Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  Their skates were in the back of the car. The rink was located at the edge of the city, a twenty-minute drive. An indoor rink and a good thing, too, as the air was unsettled today. Pauline was becoming used to the chill, the snowless winter. Already, and this was February, the farmers were burning off the feathery growth of last year’s asparagus. But something wild could be smelled—the wind, perhaps. It suspended holding-patterns of dust over long black mounds in the fields. Perhaps it was a storm, unseen, about to move down into the valley in a horizontal dark line.

  Grades three and four from the International School would be skating; Pauline was a parent helper. The school would be closed in the afternoon, so she would bring Maggie back home with her and stop at the commissary on the way. Kaffee, this week. Three half-kilo packages. Never so much asked for that Pauline could protest, not really. Still, she imagined a pantry shelf in Frau Becker’s tiny farm bulging with North American staples that Pauline herself was providing. A thought flashed through her mind, not for the first time. What if Frau Becker was selling these items to the villagers? She bit hard on her bottom lip. This was paranoia. For those few things. Richard, though—she should have told Richard. In any case, it was going to stop. She would hand over the coffee that afternoon and firmly say: Nicht mehr. Ich kann nicht.

  Wasn’t Frau Becker well paid? Hadn’t Pauline agreed to the exact hourly wage Frau Becker had requested that first day when she’d propped the old bike beside the rosebushes and stood expressionless in the doorway, waiting to be hired? Hadn’t Pauline been more than fair? The eyes of Frau Becker seemed to be fixed on her from the windshield, and Pauline had to blink and shake her head to keep the car from being towed into the fast lane and the lunatic speed of the Autobahn. She hoped Frau Becker would arrive today without food. It would make it easier to say: Ich kann nicht.

  The rink was crowded with busloads of children from international and German schools. Although the loudspeaker blared instructions to skate in one direction, three or four skaters darted against the solid oval rush, which glided like a heavy murmur. Rock music, instructions again, more music. The rules. Pauline never entirely felt that she knew the rules in this country. Blasted over loudspeakers in rinks, posted on fences at outdoor pools, welded to locker doors at indoor stadiums. It was she who barged into change rooms from the wrong side, and was chased back by custodians; she who emerged wearing boots where only bare feet were permitted; she who entered turnstiles through the Exit; who forgot to bring her market basket to stores that did not provide bags; who pulled out the wrong currency in lineups at the Bäckerei; who did not know the word Öl at the gas station. It was she who, with Maggie beside her, had walked across village fieldroads with a present for their landlord’s new baby and, when the door was opened and they were greeted, blurted out, “Ein Gift, fürs Baby,” not knowing until she dug out the pocket dictionary on the way home that Gift was the word for poison. (“Why didn’t the mother invite us in to see the baby? Why?” Maggie kept asking. “I could see its crib across the kitchen. You didn’t say anything awful, did you? Did you?”) The door having shut slowly, in their faces.

  When all of the laces were tied and mittens pulled onto small hands, Maggie and her Grade Three friends entered the stream of skaters and formed a chain on the ice. The music was fast; several older teenagers were twisting in and out at high speeds. Pauline watched from the boards and stepped down onto the ice just as the music was about to change—probably the direction, too. The instruction to change direction was shouted out at that very moment, as if Pauline had thought it through the loudspeaker. The ribbon of skaters wavered, was about to buckle, and executed a surprisingly graceful about-face.

  Pauline skated the oval twice and was rounding the curve for the third time, when out of the corner of her eye she saw a tall youth go down. A speeding skater had darted close to him at the far end of the rink. The youth was bigger and taller than the hundreds of school children on the ice and, when he fell, Pauline noted four things (remembering these later, much later): how far he had to fall because of his height; that his legs had been moving awkwardly; that he was not wearing a helmet—German children did not wear helmets at the rinks, whether they were beginners or not; that he went over backwards, his head being the first part of his body to strike the ice.

  When her blades brought her to the end of the rink, she bent over the boy; the small group around him made way as she kneeled beside his head. The music had switched to a waltz; the skaters carried on. But the boy—he was sixteen or seventeen—was convulsing violently, his back an arc, his legs and arms spastic, saliva oozing from the side of his mouth, his head rising and falling from the ice. And the most terrible thing. A click, a regular clicking sound was coming from some deep part of him. The children who were bunched around seemed poised in terror. Two adults circled close and went back to their skating. Pauline held the boy’s head and shoulders gently in her arms until the terrible writhing and clicking—which seemed to go on for minutes—was over.

  “Bitte, a stretcher, an ambulance!”

  She was shouting. If he’d been with friends, they had disappeared. If he was with a school, no teacher arrived. The boy was unconscious, it seemed, but began to stir.

  “You must not move,” Pauline told him softly, knowing he could not understand but that he would stay as he was.

  A man wearing a navy windbreaker, shoes, no skates, slid over from the nearest gate. He was smoking a cigarette, looked at the boy, looked at Pauline, shook his head. He called out behind him and two young men brought a stretcher onto the ice. As Pauline kept the head and neck straight, they lifted the boy and transported him to a sparsely equipped First Aid room.

  “Ambulance,” Pauline said again. “Please call an ambulance.” The man in the windbreaker waved an arm. Yes, yes, the Krankenwagen was on the way.

  And that was that. No one stayed. No friends inquired. Only Pauline talking softly as the boy made confused attempts to move his arms, his legs, to raise himself from the stretcher. The two were alone in the room.

  Maggie’s face appeared in the doorway. “Mom, is he all right? Did the boy die when he fell?”

  “Oh, Maggie, I hope he’s okay. He had a bad fall. Can you wait for me on the benches? I’ll come for you as soon as the ambulance gets here.”

  But when the ambulance came, she could not make the attendants understand about the convulsion.

  “A head injury. It’s important. He fell.” Her hands pointed to the boy’s head. There was not so much as a drop of blood; there was nothing to see.

  She mimed the fall. Felt with her fingers for a lump. “The doctors must be told about the convulsion.”

  The boy was lifted into the ambulance; faces were blank; no one spoke English. They spoke in words and tones Pauline could not decipher; they spoke as if Pauline were not there.

  “Convulsion!” She did not know the word. “Es ist wichtig! It’s important!” But there was no dictionary in her bag this day; she’d wanted to be free of extra weight at the rink. She tore a piece of paper from a gauze wrapper and wrote: Convulsion. Lasted more than 1 minute.

  “Give this to the doctor,” she said.

  One of the men looked at the paper, looked at her and shoved it into his pocket.

  As she drove home with Maggie, Pauline could see that the fires in the asparagus fields were no longer burning. Leaves, branches, clumps of black earth were scattered wildly across the road. The streets were dry; there had been no rain. Something had happened here that had not happened in the city.

  The groceries and Frau Becker’s three packages of coffee were in the trunk. Pauline had bought lunch for Maggie in the city, but she herself had not been hungry. The clicking noise from the boy had gone deep inside some part of her and her head seemed to move round and round with the sound, in the way that the skaters had waltzed on and on silently after the music had stopped. She pulled into the driveway. The garbage container was back in place and Frau Becker’s bike was propped beside
the rosebushes. An agitated Frau Becker met them at the door. She laughed to see “Mag-gee” home early, but began to speak rapidly as if an event of the greatest importance had taken place. Her bulk filled the doorway as she waved closed fists, up the street, down the street, into the air, patterns whirling over her head, the words Wind and Mall and Damenbinden repeated again and again. She had an urgent story to tell, a story Pauline could not understand.

  But what was the smell? The door shut behind them as they entered the house. Pauline’s nostrils filled with the tight stench of something cooking, steaming. Blood, meat, some combination that had never before consumed the air of the house. Maggie pulled in close.

  “Schweine,” Frau Becker said, and nodded with satisfaction as she saw Pauline sniff the air. Her first story merged with her second, as she led them to the kitchen stove and lifted the lid off the bucket.

  “Suppe,” Frau Becker announced, and watched Pauline’s face. She held up her index finger and slid it across her throat. “Schweine!” she said again through the steam, and Pauline knew then that the village pigs had been slaughtered and here was blood soup in her kitchen to prove it. Suppe that must have been held at arm’s-length while Frau Becker steered her bike with one hand through the village streets.

  But now Frau Becker had returned to her first story again, and she was lifting the net curtains in the kitchen. She made whirling patterns through the air with her fists. She wrung her hands as if to convey something personal, something tragic.

  “Damenbinden,” she said, her face now flushed and severe. She lifted her chin in an accusing way towards Pauline. “Ihre Damenbinden, Frau Stanton.”

  And Pauline received the knowledge the way she experienced all revelation from the German language, in an explosive and penetrating rush. Used sanitary pads—her sanitary pads—whirling through furious winds that must have lifted them from overturned garbage, the paper that wrapped them unravelling as they flew. The image tore into her. Frau Becker running behind and beneath, catching Damenbinden as they fell, picking them up as the wind strewed them across orderly German lawns. Frau Becker removing silent messages from the foreigner that punctuated the street in bloody dots like static over the short wave.

  Pauline paid the housekeeper, thinking, I might laugh and laugh and laugh. She followed her to the door and tucked three packages of coffee into the bicycle bag and nodded silently as she heard the order placed for the following week.

  “Whisky,” Frau Becker said, her eyes fixed on Pauline. For hadn’t she looked after Frau Stanton’s most private affairs? Had she not chased the foreigner’s bloody Damenbinden through the streets?

  “Byeee-Byeee,” said Frau Becker as she lifted her large body onto her bike. Pauline stood at the door until the housekeeper turned the corner, and she choked back something that was rising inside her.

  “Go to the garage, Maggie, and get the spade,” she said. “Bring it round to the back garden.”

  Pauline returned to the kitchen and lifted the bucket from the stove. Holding the stench of Schweine at arm’s-length, lid on, she carried the soup through the house and down to the back garden. I’m going to laugh and laugh and laugh, she told herself again.

  But after Maggie had dug the hole, after they’d poured the blood soup, a cloud of steam lifting to their faces as hot brown liquid splashed to cold winter earth, Pauline found that she could not stop crying. She held Maggie’s hand in the tightest grip and her shoulders shook and the sobs came from the deepest part of her, and she could not keep herself from crying.

  Accident

  In the dream, she is lying by the side of a field. It is autumn in this country. A hawk sits tensed and alert on a topmost branch. The asparagus has begun to turn, and the plants are overgrown, tall and feathery Fields and fields of asparagus, colours like Cézanne landscapes, blends of gold and orange and green. If she focusses intently, she can see clusters of sharp red berries.

  The sky is clouding over. One moment, the asparagus is tossing and shining in the sun. A moment later, all is still, dull, damp. A coldness sets in. In the slightest breath, the smell of winter.

  The hawk swings up to the sky. Margo has seen the white car resting on its flattened roof before she has crawled along the dirt and stones at the edge of the road. Now, she lies on her back and watches the hawk hover high above her.

  There are foreign voices all around. But no. She is the foreigner. She is a traveller in this country. German voices. She understands some of the words that are spoken.

  “Scheisse!” Shit! This from the doctor who cannot get the intravenous started. But why? She has always had good veins. She hears the helicopter blades. Is she in a helicopter? She flexes her hand to make a fist; the rubber tourniquet has been knotted on her upper arm. The German doctor has a black moustache, black eyes. Is this possible?

  In the dream, she is swimming. At first the water is cool, but she feels no shock. If anything, she is relaxed, refreshed. She is able to dip off the edge and slip in smoothly. Someone is resting on the bank behind her—Simon? She is not certain who it is, but she knows it is someone who is able to calm her.

  The river is narrow, with only the slightest current. Her arms pull back in an easy crawl. She raises one arm and sees that it is blanketed with caterpillar-like drippings from trees. She remembers the colour—a furry yarn-like yellow. This does not alarm her.

  In the dream, she leaves the riverbank. Just as naturally, she finds herself dressed in something long and soft, shroud-like, but soft. Several people stand around her—friends. All of them are ushered into a theatre, and they edge along the aisle as the curtain is about to rise. Margo opens her program, a double sheet. The director of the play is unknown to her. She reads that the title of today’s performance is Pain.

  Who is this, digging stones out from beneath her back? One large stone—or so it seems—is pressing into her upper spine, the very place she knows she is injured. “Can they not get the stone?” she cries, knowing at the same time that someone is already trying; someone is pawing and clawing, the way one imagines a dog to dig for a deeply buried bone. She is lifted then, by four men who keep her body unnaturally straight.

  In the dream, the doctor stands at the side of her bed. Her pill bottle is on the bedside table. He removes the lid, turns the container upside down. A single pill rolls out. The doctor picks it up, smiles, takes it with him as he turns to leave.

  “That is for my pain! “ she shouts.

  He doesn’t hear. The door swings behind him.

  The mattress has been inflated and packed tightly around her body. She cannot remember anyone doing this. The mattress conforms closely to the contours of her head and shoulders. She is lying on a bed of the finest sand. The mattress squeezes at her temples until her head aches. Simon is there, leaning over her, holding the hand that is free of the intravenous. He kneels and kisses her on the cheek. She sees that the green of his jacket is the same as that of the asparagus waving above them. His eyes hold something she has not seen there before—hesitation? fear? German voices urge him away. She is being lifted onto the stretcher and into the ambulance. Simon’s voice is saying, “I thought I might lose you.” This has not been easy to say. “There was a moment,” he says, “when I thought I might lose you.” He points to his chest where the seatbelt had held him, and he tries to smile.

  Will she see him again? She does not feel fear and is not worried about seeing him or not seeing him. Voices are humming and buzzing around her. A solution drips steadily into her vein from a pouch hooked to the ceiling of the ambulance.

  In the dream, someone has died. In another car, another man she will never have to see. His photograph is in the newspaper. Beside the inset, a photo of two cars: the white one on its roof, the other on its side. Could she have crawled away from this twisted carcass? Away from the sickening crunch of metal, the sound of which she shall never now escape?

  She did.

  But when she translates the caption, she tries to understand wh
y it informs that two have died. She peers into blurred edges of the black-and-white photo, trying to see who could be trapped in that wreckage. She knows that she had kicked and clawed at the door, over and over again, with her hands and her right foot.

  How is it possible to breathe?

  She takes rapid shallow breaths. Someone has been sent to her ward from a department below. Someone has come to frighten her. A woman smelling of cigarettes recently smoked. A heavy-boned blond. Perhaps this woman has been chosen because she can speak English. Perhaps she has come because she wears the ability to frighten on her face. She tells Margo to sit up; she listens to Margo’s breathing, front, then back. She dangles a stethoscope from her right hand, jams it into the pocket of her lab coat.

  “If you do not deeper breaths take,” she says, “in one day, perhaps two, you will the pneumonia have.”

  In the dream, the dead man appears. He walks into Margo’s room. In her sleep, she hears him. He is barefoot. His footsteps halt at the left side of her bed. He leans over and pushes down on her chest. She tries to lie on her right side but he pushes where it hurts the most. The ribs give and sway and crack under the weight of him. When he has hurt her enough, he turns to leave.

  “Simon,” she cries out. “Simon! Was he here just now? The dead man?”

  But there is only the answer of silence.

  Sometimes Margo thinks of the German doctor, of his hands. Whenever she thinks of him, it is always of his hands. He knows the importance of touch. He pats her arm, holds an ankle, a foot; touches her back as he pulls her to a sitting position. The laying on of hands. When he leaves, she lies propped against pillows that immobilize her ribs and support her neck. She sits with her eyes open, hoping for sleep, or obliteration, knowing that neither will come.