Marie hated the house at first sight. “It looks so gloomy, and all that ivy …” she mumbled.
“Moss,” Frank corrected gently. The house they had rented for three weeks was already very old. In winter, the owner had told him in his sing-song Italian accent, it was hardly possible to heat the whole building. Instead, its heavy walls were supposed to keep out the heat of the Italian Adriatic coast in midsummer.
“Too old, too lonely, too gloomy,” Marie judged sadly.
Frank grinned. Sometimes his fiancée was just too pessimistic. After all, she herself had urged them not to go straight to Jesolo, but to rent a house in the village south of the tourist metropolis. “Let’s go inside first,” he suggested. “You liked the photos of the individual rooms, didn’t you?”
Marie followed him in silence after they had parked the car right in front of the small house. Inside, the building looked much friendlier, colorful pictures hung on the whitewashed walls and the old, solid wooden furniture filled the rooms with life.
Nevertheless, they didn’t stay in the house for long. They threw their jackets and the camera into a corner of the living room and, panting, carried their suitcases up the steep staircase to the bedroom, where they haphazardly placed a few items of clothing on the beds. Marie sorted the contents of her cosmetics case onto the shelves in the bathroom, Frank added his razor. As soon as they had taken possession of the house in this way, they packed their swimming gear and made their way to the nearby sea, the sound of which they could hear even through the closed windows.
On the way to the beach, as a gust of wind tugged at the colorful swim bags in their hands, Marie turned back to the house. “It’s that damn green stuff,” she muttered. “Who knows what’s hiding in there – surely this wall is crawling with vermin.”
“It’s just moss,” Frank tried to reassure her. But he also felt a strange tingling in his stomach when he looked at the green overgrown area on the front wall of the house.
They thought no more about it when they reached the beach. The steep steps that led down from their house to the beach between bushes and a few bright flowers brought them a little closer to the carefree sun with every step. Only a few tourists had found their way to this section of the beach, and in between Frank saw individual people or small groups that he assumed were locals.
Frank rubbed some cream on Marie’s back before lying down next to her on the large, checkered blanket and closing his eyes with a pleasant grunt. He enjoyed the warmth of the afternoon sun on his back, softened a little by the gentle breeze from the sea. As they both sweated more and more, they ran hand in hand into the sea, romped through the waves, tried to swim a little, swallowed the salty water almost simultaneously and finally came out of the water laughing and snorting.
In the evening, when the low sun no longer hurt their reddened arms and faces, they ate a pizza in the only restaurant in the village. As the first stars began to reflect in the half-full glasses of wine, they slowly walked back to the house that would be their home for the next three weeks.
In the pale light of the moon, the moss-covered area shimmered silvery against the black silhouette of the house. Frank felt Marie’s shoulder begin to tremble under his arm. “I’ll take a closer look at this green stuff tomorrow,” she murmured.
He had no doubt that Marie had also taken insecticide with her. She was always well prepared.
That night he slept peacefully and dreamlessly. Sometimes, while half asleep, Frank thought he noticed Marie tossing and turning restlessly, but that might have been due to the light breeze blowing through the open windows.
The next morning, the young woman looked pale and tired when he woke her up. “Just a bad dream,” she fended off his questions.
After breakfast, they went back down to the beach until the midday heat drove them back into the cool of the house. Marie opened the bedroom window, tore a hand-sized piece out of the moss that almost completely covered this wall and quickly closed the window again before the heat could penetrate. They sat in silence in the semi-darkness behind the closed curtains that were supposed to keep out the southern summer. Frank kept looking up from his book to watch Marie, who was turning the greenery back and forth and looking at it from all sides. “It’s not moss,” she finally said. “It doesn’t have any real roots at all.”
“You must have torn it off,” Frank replied. “Or the Italian moss simply has a different structure to our local moss.” To him, the greenery looked like normal weeds clinging to the gaps between the heavy bricks.
“Something’s living in it,” Marie continued, as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “I kept hearing a rustling sound last night, as if thousands of little feet were running along the wall of the house …” She shook herself. “Just imagine how many spiders might be living in there … maybe even mice …”
“You couldn’t hear spiders, and mice are just too big,” Frank objected. He didn’t understand why Marie was having such unreasonable thoughts. “Shall we go for a walk?” he suggested in order to distract her. “If we walk uphill through the meadows, we should soon come to the little forest we saw from the road.”
Marie agreed immediately, so they put on sturdy shoes and left the house. They followed a narrow path that meandered up the hill behind the house between meadows and individual bushes. In the small forest on the hilltop, the air was cool and dry, almost a little too cold after the path between the sun-drenched meadows. Frank immediately noticed that Marie didn’t feel comfortable among the tall, dark trees. “There’s bloody green stuff everywhere here too,” she muttered, letting her gaze wander incessantly over the moss-covered trunks of the trees.
They didn’t stay long. Frank would have liked to go back to the sea, but he wasn’t sure if Marie hadn’t been lying in the burning sun for too long. Perhaps she had a slight sunstroke, although she didn’t seem to be feeling sick. He suggested they read a little, and so they both sat in the living room for the next few hours, bent silently over their books.
In the evening, when the sun had set and they had opened the curtains and the bedroom window, Marie actually took a spray can of insecticide from the depths of her suitcase and spread it over the moss around the window. Only when the spray can was completely empty, she seemed satisfied.
“We could go to Venice tomorrow,” Frank suggested as they lay in bed. “The city is only fifty kilometers away. Maybe you’ll change your mind there.”
“Yes, that sounds good,” Marie replied wearily. She glanced at the wide-open window. “Shouldn’t we close the window?” she asked. “Who knows if there aren’t mice or other animals climbing around out there …”
“If we don’t ventilate at night, it will soon be too warm in here,” Frank replied calmly, although he couldn’t understand Marie’s fear. There were no poisonous animals here that could crawl up the wall of the house. And Marie had never been afraid of spiders or mice before.
As on the first night, Frank slept peacefully and deeply. The next morning, he barely managed to wake Marie. As she awoke slowly and with difficulty, he looked at her anxiously. Despite all the sun, Marie’s face looked pale, and even the faint light filtering through the heavy curtains seemed to hurt her eyes.
“Bad dreams,” she mumbled.
“Stay in bed,” he suggested. Frank brought her a glass of the sour lemonade she liked so much and she gratefully took a sip before her eyes closed again.
“Try to sleep,” he said quietly, brushing the tousled strands of hair from her forehead. “When you’re fit again tomorrow, we’ll go to Venice; today I’m going to the beach alone.”
She nodded, and although she was so obviously tired, she didn’t fall asleep for the next few minutes while he packed up his swimming gear. Frank tilted the window to let in some fresh air. He kissed Marie on her sweaty forehead before leaving the room and quietly closing the door behind him. He still believed that the farewell would only last a few hours.
Around midday, when the sun was too scorching on his still pale skin, Frank made his way back. Something about the house irritated him, but he couldn’t put his finger on what seemed to have changed. He covered the last few meters almost at a run.
The coolness inside the house surprised him; even behind these thick walls it should have been warmer after the countless hot summer days. For a moment he wondered if Marie had found a cure for the heat, a kind of reverse heating. Then he ran up the stairs to the bedroom, two steps at a time, and pulled open the door.
At first glance, Marie finally seemed to be asleep. She was lying quietly on the bed, and if it hadn’t been for her eyes, which were wide open in fear, Frank would probably have quietly closed the door again and let her sleep on. But as it was, he slowly moved closer to the bed, sat down next to Marie and placed two fingers on the side of her neck. He nodded in confusion as he realized that her heart had stopped beating.
As if in a dark dream, he watched himself pick up the phone, dial the number for the police and, in a probably incomprehensible mixture of English and Italian, ask for a doctor to be sent. He knew it was too late. Nevertheless, Frank jumped up from the bed where he had been holding Marie’s cool fingers with relief when he heard several cars drive up in a hurry.
Contrary to expectations, the police officers had actually brought a doctor with them, who only briefly examined Marie’s dead body.
“Suffocation,” the man explained, scribbling something on a piece of paper he had placed on the bedside chest of drawers.
“Who …?” Frank tried to formulate, and when the doctor realized what the young man wanted to ask, he shook his head hastily.
“She didn’t put up a fight,” Frank understood. The doctor lifted Marie’s right hand and turned it so that Frank could see her from all directions. “No defensive wounds, no marks under the fingernails.”
Just a little green, Frank thought. As if she had once again reached into the moss with both hands.
The doctor pointed to the half-empty soda glass standing next to the bed. “Maybe she choked on a drink,” he added, “or food.” He obviously thought the green speckles between her teeth were spinach or leftover broccoli.
Frank nodded, also to the police officers’ questions. Yes, he would come with them to the police station in Jesolo, where there was an interpreter who could help him fill out the necessary papers. Yes, Marie was to be buried in her homeland.
Slowly, he followed the men who would take him to Jesolo, while others stayed behind and made all the necessary arrangements. Step by step, he descended the stone staircase without waking from his dream.
Just outside, before he got into the front police car, he turned back to the house where he had lost Marie. It still stood tall and silent at the foot of the hill, but there was no more moss, only jagged joints between bare stone that gleamed in the sun.
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