The Long and Spectacular Life of Agnes Magnusdottir 21

Extract from The Ministry of Complaints

 

Hans stood and walked to the window. He had thick tears running down his cheeks.

    “The terrible shame of it all!” 

    He beat at his chest with both fists. 

    “Oh that we live in such terrible times!”

    Although the reflection staring back at him in the glass was sharply defined all he could see were those bodies in the Aufhocker Morgue, their faces removed, their eyes dancing. 

    He understood now who they were.

    The nation’s finest writers hunted down and brutally murdered thanks to the reports Zelig had made for Wolf. 

    

He moved as if wading through a quagmire of thick mud. At the Ministry of Complaints he stamped forms he shouldn't have stamped, didn't stamp forms he should have. At home he couldn't sleep or eat. Going around his head like a swarm of bees was the same question. Should he tell Amelia and her mother what he had discovered about Zelig and the dead writers or not?

    But subconsciousness is a powerful thing…

    It wasn't until he finished work on the third day and found his feet taking him in the direction opposite to his home that he realised he had made his decision. 

 

It was the tall hats and blue uniforms he saw first. Then the crowd. 

    Another suicide?

    Did they jump or were they pushed?

    The entrance to Amelia and her mother’s building was cordoned off. There were wooden barricades, more policeman and a blue van with blacked out windows waiting with its back doors open. 

    It was a teenage boy with his shoulder blades showing through the back of his jacket and eyes as small and darting as a rat’s who let the cat out of the bag. 

    “Herr Watzmann and his cronies have come for someone. I wouldn't want to be in their shoes.”

    Parked directly behind the police van was a long low black vehicle with five or six windows on each side. On its bonnet was a single flag. In the centre of the flag was a large W. 

    “Someone's going to get their arse ripped apart. And thank fuck its not mine.”

    The teenager grimaced. 

    “That Watzmann really is a cunt.”

    Time speeded up. It slowed down. The sun went behind a cloud. It started to snow. 

    Finally, as if the snow was exactly what they had been waiting for, a policeman scurried over and opened the rear door of the long low vehicle and out stepped an extremely small man with a polished dome of a head and thick glasses, like the bottom of medicine bottles. 

    Everything that was going to happen was inevitable. There wasn't a thing anyone could do about it. 

    And more was the pity. Just the blasted code had been cracked! 

    Amelia appeared first and then her mother. Their heads were down and their arms, which were straight out before them, were secured by thick metal handcuffs.

    Helplessly Hans watched as they were shepherded into the back of the waiting van and the doors slammed shut.

    Only then did Herr Watzmann raise a clenched fist above his head and gave the air a punch. On his face was an extremely self satisfied smile. 

 

Chapter 14.

 

"Around that time, this was in the early nineteen twenties you understand, it was not uncommon for our men to go seal hunting. It was partly for sport and partly for necessity, seal furs were warm and our winters, as they remain so now, were long and cold. Very long and very cold. I don't think you Europeans can possibly understand what it is like to spend many months of the year in a frozen darkness. It requires a certain strength of character. And that was another point of the seal hunt. It was said to make a man out of boys, a right of passage if you like. During the long journey out and then back again it was believed that the child would pass from being a boy to a man.

    "Ásberg Jónsson, Agnes Magnusdottir’s grandfather, was taken on his first seal hunt when he was just twelve years old. This was an exceptionally young age, even back then when children were expected to grow up so much more quickly, but it was thought the expedition might do the young Jónsson some good. There was already talk about him and not of a kind that was to his credit.

    "Jónsson was known to be something of a bully. Not a vicious bully, punching and kicking his way through life but a bully nevertheless. There was a cruel streak to him. One day he fooled another boy into eating a Popsicle he had meticulously made from his own urine, another time he stole the shoes of the boy he was tasked to clean the school stables out with. Not so bad you think but as a result this other boy had to walk home in his socks and subsequently lost two of his toes to frostbite and infection. And so it was decided, the parents of this injured boy being at the forefront of this jury, that Jónsson should be taken away on a seal hunt. The badness, it was hoped, would be worn out of him."

    Arisa sighed and rubbed at her forehead. 

    "What do the say? The best laid plans of man and beasts...? 

    "It was on the fifth night that it happened. Up until then all had gone well, Jónsson had been the model companion, not complaining about anything and helping out whenever possible with whatever assistance he could offer. 

    "On the fifth night, however, everything changed.  The hunting party had at last reached the seal colony and in anticipation of the next day’s sport, as was the long held tradition, they had all proceeded to get raucously drunk. Or almost all of them. Jónsson refused to join in. 

    "Although he was only twelve Jónsson would have been encouraged to drink, this being a part of his journey towards becoming a man, his first taste of alcohol. But instead of accepting the proffered glass Jónsson took himself off to his tent, his face a mask none of the men had been able to read. More’s the pity. 

    "It was Ari Grotisen who found him. Grotisen had woken in the early hours of the morning with a desperate need to empty his bladder. Having wandered a discrete distance from the camp he happened to look down towards the shore. At first he wasn't sure what he was seeing. Then, when he was, he couldn't believe his alcohol soaked eyes. They were miles and miles from anywhere and yet there, right in the centre of all the lounging seals, cutting and beating at them, was a human figure, a club in one hand, something sharp and glinting in the other. But that wasn't what so shocked Ari. What really surprised him was that the figure was completely naked. Naked. And it was absolutely freezing. 

    "Stumbling forward to investigate what the hell was going on Grotisen found himself confronted with a nightmare scene, one that he never forgot to the end of his days, and one that, when begged quite enough, he told to all the children that came to visit the sweet shop he ran with his wife, me included."

    Arisa took a deep breath and then a long swig of her champagne. 

    "The naked figure, as you have probably guessed, was none other than the young Ásberg Jónsson. As Ari called out to him to ask him what he was doing, it was supposed to be fun and not a massacre, he saw Ásberg drop to his knees, reach into the slit he had just made in the body of the seal at his feet, and pull out the still beating heart. With a swift movement Jónsson brought it up to his mouth and ate the whole thing, the blood running down his cheeks, a look of sublime happiness on his face."

 

"But what does it mean?"

    I scrawled the words out quickly and pushed the piece of paper towards Arisa.

    Without picking the page up she looked at it and gave a small laugh. 

    "Meanings are for mornings. The brain is so much sharper in the morning, replenished by a full night’s sleep." 

    Pushing herself up she retrieved our two glasses in a movement that indicated our meeting was over. 

    "I am just an old woman who was spoken too much and taken up far too much of an intelligent man’s time. We should go to bed." 

    As I stood at the doorway, wanting to thank her for all that she had told me she thrust the scrapbook into my hands. 

    "You can keep this. I only ask that if you find Magnusdottir then you let me know what her story is. I have often wondered what happened to her. Such a sweet young woman."

 

Zelig Krüger's Diary Pages 7, 8, 9, 10

 

It was pure pride that led me to this. How I had risen like a choirboy’s erection under Wolf’s praise. And now what? I might as well have murdered those good, honourable men myself. 

    That first day back at the library after that terrible party I felt the books were mocking me. How they looked down on me, snivelling little wreck that I was. I was sure that if they could have managed it they would have thrown themselves down from the shelves and buried me under their collective weight. 

    I pulled out one of the books, grabbing wildly in my madness, a heavy green hardback, and hit myself across the face with it, once and then again, harder and harder and harder. 

    "Take that you little bottom-feeding shit," I cried. "Take that and that and that!"

    I carried on and on until I became quite insensible. 

    It was only on waking that something momentous came to me. 

    The previous Friday I had submitted a new report to Wolf. The report concerned one Schubert Singer, a rather fine writer in my opinion. And I had just condemned him to death.  

    That was the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. 

    I would not be party to this anymore. I would not have another death on my hands even if it led inevitably to my own demise.

    I would find Singer and I would warn him. 

 

The name, Schubert Singer, would of course be a pseudonym. It went without saying that all books were published in secret, underground, and then distributed slyly from hand to hand to be read by candlelight under the bedcovers at night. Or sitting on the toilet with the door firmly locked. So it was no good looking for any Schubert Singers in the telephone directory. If it was that easy then Wolf would never have needed my services.

    I thought back over my recently submitted report. Schubert Singer was a young man I had concluded. There was a brazenness and confidence to his writing that had not been worn down by age. And he was good at constructing things.   

    One of the novels concerned two soldiers, childhood friends who because of chance and circumstance find themselves on opposite sides of a war neither believe in. Determined that they will not fight against each other they build a boat in secret and one dark night they sail away. 

    Another of his novels was about two bank robbers. They operate by renting a room near to the bank they intend to rob and then over the course of time they dig a tunnel. 

    It was the way Singer described the building of the boat and the construction of the tunnel that I established that his expertise was outside the realm of a common man’s. 

    "You are looking for an artisan of some sort," I had written. "A fairly young one with blonde hair and a moustache. All Singer’s men, first the two soldiers and then the two bank robbers, have blonde hair and moustaches. I am sure he is describing himself. Writers like to do this very much for they are, at heart, vain beasts. Why else would you want to create your own world?"

    There was also something else, something important and a little bit out of common habits which I hadn't put in the report and something which came to me then with the force of a sledgehammer. I had come to the conclusion that Singer was a lover of his own men, a homosexual. It was there in the texts, not explicit but obvious. The soldiers and the bank robbers had loved each other. And why would Singer write about this kind of love if he wasn't an indulger himself? 

    This fact would be the basis of my plan. After work that day, instead of going home, I set off in search of Schubert Singer. I only hoped once more that I wasn’t too late.
 

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