Katharina’s Mountain

“Well, I’m no expert,” Bernard said as he gently returned the coin to the wooden box, “but I’d bet you have at least $20,000 here. What’s gold going for these days? $1,600 an ounce? And you’ve got a dozen of these things.”

The student pulled his sleeve over his fingers to form a makeshift glove, reached back into the box, and withdrew a fragile little leather-bound book, its well-worn cover black with the oil of bygone fingers; its pages pungent and brittle, having yellowed with age. “This thing, on the other hand…” he whispered, his voice betraying both reverence and revulsion. “This is priceless.” He twisted in his chair and looked up at the pretty blonde girl standing over his shoulder. “Where did you say you found this, again?”

Katie absently toyed with her braid as her eyes drifted up to the dorm room ceiling. This was the first time she had actually been in inside this apartment, she reflected, passively studying the plaster surmounting the cramped, cluttered cubicle which doubled as Bernard’s living quarters. Nicknamed “the Professor”, Bernard was her floor’s resident wise man- an austere, reclusive, 25-year-old doctoral student with the frame of a 12-year-old consumptive and the bearing of a 1,000-year-old philosopher.

Although she knew him more by reputation than acquaintance, Katie was certain that Bernard would keep her secret, and had resolved to tell him the whole story the moment she decided to seek his appraisal. She was less certain of how her tale would colour his perception of her. Breaking into a dead man’s property was bad enough. Appropriating what amounted to the contents of his private safe was even worse. At best, the graduate student would think her a total weirdo. In that case, she mused ruefully, she would fit right in.

The remote sliver of Canada’s Pacific Northwest in which Katie attended university- her first home away from home- seemed to attract the most unusual characters. Draft dodgers had flocked there in the ‘60s and ‘70s, bringing their hippie culture and New Age philosophies with them. Sasquatch hunters made occasional pilgrimages to the place, often inadvertently trespassing on the homesteads of militant eco-warriors or the secret fields of cannabis farmers throughout the course of their backcountry wanderings. The region was also said to be a favourite retirement destination for ex-intelligence officers; rumour had it that Bernard himself had once been approached by a CIA recruiter on the bus ride to the nearby ski hill. Misfits, fugitives, and folks with a past to flee rubbed shoulders with loggers, fishermen, and natives in that forested frontier on the fringe of the civilized world.

Of all the colourful personalities with whom Katie crossed paths during her first semester, the most impactful proved to be Helmut, an ancient invalid with a terrible secret. In order for Bernard to make sense of her story, she would have to start with Helmut.

“It’s kind of a long story,” she said. “Do you have a moment?”

Bernard nodded. Lending Katie the use of his chair, he shuffled around some of the textbooks and notepapers that littered his mattress and cleared a seat for himself. “Let’s hear it,” he said once they had both settled in.

“I’m not sure if you know this,” Katie began, “but I’m in pre-med.”

“You’re taking your Bachelor of Science?”

“Yeah,” Katie conceded, slightly annoyed. “But I want to be a doctor one day.” She continued her narrative, relating how she had driven down to the regional hospital at the beginning of the semester and volunteered as a candy striper, knowing that fortifying her resume with relevant extracurricular experience would facilitate her acceptance into medical school.

“I agreed to work three hours every Wednesday and Friday evening,” she explained. “There were four or five of us girls, depending on the day. At first, they sent us everywhere. We’d spend a night in the pediatric unit, a shift in oncology, or maybe a few hours in the ER- anywhere we were needed, basically.

“Every once in a while, they’d have us work in the extended care wing. There were a lot of elderly patients there, and some of them had dementia, so the place was on lockdown.

“There was this one guy in EC- this cranky old man named Helmut, whom nobody wanted to work with. And when I say ‘old’, I mean really old. Like, he must have been nearly a hundred. He had Alzheimer’s, I think, and a bad case of pneumonia. The nurses tried to keep him in bed, but he’d always get up and hobble around, grumbling that he needed to go home to take care of his wife.

“One night, they asked me to read to Helmut. I think the idea was for me to keep him occupied long enough for the nurses to give the other patients their evening pills. I started reading him the first chapter of some old classic when he interrupted me.

“‘What is your name, mein engelein?’ he asked. He had this deep gravelly voice, with a thick German accent.

“Well, I’m taking German as an option, so I replied ‘Ich heise Katie”. That means ‘My name is Katie’ in German.

“You should have seen his face light up. He told me that he was so happy to hear German again, and that it had been ages since he’d enjoyed a conversation in his mother tongue. He also told me that his wife’s name is Katie- actually Katharina. And that’s what he started calling me: Katharina.

“At the end of the shift, the head nurse told me that she’d never seen anyone pacify the old man as effectively as I had that night, and asked if I would consider spending all my shifts by Helmut’s bedside. I agreed.

“And so my Wednesday and Friday nights became Helmut nights. He never remembered who I was, of course, and was consistently delighted to learn that his wife and I shared a name, especially when I introduced myself in German. I would always try to read to him, and he would always interrupt me, sometimes to tell me how much he liked my ‘nice blonde hair’ or my ‘pretty blue eyes’, and other times to tell me about Katharina. ‘She is a wonderful painter, you know,’ he would say. ‘She makes such beautiful artwork. I was never any good at sort of thing, you know.’

“Every once in a while, when the conversation turned toward the subject of his wife, he would suddenly stop talking, and his whole demeanor would change. ‘Where is she?’ he’d ask. ‘She’s sick, isn’t she? I have to go home. I have to take care of her.’ And he would try to get out of bed. The only way I ever managed to distract him was by singing this old German nursery rhyme- something they taught us in class. His eyes would light up and he’d start mumbling along, and by the time the song was over, he had usually forgotten what he was so upset about in the first place.

“His agitation never dissipated immediately. Although he couldn’t remember what was wrong, the feeling that something was wrong seemed to linger with him for a while. Whenever those moods came upon him, things got weird. He would grab my hand and squeeze it- he was pretty strong for a ninety-something-year-old - and tell me all sorts of crazy things. He would rant and rave about digging trenches in the cold; about people running around naked in the snow; about entire families being shot; about bombs fallings, and starvation, and typhus. It really scared me. I assumed he was remembering things from the war- World War II, I guess- but some of the stuff he said just didn’t make sense. He’d talk about people walking out of burning buildings ‘with their heads off, like chickens’, and about blood falling from the sky like rain. Really spooky stuff. It freaked me out, but I assumed it was the Alzheimer’s talking; fragments of old memories that got twisted in his own mind. Every once in a while, I guess he’d get the impression that I was skeptical of his stories. ‘You don’t believe me, Katharina?’ he’d growl. ‘It’s all written down in the little black notebook.’

“About a month ago, Helmut took a turn for the worse. His pneumonia deteriorated, and I know this sounds crazy, but it’s almost as if it kicked his Alzheimer’s into a higher gear. His tirades got worse. He started telling me more about the horrible things he saw during the war; about all the terrible things he did. I don’t even want to repeat them. ‘That’s not a soldier’s job, you know?’ he would say at the end of each anecdote. ‘You don’t believe me, do you? Well, it’s all written down, right in the little black book.’

“‘Blobel gave me that book, you know?’ Helmut informed me one night, after relating some of his horror stories. But he didn’t just say ‘Blobel’; he preceded the name with ‘SS’, followed by this long, martial-sounding German title. I can’t remember what it was. ‘He gave it to me right at the end of the war,’ Helmut whispered. ‘It was his diary, you know? He told me that I was the only one he could trust, and he ordered me to burn it, but I couldn’t do that. I buried it instead, right under the mountain. Under Katharina’s mountain, you know?’

“Last Wednesday was the last time I saw Helmut alive. He was in really bad shape, and I think he knew he was dying. He grabbed me by the hand and begged me to check on his wife, claiming she was sick and needed to be looked after. Then, from out of nowhere, he produced this house key, along with an old business card with his address on it. ‘Do you promise?’ he asked, handing me his effects. I promised; what else could I do?

“When I arrived at the hospital last night for my shift, the head nurse told me that Helmut had passed away. At the end of the night, I decided to drive over to his place to check in on his wife, out of respect. I didn’t actually think I’d find her there, but I’d made the poor guy a promise on his deathbed.

“The key worked alright, and I walked inside. They’d turned off the electricity, so I had to use my phone for light. I didn’t find Katharina, of course. I did find the memorial card from her funeral on the mantelpiece: 1929-2012.

“Now, get this: as I’m leaving the house, I catch a glimpse of this gorgeous painting on the wall. It’s a landscape scene- of the Bavarian Alps, I think- with a big snow-capped mountain and a little wooden church and these pretty white flowers in the foreground. I noticed that the artist’s signature was scribbled in the bottom right-hand corner, and when I tilted the bottom edge of the frame towards me to get a better look at it, the whole thing came off the wall and crashed to the ground.

“When the picture fell, something metallic fell with it. I could hear it clinking on the hardwood. I shone my light on the floor and found a key- not the one that Helmut had given me, but a tiny old-fashioned-looking key: a skeleton key. When I tried to pick it up, my fingers slipped, and the key disappeared into a crack between the floorboards. I felt terrible and tried fishing around for the key with my fingers- a futile exercise, since the crack was so narrow. In the process, I noticed that the floorboard was completely loose. I pulled it out, and lo and behold, there was the key, lying on top of a beautiful wooden box. The box had a lock, and the key fit the lock, and… well, you know the rest of the story.”