Under ‘Type of Injury’ in
the Incident 67 spreadsheet, Oliver wrote down ‘broken hand’. The hospital chart
more or less reflected this. It did, however, enter into more detail by
specifying that the victim had sustained severe and in some cases irreparable
fractures to every bone in the left hand except the trapezium, which may have
been miraculously spared because of its position under the thumb. The sole duty
of the mechanical rolling pin was to flatten all that passed beneath it. For his part the victim was unsure how
the accident had actually occurred: pain and hysteria and morphine had settled
like a cataract over his memory. Oliver couldn’t recall seeing or hearing
anything unusual either. A malfunction of the safety shutoff on the guard was probably
to blame, but the maintenance log showed that the dough break had been fully
serviced just six weeks prior to Incident 67. If not a guard malfunction, then
a human error: under ‘Cause of Injury’ in the spreadsheet, ‘guard
malfunction/human error’ was what Oliver wrote down.
The rolling hills of the
Yarra Valley reminded Max of his native Bergischesland and certain parts of
Bavaria. Thus, like the bakery, the preceding businesses were located in the
outer northeastern suburbs of Melbourne, where Max and the mother of five-year-old
Maren had settled nearly a decade before Oliver was born. For a pittance they’d
bought a rotting wooden cottage in a Kangaroo Ground gully, which was set at
the top of more than four sloping acres of dead grape vines, matted rabbit
shit, and weeds. Within a year they had dug out the vineyard altogether. They
planted citrus, olive and almond saplings, and excavated for a swimming pool
that, on the shoulder of the slope, commanded a view the young couple
considered a gift from God. They sealed the fence line and bought a few sheep
and cattle. They answered an ad in the trading post, adopting a young female
Border Collie who was low and lissome and fast as the wind when she ran. They replaced
the rotted boards in the cottage and landscaped the long, rambling driveway, bordering
it with rocks Max stole in batches at night from a nearby quarry. The woman
Oliver knew only as ‘Maren’s Mother’ would sometimes find Max rubbing his hands
up and down the face of one rock or another as tenderly as one would a human
face, or a polished gold ingot, and inhaling the elemental scent. Meanwhile,
despite his limited English, Thomas Murray Institute had taken Max on as a
butchery teacher.
·
The period immediately
following Incident 67 was hard for Oliver. With Ulrich incapacitated, he was
forced to work on the days he normally went to university. Moreover, the other
baker, Richard, an irascible man of sixty who had been feuding with Max over pay
for some time, directed those grievances towards Max’s son in the form of a contempt
so subtle it was hardly there, which in turn made it everywhere. Oliver imputed
this contempt into tosses of flour he deemed excessively vigorous, degrees of
temperature the oven was out by, overly long openings of the proofer door; in
short, every minor discourtesy that a baker of Richard’s experience should have
known to avoid so as to keep the peace. He imputed it into the backwards swear
words that someone had fingered into the production area window. Meanwhile, it
appeared that Ulrich had lodged an official complaint with Worksafe; the bakery
had received notice that an inspector was due at any moment.
It wasn’t long before his heavily
accented phrasing, untranslatable jokes, massive frame and starry-eyed
countenance endeared Max to students, teachers and administrators alike. He
obtained permission to use the department’s facilities outside of class times
to produce artisan smallgoods, which he then sold to a list of delis and
providores that expanded rapidly as a result of culinary Melbourne’s newfound –
and short-lived – obsession with German cuisine. He used the profits from the
first few quarters to purchase machinery, and converted a rusty tin shed at the
bottom of his acreage into the small factory that would eventually pay for
Max’s, the Healesville butchery which cemented its eponymous owner’s position
as an authority on continental meats in Victoria, as well as a personality of
rare and intoxicating bearing, almost a tourist attraction of himself. It was
also the business that precipitated Max’s move away from butchery, and the
moving of Maren’s Mother back to Germany with her daughter. All of it long
before Oliver came into the world.
·
With the inspection
looming, a number of gnomic changes could be observed in Oliver’s behaviour,
although the quality of his work was unaffected. He had, for instance, begun wearing a name badge. The badge, which he found wedged between two loose wooden
planks on a café table opposite the bakery, said JONAS.
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