What You Can See from Here

by Mariana Leky

  “Because I’ve never liked it,” Marlies said.

  “Come on, Martin, let’s go,” I whispered.

  “Why do you watch the show if you don’t even like it?” Martin asked.

  I bent down as if I had to tie my shoes. I looked under the table. The ham-and-pea goo kept spreading. Martin’s calf was covered with goose bumps, and a trickle of greenish canned pea liquid ran down his leg.

  “Because the other shows are even worse garbage,” Marlies said.

  “Unfortunately, we really have to go now,” I said.

  We stood up, and Martin slipped close behind me. “Bye, Marlies,” we said, and Martin followed me out right on my heels.

  * * *

  “Thanks,” I said outside. “For that you can lift me a thousand times.”

  Martin laughed. “But not right now,” he said.

  Behind Marlies’s house he took off his shorts and shook out the pocket. The ham and mush fell on the grass. We pulled the pocket inside out and scraped off the peas and clumps of mashed potatoes.

  “I need new shorts,” Martin said.

  Our hands were sticky. We held them out to Alaska, but he refused to lick them clean. Martin pulled his shorts back on and we ran to his house.

  We stopped abruptly when we saw Palm standing at their garden gate. We hadn’t expected to see Palm. We thought he’d be out in the field.

  “Let’s go to my house,” I whispered. “I’ll lend you some shorts.” But his father had seen us.

  “Come here, right now,” he shouted, and we approached the fence behind which the dogs were barking. Alaska tried to hide behind Martin’s legs.

  Palm stared at Martin’s shorts. “Did you piss yourself or what?” he yelled. He stank of schnapps and shook Martin by the shoulder. Martin’s head swung back and forth. Martin didn’t say a word and shut his eyes.

  “It’s not his fault,” I said. “He scooped up my peas. It’s not his fault, Palm.”

  “Are you a goddamn baby or what?” Palm roared, and Martin kept his eyes closed. He seemed strangely relaxed, as if he were standing in front of the local train door reciting what I was looking at: field, forest, pasture, meadow, meadow.

  “He only wanted to help me,” I said.

  Palm bent down toward me and stared. His complexion was mottled, as if he had once had feathers and someone had yanked them out. Whenever Palm looked at me, I wondered how someone so filled with darkness could ever have known anything about luminous bodies.

  “You think you can make a fool of me,” he hissed, and his hiss was even worse than his yelling.

  I thought of the little bird, of its eye that turned red with the first blow, and I didn’t want the world to take its course, the world in the form of Palm.

  I stood in front of Martin. “Leave him alone,” I shouted.

  Palm pushed me away. Light as I was, I fell down even faster than the hut in the forest. Palm grabbed Martin, whose eyes were still closed, and dragged him into the house. Alaska growled for the first and only time in his life. The door slammed so hard it seemed it would never open again.

  I felt nauseated. Death between four walls instead of outdoors suddenly no longer seemed so unlikely. The dogs in the yard barked. I stood there, staring at the door behind which Martin had disappeared, and then at everything around it. Pasture, field. Forest.

  WITH DEEPEST SYMPATHIES

  After Palm had pulled Martin inside, I ran to my mother’s flower shop, the closest refuge. Her store was called Fresh as a Daisy. My mother was proud of the name, but my father thought it was fatuous. It smelled of lilies and pine trees because my mother kept a lot of wreaths in stock. She supplied flowers and funeral wreaths not just to our village, but to the surrounding villages as well. She was always very busy. Whenever I rushed to see her, I had to brake and wait until she finished something or other: a phone call about the phrasing for the bow on a wreath or about the color of the flower arrangements for a wedding banquet, or a conversation with the mayor’s wife, who needed a bouquet for the wife of the mayor in the neighboring village.

  Eventually my mother would finish what she was doing and turn to me. But there was always something else that needed to be done. She was always occupied with something, even when she turned to me, and this something was a question—one that had lived inside her for more than five years.

  My mother had been wondering if she should leave my father. This question filled her from head to toe. She only ever asked herself, but she asked it so often and with such intensity that she never had time to find an answer. The constant questioning even caused her to hallucinate. Looking at the funeral wreath ribbons, she did not read “Sincere Condolences,” “With Deepest Sympathies,” or “In Eternal Memory,” but “Should I Leave Him?” in a bold and suitably decorative font.

  “Should I Leave Him?” didn’t just appear on the funeral wreath ribbons. It was everywhere. When my mother opened her eyes in the morning, the question was already wide awake and dancing under her nose. It swirled in her cup when she poured milk into her first coffee of the day and formed in the smoke of her first cigarette. It dusted the coat collars of the customers in the flower shop or stuck in their hats. It was imprinted on the wrapping paper for the flowers and it steamed from the pot when she cooked dinner.

  The question could also get violent. It rooted around inside my mother the way you rummage in a bag for your keys. It fished everything out of my mother that it didn’t need, and that was a lot.

  “Are you actually listening to me?” I sometimes asked when telling her I’d learned something new—how to tell time, say, or how to tie a bow. And my mother would reply, “Of course I’m listening, sweetheart,” and she would try to listen, but her question was always louder than anything I was saying. Much later I wondered if the question would have given up and made room for me if Selma and the optician hadn’t always been there, if I hadn’t always had them to turn to, if they hadn’t invented the world together.

  “So, what’s the matter, Luisy?” my mother asked.

  “I’m afraid something will happen to Martin because of Selma’s dream and because of Palm.”

  My mother stroked my hair. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Are you even listening to me?” I asked.

  “Of course I am. Why don’t you just go over to Martin’s and cheer him up,” she said, and a customer from the next village came in, so I ran to Selma’s.

  * * *

  The baying dogs in Palm’s yard were on long chains. Alaska stopped at the fence. Selma and I pressed up against the side of the house. The dogs lunged at us, but the chains yanked them back mid-leap. They fell backward, but immediately scrambled onto their feet again.

  I grabbed Selma’s hand. “Do you think the chains will hold?” I asked.

  “They won’t break. Palm has good chains,” Selma said.

  She grabbed a broom leaning against the house next to the door and tried to sweep the dogs away. “Get lost, you hellhounds,” she yelled, which didn’t impress the dogs. She hammered on the door with her fist.

  A window on the second floor opened and Palm looked out.

  “Call off your dogs and let your son be. And if you touch Luisa one more time I’m going to poison your goddamn mutts, I swear.”

  Palm grinned and shouted, “I can’t hear you, the dogs are too loud.”

  Selma slung the broom at the dogs. It hit one on the leg. The dog tripped, yelped, and scrambled back up. “Leave my dogs alone,” Palm roared. I closed my eyes tight and buried my face in Selma’s shirt. Her chest rose as she took a deep breath.

  “Listen to me, Palm,” she said more calmly. “Luisa’s afraid you’ll do something to Martin.”

  “Do something,” Palm mimicked her. He reached to the right and pulled Martin to the window. “Did I do anything to you?” Palm asked.

  As usual, one strand was standing up on Martin’s always well-combed head. You could flatten it as often as you’d like, it would be standing on end agai
n after a few minutes, as if it wanted to point out something overhead.

  Martin cleared his throat. “No,” he said.

  The dogs bayed. “Listen to me, Martin. I’ve got my eye on your father. We’ve all got our eyes on your father.”

  Friedhelm came waltzing down the street, his arms spread as if he were dancing with someone we couldn’t see, singing, Oh, you lovely Westerwald.

  The shutters came rattling down on the house across the street. Palm laughed.

  “If I were you, I’d get lost, Selma,” he shouted. “Those chains have seen better days.” Then he closed the window.

  We turned to face the dogs. Selma pulled off a shoe, threw it into the pack, and hit one of the dogs on the head. It fell, yelped, and scrambled back up. Selma’s shoe was lost. The dogs crowded around it as if it were a slain rabbit. “I’m watching you, Palm,” Selma shouted, and threw her other shoe at the dogs. We went home, Selma barefoot.

  It was five o’clock in the evening. Ten more hours, I thought, and wanted to count them off just to make sure, but Selma took my hand, with its fingers spread for counting, closed it into a fist, and held it in her own until we got home.

  * * *

  At that time, at five o’clock, when half the village had already been to see Elsbeth and it was quieter at her place than she liked, an imp jumped onto the nape of her neck. It was one of those invisible hobgoblins that usually leap onto the shoulders of people out wandering at night. But since Elsbeth was constantly roaming through her house with the silence roaring in her ears like a forest at night, she wasn’t at all surprised that the imp had perched on her by mistake.

  The imp repeated what half the village had said. It chattered about Selma’s dream and said that possibly, but probably not, no, certainly not, but then again just maybe, yes, definitely, someone was going to die.

  With the imp perched on her neck, Elsbeth went to the telephone. She had a few truths of her own that wanted out at the very last minute, and the imp was whispering that the very last minute might well come soon.

  Elsbeth called Selma, because Selma was the best person to call when you were afraid. No one answered. Selma had her hands full with other hellhounds at that very moment. Elsbeth stood in front of the little telephone side table for a long time, an endless ringing in her ear.

  She knew what Selma would say, namely: “Do exactly what you would do on any other day.”

  Elsbeth hung up.

  “What would I do right now on any other day?” she asked, and the imp said, “Unfortunately, today is not any other day.”

  Elsbeth tried not to listen. “What would I do now?” she asked again, louder.

  “You should be afraid,” the imp replied.

  “No,” Elsbeth said. “I should go buy some cornstarch.”

  * * *

  The line in the general store was short. While she waited, Elsbeth tried to free herself from the imp’s grip, but it wasn’t easy, unfortunately, because with the cornstarch she only had one hand free. She paid and hurried out. The sound of ringing echoed in her head, the telephone ringing endlessly at Selma’s. Elsbeth didn’t know how to make it stop, the ringing or the imp’s intrusions, and then suddenly the optician was standing in front of her.

  “Hello,” he said. The ringing stopped and the imp, too, was silenced.

  “Hello,” Elsbeth said. “Did you do your shopping?”

  “Yes, heat patches for my back,” the optician said.

  “Cornstarch for me,” Elsbeth said.

  The shopkeeper’s supplier was pushing a cart as tall as he was, filled with groceries and covered with a gray tarp, into the store. He stopped halfway through the doorway to tie his shoelaces. The cart looks like a monstrous gray wall of regret, before which we will all eventually kneel, Elsbeth thought.

  “How poetic,” the imp remarked, and Elsbeth, embarrassed, was suddenly unsure if she had said it out loud.

  “Would you like one?” the optician asked.

  “One what?”

  “A heat patch. I mean, just because you keep grabbing at the back of your neck. It’s great for aching muscles,” the optician said.

  “Yes, please,” Elsbeth said.

  The optician’s shop was right next to the general store. “Come in. I’ll put one on you right now.”

  He unlocked the door and took off his jacket. On his sweater vest was a small badge that said Employee of the Month.

  “But you’re the only one here,” Elsbeth said.

  “I know, it’s supposed to be a joke.”

  “I see.” Elsbeth was never good at getting jokes. Suddenly she could hear her dead husband’s exasperated voice in her ear, “For God’s sake, Elsbeth, it was a joke,” but maybe it was the imp.

  “Martin and Luisa think it’s funny,” the optician said.

  “So do I,” Elsbeth reassured him. “Very funny, even.”

  And the optician said, “Go on, have a seat.”

  Elsbeth sat down on the stool in front of the phoropter, the instrument the optician used to test vision. When we were younger, the optician told Martin and me that you could see the future with it. Given the way a phoropter looks, we believed it immediately, and secretly did for a long time.

  “You’ll have to uncover your shoulder area,” the optician said.

  Elsbeth raised both hands to the nape of her neck and undid the zipper on the back of her tight dress. This alone provided some relief. She pulled the neckline down over her round shoulders to completely uncover the back of her neck—as uncovered as something can be with an imp sitting on it, an imp with very tired little arms who had luckily become very taciturn.

  The optician opened the package of heat patches and peeled away the protective paper. “This isn’t the right size for your neck, but it will stay,” he said.

  Elsbeth thought of the very last minute and asked herself if the optician was made for secret truths.

  The optician carefully placed the heat patch on the nape of her neck and pressed it with his hands so it would stick. The warmth slowly crept under Elsbeth’s skin. The imp jumped off.

  “Can I tell you a secret?” Elsbeth asked.

  SEX WITH RENATA BLOWS MY MIND

  Selma and I went home. Her two-story house was built on a slope with the forest at its back. It was a ramshackle building, and the optician was convinced that Selma’s love was all that held it upright. My father had suggested several times that she should have it torn down and a new one built in its place, but Selma didn’t want to hear it. She knew my father saw the house as a metaphor for nothing less than life, an off-kilter life in danger of collapse.

  My dead grandfather, Selma’s husband, had built the house, so how could she let it be torn down?

  My grandfather had shown Selma an okapi for the first time, in a black-and-white photograph he had found in a newspaper. He’d shown it to her with as much joy as if he had been the first to discover the okapi in real life and hadn’t merely found it in a newspaper.

  “What kind of creature is that?” Selma had asked.

  “It’s an okapi, my dearest, and if such a thing exists, then anything is possible—even that you might marry me and that I might build us a house,” my grandfather had said. “Yes, me,” he’d added when Selma looked at him skeptically. My grandfather had distinguished himself as her great love, but not so much as a carpenter.

  His name was Heinrich, like Iron Henry in the fairy tale of the Frog King, but he must not have been particularly ironclad, since he died long before I was born. But whenever anyone said “Heinrich,” Martin and I still shouted the line from the fairy tale in chorus, “The coach is breaking!”—which Selma didn’t find the least bit funny.

  No one had explicitly told me that my grandfather had died; it was something I had concluded on my own. Selma claimed that Heinrich had fallen in the war, which sounded to me like he had tripped. My father said he hadn’t come home from the war, which sounded to me like the war was somewhere you stayed for a long time at s
ome point in your life.

  Martin and I admired my grandfather because he’d often behaved more mischievously, if not outrageously, than we would ever dare. Again and again we asked Elsbeth to tell us how as a child my grandfather had been suspended from school because he’d hoisted the principal’s camel-hair coat up the flagpole, or how he’d shown up in school one day with a homemade bandage wrapped around his head and claimed that he hadn’t been able to do his homework because of a basilar skull fracture. We’d shout, “The coach is breaking!” and sometimes my father would add, “Not the coach but the house,” which also didn’t amuse Selma.

  In fact, the floor in the downstairs apartment was so thin in places that Selma had broken through several times. Far from being rattled, she would almost wax nostalgic about it. Once she had broken through the kitchen floor while holding the roasted Christmas goose. From her hips down, Selma had dangled into the cellar and still managed to hold the roast goose steady. The optician had helped her out and repaired the hole in the floor with my father’s help. Neither the optician nor my father was particularly skilled at home repair. Palm would have done a much better job, but no one wanted to ask him.

  Because the floor was, accordingly, unreliably repaired, the optician marked the patched sections with red packing tape so we could avoid them. The optician also marked the spot in the living room floor where Selma’s foot had broken through right after my father had said, “I’ve started psychoanalysis.” We all automatically avoided the patched spots, and even Alaska, when he entered the kitchen for the first time on Selma’s birthday, had instinctively stayed clear of the area marked in red.

  * * *

  Selma loved her house, and every time she left it, she patted the façade like the flank of an old horse.

  “You should let more of the world in,” my father would say, “instead of living in a house that is always on the verge of collapsing.”