No. 4 Imperial Lane

by Jonathan Weisman

  “Is that a threat?”

  “What do you understand? The alleyways of the Rive Gauche? The best whorehouses in Paris? You’re a wasted life at what, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? And now you presume to intervene in mine?”

  “Are you going to hit me now?”

  It was a provocation, intentional perhaps but probably not. Hans lived in his subconscious. He would think back on that line—“Are you going to hit me now?”—for years. He supposed he had to see for himself.

  João’s right hand snapped back into the car and onto the wheel. He lunged toward the passenger with his left. It was an awkward, ineffectual gesture, not so much a punch as an odd gesticulation of warning. As his left arm moved, his right followed involuntarily. The Ranger swerved toward the shoulder, then snapped back toward the center line. Neither of them saw the lorry, ever. They only heard the blast of the horn, which startled João into overcorrecting left, then right to avoid the shoulder, then left again to avoid the oncoming traffic. The car hit the shoulder gravel at one hundred fifteen kilometers an hour. The fishtail was a whip, turning the Ranger around and tossing it like a pinwheel into the ditch stretching along the road. As it flipped, the unlocked, hastily closed door on the passenger’s side sprung open and disgorged Hans. He flew like a rag doll into the wheat field, green and ripening. At the same time as Hans’s side of the Ranger was aloft, the driver’s side crashed down onto the earth. Metal crumpled. His door ajar, his body half-free, João Gonçalves was crushed under the cartwheeling steel.

  The car came to a rest in the drainage ditch upside down, wheels still spinning.

  Chapter Twenty

  “‘For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings.’” Elizabeth took a deep drag from her Silk Cut and smashed it into the chipped saucer she was using as an ashtray.

  I had not anticipated the final chapter in her bedtime tales to be so abrupt, so violent with finality. Cristina held my hand at the kitchen table, silent, and let her mother draw their story to a close.

  Elizabeth had not been pleased when we let her know that her daughter and her live-in volunteer were shagging upstairs. I remember she had pursed her lips, given me a little glare, and rolled her eyes. Then it passed.

  That had been a week before. We eased back into the rhythm of Bromwell life as comfortably as could be expected. Cristina was not shy, no sneaking around. I was in her bed nightly now, still astonished at my luck but more bedeviled than ever about my looming, still-unannounced departure. Cristina knew, and she insisted I do what was right for me, whatever that was. And now, the end of the story had come, like Scheherazade’s last dawn. Like her torturer king, I had fallen in love, though not with the storyteller, with her daughter. Now I had two to abandon.

  “I suppose Hans did save my life. Lord knows, I shouldn’t have done him the favor in return. ‘A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy, he hath bore me on his back a thousand times.’”

  She knocked back what was left of her vodka.

  That small kitchen on the south coast of England was so far from the exotic backdrops of the Bromwells’ tale. It was like leaving a movie theater after a particularly fantastic, engrossing film to find yourself in a mall. I wondered if Elizabeth felt that too, felt it every day of her life these past years—not in Lisbon or London or Hampshire, not in Angola or South Africa or tiny Guinea-Bissau, not anywhere she was meant to be. I tried to formulate something to break the silence, something that would not sound asinine.

  “You know, Elizabeth, it wasn’t your fault.”

  I guess it was no more asinine than anything else. Cristina and I were sipping tea, but my cup was growing cold on the counter. The milk was beginning to separate into sickly swirls on the surface of the liquid. It was nearly May, but still the room went cold as the warmth of the stove dissipated. I loved Elizabeth at that moment. I wanted to help her, wanted to carry her to wherever she was going, a job in a secretarial pool or behind the counter of a sandwich shop. I wanted to ask her if she’d like to show me Houndsheath, “the heap.” We could leave Hans to his slumber and take the ambulance out for a drive.

  My stomach dropped. A wave of nausea swept over me as I looked into the milk congealing in my cup. I could feel tears welling up. I ducked my head and sniffed them back.

  “Are you alright, David?” Cristina asked. She didn’t seem all that concerned, really. She thought of me as an emotional guy, and I suppose I had become one. She patted my hand.

  “I’m not so sure I can be so easily absolved, David. I sent out a distress signal, all the way to Hampshire, and it destroyed my brother’s life. It’s a little difficult to get past that. Ah, but ‘things without all remedy should be without regard. What’s done is done.’”

  “Is that Shakespeare? What’s done is done?” Cristina asked. “It sounds so…”

  “Prosaic,” I chimed in. I looked up, relieved to have something to say that was acceptably banal.

  “Yes, Lady Macbeth, and are you two already finishing each other’s sentences? My Lord.” She waved a hand caustically, lit up another cigarette, and took a deep, satisfying drag.

  “It took two bloody hours for them to find him in the field.” Smoke billowed from her lungs with her words. “They cut João’s body out of the car and figured he had been alone, the bastards. I’m sure I was hysterical when they reached me, but I managed to ask them if my brother was alright. ‘What brother?’ they said.”

  “He was just lying in a field with a broken neck for two hours?”

  “Hmmm. And a broken leg, and a broken arm, and a dislocated shoulder. I doubt he was conscious, of course. He doesn’t remember much. Has this vague image of João lunging at him, a punch of some sort, and some memories of clouds in the sky above a wheat field. I had to call a cab to take me to the crash. They didn’t want me there, not least because I had this one with me.” She nodded to her daughter. “I often wish I hadn’t gone. I’ll never forget them walking out of that wheat field, carrying Hans on this board contraption, like a stretcher only hard. His head was sandwiched between these two massive foam pads. His arm was an absolute mess. The lacerations on his face were a horror show. I was sure he was dead, sure of it.

  “You saw him like that, you know,” she said to Cristina. “You still talk about it when you’re nervous.”

  Cristina shrugged. “Not for ages, Mum.”

  “No, maybe not. You’re all grown up, aren’t you?” she said appraisingly. “Anyway, they thought about just amputating the broken bits once they had sussed out the damage to his spine. I screamed bloody murder, let me tell you. Think about it. It had been more than five years since I’d seen my brother, and my first sight was of this creature, absolutely wrecked, then trussed up in casts and a neck brace that looked like something out of the Tower of London, tubes pouring out of his nose. But I didn’t want him waking up to a body that grotesque. Funny, when you look at him now, but I still think I made the right decision.”

  “And your husband was dead,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, there’s that too.” She chuckled. “‘Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.’”

  “Mum!” Cristina protested.

  I dumped out our tea and poured fresh cups. Elizabeth tipped back some more vodka.

  “Do you miss him at all?”

  “João? You know, I do. I really do. ‘These violent delights have violent ends, and in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which as they kiss consume.’ He would have known that, you know. Romeo and Juliet. He was soft for that one. He was a beautiful man. I know I didn’t give him his due. He was fond of the whole Shakespeare thing, but what he really loved was medicine. He really loved it.”

  She wiped her eyes and looked at me squarely, her mascara clumping. Then she smiled. “Haven’t had a shag in donkey’s years. Pardon me, dear,” she said to Cristina, shaking her head.

  “All things glow in retrospect, even João Gonçalves. God, he’s the crucified Ch
rist to you. Convenient for a teenage daughter hating her mum, having a fallen saint for a father.”

  “I don’t hate you, Mum, and you know it. You’re just being a silly sod now.”

  “Well, you’ve gotten through it, I suppose. You know, I really do believe João was a good man. He just had demons I never guessed at. I loved him. I did.

  “We moved in with Greta immediately. Samuel took care of getting out of the apartment lease. It took three months to get Hans stable enough to bring back to Britain. You know, I hadn’t seen my family in all those years in Africa, and suddenly there they all were: Mum, Dad, and of course Hans, all come to see me under the worst of circumstances.”

  “A little bitter about that?” I asked.

  She paused, shrugged, and agreed. “Why would they have come to see me? My plight hardly compared to Hans’s.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I offered.

  “You’re lovely, David, really,” she said, wagging a finger at me. “‘Yet do I fear thy nature. It is too full of the milk of human kindness.’”

  “Your standards are low.”

  “You got that right.

  “It all made the headlines on Fleet Street: Tory Tragedy; Sir Gordon’s Misfortunes; and the like. Even the Labourites overlooked the South African backdrop, the story was so awful. It could have been good for my father’s career if he had gotten through it. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t.”

  “Last year, there was this Tory politician who was supposed to speak at Sussex, at the university,” I said, offering up a diversion. “He was literally stoned. Not on drugs, I mean, with rocks. His driver had to beat a retreat in a hail of rocks. He never even got out of the car.”

  Elizabeth looked at me.

  “Stupid, that, ‘full of sound and fury,’” she said with real contempt. “I’m as Labour as the best of them. I even like Kinnock, the wanker. But we’re all human in the end. A life, a world, an empire can collapse in an instant, even Sir Gordon Bromwell’s. You know, when I want to remember my parents, I remember them in those weeks in South Africa. We were all together, all grieving, all thoroughly miserable. They never even met my bloody husband. I remember standing by Hans’s hospital bed. My father came in and put his arm around me. Then he pulled me close to him, hard. He was crying, really crying. Mum walked round the other side and squeezed my hand.”

  She was crying now, softly. She was looking out the little kitchen window, into the tiny back garden. There was nothing much to see in the light of day. At night, it was a void, just darkness. You could pretend there was real space in that void, like you weren’t staring at a patch of brown earth hemmed in by brick. I like to think she was staring at the infinite space of her imagining, the kind of space she must have had in the Houndsheath nights of her childhood, lonely but vast, gone now to the National Trust. There was possibility in that kind of loneliness, the loneliness of youth when dreams could be expected to take flight. Elizabeth’s adult dreams could still take flight, I supposed, but the flight of the jambatutu, a short burst taking her somewhere else, but still in sight of here, of this patch of Brighton, cold and broken and with a quadriplegic in the living room.

  Cristina stood to join her, put an arm around her waist, and laid her head on her mother’s shoulder. Elizabeth turned to plant a kiss on her daughter’s lustrous head. Then they looked into the night together, while I did the dishes, stacked next to the sink, encrusted and cold. Elizabeth had made skate that I picked up from the fishmongers that afternoon, coated with an amandine breading and sautéed in olive oil. The purplish, heavy meat wasn’t really to my taste, truth be told, but many of her concoctions weren’t. Hans had eaten two bites.

  In the hallway outside the pediatric intensive care unit of Northside Hospital is an oversized train that rolls back and forth on a track, maybe fifteen feet long. It’s brightly colored, with stick figures, the kind that adults draw to appear as if they were drawn by children. It’s heavy, and, for a little kid, hard to push. But boys love large things on wheels that they can push, especially the kind that crash. My brother and I took turns sitting in the train while the other hurled it along the tracks to the rubber stopper and a pounding collision. We could do it for hours, and we did—lost in the action, oblivious to our surroundings, laughing at the pounding our still-small bodies could take—over and over again. No adults ever told us to stop or to shush.

  Then one afternoon my father tapped my shoulder as I counted down for one more heave.

  “Come say good-bye to your sister, boys.”

  He held our hands under the fluorescent hospital glare as we skirted the nursing station, then tiptoed into Rebecca’s darkened room. The blinds were drawn, the nurses gone. My mother’s face was buried in the hospital gown that shrouded my sister’s newly formed breasts. Her wails were muffled, but to me they were howls, unworldly, incomprehensible, shocking. I looked up at my father. His lower lip trembled, like the first stirrings of an earthquake. I looked into my brother’s face, which was as bewildered as my own.

  Then I looked at Rebecca. Her face was still swollen, an ooze of red iodine and yellow pus smearing her shaven scalp. Her mouth, a ring of sores, had lost its livid red glow, but it shined with the Vaseline my mother had just applied. Her cracked lips formed a silent, screaming “O.” She stared at some spot on the wall high above Van Gogh’s Starry Night, oblivious to her mother’s sobs, which rhythmically rocked her body. Her eyes were glazed with a film I had seen before somewhere, transparent but somehow enshrouding—the eyes, I realized, of the whole fish that peered from the ice at my mother’s butcher. I used to poke at those eyes in fascination, my brother shouting, “Eww, David, don’t do that,” my mother turning to slap away my hand. Rebecca’s were larger, even more distant, the dead eyes of my dead sister.

  “David, say good-bye to your sister,” my father coaxed.

  I shook my head.

  “Please?” he asked.

  I turned my body away, arms crossed, eyes smashed shut.

  For ten years, I refused to look back. I entered adolescence, obsessed over girls, watched in the mirror as acne sprouted, then faded, as the first hairs surfaced on my smooth face, as baby fat slowly, slowly receded, as my body changed and became a new, unanticipated trial in my life, something to beat down, indulge, try to tame. I went to high school, left home, went to college, left the country for another college, changed clothes, changed images, and all the while, I refused to see anew Rebecca’s vacant stare.

  Elizabeth confronted the death of her husband and her past every day, perhaps every moment of every day.

  “David, go check on Uncle Hans,” Cristina said gently as she touched my hand with a fingertip. “Then let’s take a walk to the beach.”

  I went into Hans’s bedroom and reflexively walked over to the bay behind his hospital headboard to draw the curtains tight, although no light was leaking through. It was dead quiet. The stool beside him beckoned. I went to sit, to absorb the stillness.

  Then a muffled voice came from under the blankets. I lifted them from Hans’s face.

  “So you have reached the present, David?”

  “What?”

  “The walls are thin. The story is over. My neck is broken in a South African wheat field, and you’re fucking my niece.”

  He was almost invisible, the room was so dark. But in that quiet, I could hear him well.

  “Yes, Hans,” I said, almost in a whisper, not wanting to break the silence. “I’m so sorry.”

  We paused.

  “About which part? The niece?” he whispered.

  I leaned over him and couldn’t hold back a smile.

  “I’m not sorry about that part at all.”

  I smoothed the wet, ragged strands of hair on his head.

  “No, I’m just sorry that this happened to you, how it happened.”

  I reached to touch his face. I laid my full palm on his sunken cheek this time; my fingers pressed gently on the hollow of his temple.

  “I a
ccept your pity, David. You know, there are plenty of cripples who have handled their infirmities with far more aplomb than I. But that’s just for public consumption. When they say, ‘Oh, this was the best thing that ever happened to me,’ or ‘You know, we all have our disabilities,’ don’t believe them. Inside, they’re raging at the injustice of it all.”

  The quiet enveloped us for a while longer. “Do you two tell your story to all the volunteers?” I asked.

  “No, never.”

  He stopped to catch his breath.

  “Have you told Elizabeth you’re leaving?” His breathing was labored, but determined.

  “Not yet. Well, I haven’t decided. I mean, I was just thinking I sort of have to stay.”

  “Don’t lie to me, David, you’re bloody awful at it. Just tell her. The longer you wait, the harder it will be on her. She has a lot to prepare for without you.”

  “Well, there’s Cristina now too.”

  “Yes, you really bolloxed that up, didn’t you? Well, if that’s to be, that’s to be, David. You can’t hold her back.”

  I nodded in silence. He couldn’t see me. The gesture was for myself. I needed the encouragement. I’d come to believe that leaving now was the meanest, most selfish thing I could ever do.

  “Is it alright?”

  “Is what alright?”

  “To leave, now.”

  “David, you have this absurdly quaint notion that you can pass through life without hurting anybody, without even disappointing anyone. But because you won’t make the decision, you merely force others to. You don’t want anyone to dislike you, so soon enough, the world will be full of people with David Heller on their guilty consciences. Is that really better?”

  I shook my head, but he could not see.

  “There is no clean path through. There’s no way to do it right. You will have to cheat. You will have to take others down, some perhaps more worthy than you. But you will find humans are a forgiving lot, or at least a forgetful one. It’s one of the better parts of our nature, forgetting.”