Memory Wall: Stories

by Anthony Doerr

  Sundays Li Qing comes by and sits with her for a few hours, drinking beer. Lately he brings Penny Ou, a divorcée with a gentle voice and a trio of moles mushrooming off the side of her nose. Sometimes they bring her son, a round-faced nine-year-old named Jie. They eat stew, or noodles with bean sprouts, and talk of nothing.

  Jie swings his feet back and forth beneath the table. A radio burbles on the sideboard. Afterward Penny takes the dishes to the sink and washes and dries them and stacks them in the cupboard.

  The days seem made of twilight, immaterial as shadows. Memories, when they come, are often viscous and weak, trapped beneath distant surfaces, or caught in neurofibrillary tangles. She stands over the full bathtub but cannot remember filling it. She goes to fill the kettle but finds it steaming.

  Her seeds sit moldering or cracking or expired altogether in a prefabricated plywood dresser that came with the apartment. Occasionally she stares at it, its unvarnished face, its eight shiny knobs, and a sensation nags at the back of her consciousness, a feeling like she has misplaced something but can no longer remember what it is.

  Her mother used to say seeds were links in a chain, not beginnings or endings, but she was wrong: Seeds are both beginnings and ends—they are a plant’s eggshell and its coffin. Orchards crouch invisibly inside each one. For a school project Jie brings over six Styrofoam cups filled with peat. The seed keeper offers him six magnolia seeds, each bright as a drop of blood.

  The boy pokes a hole into each cupful of dirt with a finger; he drops the seeds in like tiny bombs. They put the cups on her windowsill. Water. Soil. Light. “Now we wait,” she says.

  We go round the world only to come back again. A seed coat splits, a tiny rootlet emerges. On the news a government official denies reports of cracks in the dam’s ship locks. Li Qing calls: He’s going to be traveling this week. Things are very busy. Penny Ou will try to stop by.

  The seed keeper goes to the window. In the plaza, tides of people drift in a hundred directions; bicyclists, commuters, beggars, trash collectors, shoppers, policemen. Teacher Ke would have aged even more; it would hardly be possible for him to still be alive. And yet: What if he is one of those figures down there, inside one of those cars, one of the shapes on the sidewalk, a head and shoulders, the infinitesimal tops of his shoes?

  Out past the square, tens of thousands of lights tremble in the wind, airplanes and shopfronts and billboards, guide lights and lamps behind windows and warning lights on antennas. Above them a handful of stars show themselves for a moment, murky, scarcely visible between clouds, flashing blue and red and white. Then they’re gone.

  The River Nemunas

  My name is Allison. I’m fifteen years old. My parents are dead. I have a poodle named Mishap in a pet carrier between my ankles and a biography of Emily Dickinson in my lap. The flight attendant keeps refilling my apple juice. I’m thirty-six thousand feet over the Atlantic Ocean and out my smudgy little window the whole world has turned to water.

  I’m moving to Lithuania. Lithuania is in the upper-right corner of Europe. Over by Russia. On the world map at school, Lithuania is pink.

  Grandpa Z is waiting for me outside baggage claim. His belly looks big enough to fit a baby inside. He hugs me for a long time. Then he lifts Mishap out of his carrier and hugs Mishap, too.

  Lithuania doesn’t look pink. More like gray. Grandpa Z’s little Peugeot is green and smells like rock dust. The sky sits low over the highway. We drive past hundreds of half-finished concrete apartment buildings that look as if they’ve been hit by tornadoes once or twice. There are big Nokia signs and bigger Aquafresh signs.

  Grandpa Z says, Aquafresh is good toothpaste. You have Aquafresh in Kansas?

  I tell him we use Colgate.

  He says, I find you Colgate.

  We merge onto a four-lane divided highway. The land on both sides is broken into pastures that look awfully muddy for early July. It starts to rain. The Peugeot has no windshield wipers. Mishap dozes in my lap. Lithuania turns a steamy green. Grandpa Z drives with his head out the window.

  Eventually we stop at a house with a peaked wooden roof and a central chimney. It looks exactly like the twenty other houses crowded around it.

  Home, says Grandpa Z, and Mishap jumps out.

  The house is long and narrow, like a train car. Grandpa Z has three rooms: a kitchen in front, a bedroom in the middle, and a bathroom in the back. Outside there’s a shed. He unfolds a card table. He brings me a little stack of Pringles on a plate. Then a steak. No green beans, no dinner rolls, nothing like that. We sit on the edge of his bed to eat. Grandpa Z doesn’t say grace so I whisper it to myself. Bless us O Lord and these thy gifts. Mishap sniffs around skeptically between my feet.

  Halfway through his steak Grandpa Z looks up at me and there are tears on his cheeks.

  It’s okay, I say. I’ve been saying it’s okay a lot lately. I’ve said it to church ladies and flight attendants and counselors. I say, I’m fine, it’s okay. I don’t know if I’m fine or if it’s okay, or if saying it makes anyone feel better. Mostly it’s just something to say.

  It was cancer. In case you were wondering. First they found it in Mom and she got her breasts cut off and her ovaries cut out but it was still in her, and then Dad got tested and it was in his lungs. I imagined cancer as a tree: a big, black, leafless tree inside Mom and another inside Dad. Mom’s tree killed her in March. Dad’s killed him three months later.

  I’m an only child and have no other relatives so the lawyers sent me to live with Grandpa Z. The Z is for Zydrunas.

  Grandpa Z’s bed is in the kitchen because he’s giving me the bedroom. The walls are bare plaster and the bed groans and the sheets smell like dust on a hot bulb. There’s no shade on the window. On the dresser is a brand-new pink panda, which is sort of for babies, but also sort of cute. A price tag is still pinned to its ear: 39.99 Lt. The Lt is for litas. I don’t know if 39.99 is a lot or a little.

  After I turn off the lamp, all I see is black. Something goes tap tap tap against the ceiling. I can hear Mishap panting at the foot of the bed. My three duffel bags, stacked against the wall, contain everything I own in the world.

  Do I sound faraway? Do I sound lost? Probably I am. I whisper: Dear God, please watch over Mom in Heaven and please watch over Dad in Heaven and please watch over me in Lithuania. And please watch over Mishap, too. And Grandpa Z.

  And then I feel the Big Sadness coming on, like there’s a shiny and sharp axe blade buried inside my chest. The only way I can stay alive is to remain absolutely motionless so instead of whispering Dear God how could you do this to me, I only whisper Amen which Pastor Jenks back home told me means I believe, and I lie with my eyelids closed clutching Mishap and inhaling his smell, which always smells to me like corn chips, and practice breathing in light and breathing out a color—light, green, light, yellow—like the counselor told me to do when the panic comes.

  * * *

  At 4 a.m. the sun is already up. I sit in a lawn chair beside Grandpa’s shed and watch Mishap sniff around in Lithuania. The sky is silver and big scarves of mist drag through the fields. A hundred little black birds land on the roof of Grandpa’s shed, then take off again.

  Each house in Grandpa Z’s little cluster of identical houses has lace curtains. The windows are all the same but the lace is different in each one. One has a floral pattern, one a linear pattern, and another has circles butted up against each other. As I look, an old woman pushes aside a zigzag-patterned curtain in one of the windows. She puts on a pair of huge glasses and waves me over and I can see there are tubes hooked through her nose.

  Her house is twenty feet away from Grandpa Z’s and it’s full of Virgin Mary statues and herbs and smells like carrot peels. A man in a track suit in the back room is asleep on a bed with no blankets. The old lady unhooks herself from a machine that looks like two scuba tanks hung on a wheeled rack, and she pats the couch and says a bunch of words to me in Russian. Her mouth is full of gold. She has a marble-si
zed mole under her right eye. Her calves are like bowling pins and she is barefoot and her toes look beaten and crushed.

  She nods at something I don’t say and turns on a massive flat-screen television propped up on two cinderblocks, and together we watch a pastor give mass on TV. The colors are skewed and the audio is garbled. In his church there are maybe twenty-five people in folding chairs. When I was a baby Mom talked to me in Lithuanian so I can understand some of the pastor’s sermon. There’s something about his daddy falling off his roof. He says this means that just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in it. I can’t tell if he means Jesus or gravity.

  Afterward the old lady brings me a big hot stuffed potato covered with bacon bits. She watches me eat through her huge, steamy eyeglasses.

  Thanks, I say in Lithuanian, which sounds like achoo. She stares off into oblivion.

  When I get back to Grandpa Z’s house he has a magazine open in his lap with space diagrams in it.

  You are at Mrs. Sabo’s?

  I was. Past tense, Grandpa.

  Grandpa Z circles a finger beside his ear. Mrs. Sabo no more remember things, he says. You understand?

  I nod.

  I read here, Grandpa Z says, clearing his throat, that Earth has three moons. He bites his lower lip, thinking through the English. No, it used to has three moons. Earth used to has three moons. Long time ago. What do you think of this?

  You want to know? What it’s like? To prop up the dam? To keep your fingers plugged in its cracks? To feel like every single breath that passes is another betrayal, another step farther away from what you were and where you were and who you were, another step deeper into the darkness? Grandpa Z came to Kansas twice this spring. He sat in the rooms and smelled the smells. Now he leans forward till I can see the little red lightning bolts of veins in his eyes. You want to speak?

  No thanks.

  I mean talk, he says. Talk, Allie?

  No. Thanks.

  No? But to talk is good, no?

  Grandpa Z makes gravestones. Gravestones in Lithuania aren’t quite like the ones in America. They’re glossy and smooth and made of granite, but most of them are etched with likenesses of the people buried underneath them. They’re like black-and-white photos carved right into the stones. They’re expensive and everyone spends money on them. Poor people, Grandpa Z says, spend the most. Sometimes he etches faces while other times he does the deceased’s whole body, like a tall man standing in a leather jacket, life-size, very realistic, buttons on the cuffs and freckles on the cheeks. Grandpa Z shows me a Polaroid of a tombstone he made of a famous mobster. The stone is seven feet tall and has a life-size portrait of a man with his hands in his pockets sitting on the hood of a Mercedes. He says the family paid extra to have a halo added around the man’s head.

  Monday morning Grandpa Z goes to his workshop and school doesn’t start for two months so I’m left alone in the house. By noon I’ve looked through all of Grandpa Z’s drawers and his one closet. In the shed I find two fishing rods and an old aluminum boat under a tarp and eight jars of Lithuanian pennies and thousands of mouse-chewed British magazines: Popular Science and Science Now and British Association for the Advancement of Physics. There are magazines on polar bears and Mayan calendars and cell biology and lots of things I don’t understand. Inside are faded cosmonauts and gorillas hooked up to machines and cartoon cars driving around on Mars.

  Then Mrs. Sabo shows up. She shouts something in her derelict Russian and goes over to a chest of drawers and pulls open a cigarette box and inside are photographs.

  Motina, she says, and points at me.

  I say, I thought you couldn’t remember things.

  But she is sticking the photos under my nose like she has just remembered something and wants to get it out before she forgets it. Motina means Mom. All the photos contain Mom when she was a girl. Here she is in a polar bear costume and here she is frowning over what might be a lawnmower engine and here she is tramping barefoot through mud.

  Mrs. Sabo and I lay out the pictures in a grid on Grandpa Z’s card table. There are sixty-eight of them. Five-year-old Mom scowls in front of a rusted-out Soviet tank. Six-year-old Mom peels an orange. Nine-year-old Mom stands in the weeds. Looking at the photos starts a feeling in my gut like maybe I want to dig a shallow hole in the yard and lie down in it.

  I separate out twelve of the pictures. In each of them, my mom—my Subaru-driving, cashew-eating, Barry Manilow—listening, Lithuanian-immigrant, dead-because-of-cancer Mom—is either standing in murky water or leaning over the side of a junky-looking boat, helping to hold up some part of a creepy and gigantic shark.

  Erketas, Mrs. Sabo says, and nods gravely. Then she coughs for about two minutes straight.

  Erketas?

  But by now the coughing has shaken all the comprehension out of her. The man in the track suit, her son, comes over and says something and Mrs. Sabo stares at the lower part of his face for a while and eventually he coaxes her back to her house. Grandpa Z comes home from his job at 2:31.

  Grandpa, I say, your toilet paper might as well be made out of gravel.

  He nods thoughtfully.

  And is this my mom, I ask, with all these great whites?

  Grandpa looks at the pictures and blinks and puts a knuckle between his teeth. For maybe thirty seconds he doesn’t answer. He looks like he’s standing outside an elevator waiting for the doors to open.

  Finally he says, Erketas. He goes to a book in a box on the floor and opens it and pages through it and looks up and looks back down and says, Sturgeon.

  Sturgeon. Erketas means sturgeon?

  River fish. From the river.

  We eat sausage for dinner. No bread, no salad. All through the meal the photos of Mom stare up at us.

  I rinse the dishes. Grandpa Z says, You walk with me, Allie?

  He leads me and Mishap across the field behind the colony of houses. There are neat little vegetable gardens and goats staked here and there. Grasshoppers skitter out in front of us. We clamber over a fence and pick our way around cow dung and nettles. The little trail heads toward some willows and on the other side is a river: quiet and brown, surprisingly far across. At first the river looks motionless, like a lake, but the more I look, the more I see it’s moving very slowly.

  Mishap sneezes. I don’t think he’s ever seen a river before. A line of cows saunters along on the far bank.

  Grandpa Z says, Fishing. Is where your mother goes. Used to go. Past tense. He laughs an unsmiling laugh. Sometimes with her grandpa. Sometimes with Mrs. Sabo.

  What’s it called?

  River Nemunas. It is called River Nemunas.

  Every hour the thought floats to the surface: If we’re all going to end up happy together in Heaven then why does anyone wait? Every hour the Big Sadness hangs behind my ribs, sharp and gleaming, and it’s all I can do to keep breathing.

  Mrs. Sabo, Grandpa Z says, is either 90 years old or 94 years old. Not even her son knows for sure. She has lived through the first Lithuanian independence and the second one, too. She fought with the Russians the first time, against them the second time. Back when all these houses were a collective farm under the Soviets, she used to take a rowboat every day for thirty-five years and row six miles up the river to work in a chemical plant. She went fishing when no women went fishing, he says.

  Nowadays Mrs. Sabo has to be hooked up to her oxygen machine every night. She doesn’t seem to mind if I come over to watch TV. We turn the volume up really high to hear over the wheezing and banging of her pump. Sometimes we watch the Lithuanian pastor, sometimes we watch cartoons. Sometimes it’s so late we only watch a channel that shows a satellite map of the world, rotating forever across the screen.

  I’ve been in Lithuania two weeks when Counselor Mike calls on Grandpa Z’s cell phone. Counselor Mike, a lawyer who chews bubblegum and wears basketball shorts. It’s two in the morning in Kansas. He asks how I’m adjusting. Hearing his wide-open American v
oice calls up for me in a sudden rush summertime Kansas. It’s like it’s right there on the other end of the phone, the air silky, the last porch lights switched off, a fog of gnats hovering above Brown’s Pond, the moon coming to earth through sheets and layers and curtains of moisture, streetlights sending soft columns of light onto grocery store parking lots. And somewhere in that sleepy darkness Counselor Mike sits at his clunky kitchen table in his socks and asks an orphan in Lithuania how she’s adjusting.

  It takes me a full ten seconds to say, I’m fine, it’s okay.

  He says he needs to talk to Grandpa. We got an offer on the house, he says. Grown-up stuff.

  Is the offer good?

  Any offer is good.

  I don’t know what to say to that. I can hear music coming from his end, faraway and full of static. What does Counselor Mike listen to, deep in the Kansas night?

  We’re praying for you, Allie, he says.

  Who’s we?

  Us at the office. And at church. Everyone. Everyone is praying for you.

  Grandpa’s at work, I say.

  Later I walk Mishap across the field and over the fence and through the rocks to the river. The cows are still on the far side, eating whatever cows eat and whipping their tails back and forth.

  Five thousand miles away Counselor Mike is planning to sell the orange plastic tiles Dad glued to the basement floor and the dent I put in the dining room wall and the raspberry bushes Mom planted in the backyard. He’s going to sell our warped baking sheets and half-used shampoos and the six Jedi drinking glasses we got from Pizza Hut that Dad said we could keep only after asking our pastor if Star Wars would have been “endorsed by Jesus.” Everything, all of it, our junk, our dregs, our memories. And I’ve got the family poodle and three duffel bags of too small clothes and four photo albums, but no one left who can flesh out any of the photos. I’m five thousand miles and four weeks away and every minute that ratchets past is another minute that the world has kept on turning without Mom and Dad in it. And I’m supposed to live with Grandpa Z in Lithuania, what, for the rest of my life?