What My Body Remembers

by Agnete Friis

  44

  The damp heat hit us like a wall as we walked through the battered sliding doors. The sun shone through a grey veil of clouds and a strong wind shook the palm trees that lined the cracked asphalt desert in front of the airport.

  Alex took my hand and smiled. He had been very quiet on the trip over. At Frankfurt Airport he had eaten his fries in silence. He simply fiddled with my phone and read a few chapters of his first Stephen King book in English. The Green Mile. He had insisted on reading only English books ever since we got the plane tickets in the mail, and Rosa had bought him the novel before seeing us off at Copenhagen Airport.

  She was still limping around with a metal screw in her hip after her altercation with Barbara outside Pub48. But she was sober. There was a grandchild on the way, as she said, and this time she wasn’t going to fuck it up! Of course there was no guarantee that she wouldn’t fall off the wagon again. By definition, alcoholics had shaky credentials, whether they were sober or not. But I believed in her—it was the least I could do after everything she had done for me. Before saying goodbye, she kissed Alex on the forehead, urging him to send her a picture of himself in his school uniform. The new school was American, and the uniform had already been ordered on the Internet. It was blue and white with a red tie to match.

  “Are there any apes over here?” Alex squinted into the sky, his eyes following a flock of colorful birds across the grey skies.

  “Sure there are,” I said. “Otherwise we’ll just have to make do with you.”

  “What about snakes?”

  “Yep. And scorpions and lizards.”

  A couple of cab drivers called to me from their cars, fat Buddhas dangling from their rear-view mirrors, their windows rolled down, but I waved them off with a smile that I suspected was just as wide as Alex’s. It was new to me, this abundance of joy. The sweat was already pouring off me, despite the fact that I’d changed into a T-shirt and sandals in the airport toilets in Bangkok. The warmth bubbled up from within. I didn’t know what was in store for us, and my father was still a stranger to me.

  I peered over the parking lot where the cars were sweltering in the heat. I wasn’t sure I would recognize him.

  But when I finally did catch sight of him, I was as sure as I could be. The years had worn him thin, and his beard was grey, but I recognized the slightly stooped posture of his walk, and when he came closer, his smile. I let go of the handle of my suitcase.

  “There you are.” My father stood at a safe distance. Embarrassed. “I’ve been looking forward to seeing you.”

  “Thank you. Did you recognize us?”

  “Your grandmother wrote me. She said that you look like your mother. She’s right. Remind me to call her tonight and tell her you’ve arrived safely.”

  “She was upset about the house.”

  “Not as much as you would think,” he said. “In fact, I think it suits her quite well to quit this world without leaving any traces behind her. Fire and ash. Just like you, Ella.”

  I followed him with my eyes as he walked around the car with our suitcases and threw them into the trunk. We had spoken on the phone a couple of times, and he had told me the story—as he knew it. Together, we were able to tie the many strands of the tale into a coherent succession of events. All these years, he had thought that Barbara had given birth to a child. Their son. Even after all the masks had been peeled away, he still couldn’t say how much of their relationship had been based on lies. She had never been pregnant.

  “Traveling light?” he quipped in English.

  He sent me a cautious smile. My father filled much less space than I remembered, and yet his actual and factual incarnation was overwhelming.

  “And what about you, Alex? Are you ready?”

  He clapped my son playfully on the shoulder and pointed at the waving palms on the other side of the barbed wire fence bordering the airport.

  “Ready for what?”

  “For everything.”

  My father laughed, and Alex lowered his gaze, smiling a smile that never left his face. Not once. Not when we climbed into the air-conditioned backseat, not once on our drive through the city’s orchestra of honking horns and yelling street vendors.

  “How long are you guys staying for?” My father eyed me in the rear view mirror. Just like he used to do when I was little.

  I shrugged. I was watching the world go by beyond the toned car windows. Everywhere you could see small, cave-like shops; a chemist, snack-bars, bicycle shops, mechanics, T-shirts, and electronics. Wiring and advertisements strung haphazardly from the ramshackle façades.

  “As long as it takes,” I said, not knowing whether any further explanation was required. As long as it takes to make peace. It would have to be done here. Not so much by talking other than the fact of just being together.

  By slogging our way through the days ahead, morning coffees and washing days, school-boy assignments at the kitchen table and hard work on frying-hot building sites below a merciless tropical sun in the afternoons. You grow to love the people you spend your time and energy on. And I would learn to love my father again.

  He nodded. “And your friend? Is he coming to fix the kitchen sinks and toilets for me?”

  I closed my eyes, saw Thomas before me, the look in his eyes when we said goodbye. Intense. It was hard to tell where we stood, Thomas and I. We had kissed and held hands, but I didn’t know what that meant, if anything—apparently he didn’t know either. Neither one of us had had much experience with serious relationships. We hadn’t had the time.

  “Yes, he’s coming,” I said. “He just needs to sort a few things out. Clear up. Sell the house. Get through the next check-up at the hospital.”

  “That’s good to hear.” He was drumming his fingers on the wheel. He glanced at Alex and me in the rear view mirror every time he had to break for pedestrians and mopeds and carts loaded with coconuts.

  “We’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” he said. “It’s a nice house. I live well. Plenty of blue sky. I missed that all those years . . . ”

  He dried the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, then suddenly pulled the car over. A couple of scooters hooted madly behind us, swerved wildly as he opened the car door and quietly asked us to get out of the car again.

  We stood across from one another in silence, and this time, we gave each a little more time. I think he was crying, but perhaps it was just me. Details dissolve in memory. When you recall a scene, it could almost invariably have happened in any number of places. On a main road, a dark alley, in front of a store selling tires, a kiosk with a man-size stack of pink water containers. What you remember is the feeling, and all I remember is that I couldn’t figure out if I should take a step towards him, or just stay standing where I was. I was so terribly afraid of him once.

  He solved my dilemma by reaching out and crushing me on his chest. I remembered his smell, and I think this is what finally shattered something caught in my ribs. A final shudder leaving my body. It didn’t hurt letting go of my anger. For so long, I thought I would die if I did.

  But it opened the world.