What You Can See from Here

by Mariana Leky

  “As long as it’s only on the verge,” Selma would answer.

  “That’s exactly the problem,” my father would continue, “that it’s not worse.” Then he would start in again on how the house should be torn down and a new one built, one with more room, since the upstairs apartment had always been too small, with or without extensions. Selma would become furious and tell my father that he should take his wasteful tendencies elsewhere, but please watch where he stepped on his way out.

  * * *

  When we got home, my father was sitting on the front steps. His consulting hours were over. “You’re not wearing shoes,” he said to Selma. “Are you going senile? Or did you have one Mon Chéri too many today?”

  “I threw my shoes at some dogs,” Selma said.

  “That’s not exactly a sign of mental health, either,” my father remarked.

  “Yes, it is,” Selma said. She opened the door. “Come in.”

  * * *

  The optician lifted his hands off the hot compress, took Elsbeth by the shoulders, and turned her to face him. “Of course,” he said, “you can tell me anything.”

  “It’s just that I’d like to confess something in case I … in case today something…” Elsbeth said.

  “Because of the dream,” the optician said.

  “Exactly, even though I don’t actually believe anything will happen,” she lied.

  “Neither do I,” the optician lied right back. “I think it’s extremely unlikely that the dream is foretelling anyone’s death. It’s nonsense, if you ask me.”

  It’s very calming to tell a few small lies when you know a hidden truth is about to be revealed. The optician thought of Martin, who always hopped up and down a little before trying to lift something almost impossibly heavy.

  “It’s not easy,” Elsbeth said.

  “If you’d like, I’ll tell you a secret in return,” the optician offered.

  Elsbeth looked at him long and hard. Everyone in the village knew the optician was in love with Selma—but he didn’t know that everyone knew. He still thought his love for Selma was a truth that could remain hidden, while for years everyone had wondered when he would finally admit what had been obvious for ages.

  Elsbeth, however, was not sure if Selma herself was aware of the optician’s love. Elsbeth had been there the one time my mother tried to talk to Selma about her relationship with the optician. Elsbeth had not thought it was a particularly good idea, but she couldn’t talk my mother out of it.

  “What do you think, Selma, can you see it working with the optician?” my mother had asked.

  “I don’t need to work with him, he’s self-sufficient,” Selma had replied.

  “I mean as a companion.”

  “He already is that,” Selma had said.

  “Say, Astrid, since you know a lot about flowers,” Elsbeth interrupted in the hopes of steering the conversation in another direction, “did you know that buttercups are good for hemorrhoids?”

  “No, Selma, I mean as a couple,” my mother had insisted. “I mean have you thought of being a couple with the optician?”

  Selma had looked at my mother as if she were a cocker spaniel and said, “But I already had my couple.”

  In Elsbeth’s view, Selma had only enough love for one person—it was a very generous amount and it was all for Heinrich. Heinrich was Elsbeth’s older brother. Elsbeth had known Heinrich and Selma as a couple and was quite certain that nothing would follow.

  * * *

  Seated on the optician’s examination chair, Elsbeth could not believe that after so many years she would be the first to learn what everyone already knew.

  “You first,” the optician said.

  He sat on his desk across from Elsbeth. The compress had become very warm. Elsbeth took a deep breath. “Rudolf cheated on me for a long time,” she said. Rudolf was her dead husband. “And I know this because I read his diaries. All of them.”

  It was not clear which Elsbeth thought worse: that her husband had cheated on her or that she had read all his diaries.

  “I’ve tried everything I could think of to forget. You lose your memory when you eat bread that you’ve found, did you know that? I tried it, but it didn’t work. Probably because I had lost the bread on purpose beforehand.”

  “You can’t decide to find something by accident,” the optician agreed. “Did you ever talk about it with Rudolf?”

  Elsbeth zipped up her dress. “Rudolf’s diaries are yellow. Lined notebooks wrapped in a bright warm sunflower shade of yellow.”

  “Did you ever talk about it with Rudolf?” the optician asked again.

  “No,” Elsbeth said. She raised her hand to her neck and pressed the compress tighter. “I pretended I didn’t know what I knew. And now it’s too late.”

  The optician knew this feeling well. He felt it every time he’d tried to hide his love for Selma from himself.

  “There were a lot of sunflower-yellow notebooks, and even though I only read them once, I still know exactly what is in them. Often, when I’m lying in bed, I hear my inner voice reading from them.”

  “What exactly does it read to you?” the optician asked.

  “Things about the other woman.”

  “Give me an example, just a sentence, if you want,” the optician proposed. “Then I’ll have the sentence. That way it can move in with me instead.”

  Elsbeth closed her eyes and pressed the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger as if she had a headache. Then she said: “Sex with Renata blows my mind.” At exactly that moment the doorbell rang, and the shopkeeper’s wife burst in. “Hi, there!” she called, and came up to them. “Oh, a vision test?”

  “Of a kind,” the optician said.

  Elsbeth said nothing because she was feverishly wondering if the shopkeeper’s wife had heard the last sentence and could be thinking that Elsbeth had had mind-blowing sex with some woman named Renata

  The shopkeeper’s wife needed a new eyeglass chain. Fortunately, she quickly decided on one with rhinestones. “I’m going to the city tomorrow. To get my hair done. Could you watch Trixie tomorrow?” she asked Elsbeth.

  Trixie was her terrier, and now Elsbeth was sure the shopkeeper’s wife hadn’t heard the sentence, because not in a million years would she leave her terrier with Elsbeth if she thought Elsbeth was having mind-blowing sex with some Renata or other.

  “I’d be very happy to,” Elsbeth said.

  “Assuming we’re all still alive tomorrow,” the shopkeeper’s wife said cheerily.

  “That would be helpful,” the optician said, and opened the door for the shopkeeper’s wife. Then he sat back down on the desk across from Elsbeth.

  The optician looked at Elsbeth as if he had all the time in the world for her. Even if he were the one to die that day, he still had all the time in the world in that moment.

  He crossed his legs. “If you ask me: The fact that sex with Renata blew your husband’s mind doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of their relationship. Bashing someone on the head with a skillet also blows their mind.”

  Elsbeth smiled. Her bound-up truth had been massive and very heavy. It still was, but it did her good to see that the optician could carry it so lightly.

  “Earlier, a deliveryman pushed a cart covered with a gray tarp into the store and it looked like a wall, like the wall of regret we all kneel before. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Unfortunately, I didn’t see it,” the optician said, “but I can imagine that’s exactly what it looked like.”

  “I didn’t have aching muscles,” Elsbeth said. “I had an imp.”

  “I know,” the optician said. “But heat works wonders against imps, too.”

  Elsbeth cleared her throat. “You were going to tell me something.” She sat up straight and folded her hands in her lap.

  The optician ran his hand through his hair. He stood up and paced back and forth in front of the shelves with eyeglass frames and cases. Now and then he took a small,
involuntary step to the right, as he always did when his inner voices accosted him.

  Elsbeth considered what would be best for him. When he confessed his love for Selma, should she act surprised, and would she actually be able to say, after all these years, “Well, now, that is news”? She wondered whether she should advise the optician to tell Selma, and whether he might not have a stroke when he realized that he had spent decades trying to conceal a truth that was much too big to hide and so had been standing behind him for all to see.

  “So,” the optician said, “Palm has absolutely no time for Martin.”

  “I know,” Elsbeth said, and gave him an encouraging look.

  “He has made it clear to Martin from day one. And he also chased away Martin’s mother.”

  “I know,” Elsbeth said, and asked herself how the optician would segue to Selma. “And he probably beats Martin sometimes, too.”

  “Yes, I’m also afraid of that.”

  The optician was still pacing back and forth. “He shoots drunkenly at deer and doesn’t hit them. Once, on a binge, he threatened Selma with a broken bottle.”

  “Yes,” Elsbeth said, and remembered that the optician had a habit of connecting the most disparate things; he could surely find a connection between Palm and his love for Selma.

  The optician stood still and looked at Elsbeth. “This is the secret: last night I took a saw to the posts of his hunting blind.”

  IT’S BEAUTIFUL HERE

  Night was falling, and Selma repeated what she had been saying all day long: “Do exactly what you’d do on a normal day.” So I went to give Alaska a bath. Since Alaska didn’t fit into Selma’s shower, I had to wash his front half first and then his back half while the rest of him stuck out of the shower stall. The door was open, and I heard Selma say to my father: “Everyone is afraid of my dream.”

  My father laughed. “Mama, please, it’s nothing but nonsense.”

  Selma got a box of Mon Chéri. “It probably is, but that doesn’t make things any better.”

  “Dr. Maschke will laugh himself silly when I tell him about it.”

  “How nice that you entertain Dr. Maschke so well.”

  My father sighed. “I wanted to talk with you about something completely different,” he said, and added in a louder voice, “Come here, Luisy, I have something to tell you both.”

  I had toweled off Alaska all over, but he was still dripping. I thought of what the sentence “I have something to tell you” introduced in Selma’s television series. We’re bankrupt; I’m leaving you; Matthew is not your son; William is clinically dead; we’re going to unplug the machines.

  I went into the kitchen with the dog. My father was sitting on a stool. Selma was leaning on the kitchen table. “Alaska is still dripping,” she said.

  “Do you remember Otto?” my father asked.

  “Of course,” we said.

  Otto was the retired mailman who died after Selma’s dream because he had completely stopped moving.

  “Here’s the thing,” my father said. “I think I’m going to give it all up. Probably. I’m going on a long trip.”

  “And when will you be back?” I asked.

  “And where will you go?” Selma asked.

  “Out into the world,” he said. “To Africa or Asia or somewhere.”

  “Or somewhere,” Selma echoed. “And when?”

  “I don’t know yet,” my father said, “I’m still thinking it over. I’m just letting you know that I’m considering it.”

  “And why?” Selma asked. This was an unusual question. When someone says he’s going on a trip around the world, usually no one asks why. No one needs to explain why he wants to get out into the world.

  “Because I don’t want to rot in this backwater,” he said.

  “Thanks very much,” Selma said.

  Alaska was still dripping. I suddenly felt very tired. As if I hadn’t just returned from the bathroom but from a day’s journey, a long day’s journey with piles and piles of luggage.

  I tried to think of how I could persuade my father to stay.

  “But it’s so beautiful here,” I finally said, “we live in a glorious symphony of green, blue, and gold.”

  That’s what the optician said sometimes. We lived in a picturesque area, in a gorgeous, heavenly area, as was written in elegant script on the postcards displayed on the counter of the general store. Yet hardly anyone in the village noticed. We overlooked and ignored the beauty that surrounded us—we gave it the cold shoulder—but we’d be the first to complain vociferously if the beauty in our surroundings failed to show up one day. The only one who occasionally felt pangs of conscience over our daily neglect of beauty was the optician. He would stop short, up in the Uhlheck, for example, and put his arms around Martin’s and my shoulders.

  “Just look how unbelievably beautiful it is here, in this glorious symphony of green, blue, and gold,” he’d say, with a grand gesture at the fir trees, the fields of wheat, and the immense sky above. We’d look at the familiar firs and the familiar sky and then would be ready to move on. “Just savor it for a moment,” the optician would say, and we’d give him the same look we gave Elsbeth when she would tell us to go and see sad Marlies.

  “That’s true,” my father said. “And I’ll come back.”

  “When?” I asked.

  Selma looked at me, sat down next to me on the kitchen bench, and took my hand in hers. I leaned against her shoulder and thought that we could just stay here, Selma and me, and rot here together.

  “Could we have a few more details?” she asked. “Is this more of Dr. Maschke’s nonsense?”

  My father raised his head and murmured, “Don’t be so dismissive.” It was clear that he was not prepared for our questions and had hoped we would say, “Fine, go ahead, have fun, and stay in touch.”

  “And what does Astrid think about this?” Selma asked. “And what about Alaska? He’s hardly had a chance to prove himself as an encapsulated pain.”

  “For goodness’ sake, I’m only telling you that I’m thinking about it.”

  This was not true. My father had decided long before, but here, at Selma’s kitchen table, he was as unaware of that fact as Selma and I were, and we were also unaware that Alaska would become Selma’s dog because my father couldn’t take him out into the world, since Alaska, my father would claim, was not made for adventure.

  Selma and I sat on the kitchen bench across from my father, thinking of the same thing, of Dr. Maschke’s office in the county seat, which my father had described to us. The room was filled with posters of the same landscapes as those on the postcards outside the gift shop, that is, of the sea, mountains, and undulating prairies, just bigger and without inspirational quotes, since Dr. Maschke delivered these personally. There were also objects mounted on the walls of Dr. Maschke’s office. While he was searching for encapsulated pain in what my father was saying, my father was looking at an African mask, a Buddha doweled into the wall, a sequined shawl, a leather canteen, a scimitar.

  Dr. Maschke’s hallmark, my father had told us, was a black leather jacket, which he never took off during their sessions. The leather jacket creaked whenever Dr. Maschke leaned forward or back in his chair.

  At that moment, sitting at the kitchen table, Selma and I were sure that it was actually Dr. Maschke who wanted to give everything up—except for his leather jacket—and that he was actually the one who wanted to travel around the world but, for the sake of convenience, had planted the seed of this idea in my father’s mind through some adage or other. He was sending my father out into a creaking world and because of him we would all be given up and left behind to rot. That’s what Dr. Maschke had been scheming from the very beginning.

  “And when will you be back?” I asked again.

  Friedhelm waltzed by under Selma’s window, singing loudly that even the smallest ray of sunshine can reach deep into the heart.

  “That’s enough,” my father said, and stood up. He ran outside, grabbed F
riedhelm, and drove him to his office. My father had medicine for and against every emotional state and he gave Friedhelm another shot that made him tired, so irresistibly tired that Friedhelm fell asleep on the examination table and didn’t wake up until noon the following day, completely confused, into a world in which, for a while, no one, aside from me, was able to sleep.

  * * *

  Selma and I stayed in the kitchen.

  “I’ll be all yours in just a moment,” she said, and stroked my arm. I thought Selma would stand up and go into another room, but she kept sitting next to me on the bench, looking out the window. The silence that emanated from her grew much more quickly than the puddle spreading under Alaska. Just when I’d begun to wonder when I might be allowed to interrupt Selma’s silence, the doorbell did it for me.

  Martin stood on the doorstep. He was wearing a clean pair of shorts and his hair was freshly plastered down.

  “He let you go out again,” I said.

  “Yes, he’s asleep. Can I come in?”

  I glanced into the kitchen. The silence had risen higher than the dog’s shoulder.

  “What’s going on?” Martin asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  The hand rake Selma had left in the gutter above the kitchen door fell to the ground.

  “Some wind we’ve got today,” Martin said, even though it wasn’t true.

  He was pale but smiling.

  “Can I lift you?”

  “Yes, please, lift me up,” I said, and put my arm around Martin’s neck.

  EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH

  Martin and I went into the kitchen and looked at Selma, wide-eyed. We must have looked pretty helpless, because she cleared her throat, took a deep breath, and said, “Well, you two bewildered children. You may not believe it right now, but everything will work out. You both have strange fathers, but they’ll come to their senses at some point. You can take my word for it.”