Tretjak by Max Landorff Page A

Oberronnberg with mixed feelings. It was just after 11 o’clock in the morning and he was almost an hour early for the appointment. But he wanted to collect his thoughts a little bit. He had been to the hospital this morning to visit the old farmer’s wife Sigl whose eyes were dimmed by glaucoma, and the mechanic Staiger, who had just had an operation on his gall bladder. And he’d had to administer the final sacraments to a nine-year-old girl. She had been knocked off her bicycle last night at the nasty corner near the station in Neufahrn, where so many accidents had happened already because everybody collided there; the pedestrians coming out of the underpass, the cyclists from the Marktberg, and the lorry drivers using the old commercial road. And little Jacqueline, called Jackie. Lord, be good to her.
    In the little church of Oberronnberg regular mass had not been held for a long time. The church had been incorporated into Joseph Lichtinger’s congregation of Grisbach and was only opened for special occasions like baptisms, memorial services and now and again an intimate wedding. It was situated at a distance on a hill, with big cornfields in front and the forest behind it. Inside there were ten rows of wooden benches on either side of the aisle and a simple altar at the front. On the wall behind the altar hung the gem of the church: a relatively big, hand-carved oak cross, which was quite famous around here because its Jesus did not appear to be suffering but angry. The little steeple was directly above the altar and the bell rope was wrapped around a brass hook on the wall beside it.
    Lichtinger sat down in the front row and lifted his eyes towards the cross. He was of medium height and had an athletic figure, which even the badly-cut black priest’s outfit could not obscure completely. In his youth, he had been an active gymnast. Horizontal bar. And he still played football, as a member of the senior team of Grisbach. His most striking feature was his straw blond hair and bright blue eyes, which had always been the cause of much ridicule here at the place of his birth. Joseph Lichtinger was one of four brothers, the youngest, and they all had these eyes and this hair, despite the fact that both their father and mother had brown hair and dark eyes. A good-looking Swede must have passed through the area once upon a time, so the joke went when the four boys entered elementary school in Grisbach. His brothers had been dispersed all over the world. He had initially gone abroad as well, but then he had come back wearing a black suit and white collar. The nickname ‘Swede’ had stuck, priest or not.
    He had not heard from Gabriel Tretjak for two years and had not seen him... How long ago must that have been? Tretjak had called last night, and the sound of his voice had unsettled Lichtinger.
    â€˜What’s up?’ he had asked, ‘is there anything wrong... in our affairs?’
    â€˜Maybe,’ Tretjak had answered. ‘Possibly. We’ve got to talk.’
    He could come over straight away, Lichtinger had proposed. But Tretjak had declined. He wanted to go stargazing first. At least in that respect nothing had changed. A clear sky had always put an appointment with Tretjak at risk.
    Oberronnberg was not a well-lit church, the windows were on the small side and colourfully painted with scenes from the New Testament. They did not let in a lot of light. Maybe it was because of this strange twilight at midday that Father Joseph Lichtinger – the Swede – suddenly became very calm and let his thoughts wander back a long way into his own past. His memories were connected with warm feelings as if he were not remembering himself but another person he had once known well and liked, but now did not know what had become of him. That person had been a physics student back then, and for a brief moment now in the little church he thought he could solve a differential calculus without