The Pegnitz Junction Read Online Free PDF Page B

newly trimmed so that a crescent of skin left each ear looking stranded. The men smelled of aftershave lotion – lilac and carnation – that they’d been given last Christmas by the family women.
    The visitors followed Uncle Bebo once around the table. They paused when he did, to squint at an oval portrait, nodded when he said, “Baroque!” and cried out with wonder at the sweet bell-tone when he snapped his fingernails on a crystal punchbowl – all the while renewing their smiles and encouraging remarks to the staff. Finally all headed towards another door at the end of the room. This one had a pointed lintel beneath which Uncle Bebo paused for the last time. He raised his fist (still clenched around the five marks), looked up at the lintel, back at the frozen people of all ages clutching their knives and forks, did not cry, “Death to upper-class swine!” as they might have feared in their collective bad dream, but only, “This door is Gothic! No mistake!” and led the visitors on, the marks in his knuckles going
cling-cling-cling
. Granny turned back, smiled, curtsied deeply, and gave them a blessing.
    Now they began to look for THIS WAY OUT , for there had not been all that much to see in the museum. Aunt Barbara was stillwatching for the door she wanted. Uncle Bebo clamped his teeth together and made a hissing sound to torment Aunt Barbara, so that she couldn’t stop laughing, which was no help either. All at once they were outside again in the handsome park, with Aunt Barbara searching hard for a row of shrubs or a tree large enough to conceal her. As soon as she saw what she needed she cried to her mother-in-law, “Oh, Granny, a lovely tree, a thick fat beautiful tree,” and galloped off, hiking up her Italian pleated skirt. The grandmother was slower, bothered by her long petticoats – two of them navy blue, two of white linen-and-cotton, one of lawn – and mysterious bloomers that were long in the leg and had never been seen by her own daughters: they were washed apart, hung to dry between pillow cases, and ironed by Granny in the dead of night.
    Granny grasped the edge of the innermost petticoat. The trick was to bundle all the other skirts within it and hang on to the hem with her teeth. Just as she had a good hold on the hem she happened to see two boys of sixteen or so running with large black dogs on leads in and out of shade down the sloping lawn. The dogs were barking and the boys were calling to the women, “Stop! Stop!”
    But then from far away, from within the alley of lime trees, another cry sounded, and, running too, breaking free of the trees, came the steward, the horrible Jürgen, then sly-eyed Uncle Ludwig, and the owner of the trees with his little cloud of house dogs. Before these two parties could meet and lambaste each other with sticks and fists it was established that the ugliest of the intruders – Uncle Ludwig – was that Godsent figure who might purchase thousands of Christmas trees. Theboys backed off, pulled their dogs in short, and said, “We didn’t know.”
    Aunt Barbara seemed thoroughly pleased to see everyone; she always liked a crowd. But she was bothered because her skirt was not hanging as she wanted it to, her undergarments having become tangled and twisted. She had to unzip the placket of her skirt, so that it looked as if she meant to take it off; but all she did was give a good wiggle and shake, and when everything had settled she zipped it up again and cried, “Oh, the dear sweet beautiful dogs!” So everything ended well, and as the two boys led Granny back up to the little castle, through the still sunny day filled with such exquisite green lights and shadows, she could be heard saying that she had known all along it could not have been a museum; the beds looked too soft.
    Now all this family of visitors save one, the child, were struck dead before long. Five of them carried the germ of the cancer that would destroy them, and one died of a stroke. The