Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack

by Heidi von Palleske

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, young man. A beautiful woman can catch you with many things, including a song.”

  And it was at that moment that he had glanced at Hilda for perhaps a few seconds too long before looking away, awkwardly.

  “See here?” He then pointed at a small statue of a dwarf. “This is the famous Perkeo. He may have been a very small man — a dwarf — but he drank between five and eight gallons of wine every day. Every day! He died one day when someone offered him a glass of water. Anyhow, he was a great court jester and had been loved by all. Even though he drank so much of the castle’s wine!”

  “What is it with us Germans? There is always a dwarf in our folklore and literature.” Hilda had laughed and when Siegfried laughed with her, she couldn’t help but notice how straight and white his teeth were.

  “It is a throwback to the myths and stories of the Black Forest. To the days of trolls and fairies and witches.”

  There had been a spell woven around Hilda that day. The Rhine, the castle, the perfect weather. So far away from worries and so close to hope. And every time Siegfried had mentioned myth or legend, magic or love, she could feel herself yielding to an otherness that the day in and day out of domestic responsibility had eroded away. But hadn’t that magical thinking been the very thing that had made her flee Germany in the first place? Wasn’t that magical thinking the cause of the war?

  “Come on, we will go and eat something. Maybe some knackwurst and mustard. Have some fun because tomorrow we make the long drive back and then I will have to work, work, work all day long.”

  “Doing what?’ Johnny had asked.

  “Making the very best eye I have ever made for the most important person you could ever imagine.”

  “Who are you making an eye for tomorrow?”

  “For you, of course! Now, want to see if I can still walk on my hands?”

  And then Siegfried had winked at Hilda before turning upside down with all the grace and sprightliness of a much younger man. Hilda knew that he was showing off for her, but she had gone along with it, hugging Johnny as he clapped with joy.

  That had been only a few days ago, but now it felt like a lifetime had passed. She knew the magical time was ending. She would be going to him this last time, with Johnny, to see the finished eye, to place the eye in Johnny’s vacant socket, and to take the eye away to Canada. Hilda knew, in her heart, that every time she looked at her son, she would see the eye Siegfried had made and she would think of him.

  * * *

  Hilda didn’t open the envelope for at least a week after she returned. She put it aside, out of sight. She would be attentive, a good wife, and she would push all thoughts of romance out of her mind. They were just old friends. That was all. They shared a past. A past she had chosen to run from. But Siegfried hadn’t run, as she had, abandoning her mother in her darkest hour. No, Siegfried had stayed, remaining as a renter, being a comfort to her mother through the shame and loneliness. Not even as her mother suffered heart failure did Hilda return home. She couldn’t. She knew that the shadows would swallow her up.

  It was a secret that Hilda had pushed as deep down inside her as she could so that it was in such a faraway dark place of her soul that she could deny it, pretending it had never been there. She had created a world away from it. She had hidden it so well that even she could not remember where she put the memory and, in doing so, she knew that she would somehow protect her children from that dark seed and keep them away from the Black Forest of the soul.

  But Siegfried knew. He knew only too well and he shone a light upon it and somehow, in his presence, it didn’t have quite as much power over her.

  “I can only imagine the sorrow you must have felt. The shame. You ran from all you knew and loved and you chose oblivion over comfort,” he had said to her, finally, on her last day in Hamburg.

  She remembered how he had used the word love that day. Love, without expectation or apology. It was a sweet way of using the word, seeming more like a fact than a seduction.

  “You do not understand,” she’d responded. “You see, I did not know my father, it was always just me and my mother. I never missed him. I never thought of him. Only in his dying was I forced to consider him. And I hated him. I hated him so much that I had to run. Not from the shame but from my hate. It frightened me … how much I could hate.”

  Siegfried took her face in his hands and nodded.

  “I know,” he had said to her. “He was a monster. And he betrayed you.”

  Hilda could smell that familiar combination of chocolate and aftershave that German men exuded. Canadians were campfires and beer. Italians were garlic and red wine. But a German man, yes, he was aftershave and chocolate.

  “It wasn’t the fifteen American prisoners he killed for no good reason. It’s what he did in Poland. Unspeakable. They hanged him for the wrong reason.”

  “You must know that the sins of the father do not become the sins of the children,” he had consoled.

  “No, that is not true. You throw a rock into a pond and the ripples travel. My children must not carry that shame and that is why I have a life in Canada. Why I will never live in Germany again. It is as much for them as it is for me.”

  “And how will your children ever know you?”

  “It is better that they are safe in their oblivion.”

  And there it was. Secrets shared. Hilda opening up, after her years of silence, to someone who knew her as the child she had once been. A child free from worries, unaware of the war all around her. A child who spent hours practising headstands in her room, protected from the horrors she would learn later.

  How did the locked gates of secrets suddenly open? A touch of his hand was all that was needed. That was the key that opened the past and now there it was, present, and the only place where she could feel safe from her past was in the touch of his hand.

  Hilda couldn’t open the envelope because she feared that the secrets of her past might somehow tumble out and follow her to the New World. And yet she yearned for that connection to her youth.

  The first night that her husband, John, invited young Johnny to bowling, leaving Hilda home on her own, she sat for what seemed an eternity, holding the envelope in her hands. How bold and broad the letters were, fountain pen, navy-blue ink against the stark white envelope. The funny way of writing the letter H that only Germans do, with the loops on the sides instead of the clean lines of North Americans. She stared at the letters he had written with his square hands. Those hands that had touched her forehead. Those fingers that had lifted the tears from her cheeks when she cried and those fingers that brought her tears to his lips, where he could taste her pain, her grief, her confusion. She held the envelope, heart pounding. Then, as she glanced at the door, she slid her silver letter opener along the seam of the envelope and slowly pulled out the paper inside.

  Hilda, do not forget to clean the eye regularly. I would say that a rinse in salt water will suffice. The glass does not hold germs like the acrylic eye did, and it does breathe and so there will be no buildup like his old eye. You should not get any crusting. If he complains at all then he is growing and you must return right away, and I will create a slightly different fit for his comfort. He will need it changed every year to two years for optimal comfort. It is enough that you pay for the trip here. I will cover the cost of the eyes.

  Yours, Siegfried.

  And there it was. No more than a note on how to care for her son’s eye. No mention of how nice it was to see her again, to reconnect. No talk of how he felt when she was leaving. It was just a practical note. Necessary. What a foolish woman she had been! How foolish to desire that someone might still desire her! How foolish to hope for a bit of attention at her age! But a small compliment, perhaps … anything at all, to acknowledge that she existed. That her breath, her life, her being might have some worth on this earth.

  Was there something between the words perhaps? A hope that she return every year or two? The kindness of
not charging for the glass eyes. Any romance in that? No, it was just kindness, nothing more. How she had misread it all. How it had been no more than the kindness of an old friend. Kindness born of shared experiences. Of past.

  Hilda folded the note carefully and opened the envelope to return it to its resting place. It was only then that she noticed something small at the bottom of the envelope. She reached in delicately, with two fingers. Slowly, slowly she took out the small token. A pressed blue cornflower. A flower he must have picked the day they were at the castle. A flower he had said was worthy of the Lorelei to wear in their hair.

  THREE

  A YOUNG MARRIED COUPLE, Katherine and Mark, travel by small airplane and are forced to land in a small, out-of-the-way town. The people there behave strangely, and Katherine and Mark want to leave but they can’t. They are trapped by a force field that prevents them from leaving. They are held prisoner by a large bubble …

  Gareth reached over and grabbed a fistful of popcorn from his older brother’s bag. It was always the same, him opting for the candy then craving the salty. Tristan knew the routine only too well and so he always ordered a size up. He always placed the bag near his brother so that he didn’t have to ask for it. He could just take it as he liked. He had never seen him take the popcorn, though. Both his brother and the popcorn have always been on the unseeing side. Not something he ever consciously chose to do, but something that was so much a force of habit that he didn’t even know that he was doing it. His compensation was natural, unlearned, easy. By putting the popcorn on the unseeing side, it left the good eye, the eye with the periphery, on the public side. He knew if someone came and wanted to be seated, or if someone was struggling with their own popcorn and drinks, he would see them and could easily accommodate them. These instinctual reactions stopped him from blindly bumping into others, from knocking into what he didn’t see, and from jumping, startled, from an unforeseen surprise. It was all second nature. No big deal. No one ever realized that he was even blind in one eye.

  The hand stealing his popcorn did not bother Tristan. But Gareth was irritating him more than he could possibly imagine. Every time his brother jumped or yelled out “Too cool!” Tristan bristled. He had no idea what his younger brother was on about. It seemed to Tristan that they were not even watching the same film. He took off his 3D glasses, wiped them on his trousers to clean them, replaced them, but still nothing. No magic.

  He looked at the glasses, one red lens and one blue. The red lens covered his blind eye and the blue his seeing eye. Perhaps if he switched them? He turned the glasses upside down so that the blind eye had the blue lens. Still nothing. Nothing at all.

  Tristan had never considered his blindness in one eye. He hated all the talk of operations and procedures to recover his sight. Finally, it had been agreed that they would try the patch procedure. It was explained that Tristan had something called refractive amblyopia, a decreased vision in one eye due to abnormal development of vision in his infancy, possibly a condition caused by his premature birth. His vision loss occurred because his nerve pathways between the brain and the eye weren’t properly stimulated. As a result, his brain favoured his good eye and his brain reacted only to the visual stimuli from that one, ignoring what was blurry and weaker, until it learned to not accept any information from the less-seeing eye. In time the brain accepted it as blind, but, with effort, Tristan could force the brain to accept the weaker eye, he could force his brain to accept that it could see, though in a blurry fashion, if, and only if, the good eye was limited. By using drops to blur his vision in his strong eye or by patching it in order to blind the good eye, the brain would be forced to acknowledge the weaker eye until the pathways were stimulated once again. Eventually, he would get to the point where he could wear glasses, one lens quite clear and unnecessary and the other very strong and thick. Then he could have two working eyes. Two seeing but unequal eyes. But why? Why all the pain and fuss? And why hamper the strong eye? Why make it feel like less just so that the weaker could have a chance, and feel better about its inadequacies? Why handicap the better of the two? To Tristan, it seemed like a punishment of the good eye. It was like the time when he won a first-place ribbon for being the fastest in his class, but then all the other kids got ribbons, too, just for participating, and suddenly his red ribbon, the ribbon he had won fair and square for being better than the rest, didn’t seem quite as valuable. He had one brilliant eye. Why not just let it be brilliant in its own right? And so he argued with his parents. He stomped his feet. He started to become rude and petulant to the doctors. He didn’t want any more drops and prodding. He didn’t want any more lights shone into his eyes. He didn’t want more of his afternoons used up. He was fine just the way he was! He didn’t need to change.

  Tristan didn’t understand why there was all the big fuss over Gareth’s friend, Johnny. Johnny lost one eye and that made him just like him. But from that day on, Johnny did everything with fear that he might lose the other eye. Always took precautions, like wearing glasses when he could see perfectly well. Why? Tristan imagined his heart. Only one of those! But he didn’t approach the world with trepidation because there’s only one heart, not two. It never occurred to Tristan to be fearful in case he were to lose the other eye. When he played outside with his friends or when he did sports, he always took off the protective glasses the ophthalmologist insisted his parents make him wear for the safety of the good eye. For him, it was, and would always be, a monocular world. The eye patching of his good eye to train his blind eye, the blurring drops, the discomfort, the embarrassment, he was done with it all! Oh, how the kids teased him at school when he arrived with that patch. “Pirate, pirate!” They all laughed. And even when he threw the patch away the nickname stuck. He hated it. And he saw the world better using only the more gifted eye, anyhow. Why go through all the procedures for something he had never missed?

  Until now.

  He felt excluded in the cinema, a place he had always loved, with its smell of popcorn and the sticky floor beneath the seats. He loved the beam of light that carried the magic to the screen and the way the dust and smoke in the air could be seen dancing within that beam. The cartoons, the trailers, the short film, and then the feature — it was all magic! At the movies, he could travel to other worlds, be anything the characters were, live other stories, and imagine a life of adventure. He had wanted so badly to experience 3D for the first time. He was the one who chose the film, convinced their parents they should go. He imagined he’d be in the film, a part of it, with the action all around him. But try as he might, he saw the picture the same with or without glasses. A fuzzy blur where a sharpness should be. And everything about it seemed just silly. Things falling for no reason. Things pointing toward the camera for no reason. And without the effect of 3D, the story was just silly and pointless.

  The world had always been accommodating for him. He had never felt disabled. He rode his bike fast, sometimes over ramps, he played sports, ran hard, swam far, even learned to shoot a rifle, for which he never had to close an eye, but there, in the darkened cinema, a world he loved to share with his younger brother, there he was discriminated against. There the magic of 3D was withheld from him.

  Gareth jumped again and laughed. On the screen, a huge rock was tumbling toward the lens.

  “It’s great, isn’t it?”

  The giant bubble closes down on Katherine and Mark and the edges of the bubble reach off the screen and into the audience. Gareth shrieked, thinking he would be caught in the bubble, too! He grabbed his brother’s hand. He had no clue that he was experiencing something his older brother would never know.

  Tristan couldn’t see the posters he had collected and taped to his wall. But he knew where each one hung. He knew exactly how each looked. He turned his blind eye to each in its turn, mustering up the image in his mind, willing his dead eye to see what was there on the wall. The first poster, a goldish brown with a robot woman down the centre. Very art nouveau. Very imposing. A
nd the words EIN FILM VON FRITZ LANG.

  Tristan ran through all the things he had learned about Fritz Lang. He was born in Vienna, in 1890. He trained as a painter. He was the master of dark and shadowy heart-pounding psychological thrillers. He was known as the father of expressionist cinema …

  Tristan then whispered out loud, “And he was blind in one eye.”

  Tristan turned his head a bit, centred his dead eye on the next poster. Willed it to show him a fuzzy outline of a feisty redhead with the top buttons of her shirt undone as she pulls away from the strong and silent man who towers above her. John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, and the word TECHNICOLOR, much larger than the director’s name, which is written simply and unpretentiously at the bottom: John Ford.

  Tristan again ran through his knowledge of the director, itemizing to himself the facts.

  John Ford went to Hollywood because his brother was an actor there. Became known for making westerns. He won six Oscars …

  “And he was blind in one eye.”

  The third poster has mountains and a sepia-toned black-and-white picture of Humphrey Bogart and Ida Lupino. Bogart is all dangerous as he looks into the lens and Lupino stands all sexy-like behind him, the way any moll would. At least that is what Tristan always imagined, though he wasn’t really sure what a moll was. Just a beautiful woman who stands mysteriously behind a man, but probably way more dangerous than the man is. And at the bottom, again, is the director’s name. Raoul Walsh.

  Raoul Walsh. Directed films for fifty-two years. He was known for crime movies. High Sierra was the first film that cast Bogart as a leading man. Yup, he could sure see talent …

  “And he was blind in one eye.”

  Tristan knew there were only two more posters to go. Then he could take the patch off his eye. He tried to focus on the next, a huge poster of Bugs Bunny, that giant, saucy rabbit, chewing on the end of a carrot. Tristan could almost hear him say, “Eh, what’s up, Doc?” And who created him? Director Tex Avery. Yup, he directed all the great animated characters, including Porky Pig and Daffy Duck …