The Pearlkillers Read online

  Erwin put out a hand to steady her. ‘How selfish of me,’ he said. ‘I should have thought. It’s probably the altitude, too – most people feel that straight away.’

  She didn’t see Carl until just before lunch. He was coming down the main staircase as she was going up. She asked, ‘What happened last night?’

  ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘This place is driving me crazy. I couldn’t find my way back to your room, and then I almost got lost again when somebody turned out the lights. Jesus, did you hear the crying?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Roderigo says everybody thinks it’s a ghost.’

  He started to tell her about the tour he’d been given. She thought how healthy he looked, and how happy. He even seemed a little too cheerful – like a commercial for a cereal. He told her, ‘This place is fantastic. The whole thing. It’s like a private empire. Really.’

  ‘And by rights Aunt Gisela should have had her share of it. Maybe it was all hers.’

  ‘First I’ve heard.’

  ‘She told me that. She said: “Theodore stole the Treasure from me.”’

  ‘She was kind of gaga towards the end of her life.’

  ‘“Count Walter’s Treasure” – that’s what she called it. At first I thought it was her way of alluding to something else, like her emotions or her honour. You know. But she would have been almost a generation older – well, not quite that much, but I think she was too old to have had any kind of an affair with him when she was young. She was way up in her nineties – at least ten years older, so it couldn’t have been in her youth: he’d have been too young for her back then.’

  He said, ‘I know these older women that keep on moaning about being ruined by younger men.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  ‘Wishes.’

  ‘Carl, has Uncle Theodore said anything to you about how long we’re invited for?’

  ‘It’s indefinite.’

  ‘My work isn’t indefinite,’ she said.

  Over luncheon Uncle Theodore talked about the history of the estate and the founding of the family fortunes in that part of the world. Regina listened to him without comment. She shovelled her food purposefully into her mouth and chewed. Aunt Kristel had risen from her sickbed in order to attend the meal. She had shied away from both young people, saying, ‘Please – if you’ll forgive me: my hands hurt today.’ And she had placed the hurting hands in her lap. ‘Some days’, she murmured, ‘are worse than others.’ Carla was just as glad to avoid the physical contact. Kristel’s whitely desiccated face and hands were alarming: they had a leprous look.

  She shot a glance at Carl but he was turned to Theodore in an attitude of interest and expectation. She looked down at her plate. The meeting with her aunts and uncles was one she’d felt she had to have, but it was hard for her to believe that she was related to these people. They seemed grotesque. She couldn’t understand how Carl was able to play up to them, unless he was simply impressed by their wealth. To the end of the week, she thought: and then she’d be saying goodbye.

  ‘Goodbye?’ Uncle Erwin said. ‘But – we shouldn’t dream of letting you go so soon.’

  ‘I have to get back to my work.’

  ‘Yes, the child is right,’ Theodore agreed. ‘We’re retired. And the young have their own lives.’ He sighed. ‘But stay to the end of the week at any rate. We’ll have a few parties. Show you around the neighbourhood and boast a little.’

  ‘Yes, parties,’ Kristel squealed. The onrush of gaiety made her look momentarily imbecilic as well as ill. She raised her afflicted hands in the air and made a few dancing movements with them.

  ‘I’ll send someone down to the village,’ Theodore said. ‘Have you any preference for a day? I’m afraid the best we can do is Tuesday or Thursday. Let’s make it this Thursday. Then we’ll be able to keep you a bit longer.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. Everyone around the table smiled. She wondered why she’d ever had the feeling that they might not be willing to let her go.

  That afternoon she and Carl had tea with Theodore, who talked about the duties of running such a large estate and the difficulties of growing old without heirs. ‘You have to leave everything to foundations,’ he said, ‘and do it in such a way that the next generation won’t be forever quarrelling about what you really meant.’

  Carla said that she agreed with her grandmother: you should just give your possessions away and let the other people do what they liked with them. She twisted and turned her grandmother’s ring as she said so. It wasn’t easy to speak up against Theodore.

  ‘One or two trinkets’, he told her, ‘are hardly to be compared with a huge amount of land.’

  ‘But the principle’s the same. The future may be completely different. The way people live, the circumstances of their –’

  ‘The future,’ Theodore stated, ‘can be controlled from the past. Good planning ensures that the future will be as one wants it. We have to look ahead, that’s all.’

  ‘No one’s ever been able to do that.’

  ‘I agree with your uncle,’ Carl said.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Certainly. It’s only a question of organization. It’s political.’

  ‘Really,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right. And’, he looked at Theodore as if for confirmation, ‘the systematization of heredity.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means: the great thing about graduating from the Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon stages is that once you’ve got a good brain, you can get the people with less brains to work for you. And if you’re only reproducing with your own kind, your people become more and more intelligent, while theirs become progressively stupid and degenerate, and finally unable to run their lives without being governed by someone else.’

  ‘But does inheritance operate like that? I thought it was supposed to skip around; you know – the similarities show up on the tangent and between generations that are three or four steps apart.’

  ‘No,’ Carl said flatly. ‘All you have to do is look at greyhounds and horses. It’s a matter of breeding.’

  Uncle Theodore nodded. He looked approvingly at Carl. It was easy to see where the theory had originated. Carla said, ‘Even if that were true – which I don’t believe – would it be right to deny people equality just because they’re stupid or underbred?’

  Theodore took over. ‘It’s definitely right’, he answered, ‘to prevent them from taking up a position of power for which they’re completely unqualified.’

  ‘If you change people’s circumstances and upbringing and education, you change their qualifications.’

  ‘No. There’s nothing you can do with poor stock.’

  She was irritated enough to push the argument further, even though it would break up the tea-drinking. She opened her mouth to begin and then saw that the others all sided with Theodore. It was better to drop the subject. She said, ‘Well, I don’t agree.’

  Kristel giggled and said she’d always felt that debates on these big political subjects were best left to the men. Regina threw her a look of contempt.

  ‘The future is our job,’ Theodore said. ‘As well as the present.’

  Carla raised her cup to her lips. Maybe the mania for control – like the whole line of reasoning – was connected with the fact that these people had no generations to come after them. The future meant children. Now, at last, she was glad she didn’t have any. She remembered one of the quarrels she’d had with her husband; suddenly she could even recall, as if echoed intact, the tones of their voices as they’d yelled at each other. ‘When are you going to get pregnant?’ he’d shouted. And she’d screamed back, ‘When you stop sleeping around.’ ‘I’m not going to stop,’ he’d told her. ‘I like it. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than you are right now.’ And so forth. It had gone on and on. And all that time she’d wanted children, yet she’d known that no matter what he said, he’d walk out on her as soon as she had any. She hated him more than anything
in the world and wished that she could kill him again and again – once wouldn’t be enough.

  She was gripping her teacup tightly and staring down at the rug. She still loved him, which made it worse. The marriage couldn’t have ended any other way, but she kept catching herself at wishing: if only things had been different. The future might be determined by the past, but the present seemed to her always uncontrollable and chaotic.

  Kristel finished her last cup of tea as she pressed flowers into the pages of a book for Erwin’s collection. Regina occupied herself with some kind of crocheted scarf. And while Theodore took Carl upstairs to look at some old papers that concerned the estate, Carla walked up the opposite staircase, to her room. On her way she passed the three paintings that gave her the creeps: a landscape of blasted trees and ruined temples lit by a livid glare that made the stone columns look like old, naked legs; a still-life vase full of rotting flowers, with a cup and saucer sitting on the table in front of it; and a mythological scene that showed a convocation of centaurs: these bearded, hairy creatures were grouped in a circle, though most of them had their muscled backs towards the viewer, and within the tight huddle they formed, appeared to be doing something singular, perhaps unpleasant, possibly unspeakably gross.

  Regina had told her the names of the painters, who were apparently well-known. Regina was extremely proud of all three. They were, she said, prime examples of German culture.

  *

  Carl came to her room before they went down to dinner. He said, ‘I won’t see you tonight. Your uncle is initiating me into some kind of ceremony. It’s for men only.’

  ‘What kind of ceremony?’

  ‘I don’t know. Some club the ranchers have, maybe.’

  ‘I hope it isn’t anything political. From the way they’ve been talking, you might end up covered in swastikas.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ He sounded as pompous and didactic as Theodore, but unlike Theodore, he wasn’t the kind of man you could be afraid of. There was a hint of shiftiness about him. He’d probably done something crooked with her great-aunts’ money, she thought. He’d probably been friendly with Agnes.

  ‘What are you looking like that for?’ he asked.

  ‘I was remembering what you told me about older women,’ she said. ‘How they fell in love with younger men.’

  ‘It isn’t just the older ones here. It’s all of them. Haven’t you noticed? There are a lot of blond children on the estate. And grown-ups, too. Theodore told me: it’s in our interest to have as many workers as possible. And it isn’t as if they mind.’

  ‘Who mind?’

  ‘The women. They come to us naturally, of their own free will. They reject their own men.’

  Us? she thought. She said, ‘Why do they do that?’

  ‘Because’, he said, perfectly seriously, ‘we’re superior.’

  It wasn’t worth getting angry about, but the effort of putting up with him was beginning to wear her down. He was still good-looking and she still felt tolerance and a certain affection for his body, but not so much now for his face or voice. And all at once she wondered about the fire at her aunts’ house: how it had really started, and if someone had deliberately set it, or had even been told to.

  ‘I guess it’s like the lobotomies,’ he said. ‘They think of it as medicine.’

  ‘What’s medicine? Are you talking about sex? What does lobotomy have to do with it?’

  ‘When you took the tour with Erwin, didn’t you see how many of the Indians have a scar right here on their foreheads?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the way they get rid of the poison from some kind of insect. It’s trepanning, not lobotomy.’

  ‘Whatever you want to call it. They go to Erwin, crowds of them, and ask him to do it. Theodore, too; Erwin taught him how. No insect bites, no infection – they just want the operation. And afterwards they feel better. A lot of them want it done over and over.’

  ‘There isn’t any reason for it? They aren’t sick?’

  ‘They’re all completely well. I told you: they just want the operation. Apparently it goes way back. The Incas used to do it, too.’

  ‘The Incas used to cut the hearts out and eat them.’

  ‘That was the Aztecs.’

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘It’s all in the history books.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. They really do feel better afterwards. And a lot of civilized people believe the same: they want somebody to run their lives, fix them up, change their luck.’

  ‘That’s horrible.’

  ‘If it makes them happy?’

  ‘It can’t,’ she said. ‘To have an unnecessary operation can’t make them happy.’

  ‘But it does,’ he told her.

  *

  Carla sat between Regina and Kristel on the back seat of a horse-drawn carriage. They were shielded by screen curtains and covered with a green canvas top, in spite of which she’d already been stung by a gnat.

  They had a driver named Eusabio. He’d stopped the horses so that the ladies could admire the view. In the distance, outcrops of rock massed together into a chain of spiky hilltops. At the top of one of the high peaks was another monastery; they’d seen three already.

  ‘Now, this is really interesting,’ Regina said.

  Kristel murmured, ‘I don’t feel well.’

  ‘I’ve got a bit of a headache myself,’ Carla admitted.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Regina said. ‘You’ll both feel better once we’ve had some exercise.’

  ‘I’m not walking all the way up there,’ Kristel wailed. ‘That’s how Frieda got sick. You kept pushing her.’

  Erwin turned around from the front seat and smiled at Carla. ‘You mustn’t think we’re like this all the time,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Regina told him.

  ‘Usually’, he added, ‘we’re much worse.’

  Regina rose from her seat. She climbed down to the ground. Erwin followed, saying that they’d be back soon. Eusabio drove the carriage forward slowly and stopped under the shade of some trees. They waited. Carla fanned herself with a piece of paper she’d found in her purse; she always kept a supply of paper by her in case she wanted to jot down an idea for a design.

  ‘I hate these places,’ Kristel said. ‘They aren’t my idea of Christianity at all. I remember the way churches used to be – the way they still are, on the other side of the world. God knows what the people here really believe. They’re all like animals.’

  ‘I got the impression they were very devout.’

  ‘They like ceremonies. They love all these ceremonies about death and entombment. The ideas, the ideals, mean nothing to them.’

  The glare coming off the rocks was beginning to make Carla sleepy and slightly dizzy. She looked down at the fan she was holding, and noticed that on part of the paper she’d begun a picture of one of her cat-boxes; the paper must have been in her bag for months: the drawing divided the sitting cat at a point lower than the one she’d finally chosen. And the completed boxes had been put into production before the previous Christmas. She considered telling Kristel about the German church of the fourteen saints. But it wasn’t worth trying to shock these people.

  ‘I feel sick,’ Kristel said.

  ‘Was Frieda the one who couldn’t walk? Was she always –’

  ‘Healthy as a horse till her eighty-sixth birthday, when she made a pig of herself on Elvas plums and brandy.’

  ‘Didn’t she have a disease like –’

  ‘Oh, everybody knows what was wrong with her. Disappointed in love, that’s all. And Regina – well. She was the scandal.’

  And you? Carla thought.

  ‘Regina would still be a scandal if anybody’d take her. It’s a disgrace. And now she’s so righteous.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Do you like living here?’

  ‘Oh. Of course. I’d rather be back home, naturally, but this was where Theo want
ed to take us.’

  ‘Where’s home?’

  ‘Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig.’

  ‘And the last time you were there?’

  ‘I went back once on a visit with Erwin in 1931. We had a lovely time.’

  ‘I see,’ Carla said.

  ‘I love parties. Are you looking forward to yours?’

  ‘My what?’

  ‘Your initiation ceremony.’

  ‘Oh? Initiation into what?’

  ‘Into the family.’

  ‘Is that the same kind of thing Carl was doing last night?’

  Kristel looked suddenly as if she’d said more than she should have, and knew that it was too late to do anything about it. She flapped her hands, laughed, and said she had an idea that the business with Carl was some sort of contest that had to do with the Indians.

  ‘Like what?’ Carla asked.

  Kristel shrugged. She didn’t know, she said. And maybe, Carla thought, she didn’t.

  ‘But I’ve seen your dress, and it’s beautiful. It’s just wonderful. It’s silk and satin and all covered with little glittering jewels and shining white, like a wedding dress.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. Right down to the floor. And there’s a veil that goes with it.’

  Carla turned her head. Kristel was looking straight out into the landscape; her face glowed with eagerness. It was impossible to tell if she was lying, or remembering some other event, or imagining a thing that had never been.

  ‘And you’ll be wearing the family jewels. Including the Treasure – they had such a time getting it away from Gisela before we left home.’

  *

  She caught Carl as he was turning out of the hallway leading from her landing. ‘What’s going on?’ she said.

  He was in evening clothes. Something about them didn’t look right. They fitted perfectly, but seemed antiquated, especially the jacket. ‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ he said. ‘I thought you were trying on your dress. We aren’t supposed to see each other.’

  ‘Carl, what is all this?’

  ‘It’s just to make them happy. Some kind of pageant-thing they do. The Indians believe it makes the grass grow, or something.’