Caging Skies

by Christine Leunens

'Oh, Johannes, I've never given you anything. I have no money. You've given me so much. Put walls up around me and a roof over my head. It was a way for me to give you a little something back, however small and insignificant. It meant a lot to me.'

  The only thing I believed was she was starting to believe herself.

  On the verge of tears, she made another attempt to get me to take it. 'Here, I give it to you. Please accept it.' I felt as if she were trying to get me to literally hold her lie. I pushed her hands away. 'Why did you hide the slippers I gave you? Why did you get rid of your dressing gown?'

  'I was just protecting the bird. It's so pretty, I didn't want it to break. It's so fragile — look, its beak has already been damaged. Right here, did you see?'

  'I don't trust you. Plenty of people are seeing you, speaking to you, enjoying you, aren't they? You pulled your own button off, didn't you? You're ready to damage anything to cover up your lies. You lied to me about your toe, too. You are nothing, Elsa, I'm sorry to say, but one great liar.'

  'I had to lie, you gave me no choice! You kept insisting on my feet being cold — if you had just let it go! You force me to lie! You never can handle the truth! You're like a dog that bites a branch and can't let go, even if it means hanging itself!'

  I carried her to the bed, where I demanded to know who she'd seen.

  She pursed her lips, feigning incomprehension. 'I didn't speak to anyone. I walked till I reached those trees, looked through the leaves, saw the sky, walked back.'

  'The truth!'

  'The cars; I noticed the cars had changed.'

  'Elsa,' I begged. 'Tell me!'

  'I didn't look.'

  'You don't have to look to see. What did your peripheral vision tell you?'

  'I saw all those who should have been and weren't. I saw gaps and spaces until I couldn't see.'

  'You weren't blind. You were able to walk.'

  'I didn't look. If I looked, I would have seen that I was seen.'

  'In whose bed did you lie?'

  'A bed of leaves.'

  'It was Beyer, wasn't it? You and he went for a roll in the hay? Behind his wife's back? Sad, aren't you, because he never came back?'

  'Herr Beyer?'

  'Don't play the innocent. I think you know the dirty old man I mean.'

  'Who are you talking about?'

  'Who? Hoefle? Campen? A total stranger?'

  She put up no resistance to my shakes and, yes, I confess, slaps. 'You think you can go and get yourself poked and then come back like it was nothing? Just go off like that, open your legs, come back, mouth sealed? Tell me, was it good? Was it sensual with those leaves crunching under your back? The twigs scratching your fat arse? So fat, he's never been back to claim you? Where's his love now?'

  Elsa's eyes, puffy and tired as they had been of late, were wide open in what I could have sworn was her former ignorance of the world. Cautiously, as if to test the truth — but also as if to stay on the safe side by making it sound as if she was only telling me what I wanted to hear so I'd stop hurting her — she replied, 'I might have met with Harold before. If I did, it was a while back. We never talked. We didn't have to. He felt everything. It didn't last. Not long. I wish it had never happened. Anyway, it's gone and past.' Her words gained weight. 'But this once, I met with God.'

  Harold was Beyer's first name. I had her confession! He whom I'd half suspected I now fully hated.

  That night I dreamt that Elsa ran towards me with the ceramic bird cupped in her hands, screaming that it was pecking her — please, help her! She dropped it in mine, and, looking at it more closely, I noticed the beak was broken off at the base, leaving behind it a smooth, white spot that gave it a harmless, open-mouthed expression. Without a beak, the creature didn't look like a bird any more but a fish. Just as I was thinking that, having no beak, it could not possibly have been pecking her, so I'd caught her red-handed lying again, a stabbing pain went straight through my heart. I realised that the bird had pecked me there, leaving its beak behind like a thorn, and I would die within the hour.

  ***

  I changed the lock so she couldn't open the door on her own. This right would be reserved to the keeper of the key. She watched me with that cursed borderline smile of hers, particularly when the key got stuck so I feared it would break if I forced it. I went downtown for some grease and had just walked out of the hardware store when someone tapped me on my shoulder. It took some effort for me to place the face. It was the architect, looking haggard. For a second, I expected a blow.

  'Where'd you disappear to? I searched every hotel on the Ring! The new, the old! No one's ever heard of you.'

  I babbled that my project hadn't worked out.

  'Where do you live, then?'

  I was cautious saying only, 'Buchengasse.'

  'What did you mean leaving all your junk behind? I'm not responsible for your artwork! If you need storage, you have to pay for it!'

  'I thought if you liked it you'd keep it, and if you didn't you'd toss it out.'

  'Toss it out? A hundred cubic metres of it? You know how much that would cost? It's not for me to pay! You know how long it would take just carrying that junk up and outside?'

  'I'm sorry; I didn't realise it would be such an inconvenience. If you like, I'll come and get it all by the end of the week.'

  'By the end of the week? You're coming with me right now!' He caught me by the sleeve.

  'Impossible! A member of my family is unwell.'

  'That's not my goddamn problem.'

  'What do you expect me to do on my own? I have to arrange some friends to help me.' As I wriggled to extract my arm from his grip, he felt something that made him let go instantly. He'd forgotten about this handicap of mine. He calmed down.

  'How do I know you're not going to sneak away like last time? No telephone, no way to reach you?'

  'It wasn't my fault the hotel never went up.'

  'I need to know what day. And don't trifle with me.'

  'Friday. Friday afternoon.'

  'I expect more than thanks for having stored them so many months.'

  'You'll get it.'

  'And I don't mean some tip. I could've rented that space out. I could've turned it into a photographer's darkroom. You're going to have to do some multiplying on your fingers before you have any idea what I've lost.'

  'You'll get it. You have my word. Friday. Please, Herr . . .'

  'Hampel.'

  'Excuse me, Herr Hampel. Let us please not discuss figures in the streets.'

  He scrutinised me, trying to decide whether he could trust me, before backing off.

  I called after him, 'By the way, how's the house?'

  I walked around town, not remembering why I'd come. I was oblivious to the bag in my hand and the hint it contained. I felt eyes on me and recognised Petra and Astrid, the yellow raincoats they were wearing. Were they behind the architect finding me? Were they behind the card games? I ducked behind some shoppers, but didn't throw them off. The chase crossed several quarters. They changed their coats to fool me — that's what they'd been hiding in those big shopping bags. I came up behind them and poked their backs. It wasn't Petra and Astrid, not at all: it was an adolescent girl holding hands with her mother.

  By then I realised I'd lost my bearings. My surroundings looked familiar yet alien, as if they didn't belong to that time or place on earth any more. Shiny, metallic structures towered over the city's older houses. It looked as if the banks were made out of the coins they'd collected, melted down, the highest belonging to the banks that had collected the most. Cars were driving about the city with queer pastel wings growing out of them. A dozen vehicles were stopped at every red light, blocking a good forty metres of many streets. The exhaust fumes made me light-headed, the noise of their engines killed the sweeter sounds of pigeons murmuring, autumn leaves whispering, the Danube moving silently along; silence being a sound, just as pauses are part of music.

  The police drove me back to my block, talking b
etween themselves about how it would be the end of the world if the two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, took to dropping atom bombs on each other. One alone, and a giant mushroom would swell in the sky and an overwhelming light would sear people's shadows into walls and footpaths. The radiation would spread to us, leave our innards smouldering and warp offspring in women's wombs. It was a terrifying thought. I wanted to go home! Home! Home!

  On my recognising the shoe-repair shop on the corner, they let me out and told me to go home and rest. The aspects of the area that used to displease me now comforted me: nutshells on the footpath, pipes like veins coming out of the various buildings, cooking smells exhaling from windows like warm, familiar breath.

  That was until I saw the circle of people in front of our building, adults and children, all looking down in stances of gloom. I didn't even look to see whether Beyer was or wasn't there. I looked up for the mushroom, then I saw it, the window to our flat open horizontally. Friedrich was crying; his mother was telling him that everyone dies one day. I remembered I'd locked the door. I'd locked the door! It was my fault. She'd done it, my God — she'd got even with me in the worst way she could have, the very worst.

  Crying out, 'Elsa!' I broke into the core of the circle.

  It wasn't Elsa. It was the cat.

  xxx

  With her thumbs tucked into her fists like birds' heads under their wings for the night, Elsa watched the sky. She watched the first light dissolve the black to grey, then the grey to pale blue. She awaited the splotches of pink, red, orange, then took in the blues, the incoming white and grey strokes. The end of the day drew the palette away and left a blanched sketch of her own face reflected in the glass.

  She explained to me what was going through her mind when I asked her, but I found that for all the thought she'd given to what she said, it lacked sense. 'See, Johannes, as I watch the sky from this window, someone else on the other side of the world or right next door is also watching it, but they have a unique view of what's within their own frame. Other planets have skies, too, all across the universe. Every planet is a unique pearl twirling within its own bed of hues, but this piece of this sky is my life, my small part of heaven, that which was given to me. It is like God's painting to me, personally. Do you understand?'

  No, I didn't.

  From the lower section of the window, treetops could be seen. They, too, were integrated into her understanding of life. She watched them bud in different shades of green before God's paintbrush turned them red, orange and yellow, after which the leaves fell. She saw a relationship between the trees and the sky, both vividly coloured before dying, and the mysteries of life and death. God did not take life away; no, He simply reabsorbed His colours.

  Gazing at the stars one night she woke me up to ask, 'Johannes? Do you think God evaluates a person's life divided by the number of days to come up with an average? Or does He make a graph of the person you start out as, and follow you along your life up to the person you end up being? If you went up more than you went down, would your soul have done well? Or perhaps it is only the last person you are that counts? You know, nothing at all cumulative? You have to get to a certain high point by the end of the game. Would that be fair?'

  I was at my wits' end.

  Some hours later, in broad daylight, she called for me so wildly I came running out of the bathroom, my trousers around my knees, thinking she was dying, only to be asked, 'Why do you think people who don't want to die never suffer over the time that passed before they existed? Eternity goes two ways, into the past and the future. Why do you think they only want to go forward, but they never crave to go back? In this sense we were all already dead. Eternally dead, going back the other way!'

  Outside, I could hear cars and motorcycles going by at high speeds; downstairs, the Campens fighting over the length — or rather the shortness — of their daughters' skirts, which indecently exposed their knees when they sat. Overhead, jets flew by on the hour. But Elsa didn't live in this modern world. To her, sky led to sky, thought to thought. To her way of thinking, she wasn't immobile. She was moving as fast as the world rotated, doing gigantic somersaults through space. But ordinary people like me never felt the great ride they were taking.

  I had no leisure for such idiocy. My days were occupied with paperwork, worry, housework. I had received a note in my mailbox informing me of the next owners' meeting. The thought of sitting with them all around the Hoefles' kitchen table was so distasteful I had decided not to attend. Some days later I opened a letter that knocked my socks off. The owners had voted to whitewash the sooty black that car exhausts had progressively left on our façade. This was futile, since the neighbouring building had done the same, only to have it turn black again. They had also voted to take advantage of the scaffolding to redo the roof. It was a plot to get rid of me by presenting me with a bill I couldn't pay.

  If that wasn't enough, I opened a letter from the architect's lawyer, billing me for eleven months of storage since November 1955. Stapled to this was an estimate of the municipal fees to do away with the 'waste'. The next page itemised the detective's fees for finding my address, since having no telephone, my name wasn't listed in the telephone book. The last page was a detailed account of the lawyer's fees. The letter threatened court action if I didn't pay within thirty days. He'd included a letter that Herr Hampel was forwarding to me. Its postmark was a fortnight old and it bore the sticker I'd seen once before: E. Affelbaum, from New York. This time it was addressed to me rather than my parents. Having no desire for any more headaches, I dropped it in the collective bin.

  I couldn't sleep in the same room as Elsa any longer. Her gentle, rhythmic breathing was like an instrument of torture, painfully stretching a night many times past its natural length. I told her it was because I had work to do, I didn't want the light to disturb her, I was coming down with the flu, didn't want her to catch it, it was too hot to sleep next to her, she made my legs sweat, and quite soon I didn't have to give her any excuse: it had become a habit, we were sleeping in two beds. (By habit I use the word 'bed' — in fact mine was a row of pillows.)

  Those nights my life fluttered through my head in fragments like a thousand puzzle pieces. Disconnected memories came back to me, each one lodged irrationally in the next. The years that had passed since the family deaths weighed down on me. I would just be falling asleep when some girl I'd once known at primary school and long since forgotten popped into my mind. I would wake up with my heart pounding, wondering what had become of her. I could spend the next hours making plans as to how to get in touch with her again. It struck me as so urgent, I couldn't live a day longer without knowing. With the arrival of day, she was forgotten and the mental drama I had gone through seemed harebrained.

  There was nothing rational to my insomnia. I turned from side to side, missing our old house as if it were a living part of me brutally amputated. I came up with infallible ways to catch whoever was in possession of Ute's violin, to re-establish my grandfather's factory with funding and apologies from the government.

  I took a job in a pastry factory, partly to earn money, partly to gain breathing space from Elsa. That may seem like a peculiar notion: a factory for pastries. Machines mixed the batter, let it drip into the moulds that later received another drip, which would sink to become its filling. Then they moved on to the massive ovens. Five metres after they had been cooled down by powerful fans, they were squirted with pink icing. I found it an insult to our traditional Viennese Punschkrapfen to give these mechanical products the same name. Each Punschkrapfen was exactly the same as the one before and the one after — no bigger, no smaller. Nothing like the pastries made by a caring baker's hand.

  We workers supervised the machines. Sometimes the belt would get stuck or an avalanche of icing would come out. My function was to verify that six intact pastries were nested in each plastic container before closing the lid, and that none was missing its paper doily, to which it would soon be stuck. The worke
r after me would secure the lid with tape. The next would stick on the fancy label.

  It was hellish. It felt as if I was working hard to stay poor. If I hadn't previously gone to the bank and mortgaged the flat to cover my debts, I would have quit ten times the first month. I found myself envying Elsa, who'd never known such toil, such grim people. From the three seated closest to me, I never received so much as a nod in response to my greetings. I thought it was because no one could hear me over the machinery, so one morning I initiated a handshake. My hand remained suspended in the air, receiving from one only the limpest contact I'd ever experienced. Considering the stickiness of the few fingers she'd used, that was reluctant indeed.

  After having time away enough to miss her, I found Elsa a joy to come home to. My only joy. I gave her books, the boring kind she liked with all the footnotes, but since Karl had fallen off the roof she'd stopped reading. Contemplation got her to the same truths without tiring her eyes. Her chronic apathy drove me to pull newspapers out of the old stacks in the workers' lounge and leave them lying around at home. I was hoping they would do my job for me; expose my lies so there'd be no turning back. Reality would jolt her out of her depression and then I would deal with her myself. I still remember the sensation of nervousness in my limbs all day at the factory, and my heart sinking every time I thought about it. The first thing I did straight back from work was look to see if they were where I'd left them. They were. She didn't want the papers to do the job for me.

  Wracking my brains for something to help her, I brought her home a calendar whose winter months had pictures of igloos no bigger than our bathroom. The men went hunting, the women stayed home, never knowing whether they'd be back, for the polar bears were merciless. I rubbed an ice cube along the back of her neck, asked her to imagine that was the floor of her home. She closed her eyes, actually made a snorting noise that could have been a chuckle. This encouraged me. I ran for a bowl of chilly water, dipped her hand in it, telling her to imagine it was the roof of her house if she fell asleep before putting the fire out. I told her about the aurora borealis, the sun rising and setting one hour later in winter, its shining all night in summer, darkness only a blink. She was listening to me! Her fists awakened, came back to life.