Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack

by Heidi von Palleske

  The twins did not have to say this to each other as they zoomed along. They knew what the other thought and, when one didn’t, they had a secret language. A language that kept them safe.

  Blanca rubbed her foot along the colours. They were so intense that even she could differentiate between the reds and purples and golds. It was a woven garden, with vines reaching past the flowers to the edges of the carpet, and all the way around there were fringes, tied rope or wool, or whatever it was, stretching out along the shine of the polished hardwood floors. She took off her sandals. Pressed her bare foot into the plush of the rug, felt the soft wool pile embrace her tiny foot.

  The two girls had been invited for tea in the downstairs apartment the day before, when they came home, again, with downcast stares and pouting mouths, because their mother hadn’t come back with them. They hadn’t even seen her. She’d had one of her episodes again and was in the big building being watched after a treatment. To the twins, it was just another disappointment they could lock away in their treasury of childhood memories. And so, when Esther saw them, she gave them each a piece of poppy-seed cake and told them to come by the next day for high tea. “After church,” she had said. And told them not to change out of their Sunday clothes. That’s how the girls knew how special high tea had to be!

  Clara sat waiting, her tiny body trembling with anticipation. She had never had high tea and didn’t know quite what to expect. She only knew that manners were in tall order. It all sounded so special. As special as the pictures on the walls. They had to be special because there were huge gold frames around them. Clara got up from her chair and approached one of the paintings. As she got closer she saw that it wasn’t flat like the pictures they had in school and at the library. It had texture that seemed to swirl toward her. She wanted to get closer, to run her hand over the paint, feel the three dimensions. But then, when she got close, she realized that the woman in the painting was completely naked. Why, she wondered, didn’t she put on her underwears before she was painted?

  They had never been all the way inside the lower apartment before, only glimpsed what they could whenever the door opened, always too quickly for the girls’ curiosity. Still, they had seen things. Knew that the first-floor apartment was a world apart from the attic one their grandfather had. How could two apartments in the same big old house be so different? Smell so different? But mostly sound so different? Clara looked over at the piano. It practically looked like another table, but higher up. She had never seen a piano so large and wide. She wanted to go to it, touch the keys with her sticky little fingers, just to hear what sound it would make. She imagined stretching her small hands as wide as possible so she could play a chord. She wanted multiple notes, all at once, and for them to sound pleasant, resonant, and accomplished.

  “We can play the piano after tea,” Esther Perlman announced. Clara knew she was found out. Caught staring, with a covetous eye, at the instrument. Hopefully, Mrs. Perlman wouldn’t prefer her sister now like everyone else did.

  “Clara wants to play the piano, but I want to sing!” Blanca announced.

  “Well, we can do both,” Mrs. Perlman said, smiling.

  Gosh, she was wonderful, even if she had a funny way of pronouncing words.

  “You know,” she said, moving closer to the girls, confiding, “I used to practise both before I had to leave Hungary.”

  “I’m hungry!” Clara blurted out, misunderstanding.

  Esther took the cue and poured out the steaming tea from a gold-trimmed, fine white teapot and offered the girls each a plateful of cake.

  “Eat as much as you like, but let’s make sure we leave one piece for David when he gets home.”

  “Is David your husband?” Clara asked.

  Esther nodded.

  “Why don’t you have any children?” Blanca inquired.

  “We were not blessed with children,” Esther stated flatly so that the girls would not know how that great regret lived within her every day of her life.

  “I wish we could come here whenever we’re sad,” Clara blurted out, spitting crumbs across the table.

  “Are you sad often?” asked Esther.

  “Well, we’re sad we have to go back to school soon. Everybody makes fun of us.”

  “Well, have some more cake and let’s not think of that for now. Come as often as you like during the summer and on weekends when you go back to school,” Esther soothed and secretly thought, What strange little creatures they are!

  When summer ended Johnny worried about going back to school. There would be real classes now, a full day from nine till three thirty with a lunch break and two recesses. There were so many new responsibilities that came with being six. Lunch buckets with Thermoses. Different subjects. And paperwork to bring home almost every day. But Johnny didn’t worry about any of those new responsibilities. He only worried that someone might make fun of his fake eye.

  It was not to be his final eye. Johnny’s eye was a temporary conformer, placed over the orb, to fill in the roundness of the eye that had undergone enucleation. It was small, half an almond shell, placed behind the eyelids to maintain an eye-like shape after the surgery. A match, as close as possible, hazel with a grey outline, was found in a drawer. And while the socket was healing, the fake stand-in seemed to ooze and crust over like a captive reindeer’s weepy eyes. Of course, the infection came from somewhere deep within the cavern of the socket, far away from anything his classmates could ever see or imagine, but it seeped forth through every unfit space like spoiling leftovers in a Tupperware container with an ill-fitting lid. And so he began to cover it with his hand, hoping no one would notice it.

  “Does it hurt, Johnny?” She was a new teacher, fresh from college. She wore bright colours and lipstick on her ever-smiling mouth. Her voice was high and airy, like a cartoon. Not a squeaky cartoon, but a princess in a cartoon. One of those drawings with the long spiralling curls and pointy boobs. Miss Argyle had both. The hair, an ash-blond colour, fell down to where the points began and all of it was accentuated by the bright salmon- or seafoam-coloured cashmere twin sets she wore, a single strand of imitation pearls floating between the neck and inevitable swell. Both Johnny and Gareth loved her right away and laughed when one or the other accidentally called her Mom.

  “Does it hurt?” Miss Argyle asked again, as she reached out to touch his hand softly as she moved it away from his unseeing eye.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Don’t be ashamed of it. You had quite the ordeal! You know something? I think you are the bravest boy I’ve ever met. Your new eye is a badge of honour. You should never feel like you have to cover it.”

  At that moment Gareth disliked his friend’s new eye almost as much as he believed Johnny’s good eye did.

  Hilda tossed in her bed. Her prince lay in the next room, asleep, his seeing eye as blind to the world now as his other eye. She knew it would be a restless night. Knew that the only cure would be to pick herself up, move away from her husband, and creep into her boy’s room. How much more sturdy her girls were, playing double dutch and clapping hands! What was that rhyme they sang, over and over again? “Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black, with silver buttons, buttons, buttons …” How much easier it was for this generation. Protected by games and optimism. Protected by a look to the future. Her girls faced life head-on, both eyes open. But not her son. Not him. Even when he had two eyes, he was always just a bit more hesitant.

  She opened his door, the knob whining under her grasp. She went in to have a look. Peaceful and still. With eyes entirely closed, he looked normal to her, handsome. An angel, perfect, unmarred, and content. Did he dream with the perspective he once had, with two seeing eyes instead of just one?

  Hilda couldn’t remember the last time she dreamed or the last time she slept through the night. She had been avoiding sleep as much as she had once embraced it as a child. When she was young no one ever had to suggest that it was bedtime to her. She would finish h
er evening meal and then take herself to bed, eager to experience the world of her imagination. She believed that her imaginary dream world was every bit as real as, and a lot more inviting than, her waking world. She had been bullied when she was young. Teased to try harder, go further.

  She had grown up in a small town just an hour drive outside of Hamburg. Bad Oldesloe. “Bad,” not meaning naughty but meaning “bath.” And there were baths, old Roman baths, in the village, with steam rising from the concrete, and the faint smell of sulfur. The baths were a greenish colour, but healing. When she was a young girl she went there with her mother and watched as her mother walked the perimeter of them, putting her hand on rocks or trees, as if invoking something. Something so old and foreign to the new regime that had taken over. Something beyond threats and politics and horrors. When her mother completed her ritual, Hilda felt safe and secure. Protected. As though a circle had been drawn around her, so strong and so invisible that nothing could ever penetrate it.

  Why hadn’t she done the same for her own son? Why hadn’t she drawn the protective circle for him so that the old gods could watch over him? Gods who could have caught him when the branch broke, to ease his fall. She secretly knew what had stopped her from practising the old ways. Optimism. Yes, that was the obstacle! She had been seduced by hope, believing she was in a new world, with a new chance and a new beginning. Surely, the protection of old spirits had no place in Canada.

  Hilda stared at her one-eyed son in his Spider-Man pyjamas, sprawled crossways along the twin bed. It was only recently that he took to sleeping on his own, and that was certainly not her choice or his.

  “It’s time,” her husband had announced to their son, wanting his wife to share their bed with only him again. “You are a big boy now. You’re going to be going to school full-time soon. You don’t need your mama to protect you from the dark!”

  The very next day, Johnny tumbled from the tree. No, it wasn’t the dark that was the problem, but rather the false security of daylight.

  Hilda preferred the night hours, anything from twilight on. In darkness and in sleep there were no rules, no orders. Daylight meant obeying. It meant schedules and rations. Hilda remembered the years of bringing sandwiches stuffed with potatoes to school because meat was needed for the brave soldiers, and so her mother, wanting to give her more than dry bread, added potatoes, leftovers from the main meal from the day before. Large houses were divided and roomers were allotted. Hilda could not think of a time when there weren’t old men and lonely women on the third floor or in the attic. There had been a woman who helped with peeling the potatoes who always wore an apron, even to bed. She had her long grey hair in double braids that wound in coils around her head and, when she smiled, a glint of tooth-metal could be seen. She used to reach out to tickle Hilda and, terrified, Hilda would run as fast as she could, around the corner, sliding on the hardwood floors and up to the wide, winding staircase, first grabbing the newel post with her left hand to whirl that last turn before racing up two at a time. But never did she fall or tumble or hurt herself. Yes, girls were the far more resilient sex.

  There had been another man there. Much younger than the others, almost a boy. A boy-man who could stand on his hands and even walk on them. He used to perform this for young Hilda, lifting one hand then the other to amuse her. Hilda would then try to do headstands and handstands in her room, using the wall for support. As she flipped upside down there would be a thump-thump as each heel hit the plaster. Her skirts would descend over her upturned head, and there she would, again, feel safe in a skirt tent, happy in her topsy-turvy world.

  But there was something else about the acrobatic young man. He had a special purpose. And as Hilda Wagner looked down at the discarded prosthetic eye on her son’s night table it all came back to her. The young man who did handstands had been an ocularist for the German army.

  TWO

  BY THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY, the only country that made glass eyes was Germany. Italy had turned its gaze from the eye to the vase, France had its perfume bottles. Only Germany had the wherewithal to dominate the entire world in the artistry and manufacturing of the glass artificial eye. Precision and perfection were the hallmarks of the German ocularist. Each pupil, each vein, each nuance of colour, was a different shard of carefully blown glass. It demanded patience. It demanded precision. It demanded the obsession to create perfection for something that would always benefit the onlooker more than the host.

  Siegfried had learned from his father, who had learned from his father. Siegfried could trace oculary back five generations. He had always been surrounded by eyes. Even as a toddler, they blindly watched him. His father’s creations were so plentiful in their house that it seemed odd to Siegfried, when they went visiting friends, to sit in a place without eyes staring at him. From shelves and work tables, from counters and opened drawers, there they were, protecting him. Watching over him. They must have been. That is why he lived when the others didn’t.

  When the fire from the sky ripped through the clouds to strike the heart of their house, Siegfried was alone in a room full of eyes. He stood on one side, in the oculary, while his family were already sitting at the table for their four o’clock Kaffee und Kuchen. Siegfried could smell the Apfelkuchen, hear the chatter and his name being called, until there was a deafening ripping sound and then only silence. There, and then gone, and all around him smoke and debris. And discarded, misplaced eyes.

  There was no point in finding him a home or putting him into an orphanage. He was fifteen, almost old enough to join the army and fight, and so off he went to the front lines with his pockets full of glass eyes. When a mine exploded and an older boy lost an eye, it was Siegfried who knew how to do the enucleation. It was Siegfried who fashioned an eye from his pocket, matching as close as he could, promising that when the war was over he would make a perfect match to the one that was left. When the eyes were used up Siegfried was sent back to Germany, put into a house safely away from the cities, and outfitted with the means and tools to make eyes for the many soldiers who would need them. Germany may have been losing ground on the battlefield, but they would win in the field of ocular replacement. While Siegfried made more and more eyes for the boys in Hitler’s army, the Allies were denied the German glass eyes. Gunshots and mine wounds were sewn closed by the Allies, while carefully blown glass eyes were outfitted for the Germans.

  There would be no more killing for young Siegfried. His world was nothing now but the shaping of hot, treacly molten glass into concave segments. He never brought the eyes into the new house, though, he kept them in drawers in an outdoor shed. They wouldn’t be able to protect his new family any better than they had his old one. But when the war ended, he took his favourite eye and had it fashioned into a necklace that he gave to Hilda’s mother. She wore it around her neck till the day she died.

  Hilda, what had happened to her? That reckless girl of the house who was always running up stairs and sliding down banisters? That skinny girl who hid behind doors or furniture and listened to the adults talk? Oh yes, she ran away to North America. That barbaric place where they make eyes from acrylic in readied moulds. Now, where is the artistry in that?

  The ocularist knew he was one of the last of his kind. He stood in front of the mirror, an overhead light bearing down on him. Even now he could see how the light illuminated the thinning strands of hair escaping the top of his head. He really should just shave it all. Make it a choice of baldness, instead of a slow, sad farewell strand by strand. But it seemed so unfair to the strands loyal enough to stay. The ones that survived when the others fell away. Those strands that hung in there and didn’t betray him.

  Would more hair make him more attractive? Lessen the height of his forehead? Take away from the new fleshiness his jowls had taken on? Make his nose seem smaller, his skin less reddened, his eyes more alert? His eyes. There seemed to be a change creeping into them. He had to go up a few points in his prescriptive reading glasses, from a plus-one to
a one-point-five. His eye doctor had even suggested he may need bifocals at some point in the future. Bifocals, imagine that! How ugly that would be. How old and ugly!

  Siegfried had secretly been making his own replacement eyes, just in case. Every year he created two new ones, a left and a right eye, to match any changes the passage of time may have brought on. And if he never needed them, Gott willing, what would he do with the drawers of eyes that lay in the dark, waiting just in case? Actors, he thought. That is what they are, just understudy actors, waiting to go on in a pinch, to take over from the real stars. Always hoping that no one notices the replacement.

  Who will take his place, though? Who will replace him? Who will learn from him? In his forties and no wife, no girlfriend, no prospects. His art could not die with him. But without love, there is no immortality.

  Siegfried opened the third drawer from the top. He reached in and, eyes closed, he pulled out a smooth oval object and turned it over and over in his palm like a worry stone.

  Johnny looked out the tiny window. Below him were clouds, big and fluffy and porous. Above him there was sunshine. And nowhere in sight was there earth, solid, safe, and predictable. He’d had to go pee for almost an hour, but what if he stood up and his shift of weight unbalanced the plane? What if, suddenly, the plane dipped to one side because he upset the balance? Johnny wished that his friend Gareth was with him. He’d know what to do. He always did. Like the time the teeter-totter wasn’t even. Gareth scooted from his seat and moved a bit, just a tad, toward the centre until the two sides were level and unmoving. He understood perfect balance. When he walked over the diving board in swimming class, when he rode his bike with no hands, and when he climbed a tree, Gareth was always perfectly balanced. That’s why he didn’t fall that day, why he still had two eyes.