The Fig Eater Read online

  Erszébet and the Inspector make the first dark footprints in the snow on the narrow street behind the theater. He holds an umbrella over her head and follows her directions to the Minoritenkirche. She’s drawn to this Gothic church, always approaching it a certain way in order to view its strange asymmetry, an alien shape set in a greensward.

  She touches his arm and they stop across from the Minoritenkirche. Her eyes scale the untapered octagonal tower, two of its sides dimly visible through the falling snow. Preoccupied, he ignores the church.

  Some evenings when they walk together side by side, not looking at each other, Erszébet will talk about the Gypsies she encountered as a child. Her Magyar accent becomes stronger, the words emphasized on the first syllable. Her musical voice soothes him.

  Tonight she tells him about a vacation she took with her family when she was a child. They’d traveled by train to Hatvan to stay with a couple at their country estate, Ecsed. Their host took them through the house, the orchards, and the extensive kitchen garden. As they toured the barns, he complained that his hens and geese had been disappearing. He suspected the Gypsies camped at the edge of his land were the thieves.

  Later, Erszébet and his two little boys hid themselves near the barn to wait. They all fell asleep in the sun, and woke up to find a Gypsy woman pitching bread from her apron at the geese. The birds hissed and fought. After the largest goose swallowed a hunk of bread and began to waddle away, the woman gripped her hands together and crouched down. The bird swung violently around toward her. Magically, as if the struggling bird were connected by an invisible string, it was pulled closer and closer to the woman. The goose was unable to escape or resist. Was it under a spell? Erszébet clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from crying out. Suddenly the woman leaped forward, grabbed the goose, and wrung its neck.

  Later, the adults told Erszébet that the Gypsy woman had hidden a fishhook on fine wire in the bread. The herb asafoetida had been rubbed on the bread, which made it irresistible to geese.

  “Can you tell me something else about the Gypsies,” her husband asks after a moment of silence. “What do they do with their dead?”

  “Why, they put their dead in the ground, like everyone else.” She addresses her words to the Minoritenkirche, not to him. “But the Gypsies’ act of dying is truly remarkable. They are moved outside so they can die in a field, in open air. This is their family’s responsibility. They also have particular burial rites. Some Gypsies bury a corpse wearing its clothes inside out. They believe this will keep the body in the grave, I don’t know how. Other tribes burn everything that belonged to the deceased.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “The dead haunt whatever they’ve left on earth. They have no peace until their possessions are destroyed, or put in a place where the living can no longer touch them.”

  He sees Dora’s body in its coffin, the terrible round cut on her hand.

  “Would Gypsies ever mutilate a body?”

  She steps away from him, away from the umbrella, and tilts her head back so the falling snow spangles the veil over her face.

  “I’m not certain. I’ve heard some Gypsy mothers will cut off their boy’s finger or a thumb so he can’t serve in the military. Who could blame them, when the country treats them so poorly.”

  “But would they cut fingers off the dead, is there some superstition about mutilation?”

  “Would they dig up a body?” She shrugs. “Yes, if the corpse is a revenant, a living dead. Gypsies know a revenant can be dissolved by stabbing it with a steel needle. I remember what the peasants in our village believed. If the illegitimate child of two illegitimate parents killed someone, that corpse would become a revenant. To kill it, the peasants disinter the corpse and cut out its heart. Then it is burned.”

  He watches Erszébet’s profile.

  She’s silent as wind stirs thick snow around them. The shifting white pattern transforms her, makes her silhouette as indistinct and mysterious as the dark church in front of them. She turns toward him, half her face hardened by shadow, her hat a blur against the tower. The snow has destroyed his sense of perspective. Erszébet seems to be simultaneously close and distant, as if she stood on a ship that was rapidly moving away, but his eyes were filled with her familiar face, so he didn’t notice the space between them until she suddenly became a blur.

  He feels helpless, incapable of understanding what she’s just told him. Before he met Erszébet, he would have dismissed such talk as primitive superstition, childish ghost stories. Even a hysterical female fantasy. But now he has a tug of fear in his muscles. He struggles to find the reason her words have released this feeling. Perhaps the stories he’s woven about Dora alive and Dora dead are just as tenuous.

  He is trained to look for the error in the situation, but all the errors he’s identified could be his own. Everything could slip through his fingers. He stamps his feet to distract himself, then reaches for her hand.

  “Did you ever see such a thing, a revenant?”

  The pleading tone of his voice surprises him. He’s relieved when she shakes her head, no. But when I was younger, a strange thing happened, she says. I was about twelve years old. On a hill near our house, a French botanist collected plants, bending and stooping over the ground in his cloak. The peasants saw him crouched there and thought he was a csordásfarkas, a wolfman. When he stood up, it seemed as if he’d changed shape again, transformed himself back into a man. The peasants rushed over the hill toward the botanist, ready to kill him and burn his heart, when a wagon drove by. The terrified botanist ran after it and leaped inside.

  I know. I saw him. I was in the wagon.

  CHAPTER 7

  Wally watches Erszébet enter the Café de l’Europe. She wears a velvet hat and an immense black fox boa, which obscures her neck, shoulders, and half her face. There is pale embroidery around the bottom of her coat, so her ankles appear to be hobbled by a chain of intricate circles. Wally takes pleasure in the dramatic silhouette she makes. She covets her furs.

  Later, after Erszébet leaves their table to talk to an acquaintance, Wally quickly slips the furs off her chair and loops them around her bare neck. The black hairs are finer than eyelashes, and the heads and paws of the animals are dry and surprisingly weightless. She detects Erszébet’s scent spread along the inside of the furs, the skin part, where they touched her body.

  Erszébet returns to the table. Wally watches apprehensively as Erszébet strokes the furs and settles them back around her shoulders, afraid the warmth from her own skin still clings to them and will betray her trespass.

  Wally rehearsed the announcement of her story so she could recite it without a false step or slipping accent. “I have the most terrible news” is the dramatic way she introduces Dora’s corpse. “Someone dug up Dora and cut off her thumb. Egon photographed her body for the police and told me about it.”

  Although Erszébet listens with a calm face, she’s instantly suspicious. There was no mention of the mutilation of the corpse in her husband’s notebook.

  “Why would someone cut off Dora’s thumb?” Wally whispers. Now that she is with Erszébet, she can become more emotional about this gruesome act. She wonders what kind of knife was used.

  “I’m certain the thumb was stolen to use as a talisman. We must consider who would have use for such a thing.”

  “Maybe the police took the thumb?”

  But Erszébet barely hears her question. She calculates, Was it a deliberate or a random theft? Or did the corpse — a revenant — make its own way out of the brown earth? Some Gypsies believe anyone who dies alone will became a revenant. She recollects a gravestone in Veszprém. Two holes had been bored in it, the sign it was the grave of a vampire, a revenant. She’d watched while two men poured boiling water from iron kettles into cracks over the grave to kill the unholy occupant. She’d enjoyed the heavy, comforting smell of the hot mud. Revenants also fear rosaries, certain types of wood, crosses, and steel needles. The Moslem G
ypsies carefully watch pumpkins, since they can become a type of revenant, moving and making noises. This story once gave ten-year-old Erszébet and her brother a nervous walk across a field that was strewn with the haunted, unharvested golden yellow globes.

  But Dora. Erszébet sees the scrabble through hard earth to her coffin, a mute box at the bottom of a hole in the ground. She can’t quite distinguish the figure standing next to Dora’s open grave. This vision takes place in silence, in the same way that she dreams of the familiar dead, who never speak directly to her but pantomime their unspoken wishes, which are clearer than language.

  Erszébet leans over the table, the furs forgotten, sliding off her shoulders. There’s something else, isn’t there? she asks.

  Wally tells her about the man she saw in Herr Zellenka’s garden, the silver glint that was his nose. How he pursued her. How frightened she was. How nothing else existed during those moments. She is surprised by the details she remembers.

  A man in a garden. Erszébet is certain Dora was killed by a man. He wasn’t a stranger. She has no other sense of him. Not now.

  Wally interrupts her thought. “There was no fig tree in Herr Zellenka’s garden. Not that I could find. There were fruit trees in the garden of the house next door. And I dressed like a man to climb over the wall.”

  “You wore men’s clothes on the street?”

  “No one looked at me. I could have been a stable boy. Even the horses on the street were fooled. Anything in trousers must look the same to an animal.”

  They both laugh.

  “I walked back into town in only thirty minutes. In my dress it takes over an hour.”

  Erszébet wonders about the strange weightlessness of trousers instead of a skirt. Two legs instead of fabric ballooning out with every step.

  The waiter brushes against their table. They order two slices of Esterházytorte and coffee with brandy to celebrate.

  After they’ve raised their cups in honor of her accomplishments, Wally reveals she’s found Rosza and will interview her alone.

  Erszébet hesitates. Her voice nervous, Wally says the plans are made, and that it will upset the balance of the conversation if Erszébet is with her.

  Erszébet tightens her smile, and they pass on to other matters. Wally is relieved.

  Rosza is disliked by Dora’s mother, Wally says. She suspects Rosza had been intimate with Herr Zellenka. She didn’t see anything suspicious, but she eavesdropped on them in a hotel room. I can only bear one more visit to that woman. Last time she cried so much I couldn’t ask her about Dora’s jewelry. Perhaps if I take her to a café she won’t cry, won’t cling to me.

  They agree that Wally will go back to Dora’s house, to more thoroughly search the garden for the fig.

  “You must do it soon,” Erszébet says. “A heavy snow is coming.”

  Wally quickly agrees and then changes the subject. “What does your husband think about the crime?”

  “He tries to keep from making up his mind, to consider everything. If you met him, you’d notice even his conversation is calculated. I can’t ask too many questions or he’ll become suspicious.”

  Without its being discussed, Wally understands that Erszébet keeps their friendship a secret from her husband. This suits Wally. Perhaps it confirms what she believes, that the place she’s mapped out for herself in Vienna is temporary, artificial. As if her presence could be easily erased. But she’s committed Erszébet to memory, all the details of her face. And when Wally occasionally asks about her husband, it’s as if he were a distant relative or a guest. She can’t consider him as someone who studies Erszébet in the same way she does.

  Erszébet continues. “When my husband first told me about Dora’s murder, he said that strangers, Gypsies, might be responsible. Dora had blond hair. You know Gypsies consider blonds and redheads good luck, Bolo hameshro.”

  “Dora was hardly lucky.”

  “I know. Something went wrong.”

  The waiter brings them more coffee. Erszébet arranges her furs and says she has more information from her research. She’s discovered the fig was sacred to the god Priapus. And that fig — fica — was the word for a woman’s quaint.

  Wally says she has some evidence, too. She places a knotted handkerchief on the table.

  “What do you have here?”

  Erszébet feels two small hard objects inside the cloth. She unties the fabric and smooths it flat on the table.

  Pearl earrings.

  They were Dora’s earrings, Wally whispers. They were given to me, and now they’re yours.

  But Erszébet is silent. She has a strange vision of another small object wrapped in a cloth.

  In that part of his mind he identifies as the hysterical element, the Inspector wonders if Dora’s corpse was violated by some animal. Perhaps a dog. Or a csordásfarkas, the wolf who is sent, a shape-shifter. In Latin the creature is Versi pellis, “turn pelt.” Erszébet told him about these legendary wolfmen, who gather once a year. When they remove their wolf skins and hang them up in a tree, they are temporarily transformed back into men. However, if a wolf skin is stolen and burned, its owner can remain in his human body. It is said the csordásfarkas are grateful for their violent rescue.

  He quiets himself, dismisses the tale as superstition. His wife’s story. But if Franz had made the same suggestion, he would have encouraged his speculation, treated it with serious consideration, teased it along. Why not? Every speculation has some value or use, even a dream. Somewhere he read a phrase that stayed with him, Man muss ein Stück Unsicherheit ertragen können, “One must learn to put up with some measure of uncertainty.” He believes this.

  He remembers that Professor Gross frequently invoked Leonardo da Vinci during his lectures. His favorite quotation was “The organ of perception acts more rapidly than the judgment.”

  Gross told his class, “Once you understand and can truly conduct yourself according to da Vinci’s observations, you will be a superb Investigating Officer. You must possess the restraint and discipline of a great artist.”

  The Inspector turns to the page he’d marked in Kriminalistik that complements da Vinci’s words.

  In carefully examining our own minds (we can scarcely observe phenomena of a purely psychical character in others), we shall have many opportunities of studying how preconceived theories take root: we shall often be astonished to see how accidental statements of almost no significance and often purely hypothetical have often been able to give birth to a theory of which we can no longer rid ourselves without difficulty, although we have for a long time recognised the rottenness of its foundation.

  The history of the cards called by the French tarot, the Italians tarocco, and the Germans Tarok, is all speculation. For centuries, experts have argued about these mysterious cards, some becoming fanatical in their convictions. At various times the Gypsies, Egyptians, Italians, Indians, Chinese, Portugese, French, and the Spanish have been credited with or claimed the invention of tarot cards. The eighteenth-century French scholar, pastor, and Freemason Antoine Court de Gébelin erroneously claimed TARO was derived from the Egyptian words tar, meaning “way” or “road,” and Ros, “king” or “kingly.” He interpreted the cards as the royal road, an allegory for life. The designs published in 1780 in de Gébelin’s book, Monde primitif, are the basis for all tarot cards since that date.

  Tarot cards are used to predict fortunes or played as a game. In Austria, the card game tarok can be played with up to fifty-four cards.

  Egon has always been fascinated by one particular tarot card, which depicts the figure of a man — the Fool — carrying a bag over his shoulder, symbolizing the faults he doesn’t wish to see. However, there is a tiger biting at his leg, which represents remorse. In games of cards, the Fool is called l’Excuse or Sküs, since it is a wild card, worthless in itself, giving value only to the other cards.

  Egon sits in a high-backed booth next to Wally in the Landtmann Kaffeehaus. Tarot cards are stacked between the
ir cups of Einspänner and glasses of water. Rosza is across the table by the window.

  Even though the room is warm, the women keep their hats on. The beads hidden in the elaborate folds of Rosza’s hat reveal their presence with erratic glints, the movements of her head striking them into black sparks. A veil shadows half her face as she bends over the cards. Egon’s memory fastens on something familiar about her. Then he suddenly realizes he associates her veil with his camera, the black cloth that hides his head when he takes pictures.

  As if on cue, she raises her eyes straight to his. Embarrassed, he looks away, caught staring.

  “Let me see what your fortune is.” She hands him the cards and instructs him to shuffle them three times. “Now pick the top card.”

  The card he draws is the Tower. It has the image of a man and a woman plunging from a tall building, their figures sprawled in midair, as stiffly geometric as if they were depicted on a stained-glass window. Behind them, a lightning bolt violently splits the tower.

  When he sees the card, Egon’s dismay grows until it becomes a knot of fear in his stomach.

  Wally asks if he’s feeling ill.

  “No. But I have this extraordinary card. It isn’t a good symbol.”

  Rosza takes it from him. “The Tower card symbolizes an end, perhaps a catastrophe. Disruptions, relationships abandoned,” she says without embarrassment or sympathy. Her breath moves the veil over her face as she speaks. “Impulsiveness brings failure. I see violence. This card is called the House of the Devil.”

  She leans back to study his face, calm, as if she’d just finished reading a story to a child.

  “It’s just a game. You’re not a Gypsy fortune-teller. It’s only fair you pick a card.”

  Bored, Rosza lifts a card from the stack, glances at it, tosses it down. “So?”

  Egon smiles. “I know your card.”

  La Papesse. A seated woman with a crown on her head, an open book on her lap.