The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “Forget it,” said Glass. “Let’s get a move on.”

  When the two women had left the room—Tereza to drive the car into the secluded rear yard and Glass to find the rear exit from the house into this yard—Dianne and I pushed a stool in front of the coffin. We climbed up, stepping on each other’s feet, as we satisfied our curiosity, inspecting the corpse that lay between the velvet-lined walls of the coffin like an outsized present packed in white wrapping paper. Apart from the distant, whistling breaths of the fat man from the room nearby, all was quiet.

  “He seems to be laughing,” said Dianne after a while. “And he smells funny too.”

  The professor looked thoroughly peaceful, but he hadn’t been fully prepared by H. Hendriks, or even made up. At least his face hadn’t been powdered over, and the tiny knots at the end of the wires tying the jawbone to the upper jaw were plainly visible, shimmering faintly in the cold neon light. There had only been one single occasion when Dianne and 1 had seen the professor alive. Since the professor had about as much understanding of children as of exotic birds, he probably wouldn’t have left much of an impression on us except that when Tereza introduced us to him, he began flapping his arms around wildly as if we were bothersome insects that needed to be shooed away. He looked so funny with his arms flailing that Dianne and I burst into loud giggles, which only served to increase the professor’s irritation and made him wave his arms even more, leading to shrieks of laughter on our part. Now the flailing arms lay motionless alongside the dead body. I looked at the hands and was astounded that they were hardly bigger than mine. A grown man with small, graceful hands as delicate as the tiniest flower.

  Another flower came into my field of vision—Dianne’s outstretched hand. I thought she was going to stroke the dead old man. But my sister, who a year later was to have a small snail removed from her left ear, simply wanted take leave of the old professor in her own particular way. She had fished something out of her trouser pocket. Without further ado, but with due respect, she stuffed a red jelly bear right up the left nostril of the dead man with the small hands. Back in the car, our second and last jumbo bag had gradually emptied out, and there were only a few left to see us through the long night ahead, which in my view raised Dianne’s farewell gift to the level of an almost princely sacrifice. We hurriedly jumped down from the stool as we heard Glass and Tereza come back into the room, panting as between them they dragged the first of the three sacks of potatoes bought at the supermarket.

  “The expensive variety,” Glass remembered. She looked out from the veranda at the fading evening sky and refilled our punch glasses. “Small, lumpy things. I’ll never forget their name—dementia, fast-boiling! To this day I wonder why anyone should bother cooking potatoes that are slow-boiling.” She put the jug down. Tereza rolled her eyes.

  Exchanging the professor for the sacks of potatoes proved to be an exhausting business. Dianne and I were standing on the stool again, having moved it to one side, and watched in silence as Tereza grabbed one of the corpse’s arms, which to her relief she could move up and down easily; she had been expecting rigor mortis, but this had already passed by now. The way she moved the lifeless arm eerily resembled the irritated waggling of the professor’s arms that now came back into my mind. I had to bite my lip to stop myself from laughing.

  Tereza and Glass each seized the professor by the hand and jerked him into a sitting position. The professor’s head toppled to one side. There was a gentle hiss as air escaped from his nose. Glass shrieked in terror, let go of the corpse, and leapt backward. The professor toppled to one side, and his head struck the edge of the coffin with a dull thud.

  “Please!” hissed Tereza.

  “Sorry, darling. I just—”

  “All right. Now, once more.”

  Dianne and I jigged about in excitement as the professor was dragged, pulled, hauled, and heaved through the building. “This is never a hundred and fifty pounds,” groaned Glass when they were halfway along. “We should have stuffed some carrots or something into the coffin as well.”

  “Wheelbarrow,” I heard Tereza panting, and this one word, sounding like the vain wish for assistance from an absent fairy godmother, was the last she spoke until the professor had finally been stowed in the trunk of the car and we arrived at his house after a short drive through the rainy, windswept night. Fearing discovery by neighbors or passers-by, Tereza hadn’t dared to dig a hole in the garden by daylight. She had chosen a spot under a maple tree for the grave, and her father now lay there bedded in the wet grass as Tereza and Glass brandished the spanking new spades. Before she started digging, Glass fumbled in her coat pocket for a cigarette, lit it, and, inhaling deeply, looked down at the lifeless body at her feet.

  “Should we undress him?” she asked.

  Tereza shook her head. “There was never any question of him wanting to be buried naked.”

  “Did you ever see him naked?”

  “No. And I’ve no intention of doing so now.”

  It didn’t stop raining as the two women kept thrusting their spades into the soft dark earth and dug a pit, and it took half an hour before they declared themselves satisfied that it was deep enough. From time to time they took a swig from H. Hendriks’ bottle of vodka, which Glass had taken away with her. At some point my mother began giggling helplessly.

  Dianne and I weren’t in the least bit tired. Tereza had sat us down cozily and comfortably on a tall broad stack of wooden logs, under the shelter of a corrugated iron roof. We squatted there like night owls, our eyes having long since adapted to the dark, and when we began to get bored with watching the silhouettes of the two women working away, the sound of their spades breaking up the earth and the stillness of the night, we tried to see if jelly bears melt if held out long enough in the rain.

  At last the professor was heaved quite unceremoniously into the pit, a lifeless weight, slumped like a marionette with its strings cut off. Tereza and Glass shoveled earth over the body and then crawled on hands and knees over the grass to weight the earth down with stones. Their long tangled hair hung down over their faces, their clothes stuck to their bodies, and what could be seen of my mother’s new underwear, the lacy white edging I had so admired, had meanwhile turned the same color brown as her coat.

  Dianne pointed a finger at the freshly dug grave. “It looks as if the earth has had hiccups,” she said.

  “And now?” Glass had straightened up and, leaning on her spade, looked at Tereza inquiringly. “D’you want me to sing something? ‘What I Did for Love’ was a high school song we used to—”

  “Shut it, Glass,” muttered Tereza.

  Glass grumbled, “But shouldn’t we at least say a prayer?”

  “Let’s pray for it to stop raining,” sniffed Tereza, looking up at the hillside. “I feel quite ill at the thought of the earth being washed away.”

  “I feel ill as well,” Dianne piped up next to me. That was the only warning. She had barely finished speaking when she bent over the edge of the log pile and brought up a flood of half-digested colored gelatin, and—inexplicably to me—that proved the signal for Tereza finally to give way to tears. Her whole body jerked and shook; she sank to her knees and pounded the grass and sticky wet earth with clenched fists; dropping her head to her chin and bawled. Her mouth opened so wide, I was afraid she would drown in the rain.

  “And then, a mere ten hours later, the funeral,” Glass continued conversationally. “Not a hint of rain anymore, quite the contrary. Glorious sunshine!”

  Everyone ought to be buried in a slight wind and under a sky full of cotton-wool clouds. The cemetery lay at the eastern outskirts of the town. A leaning, weather-beaten chapel stood on the crest of a hill; cascading down the hillside were seven or eight sheer semicircular terraces, interspersed with tall trees dense with foliage, the Little People’s God’s Acre. Years before the professor had reserved a space beside his wife, who had died young; the plot was five levels down, overlooking the valley and the river.
I was delighted to see that even the pewter-tipped roof of Visible could be seen from here. The air was pleasantly warm, and a light breeze wafted the smell of decaying flowers from a nearby compost heap across the cemetery. Here and there fine veils of steam drifted over the ground, where the warmth of the sun met the previous night’s rain in the soil, and there were small angels of pale marble patiently standing on some of the gravestones, like dolls waiting to be played with.

  I don’t remember anything about the funeral service in the chapel—exhausted from the previous night, I fell asleep. But now I was wide awake and was filled with admiration for Tereza. She looked beautiful, in spite of the dark rings under her eyes. She was wearing a deep blue dress and gloves to hide her sore hands, covered in blisters from the night’s digging. There were even colleagues from abroad who had insisted on attending, and as an unending line of people in black filed past the grave to pay the professor their last respects and throw some earth on his coffin, Tereza was bravely listening to expressions of sympathy, shaking countless hands, all the while standing dry-eyed and as motionless as a statue.

  Glass had red eyes too, though these owed their presence not so much to grief as to excessive vodka consumption and a full-blown cold caught during the night. H. Hendriks was throwing her cross-eyed leers that he must have intended to be enticing but were totally ignored by her. Had he wondered whether Glass might have considered not attending the funeral on account of her immoral reputation, and why she had reconsidered and turned up after all, this was a mystery that remained forever unanswered. Regardless of this, Hendriks repeatedly phoned Visible in the days that followed and didn’t leave Glass alone until she had finally had enough and threatened to spread a story about him and her putting oak coffins to inappropriate erotic use. She had no sympathy for the man. She never felt sorry for any man.

  Dianne and I paid careful attention to the way each of those present tipped some damp earth into the grave. Faithful Elsie stayed at the sunlit graveside a long time, longer than anyone else, sniffing, the trowel firmly grasped in her trembling right hand. And for one awful moment it seemed as if Glass had been right in suspecting that Elsie had been in love with the professor, for suddenly the little housekeeper’s knees gave way for a second, and it looked as if she was preparing to make a courageous leap. Could have been love or a circulation problem, Glass reflected later, and actually it made no difference; after all, it came to the same thing.

  When it came our turn and we stepped up to the graveside, Dianne tapped the vicar on the shoulder, a gaunt, chinless, creepy-looking man who was keeping an eagle eye on the seamless observance of the ritual procedures. “That box down there,” said Dianne, “it’s only got potatoes in it.”

  “Yes, of course, dear,” replied the vicar sympathetically. He placed a skeletal hand on her shoulder and, looking across at Glass, who must have told her daughter this un-Christian stuff, shot her a glance of boundless, barely disguised fury. Which, however, my mother didn’t even notice, as despite her sniffling and sneezing, she was flirting shamelessly across the grave with a handsome, bronzed, dark-haired man with honey-colored eyes, eyes more beautiful than any I have ever seen since. I watched as this man slowly cleared a way for himself through the crowd. Determinedly I grabbed Dianne’s hand away from the bony grip of the vicar and instinctively began to march off.

  “Trowel!” hissed the vicar.

  I let the trowel fall and with Dianne at my side fought my way through a dense forest of black legs. Then we were standing in front of Glass and next to the man, who was by now introducing himself to our mother, stammering in broken English that he was Argentinian—a lecturer in botany, specializing in subpolar mosses and lichens. Glass said something unintelligible in reply. I tugged at his trouser leg. He looked down at me and laughed, a dazzling white laugh, and the next moment I was dangling in the air, swung up by two long, strong arms. I felt as if I was in a swing boat or a whirling merry-go-round, the blue sky flashing past, the clouds white, the people black; then I found myself sitting on the Argentinian’s shoulders.

  America, I thought, America, America . , .

  I was surprised how different the world looked from this height. There was the terraced cemetery, stretching apparently endlessly in its ivy-covered splendor and watched over by all these toy angels. There was Dianne laughing up at me and stretching out her hands to the handsome man from South America—she wanted a go as well, and was going to have one, but not before I was allowed to look around a little longer, and saw Elsie shaking her head in outrage and the gaunt vicar about to lose it altogether; saw Glass with her reddened eyes and Tereza smiling behind her veil; saw the people gathered round the hole in the ground like black grapes clinging to a vine, looking at the Argentinian and at me with disapproval; saw the horizon, a flickering, stripy illusion under the midday sun, and I was the proudest horseman in the world and threw my arms up in silent jubilation. Life was wonderful, death a fabrication.

  Then I was lifted off the shoulders and it was Dianne’s turn, and all I could do was to gaze in adoration at this beautiful man, touch the fabric of his trousers, cling to his leg, still beside myself with happiness. I wouldn’t have had any objections to a lichen specialist as head of the family, but after spending one night at Visible the Argentinian left again, and I thought sadly of poor, poor Tereza, now with no father either.

  “When I was a child,” said Tereza as the fruit cup was coming to an end, the sun had set, and the first mosquitoes had arrived, “like every daughter, I guess, I was in love with my father. For a thousand reasons, but above all on account of his eyes. You know, he had these beautiful deep blue eyes. When I walk through his garden today, I look at the delphiniums or the campanula, and I imagine to myself that the pigments that colored his eyes blue for seventy years are somehow floating around in the blooms of these plants.”

  I looked at Dianne, who nodded and grinned and at that moment was probably thinking the same as me—that somewhere in the red plants, in the rose petals or the dahlias, the pigments of a long-forgotten little jelly bear stuffed into a dry nostril might still continue to shimmer.

  That first spring after the funeral Glass visited the cemetery every day, not out of respect for the professor but driven by fear—unfounded, as Tereza continually reassured her—lest the potatoes might have started sprouting, the shoots working their way through the wood of the coffin and the soil around it, and producing the first green shoots on the grave.

  “Solanaceae,” said Tereza, flapping at a mosquito. “Solanum. Just like deadly nightshade—Atropa belladonna. To this day some women still use its poison in small doses to enlarge their pupils and make themselves look more attractive.”

  Dianne tilted her head to one side.

  “And taken in bigger doses,” continued Tereza drily, “with a bit of luck they can put an end to what their enhanced attractiveness has landed them with.”

  Dianne, who had been listening attentively, gave a quiet laugh, and I emptied my punch cup and flapped away the mosquitoes with my hands.

  Outside broad bands of rain are running down the windows. The streaks they leave behind turn the world beyond into a gray blur. The heating ticks. We’re lying naked side by side on sweat-stained sheets on the bed. Nicholas’s back and head are dark against the dim light; his right arm forms a straight line against the white background. On the floor beside the bed are two large mugs, both half full of rose hip tea gone cold. All we could find in the kitchen, left behind by summer visitors.

  “Full moon,” murmurs Nicholas beside me.

  “What?”

  “Today’s full moon. People do crazy things when it’s full moon. They steal dead bodies from their graves and bury them in the garden.”

  “They do crazy things when the sun’s shining as well.”

  He answers so softly, a tired whisper, that I can’t make out the words. I watch the condensation forming on the inside of the windows. I’m feeling dizzy and blame it on exhaustion, lack of oxy
gen, the sticky air wafting down from the ceiling. I assume Nicholas has fallen asleep, but then I feel his hand on my back, warm and light as a feather, feeling its way down one by one over my vertebrae, burning holes in my skin, before it comes to a halt; only then does he fall asleep.

  We made love three times. Except that love isn’t the right word. I turn on my back, stare at the ceiling, and reluctantly admit that Pascal had been right on when she said we’d just screwed; she didn’t need to explain that the two can be worlds apart. But I want more, I want more, more than that. At this moment nothing seems more fleeting to me, nothing could fill me with more fear here and now than the body next to me withdrawn into sleep. I want to be the air that Nicholas breathes, to be his blood, his heartbeat, everything without which he can’t exist, and I hear Pascal mocking me—I might as well wish for wings of gold.

  At some stage I fall asleep. When I wake up the room is in darkness. The rain has stopped, the house is silent. I don’t know how long I’ve been sleeping, but it must be hours. I feel for Nicholas, but there’s no one beside me; the sheet is cold.

  The day should have been over, but it isn’t. When I arrive at Visible just before midnight, Glass is waiting for me. She’s standing in front of the house. She looks very pale in the moonlight, quite shattered. To my surprise for the first time I notice tiny wrinkles on her face, fine lines that must have found their way there in secret; for the first time I think, My mother’s getting old. It’s as if I’ve been away traveling for ages.

  Glass has no jacket on in spite of the chill in the air after the rain; she’s just standing there, far too small compared with the large house, as if she’s waiting for a bus. But it’s Michael she’s waiting for to take her to the hospital. That too is strange; after all, she could drive herself there, and it’s quite ridiculous that it doesn’t occur to me to ask myself what on earth Glass is doing going to the hospital at this hour, because at this moment all I can think of is that I smell of Nicholas, and I’m still thinking of this as Glass explains to me that we’re going to the hospital to fetch Dianne, that I shouldn’t worry, she’s all right, but there’s been trouble.