Part I, Chapter 2. The Zamserschinder

Tell me, have you ever dreamt you were flying? 

–Philipp Halsmann, in a letter to Ruth Römer, Innsbruck Prison, 30 July 1929

In the beginning, on the path through the mountains that was called the Zamserschinder, all he wanted was to get away from his father.

“Philja!  Wait!” his father commanded.  Papa was not so tall with strong short arms and legs and a big head.  His hair was short and white and slick like the coat of an otter.  He ran his thumb over the wet hair and then flung the water and sweat onto the path.  He started up the rocks as though he were not in the least tired and kicked and climbed all the way up to the tall iron cross standing in the sun.  There was a boy in the shade of the rusted cross with a goat on a leader, another one of these boys selling garnets from a tin can.

“I thought you wanted to make the train,” Philipp shouted.

“I do,” Papa shouted back.  Papa would not buy gems from a tin can, but a whim had once again moved him. 

Philipp sat on a rock to rest.  A stitch had been burning in his left side off and on since the Schwarzsee, where Papa had challenged him to a swim across the lake.  His mouth was dry.  His feet hurt and his skin was chafed with layers of dried sweat salt.

Where did these boys come from?  Where did they get their garnets?  You could go a day without seeing another person up here in the lonely green hills, the sun shining down on the dumb goats and wildflowers, then you’d come upon a lone figure, like the boy under the cross, standing there as if on the spot where he’d been born, like a gnome or spirit of the hills. 

The boy said nothing as he poured the stones out into the palm of his hand.  Papa said nothing as he pointed at them.  Even with the water falling everywhere over this green land in rills and rushing brooks, what prevailed up here was quiet.  The great unpeopled silence of the hills dwarfed human voices and the glacial Eiswelt presided above the hills like a span of gods.  You were somehow too small to speak before the vastness, as in a temple or a church. 

“Do you know the distance to Mayrhofen?” Papa said loudly to the boy under the cross, who didn’t answer.  Papa held one of the garnets up to the sun, then placed it back in the boy’s palm.  The goat was nibbling the petals of a purple flower, and the boy jerked on the rope around its neck.  Then he held out his hand again with the garnets in it.

Philipp got up and wearily climbed the pile of rocks.  “Let’s go then!” he said.  He touched his father’s back and could feel the heat of his father’s body through the cold, wet shirt.

“All right,” Papa said.  He turned to the mute boy again, shrugged and laughed.  “What will I do with my heir, here?  I think he would like to be rid of me.”

They trudged down the ridge to the path, Papa’s feet falling loudly on the earth, buckles on his rucksack jingling like bells.

“You haven’t soaked my pack have you?” Philipp said.  “My diary is inside.”  Papa had been drinking from the stream below the footbridge. 

“What?  No,” Papa said.  He then dragged Philipp’s pack up from the ground and fished his arms through the leather straps.  He slapped the pack on his chest with both hands, puffing up a small cloud of dust from the dusty canvas, and heaved the pack up higher on his chest.  He looked at his son then with sage amusement, gold crowns gleaming in his open mouth. 

“I should get out the camera,” Philipp said.  “You look very striking there, with the footbridge in the background.”

“That’s foolish.”

“Let me carry my pack the rest of the way at least,” Philipp said.  “Mama will be angry with me.”

“Listen to the doctor,” Papa said.  “You need the sun on your back.”

“I should listen?” Philipp said.  “What about you?  You’ll never listen to a doctor in your life!”

“Why are you standing around?” Papa said.  And he strode ahead on the trail with both packs.  Philipp felt so light by comparison, he thought he would float into the sky.  “Next year, when you pay your own bills, you can do as you like,” Papa called over his shoulder.

It had been this way since they got lost on Monte Generoso.  There had been a woman atop the scree and Papa called to her and started up the sunny steep rocks three times in three different places, but each time he tilted backward off the scree and had to backpedal to the trail.  Once, he got his foot stuck.  But Philipp stretched himself for a foothold that was the obvious key to the operation, and he made it up with ease on the first try.  At the top he spoke to the little woman having lunch on the rocks.  She advised they double back.  But when he got back down, his father was annoyed with him for wasting time and pretended he had never wanted to ask directions in the first place.  He said he’d already figured out the right way.  And he’d proceeded onward at a furious pace as if he meant to leave Philipp behind on the mountain.  In the morning, when they set out again, he went charging on at the same furious pace and now, by Philipp’s estimation, they were hiking 35 kilometers a day.  They would scour the entire Alps with the Halsmann family eyeballs, personally testify to everything in the guidebook and a few more places besides, and then discard the guidebook like the rind of a squeezed lemon.  They’d been up at 5:30 that very morning and vaulted up the Schönbichlerhorn into its frigid airless winds, had their retinas oxidized in the ether, and their hands seared on the snow and the flint rocks, hot as sunburned metal.  They had broken themselves on the mountain and been baptized there above the timberline at the top of the world, where the river of air meets the river of fire.  And Papa still insisted on making the evening train at Mayrhofen.

They pushed on over the trodden grass to the Zamserschinder, below which the Zamserbach roared through the leaning pine trees in a torrent of mud between sun-bronzed rocks.  Philipp hurt his ankle and they argued again about the pace and the train.  “It’s not healthy for you,” Philipp said. 

“Senna leaves?” his father yelled above the roar of the water.  “Does a doctor treat a serious heart condition with senna leaves?”

“The doctor in Chamonix was a fool,” Philipp said.

Two young men came up over the hill on the trail.  Philipp fell silent.  The sound of rushing water closed over everything that had been said, as though it had not been said at all.  His father shouted to them in his loud Yiddish-tinged German—“Guten Tag!  Do you know the distance to Mayrhofen?”—and his mouth hung open, showing the gold teeth.  But the two boys didn’t stop.  One of them cupped his hand behind his ear as though he couldn’t hear, and they walked on and laughed when they had passed.

“Did you hear what they said?”

“No,” Papa said, in a tone that warned: do not go any further with this irrelevancy.  He hurried on.

“They said, ‘It’s the two Jews from the Berlinerhütte.’  Remember?  We saw them up there.”

“They said nothing of the kind,” Papa said.

Papa could not be embarrassed.  But just today at the Furtschagelhaus the Austrians, staring unashamed and blowing at their coffee mugs with red cheeks, had studied him and his father as though they were insects.

“Ach,” Papa said.  “Nature calls, I’m afraid.  You go on ahead, Philja, and I’ll catch up to you.”  Papa took Philipp by the arm, raised the bare skin to his mouth, and kissed it.

“I’ll wait for you,” Philipp said.

“You may be staying in Breitlahner tonight,” Papa said, “but I have to get all the way to Jenbach.”

“What’s so important in Jenbach?” Philipp said.  He knew.  Papa would teach the rocks of Monte Generoso a lesson and break these mountains like a horse.

Papa said nothing.

“What’s so important in Jenbach?” Philipp said.

“Mama,” Papa said quietly.  The only time his father’s voice quieted was when he was cornered into a confession.  It was like that time when the boat had capsized in the Aa—Papa was not good in the stern—and Papa had lost the watch that Mama had inscribed for him.  When they’d righted themselves, Philipp kept trying to push off, and Papa kept saying wait, and Philipp kept dipping his paddle, and Papa said wait, and Philipp dipped the paddle, until Papa lowered his voice and said, “I need a minute.” 

“Okay, Papa,” Philipp said. 

His father dropped the first rucksack to the ground and Philipp went over the stone footbridge and down the winding path between the alder bushes, where the mountain rose up steeply above the path and cast it in shadow.

He felt something almost like peace then.  It had become a lovely day.  Crisp pure air, newly minted by the wind gods of the Eiswelt, blew down over the trembling grass.  The sound of the rushing water and the damp pine smell enveloped him.  What would be truly lovely would be to have Ruth there beside him.  Why was it that he loved her so much more when they were apart?  Love—there was that word again.  Lugano.  Love.  Does it mean you’re “in love” if that’s what comes to your mind?  How many times should it come before you can say you’re “in love”?

Who could say? 

Philipp heard a sound of barking dogs and stopped.  The sound was so faint, he couldn’t be sure if it were real.  But then a louder sound: a sharp cry from behind him on the trail.  Just one cry and then nothing but the ceaseless roar of the Zamserbach.  He thought it might have been a trick of the Zamser’s waters on his ears, but when he turned it seemed that he saw through the leaves a flash of movement: his father, falling.  It was pictorial and still, like an image on a photographic plate—his father tilting backward off the trail at an incredible angle, hands clutching the straps of his rucksack.

He rushed back toward the stone footbridge, and even before he got there, what he suddenly wanted to do was to rush back in time instead of space: to the deck of the Furtschagelhaus where they’d together looked up at the glacier, the icy firn like massive shining stairs from the rocks of the grassy moraine up into the heavens; to go back before that, to the Schwarzsee, the Black Lake, with its shrunken trees and supralunary mirror that inverted the heavens.  His father, who couldn’t swim, had challenged him to a race across the lake.  He clung to those memories, though they had not until now been good ones, like a child, suddenly homesick and clinging to the memory of home.

When he reached the footbridge, he saw his father lying below on his back, murmuring.

Part II, Chapter 7. Herr Eder

[T]he traveller in the Alpine valleys will find a race healthy to the core, firmly rooted in the soil, solid, and virile.  Here the loneliness of the mountains has created some of the finest personalities and characters ever produced by the German stock.

–Professor Dr. Norbert Krebs, “A Geographical Sketch” of Tyrol, Baedeker’s Austria, 1929

Hohenleitner’s eyes were pleased half-moons over the rose spots on his cheeks.  “Josef Eder,” he told the jury, “is the owner of the Dominikushütte.  He was the first to discover the evidence of foul play.”  The man came limping forward from the gallery, a stocky and powerful man with a creased, red Tyrol face, chewing an unlit pipe.  He wore a suit that was much too small and carried in both hands a red alpine hat with a shock of gray chamois wool on the brim. 

“How did you learn of the accident?” Hohenleitner asked.

“The Riederer boy told me,” Eder said.  His voice was very deep, as if it had been sawed from his lungs by mountain wind.  He laid his pipe on the table.

“What did he say?”

“He asked if I had a stretcher, because on the path a man has fallen to his death.”

“Did he tell you where?” Hohenleitner said.

“It was a place I knew well because I have repaired the retaining wall there in May.  I asked him, ‘For God’s sake, what happened?  Did he have a stroke?’  He told me, ‘I don’t know.  I only know that his head is completely smashed.’ ” 

“And what did you think of that?”

“I thought, ‘Something is wrong.  I better go to see for myself what happened.’  I felt responsible, because I have repaired this passage.  I tried to get there right away, but I wasn’t able to walk so fast because I have broken my feet recently and could only walk with a limp.  My wife sent my waitress after me to make sure that nothing happens to me.  I bring my dog, also.”

“And what did you find when you arrived?” Hohenleitner said. 

“There I met two men, Netterman and Schneider.  Netterman asked me, ‘What is your dog looking for?’  I wanted to chase the dog away, but as I was bending down, I have noticed some traces of blood.”

“Traces?” Hohenleitner said.  “How much blood?”

“The grass was trampled, and it looked as if somebody was dragging a bleeding pig over it,” Eder said.

“But the body was below in the water?” Hohenleitner asked.

“Yes.”

“And why was there blood on the path, do you think?”

“Well, from the dead body, I expect,” Eder replied.

“What I mean is, Herr Halsmann has said that his father had a stroke or heart attack and fell from the path, from the top of the retaining wall.  If so, why was there blood on the path?”

“The witness is not an expert,” Pessler said. 

Judge Ziegler lifted his head, extending his neck like an old tortoise, but said nothing.

“I think the man was beaten with a stone,” Eder said.

“Why?”

“He want to smash his head,” Eder said.

“I mean, what makes you think he was beaten with a stone?”

“I found a stone with blood and hairs on it.”

“You made a thorough investigation,” Hohenleitner said.

“The witness is not an expert,” Pessler said, “and he cannot have made an investigation.  It is properly called interference at a crime scene.”

Hohenleitner stepped up to the jury box.  “Herr Vorsitzender will recall that this murder took place high in the mountains.  We are lucky to have men in our country like Josef Eder, who take charge in such remote places until professional help arrives.”

Ziegler’s head looked as though it could slam down on the bench at any moment.  He blinked quietly but didn’t speak. 

“The man did not just fall.  That was clear,” Eder said.  “I thought to myself that the boy was telling a lie.  I began to think he had done this.”

“Done what?”

“Killed the man.”

“And when young Halsmann returned to the crime scene, you took action,” Hohenleitner said.  “What did you do?”

“The son returned from Breitlahner with Dr. Rainer, a medical doctor who was hunting with Prince von Auersperg’s party.  Dr. Rainer also could see that this was murder.  We agreed that the son must not be allowed to escape.  Since also there were several beaters from the hunting party who had come, I gave strict instructions that they should guard the son.  They took him back to Breitlahner under their guard.”  Eder leaned sideways to look at Philipp.  His mouth was a wire-thin straight line across the weathered face.  “He insisted that the body be carried away.  Then I said to him, ‘I forbid this.  It is a custom here in Tyrol that in such cases we wait for a commission.’  He asked me, upset: ‘Who are you to forbid that?’  I responded: ‘I am from the secret police, and who I am, you will sure find out.’  He said, ‘But what should I do?  I have to tell my mother what happened.’  I answered to that, ‘Go to the Breitlahner.  You can make a phone call from there.’  But I made sure the beaters would guard him and would not let him leave Breitlahner.”

“What happened to the rucksack of the dead man?” Hohenleitner said.

“The accused has taken it with him.  But he doesn’t carry it himself.  He has given it to one of the beaters to carry it,” Eder said.

“The State thanks you for your service as an exemplary citizen.”

“So you told Herr Halsmann that you are a member of the secret police?” Pessler said.

Eder put his hat on the table and hung on to the brim with one great red paw.  “Yes, I did.”

“And are you in the secret police?” Pessler asked.  “Or any other kind of police?”

“I keep the order around the Dominikushütte,” Eder said.

“Are you employed by any city, province, or nation as a police officer?”

“Not anymore.”

“Have you ever been employed as a police officer at any time in the past?”

“No.”

“Okay,” Pessler said.  “But you felt that someone needed to serve as a police officer under the circumstances?”

“Yes, I did.”

“So when you told Philipp you were a police officer, it was not true.  But you said it because you felt there was danger and you were trying to help.  Is that right?” 

“Yes, that’s right.”

“You also told Philipp that he could call his mother from Breitlahner, but this wasn’t true, because you had told the beaters from the hunting party to keep him completely isolated—so that he wouldn’t escape—and he was not allowed to use the phone.  Correct?”

“Yes.”

“And you told everyone you could that Herr Halsmann had committed a murder?”

“If they know a murder has happened, any good Tyroler would know what to do,” Eder said.

“Did you tell the constables that you knew who had committed the murder?”

“Yes.”

“And you told Dr. Rainer.  You said, ‘Watch out, he could shoot.’ ”

“I thought he might have a gun.”

“Well, now you are before the halls of justice in the Innsbruck Landesgericht, Herr Eder,” Pessler said.  “So no more lies, not even well-intentioned ones.  Agreed?”

“Yes.”

“Am I correct when I say that you had one reason for believing that Philipp had killed his father—that he seemed to have lied about what happened.  Is that right?”

Eder stared. 

“You did not see Philipp carrying a gun, an axe, a stone, or any weapon.  You did not see blood on Philipp’s person, his clothes, his belongings.  You did not know Philipp Halsmann, and so you knew of no reason he would or would not wish to harm anyone.  You did not witness the assault on Max Halsmann.  You did not speak to anyone who claimed they witnessed the murder.  But Philipp said it was a fall, and there was blood on the grass and a bloody stone on the trail.  That is the reason you believed Philipp had committed a crime, and that is the only reason.  Because he seemed to be lying.  Correct?”

“He said it was an accident,” Eder said.  “There was blood filling up the place everywhere and a stone full of blood.  No one else was anywhere around.  The Zamserschinder is a faraway and lonely place.”

“You mentioned your dog.  I understand she was most helpful that afternoon.”

“Yes, she was.”

“It was the dog who discovered the blood, yes?”

“Yes.  And she found the rock.”

“And you trained this dog yourself?”

“Yes.”

“You must be proud.  The dog is a faithful guardian, a hero.”

Eder smiled.  He was proud.

“If you hadn’t trained such a clever dog, the murder might not have been discovered in fact, isn’t that right?  Because several people had arrived at the scene, but no one saw the blood on the grass or the bloody rock until your dog sniffed it out and called it to your attention.  Correct?”

“Right.  I give her a good bone full of fat.”

“Did Herr Nettermann have a dog with him that day?”

“No.”

“And did he discover the blood?”

“No.”

“Did Herr Schneider, Herr Riederer, or Dr. Rainer have dogs with them that day?”

“No.”

“And did they discover the blood?”

“No.”

“That’s how important your dog was.”

A slight smile, like a little electric current, continued to deflect the edge of Eder’s wire-thin mouth.

“If not for your dog, no one might have known about the blood.  And did Philipp Halsmann have a dog with him that day?”

“No.”

“Did he show you any blood, or mention any blood, or a rock?”

“No.”

“And did you show Philipp Halsmann the bloody rock?”

“No.  I didn’t want him to run.”

“And you ordered a stretcher laid on top of the blood stains to hide them from Philipp, yes?”

“That’s what I did.  To keep him calm so he wouldn’t run away,” Eder said.

From Part IV, Chapter 4. The Persistence of Memory

I doubt about my success in life. But I have known one man who always believed in me and my success, and that was my poor father.

–Philipp Halsmann, in a letter from Stein prison, 1930

        “What’s the matter with you?” the girl said.  She stood by the shelves of tacky china, a young and quite beautiful brunette in a blue hat cantilevered forward over her brow and a blue suit.  She was rapidly chewing gum. 

“Yes,” Philippe said.  He could understand English but his vocabulary was still arrestingly small.

The girl stepped over a stack of diapers and set her handbag down on the sofa.  She untied her scarf and wrinkled her nose as she looked around at the soiled walls, cheap furniture, and piles of junk.  “Was that the janitor downstairs?  He sure did get an eyeful of me when I came in.”

“How old are you?” Philippe said.

“Didn’t I already tell you that at the agency?” she said, as if her youth were a flaw.

“I am practicing my English.”

  “I’m eighteen,” she said.  “So what’s wrong?  Your dog die or something?”

“So young and so ... how do you say in English?”  He picked up the little blue dictionary.

“My mother calls it ‘strong-willed.’ ”  The girl chewed her gum vigorously and looked at him with skepticism. 

“So young and so ... advanced of body,” he said.  By the strange look on the girl’s face, he could tell that his word choice was incorrect.

As if by clairvoyance, the phone rang then.  It was the girl’s mother.  He pinned the receiver between his shoulder and chin and held up to the light the paper American flag.  “I don’t like the idea of my Connie hanging around in a furnished room with a Frenchman,” the woman said.  “She’s a child, now, you understand?  In America, that means hands off.”

“Of course,” Philippe said.  “I am married.”

“That never stopped any Frenchman I ever heard of.  I’ll call back in fifteen minutes and you had better answer.  Goodbye.  Make it ten minutes.  Goodbye.” 

Philippe hung up and knelt in the center of the floor beside a basket of dirty laundry.  He pinned one corner of the flag under the leg of a floodlamp.

“This is your place?” Connie said. 

Philippe looked up.  “We are soon to depart.”  He pushed himself up and began to circle around the girl.  The face was as he remembered at the agency, with a strong chin, an almost masculine jawline, and skin and eyes like an Egyptian queen.  Philippe reached up to the top of the tall girl’s head and pulled out her hat pins.  The hat dropped into his hands and he placed it on the imitation altar table that sat before the hideous brown sofa.  “Clothes off, please.  The chemisier.  The top.”  He tugged at his own shirt.

“What?”

Again the phone rang and Philippe answered.  “Madame Ford,” he said, “it is only two minutes till before.  Seconds, perhaps.”

“She may think she’s thirty-five,” the woman said.  “But she is in fact eighteen years old and her virginity is intact and shall remain so.  No clothing shall be removed.  Not even her shoes.  Do you hear?”

“I understand, Madame.”  He placed the hat pins beside the hat on the altar table.

  “Now,” the mother said, “let me speak to her.”

Philippe handed the phone to the young model and went to draw the window shade down. 

“I know, Mother,” the girl said.  “I know.  I’m more worried about the pictures he’s going to take.  This place is a real dump.”

Philippe crouched and made a few mental calculations.  He tore a few pieces of dirty masking tape from a roll, turned the two-cent paper flag, and taped its corners down.  He stood and pointed the floodlamp down and set a reflector on a stand on the opposite side.  The reflector would soften the shadows, especially on her wonderful long neck, and would add a little bit of contour to her shoulders, making them round and touchable on film.  “Remove the shirt,” he whispered.  “I require to see the skin to here.”  He placed his hand perpendicular against his own sternum. 

“Yes, mother.  I have to go.  He’s trying to start the shoot.”

“Naked shoulders,” Philippe whispered.

“Mother—I heard you.  Bye.” 

The model handed him the receiver and he laid it back on the cradle.  She unbuttoned her suit jacket and rested it carefully across the arm of the sofa.  Then she pulled the white blouse over her head, revealing two full and jutting bosoms in a pink brassiere with a little pink bow between them. 

He pointed to the bra.  “Off,” he said. 

The young girl blanched.  “No.”

Philippe looked around the room, wishing Yvonne were there.  He went to the closet and from the bottom shelf extracted an old sheet, which he gave to his subject. 

“Are you any good or are you just hoping to trade on my looks?”

Trade on her looks?  He was shooting her for free.  “Trust me, please,” he said.

“I want respectable work from this, you know.”

He pointed to the brassiere again.  “Off.”

“My mother was right about you Frenchmen, boy,” the girl said.  She wrapped the sheet around her shoulders and turned away from him and began wriggling out of her bra.  “I don’t want to end up on a deck of dirty playing cards, okay?”  He heard the bra uncupping itself from her bosoms and then saw the detached cups lying on the sofa like the shells of a hard-boiled egg.

“I would like to make a photograph tout nu, of course,” he said.  “But I not require tout nu.  The shoulders naked only.  Now, please.  Lie on the floor.”

“Lie on the floor!  Really!  You don’t understand America, Jack!”

“No, I understand le monde.  Lie on the floor with the head on the colors American.  The flag.  Please.”

“It’s dirty,” she said.

“Please.  On the floor.  And the shoulders—very naked.”

She knelt down and lowered herself to the floor.  “Like this?”

“More naked,” he said, pulling the sheet down a bit on her breasts.  He dragged the Halsman camera over on its tripod and stood it beside the floodlamp.  “The chin down.  The head right.  More.  Good.”  The stripes of the flag slanted against her face at a near right angle to her nose.  Stars hovered about her head above the hairline.  Shadow faintly veiled her eye as if to suggest the fatigue of American hard work, and her strong jawline was traced by a thick boomerang of shadow, showing America was up to any task.  He had created a real American goddess if he didn’t say so himself, Lady Liberty in the flesh, born there on the squalid floor of the boarding house.  They ought to put this photograph on the national currency.

“I don’t see what naked shoulders have to do with patriotism,” she said, “but whatever you say, fella.” 

Don’t you want to beat Germany? he wished to say, but he hadn’t the command of the English words.  You win a war with naked shoulders.