The Sleeping Nymph, page 11
Teresa craned her neck to get a closer look. The entries were dense but neat, chronicles of a time she and most others knew so little about. It was a bitter irony that the value of a memory was so often recognized when the person capable of passing it on was no longer alive to do so. She thought of her parents and her grandparents who had lived through the war and had remembered it clearly: they had tried to tell her about it, but she had been young and hadn’t paid them much heed. The hunger for life, which could be such a potent force in youth, tended to overshadow the misfortunes of the past. But thinking about it now, she felt poorer for not having listened.
“The man you’re looking to find out more about is mentioned in the entry dated May 9th, 1945,” Father Georg continued. “Of course, they didn’t know his name then. I’ll read the passage out to you now, but from the beginning, so that you may understand the true circumstances of those terrible days.”
Teresa was intrigued by this observation.
“Do you feel that the reverberations of the war could be considered a mitigating factor in the event of a homicide?” she asked.
The intensity in Father Georg’s expression was of a magnitude Teresa had rarely encountered.
“I believe that death begets death, Superintendent, even in the purest hearts. Many good people killed to protect themselves, and many more would have done the same had they needed to.”
“That’s not what I would have expected to hear from a man of God,” said Marini.
Father Georg brushed his fingers over the page.
“We can’t even imagine what war is, Inspector,” he said. “The kind that breaks into your home, manhandles your kids and savages your wife. I’d urge you to listen before you judge.”
Bovec, May 9, 1945
The war that has soaked the world in blood has ended on paper and in the politicians’ speeches, but the final echoes of its tragic violence endure in this stretch of Yugoslavia. The bullets of Marshal Tito’s 9th Corps still hiss and slice through the night, not far from here. Some of these men are no longer men but beasts thirsting for blood, as if there hadn’t been enough spilled into the earth already. They seem to crave it, even their own people’s, if necessary. We live in terror. They are oblivious to ideals, to responsibility, to duty. They no longer know the meaning of honor. They strut around like lords of sin, cowards hiding under the festering cloak of impunity.
War plants the seeds of mournful fruits into every human soul. The flower of the basest of evils has blossomed in theirs: the evil that preys on the meek. A woman can no longer leave the city to go into the fields unless she is accompanied by a man. Animals are not safe when they are out grazing and sometimes not in the barns, either. The elderly who live in isolation are harassed and coerced into giving up what few possessions they have. Robbery, beatings, violence: that is what the soldiers I am about to write about shall always be remembered for.
Around dawn this morning, they arrived in Bovec, a ragtag band of nine. Demons, the lot of them.
Their leader, who never divulged his rank, called himself Mika. An ancient scar cut his face in half, though I think he could not even have been forty.
They made all of us—even the elderly who can hardly walk and the sick—come out into the street, wearing nothing but the mantle of sleep. They combed through the town and turned it inside out. They kept barking orders. They lashed out indiscriminately at anyone who happened to linger at the door of their home, or dared to lift their eyes from the ground. They were looking for anyone who opposed Tito, shouting at the town to hand them over immediately. Needless to say, there was no opposition in town—only poor exhausted souls who had briefly harbored the illusion that they had finally found some peace again.
They searched every single home and all the stables. They ate our food, sat at our tables and took turns beating up some of the men—a couple of them little more than boys—to induce the others to speak out. They took them out into the town square and hit them with the butts of their rifles until they lost consciousness. I feared for the women, for I saw the primal thirst with which those beasts looked at them—and particularly at young Maja Belec, on whom their collective attention was soon focused. They made her scream in terror as they lifted her petticoat up to her waist, exposing her nakedness for all to see. But her tears only fueled the fire of their wickedness. They shaved off her mother’s hair, too, declaring that they suspected her of collaborating with the Nazis, only because she had dared to look at them in a way they hadn’t liked.
Thank God, and surely by the grace of St. Lenart, they did not go any farther.
They stayed until sunset, until finally, their bellies full of our food and our fear, they moved on to resume their search of the forests, and we never saw them again.
But the passage of the soldiers of the 9th Corps was not the day’s only calamity.
Zoran Pavlin, the lumberjack, found the body of a man in the woods. His wife, who came to fetch me, described him as a corpse painted in blood and still breathing.
I hurried toward their home. The Pavlins had put him in the stables. He certainly did appear to be dead—and yet he was breathing. Using a lamp to look more closely revealed the faintest movement around his ribs, which were expanding and contracting.
He was covered in blood and mud that even the rain hadn’t been able to wash away. His coloring a deep red, he smelled of death.
He looked like a newborn demon, lying on the hay curled up like a fetus in the womb of the darkness that had delivered him. In one hand he gripped a leather bundle, which he refused to release, even when he lay unconscious. I tried to loosen the grip of his fingers around it, but his strength was such that I failed.
His clothes were in tatters, torn all over and soaked in blood, and at first I thought he must have received some mortal blow that had left him fighting for his life. But I was wrong.
We stripped him. The lumberjack’s wife brought some warm water and clean cloths, which we used to wash him: we discovered that apart from a handful of light scrapes over his arms and thighs, the young man carried no other wounds. The blood wasn’t his.
We looked at each other then, distressed by our discovery, and the thought that had come to us all in the same moment escaped our lips in the softest murmur: Have we taken in a savage killer?
Father Georg paused.
“The same question you’re wondering about now, seventy years later, Superintendent,” he remarked.
Teresa nodded, disturbed by the account. She and Marini exchanged a series of quick glances: Alessio Andrian had been covered in blood that wasn’t his own. The sinister rumors about the day he had been found could now be confirmed.
Teresa turned to Father Georg again.
“Did Father Jakob write any more on this?” she asked him.
“He made a few more notes over the following days. Let me see if I can find those passages for you.” The priest ran his finger down the page. “Here’s one,” he said, reading aloud again.
May 11, 1945.
The young man remains unconscious. He is running a fever and was in a state of delirium through the night. He has drank barely half a glass of water, and I believe he must be severely dehydrated. I wonder how long it has been since he last ate. We worked out from the handkerchief that was tied around his neck that he is an Italian partisan. Zoran Pavlin says he can deliver a message to his comrades. With any luck, they will come to retrieve him soon.
His hand remains clasped around what I think may be a drawing. I haven’t attempted to take it away from him again, for he gets agitated when I do, as if it were his very life I was trying to pry away. Once, for the briefest of moments that was nevertheless enough to frighten me, he looked up and stared at me with black and burning eyes, the warning not to touch the drawing like a soundless howl from his closed lips.
Teresa thought of Andrian then, of the unexpected strength the old man had displayed the day before when he’d held the drawing in place with his hand. The strength of insanity, perhaps.
“It was indeed a drawing, and one that he’d made himself,” she said, showing Father Georg the photograph of the Sleeping Nymph. “It’s dated April 20th, 1945. I wonder what Alessio Andrian did during the weeks in between.”
The priest picked up the photograph and studied it for a time.
“He wandered around the woods,” he replied, lost in reverie. “Nothing to eat, nothing to drink. Shivering with fever. It’s certainly a vivid portrait, and masterly in its execution.”
“Andrian was probably suffering the effects of a powerful shock. The question is, what could have happened to unsettle him so deeply? What death?”
Father Georg shook his head.
“Humans are capable of killing their fellow humans, and sometimes they do, but there’s nothing to say they should necessarily enjoy doing so, or even have a choice in the matter,” he noted.
“Are you saying that Andrian may have been forced to kill someone in order to protect himself? He only had scratches on him. If he was merely defending himself, then his reaction was disproportionate to the offense. We believe the victim was female. Father Jakob wrote in his journal that those were dangerous times for young women.”
“I never heard of any acts of sexual violence committed by your partisans around here or along the border. I will not claim to know what may have happened, Superintendent. Nor can I presume to enter the mind of a man I don’t even know, and whom we’re judging for a murder he may or may not have committed in wartime. But there’s one thing I’m sure of: the young man’s deteriorated state as Father Jakob describes it doesn’t strike me as that of a cold-blooded killer. Rather, I can’t help but sense a kind of overwhelming despair coming from the man. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Teresa took back the photograph the priest had handed her.
“Andrian is a sick man, Father. His mind is not healthy, and perhaps never has been.”
“Your colleague gave me some background on the case when he got in touch. I suppose it was necessary for him to do that, so that I’d understand how important it was that I should help in any way I could. I understand this artist may have taken someone’s life in order to paint this portrait.”
Teresa’s fingers lingered briefly on the face of the nymph.
“Perhaps what you’re describing as despair was actually a form of psychiatric disorder—serious enough to lead him to kill someone,” she said.
“That may be so, but it wasn’t anyone from in and around Bovec. There are no reports of violent deaths or disappearances from around that time. If there had been, Father Jakob wouldn’t have failed to record them.”
“Where do you think Andrian could have come from?”
“It’s hard to say. He could have come through the western end of the valley, or along the pass farther north. The line of the border isn’t far from here and runs across the whole region, from the Alps to the Adriatic Sea.”
“And is that the end of Father Jakob’s notes on the matter?”
The priest flicked through a couple more pages.
“I’m afraid so. There are just a few more lines to say that the young man never uttered a single word, not even so much as a sigh. The partisans collected him the next day, and no one here heard anything about him ever again, never even learned his name. That is, until yesterday.”
“All right,” said Teresa. “Thank you.”
The priest returned the journal into its sheath.
“I wish I could have been of more assistance, Superintendent, but as you’ve heard, the journal holds little in the way of concrete information.”
“I can assure you it’s been very useful in allowing me to form a clearer picture of the case.”
Teresa was standing up to leave, when her phone rang inside her bag.
“Excuse me, I’ll have to take this.”
She stepped away before answering Parri’s call.
“What is it, Antonio?”
The coroner wasted no time.
“Come to my office as soon as you can, Teresa. I have some rather interesting updates.”
“Have you received the results of the genetic testing?”
“Yes.”
Parri’s reticence was unusual and puzzled Teresa. Ordinarily, he was more than happy to expound.
“Aren’t you going to give me anything?” she asked.
“To tell you the truth, it’s something of a long story, and not even too pertinent to the field of medical science.”
“Then what is it pertinent to?”
“Fourteen hundred years of history, more or less. Hurry up; I’m waiting for you.”
22
May 1945
The moon, rising in a wispy purple haze behind the peaks of the Kanin, was blood red that night. A bad omen, according to the lumberjack’s wife.
And not the only one, either. A few days ago, a goat had given birth to a one-eyed, tar-black kid that had begun to bite its mother before it had even learned how to breathe.
The lumberjack had arranged for someone to pray over the barn and had devoted more time to the kid than to any of the other animals, in keeping with conventional wisdom: if you light one candle to God, light another to the devil, as the saying went. It was right to fear evil, but one should know how to keep on its good side, too.
Ever since that day he’d had trouble falling asleep, and now the bloody moon fueled his unease.
As he entered the forest with his wife clinging to his arm and a lantern to guide his steps, he tried to will all inauspicious thoughts away. He would rather have been in bed, sleeping the sleep of the just, but first there was something he had to do to protect his home from misfortune.
The soldiers of Tito’s 9th Corps had come that morning, crossed his land all the way to the woods and back. He’d been forced to give them fresh milk and a sow. They were looking for deserters, and their thirst for blood was matched only by their hunger for the food they took by force.
He overheard them speaking of a young man who had died in the woods not far from the lumberjack’s fields. Those savages had just left him there, without even bothering to give him a proper Christian burial. His wife had been pestering him about it since, unable to bear the thought of that poor soul to whom absolution and paradise had both been denied. He wasn’t comfortable, either, with the idea of a rotting corpse just beyond his garden. If it rained, it might contaminate his crop.
“We must bury him,” his wife had pleaded.
They had waited for nightfall before setting out with a spade, some holy water and a wooden crucifix.
They didn’t have to go far. They found the corpse lying on a bed of ferns.
The lumberjack brought his lamp closer.
Blood. Blood all over. It covered the corpse from head to toe like a second skin.
The body looked so gaunt that it was as if death had been eating away at it for days, though without causing it to bloat.
“Mother of God!”
His wife crossed herself, placed the crucifix over the corpse’s chest and began to pray.
The man took off his jumper and picked up the spade but was startled by a sudden cry from his wife. He quickly covered her mouth with his hand.
“Quiet!” he muttered. “Don’t let them hear you.”
Tito’s men might still be lingering nearby. But something in her expression, in the tremors that shook her, unnerved him.
He lifted his hand away from her mouth and followed her eyes to the crucifix.
“It’s moving,” the woman whispered.
The corpse was breathing.
23
Teresa and Marini arrived at the Institute for Forensic Sciences an hour later. Teresa strode down the hallways with a vigor in her step she was surprised to possess still. Even Marini noticed it.
“Parri’s not going anywhere, you know,” he pointed out, though he could comfortably keep pace with her.
Marini didn’t understand. How could he? Teresa had known the coroner for almost thirty years, and on the phone she had heard in his voice that peculiar and unmistakable note of excitement that could only mean one thing: the blood had spoken to him and revealed its secrets. Like a necromancer, Parri had made death sing to him.
By the time she reached his office, Teresa was flushed.
“So?” she said, standing at the door.
Parri didn’t look up from his computer screen.
“I thought you’d get here sooner,” he said.
“We were in Bovec, interviewing the parish priest. He translated some documents for us about the day Andrian was found.”
Parri looked up at them then with newfound interest.
“Was it useful?”
Teresa sat down and began to fan herself with her diary.
“The condition they found him in could certainly have resulted from a crime of a particularly brutal sort, likely a crime of passion,” she said. “He was covered in blood that wasn’t his own and was clearly in a state of shock.”
“So you’ve already convicted him,” said Parri, shaking his head. “That’s not like you.”
Teresa opened her diary.
“I haven’t convicted him. I’m only following the clues,” she muttered, noting down the date and time.
“But you think he’s guilty,” the coroner pressed.
Teresa looked up.
“And you think he’s old enough that whatever he may have done in the past no longer matters. Isn’t that right?” she asked.
“You said it yourself, the man isn’t even aware of his own existence.”
“You sound just like Father Georg. I got the feeling he, too, was suggesting I should let it go.”
