“O wilt thou go with me, thou loveliest Child! / By many gay sports shall thy hours be beguil’d;”
The Erl-King
October 26, 1991, 3:40 PM / UTC+1 – Osterholz, Haan, Germany
I could have taken the bus.
It went from Gruiten to Vohwinkel every hour and stopped a hundred meters from my front door. The timetable was in my jacket pocket, written on a slip of graph paper by Hildegard Pohlmann in her shaky pensioner’s hand, because she thought a man with such an expensive camera had no business walking through the woods. She was seventy-four, dressed in a lilac suit with an amber brooch and a perm that had come out from under the dryer hood that morning, and she had spent exactly fifty years married to a man who shut his eyes twice in a row for the group photo on the inn steps. She was right.
I walked anyway.
It was one of those October days when, by half past three, the sun hangs so low it seems to have given up. It hung above the fields behind Gruiten, the yellow of old newspaper, and gave off no warmth anymore. My ears burned. I kept my fingers in the pockets of my green waxed jacket, my right hand closed around the slip of paper, my left around my father’s pocketknife, which had been with me since his funeral though I had never used it. The camera bag was over my shoulder. The Minolta was inside, a Dynax 7xi, new that year, with eight installments still owing. Before leaving, I had put in a fresh roll of Kodak Gold, thirty-six exposures. Out of habit. A photographer whose camera is empty has nothing in his hands.
The path into the Osterholz starts behind the last farms, where the asphalt turns to gravel and the gravel to mud. I knew it. As a boy I had ridden my bike out here as far as the fence around the old lime pit, to throw stones over the wire into the green water, until a forester with a dachshund chased us off. That was twenty years ago. The woods hadn’t changed. Beeches, a few oaks, and between them spruces someone had planted in rows after the war, which still looked as if they were waiting for an order. The leaves lay ankle-deep. It smelled of wet wood and of something mineral, chalky, that settled on your tongue if you breathed through your mouth. Lime dust. The Osterholz quarry over toward Vohwinkel was still working, and when the wind was right it carried the dust across half the woods.
I thought about Jenny.
I had phoned her that morning before driving to the golden wedding. Jenny was seven. She had watched a cartoon on video at a school friend’s house; the friend’s father worked for the Americans. A boy wearing a striped sweater waits in a pumpkin patch all night for the Great Pumpkin, which never arrives. Ever since, she had wanted a pumpkin with a face. Eyes and a mouth, with a candle inside. I had promised to see to it. Where you found such a thing in Wuppertal, I didn’t know. Around here in October 1991, people didn’t carve faces into vegetables. Pumpkins from the Vohwinkel market went into soup or were pickled, and the woman at the vegetable stand would have stared at me as though I’d asked her for a coffin.
I was wondering if a turnip might work when the blast came.
It wasn’t loud. It was deep. I hardly heard the dull jolt, but I felt it rise through my soles and knees into my stomach. A few leaves came loose from a beech above me and drifted past at an angle. One crow screamed, and then the crows stopped.
Blasting, I thought. At the quarry.
I went on. It took another twenty, thirty steps before I remembered it was Saturday. They didn’t blast at the Osterholz quarry on Saturdays. They didn’t work there on Saturdays. An extra shift, probably. Or a truck on the road beyond the trees. Probably nothing at all.
I could have gone back. The bus stop was twenty minutes away.
I didn’t go back.
Just beyond the bend where the main path turns right, I came upon the trail. It led left between two hollies, a thin line through the leaves heading for old Pit Seven. I had known these woods for thirty years. No trail had ever been there. There had been a ditch, with brambles beyond it that even we boys couldn’t get through.
Now there was a path. Its leaves hadn’t been flattened underfoot like the leaves on a hiking trail. They had been shoved to either side in two low ridges, as though something heavy had been dragged through them. Something round. More than once.
I stopped to look along it. The trail went straight for twenty meters before turning behind a spruce, and a light shone from beyond the turn. It wasn’t lamplight. It was closer to a glow, orange and warm, suspended among the trunks like the last of a sunset, though the sun was in the opposite direction.
There was a smell, too. Sweetish. Damp. Like vegetables cut and left somewhere warm too long.
I let go of the pocketknife and opened my camera bag.
Past the spruce, the trees gave way to a clearing that shouldn’t have existed.
The clearing reached all the way to the old pit. Remnants of rusty chain-link fence stood between leaning concrete posts, with a tin sign hanging from one post, its lettering flaking away. Beyond the fence, the ground fell sharply past gray walls of lime covered with green lichen, down to the water. Black-green. As smooth as lacquer. There wasn’t one leaf on its surface, though leaves must have been falling into it from every side.
In the center of the clearing, before the fence, they sat.
My first thought wasn’t fear. My first thought was: who went to all this trouble? I let out a short laugh through my nose, the way I do at weddings when the best man shows up in a tie covered in ducks. The whole thing looked like a Karstadt shop window, except nobody puts a shop window in the woods.
Pumpkins. Dozens of them. They sat on a pyramid of old, moss-covered tree stumps with hay packed into the gaps, although no farm within two kilometers made hay. The largest were at the bottom, broad and ribbed, the orange of safety vests. The middle-sized ones sat above them, their stems curling backward like fingers calling you nearer. The highest stump had no pumpkin on it. There was only hay pressed into a hollow, as though one had occupied the spot and just risen from it. Small ornamental gourds filled the spaces between, yellow, green and striped, with maple and beech leaves laid about so evenly they might have been placed there by hand.
Every one of them larger than a fist had a face. The little gourds lay around them like side dishes on a platter.
I counted. When nerves get to me, I count things: stairs, tiles on a floor, wedding guests who must all fit into one group shot. Thirty-five. Thirty-five faces carved into pumpkins. Some had round eyes, others narrow ones, with triangular noses and mouths. Especially mouths. Grins stretched wide, with teeth left in the rind. Some mouths were lopsided or tightly drawn; others made an O as though screaming. One had narrow slits for eyes and the corners of its mouth cut downward, and it reminded me of my seventh-grade math teacher whenever someone returned late from recess.
Some of them were wearing things. I noticed that second. One had a black top hat on, a real one, felt, with a dull brass badge in front, the kind chimney sweeps wear in January when they hand out lucky pigs. On the biggest, bottom row in the middle, someone had put glasses. Round, cheap health-insurance glasses with a thin metal frame, the left temple wrapped in flesh-colored adhesive tape, the way old men do when they don’t want to pay for a new pair. A third had hair. Dry flower panicles, gray and frizzy, stuck into the top of the rind, and they looked like a perm that had sat under the dryer hood too long.
Hildegard Pohlmann and her fresh perm came to mind.
Then I thought of Jenny, her Great Pumpkin, and the photograph I could take home to her. I pulled the camera from its bag. I have to admit that, though I wish it weren’t true: my daughter was why I began.
There were no burning candles. The light came from inside the flesh, behind the openings, a deep orange that grew redder farther in, like the embers in my grandmother’s coal stove when she cracked open the little door to check them. f/2.8, and the meter called for a sixtieth. A steady hand can manage that. Mine was steady. I remember.
I photographed them. First the entire pyramid from three paces away, then closer shots. The top hat. The glasses. I knelt, and cold, wet leaves soaked through my jeans at once, then brought the macro close to the mouth of the big pumpkin with the glasses at the bottom. My knuckles rested against the rind. It felt warm.
Through the viewfinder, I could see the cut edges.
They were wet. This wasn’t dew like the moisture on the surrounding leaves. It was the wetness of a fresh cut. The edges of the flesh gleamed, with tiny pale drops caught in the fibers. A brown beech leaf, already half rotten, was stuck to the top of that pumpkin as if it had lain there a week. Cut vegetables wrinkle within days. The rind beneath the leaf was old. The cuts had been made today.
They were clean cuts, too. Nothing like a pumpkin on television, hollowed out by children with a kitchen knife. Someone had made each line in a single stroke, using a short blade they knew how to handle. A blade no longer than a finger. The sort a pocketknife has.
I released the shutter. The motor whirred as it moved the film on.
That was when I saw the flies.
Only three or four of them. Fat, green-gold flies crept slowly around the corners of the pumpkin’s mouth, full and sluggish like flies on the market butcher’s counter in August. October was almost over. The temperature was six degrees. Green flies needed summer; they weren’t around at this time of year. These seemed unaware.
I took the camera from my eye and drew a breath through my mouth. I shouldn’t have. The sweetness coated my tongue, stronger now, like jam left to boil too long, and beneath it lay another smell. Heavy. Iron. My mother used to shop on Saturdays at a butcher’s on Kaiserstraße, and sometimes, as a boy, I was allowed into the back room where half carcasses hung from hooks. This was exactly its smell. Cold tiles, yet warmth as well.
I told myself it was the pumpkin. Rotten vegetables just smell like that.
Something glinted inside the big pumpkin’s mouth, between two teeth left standing in the rind. A brief yellow flash caught the glow within. A wet seed, I thought. Or a reflection in the lens. I didn’t move in for a better look. I know now that I saw it and chose, in some part of myself, to pass over it.
I stood and carried on taking photographs.
My grandmother grew up in Gruiten in a house by the Düssel. When I was little, she told me stories on Saturdays when my parents went out. In one story, a woman lived in the old lime pits. The Lime Woman. She kept anyone who ventured too near them. Afterward you weren’t dead, Grandmother said. You still had it all: the laughing, the brooding, the bad moods. If you’re quiet enough, she had told me, lowering her own voice, you can hear them talking.
I was six then. I stayed awake the whole night.
I fell quiet. Whether I meant to, I couldn’t say. My shoes stopped scraping through the leaves, I stopped breathing through my nose, and my finger remained on the shutter release without pushing it. The woods fell quiet around me. The crows were gone, as were the wind and the cars on the distant road. There was only that glow and that smell.
Then came a very faint murmur.
It rose from the pyramid. Voices overlapping, muffled like voices from the taproom when you’re in the kitchen with the door closed. No words came clear. I could hear the way they spoke, though. One voice told a story; another gave a brief, dry laugh, an old man’s laugh; then a woman went “tsk,” the sound a woman makes when a man at the table starts telling the same story again.
They stopped together. In an instant.
A voice spoke one word into the quiet. It was behind me, away from the pyramid, at the pit’s edge in the direction of the black water. It came so close that the word touched my ear like warm air.
“Closer.”
I didn’t look around. That much I know. My eyes went to the camera’s frame counter, where a number showed in the little gray window. Thirty-six. I had finished the roll.
I had taken maybe twenty-five pictures.
The next thing I knew, I was on my back beneath a passing train.
It roared over the embankment less than ten meters above my face, its lit windows sliding past with people inside reading their papers. The earth shook. Bits of gravel fell. Then the train had passed, its red rear light receding toward Vohwinkel, and darkness covered everything. Complete darkness.
I lay at the base of the railway embankment, far from the pit. I still don’t know how I reached it.
My wristwatch, a Casio with a light button that Jenny had picked out for me at Christmas, said 6:52. Between the word at my ear and that train, almost three hours were missing. I tried to understand. I searched the way you search a drawer where you think the key must be, again and again, until your fingers are raw. There’s nothing. No picture, no sound. Only a feeling, if I think about it long enough: the feeling of something soft giving way under pressure, and of warmth on my hands.
I pushed myself upright. Nausea rose in me. My clothes were wet down to my underwear and I shook so badly with cold that my teeth knocked together, yet my hands were warm. I raised them before my eyes and pressed the Casio’s light button.
Its green light showed me my right thumb. A long, shallow cut crossed the upper joint, its blood already dark and dry. Beneath every fingernail, all ten of them, were orange fibers. I picked at the fibers with my thumbnail and sniffed my fingers. They smelled sweet. Underneath was the smell of the room behind the butcher’s counter.
White dust covered my shoes past the ankles. Fine lime dust, as if I had climbed down the pit’s steep walls and climbed out again, something nobody could do without a rope. The shoes were damp as well.
My camera bag remained on my shoulder. Inside, the camera had been put away tidily, with its lens cap in place. I hadn’t done that. Though the frame counter had returned to zero, I cracked the back open and checked. The cartridge was still in its chamber. Rewound. The Dynax rewinds automatically after the final exposure; its motor draws the entire strip into the cartridge. But I hadn’t used the last exposure. At least, I knew nothing about it. I had made twenty-five photographs, perhaps twenty-seven, and the camera had reached thirty-six and stowed the film as though someone knew it needed to go to the lab.
In my left jacket pocket was the pocketknife, where it should have been. Its blade was folded away. The knife clung to my fingers when I took it out. I opened it. Someone seemed to have wiped it on a trouser leg: the blade was clean and nearly bright, though dark gunk remained in the nail nick, the small groove used to pull it open. Under the Casio’s green light, the gunk looked black.
I rubbed the blade against my jeans, returned the knife to my pocket and followed the tracks home for an hour through the dark. I never looked to my right at the woods.
Once home, I spent a long time washing my hands. The sink water went orange, then pink, then took on a color I blamed on the kitchen light. Its shade was brown. That explained the color.
Bread rolls scented the apartment on Sunday. They do every Sunday. I lived over a bakery on Kaiserstraße; its oven started at five in the morning, and by seven the smell filled every room, the curtains and the pillow too, warm with yeast. I had always been fond of that bakery. Beside me on the bed was the second pillow. I had left it without a case since moving out of the place in Haan. It had no smell.
That Sunday I lay in bed and thought about the smell in the clearing, and I felt sick.
The cut on my thumb pulsed. I had wound a bandage round it, flesh-colored, and when I saw the bandage over the joint, I thought of the temple of some glasses without knowing why. I got out of bed and made coffee.
I rang Jenny around noon. Her mother answered, said my name in the voice she used for “shoes off,” and called into the apartment.
“Daddy! Did you get one?”
The pumpkin, of course. I could hear her bouncing in the hall, pulling the phone cord against the doorframe, with the television too loud behind her.
“I saw some,” I said.
“With faces?”
“With faces.”
“Will you bring me one?”
Through the window, I watched a woman below carrying a cake box from the bakery by its ribbon, the way you do on a Sunday visit to your mother-in-law.
“Those are already taken,” I told her. I don’t know why I said it. Jenny laughed, taking it for a joke. I laughed along, but the sound came out wrong. We went on talking about school and a teacher with a mustache, and I promised to buy a proper pumpkin next Saturday and carve it with her, using a knife she could hold herself while I watched.
I should not have made that promise. I made it anyway.
On Monday morning I took the film to the lab. Foto Kerkhoff, three doors down, a narrow shop with a window full of passport photos and First Communion candles and a cardboard cutout advertising Agfa. Bodo was behind the counter. Bodo was in his late twenties and wore his hair short in front and long in back, and his denim jacket was so covered in patches you could barely see the fabric. He smelled of fixer and cigarettes, and his fingertips were yellow from the developer, like a chain smoker’s. He had a face like unbaked dough, soft and pale and always about to grin.
“So?” he asked. “Wedding? How many have their eyes shut?”
“Golden wedding. The groom. Twice, probably.”
“He can’t help it. Fifty years, all he does is sleep.” He tossed the second cartridge lightly against his palm, like a die. “Full? At weddings you always leave two.”
“I miscounted.”
“That’s what they all say.” He filled in my details on a blue carbon-copy order slip. “Tomorrow after two. Standard size?”
“Four by six. And a contact sheet.”
“And what’s on it, if it isn’t a wedding?”
I looked for an answer. “Pumpkins,” I said.
Bodo watched me as if a punch line ought to follow. When none did, he shrugged and dropped the cartridge among the others in the box.
Walking home, I bought a newspaper. At the kitchen table, with coffee beside me, I read it in my usual order: from the back, starting with sport before turning to local news. A small box sat at the lower left of the third local page, between the annual general meeting of the allotment gardeners and an advertisement for winter tires. The police wanted information.
A seventy-one-year-old pensioner from Haan-Gruiten had been missing since October 14. He had last been seen taking his dog for a walk, and the dog had returned alone. The man stood about one meter seventy tall, had gray hair and wore glasses. His distinguishing feature was a gold crown in his upper jaw.
Below it was a second, shorter case. Since October 21 a fifty-two-year-old master chimney sweep from Vohwinkel had been missing. His unlocked company car had been found at the hikers’ parking lot by the Osterholz, the ladder still on the roof. The first box came from the district police in Mettmann, the second from police headquarters in Wuppertal. Neither said that both men had disappeared in the same woods.
I read both boxes. I know I read them, because I can still recite them today. I read them the way you read the lottery numbers when you haven’t played. Then I turned the page, back to the allotment gardeners, and read that the club had a new treasurer.
On Tuesday at two I stood in front of Foto Kerkhoff, and Bodo wasn’t grinning.
He already had the envelope out, a yellow Kodak envelope, and he slid it across the counter without letting go. His yellow fingertips lay flat on it. Behind him a radio was playing, something by Roxette, and he turned it down without looking.
“What is that stuff?” he said.
“I told you. Pumpkins.”
“Yeah.” He gave a slow nod. “Pumpkins.” His gaze moved to the envelope and back. “I flushed the machine twice afterward. The developer tank stank. After that run. Like opening the compost bin in summer.”
“That’s chemicals, Bodo.”
“I’ve been doing this nine years.” His fingers lifted from the envelope. “I don’t want the negatives in the shop. Take them with you. All of them.”
I paid, just under twenty marks for thirty-seven prints, matte. The wedding pictures were in a second envelope; those went on the Pohlmanns’ bill. He handed me my change so our fingers didn’t touch, and he didn’t say, the way he usually did, that I’d get the loyalty discount once I hit fifty marks.
At home, I sat down at the kitchen table beneath the lamp with its brown shade before opening the envelope. I don’t know why I held off. Normally, I would have torn it open out on the sidewalk. Perhaps I wanted to be inside four walls.
I pulled out the contact sheet first. Small frames lined a letter-size sheet in rows, like stamps. There were thirty-seven; I counted them. A roll marked thirty-six exposures sometimes gives you one more when the strip is a little longer than promised. Nothing strange in that. I told myself so.
I took out the prints and went through them in order.
The first photographs belonged to me. I knew their framing and angle, and I remembered standing in each position. I had photographed the pyramid from three paces off; the glow was slightly overexposed because the meter struggled with light shining through the cuts. Then the top hat. Then the health-insurance glasses.
Frame eleven. Frame twelve. Frame thirteen.
I laid them side by side because something didn’t sit right, and it took me a while to see it. In frame eleven three of the mouths were narrow slits. In frame twelve two of them were open. In frame thirteen all three. I hadn’t moved between the frames. I had only kept pressing the shutter.
Frame twenty-three showed the glasses. I am certain I took that photograph standing up. The macro came almost against the lens. The taped temple showed clearly, including a darkened patch on the tape. Brown and crusted, like a bandage left on an injury too long. Beyond the lens, blurred, lay the eye cut into the pumpkin. The eye held something. A round, wet shape, little more in the blur than a pale patch with a dark point at its center.
The newspaper notice came back to me. One meter seventy, gray hair, glasses.
I placed the print face down on the table. Then I turned it over again.
The pictures after frame twenty-seven were not mine.
In frame twenty-eight, a pair of hands worked on a pumpkin. The photograph looked down over a shoulder from a standing man’s height. A pocketknife with a wooden handle was in the right hand; the left kept the pumpkin still. The blade had entered the rind at the center of an unfinished eye. The right thumb pressed against it, showing a fresh cut across its upper joint.
I looked down at my own thumb and its bandage.
Frame twenty-nine showed those hands again with the eye complete. The nose followed in frame thirty. In frame thirty-one, they cut the mouth, working faster; the fingers blurred because the shutter could no longer catch their movement. The finished pumpkin sat among the leaves in frame thirty-two. I knew its face. The nose was broad, the bushy eyebrows marked by two notches, and its laughing mouth had a gap between the front teeth. It was the man who had shut his eyes twice in succession.
Mr. Pohlmann. Fifty years married. I had taken his picture beside his wife on the inn steps at noon on Saturday.
I had carved him. A good likeness, even. I hadn’t even noticed the gap between his teeth in the group shot.
I rushed to the bathroom and vomited. Afterward I sat on the cold tiles, gripping the tub, while somebody laughed in the bakery downstairs. When I stood, the mirror above the sink showed a man I would never have chosen to photograph. Thirty-four, gaunt and a little bent from carrying a camera round his neck for years. Stubble from three days. Dark blond hair reaching over the collar at the back, overdue for a cut. Eyes reddened. Fingernails marked brown by developer stains that never entirely wash out. I studied my face until I knew it by heart. Then I returned to the table. Five photographs remained.
Frame thirty-three was nearly black. It caught the trees and a sideways view of the clearing. Between two trunks at the edge of the pit stood someone. I have to call it “someone”; no other word comes to me. Tall, taller than the fence posts. It stood as water stands inside a glass, motionless, filling its shape entirely. The place where its face should have been was so dark that the print looked dull there, like velvet. Something pale hung at its left side, about where a human hand would be. I took the loupe I use to check the sharpness of wedding photographs and looked closer. Fingers. Long fingers, lime-white, each with too many joints. Just one joint too many.
Frames thirty-four and thirty-five were empty, only leaves and glow, as if someone had tripped the shutter while walking.
I was in frame thirty-six.
I lay face up in the clearing’s leaves with my arms beside me and my eyes open. The camera looked straight down from above, from a height I couldn’t account for, perhaps two meters, perhaps higher. I might have been asleep if my eyes had been closed. There was no tension in my face. No photograph has ever shown me so relaxed, neither one from childhood nor one from my wedding. Seeds lay in the leaves all around me. Hundreds of them. Arranged in orderly rows.
The extra exposure, frame thirty-seven, was orange from edge to edge. It showed nothing I could name. There were no outlines and no shadows. Only deep, warm orange, reddening toward the middle like the embers in my grandmother’s stove. Like a pumpkin’s light seen from within.
I studied it for a long time. I think it showed a place to sit. The empty place at the top of a stump.
Tuesday night was the first time I heard it inside my chest.
Awake in bed, I listened to the bakery below: its refrigerator humming, then the first baking trays clattering after a while. Beneath those sounds, between my ribs, came the murmur. It was so faint that I mistook it for my heartbeat. Muffled voices, many of them, as though on the far side of a door. A story being told. Somebody laughing. A woman saying “tsk.”
I switched on the radio, WDR 2’s night program, and raised the volume until my neighbor thumped the wall. The voices remained. They weren’t coming from the room.
At ten past eight on Wednesday, the telephone rang. Hildegard Pohlmann wanted to know whether the photographs were ready. The police had asked for one, she told me, “One where he has his eyes open.” An officer had said that old men generally came back of their own accord. She hung up before I managed a reply. I stayed in the hall, listening to the dial tone with the receiver in my hand.
I went to the market around noon for a pumpkin. I insisted to myself it was for Jenny, for the Saturday I had promised her. The vegetable seller asked whether I planned to make soup, and I told her I did. I chose a medium-sized orange pumpkin with a stubby green stem. It was three marks twenty. The seller had a wide, kindly face, with a wart beside her left nostril. As she counted my change, I could already see where to put the blade. I would have kept the wart. I took the pumpkin home in both arms as if it were a newborn, placed it on the counter, washed my hands and went to bed early.
On Wednesday night it was under my skin.
A prickling in my forearms woke me. Running a hand over them, I felt small, hard, flat shapes under the skin, longish lumps moving beneath my fingertips like seeds inside a bag. I put the light on. My forearms showed nothing. Just smooth, pale skin, some hairs and the old bicycle scar. When I put the light out, the seeds returned. So did the voices, closer, filling my arms, my wrists and my warm fingertips, which felt as though they held something.
I don’t know when I fell asleep. I know where I woke up.
I was barefoot in the kitchen, standing on tiles so cold my feet had gone numb. The brown-shaded lamp was lit. An old newspaper covered the table the way you lay one down before polishing shoes. Seeds were spread across it in rows, sorted by size with more care than anyone would take. Wet orange fibers lay among them.
My father’s pocketknife was in my right hand.
And in front of me stood the pumpkin from the market. It had a face.
It was a small face. Round eyes, set wide apart, a little too big for the head, the way children’s eyes are big. A snub nose. And a mouth that laughed, with a gap at the top front where an incisor is missing, because two weeks ago it had come out while she was eating an apple and had lain under a pillow, for a five-mark coin.
I had carved Jenny.
The likeness was good. I cannot get past that. I had made the best portrait of her I had ever made, without touching a camera.
I remained at the table and stared at the pumpkin. It stared back. Very slowly, light came into the flesh behind its cuts.
I called her mother at eight.
“I can’t do Saturday,” I said.
A pause. “She’s already packed her bag. It’s been standing in the hall since Monday.”
“Tell her I’m sick.”
“Are you sick?”
My eyes went to the rows on the table.
“Yes,” I said.
I could have gone to the police. I thought about it, for half an hour, with the receiver in my hand. I saw myself sitting at the station with thirty-seven prints and a bandage on my thumb, I heard myself explaining that a pumpkin has Mr. Pohlmann’s expression, and I saw the officer’s face. And I saw frame twenty-eight. The hands. My hands.
I didn’t go to the police.
I went to the gas station on Bahnstraße and bought a red jerry can and ten liters of regular and a lighter with a picture of a woman in a bikini on it, because they didn’t have any other kind left. Anyone who wants to burn evidence at night can’t be picky. I told myself I was going to burn it. All of it. The stumps, the hay, the faces. I told myself that was why I was going back.
“Closer,” somebody said inside my head.
That was its first day inside my head. The soft voice there no longer belonged to my grandmother.
I returned the night before All Saints’ Day.
I caught the last bus to Gruiten, the one at ten-sixteen at night. Sitting at the very back with the can between my shoes, I watched the driver study me in his mirror. He had the look you give a man taking gasoline into the woods at that hour. In the mirror, I noticed deep creases around his mouth. I nodded. No nod suits a situation like that, though I made an attempt. I got off in Gruiten. A St. Martin’s parade poster hung in the bus shelter window. Children carrying lanterns.
Lights had already appeared in the churchyard. Grave candles stood in rows, red plastic cups capped with gold lids, put out the evening before so the graves would look nice by morning. I followed the fence, seeing the flames flicker along row after row, and thought nothing of them. I spent the next twenty minutes on foot.
Between the hollies, the trail waited. Leaves lay banked to either side, fresher than they had looked on Saturday. My flashlight found a mark along the center, a thin dark track that glistened on the wet leaves, as though something dripping had been carried along it.
I switched off the flashlight. Light from the clearing gave me enough to see.
It had turned red.
Each pumpkin now held a grave candle. I could make out red plastic cups and gold lids through the mouths and eyes, thirty-six cups in all. Their light did not flicker like ordinary candlelight. It breathed, brightening slowly and dimming slowly in a single shared rhythm. I realized my own breathing followed it. I tried to quicken it. I couldn’t.
At the very top, the highest stump stood empty. Moss and hay formed a little nest there.
I unscrewed the can. The smell of gasoline was a blessing. It was sharp and honest and smelled of gas stations, of the Autobahn, of Saturdays when you drive somewhere, and for a few breaths it pushed everything else back. I walked around the pyramid and poured. Over the stumps, over the hay, over the faces. The gasoline ran into the mouths and hissed at the lights and didn’t catch, and the pumpkins went on laughing. The one with the glasses. The one with the top hat. Mr. Pohlmann, with the gap between his teeth.
Facing them, I gripped the lighter while the woman in the bikini smiled from its side. I rolled the wheel.
It sparked. Nothing caught.
The blast rose beneath me.
The same dull jolt as on Saturday, through the soles, through the knees, only closer, much closer, as if it weren’t over in the quarry but right beneath me, in the lime, in the pit, in the black water. The lighter fell out of my hand into the wet leaves. I didn’t bend down.
Heat gathered behind me.
It wasn’t breath. Breath arrives in bursts, and this was steady, dry warmth pressed against my back. It felt like standing before an oven while somebody opened its door behind you. Wet lime scented it, along with sugar scorched on a hot plate, bitter and dark and sweet, like candied almonds left too long in a fairground kettle.
I kept my face forward. My neck had stiffened. I was afraid to look.
Something put a hand on my shoulder. The hand was warm, not cold: as warm as the pumpkin I had touched with my knuckles on Saturday, as warm as a forehead burning with fever. Through the waxed jacket, I felt each finger settle and counted them. Five. Each finger had one extra joint. I’ve photographed three hundred brides displaying their rings to my camera. I know the joints of a finger.
“Well, you’ve already started,” the voice said. It spoke from inside my head, from the spot where my own thoughts usually sound, using my grandmother’s tone when a story made her speak more softly and I had to lean toward her.
I understood frame twenty-eight then. The hands seen over a shoulder, the blade entering an eye only half made. She keeps those who venture too close. First, though, they carve.
A pumpkin with a gap in its teeth stood at home on my kitchen table beneath the brown-shaded lamp.
Running would still have worked. Down the trail, between the hollies, onto the main path, an hour home, and then take the frying pan and beat the pumpkin on the kitchen table to mush until nothing was left of its laugh. My legs knew that and stayed where they were.
I went down on my knees.
I don’t know who decided that. I only know it didn’t feel like giving up. It felt like coming home. The warmth at my back was the first warm thing since the day I carried my boxes out of the apartment in Haan, and the murmuring from the pyramid sounded like a taproom on a Friday night, where everyone has a seat and nobody asks about installments. Someone laughed. The chimney sweep, I think. He had a laugh you’d hear well in a chimney.
“Give it,” the voice said within me.
I drew my father’s pocketknife from my jacket, opened it and reached back over my shoulder with the handle toward her. Just as I had taught Jenny. You pass a knife handle first. Fingers with one joint too many wrapped around it and grazed my hand, and my hand welcomed the touch.
I say so because it happened. My hand welcomed it.
Then she laid me down. Not roughly. The way you carry a sleeping child from the car to bed so it won’t wake up. The leaves were wet and cold under my back, and above me, between the crowns of the beeches, the sky was black and starless, and I thought that I would have to open the aperture all the way now and still wouldn’t get anything on the film. I was lying exactly the way I had been lying in frame thirty-six.
What followed caused no pain. Nothing I can say about it is worse than that.
I had expected pain. In my mind there were knives and blood, and in the clearing there was a knife and there was blood. I could smell it: the back room at the butcher’s, the half carcasses hanging from hooks, the tiled warmth. Warmth spread across my ribs and soaked the waxed jacket. I knew its source. It did not hurt. The blade moved against me in short, neat strokes, each one completed at once by a hand that understood its work. How you open a pumpkin. You start by cutting around the stem to make a lid, then lift it away. After that, you clear out the inside.
The sound stayed with me. I heard wet things set beside me among the leaves, one after another, with as much care as Hildegard Pohlmann had shown arranging cake slices on the coffee table that Saturday. Rows of them. I counted until the count lost any point where it might end. Each row left me lighter. The thing that entered the spaces smelled like jam boiled too long. My heart kept beating. I could hear it in the leaves to my left, an arm’s length from me. It beat as though it were content.
The corners of my mouth went up. I didn’t do anything to make them.
I used to have a name. My mother called me by it when dinner was ready, and it appears on the doorbell above the bakery and on eight installment slips for a Minolta Dynax 7xi. I cannot bring it to mind now. The installments end in June. Someone else must deal with them.
My face went next. The blade shaped round eyes, a triangular nose and a mouth. Cutting the teeth tickled. I can still picture my face in frame thirty-six, lying relaxed in the leaves. That photograph is all I have left of it.
Then the hands went. I would have liked to keep those. With them I arranged three hundred bridal couples on the steps of inns and once in my life carved a pumpkin that laughed back.
I lost my weight after that. I became round and warm, warmer than I had felt in months. Light started inside me. The leaves were no longer beneath me; I was at the top, in the hollow of hay. It matched my back so precisely that someone might have measured it. The others drew nearer below me, like people in a taproom making space when another person takes a seat.
“About time,” the man with the glasses said.
Jenny didn’t go. Jenny is still there. That’s the part she leaves you. The laughing, the brooding, the bad moods. And everything you love.
I should have wanted Jenny kept away. Her mother should have taken her to Bavaria, or America, to the pumpkin patch where nothing ever arrives. A father ought to have wanted that at the end. I know I tried to. But before wanting became impossible, my last wish was different.
I wanted Jenny to come and see me.
After that I fell quiet.
My place is at the top. The trail is visible from here.
Below me they’re talking. They talk all the time, you get used to it. The chimney sweep tells about chimneys where he found dead pigeons, and the man with the glasses says he’s told that one three times already. Mr. Pohlmann sleeps most of the time. Sometimes he asks for Hildegard. Nobody answers him.
Saturday has come. Every other weekend.
Men below call out a name. Dogs bark, radios crackle, and shafts of light move between the trunks across the leaves. The name is the one written on the doorbell. It means nothing to me. Someone with a packed bag probably stood outside my door this morning. They must have come across the prints on my kitchen table.
This afternoon the dogs reached the hollies. They would not go past them. One whined.
From the cars in the hikers’ parking lot, I hear a woman calling another name, louder than the men call theirs.
Something rustles between the hollies. Small steps. They stop and go on and stop again, the way children walk when they’ve seen something they’re not supposed to see.
Red rubber boots. A parka hood fallen halfway across her face. She carries an unlit St. Martin’s lantern.
“Daddy?”
You can hear us if you stay quiet enough. She stays very quiet. On the telephone, she never did.
My father’s pocketknife lies among the leaves before the lowest stump. The woman of the pit left it there. She leaves it there every time. Its blade is short, no longer than a finger.
It fits in a child’s hand.
THE END
“Pumpkins with Personality” is available as an e-book, the first of the Tales of Dread. You can check roman-reed.com to find out where to get it.
