Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack

by Heidi von Palleske

  “You should shut your eyes. Try to sleep,” his mother, Hilda, said, putting a protective arm around him.

  They were lucky; not a full plane. And when the stewardess saw the woman with the tired-looking one-eyed boy, she brought them to where there were three empty seats.

  “More room to stretch out,” she had said. “It’s so tiring travelling with young ones.”

  Hilda looked at her boy. His eye must have been irritating him. He was rubbing the replacement. His lids were red, a bit swollen and, behind the irritation, an unmoving, fake-looking eye. It seemed that Johnny was allergic to the eye and his entire system had been spending the past three years rejecting it. It may be a replacement, but, to his body, the eye was an invasive species, wreaking havoc with his physical ecosystem.

  Hilda knew that the three seats weren’t really for them. What seemed a generous offer was actually to make sure that the other paying travellers felt comfortable. She graciously took the three seats, not really wanting the extra space. She didn’t mind being squashed by a stranger on one side, her son on the other side, by the window. She had behaved as though she was thankful for the extra space even though it meant that she’d have to take a seat farther back. Back, farther away from first class. Back, where it takes longer to get your dinner. Back, where it is only a few rows till you are in the smoking section. Already she could smell that familiar sulfur smell of a struck match. The rising smell of smoke, the tobacco, and the pungent air. It wasn’t like there was an invisible wall between her row and the smokers! It would all find its way to her. Envelop her, cling to her hair, her blouse, her nostrils. How she would rather be cramped with a complaining child and a disapproving stranger than have to smell that familiar scent when she was already so anxious about flying!

  God, she wanted a cigarette. But she had given up the habit on her wedding day. It was a deal they’d struck. She would give up smoking and he would be neat and tidy. More organized.

  “Just going to stretch my legs a bit, sweetie. You okay?”

  Johnny nodded as he watched his mother rise from her seat and walk toward the bathrooms at the back of the plane. It didn’t tip! Didn’t dip at all! And Johnny knew that his mother would never truly understand him because she was as balanced as his friend, Gareth.

  Johnny sat very still in his seat. He didn’t risk looking back at her as she walked away. Didn’t see her bum a smoke from a man with the piercing blue eyes and an accent as strange, as thick, and as wonderfully foreign as his mother’s.

  * * *

  Johnny had never been in a taxi cab before. No reason for it; if he couldn’t get somewhere by foot or by bicycle, then there was always his dad’s truck with its long Naugahyde bench seat and three faulty seat belts that they only pretended to buckle if a police cruiser cruised by. When his sisters were in the truck, as well, Johnny would duck down, head near their laps, so he wouldn’t be seen. And then there were the rides in the school bus. Again, bench seats and no seat belts. He and Gareth would rush for the back seat to catch the bumps as the bus zoomed along the gravel streets. Of course, the bumps were never big enough for them so they would bounce up and down, exaggerating the anticipated fun. Or, perhaps, encouraging it.

  This was so different. The seats had the same smell as his yearly new Buster Brown shoes. Tan-coloured. And they felt warm in the sunlight. Soft to the touch. The outside of the taxi cab was sleek, and shiny black, with four separate doors and a deep trunk where his mother let the man with the blue eyes put her suitcase before he slammed it shut. Before he suggested Johnny ride up front with the driver, to get a better view.

  And that was the last thing Johnny understood. From then on, it was a series of sounds that seemed so strange to him that he had to look back to make sure that it was indeed his mother responding and not some other woman who had sneaked into the car in her place. When the laughter started and he heard a back-of-the-throat ch-ch-ch sound, he looked back and saw the man squeeze his mother’s knee. His mother put a reassuring hand on Johnny’s shoulder and Johnny turned from her, focusing only on what was in front of him.

  A box. He had never seen anything like it. A metal handle, almost like a flag, emerged from it and on it were the letters FREI. Johnny had no idea what FREI meant, only that when it was flipped up by the driver the box came to life and every few seconds the number on it increased just a little.

  An important event in the history of the taxi was the invention of the taximeter by Friedrich Wilhelm Gustav Bruhn, a German engineer, born in 1891 in Lübeck. Johnny knew nothing about the invention but he did know all about Lübeck and had secretly hoped, from the time it was announced that he would be going to Germany, that Lübeck would be their final destination. Lübeck was the place where they made marzipan. Sometimes his mother would tell him how the entire town was built on marzipan. Johnny imagined hills of the almond paste and rivers of rich, dark chocolate. He thought that buildings would be sweet morsels, but safer than the house that had tempted Hansel and Gretel. There would be no witches in Lübeck. Just German grandmothers. Omas with aprons and white hair and smiles that never left their mouths. That is how he imagined his own oma, a woman who used to send packages at Christmastime, filled with gingerbread, marzipan, and a new Steiff Bear every year. That was the Germany of his mind. A Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang Germany, but without the evil baron and baroness. But this? This wasn’t the Germany he held in his mind’s eye. This was cold and concrete and busy with zooming cars, darting randomly in and out of the lanes. He suddenly longed for his orchard and the lake. He longed for his best friend. But mostly, he longed for his mother because, deep down, he knew that from the minute the plane had landed, his mother had changed. She was the woman of her youth, more carefree and more animated. Johnny understood that he had not existed in her youth and so he had no place with her in this strange land. He felt as separate and as dragged-along as her worn suitcase.

  Johnny counted between the number changes on the strange box. One, two, three, click. One, two, three, four, click. How high would the numbers go? Was there a limit or could the numbers go all the way up to infinity? Like the number pi.

  He hated Germany. He hated the blue-eyed man. He hated all of it. He didn’t want a glass eye! He just wanted his mother back.

  Hilda climbed the stairs to the top. Already she was giving herself over to the twisting staircase, the polished dark wood banister, the thick but worn runner leading the way up, up, up to the little room they would share. Of course, there wouldn’t be a private bathroom, but a shared one at the end of the hall. Johnny would have to carry his own toothbrush there and back, walk the hall alone, and be responsible for his soap and washcloths. Good. He had been mollycoddled by her for far too long. He was ten now; he needed to start to learn some responsibility. She wouldn’t be there forever to take care of him.

  She knew his childishness was her fault. She held to him too tightly, fearing the day he’d grow and leave her. Her girls were already gone, at least emotionally. They were more interested in boys and parties than doing anything with her. They had their own secrets. How they hushed when she walked into their room to leave them their folded laundry. Only as she retreated down the hallway could she hear them laughing again.

  Had she ever been that way with her own mother? Of course, she had more chores to do than her girls ever had. All those boarders meant extra meals, more dirty dishes, and a weekly polishing of the wood and antiques, rubbing linseed oil into the huge, round table, bringing it to a high polish with her elbow grease. How she had dreamed of the day when she’d have daughters of her own who would polish for her. But they never did. She didn’t even have a grand, round table in Canada. Just a long, knotty pine slab on four legs. Four chairs around three of the sides and a long pine bench across the back. Of course, the meals were rushed. Of course, there was no discourse for hours on end. The table was too casual. Too taken for granted. Too convenient.

  Already she could feel the past entering her being. How freeing it f
elt to know that breakfast would be served at a specific time. That the eggs would be in an egg-warmer, each one in its own quilted compartment, in the centre of the table. There would be no coffee from a convenient machine. No, it was all about process and time. Water at just the right temperature, carefully poured over freshly ground beans and strained through a white porcelain filter holder, releasing the bitter aroma into the air. How excited she was to share these rituals with Johnny. Her girls were already lost from her world, in the modern world of transistor radios, miniskirts, and junk food. But maybe, just maybe, this trip would reclaim one of her children. Maybe not all was lost for Johnny. Maybe he would be the one to truly know and understand her.

  “Do you like the room?” she asked Johnny as she swung open the door.

  He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “What’s not to like? Look at that big fluffy eiderdown. You know when I was a little younger than you I had one like that and I would fling it on the floor and then jump from the bed into the feathers. It drove my mutti crazy!”

  Johnny just shrugged again. He couldn’t care less about the big fluffy comforter (not a comforter, an eiderdown) or the stairs or the wood.

  Hilda placed her raincoat on a chair, kicked off her shoes, and threw herself into the thick swell of the eiderdown.

  “It’s heaven, Johnny, come try!”

  He wanted to punish her for ignoring him earlier. But the bed did look cozy and comfy, and he would feel so much better snuggling into her.

  “Mom?” he said, burrowing his head into the crook of her arm.

  “Mmm?”

  “What if the glass eye isn’t any better? Then we came all this way for nothing.”

  “It’ll be better, I promise.”

  “But what if it isn’t? I’m scared.”

  Hilda rubbed her hand through his soft dark hair. How like hers. Dark, slight wave, widow’s peak. The girls were strawberry blond like their father, with that easily freckled skin and green eyes. But Johnny was like her. Dark hair, skin that could tan, and astonishing pale hazel-grey eyes, in contrast with the hair, the dark lashes, the olive skin tone. That acrylic eye didn’t do him justice. It didn’t have the luminosity their eyes held. That glow. That liquid look that said, “Look at me, my eyes float on water.” For almost four years now, Johnny has had one liquid eye, full of life and movement and one dull, opaque eye, lifeless and flat. It was replaced every other year, but the fit was never quite right and his eye was forever irritated. He had infection after infection, and a constant buildup of mucus, which Hilda patiently cleaned nightly. For all the trouble and fuss, she had hoped that the eye would have been worth it. But no, it was an affront, a mockery of his soul.

  “Don’t be scared. Soon you will meet the only man who can help you. He is an artist beyond compare. If he can’t help you, no one can.”

  “That’s why I’m scared, Mom.”

  If Siegfried had enemies, they were John and Charles Erickson. Viking blood. They probably couldn’t help but pillage and destroy wherever they went, wanting to possess kingdoms. In the late 1940s those Viking descendants, those brothers, those mere dispensing opticians from Tacoma, Washington, saw a market and they systematically went from optician to optician, in every surrounding state, flung open their drawers, threw down their money, and then scooped up all the glass eyes. What joy they must have had, those pillagers, as they broke and crushed each pupil, each innocent orb.

  Even now when he thinks of the travesties committed all those years ago, Siegfried cannot help but shudder in horror. At least fifty thousand glass eyes, smashed and destroyed, by those avaricious brothers. Those money-grubbing artisans. Yes, artisans. Wannabe ocularists! But not the real thing. They were not artists who learned from their fathers and grandfathers. They were businessmen, betrüger! They didn’t know what it meant to blow the glass, lay in the individual colours. What did they know of reflection, depth, and the liquid quality shared by both the human eye and glass? After all, glass was a liquid! But how would those Vikings know that?

  The eye is the only organ that can possess and also behold beauty. There is nothing that compares to the eye. It is, Siegfried thinks, indeed the mirror of the soul. And is not a mirror made of glass and not cheap plastic, for crying out loud!

  Glass eyes are no good in a cold climate. A man in midwest America could leave his house on a cold winter’s day and that glass eye could crack in his head. In fact, I have heard of such a story. Not so with acrylic. Nope, glass eyes have no place in America. We custom-make each to fit the individual. Form it — no, mould it, actually — for a better, more comfortable fit. Germany is behind the curve. The future is in plastics.

  Those were the words repeated at the ocularist convention by the American ocular representative. Gott, he hated the New World. A world of hula hoops. A world of bubble gum. A world of plastic. Gott, how he hated plastic. Cheap, cheap, cheap, and disposable! Of course, Siegfried hadn’t gone to the convention to actually learn anything. He hadn’t gone to — what was it they called it? — schmooze. No, he went to find someone who loved his art to the level he did. He went in search of an apprentice. Someone he could teach. Instead, he saw the way things were going. He saw the moulds, the dull plastic materials, the opaque replacements with their threaded veins. Oh, the best of them could match colour very well. They could add the veins as threads in the whites, subtly, and use what seemed like children’s pencil crayons to colour and shade, but the eyes didn’t breathe, they didn’t shine. They did not reflect the soul. All Siegfried could do was to despair that he was becoming the last of a dying breed in a world that was destined to accept so much less than it deserved.

  “Mirror, mirror on the wall,” he said, doing his morning tradition of shaving, and caring for those last strands on his head. “Who’s the fairest of them all?”

  There is a boy coming. He is the fairest. And you will know him by his mother, for he has her eye colour.

  Siegfried smoothed his hair, splashed cold water on his freshly shaved face, then, for the first time in ages, he opened his medicine cabinet and took out his aftershave. A twist, a sniff, and he thought better of it. Old Spice was for sailors. Not ocularists.

  Hilda stared at her reflection in the mirror. Her lips were still full, her skin still soft, her teeth still straight and white. But there, at the sides of her eyes, she could see those crinkles creeping in. Laugh lines, they called them. But hers were not just from laughing. How many tears had she cried, alone, when the house was asleep? Tears for her son. Tears for her marriage, tears for the life she left behind, and tears of boredom. Indeed, her nightly habit of leaving her husband’s bed so that she could cry had become the most seductive aspect of her life. Nobody noticed her sadness. They didn’t notice her at all. Her cloak of invisibility was already woven and ready for her.

  Invisibility has a way of waiting and then slipping stealthily into a life. It begins when the meal is taken for granted. When the kids’ needs come first. When a husband is too tired to fuck you, and then too distracted with worries to fuck you, and then just too distant to fuck you. You become a stranger in his bed, seen only as a mother, a wife, and a financial partner. Anything but a woman. Why? Hilda wonders. Why is it the sacrifice that every woman must make for her children? A sacrifice that will only be repeated again by her daughters and then by theirs, throughout the generations?

  Hilda put some kohl pencil around her eyes, darkened her already-dark lashes, smeared a warm red across her lips. She knew that Johnny had seen the stranger’s hand on her knee when they were in the cab. Why did she allow that? Why didn’t she slap the hand, or at least remove it? It would lead nowhere. It was just a flirtation in the back of a shared cab. But still … still. It was like an ignition button being pressed. Not a fire, but the first spark of possibility. It was the first time in years that anyone saw her beyond her function and related to her as a woman. As a human.

  Of course, she didn’t make this trip back to Germany for that. It wasn�
�t to trace her youth and reclaim her identity. No. It wasn’t to hear a language that still existed deep, deep in her soul, but was forgotten a little bit each day. No. And it wasn’t to wear nice clothes — city clothes — and to touch the sweeter parts of her youth. No. It was to help her son. To get him an eye that would stop the bullying and the pain. To give him a new start.

  But still …

  Still, she couldn’t help but wonder if Siegfried would remember her. If he would be happy to see her.

  The boy looked ten or eleven at most. His hair flopped over his high forehead. Siegfried noted the long limbs, the awkward body language, the shy and cautious smile when spoken to. How like his mother he was! Siegfried remembered Hilda, spying on him from behind the door, thinking she couldn’t be seen that first day when he had arrived at their house, a thankful soldier away from action. How old was he then? Perhaps five or six years older than the boy before him.

  “Come over here, young man. Do you speak German?”

  Johnny shook his head no.

  “Then I have a good chance to practise my English, but you must promise not to laugh at me if I get some words wrong.”

  Johnny lifted his downturned gaze and smiled openly at the older gentleman. It was only then that Siegfried could look into the boy’s eyes. See his perfect hazel-grey orb reflecting the light and shining with his emotional responses while the dull acrylic replacement sat lifeless in the other socket. How uncomfortable it looked! How foreign! What a mockery it made of the boy’s emotions and thoughts. A well-crafted, perfectly painted mockery. And all because of those American Vikings from Washington! What blasphemy! What hackery! How dare they, those pillaging bastards!

  “Now, I have a very important question to ask you.”

  Johnny was ready for this. The endless questions. What happened that day? Did they remove the eye right away? Was there ever an infection? Do you clean the eye regularly? Properly? Do you feel pressure at the back of the eye? Any pain? Discomfort, irritation, dryness? Johnny knew all the questions and had practised the answers over and over again.