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  Glass-eye U.B.Z. stubbed out his cigarette and looked Ulrike sternly in the eyes. “Pasolini was one of the great film directors, but only one. In contrast, there has never been a more ingenious musician than Scott Walker. Period.”

  Ulrike nods, half asleep, in the sweet darkness behind her Eye Mask DeLuxe. She amuses herself, imagining a roguish Ninetto and a handsome Pier Paolo making love. Slow, moose-like movements. Open mouths, gruff bellowing. How does a middle-aged man make love to an underage boy? Does he make love to the boy, or does the boy make love to him? Or does it really happen together, at one time, the man with the boy and the boy with the man? However it works, Ulrike enjoys their love. This time she decides to let Paulo lead. She is Ninetto, young fifteen-year-old wicked Ninetto, who submits, who allows the older man to mount his back once again . . .

  Glass-eye U.B.Z. knows a lot of things. He tells stories, but he still doesn’t reveal anything. Ulrike’s new friend at the Eagle’s Nest, Anke-Marie, is sure that U.B.Z makes up all of it. “It can’t be true,” Anke-Marie says. “Like the story about the eye. Come on!” Anke-Marie is skeptical. She frowns as if in disapproval of U.B.Z.’s stories, but she still enjoys them. Maybe Anke-Marie is a little infatuated with Ulrich? She smiles (her gums show) when Ulrich walks up to the kiosk in the courtyard of the Kehlsteinhaus during the shift change and buys a package of throat lozenges and cigarettes from her. The kiosk belongs to Anke-Marie’s mother, but because her mother has to care for her own ailing mother in a gingerbread house in the valley of Berchtesgaden, Anke-Marie is spending this summer sitting on a tall barstool behind the kiosk window. Ulrike thinks Anke-Marie is the best thing at the Eagle’s Nest, besides the salary. And besides Ulrich. When Anke-Marie explodes with laughter, the vultures in the mountain tops hear it too.

  Ulrich B. Zinnemann is a unique case. None of the characters from any normal gallery of stereotypes fits his description. A forty-year-old man who lost his left eye in a duel! Ulrike and Anke-Marie have spent many a day considering the mystery of the unmoving, lifeless glass eye. Until one fine day, Anke-Marie goes and simply asks, “One of your eyes doesn’t move, Ulrich. What happened to it?” The three of them were hanging around the kiosk. The Eagle’s Nest was already closed, and Anke-Marie was locking up. “Is your left eye made of glass?”

  Ulrike wanted to kick Anke-Marie in the shins, but U.B.Z. didn’t seem to mind. He leaned on the counter, loudly sucking on a mint, and began to tell the story of his left eye: “There was a woman, a very beautiful woman, who had another man. I got in the way of a budding romance. The woman fell in love with me, and the other man couldn’t get over it. He happened to have certain obsessions with the past, so he suggested a duel in accordance with the old ways. For some crazy reason, I accepted. I was young, stupid in love, reckless, and competitive. We arranged the time and the place, and invited seconds to witness. Then we dispatched the battle with rapiers. Neither of us died. He ended up gushing blood. I lost my eye, and all for nothing: the woman wasn’t worth it.”

  Anke-Marie is right. It can’t be true.

  Ulrich B. Zinnemann works as a lift-boy at the Eagle’s Nest. Temporary. Really he’s a film director, but his projects are too uncompromising, too artistic, so finding sources of funding is difficult. Which is why he directs tourists into a shiny, golden time capsule that rockets them 124 meters up to the top, through a chasm quarried into the mountain. U.B.Z. counts the proper number of people, cuts off the queue at the right spot, and presses the button. Up above, he directs the people out of the lift and then takes on an appropriate number of people going down. Then he presses another button.

  Sometimes someone asks something. U.B.Z. replies with a routine, cursory answer. Lift-boys are not allowed to speak out of turn. Tour guides distribute the necessary information, but they have also been instructed not to mention the Forbidden Name (unless it’s absolutely unavoidable). They prefer to discuss the great arc of history, the Allies and the German Army, the movements of troops, and military strategies. The fact that the Kehlsteinhaus is actually a hideout, built as a fiftieth birthday present by the National Socialists for Him of the Forbidden Name—that doesn’t actually mean anything. “You can easily hide that in an aside so it won’t give anyone the chills,” Ulrich B. Zinnemann whispers to Ulrike in the Eagle’s Nest kitchen as they wolf down a quick standing lunch. “The Kehlsteinhaus lacks any hint of the macabre, any of the eerie karma that tyrants leave on things they touch and in places they visit. And do you know why?” Ulrike nods but can’t say anything because her mouth is full of spaghetti and she doesn’t want to get any sauce on her blouse or spit mushroom bits in U.B.Z.’s face, which is very close to her own. “Because,” Ulrich whispers, “the recipient of the gift wasn’t able to appreciate the gift he received due to his fear of heights!”

  Ulrike knows. During her downtime she’s read all the Kehlsteinhaus tourist information plaques and listened to all the stories the guides tell. He of the Forbidden Name only visited the mountain about ten times and spent a maximum of half an hour there on each occasion. The visits were pure theatrics. He of the Forbidden Name didn’t enjoy a second of it. And because he didn’t enjoy it, the Allies didn’t have to bomb the building to smithereens.

  That was not the case, however, for the Berghof in Obersalzberg, He of the Forbidden Name’s beloved vacation home, which had an entrance hall decorated with cactus plants in majolica pots. The ceiling of the dining room was paneled with expensive cembra pine, and the walls were covered with watercolors painted by He Himself. The British air force bombed the building to the ground and retreating SS troops lit the ruins ablaze. Nothing that He of the Forbidden—and becoming more Forbidden by the moment—Name had really and truly liked could be allowed to remain intact on the face of the earth. The imperceptible but inevitable transformation of it into a memorial had to be nipped in the bud.

  Paulo and Ninetto have long since slipped into a deep post-coital sleep, and Ulrike dozes along with them. Not until the bus arrives at the Berchtesgaden Station does Ulrike-Ninetto start awake, with the taste of moss in her mouth and her tongue feeling hairy. Today, on the fifteenth of August, Ulrike is getting to the Eagle’s Nest in Ulrich B. Zinnemann’s Volkswagen. This is the first time she’s climbing into Zinnemann’s Volkswagen without Anke-Marie. No giggling. That much is obvious. Giggling doesn’t work without Anke-Marie. Lots of things don’t work without her, but one thing might work now that the kiosk is closed. Anke-Marie has to be away to help her mother, her mother who insists on taking her own dear mother to Mass and then out to eat. Anke-Marie didn’t think that was a good idea. “Grandma Verona doesn’t need to go to Mass any more,” Anke-Marie huffed as she shuttered the kiosk. “Yes, she might very well need it,” Anke-Marie said, mimicking her mother’s loud, shrill voice. “Grandma still understands the language of music!” Then Anke-Marie put her hands on her hips like her mother does, apparently, when she wants to tempt fate more than necessary: “We’re going to put her in her dirndl, we’re going to buy her flowers at the door of the church, and we’re going to wheel her to the front row just like last year.” At this point Anke-Marie lowered her voice back to her own tone: “Really Grandma Verona will just get tired and start to whimper.” In the end Anke-Marie cleared her throat and shouted louder than was necessary, and off key in the way someone who doubts her own decision but is stifling those doubts is wont to do: “Grandma is going to church and that’s the end of it! We’re taking her to Assumption Mass every damn year as long as she’s alive!”

  Ulrich is waiting for Ulrike outside the bus station. He waves and opens the door for her. “Could you put on The Drift?” Ulrike asks as soon as she sits down, and without a word, Ulrich puts Scott Walker’s thirteenth studio album in the CD player. The passenger seat is Anke-Marie’s seat, but Anke-Marie isn’t here. “Is your left eye glass?” God damn it! She would never dare ask that! But Anke-Marie does, and in reward they get to hear all kinds of crazy stories. Do you have any children? A wife? Oh,
you live with your mother? Isn’t that a little . . . psycho? U.B.Z. always plays along. Anke-Marie says something inappropriate and turns to look at Ulrike sitting in the back seat. She laughs and her gums glitter. It’s hard to resist. Gradually Ulrike learns to relax, to laugh along with them. U.B.Z. doesn’t bite. U.B.Z. looks at her in the mirror and winks, with the eye that moves, the right one. Ulrike smiles back, and U.B.Z. turns serious. He glances at the road and then looks at her again. For just a moment too long.

  And now they’re in the car together.

  Ulrike’s exhaustion is gone. That’s an accomplishment. When she started at the Eagle’s Nest in May, when she didn’t know Anke-Marie yet, let alone Ulrich, she always slept whenever possible. She slept on the way to work, she slept coming home from work, and without enormous doses of caffeine, she would have slept at the Kehlsteinhaus too. She would have nodded off in her seat or passed out standing up like a horse. Yes, in an emergency she could have locked her knees like a horse and dozed on her feet, or even on one foot like a flamingo. That was how profound her exhaustion had been. But of course sleeping at work was not befitting. That would have meant getting the boot, and Ulrike couldn’t afford that. She needed money. She needed to save for the coming year. For leaving Salzburg. Goodbye, horse-shit cream-cake city! Goodbye, Hanno! Goodbye, Mom and Dad! Living at home was simply too intolerable. The atmosphere was slimy. Whose fault that was, Ulrike didn’t care to figure out any more, but two opposing truths existed. Her father thought they were victims of speculators. Her mother thought they were victims of her husband’s obstinacy, since he had refused to sell his money-losing company in time and just let the Great Catastrophe happen. He had practically rolled out the red carpet for the Catastrophe despite all the warnings. But if that was the case, if her father really had made too many unforgivable mistakes, as her mother claimed, why on earth were they still married?

  Goodness, how Ulrike could drink coffee! Sometimes black, sometimes with milk, sometimes as espresso from the espresso machine, sometimes instant from coffee granules—whatever happened to be within reach. And sometimes, for variety and refreshment, she drank lemonade. This was how Ulrike was able to offer her best service the whole long day through at the Kehlsteinhaus.

  Tourists arrived at the parking lot in lines of buses that wound along the serpentine road, disembarked, and then moved in a queue to the tunnel carved in the mountain. Clumps of them then entered the polished brass lift, the buttons of which were pressed by the lift operators, among them Glass-eye Ulrich. The lift carried them and their cameras and sun hats or ponchos and umbrellas or walking sticks or binoculars or tightly packed backpacks and water bottles and sunglasses on their foreheads, straight to the lobby of the Eagle’s Nest. Ulrike waited for them in the restaurant. She wore a picturesque if not rustic blouse with gathered sleeves, in a customer-friendly and easily approachable white-and-violet checked fabric. Her right hand was prepared to set a laminated menu on the red-and-white checked tablecloth before the customer next to the artificial white roses decorated with glass beads. Ach so gemütlich! On the belt of her black work trousers, Ulrike carried a train conductor’s wallet for easy access to coins and bills, as well as a small notebook where she could quickly check the orders. This summer she was Fräulein Kehlsteinhaus, a diligent, eager, perhaps slightly hysterical, but all the more lovely waitress.

  Sometimes she got moving so fast the money belt swung all the way around her hips to her behind. Ulrike strode from the dining room to the kitchen delivering orders to the cook, and back from the kitchen to the dining room carrying dishes to the hungry customers. Weighed down by coins, the bouncing money pouch lent her movements even more speed. This quick scatterbrain wasn’t the gloomy Ulrike of Salzburg; this was the light-footed, sashaying Ulrike of Kehlsteinhaus. If she slouched around Salzburg in combat boots and with her hair in her eyes, just for the sake of contrast, here she had intentionally learned perfect grace as she carried head cheese seasoned with oil and vinegar, Hungarian goulash, Leberkäse buns, pork schnitzel and chips, hüttenwurst and sauerkraut, spätzle, venison and red cabbage, salad, beer, coffee, and apple strudel—with charm and swaying hips. Her blokeish walk, where she moved her entire upper body as one massive plate like a security guard, which appealed to Ulrike so much because it matched so poorly with the natural movement of her slender, somewhat girlish frame, did not belong in the Eagle’s Nest. In the Eagle’s Nest she had to hurry with the cotton-wool lightness of Lepus timidus, which leaves the beaded paw prints of a fox as it flees.

  The results of her walking practice at the Kehlsteinhaus were excellent. Now and then Ulrike ended up posing in front of the enormous, restored picture window with overly tanned American men drunk on beer who looked like Hugh Hefner. Their friends took pictures and then traded places. Ulrike might smile under the arm of as many as four Hefners at a time. She always got an excellent tip. The men were extremely generous. She also got a round, white bobtail between her buttocks and long rabbit ears on her head, which made returning to the packed dining room difficult. The ears always seemed to get in the way and made it hard to see as Ulrike weaved between the tables with a tray full of empty plates and tall beer glasses. The bunny tail swung under her legs and dangled like a poorly-seated tampon, and her mood didn’t return to normal until her smoke break or even the ride home, when Ulrike, already half asleep, inserted her earbuds.

  Ulrich B. Zinnemann turns up the CD. He rolls down the window of the car, shifts into fourth, and makes the tires of his Volkswagen squeal. Old, wise Scott is singing about Claretta Petacci, who demanded to die alongside her beloved Benito Mussolini. Ulrike learns, U.B.Z. makes sure, that women who fall in love with dictators are always like that. Poor Eva Braun married her Führer only a day before their double suicide. Death and love, violence and passion, sacrifice and victory—“Listen, listen carefully!” U.B.Z. says. And Ulrike listens.

  Benito and Claretta were shot on April 28, 1945. The following day their bodies were carried to the Piazzale Loreto in Milan and hung upside down from the roof of an Esso petrol station. Their bodies were desecrated with much rage and rejoicing. Their bodies were mocked and abused. Their bodies were shot to pieces, BAM BAM. The tires of the Volkswagen wail a strange love song. Ulrike and Ulrich sing along with Scott Walker, their individual voices still coming through the melody. How thoroughly the nervousness has disappeared from Ulrike. She doesn’t need Anke-Marie for this. She’ll do fine. She’ll do fine, BAM BAM, she’ll do fine. Hefners, tails, and ears—BAM! Coffee cups beer glasses plates waiting above —BAM! Notebooks coins banknotes lilac white gathered checked sleeved waitress blouses, BAA-AM! If the Volkswagen drove off the road right now . . .

  Auf der Alm da gibt’s ka Sünd . . .

  They both know the mountain knows no sin, which is why Ulrich B. Zinnemann has the courage to make a proposition to Ulrike.

  Mountain, home, ravine, conductor’s purse, flower, mother, father, elevator, Hanno, mountain, Ulrich B. Zinnemann’s glass eye, purse, home, ravine, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.

  Ulrike opens her eyes and sees the women’s expectant expressions. She rises up on her elbows and glances at the clothing she has on, gently worn corduroys and a Scott Walker T-shirt, still stiff from being new, with a young mop-headed Scott looking confidently and also very dramatically somewhere up and to one side, toward the sky, toward Ulrike. The digital display of her wristwatch stopped at 21:03. So that was how it must have been. She had died on August 15, around nine o’clock. Had she made it back home to Alpenstraße from the Kehlsteinhaus? Alone, of course alone, and on the bus. Not in the Volkswagen? No, not in the Volkswagen. No matter how hard Ulrike strains, she cannot recall Ulrich B. Zinnemann’s face or touch or kiss. Had she turned tail like a coward? Or—a terrible presentiment suddenly forms a tight lump in Ulrike’s throat, which she can still feel—had U.B.Z. changed his mind while they were at work?

  Horrible shame rushes to Ulrike’s ears. Just so. Yes, yes. Ulrich B. Zinnemann ha
d succumbed to regret. The more openly Ulrike glanced at the elevator, the more he had berated himself: what had he gone and done? She was still a little girl. Every 124-meter ascent, every 124-meter descent had confirmed the understanding that chafed and grew within U.B.Z.: No, not like this. She’s still a child.

  Now Ulrike remembers the trembling of her legs, the sweat that formed in her armpits and on her back, even creating a tiny bead in the droplet-shaped cleft beneath her nose, the philtrum. Ulrich B. Zinnemann had disgraced her. At the end of his shift he came, grinning, and took up a position along her route: the corridor between the kitchen and the dining room. She had walked with a stack of dirty dishes in her hand the way one walks toward the rising sun: eyes squinting, a bewildered expression on her face. She had walked right up to U.B.Z. and smiled knowingly at him, the way people do who share a secret smile at each other. She looked him straight in the right eye, ready to accept anything. But not this. “Can we go for a drink some other day, Ulrike? Sometime when Anke-Marie can come too?”

  These words hit her in the temple like a nail gun. BAM!

  Ulrike had been able to read between the lines in a thousandth of a second: Ulrike, I’m really sorry, but I didn’t realize before that you have these kinds of feelings for me. You’re just a child still. I like you, and I also like Anke-Marie. Let’s keep this as a bit of fun, this friendship of ours. Let’s not mess it up with anything that doesn’t fit with that.