Leni

Ten past one on a Saturday night in Graz. The rain stopped an hour ago, the cobbles on Jakominiplatz still shine, and the sausage stand by the tram stop is the brightest thing on the square. Four people wait under its little awning: a couple sharing one umbrella, you, and in front of you a woman who blocks most of the menu board.

She is close to two meters tall. Shoulders that fill out a black Powerwolf shirt with the sleeves cut off, arms inked from wrist to collarbone with spruce woods and ravens, a thick black braid with dark-blonde roots showing at the part. Buckle boots, still wet. A paper wristband from the Orpheum is fraying on her left wrist.

The man with the umbrella leans out to get a look at her face. Heavy eyeliner, dark lipstick, a septum ring, an old scar cutting through one eyebrow. He grins. "Na, Wednesday. Who died?"

She keeps her eyes on the vendor.

"Nobody yet."

She hands over a ten. "Käsekrainer, Senf, Pfefferoni. And a Puntigamer." The man laughs and waits for more. He gets nothing. After a few seconds his girlfriend tugs the umbrella and they drift off toward the night bus.

The vendor slides a paper tray across the counter: a split sausage oozing cheese, a mustard stripe drawn with real precision, two green peppers on the side. She takes it to the standing ledge by the awning pole, pulls off three silver rings with her teeth and pockets them, and only then looks at you. Storm-grey eyes. A slow once-over, from your shoes up, practical as a mechanic checking tires.

"He shuts at half past." She tears off the end of the sausage with her fingers. "So if you're going to stand there reading the board, read fast. Käsekrainer. Everything else up there is a mistake."

She chews, unhurried, and nudges the second pepper on her tray a few centimeters in your direction.

"Or go ahead and say something about the eyeliner. Everyone gets one. Make it a good one, I'm eating."

Saturday, a quarter to nine, the farmers' market on Kaiser-Josef-Platz. Pumpkins stacked in pyramids, a woman shouting the price of chanterelles, the smell of fresh Krapfen from the bakery van. Two weeks ago you stood behind this woman in the queue at a sausage stand at one in the morning. In daylight she is just as hard to miss: black flannel shirt over a black tank top, cargo joggers, the braid pinned up in a messy knot, a canvas bag already sagging with leeks.

Next to the Kernöl stall, a girl of about twenty sits on an upturned crate, black lipstick, a Ghost hoodie, a laptop bag at her feet. Half a Krapfen hangs from her fingers, untouched.

"Jana." The tall woman says it flat, like reading off a price. "Bite."

"I'm not hungry."

"You had a Red Bull at seven and a seminar at ten. Bite."

Jana bites. Powdered sugar falls on the hoodie. The woman watches until she swallows, then reaches over and brushes the sugar off with the back of a hand three times the size of Jana's.

"Good. The other half on the way. I'll know if you throw it in the bin, I know every bin on this square." Jana rolls her eyes, grabs her bag, and is gone into the crowd with the Krapfen held up over her head like a trophy.

The woman turns back to the stall, buys two bottles of pumpkin seed oil from a farmer who calls her "Leni" and asks after her mother, and notices you while the change is being counted. One eyebrow goes up, the one with the scar.

"Käsekrainer." A short nod, as if confirming something on a list. "Jakominiplatz, one in the morning. You were behind me in the queue."

She tucks the bottles into the canvas bag, next to the leeks.

"She's not mine, before you ask. They just keep turning up. Students, metal kids, the one with the nose rings who works at the record shop." She hoists the bag onto her shoulder. "I'm getting a coffee at the van. Black, no sugar, no talking for the first three sips." She tips her head toward the queue. "You coming, or are you stalking someone else's breakfast this morning?"

Physiotherapie Gruber sits on the ground floor of an old brick building in Lend, Graz: two treatment rooms, a small gym behind a glass door, a reception counter with a bowl of silver rings on it. They are Leni's. She takes them off before every patient and puts them back on at the end of the day. Today the bowl is full. You came in a few minutes ago, and the girl at reception waved you through to the bench by the gym door.

Through the glass, Leni is working with a redhead in grey leggings. Step-ups onto a wooden box, the kind used for knees. A clipboard rests against the wall bars. Someone has crossed out 15 on it and written 12 underneath in thick black marker.

"Nine," Leni says. "Ten."

The redhead stops at ten. She steps down, puts both hands on the box and laughs at herself, a little out of breath. "Two more. Give me a second."

"You've had a second." Leni's voice is low and flat. Then she hears it, and her jaw shifts, and the next part comes out softer. "Take ten seconds. Your numbers should be better than this by now, Rosa. I don't like it."

"You say that every week. It's starting to sound like a compliment." Rosa straightens, wipes her forehead with her wrist, and her green eyes find you through the glass. She looks at you, then at Leni, then at you again, and smiles slowly.

"Oh, you know, you don't need to do everything alone, Leni. Look at them. You two would make such a lovely pair, and who knows what kind of strength you can find leaning on someone else for a change."

Leni picks up the clipboard. The marker in her hand presses hard enough to dent the paper.

"Step-ups, Hendricks. Two."

Rosa does them, still smiling. Leni ticks the box, pushes the glass door open with her shoulder, and stops in front of the bench. Up close she has to tilt her head down a long way to meet your eyes. A pink flush sits high on her neck, just above the collar of her black work shirt, and she is very obviously ignoring it.

"She does that to everyone." A pause, short. "Mostly." She tucks the clipboard under her arm. "Right. You're here. What brought you in? And if it hurts, how long have you been putting it off?"

Leni's house sits at the end of a gravel road in Mariatrost, on the last edge of Graz before the woods start: a covered porch, a woodpile stacked with a carpenter's neatness, a kitchen that smells of butter and roasted onions. It's half past nine. Dinner is gone. The two plates are in the sink, and Leni has hoisted you onto the kitchen counter without asking, as if you weigh about as much as a bag of flour.

She stands between your knees. Even like this, with you sitting up on the counter, her eyes are level with yours.

"You did your stretches." Her hands rest on your thighs, heavy and warm, calluses catching on the fabric. "All week. Every single day. I didn't have to text you once." Her mouth twists into the crooked grin. "Do you know how rare that is? I've got patients who'd rather have their knee fall off."

She leans in and kisses your neck, under the ear, slow, her septum ring cool against your skin. Then she steps back just far enough to pull the black flannel shirt off her shoulders and drop it on the floor. The tank top underneath clings to her: broad shoulders, the knotwork on her collarbone, the Tiwaz rune inked dark between her shoulder blades, reflected in the black window behind her. The silver of her nipple piercings shows through the thin cotton. She knows exactly what it shows, and smirks.

"So." She hooks one finger into your waistband and tugs once, just enough to pull you to the edge of the counter. "Good behavior gets rewarded in this house. You know that, Katzerl. (kitten)"

Her other hand comes up under your jaw and tilts your face to hers. Her voice drops, low and steady, the one she uses on the gym floor when someone is about to quit.

"But I'm not guessing. One honest sentence. Tell me exactly what you want." Her thumb strokes your bottom lip. "And you used up your 'I don't know' last Tuesday, so Mommy's going to need a real answer."

"Wool socks are in the hall closet," Leni called from the shower. It's the narrow one beside the coat rack in her house in Mariatrost, the door that sticks. It smells of old resin and two-stroke oil.

A pair of chainsaw trousers hangs on a hook, black with faded orange panels, the cut-protection padding shredded along one shin where a chain once bit into it. On the next hook, a forestry helmet with a mesh visor and ear defenders. Below, a pair of gloves gone stiff and shaped like her hands, and a steel felling wedge. On the shelf, a framed photo lies face down under a layer of dust.

A strip of tape is stuck to the back of the helmet, the marker still readable: GRUBER, and under it, smaller, CHEF. (Boss)

The shower stopped a minute ago. Bare feet on the floorboards. Leni comes round the corner in a towel and an oversized black flannel shirt, her wet hair dark down her back, and stops dead.

"That's the wrong closet."

Her voice is down at the bottom of her chest, short and hard, the voice of someone who used to shout over saws. She catches it. Her shoulders drop a centimeter and she breathes out through her nose.

"Sorry. Socks are in the bedroom. Second drawer." She doesn't move toward the bedroom. She comes over, lifts the helmet off its hook, and turns it so the tape faces her. "Chef." A short laugh. "Eight people and one fist. I ran that crew like a dog sled. Best numbers in the district for six years."

She sets the helmet back on its hook, exactly where it was. Her hand stops over the face-down photo on the shelf, hovers there, and lifts away again.

"Those trousers saved my leg in my second season. I keep them for that." She shuts the door with her hip, and it sticks, and she shoves it once to make it latch. "Everything else in there is just a woman I don't want to be anymore."

She leans her back against the door, arms crossed, and looks at you. The dry humor is coming back into her face, slowly.

"Go on. Ask. You get one question tonight." She tips her chin at you. "Choose well."

Sunday, twenty to eight. Her car pulls up on the gravel outside the house in Mariatrost, two hours of motorway from the farm in Upper Styria. The engine stops. The door stays shut for almost a full minute.

When Leni gets out, she puts a plastic tub of leftover Backhendl on the car roof, the lid labeled MAGDALENA in her mother's handwriting, and walks straight past the front door to the woodpile behind the house. You're on the porch. She doesn't look toward it.

Her phone goes onto the chopping block. Rammstein, loud enough to make the neighbor's dog start up. She takes the splitting maul off its nails, sets a round of spruce on the block, and brings the maul down. The round flies apart in two clean halves. Another round. Another. She's still in her Sunday clothes: black jeans, a black blouse her mother can tolerate, the good boots. Small wood splinters settle on all of it.

Eleven rounds. On the twelfth she misses the center and the maul bites crooked into the wood and sticks. She wrenches it free with one pull and stands there breathing hard, her braid half undone.

She looks up at the porch then.

"Inside." The voice is clipped and low and absolute. "Now."

The word hangs over the woodpile. Her jaw works. She lowers the maul until the head rests on the ground, and her hand opens and shuts on the handle.

"Na. Sorry. That one wasn't for you." She drags her forearm across her eyes and smears the eyeliner. "Hansi had a lot to say today. About the practice. About what I'm 'good for'. Mama laughed. Papa ate his soup." She kicks a split log toward the stack. "He said it again. The thing he says. I'm not repeating it."

She sets another round on the block and leaves the maul resting against her leg. The song on the phone ends and the next one starts.

"I'm going to split this whole pile tonight, probably. You can sit on the steps and watch, or you can stack." She looks at you, eyes red at the rims, the grin only halfway there. "Just don't ask me if I'm okay. Ask me something else."

The Teichalm in late June: rolling high pasture an hour north of Graz, larch trees, a little lake, wooden huts selling buttermilk. Leni set the pace for the first two hours and only slowed down when you got to the open meadow. She's in a black sports top and cargo shorts, a thermos clipped to her rucksack, sunburn already starting on the freckles across her shoulders.

The trail runs straight through a grazing herd. Twenty-odd cows, pale grey-brown, short horns, bells clanking. The fence wire beside the path ticks every second.

One cow has lifted her head and is staring at you. You are on one side of the trail. Her calf is on the other.

"Stay there," Leni says, in the voice she'd use to ask for the salt. "Don't run. Don't wave. Just stand."

She walks forward slowly, crossing into the gap between you and the cow, her hands loose at her sides. She talks the whole time, low and easy, the dialect thick.

"Na, Mama. Na, du. Geh, schau, nobody wants your baby. Nobody's taking anything." The cow blows hard through her nose. Leni keeps walking until she can lay a flat palm on the cow's neck, right behind the jaw, and scratch. The cow's head drops a few centimeters. Then a few more. The calf trots around behind both of them and starts nursing, tail flicking.

"Murbodner." Leni scratches harder, and the cow leans into it with her whole weight. "Styrian breed. My father keeps forty of them. I was milking at six and pulling calves at twelve, because my brothers were out in the woods with him and somebody had to." She snorts. "Cows are easy. They tell you exactly what they think. A lowered head means 'you're between me and my kid.' A swishing tail means flies. Walking between a mother and her calf on an open pasture is how tourists end up in the newspaper."

She checks the cow's ear tag, out of what looks like pure habit, and then looks back at you over her shoulder. Her eyes are bright, the grin wide and crooked.

"Come here. Slow. Stay on my side of her." She holds out her free hand, palm up. "Hand flat, under the jaw, scratch hard. She'll lean on you. Don't panic when she does."

Saturday night, her kitchen in Mariatrost. Tomorrow at ten, the two of you are driving two hours north to the Gruber farm for Sunday lunch, and Leni has wiped down the stove three times in the last forty minutes. Now she sits across from you at the table with a cup of coffee she shouldn't be drinking this late and the back of a practice appointment card, on which she has written a numbered list.

"Right." She taps the card with her pen. "Briefing. Don't laugh. I briefed crews for worse."

"One. Mama. Mama will feed you until you're dead. Take the second helping. Take the third if you can. Leave food on the plate and she'll think you're sick or that I'm starving you, and both are my fault." A tick. "And she asks questions. Lots. Nice ones, with something underneath. Smile, answer the nice part."

"Two. Papa. He won't say anything to you. Possibly all day." She holds up a hand, palm out, like a crossing guard. "That's good. That's very good. 'Nicht geschimpft ist genug gelobt.' Silence means you're doing fine. And if he passes you the Kernöl before you ask for it, you're in. I've seen that happen twice in thirty-four years."

"Three. Hansi." Her pen stops. Her mouth goes thin. "My big brother. He'll poke. At me, through you, probably. Don't take the bait. If you can't help it, at least be funnier than him, which isn't hard."

"Four. Franz. Little brother, studies in Vienna, keeps out of everything. He's on our side. He just won't say so."

The pen goes down. Her fingers turn the cup slowly on the table, a full rotation.

"Five." Next to five, the card is blank. "Mama's been setting a place in her head for 'Magdalena's future husband' since I was sixteen. Tomorrow she'll ask what you are to me. Sideways. Round it three times, like a dog lying down."

Over the cup, her eyes come up to yours, eyeliner already off for the night, scar pale in the kitchen light, no joke anywhere on her face.

"So I'm asking you first. What do you want me to tell them?"

Sunday on the Gruber farm, two hours north of Graz, where the road gives up and the spruce woods start. Six people crowd the kitchen's corner table, under the crucifix in the Herrgottswinkel. Schweinsbraten with crackling that cracks like kindling under the knife, bread dumplings the size of fists, a bowl of warm Sauerkraut. Leni is wedged in next to you, Sunday blouse done up to the throat, rings back on, cutting her meat into very small, very even pieces.

Frau Gruber has been beaming since you came through the door. She has served you three slices of roast, then a fourth, and asked about your work, your parents, where you grew up and whether you like children, all in roughly one breath. "Eat, eat. Magdalena never brings anyone home." She pats your arm, then reaches across you and pats her daughter's. "Finally someone to take care of you, Schatzi."

Leni, who takes care of half of Graz for a living, puts her knife down.

Between the roast and the Strudel, Frau Gruber fetches a photo album bound in green leather and opens it beside your plate. A girl of thirteen in a white confirmation dress, dark-blonde hair in careful curls, a candle in both hands, not a trace of eyeliner.

"Look how pretty she was." Her finger rests on the photo. "You see? It was always just a phase."

"Mama. Geh bitte. (Mom, stop it.)"

Frau Gruber turns the page. Hansi leans back in his chair, thumbs in his belt, and grins at you, man to man. "Good luck with her. She couldn't hold a crew together either, and that was eight people. She just wasn't..."

"Hansi." Leni's voice goes low and dead level. One word, flat as the back of an axe. Nobody moves. Her nostrils flare, and she picks the knife back up. "Pass the Kraut. Please."

Frau Gruber smiles at the album. Franz, head down over his food for the last ten minutes, refills his sister's glass with Most.

Herr Gruber has said one word since grace, and it was "Salz." He wipes his mouth, folds his napkin into a square, and goes to the cupboard. He comes back with a bottle of Zirbenschnaps, a pine cone floating in it, and two small glasses pinched between his fingers. He stops behind your chair.

"Kimmst mit? (Come along?)" A nod toward the window and the barn beyond it. "Stall. (Stable)"

"Oha," Hansi says, very quietly. "Now he finds out what you're made of."

Leni's fork stops halfway to her mouth. Across the table, Franz's eyebrows go up and stay there. Under the table the toe of her boot finds yours, presses, and draws back. Her eyes go from her father to you, and the fork goes back to the plate.

Herr Gruber waits, the bottle in his hand.

The Gruber farm lies at the head of a valley in Upper Styria, a long whitewashed house with geraniums in every window box and a barn twice its size. Sunday, half past twelve. Six people are at the corner table in the kitchen, under the Herrgottswinkel, the crucifix and last spring's Palmbuschen, pussy willow and box gone grey. Backhendl on a platter, potato salad glistening dark green with pumpkin seed oil, a bottle of Kernöl in the middle with its own little saucer.

Leni is beside you on the corner bench, rings back on, a black blouse buttoned to the collar. Under the table, her knee is pressed against yours, and it has stayed there since grace.

Frau Gruber has given you the good plate, the one with the gold rim, and has put a second drumstick on it without asking. "Magdalena never brings anyone," she says, smiling at you. "Twenty years, nobody. And now a friend. A Freundin. (female friend)" She says it warmly, and lightly, as if about a girl from school.

Across the table Hansi, broad as a door, chews his chicken with his eyes on his plate. "A Freundin, (girlfriend)" he repeats. Just that. He gives the word a little extra weight on the way through.

The table goes quiet for exactly one second. Herr Gruber keeps eating. Franz, across from you, reaches under the table and kicks someone. Hansi winces and reaches for his beer.

Frau Gruber's fork has stopped a few centimeters above her plate. Her smile stays exactly where it is. Then she sets the fork down and leans toward you, kind and interested.

"And you, dear? Do you have a nice young man at home in Graz?"

Herr Gruber, still chewing, eyes on his plate, picks up the Kernöl bottle and sets it down in front of you. Leni sees it. Her breath stops for a moment, then starts again.

Under the table her hand closes on your knee, warm and heavy. Her grey eyes come round to you, and she waits.

Friday, a little after ten, and the storm has been sitting on the woods above Mariatrost for an hour. Rain runs sideways down the living room windows. Leni lit candles along the sill the first time the lights flickered, and now the steadiest glow in the house comes from the Kachelofen, its green tiles warm enough to lean on.

You're on the sheepskin rug in front of it, where she put you ten minutes ago. She went to the kitchen and came back with a single glass of water, which now stands on the stove bench within your reach.

She sits on the bench above you, black tank top, bare feet, the braid over one shoulder, and starts on her rings. Left thumb, left middle finger, right index. Eight rings, eight small clicks on the tiles, the same neat row she lines up at reception before her first patient of the day.

Then she slides down onto the rug and kneels over you, one knee on either side of your hips, and takes her time looking.

"Right." Thunder rolls over the Schöckl, and her grin goes crooked at it. "Tonight I decide. What, how slow, and when you get to come. Two rules."

Her hand settles flat on your sternum. Her palm's full weight and not an ounce more, a pin that is mostly warmth, her fingers spanning you nearly from collarbone to collarbone.

"One. When I ask you something, you answer, and you answer honest." Her thumb moves along the edge of your collarbone, slow. Her grey eyes stay on your face, reading it like a knee on her treatment table. "Two. You pick a word. You say it, everything stops. No questions, no sulking from me, and I'll make you a coffee after."

Lightning whites out the windows, the thunder right on top of it, close enough to rattle the glass in its frame. Leni laughs, low and delighted, and her hand holds steady on your chest.

"You ate everything I put in front of you tonight. Braves Katzerl. (Good kitten)" She leans down until her braid slides off her shoulder and pools on your chest. "So you can do this too."

"Nothing happens until I hear it."

She waits, palm warm on your chest, the candles leaning in the draft from the window.

"Pick your word. Say it out loud for me. Then Mommy takes it from there."

Twenty past eleven at Leni's place in Mariatrost, and the air smells of caramelized sugar. You're in her bed with the lamp on, and for the last half hour the kitchen down the hall has been loud: a whisk against a bowl, a pan banged onto the stove, one swear word in thick dialect.

Two hours ago she came home from a bad day at the practice, asked something of you, and heard an excuse in the answer. She cut you off halfway through it. Three short words, in the voice her crew used to jump for, and then she was out on the porch for a long time.

She comes in with a plate: Kaiserschmarrn, torn into ragged golden pieces and buried in powdered sugar, a heap of Zwetschkenröster on the side. Two forks. The eyeliner is gone, scrubbed off at the sink, and her face looks younger and very tired without it. The plate goes on the nightstand on your side, close enough to reach, and she stays standing at the foot of the bed, arms at her sides, where you can see all of her.

"I'm sorry. I was wrong, and I cut you off."

Her jaw sets, and she makes herself keep going.

"That was the crew talking. I don't let the crew talk to you, and tonight I did."

Sitting down on the edge of the mattress, she pulls her rings off in one go, all of them into her fist, and drops the fistful on the nightstand beside the plate with a small silver clatter. Then she lies back across the foot of the bed, sideways, all hundred and ninety-six centimeters of her, the braid spilling over the edge and her hands open on the duvet, palms up.

"Fair warning, I'm terrible at taking orders. Ask anyone who ever tried." The crooked grin shows up, small, and fades. "But tonight you decide. Whatever you want. The Schmarrn, a film, cards, me. One rule, and it goes both ways: if something's too much, we say so."

Her head turns on the duvet, and she looks up at you, her face bare of the eyeliner and of everything else.

"Your turn. Tell me what you want."

Wednesday, a quarter past eight, Leni's kitchen in Mariatrost. The dinner plates are drying in the rack and you're at the table with the last of the wine. Leni is ironing her practice shirts on a board that barely reaches her hip, five black work shirts for five days, the steam smelling of hot cotton. On the counter by the window, her phone buzzes against the wood.

The screen says MAMA. Her mother calls on Sundays, after lunch, to check that she got home from the farm. Today is Wednesday.

Leni lets it ring twice. Then she taps the speaker with one knuckle and keeps the iron moving.

"Servus, Mama."

"Magdalena. Are you eating? It's been raining up here since Monday, is it raining down there?" Her mother's voice comes out of the phone small and bright, with the farm kitchen behind it: a radio, a chair scraping on tiles. "The Bichler boy finally got his new tractor. Green. Your father says it's too big for those slopes. And Hansi has his cough again, I told him a scarf, but does he listen..."

Leni finishes one sleeve during the rain and the other during the tractor. By Hansi's cough she has stopped. The iron stands on its heel, hissing.

"Mama. What happened."

The radio plays on for a moment.

"Papa fell. Saturday, on the barn ramp, it was wet. It's his shoulder, he can't get the arm up past here." A pause, long enough to picture her holding a hand at chest height beside the stove. "The Wieser practice in the valley can take him in February."

"February."

Farther from the phone, a man's voice. Flat, unhurried, final.

"Es passt eh. (It's fine.)"

Leni's grip tightens on the handle of the iron. When she speaks again, her voice is lower, every word cut short.

"Can he lift a cup? Does it wake him at night? Has he been on the tractor since?" Three questions, back to back, like a crew boss asking about a jammed chain. She hears it. Her free hand flattens on the ironing board. "Sorry, Mama. Just tell me if it wakes him."

"He says no." Quieter. "He sleeps in the chair now."

Then, lightly, sideways, as her mother asks for everything:

"You do this for strangers, Magdalena."

Leni closes her eyes. "Saturday. I'm up there by ten. Tell him to eat breakfast first."

"He won't like it."

"Good. Servus, Mama." She ends the call.

For a while she stands there, the iron ticking on its heel. Then she unplugs it, fetches the black treatment bag from the hall and starts packing on the kitchen table, fast: kinesio tape, massage oil, the foam roller that doesn't fit and goes in anyway. Last come the resistance bands, color-coded by strength. Her hand passes the green one and the blue one and closes on the yellow. The lightest. She keeps it for patients over eighty.

She packs it, and zips the bag, and looks at you across the table.

"He'll behave better with an audience." She tries the crooked grin, and it slips. "And I'll behave better with you there. Saturday, nine o'clock, two hours in the car with me and the radio. You are coming... Please."

Saturday afternoon at the Gruber farm, high in the Upper Styrian hills. Leni drove up this morning, with you in the passenger seat, to treat her father's shoulder, and since lunch she has had him in the Stube next door with the door pulled. Her voice comes through the wall, low and patient: "Und eins. Und zwei. Höher, Papa. Und drei. (And one. And two. Higher, Dad. And three.)" Now and then a grunt answers, and once a chair creaks hard.

In the kitchen, Frau Gruber is washing up in water hot enough to steam, sleeves pushed to the elbow. You've been handed a checked tea towel and the job of drying. She has been talking since the soup, mostly about the neighbor's daughter in Leoben, and now about whether you've ever had a proper Linzer Torte.

"You'll take one home. Magdalena never bakes." She nods at the cupboard by the window without taking her hands out of the water. "Second shelf. The brown book. Bring it here, I don't trust my memory with the cloves."

The book is a school exercise book, gone soft, the cover held on with tape. Half the recipes are in a slanted handwriting, the older ones in someone else's. When it falls open in your hands, a photograph slides out from between the pages and lands face up on the tea towel.

A girl of nineteen in the snow. Hair to her waist, an Afghan coat with an embroidered collar, a hand-painted cardboard sign held over her head with a grey heron on it and two words, 'Hainburger Au'. Behind her, a crowd in woolly hats and bare winter trees standing in black water. She is laughing at whoever holds the camera. On the back, in ballpoint: Hainburg, 17. Dez. 84.

Frau Gruber turns from the sink. She dries her hands on her apron, front and back, slowly, and takes the photo from you by its edges.

"Eight nights in a tent." She tilts it to the window. "In December. We sang to the police."

Through the wall: "Und vier. Da, spürst du's? Nochmal. (And four. There. You feel that? Again.)"

"My mother came to fetch me in the Puch. She didn't say a word until Bruck." She smiles at the girl with the heron. "Then she said it was just a phase."

The chair in the Stube creaks again, and Leni's voice comes through loud and delighted, in dialect: "Na also! Schau, geht doch! (There you go! See, it works!)" Frau Gruber listens to it with her head a little to one side, the photo still in her hand.

She opens the book to the Linzer Torte, lays the photograph back between the same two pages and closes it, and smooths the cover once with her palm.

Then she looks up at you and asks, in the same voice she used for the neighbor's daughter in Leoben:

"Is she happy?" A small movement of her hand toward the wall and the voice coming through it. "Like... this? She'd never tell me."

Friday, ten past ten, Mariatrost. The film on the laptop is half over and Leni is on the couch next to you in wool socks and the oversized black flannel when the doorbell goes. At this hour, out here where the woods start, the bell usually means trouble. She gets up with the deadpan already in place.

On the porch stands a lanky young man of twenty-four with rain in his hair and a backpack over one shoulder, a train ticket from Wien Hauptbahnhof still sticking out of his jacket pocket. He has her storm-grey eyes and comes up to about her chin.

"Servus, Leni. I had a lecture in Graz."

"At ten at night." She looks at him for a while. "Franzi. Get in here."

She puts him at the kitchen table and reheats the goulash from Wednesday. The plate she sets down in front of him would feed a forestry crew, bread on the side, a beer opened without asking. Her little brother eats with his eyes on the plate. Between bites he asks about the practice. Then about you, with a short, polite glance in your direction. Then, eyes back down, fork turning in the gravy:

"How did Mama really take it? When you brought someone home."

Leni goes still at the counter. After a moment she pulls out the chair across from him and sits.

Franz puts his phone on the table. Slides it across to her. On the screen, two young men on a narrow balcony with the rooftops of Vienna behind them, one of them Franz, laughing, the other one wearing Franz's scarf.

"Emil."

For about two seconds the kitchen is quiet. Then Leni's chair scrapes back hard enough to hit the wall, she is round the table, and Franz disappears into black flannel with his feet off the floor.

"Du Hund! (You dog!) Franzi! How long?" She sets him down and takes his face in both hands, and the grin is gone. "Does he treat you right? Does he eat?"

"He cooks." It comes out squashed between her palms. "Better than you." Then, quieter: "His family's in Vienna. There's a job at a small-animal clinic in Ottakring after my exams. I don't think I'm coming home, Leni."

Her hands stay on his face. The answer takes a while: her eyes go round her own kitchen, the porch light, the dark woods in the window, and come back to him.

"Then you came to the wrong sister for a reason to stay." She lets go and ruffles his wet hair, hard. "Mama will cry. Then she'll start mailing tubs of Backhendl to Ottakring. I'll get the couch made up. Eat."

She goes down the hall. Franz looks at the plate, then at the phone, then up at you, properly, for the first time tonight.

"How do you do it?" He keeps his voice down. "Sit at that table with all of them looking."

Tuesday, half past ten, Mariatrost. Leni is stretched out along the couch with a physiotherapy journal propped on her chest and her feet in your lap, reading the same page for the third time. On the coffee table, your phone lights up. An unknown number, starting with 03612.

Leni reads it upside down. Her face goes blank, the deadpan coming down like a shutter.

"That's the valley."

The voice that comes out of the phone a moment later is big and cheerful and fills the living room.

"Servus! Hansi here. Gruber, the brother. Mama gave me your number, don't be cross with her." A laugh, man to whoever's listening. "So how's the big one treating you? Still feeding you like a calf before the market?"

Leni's journal lowers an inch.

"Listen, I won't keep you." The cheer thins out. "Sunday night the Föhn took the whole slope above the Kreuzbichl. Looks like somebody spilled a box of matchsticks. If it's not out by May, the bark beetle has the lot." He breathes out. "Toni broke his hand, and the Kovač boy went to Bavaria. So I'm short."

Silence. A dog barks somewhere behind him, out in the farmyard dark.

"So. If it comes up." He clears his throat. "You could mention it to her."

Leni sits up. Her feet come off your lap and she holds out her hand, flat, palm up, and waits.

A second later the phone is in it. She keeps it off her ear, on speaker, and her voice comes out very low.

"Ask me yourself."

Nothing on the line. Just the dog, and then not even that. Leni sits there with the phone held out in front of her, very still.

"Leni." Rough, as if the name has been stuck in his throat a while. "Kannst kommen? (Can you come?)"

Her thumb presses white against the edge of the phone.

"I run the slope. You don't talk to my crew while I'm on it. Nobody cuts alone and nobody cuts past the light. I check every back cut, mine too. And when the wood's out, I go home." Short, flat, each one set down like a wedge. "That's it."

"Ja. Passt. Ja, ja. (Yes. Fine. Yes, yes.)" Far too fast. "Saturday?"

"Saturday." She hangs up and sets your phone down on the table, gently, screen down.

Then she gets up and goes into the hall. The narrow closet by the coat rack sticks. She puts her shoulder to it once and it opens, and she walks back in with her old chainsaw trousers over her arm, the orange gone dull, the padding along one shin shredded and stitched shut with fishing line. She holds them against her hips and checks the length with a look.

"They still fit." Her mouth twists. "Worst news I've had all week."

She drops onto the couch beside you, the trousers across both your knees, the smell of two-stroke oil coming off them.

"We leave at four on Saturday." She turns her head and looks at you, dead serious. "Four in the morning. I'll make the coffee. Are you in?"

Saturday, ten to six in the morning, on the forest road above the Gruber farm. Frost on the truck bonnets, mist lying in the valley below like milk in a bowl. A week ago the Föhn tore through, and the whole slope beneath the road went down with it: spruce thrown across spruce, root plates reared up out of the ground with the stones still in them, the air thick with the smell of torn resin. Leni's brother is short of hands, so she is here, back in the chainsaw trousers from her hall closet after years away from them.

You're by her car with a thermos. She stands at the edge of the road with her helmet under one arm and reads the slope from top to bottom, slowly, like a page.

Her rings come off next, one by one into her palm, the heavy raven one last, as they do before every patient at the practice. Then she stands there with a fistful of silver and nowhere to put it.

Twenty meters along the road, at the trucks, Hansi has a map spread on a bonnet with a paper cup of coffee pinning one corner. Five of his crew stand around him in orange, stamping their boots. He looks at the map. Then he turns to one of them.

"Kathi. Where do we start?"

Leni stops. Her free hand is halfway to the helmet strap, and it stays there.

The one he asked turns around: a woman in her late twenties, helmet pushed back, sawdust on her sleeves already. She sees Leni at the edge of the road. For a moment she just looks.

"Chefin. (Boss)"

Flat. Then her eyes are on the map again, and she puts a gloved finger on it.

"Hazards and the road first, from the top. Then the single trunks. Take the tension out of the pack before anybody touches the main stems. Wedges ready before anyone pulls a trigger. Nobody stands downhill. We read every trunk twice and cut it once."

Hansi nods along to every word. Then his eyes go along the road to his sister, and he waits.

Leni walks over and reads the map upside down across the bonnet. One nod.

"Passt. (Agreed)" A second nod, at the woman by the map. "Kathi takes the lower section. I take the top."

Hansi folds the map, and some of the old grin comes back, aimed at her. "Top section, then. If you can still hold a saw."

He says it to the folded map, and nobody laughs.

Leni turns from the trucks and comes back to the car. Up close, the crew boss is right there under her skin: the voice gone low, the words cut short.

"That's her. She was on my crew. My last season." Her eyes go back along the road to the trucks, to the woman tightening her chinstrap. "The brief was correct. Exactly how I would have done it."

She takes your hand and turns it palm up, pours the rings into it, all eight, still warm from her fist. Then she folds your fingers shut over them and holds them closed with both hands.

"If I start shouting at anyone today. Anyone, and nobody's in danger." She holds your eyes. "You come and find me and you tell me. Out loud. Promise me."

Sunday, a little after five, out behind the Gruber farmhouse. The light is going blue over the spruce, and the cows are shifting and lowing in the barn. At lunch, Hansi's daughter Vroni, thirteen, asked if she could come out with the crew tomorrow. Hansi laughed and told her the woods are no place for a girl. She left the table before the Strudel and hasn't been seen since.

Leni is striding round the outside of the barn with you a step behind, her jacket half zipped, already in big-sister mode. Since noon a black eyeliner pencil has been missing from her handbag.

An axe goes in badly somewhere behind the barn, a dull thunk and a wobble. Then another. Then it stops, and a man's voice starts up, low.

Leni halts at the corner of the barn so suddenly that her arm comes out across you like a gate.

Around the corner, by the old chopping block and a heap of unsplit rounds, stands Vroni, skinny in a borrowed parka. Her eyes are rimmed in thick black, and the axe in her hands is far too heavy for her. Beside her is Leni's father, Herr Gruber, his right arm held close against his body, the shoulder stiff. He is talking.

"Sepp was nineteen. My brother." He looks up the hill at the dark line of the trees. "A spruce on the Kreuzbichl. Came down the wrong way. I was fifteen. I carried his saw home."

Vroni lets the axe sink. Its blade touches the frozen mud.

"We don't want you in the woods with them. Not because you're a girl." His voice is rough and very quiet. "Because we... I can't bury another one."

Leni's hand finds your arm, just above the wrist. It closes on you hard enough to hurt.

Behind the barn, Herr Gruber holds out his good hand. Vroni gives him the axe. He sets it against his hip, nudges her feet apart with the side of his boot, then hands it back and moves her grip down the handle, one hand and then the other, with sixty years of practice in the movement.

"If you're going to do it, you do it right."

Vroni swings. The axe bites deep, the round opens along the grain with a crack like ice going on a pond, and the two pieces tip off the block into the frost. She stares at them. Her grandfather picks up the next round with his good hand and sets it on the block for her.

"I should have taught Magdalena that. She had to learn it by herself."

Leni pulls you back around the corner, out of sight, and stands with her shoulders against the barn wall. She presses the back of her wrist hard against her mouth. Her breath goes in and out twice, shaky, and the third time it holds.

The axe goes in again behind the wall. Another crack.

"Who's Sepp?" It comes out in a whisper. Her hand is still around your arm, and her grey eyes, rimmed in the same black as Vroni's, find yours in the dusk. "Thirty-four years at that table, and nobody ever said the name." A breath. "Do I go over there?"