The apartment was full. It was bursting at the seams. No cupboard matched any other, chests stood around, some of them stacked on top of each other, on top of one cupboard Waclaw saw the tires of an old model car and the wings of a little airplane. Screws, hand cream, tissues, economy packs of pencil lead, old ice cream cartons filled with pens and dusty batteries, copper plates, vases, pitchers, houseplants, few of which seemed real.
In the oven were chicken nuggets in the shape of animals—he saw how the paper moved in the air from the fan. Rodlo went first and laboriously turned on an old floor lamp, but Waclaw stayed in the kitchen. A fruit basket, brown bananas, an open carton of West cigarettes.
He could feel that something was wrong with his throat, and he thought of Enni. He thought: I can’t do anything more for her. He thought: If only I had kept her. Once he’d taken a walk on the esplanade during a storm, so close that the waves almost reached him. The breaking of the water had made such a powerful noise that it had calmed him. It was the kind of noise one can’t understand, a noise much bigger than him. Here, in contrast, everything was quiet, and the quiet made him uneasy.
In front of him, the numeral on the oven jumped.
Rodlo held the tea towel in his hands.
It looked small.
Next to the window stood a potted palm. The sky was white behind it.
She’s not responsive.
Does she live alone?
She doesn’t live anywhere, Wenzel. She’s on life support.
He saw the bare yellow land growing smaller beneath him.
The room was stuffy. He looked out the window at an indifferent lawn, and then there was the pale forehead of Rodlo, who’d gone to fetch something from the other room, something he held behind his back. Waclaw couldn’t help thinking of his father’s oxygen pump that stood next to the bed. Of how silver it had been, and that he’d sometimes thought it was the color that would stand up to the dark realms inside. A childish thought. Light versus darkness. Rodlo, who stood before him with his heavy jowls. Look, he said. Rodlo took out the hand that was behind his back.
The Italian rooster.
He gave Waclaw a big white mug with a photo printed on it. The colors were almost completely faded, and their faces—Milena, Rodlo, and Waclaw—were yellow spots. They stood in front of a wooden gable, atop which sat a gigantic rooster.
You had it put on a cup?
Rodlo looked at him. When you two were gone, yeah.
Waclaw stood up.
When do you have to go back? Rodlo asked. Waclaw?
Tomorrow. To Rotterdam.
He looked out the window again.
The ships in that harbor are three times as big as your house.
Rodlo tried to smile. Then he looked at him.
Stay a bit longer.
At some point Waclaw stood up, and he walked, a long line, down the well-polished flooring in the stairwell and along the tight twists of the banister to the ground floor. He walked over the flagstones, between which no grass grew, back to the Fiorino pickup, in boots that didn’t belong to this world any more than he did. As if he hadn’t released the pigeon, but rather it had been the other way around, that he’d fallen, still and soundlessly, until she was only a tiny point high in the sky.
The day did not return.
He saw Milena at the edge of the pool, both hands propped next to her body, little waves lapped over the edge, as if she sat on a strip of some very distant, old-fashioned beach. Her head was tipped forward and her feet in flip-flops hardly touched the ground. They swung slightly, and the water ran down her legs.
That night he lay once more on the same hotel bed. His jacket, which he couldn’t hang anywhere. Everything out there was no more: the narrowness and the dirt that belonged to those years, that had meant something. A corner where people waited for each other, or a window one looked up at, just to see whether a light was on. Whether someone was there. No one sang as they hung out the laundry. No one passed a glass of schnapps over the fence, Poire Williams, for the women, secretly. We had our fun too. He wasn’t elsewhere, the church was dead, the workers were gone, but no one had started a new story, no one had turned the page. They’d crossed the Alps in buses, a church trip. They’d taken pictures of St. Peter’s Square, not understanding that they just needed to look very carefully, that they’d always be reflected in the white plates, the porcelain that grew scratched over the years, little cups on Sundays that they were too careful with, awkward.
In the dawn he dumped the duffel onto the bed. As if preparing for a long journey. He looked at the soapstone, the animal. Half land, half water. The bright screeching of the birds in the Bodhi tree, as he lay in bed with fever. The days when the house and the cherry tree had drowned in a torrent of other places, interchangeable, as if the piers, esplanades, whitewashed rooms with ceiling fans, the smell of peaches in the bathroom, were all made for someone else who was meant to stand there in his place and experience it all. Sometimes it seemed to him that those years had been flung away like bits of clay from a potter’s wheel that they touched only briefly, and the middle of the wheel remained empty.
He remembered how in Mexico they’d all looked simultaneously at the young charro, the sweat risen to the oval of his brow, his eyes tearing. But it was as if for a moment they could see behind it, as if they could watch as his whole world grew blurry, a farm that grew smaller in its special light, something carved into a tree, the name of his first love. The boy stood up slowly. His hands useless at his sides, his too-small shirt. Waclaw evaded his gaze as he looked at them, one after another, full of disgust and with the last flickerings of pride.
Then someone had pounded the table: it was like a signal that freed them all from their frozen state. As the noise of glasses and voices returned, the boy put the boots on the table between the cards and walked in dirty socks to the door. He left the casino without turning around.
That night their laughter had sounded like noise in Waclaw’s ears, and he got up early that morning and waited in the lobby, though he knew that the boy was gone forever.
30
Brights
The fields were plowed and lay like a huge cloth without a seam and without interruption, just here and there corn and silage under tarps weighed down with car tires. The plots were big. The wind would carry away the upper layers of sand before spring came.
He drove for days. Not in a straight line. Not straight toward it. He’d met Milena when he was already working for a shipping company that allowed him to stop off with his parents on Aegidistraße now and then. The neighborhood parties were big, the streusel on the fruit cakes as thick as the gravel on the paths. That’s where he saw her for the first time. At first he visited her often, then they set out together. He steered the Fiorino in that direction.
Across the Polish border, RVs under the highway overpasses, all the signs: love for sale. The car in front of him put on its turn signal in the fog, didn’t he know that their shoes would be made of cheap plastic, that their hearts skipped in fear when they saw the brights, even if it was only a little joke? What forsakenness hid in this half-light? All the closed doors, the torn maps, and looks that said my heart can’t take this anymore. Only the younger ones were given candies. Do they know how brightly those cellophane wrappers crackle? That it can be the very opposite of sweet?
In the nights he saw station wagons on the country roads that ate slowly into the land, headlights left on at railway crossings, spare cans in the trunk, sleeping families. Trips they were on together, waiting together for the trains to pass, for the gates to go up again. How these lights then ate through the plains, and how warm it was inside.
Rodlo hadn’t said much more. Milena had broken off contact, in the end she’d lived in the village again, continuing to work at the hotel spa, then in an amusement park one summer, where the visitors paid to drive their cars between the pens of lions and monkeys. Rodlo said: Imagine that. Waclaw hadn’t asked any more questions. Sometimes he drove
as if he were in a great hurry, then he would park the Fiorino at the edge of some field or other. He hadn’t called Alois, he wasn’t interested.
There was the dampness of the villages, where dung heaps steamed in the cold autumn air. He sat in a pub, it was already cool outside, there was little staff in the place, and he looked out at the willows that moved heavily back and forth, already yellow and seeming to know everything about the fall and the armada of big clouds crossing the plains from the northeast. He drank his beer, and it was too warm and had a rusty aftertaste, as if something was wrong with the tap or it had sat too long in the lines, or as if too few guests came to the hobbling barman who kept staring at him and then turning away again and again, as if he had to force himself not to look—perhaps someone had said something to him about it once. It didn’t bother Waclaw. He looked out at the willows. Beyond them lay Mendoubia Park, the eucalyptus trees above the green, he could see once more how they lay there, only the swaying of the branches above them, thin and supple in the wind. As if this pub were the other side of that moment, which he had sensed even then. Which he knew about, even then, Mátyás’s head on his shoulder, the slight smell of a blacksmith’s fire, and on the way back the old cannons under the trees, the graves of colonial masters, the inscriptions that he could read but not yet understand. Mátyás lay next to him on the green. As if there’d been nothing beyond it all but the swaying of the branches. As if he could have seen it even then, if he’d only paid closer attention. Himself, at that dark brown oak table. His hair a fucking mane, that’s what he’d thought that morning. The barman tapped a cigarette out of the pack, took a match and struck it, his teeth were yellow, and he squinted, his own smoke getting in his eyes, something making it hard to see.
Waclaw looked out. As if there were an image on the other side of this afternoon that was slowly dimming under a cool, dark gray. As if there were something in the clouds that had to do with him and with everything here. As if there were something like fear there. During the day he’d steered the pickup through the villages. The grapes had turned red, giant pumpkins gleamed atop the muck.
The filter was still burning in the barman’s hand when he started the engine.
The village approached. The landscape calmed nothing in him, even when it grew open, wider. He stopped at the old granary. He dipped his hands in the little lake. The water was cold and sweet. He felt his back. The smell of damp earth and fall. They’d seen the shadows of the birds on the high brick walls, a bright, light dance. From here it wasn’t far to the intersection where he’d often turned back then to drive rolls of paper from the port south, sometimes to Prague or České Budějovice. There in the harbor a man had told him about the oil jobs, and he remembered the potato pancakes they’d eaten, and the disquiet that he’d felt rising inside him.
On that day he’d had to pick up rolls of paper for a printer, and he’d already loaded them and filled out all the customs documents. There was a little snack bar nearby, the kind that were everywhere in those days, and he got into conversation with the man because they both had to wait too long for their food. It was still early in the day, and the fat in the fryer had to heat up. The woman was just putting on her hairnet when they ordered. The man’s name was Erik; after a while they sat down on wooden benches that must have been made for children, Waclaw’s knee touched the underside of the table. Erik advised him to apply for work on the water, offshore. He was just passing through, he worked on the North Sea. Mostly that afternoon they compared their salaries.
And only two years later, when, despite the two jobs, they didn’t even have enough money for the newspaper, did Waclaw revisit the thought. They’d made a fire in the round iron stove, and they drank the last apple wine of the year. Milena wasn’t exactly thrilled by the idea, but they discussed it and weighed the options.
At that point, Waclaw was working as a janitor in an elementary school, big empty hallways, pictures that he wiped off the blackboards every day, the smell of chalk. He had nothing against the work, it was just that the ringing of the school bell between classes had started to bother him more and more. For most people the sound probably would have disappeared after a while, but for him it was exactly the opposite: the shrill sound grew more and more conspicuous, and with it, the monotony of the paths that he took to school and back. It wasn’t just the money, it was the feeling of really getting out. Among parrots. The real exotics. The opposite of everything he knew. Like a promise of a voice or a color that he’d never seen before and couldn’t even imagine. When they began to talk about it, the possibility of spanning all those distances had seemed like little more than an idée fixe. Sometimes the young guys still reminded him of it, when they came full of expectation, and read the horizon, their shiny helmets under their arms. Looking at it from the village, where the pigs didn’t care who brought them their potato peelings, and the headless chickens fought their last battles with death in the meadows, where leaves were burned in the fall and crooked fences let cats slip through the pickets, from there, there seemed to be no reason for all that had come to pass up to that point.
He’d driven that street, over and over again. They bought the gear together. Three streetlamps. At first, they’d counted the days and nights until he’d come back. Milena spoke little of her life, as if the weeks just had to fall through this little neck that was their reunion, like the grains in an hourglass. Yet when he came back, he found the house changed, as if someone had shifted everything by a millimeter, or as if the light that fell on the kitchen tiles in the morning had altered slightly, or perhaps it was just the sound the butter knife made when they set it down that wasn’t quite the same.
But with Milena, too, a change had occurred. She had never been loud, but now she was almost uncannily quiet. It wasn’t that she didn’t say anything anymore, but she had, for example, stopped singing when she did chores around the house. And then what they had consisted of nothing more than these little, everyday things. During that time, they hardly went anywhere together anymore, and only rarely saw their old acquaintances, Rodlo, or Milena’s sisters. In any case, the banal wordlessness over the peeling of potatoes made Waclaw think of the birds that were sensitive to gas in the mines, and would fall off their perches, unconscious, when the level grew too high. When such a bird stopped singing, a miner had to run for his life. There were little bottles of oxygen attached to the cages; they were supposed to guarantee a safe exit.
At some point Waclaw could see the waves that came from afar, washing the sea up into the garden, and the spray rose in the elderberry bushes, rose in his throat, and made all the words he reached for look the same. As if they had become blurry to each other. As if this world were no longer enough. Or as if it were still the same village, but neither could find the other there. They began to think about a name for the child that didn’t exist yet. The child would be like a home. When he called her from the rig, he spoke the names of exotic animals, papaya trees, vultures, he tried to describe the men he was with. But it felt like he’d been struck dumb. And with every sentence he grew dumber, and the pile of things he wasn’t able to tell grew and grew. As if none of it counted next to the rotten fence they had known together, by the corrugated metal garages where the cats lay in the sun.
Later, when it was all over, sometimes sitting in an airplane he’d imagine he saw the house on the little screen, the leaky gutters, and behind it, the river with the blackberry bushes and the diving birds, green land, the route a dotted line, distance to destination in miles, but when he looked out the window, there were only clouds. The light fell on the white, and down below, when they broke, the cities had long become other ones; up there, he felt like a spy, a distant observer. In those narrow seats he’d stared at the illuminated ceiling while stewardesses shook cartons of juice, white collars, braids, he’d thought about all the things he didn’t know, a whole life broken off, rows of seats in front of him turning their backs on him, that didn’t matter, but what did? The pressurized air high
up there, as if he were always breathing the wrong air, some other, artificial atmosphere.
He saw a father and son pushing a shopping cart. They took the narrow path that ran along the train tracks, away from the estate. They looked tired, and dirty.
And the village, nothing but adjacent low stucco houses, a red metal fence, the barking of dogs, as if they wanted to urge him to pass by, there of all places.
He’d seen the men here gradually ossify amid all the wood of their houses and fences and barns. He’d seen Jacek, with his watery blue eyes, and the threads with which he hung the apple rings to dry over the oven, for their late child, Iga’s thin body and inward-turned face in the evening, under the rising winter constellations. They would hear the rain that hit the metal of the gutters, and they would stay, and from far away one would see the lights going on and off behind the kitchen windows, and new faces behind those same windows, and how they turned into outlines as night fell.
In the first years he’d been proud of having escaped it. Then he’d seen the men, tired in hotel lobbies, freshly shaven necks with lighter edges below where the hair began. They paid for people to put bowls of potpourri next to the bathroom mirrors, flower petals, as if someone were waiting for them.
Maybe he hadn’t believed that this place could still exist like this, the same fences, the same paths between the gardens, a burst tomato lying in the middle. The tired heads of the last sunflowers, brown. It all remained unchecked, it was simply there. They were the same flower beds.
31
The Garage
That afternoon, as he tried to understand, it rained again, a dark curtain across the land. He waited. He saw the dolphin’s split mouth and the rows of teeth. And he knew that fall was coming now, and that it would grow cold. He tried to avoid the looks that came from the houses, as he parked the car and walked up the village streets in Wiórek.
High as the Waters Rise Page 24