by Mariana Leky
MON CHÉRI
If Selma hadn’t dreamed of the okapi the previous night, Martin and I would have gone to the Uhlheck after school like we always did. We would have rebuilt our hut in the forest, which Palm often knocked down when he drank. It didn’t take much. Our hut was already shaky, and the fact that it collapsed so easily provoked Palm to such a degree that he always trampled the remains after it fell.
We would have played weight lifting in the field like we always did. Martin was the weight lifter and I was the audience. Martin would find a branch that didn’t actually weigh very much and would lift it above his head as if it weighed a ton. “And now you must be wondering how the super-heavyweight Vasily Alekseyev was able to lift a hundred and eighty kilos in the snatch. You have to picture it more or less this way,” he would say, holding the branch over his head, letting his narrow shoulders and thin arms tremble and holding his breath until his face turned as bright red as weight lifters’ faces turn in competitions. “He was also called ‘the Crane of Shakhty,’” Martin would say proudly as he took a bow. I would clap. “I’m sure you want to know how Blagoy Blagoev was able to lift a full hundred and eighty-five kilos,” Martin would say with another demonstration of trembling and shaking, and I would clap.
“You have to clap with more enthusiasm,” Martin would say after about the fourth demonstration. I’d try to clap more enthusiastically and would add: “Amazing.”
But that day, after Selma’s dream, we avoided the Uhlheck. Despite the clear blue sky, we were afraid lightning might strike us on the field, a bolt of lightning that couldn’t care less about being meteorologically impossible. We were afraid we might meet something in the forest even more dangerous than Palm, maybe a hellhound that couldn’t care less that it didn’t exist.
From the train station, we went straight to Selma’s. We felt safer there on the day after her dream. We were ten years old and afraid of deaths that could not possibly occur instead of the real one that came in through the door.
* * *
The optician was sitting at Selma’s kitchen table. He held a large leather bag on his lap and was unusually quiet. Selma bustled about, doing housework, wiping away dirt that didn’t exist.
Martin and I sat on the floor and talked the optician into playing the similarity game with us. In the similarity game we would name two things that had nothing to do with each other and the optician had to find a connection.
“Mathematics and calf’s liver,” I said.
“You have to absorb them both and neither is to your taste,” the optician said.
“What does absorb mean?” Martin asked.
“To make something a part of you,” Selma replied.
She stepped onto the kitchen bench next to the optician and brushed would-be dust from the photograph of my grandfather. Selma’s shoelace had come untied.
“A coffeepot and a shoelace,” I said. The optician thought for a moment and Selma stepped down from the bench and tied her shoe.
“Both are used first thing in the morning,” the optician explained, “and when used, they both get your heart rate going.”
“That’s a bit of a stretch,” Selma remarked.
“Doesn’t matter, it’s still true,” the optician said.
“A glass soda bottle and a Christmas tree,” Martin said, and the optician answered: “That one’s easy. Both are most often dark green, both whistle when people or the wind blow in them.”
Selma took a stack of leaflets and television guides from a chair to fluff up the cushion. One of the covers showed the actress who played Maggie in Selma’s series. Last week Maggie’s husband, who was severely injured from an accident, had been unplugged from the machines in the hospital. “Love and death,” I said.
“That one’s easy, too,” the optician said. “You can’t practice for either one and you can’t escape them—both will befall you.”
“What’s befall?” I asked.
“When something bowls you over,” Selma explained.
“And now, outside with both of you,” she said, because she didn’t want us to hide. She wanted us to do what we always did, despite her dream, and it was clear that she would not be contradicted.
“And take Alaska with you,” she said. Alaska stood up. It always takes a while for something big to get up fully, even when still young.
* * *
We crossed the apple orchard to Elsbeth’s house. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. On my fingers, I counted how many hours were left until we could be sure everyone survived Selma’s dream. There were eleven.
Alaska stopped under an apple tree and found a bird that had fallen from its nest. It was still alive and already had feathers but couldn’t fly yet. I wanted to take the bird straight to Selma, convinced she could raise it so that, although it was born a titmouse, it would later trace artistic circles in the air over the Uhlheck.
“Let’s take it with us,” I said.
“No, let’s leave it in peace,” Martin objected.
“Then it will die.”
“Yes. Then it will die.”
I tried to give Martin a look from Selma’s television show and said, “We can’t let that happen.”
“Yes, we can,” Martin said. “It’s the way of the world,” he added, which had also been said in Selma’s show. “Let’s just hope a fox comes soon.”
Then the twins from the upper village ran up. They’d apparently discovered the bird before we did.
“We went to get sticks to kill it,” they said.
“Not a chance,” I said.
“We’re just putting an end to its suffering,” the twins said, the same way Palm would say, “I’m just doing my part to protect the environment,” before going off to shoot animals in the forest.
“Can’t we just wait for a fox?” I asked, but the twins were already beating with their sticks. The first blow missed. The second slipped and wasn’t decisive enough. It just grazed the bird’s head. I saw its little eyes turn red before Martin took my head and pressed my face into his neck. “Don’t watch,” he said. I could still hear the blows of the sticks and I heard Martin yell: “You idiots, just get it over with.”
I decided I would marry Martin one day because I believed that someone who would spare you from having to watch the world take its course had to be the right person.
* * *
“Oh, it’s just you. That’s a nice change,” Elsbeth said when we stood at her door, because half the village had already rung her doorbell that day.
Half the village had slipped through Elsbeth’s garden gate with their coat collars turned up. They’d looked around several times, the way men in the county seat turned up their collars and looked around when they opened the door to Gaby’s Erotic Boutique.
After Selma’s dream, those in the village who were not truly superstitious naturally wanted to do everything they could to ward off possible death and reasoned that maybe it could be deflected with a little trinket. After all, you can never be sure. They rang the bell, flitted into Elsbeth’s front hall, and said contritely, “I just wanted to ask if there’s anything that can be done to protect against death.” Elsbeth looked at them the way a priest looks at congregants who only come to church on Christmas.
Elsbeth had something to guard against gout, against unhappy love, against childlessness, against inopportune hemorrhoids and calves born breech. She had several things to ward off the dead; she knew how to cajole their restless souls out of this world and keep them from coming back. She even had something to erase memory and, of course, had a whole bunch of cures for warts, but she had nothing to protect against death itself. Elsbeth was reluctant to admit it, though, especially if people were finally coming to her for help, so that morning she had told the mayor’s wife that leaning your forehead against that of a horse would keep death away, even though it really only helped ease headaches. But then Elsbeth’s conscience wouldn’t let her rest, so she went looking for the mayor’s wife. She found her in the
stall, her forehead pressed against a horse’s. Elsbeth had rarely seen the mayor’s wife so relaxed. The mayor’s wife and the horse were standing very still, just like Selma and the okapi in the dream. Elsbeth gently put her hand on the mayor’s wife’s shoulder and said, “I lied to you. It only helps with headaches. I don’t have anything to protect against death.”
The mayor’s wife answered without looking up, “But this is very nice, and I think it’s working.”
Elsbeth’s doorbell rang every few minutes. The three of us sat together on the sofa. Alaska curled up next to Elsbeth’s beige-tiled coffee table on which she’d placed two champagne glasses filled with lemonade, and the doorbell kept ringing. And each time she’d just finished asking how school was or what Martin had lifted that day or if we’d rebuilt our hut in the woods, she’d have to jump up and run to the door. Then we’d hear someone ask if she possibly had something to guard against death, we’d hear the someone leave, and Elsbeth calling after: “I do have remedies for toothache or unrequited love, if you ever need them.”
Through the living room window we saw people wave goodbye politely and fold their coat collars back down outside her garden gate.
Martin, Alaska, and I watched Elsbeth as she kept jumping up and running back and forth. She always wore the same style of slippers—she had since the beginning of the world. When the outside edges of the soles wore down because of her bow legs, she switched the right slipper to her left foot and the left slipper to her right, and this lasted for a while until someone took pity on her and gave her a new pair.
Elsbeth was small and round, so round that when she drove, she put a piece of carpet on her stomach so the steering wheel wouldn’t chafe her. Elsbeth’s body was not made for so much back-and-forth. Dark spots formed under her arms and down the back of her dress, which had flowers as big as the ones on the living room wallpaper. Finally she said, “Children, you see how busy it is here. Go and see sad Marlies.”
“Do we have to?” we asked.
“Be nice,” Elsbeth said, and jumped up when the doorbell rang again. “Someone has to check on her.”
* * *
Strictly speaking, Marlies wasn’t sad, she was bad-tempered. The grown-ups always spoke of Marlies’s sadness to Martin and me to make us feel bad for her. They knew if they told us Marlies was sad, we’d have to visit her out of decency and then they wouldn’t have to go themselves. Visiting Marlies was not exactly fun, so they always sent us.
She lived at the end of the village. Martin said this was convenient because if robbers tried to attack the village from the back, Marlies’s foul mood would scare them away.
We went through her garden gate and made a wide arc around her mailbox, where a bee nest hung, which Marlies simply would not allow to be removed. The mailman refused to put letters in Marlies’s mailbox because of the bees, so he stuck them in the garden gate, where they always ended up soaked in the rain.
“Can we come in?” we asked when Marlies opened the door a crack, and Marlies said, “I don’t want the dog in here.”
“Sit, Alaska,” I said. Alaska stretched out in front of the steps to Marlies’s little house because he suspected we could be a while.
We followed her into the kitchen. Marlies had not chosen a single thing in the house herself. The house and every last piece of furniture had belonged to her aunt: the bed upstairs, the night table, the wardrobe, the dark three-piece suite, the wrought-iron shelves in the living room, the carpet, the moldy cupboards, the stove and refrigerator, the kitchen table, the two chairs, even the heavy, sticky pans hanging above the stove.
Marlies’s aunt had hanged herself in the kitchen at the age of ninety-two, which Marlies could not understand. In her opinion, committing suicide at ninety-two was hardly worth the trouble. Marlies often talked about her aunt, an intolerably prickly person, utterly unreasonable and always in a foul mood.
“And that’s where she was hanging,” Marlies said every time we came into her kitchen. She said it this time, too, and pointed to the hook next to the ceiling light. Martin and I did not look up.
The only thing in the house that came from Marlies was the smell. The house smelled of cigarettes, of cheap deodorant’s feeble efforts against acrid sweat, of food left out for days, of cheerfulness that had expired decades ago, of smoldering fires extinguished in ashtrays, of garbage, of tree-shaped air fresheners and damp laundry left too long in the basket. Marlies walked with a stoop even though she was in her twenties. Her perm was half grown out, and her hair was as brittle as straw. Whenever I saw Marlies’s hair, I thought of the shampoo in the local shop, “Schauma for assaulted hair.” Martin and I found the wording odd because we thought you could only be assaulted by hellhounds, lightning, Palm, or criminals, and even then they didn’t usually attack your hair. Through Marlies we learned that chronic bad temper, too, could be belligerent and attack hair as well.
Marlies dropped onto a kitchen chair. As usual, she wore only a baggy Norwegian sweater and underwear. Her panties were the kind sold in the local shop in packages of three colors. Selma wore the same kind. However, you never knew if Marlies was wearing the yellow, apricot, or light blue pair because they were all as faded as the look she gave us when she asked, “So, what’s up?”
“We just wanted to see how you’re doing,” Martin said.
“Don’t worry about me, I’m definitely not the one,” Marlies said regretfully, as if she were playing a lottery with extremely low odds of winning.
“Do you want something to eat?” Marlies asked, a question we’d been dreading.
“Yes,” we said. We desperately wanted to say no, but Elsbeth had drummed into us that if we didn’t eat sad Marlies’s food, she would be even sadder.
Marlies went to the stove, poured peas from an open can onto two dessert plates, slapped a lump of cold mashed potatoes next to them, and topped each plate with a slice of boiled ham. She set the plates on the table and dropped back onto her chair.
There was only one other chair in the kitchen. “Do you have anything else to sit on?” I asked.
“No,” Marlies said, and turned on the small television on top of the refrigerator. Selma’s show was on.
Martin sat down and patted his thigh. I sat on his lap.
The mashed potatoes were the same indeterminate color as Marlies’s underwear. The peas lay in a snot-colored puddle. The ham was shiny and covered with spots that looked like badly healed vaccination marks.
Martin and I simultaneously stuffed a forkful into our mouths and looked at each other. Martin chewed. “Get it over with as fast as you can,” he said, and shoveled it all quickly into his mouth.
The peas in my mouth didn’t get smaller, they swelled. I glanced at Marlies, who was watching Selma’s show, and I spit the peas and mashed potatoes back onto my plate. “I an’t eat it, Martin,” I whispered.
Martin’s plate was soon empty. He grabbed a bottle of water and washed down the peas and potatoes. Then he looked at my full plate. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but there’s no way I can get that down, too. It would make me throw up.”
He burped and, looking panicky, he put his hand over his mouth. Marlies turned toward him.
“Taste good?”
“Yes, thanks,” Martin said.
“You’ve hardly touched yours. Eat up before it gets cold,” she said to me, as if the food had ever been warm, and then turned back to the television. On the screen were Matthew and Melissa, whose destinies Selma was following feverishly. They were standing in the middle of a field, and Matthew said, “I love you, Melissa, but you know our love doesn’t stand a chance.”
“Stand up for a second,” Martin whispered. I got up quietly so that Marlies wouldn’t look around, but she was watching Melissa say, “I love you, too.”
Martin scooped my peas and mashed potatoes onto one slice of ham and covered it with the other. Then he slipped the badly packed mush into the front pocket of his shorts. Martin wore light red Bermuda shorts with deep
pockets.
On the television, Melissa said, “But, Matthew, we belong together,” and the theme music started playing. Marlies turned off the television and faced us.
“Seconds?”
“Thanks, but no,” Martin said.
“Why are you standing there?” Marlies asked. I was standing because I didn’t want to smoosh the pea-and-potato mush into Martin’s shorts.
“Because there’s no chair,” I said.
“Sit back down on your friend’s lap,” Marlies said, “you’re making me nervous standing there.”
I thought of the optician, who often couldn’t sit because of his back trouble. “I’ve got a problem with my disks because of my primarily sedentary occupation.”
“So young, and already falling apart.” Marlies sighed.
She lit another cigarette, a long Peer 100. She smoked and tapped her ashes onto my empty plate. Marlies started muttering. She could just as well have been talking to Matthew and Melissa. I stood next to the kitchen table and watched from the corner of my eye as an enormous dark patch spread rapidly over Martin’s light red shorts. Martin scooted his chair close to the table so Marlies wouldn’t notice anything if she stood up. But she stayed in her chair and told us that she didn’t like the television show and hadn’t liked the last May Festival and she definitely wouldn’t like the next episode or the next May Festival, either. “Why didn’t you like the last May Festival?” Martin asked, pulling in his stomach because the mush had reached his waistband.