

15 May

Mörlbach, Jedlitschka Farm, 12.15am

A man should not try to prove to others what he is worth. He should prove to himself what he is worth. That's what makes him attractive. Gabriel Tretjak had been a student when he read these sentences – in an interview with a French actress he adored. She didn't want to notice immediately, she said, that a guy was wearing an expensive suit. In the morning, after she had gone to bed with him, she wanted to
feel
the jacket, casually tossed over the chair the night before, and
feel
that he thought he was worth wearing cashmere, preferably triple ply. Tretjak remembered these sentences. And he remembered how impressed he had been as a child when he saw a single word in the papers on a Rolls Royce specifying how much horsepower the engine had: ‘enough.'

Fiona Neustadt, who had only this afternoon looked into the high fees listed in Tretjak's account books, was obviously looking out for a flashy car. Tretjak drove a charcoal grey BMW without a model number or any other visible distinguishing characteristics, but with enough power under the bonnet and special additional equipment inside, which was not immediately obvious.

When he saw Fiona Neustadt standing, as arranged, outside Scarletti, the ice cream parlour on the Rotkreuzplatz, he immediately noticed that she had not followed his instructions. She was wearing jeans, trainers, a thin grey sweater and a black leather jacket. He caught her attention by honking and she got into the car.

‘Where is your hat?' he said while turning the car around and taking off in the direction of the middle ring road. ‘And where are your gloves? You'll be freezing. It is cold where we're going.'

‘Go ahead: tell me, where are we going?'

He had already noticed this afternoon that she had an iPhone. ‘Would you like to put the coordinates of our destination into your smart-phone?' he asked.

‘Google Maps?' she asked and took her phone from her jacket pocket.

‘No,' he said. ‘Google Maps is too limited. Put M-51 into an ordinary search engine and look for pictures. Capital M and the numbers 5 and 1.'

Fiona Neustadt typed the digits onto the display. He turned off the ring road and connected with the autobahn in the direction of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. It was already after midnight. The roads were empty. Tretjak had only ever been alone when he had driven along this route. He had surprised himself a little, by making it different today. But recently he had surprised himself a lot. More and more often he felt the urge to change things a tad, to change his habits, his rituals, and mess up his principles a little. Like a planet wanting to leave its orbit.

‘Ah,' he heard from the passenger seat. He saw the image on the display of the iPhone when he glanced over to his side.

‘M-51 is the Whirlpool Galaxy. It is 25 million light-years away and part of the Hounds Constellation. This is where we are travelling tonight, if you agree.'

Tretjak had no idea whether Fiona Neustadt knew what a galaxy was, whether she was looking at the image appreciating the fact that here was a mass of billions of suns, very similar to our galaxy, the Milky Way. He did, however, sense that the picture impressed her. The arms of the spiral lunging out, the red and blue dots, which showed the age of the suns, the dark dust bands between the brilliant light sources – all this in front of the pitch dark sky of the universe.

‘Do you have music in the car?' she asked when he took the exit marked Hohenschäftlarn.

‘No,' Tretjak answered. ‘I'm afraid you have to find a radio station you like. I practically never listen to music. But we're almost there.'

He directed his car towards Mörlbach. The road ran through hilly territory, through fields and forests. During the day one would have been able to see the Alps from here. Now, however, it was totally dark, only occasionally a light appeared, which belonged to a house. Once the car lights picked up a deer on the right side of the road. For the last few minutes they had driven in silence, and this silence was getting a bit tense.

Tretjak picked up his telephone and hit speed dial. ‘Frau Jedlitschka, it's me, your tenant,' he said. ‘I am going to be there in a few minutes. Could you switch off the lights on the farm? Thank you.'

How many times had he offered to have a remote control system installed so that he could switch off the lights? But the old lady had told him that she couldn't sleep because of the bad circulation in her legs and was up anyway, sitting in her kitchen. The young family was sleeping in the annex and would not be woken up by the telephone. Between Mörlbach and Bachhausen Tretjak made a sudden and sharp turn onto a dirt road. It was now almost eight years ago that Tretjak had crisscrossed this area south of Munich to find the ideal position for his telescope. He had got lost many times, had talked to the wrong people – it had been a time-consuming business. But then suddenly, from the top of a hill, he had spotted the Jedlitschka Farm. It was lying there, totally by itself, not a single neighbour anywhere close by. There was a big old farmhouse, the first floor framed with a wooden balcony decorated with flowerpots full of geraniums. Next to the old farmhouse was a small annex, almost like a bungalow, with a terrace and a round plunge pool for the children. In front of both buildings was a yard paved with concrete, with a wooden barn on the left and two wheat silos on the right of a brick-built shed for the tractors and trailers.

Tretjak had been interested in the back of this shed. From there one had unobstructed southerly views, with a deep horizon and not another house in sight, which could have produced light pollution at night. The Jedlitschka family back then was made up of the old farmer and his wife, plus their son and his wife and two small kids. Tretjak had negotiated with the old farmer, an open and friendly man with a Bavarian moustache covering a small harelip. He had gone there twice and then they had had a deal: Tretjak was allowed to construct a small observatory with a permanently installed telescope. For the space and the bit of electricity he needed he wanted to pay an annual rent. The farmer had suggested 600 euros, and Tretjak, who thought the sum embarrassingly low, had countered with 800. Laughingly, old Jedlitschka had shaken hands on 700. He did not want a contract: ‘If you are quiet and don't need any light you can look up at the sky from here for another 20 years if you want.' The old man had died since then, struck down by a heart attack sitting on his Bulldog-tractor in the middle of the corn harvest, but the arrangement persisted. Once a year, just before Christmas, Tretjak visited the family and brought them small gifts. Otherwise they did not get to see him at all, because he came only when it was dark. A path circled the whole farm, leading directly to the observatory, the small white building with the rotating cupola on top of the roof.

 

*

 

Fiona Neustadt turned out to be a capable and useful companion on the way into the universe. She did not ask any questions and left it to him to explain what he thought important. The thing about the darkness, for example: there was no light whatsoever, so the pupils would dilate, only one small red flashlight was permitted. Tretjak took the tax inspector by the hand when they left the car and they trudged through the darkness in the light of the red glimmer. And the thing about the heat: no radiators near the telescope, because otherwise the air would oscillate and the images become blurred. When they entered the observatory, Tretjak opened a little closet and took out two fleece pull-overs, a fleece cap and woollen gloves which he handed to his companion, who remained standing in a corner while he got the telescope ready. Tretjak mastered each and every task as if he were sleepwalking, moving safely and quickly through the darkness.

His telescope was a Celestron C14, with a mirror measuring 35 centimetres in diameter and a black tube which was mounted on a black column in the middle of the room. A complicated mechanism with counterweights allowed the instrument to be turned in every direction and every angle. Red spots lit up on an electronic dashboard. And then cupolas opened over their heads and with a muffled motor noise revealed a metre-wide glimpse of the star-filled sky. The fresh night air carried in the smell of the surrounding meadows.

Tretjak screwed an ocular into the telescope. ‘Sit down here on the observation chair,' he said, ‘the show is about to begin.'

He had spent many a night here. Sometimes he stayed until dawn. The reliability of the universe was immensely calming, he found. With his telescope he could look up old acquaintances with wonderful names, stars like Betelgeuse, gas regions, in which new stars were born like the Orion nebula, and milky ways like the Galaxy with the Black Eye. There were remnants of supernovas and formations known as dark clouds, globular clusters and binary stars... each season was different. During the course of the night these old acquaintances crossed the whole firmament at quite a pace, so quickly in fact that one got the impression not of sitting in an observation chair, but on a carousel, and in a way that was right: the earth was a carousel, a tiny carousel in an infinitely huge fairground.

Tretjak explained to the tax inspector that everything she was seeing belonged to the past. If light needed 25 million years to reach Earth from the Whirlpool Galaxy, then the image of the galaxy was 25 million years old.

The more her eyes became accustomed to the darkness the lighter Tretjak's observatory seemed to her. In the end she could make out the contours in his face and the sparkle in his eyes. That was how they spent nearly two hours together.

At one point Tretjak had to think back to that afternoon and her question, what exactly he did for a living. And he remembered that he had sat with the farmer's wife in her kitchen and had talked with her, whose breathing became heavier from year to year and whose legs kept swelling, about exactly the same thing. Why was it, Mrs Jedlitschka had pondered, that people longed so much for somebody else to take care of matters for them. ‘The more well known they are, the more money they have, the deeper is that longing,' he had responded. And he had told her a little about what his clients asked him to do, only the harmless stuff of course. In the end she had said: ‘So you are a fixer...' And after a while she had added: ‘You know, Mr Tretjak, in the old days you wouldn't have made a lot of money doing what you are doing. Back then people were too stingy, at least around here. Maybe also there was not so much to fix back then.' From that day onwards the old farmer's wife had called him The Fixer.

Tretjak turned the telescope in the direction of the constellation of Leo, where a particularly bright spot was visible. ‘This is Jupiter,' he said and looked at his watch. ‘In four minutes you will be able to observe how one of its moons passes in front of it.'

‘In four minutes,' said Fiona Neustadt. ‘What do we do if it is late?' She rubbed her hands together for warmth.

 

It was almost three o'clock when Tretjak stopped his car in front of the long-closed ice cream parlour on the Rotkreuzplatz back in Munich. Fiona Neustadt had taken off the fleece and thrown it on the back seat. He admittedly had expected her to lean over to the driver's seat to kiss him good-bye and thank him. But nothing like that happened. She seemed tired, opened the passenger's door, and had already set her foot outside the car, when she looked around at him again and said: ‘That was very interesting. I have never seen something like that before. Good night.' Then the door fell shut and she disappeared through the entrance to one of the apartment buildings. When Tretjak later, back in his garage, folded the fleece to stow it in the boot, he stopped for an instant and smelt it. Grapefruit. No doubt about it.