from

Fliehende Wasser
by Ursula Fricker

Translated by Helena Ragg-Kirkby

[pp 5-6]

He was found in a ditch by the side of the road. Between two tiny villages at the very edge of Switzerland, at the point where a step or two in any direction lands you on the border. He lay buried beneath a crust of fresh, feathery snow, his eyes shut, as though sleeping peacefully in a bed of ice. It was just getting light.

But my father never got drunk.

His bike lay a few yards away, half in the ditch, a bright green, 3-speed bike with both its tyres worn to the canvas.

Old Farmer Sieber had found the body. It was half-past seven in the morning. He was on his way to the station when his tractor headlights caught the overturned bike for an instant, making its reflector glow, and it occurred to Farmer Sieber that where there was a bike there must also be a rider. He stopped, climbed down from his tractor, walked back a few paces, and peered into the ditch.

Stone the crows!

The man was lying on his back. What struck Farmer Sieber was the fact that his hands were buried deep in the pockets of a ridiculously thin jacket: it was winter, for heaven’s sake! No one from around here. A stranger. He could see that straightaway. Despite his aching limbs old Farmer Sieber climbed down into the ditch to shake the man awake, and gave his face a hard slap. Drunk, he thought to himself; so pissed that he fell off his bike. Wake up, that’s what he’s got to do: wake up.

It was a beautiful morning, crisp and cold. All two hundred and three inhabitants of the village were standing by the ditch gazing down at the corpse that lay in a tangle of bent and broken laburnum bushes. People on bikes don’t normally get cold, said Sieber, not so long as they keep on riding. The dead man’s lips were dark blue, and contorted into a travesty of a smile. Wisps of black hair fluttered in the breeze coming down off the hillside. Dogs were sniffing around everywhere and lifting their legs against the trees. The Ramsen policeman arrived in an Opel Kadett with the local medical officer. The latter could find no injuries: no stab wounds, no bullet wounds, no heavy blows to the head. No one else involved, said the doctor, that’s for sure. Alcohol, maybe. Froze to death very probably. The policeman nodded. In the man’s left hip-pocket they found a wallet. Behind a hundred-frank note was a much-folded photograph: an out-of-focus picture of a young man standing by the edge of an anonymous sea. There was an identity card as well. According to the card, the dead man was Simon Brock from Schaffhausen, a silversmith.

*****

[pp 136-8]

Simon Brock had forgotten to take the photograph of Jean out of his wallet. People carry around photos of their mother or their wife or their children, but certainly not photographs of people like Jean. Simon Brock knew this. The picture had been folded and re-folded many times, and where the emulsion had cracked and peeled there was a grille-like pattern of lines. As though he were looking out at the world with Jean through the tiny window of a dungeon. He simply couldn’t bring himself to throw the photo away, to tear it to pieces and chuck it in the bin. Or burn it. Perhaps burning it would have been best.

You’ve not been the same, said Elisabeth Brock, since you starting training apprentices.

The apprentices all looked like Jean.

The apprentices were lazy, all three of them. They were incompetent. Worse than incompetent. They hung around in the soldering room with hunched shoulders, sloppy posture and long hair. Simon Brock showed them how to solder a lid-hinge onto a teapot. The sharp smell of flux in their noses. Beads of sweat on their foreheads. If the flame is too hot it burns a hole in the silver. If the temperature is too low, the joint won’t hold. Then the two pieces break apart – but not straightaway. Just as someone was pouring tea in some grand household, the handle would come off. The firm would have to pay compensation, replace the broken porcelain cups, pay exemplary damages for burnt thighs. The firm’s reputation would suffer. A nasty business. Although he wasn’t bothered about the firm’s reputation, Simon Brock never made mistakes. He was careful by sheer force of habit. It never crossed his mind to do things any other way. All the pieces that others had messed up landed on his workbench. The apprentices stood around him in a semi-circle and watched. People who want to be silversmiths, he told them, don’t have long hair. They went and complained to the foreman, Fehr. After that the apprentices’ hair was even longer, a tangled mass on every head.

He showed them how much flux to put on the joint, how big the flame needed to be, how steady they had to keep their hand. If he happened to glance up at them, he saw conspiratorial grins on bored faces. Later, when they were supposed to try for themselves, they did everything wrong. They always did everything wrong. They were in cahoots with Fehr. He’d never wanted to have any apprentices. They had soft, pink hands. They made sure flux never spilled onto their hands. They made sure they never cut their finger.

Simon Brock’s hand-filed ebony handles looked as if they had been made by a machine. When the apprentices did filing he could see their muscles working beneath the skin, beneath the little blond hairs on the backs of their hands. He saw the strain on their faces and made them strain even more. He watched the apprentices’ handles become bent and crooked. He could have screamed. They got blisters on their hands. They should have given themselves really deep cuts – he wanted them to have scars to show for it. Black sawdust was stuck under their fingernails and eyelids. He drove them on and on, he criticised their every move, until they just couldn’t take any more and went running off to Fehr again. They were welcome to go running off to Fehr: he wanted rid of them once and for all. He didn’t want to have to look day after day at their young faces, their beautiful eyes. Sometimes, when no one was looking, he held the soldering torch close to the skin on his arm, at the point where it was most vulnerable: the inner surface of his forearm. He bit his teeth together. The heat burnt a patch of his skin. His wife was at home awaiting their second child.