A Glittering Chaos

by de Nikolits, Lisa

  I never got the chance to thank you for what you said about my manuscript, I’m very happy you liked it. I made some of the changes you suggested and sent it off to a publisher. Funny how long ago that seems; it’s a lifetime ago. Maybe if I hadn’t been so preoccupied by my writing I would have been able to help Hans. Ach, I know that’s not really true. We can only help others if they want us to, isn’t that so?

  She puts the letter on the bedside table, turns off the light and rolls over on her side, encased in her warm cocoon and falling into an unconscious sleep.

  28.

  AS SOON AS MELUSINE WAKES, she dresses and drives down to the park. She quickly spots Hans; he is with the same group of men as the previous day and he already has a bottle in hand. She sits watching him for an hour or so and when they leave, she follows them as they head towards the Mission.

  The Mission is housed in a community hall adjoining a gothic old church with a single ornate turret filthied by time.

  Melusine makes her way to the hall entrance, threading through the scattered group of men and women who are wandering in and out, leaving and returning. None of them seem to notice her.

  The hall is clean and bright and the linoleum floor is polished but the smell of sour unwashed bodies, acrid bleach and strong coffee mingle, and Melusine breathes through her mouth. There are long folding tables with plastic yellow table cloths and stainless steel serviette holders.

  She stands at the back of the hall and watches Hans line up for a sandwich. He shakes his head at the offer of a glass of milk or orange juice. He sits down at one of the tables and chews his food with enthusiasm, talking loudly and waving his hands. If he notices Melusine, he hides it well. It seems to her as if he is enjoying himself, he is the centre of attention, holding court and laughing.

  As soon as they have eaten, the men file past and even though Melusine is in clear view, Hans does not appear to see her.

  “Can I help you?” A skinny birdlike woman in her sixties appears at Melusine’s side.

  Melusine startles and she turns to the woman.

  “The man in the tan trousers … the new one…”

  “Hans?”

  “You know his name?”

  “Of course. Kristian, one of the more lucid fellows in the group told me. How can I help you?”

  The skinny woman is dressed in a navy floral frock with bright yellow flowers and a beige cardigan and her glasses hang low off a beaded chain. She looks quizzically at Melusine.

  “I’m his wife.” Melusine cannot think what to say next.

  “And I’m Sister Mary Anne. Come on, let’s go where we can talk.” The woman takes Melusine by the arm and leads her to an office. She seats Melusine on a sofa and sits down beside her. “Can I get you a coffee?”

  Melusine shakes her head. There is something motherly about this skinny straightforward woman and Melusine feels tears welling up in her throat, threatening to choke her. Her eyes fill and before she can take control, her face is splashed with tears.

  The woman is silent; she hands over a box of Kleenex and waits.

  “I just don’t know what happened!” To her chagrin, Melusine is keening in a way she has not cried since her parents died. And, having opened the floodgates now, she cannot seem to close them.

  “I don’t know what happened,” she says again. “One minute we were a normal family, a family … sure, we had faults and problems, all families do but we were happy….” This sets her off again, a thin wailing sound that comes from her gut and winds around and out through her heart, and again the woman just nods and waits.

  “I failed everybody!” Melusine manages to say, “my poor sweet boy, my marriage…”

  She slowly begins to calm down, and she hugs her arms around her sides.

  “These things just happen, dear.” The woman is imperturbable and yet not unsympathetic.

  “These things don’t just happen to us!” Melusine blows her nose loudly as if to emphasize her point.

  The woman shrugs her bony shoulders and smiles for the first time. “I’m sorry, dear, they do. And when they do, all we can do is manage the situation to the best of our abilities. From our side, we’ll feed Hans and keep an eye on him and offer him counsel if he seems open to it and that’s all we can do.”

  “Do any of them ever … get normal again?”

  The woman sighs and pats Melusine on the knee. “Not usually. If they show any signs of wanting to rejoin the real world, then of course we help them and we get in touch with their families. Hans is pretty far gone which is surprising in a sense, considering that last week he had a job and a home. But there’s a breaking point for all of us and this must have been building inside him for quite some time.”

  “It must have been on his mind for a while but it all really started going wrong in October when we went to Vegas and Hans attended a psychic fair. They destroyed him,” Melusine says and the woman smiles again and Melusine notices that she has large, horsy teeth.

  “What happened in Vegas followed you home instead of staying there,” the sister said. “We have a fellow mission out there in the desert. I hear lots of horror stories.”

  “The psychic responsible for this mess works for the Healing Lives Ministries and if you have contacts there, maybe you can help me find whoever Hans was seeing at the fair?” Melusine is hopeful but the woman shakes her head.

  “We’re nuns, dear, not detectives. And besides, if you ask me, you’re looking for a needle in a haystack. I understand you want to know what happened but the odds aren’t in your favour. You’re better off trying to move forward.”

  “But just from a practical point of view I don’t know how I can live with it. How can I be alright in my warm safe home when it’s freezing out there and I can’t bear to think of him out there in the cold, sleeping in the park. He’ll die of exposure, he’s not used to that kind of thing. For goodness sake, Hans never even liked camping!” She feels foolish for blurting out the last and Sister Mary Anne pats her hand.

  “They find places when it’s cold and the police turn a blind eye as long as they don’t get up to any mischief and they seem to know which lines not to cross. We used to have beds here but the funding got pulled. But don’t worry, they find shelter in abandoned houses and some of them even have shacks down in the old tunnels behind the train station. And your husband has made friends. He’ll be alright, dear, hard as that might be to believe.”

  Melusine nods. Her face feels hot and swollen and she presses the palms of her hands to her eyes. She takes a deep breath. “To think I once thought madness was a romantic and poetic notion.” She sits up straighter. “Sister Mary Anne, you’re right. I need to deal with this situation as best I can and do the best I can for my son. And that’s exactly what I’ll do. Thank you for listening.”

  They stand and Melusine feels foolish. “It will all be fine,” she says, knowing the lie as she says it.

  The woman shows her out and Melusine stands blinking in the winter sunlight. She gets into her car and drives across town to the bank; she wants to find out what happened to the money Hans got from selling his car.

  The bank teller clicks through several files. “Yes, here it is, he set up a savings account. He’s got a bank card. I’m not sure what you can do about it, it all looks to be above board.”

  “I don’t want to do anything, I just wanted to find out. If he ever needs any money, don’t tell him but phone me, okay?” She is not sure why she says this; is she saying she is prepared to fund her husband’s indigent life? She shakes her head, having no idea. She checks the time on her cellphone, and she notices five missed calls from Ana. That can wait. She calls Jonas and tells him about her conversation with the nun.

  He gives a loud sigh. “I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I didn’t go to classes today, I just needed to think. Mami, I don’t want to sound defeatist but I don’t think there’s anything we can do except keep an eye on him.”

  “Jonas,” Melusine says and then her voice c
atches in her throat.

  “What Mami? Are you okay?”

  “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you have to go through this my sweet boy.”

  “Mami!” Jonas is stern. “You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. This was no more your fault than mine, okay? We loved Papa, we did. We still do. Have you seen Auntie Ana yet by the way? She’s phoned me like four times today, looking for you.”

  “Yes, she called me too. I’d better phone her.” Melusine takes a deep breath.

  “Better yet, go over there.”

  Melusine sighs. “I can’t, not yet.”

  But once again Jonas is firm. “Go and get it over with, Mami. You drive there and I’ll phone Auntie Ana and tell her to tone down the drama. You might want to prepare yourself for something else, too. Dr. Glott was right, the newspapers are full of it and it’s not pretty.”

  “Yes, I’ll have to see what they said. Fine, I’m bravely setting off to see my best friend and carry the load of her excitement and drama.”

  “And her love.”

  “Yes, and her love.”

  And when Melusine climbs out of the car and sees Ana waiting for her, all she sees on her friend’s face is love and worry. Melusine hugs her tight and together they go into the house.

  29.

  BY THE END of the following day, the whole town is familiar with the story. The national newspapers pick up the schoolgirl incident and run it in detail, and Kateri’s disappearance and investigation are thrashed through once again, featuring a large grainy black and white picture of the girl when she was fourteen.

  Melusine stays at the hotel for a week. She cannot face going home but eventually she has to.

  She does not sell the house. Primarily because no one wants it. No one from the town anyway and there are no newcomers to the area. Her house is worthless.

  “Forget about selling it,” the real estate guy says, his pomaded hair the wrong blonde and ridiculous. “I’m not even going to put it on the market, I’d be flooded with nosy people with no intention of buying but just wanting to see the house of horror.”

  “House of horror?”

  He looks at her. “House of Toe Sucker?”

  She shudders. “Okay, house of horror. I get your point.”

  She goes to a café where she’s arranged to meet Jonas.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she says.

  They both think in silence.

  “We could pack up everything of Papa’s,” Jonas says, “and we can throw out some of the furniture or put it into storage with Papa’s stuff. Then you, me and Nika can repaint the house and make it like new. We can do that, Mami, what do you think? That way you don’t have to live with it but if Papa ever comes back, all his stuff will be there for him.”

  “I love it,” she says and she starts sorting things into various piles the minute she gets home.

  And she wonders, as she packs up Hans’s belongings, if he will ever return. She searches for clues for the Healing Lives Ministries but comes up empty. She searches on Hans’s computer again and does not find a single thing there either.

  The only thing she finds in his desk drawer is a leaflet from the psychic convention for a show called Celestial Sound Vibrations and she puts it aside, thinking that she will contact them; they might have seen who Hans was talking to.

  She finds a box filled with family photographs from Hans’s childhood and she studies the people in the pictures, wondering about Kateri and marveling at the girl’s power.

  She also finds two boxes filled with Kateri’s old diaries, books and toiletries. It looks like Hans has kept every single item that his sister left behind.

  And even though she knows that he would have done it a thousand times before, she roots through the contents, looking to see if she can find a clue that somehow, miraculously, the others might have missed; some clue that will explain Kateri’s disappearance.

  But she does not find anything. She does not even get a real sense of the girl; Kateri seems fey. And while she knows that Hans thought her ethereal, Melusine, meeting her for the first time through the remnants of her belongings, finds her boneless, insubstantial and distant. Melusine tells herself that she is being unfair to the girl but she thinks back to her own possessions at fourteen; her books were diverse and interesting and her trinkets spoke volumes about her passions: art, music and science. She packs up Kateri’s things and prepares them for storage.

  She comes across a picture of herself and Hans on their wedding day and she feels a terrible sadness for her naiveté; there was no way she could have known. There was Hans, confident and assured while she looked hesitant but then again, she thinks, that was just her way of smiling to hide her crooked front tooth.

  She does not want to feel anger towards Hans. She sees him as a tragic, unheroic man who cannot be compared to Ingeborg’s Paul who was tragic and yet still heroic — Hans is more the tragedy of pathos. And she does feel sorry for him until she comes across a picture of Hans teaching Jonas to fly a kite. Hans is explaining something and it is not the image of him that moves Melusine to rage, it is Jonas’s stoic little figure standing to attention as his father demonstrates the correct maneuver.

  He wasn’t even six years old! Why couldn’t you just have loved him? Because you couldn’t love anybody except your stupid, perfect sister. Oh, I hate you, Hans, I do.

  She knows this is not true but she says it out loud as she stuffs the photographs into a box. She keeps the pictures of her parents and Jonas, and puts all the others away.

  Nika and Jonas repaint the inside of the house, along with a bunch of Nika’s friends who work at high speed in exchange for generous orders of pizza. Melusine finds painting to be unexpectedly exhausting and she is delighted to buy them as much pizza as they want.

  She and Jonas had argued over colour. Melusine had chosen what she called her ‘Vegas palette’; the rich cinnamon of the desert sand for the kitchen, the vibrant red of the rocks bathed in the glowing evening sun for the living room, the bright yellow of the noonday sun for the hallway and study and the deep cobalt blue of the clear sky for the main bedroom and bathrooms.

  “It will look like a circus,” Jonas objected. “No one has a house like that.”

  They were in a speciality paint store in Frankfurt, having made a day’s trip as Melusine knew that none of the local stores would have the exact tones she had in mind.

  “All the more reason that your mom should,” Nika said, leaning on the counter and playing with swatches. “I love the idea. You’ll see, Jonas, you’ll love it in the end too.”

  And he does.

  “It’s great,” he says when they are finished painting and he is slumped down on the sofa. “Okay, Mami, I was wrong.”

  Melusine further surprises Jonas, Nika and Ana by ordering a huge aerial photograph of Las Vegas, taken at night, with the Strip ablaze with lights and glittering with colour. She has the photograph framed with a thick gold border and the oversized art hangs centrepiece in the living room, covering the place that Hans once stained with his glass of wine.

  “Could you get a picture any bigger?” Ana asks.

  “Actually, no,” Melusine says and she grins. “I was happy there, Ana. I loved it.”

  She tells Gunther about the photograph when she writes to him but his response seems somewhat distant, although she wonders if she is imagining things. She is worried she is losing him too, along with her marriage and all the other things she could rely on in her life. Gunther has been sympathetic about Hans, and while she knows that is the most she could expect from him, she cannot help wishing that he had been willing, or able to do more.

  She is reminded of the periods of silence in the correspondence between Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan and then she tells herself they are not Ingeborg and Paul; Gunther has made it clear he has no use for romanticizing tragedy and she herself is too sensible for poetic madness.

  But even though Gunther is no Paul, she wonders if he is uneasy by what he might
perceive as her increased need for him by the changed circumstances of her life.

  She wants to tell him that she is no Ich, the tragic heroine of Malina. At the end of Malina, the woman disappears into a crack in the wall and the reader is left wondering whether she ever existed at all.

  I exist, Melusine wants to tell Gunther. I no longer doubt my worth or my existence. You have nothing to fear. I will not leach you dry by my need nor will I let what I feel for you smother me.

  In Malina, Ivan, Ich’s lover tells her that without a game their relationship will not work and she tells him she does not want to play any kind of game.

  Melusine wonders if, like Ivan, Gunther wants her to be less accessible, to be remote.

  Melusine knows that she cannot tell Gunther what he means to her and once again “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

  Ingeborg had written to Paul: “I love you and I do not want to love you, it is too much and too difficult…” and Melusine understands. It is too tormenting but she has no choice; she cannot unlove him.

  Melusine decorates the main bedroom with large pictures of the Nevada desert at sunset and she forces herself to start sleeping in the big queensize bed again and after a few tough nights, it is almost as if the bad stuff never happened.

  Her need for sexual release has been dormant for quite some time and she wonders if it is gone forever, banished by the destruction of Hans’s madness. Her writing has also gone quiet, or maybe, she thinks, she simply does not have anything else to say. Yvonne and Isolde had been a sexual release of sorts too and now all her creative and sexual fires have been extinguished.

  She strokes her body as she waits to fall asleep and although she finds the gesture soothing, it is as if her body has lost all power of passion.