Milk Teeth

by Helene Bukowski

  He had spoken so quietly that Meisis couldn’t have heard him. I quickly turned the key in the ignition and put my foot on the gas. Pesolt had to jump back so he wouldn’t be carried along by truck. In the side mirror I saw him standing in the road flailing his arms, getting smaller and smaller.

  “I still saved a handful,” Meisis said, reaching into the breast pocket of her dress and showing me five plums.

  I tried to smile.

  “We’ll eat them when we get home,” I said, and looked back at the highway.

  Back at the house, we sat on the sofa in Meisis’s room. She spread out a cloth handkerchief between us and laid the five plums on top of it.

  “You can have three, I’ll have two,” she said, pushing the fruit toward me.

  “You take three.”

  I gave her one back and put a plum in my mouth. It was so ripe that it liquified on my tongue. I spat the stone into my hand.

  “Delicious, right?” Meisis looked at me. I nodded at her, and yet before my inner eye I saw the plums rotting on the trees.

  Later, while Meisis was outside in the garden sorting my building blocks, I beat my fist multiple times against the wall in the attic. I beat it so hard the skin broke.

  In the bathroom, I washed the blood from my knuckles and avoided looking myself in the eye in the mirror over the sink.

  “What happened to your hand?” Edith asked me as we passed each other in the hallway that night. In order to cool the bruised bone, I had wrapped a wet cloth around it.

  I leaned against the handrail on the stairs and didn’t respond.

  Edith twisted her mouth in a mocking way. “You always want to sit things out and hope that everything sorts itself out in the end.”

  I shrugged my shoulders and went to bed.

  65.

  SOMETHING IS SHIFTING, AND IT FEELS LIKE FALLING DOWN. I DON’T KNOW WHICH WAY TO SHOOT.

  The next morning, Edith was gone. I couldn’t find her in the house or in the garden, and her furs weren’t anywhere to be found. I hoped she would never reappear.

  But when she was standing among the pines around midday and then walked toward the house, I was actually relieved. Her eyes were tired; the seam of her dress was wet. Leaves hung from her coat.

  “Where were you this morning?” I asked her when she was standing in the darkened kitchen that evening. She poured herself a glass of elderberry juice that I’d left out on the table and said, “I just did a couple of laps; it clears my head.”

  “I don’t buy it,” I said.

  Edith shrugged her shoulders.

  I took a few steps toward her and planted myself in front of her. “I haven’t forgotten our argument. What are you not telling me?”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t take the child away from you,” Edith said, ducking around me and leaving the kitchen.

  In the days that followed, she was sometimes gone for hours. She evaded my questions.

  She got up every morning before us. When I came downstairs, she was already in front of the sink in the kitchen. She had started eating regularly again, wore a different dress every day, and wore makeup. After breakfast, she put on lipstick and powdered her face.

  It looked like a mask.

  At the time it seemed to me that she was steeling herself for something.

  That in a way she was, I understood only in retrospect.

  Every evening she combed her hair with the brush made of driftwood.

  When Meisis asked her, she braided her two plaits.

  “What have they got against this color?” she said, looking in wonder at the luminous copper tone. I watched both of them from the door. There was a throbbing behind my forehead. They didn’t notice me, and I turned and left. I fetched the ax from the shed. I went deep into the forest and hacked at a branch that Meisis had recently pulled out of the undergrowth and that had been lying in her room ever since. I hacked at it for as long as it took for there to be almost nothing left of it. And yet I still couldn’t fight the scenario incessantly repeating in my head: how I had once asked Edith for braids. In reply, she had said, “The straw on your head is much too unruly, it’s impossible to do something good with it.” She eyed me up snidely in the mirror of the vanity, where she sat twisting her own shiny wet hair around driftwood and pinning it up. I bolted out of the room and put three of her books in my bag. I walked into the forest that very night, where I burned them in a clearing.

  I never asked her again.

  At dinner Edith now often held out her dish for a second helping, and she drank the juice from the jars of plums in the cellar. I watched her with suspicion. Our supplies were dwindling.

  “What are you playing at?” I asked her, after I caught her spooning mashed potatoes into her mouth in the bath. She avoided my look, acting all innocent.

  “First you get upset that I don’t eat enough, and now suddenly you’re complaining when I do eat,” she moaned.

  I tensed my shoulders. “That doesn’t mean you can just help yourself to the supplies whenever you want without thinking of us.”

  Edith nodded, but the next day I found her and Meisis laughing while they drank the last cartons of evaporated milk in the cellar. I ripped them out of their hands angrily.

  “What did I say to you yesterday?” I shouted. Meisis looked at the freezer cabinet next to her guiltily. Edith withdrew to the sofa to brood.

  When Edith and Meisis went to sleep that evening, I locked the pantry door and the hatch to the cellar and threaded both keys on a piece of string. I wore them around my neck from then on. Edith didn’t bother asking for the keys.

  66.

  Even though it was a waste of gas, I sometimes drove around the territory without a purpose. I needed a little space between myself and the house, where Meisis and Edith spent more and more time together. Driving fast and smoking helped me to rein in my anger at Edith. I hoped that a plan would come to me for how I could finally take Meisis out of the line of fire, because not a single tooth was loose yet.

  On one of the days I was driving in the pickup, I drove by Pesolt’s cherry plum trees. As I passed them, I noticed that there was already new fruit on the branches. They were for the most part still green, but some were already nearly ripe. Twice in such a short amount of time. For as long as I could remember, that had never happened before. I drove on, preoccupied.

  Later, as I lay in the garden and Meisis played under the cherry and plum trees, I wrote on a sheet of paper:

  THE CHERRY PLUM TREES BEARING FRUIT AGAIN SEEMS LIKE A TRAP TO ME.

  In the night I dreamed of overripe fruit that burst when I touched them. Their fermenting scent saturated the ground, the air. The only sound was the buzzing of the wasps. Flies and hornets too. An unceasing flickering, a teeming, nothing stayed in place. I woke from my dream in terror. The close air was almost unbearable. It hummed with electricity, like right before a storm. I couldn’t sleep for a long time and listened to the outside, but rainfall didn’t come, and at some point, I dozed off.

  When I got up the next morning, the ground was as dry as it had been the evening before.

  67.

  Three days later, my suspicions were confirmed. I found out where Edith disappeared to so often.

  It was midday when I happened to see her walk through the garden in the direction of the forest. I told Meisis to stay hidden in the attic and followed Edith.

  I kept the distance between us so great she couldn’t hear my steps, but I didn’t let her out of my sight. We walked like this for a while through the forest. Finally, we arrived at the river. Mosquitos danced over the water. Behind it stood the concrete bridge like an indented cliff in the landscape. I was dizzy from the heat.

  Edith carefully climbed down the bank, holding tightly on to the high grass so she wouldn’t lose her balance. When she reached the bottom, she took off her shoes and stepped into the water. At this point of the river it only came up to her ankles. The hem of her dress guzzled up the water. She stood like that for a
while, then leaned down, put her hand in the water, and bathed her neck and face. A dragonfly hovered motionlessly in the air above her head. Edith removed her dress and laid it next to the coat on the rocks. Underneath she wore her mother-of-pearl-colored bathing suit. Her body was much more muscular than I remembered. She waded into the water. The waves sloshed against her knees at first, then against her hip bones, and finally against her chest. Her bright hair, which she had tied into a knot, shone in the sun. The water reflected the light too. She tentatively swam a few strokes, quickened her pace, and gasped for breath. The current was strong; she had to fight against it. Her progress was slow. She arrived at the middle of the river, stopped, and swam back, always cautious not to be wrenched away. The water washed her back onto the bank, where she got up, shiny and wet, and from there went back to the rocks where her dress and coat were. She made a contented face, stretched, got dressed, and turned to leave. Before she could discover me, I ducked behind a tree.

  I made the decision to confront her the following day.

  EDITH IS STILL SURE IN THE WATER. SHE SWAM LIKE A PIECE OF WOOD, WITHOUT SINKING EVEN ONCE.

  68.

  Early the next morning, I went to the quarry. I smoked five cigarettes on the way, even though the pack was almost empty.

  I stopped up on the edge. Wolf and Levke had left behind their schnapps bottles between the scrap cars. In one spot there was wood that had been bleached by the sun. In another, there was gravel formed into a pile. I recalled that it was me who had piled up these stones. I had spent an afternoon doing it because I didn’t want to go home, where Edith had been lying motionless on the sofa for days and hadn’t even reacted when I had put my hand right in front of her face.

  As I was about to light a sixth cigarette, I noticed there was someone standing on the other side of the quarry. It was a girl, a little younger than me. She was wearing overalls that looked like they were made of paper. But the most remarkable thing about her was her hair. It was as red as Meisis’s. She had seen me too. We stared at each other across the pit, then she turned on her heel and disappeared into the forest behind her. My heart was hammering. I blinked. There was no longer anything to indicate that the girl had really existed. I quickly ran down the slope and almost fell, I was just about able to brace myself. I rushed through the quarry and climbed back up the other side. There, I looked for the spot where I had seen the girl standing, but she hadn’t left anything behind. Not even an imprint in the moss. I fought my way through the thicket lying behind it, yelled into the forest, listened. But no one answered me.

  THE CONSTANT HEAT MAKES ME HALLUCINATE.

  69.

  I DREAMED OF THE RIVER. WATER WAS ALL AROUND ME.

  I WAS FREEZING, WITHOUT BEING ABLE TO SAY WHERE I WAS. I DIDN’T SEE THE RIVERBANK ANYWHERE.

  AND THEN A SHOT. IT CUT THROUGH THE DEPTHS, CUT THROUGH THE DREAM. I WOKE WITH A START.

  I had fallen asleep at the kitchen table. The ceiling light was burning. Meisis was sitting opposite me and was drawing crosses with a pen on a sheet of paper. I ran my hand over my face and propped myself up.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked.

  She nodded hesitantly and said, “It sounded like something shattering.” She turned the paper over and began to draw on the reverse side too.

  “Where’s Edith?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. I hadn’t seen her since getting back from the quarry that afternoon.

  Meisis shrugged. “She was pacing next to the brambles.”

  I got up and went to the window, but it was so dark I could only see my face in the glass. I turned, went into the hallway, stepped out of the house, and called Edith’s name into the night, yet received no reply. For a moment I stayed outside, listening, but the landscape was quiet, quiet like I’d seldom experienced.

  When I returned to Meisis in the kitchen, I said to her that it was time to go to bed. She reluctantly folded the sheet of paper, pocketed it, and followed me into the bathroom. We brushed our teeth standing in front of the mirror. I noticed for the first time that the dark circles under my eyes were just as shadowy as Edith’s. The exhaustion was written on Meisis’s face. She rinsed her mouth out and showed me her teeth.

  “Are any of them wobbly?”

  She shook her head.

  I opened the window in Meisis’s bedroom. Not a sound came in from outside. Meisis made herself comfortable on the sofa bed. She had recently started placing the things she’d found during the day around her pillow. Today there were two pine cones, a twig she’d peeled the bark from, and three rowan berries. She pushed the drawing of the crosses under her pillow.

  “You’ll stay until I’ve fallen asleep, won’t you?” she asked.

  I nodded, turned off the light, and sat on the floor next to the sofa. I leaned my back against the wall. From the corridor a small slit of light pushed under the door. The sight soothed me, but when I closed my eyes, I once more saw the dividing mass of water, so I stared into the dark room, where the contours of the furniture swam.

  70.

  Later, while I was washing our dishes, I heard someone whistling outside. I went to the window and looked out. Underneath the light over the door stood Wolf. He looked in an even worse state than last time. I took a knife from the sideboard and stepped out to him.

  “What do you want?” I asked in a hushed voice. The situation seemed surreal to me.

  Under his cap he was as pale as a limewashed wall. He nervously wiped his sweaty palms down his trousers and said, “We hit someone.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We hit someone with the car,” he said. Wolf took off his cap and twisted it in his hands.

  “But you don’t have a car.”

  Wolf and Levke used to race their cars down the highway at night for fun. It hadn’t taken even a year before they had planted them into a tree and were lucky that that was all they’d done. The bruises, cuts, their damaged bodies—they had put it all on show afterward, as if they had been wounded in battle.

  No one had wanted to lend them a car since, so they had to walk everywhere on foot, or they rode together on one bicycle, one on the saddle, the other on the rack. But in the last few years, they had often been too drunk even for that.

  “Levke and I,” Wolf stuttered, “we borrowed Pesolt’s car. We do that sometimes, when Pesolt’s drunk too much, because then he usually sleeps a few days and doesn’t even know.”

  I didn’t understand what Wolf was getting at. I stepped impatiently from one foot to the other.

  “What’s that got to do with me?” I asked. “Who did you hit?”

  Wolf’s eyes widened. “A girl,” he said.

  “What girl?” I became exasperated. “Wolf, what are you talking about?”

  He chewed his lower lip. “She wasn’t from here,” he said.

  “What do you mean, she wasn’t from here?”

  “She has red hair.”

  I held my breath.

  “Like the child,” he added.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Who?”

  “Damn it, the girl that you hit!”

  Wolf rubbed his hands down his trousers again.

  “Spit it out.”

  “In the trunk of Pesolt’s car.”

  I cursed. “Take me to her.”

  Wolf didn’t move.

  “Right now,” I shouted.

  Wolf led me through the forest. I couldn’t say how long we walked for, but it felt like an eternity. It didn’t seem to take any effort for Wolf to orient himself in the darkness, while I no longer knew in which cardinal direction we were going after only a few meters.

  Pesolt’s car was standing in the middle of the road. Levke was leaning against the hood. When she saw us, she cursed. “What took you so long?” Just like Wolf, she seemed to still be in a state of shock.

  “I want to see her,” I said.

  Levke led me around the car and opened the trunk.

  It was the girl from the quarry. Her
hair glowed red. She had a cut on her forehead. I bent over her. On her wrist shimmered a mother-of-pearl bracelet. It was the one I’d placed on the tree stump. My heart began to beat faster. I reached for her arm, felt her wrist, and took a step back.

  “She’s still alive,” I said.

  Wolf rushed to my side. “Are you sure?”

  “I can feel her pulse.”

  Levke pushed Wolf aside and gripped the girl’s wrist herself. “Skalde’s right.”

  “What do we do now?” Wolf asked, pacing up and down.

  “We’ll bring her to our house before someone sees us,” I said. It briefly went black in front of my eyes. I had to steady myself against the car.

  Wolf touched my shoulder. “Are you okay?” I pushed his hand away.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  I pushed myself off the car, opened the door, and shuffled into the back seat. Levke got in front of the wheel, Wolf sat in the passenger seat. When I looked out the window, I saw a cat in the undergrowth, its white fur filthy. It seemed to notice me looking at it. The car drove off; I wrenched my head in the cat’s direction and watched as it ducked and disappeared into the forest.

  We drove without lights. No one said anything. When we reached the house, I was the first to get out. I opened the trunk.

  “You have to help me carry her into the house,” I said, cradling the girl’s upper body.

  Levke took her legs, and together we carried her through the door that Wolf held open for us and laid her on the sofa in the living room. I checked the girl’s pulse. I could still make out a faint heartbeat.

  “And now?” Wolf and Levke asked, looking at me.

  “The car, you have to take it back to Pesolt.”

  They nodded but didn’t make a move to leave. I stood up and pushed them to the door.