by Mariana Leky
“That’s a very handsome dog,” Frederik said, lying to me for the first and only time. Alaska was friendly but by no means was he handsome.
I stood up. Frederik and I stood facing each other and I tried to think of something else I could lose, on the spot, so that he and I still had something to look for.
Frederik scratched his bald head. “I should start back,” he said. “How do I get to the House of Contemplation from here?”
“We’ll walk you there,” I said, a little too loud and with the delight you feel when you’ve managed to make an imminent farewell somewhat less imminent. “We’ll just take you all the way to the House of Contemplation.”
We walked along the forest edge, Alaska between us, my hand resting on his back as if on a handrail. We kept walking straight ahead until the neighboring village appeared much too quickly.
“It’s like this,” Frederik announced abruptly when we had almost reached the House of Contemplation. “I’m actually from Hessen.”
“I thought you came from the void.”
“It’s pretty much the same thing. Two years ago, I dropped out of university to—”
“How old are you?” I asked, because suddenly all the questions had become untangled and were ready for use.
“Twenty-five. I dropped out to go to Japan and live in a monastery, and—”
“Why?”
“Stop interrupting me,” Frederik said. “I didn’t interrupt you. I spent a few weeks in a Buddhist monastery. And I decided to follow this path. Actually, what time is it?”
We were standing on the doorstep of the House of Contemplation. A small wreath hung on the door. I recognized the model. The House of Contemplation must have bought it from my mother. The wreath was called Autumn Dream and was constructed out of cloth leaves in atmospheric fall colors. It’s still summer, I thought, way too early for an autumn dream.
Frederik took his watch from his pocket. Way too early, I thought. “It’s way too late,” he said, “I have to go in now.”
Alaska had sat down in front of Frederik as if he wanted to block his way.
“Thanks for your help,” I said softly, because you can’t constantly keep being snatched from the jaws of a farewell. Unless, I thought, the House of Contemplation were to collapse all of a sudden because the walls had become unstable as a delayed side effect of too much primal scream therapy.
Frederik looked at me. “Goodbye, Luisa,” he said. “Meeting you was an adventure.”
“You too,” I said.
Frederik patted my shoulder. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again, Frederik was halfway through the door. The door started to close after him and I sensed that it was a door that, unlike other doors, would close perfectly.
It’s said that when someone dies, their life flashes before their eyes. That must happen very quickly sometimes, when you fall out of something, for example, or when you’ve got the barrel of a gun under your chin. As the door was closing behind Frederik, I thought at the speed of a life in free fall that Alaska had gone in search of adventure even though my father had denied that he had any capacity for it. I thought that it may be impossible to judge anyone’s level of adventurousness if you’ve known them for too long, that a person’s adventurousness can only reliably be assessed by someone who happens to stumble out of the underbrush. I thought, as I watched the door closing, that Frederik had said he had decided to follow this path, and I thought that I’d never decided on anything in my life, that things just happened to me. I had never really said yes to anything before, I’d only ever said no. I thought that you shouldn’t let yourself be intimidated by an overstuffed farewell, that you can, in fact, escape its jaws, because as long as no one dies, every farewell is negotiable. Faulty doors on a local commuter train are not negotiable, but the closing of a door decorated with an unseasonable autumn wreath certainly is. And at the very last second, before the latch fell, before a life had time to pass before anyone’s eyes, I leapt forward and stuck my foot in the doorway.
“Ouch,” Frederik said, because the door had hit his forehead.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I need your phone number.”
I beamed at Frederik, because I had finally let the world in, and that alone was so extraordinary I simply didn’t care if the world were to say, “Get lost!”
Frederik rubbed his forehead. “Phone calls are very complicated. In fact, we never get calls.”
“Give me your number anyway.”
He smiled. “You’re very stubborn,” he said, something no one had ever said to me before. He took a pen from his pocket. “Do you have a piece of paper?”
“No.” I held my hand out. “Write it here.”
“One hand isn’t enough,” he said.
I turned my arm over. Frederik took hold of my wrist and wrote his number on the inside of my forearm. The pen tickled. Frederik wrote and wrote. The number reached from my wrist almost to my elbow. Almost all the telephone numbers I knew only had four digits.
“Thank you,” I said. “But you’re already late, so you really should go.”
“Goodbye, then,” Frederik said. He turned around and closed the door.
“Come, Alaska,” I said, and after we’d walked away, when we were some distance from the House of Contemplation, the door opened again.
“Luisa,” Frederik called, “what’s an okapi?”
I turned around.
“An okapi is an incongruous animal that lives in the rain forest,” I called back. “It was the last large mammal discovered by man. It looks like a mix of zebra, tapir, deer, mouse, and giraffe.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“See you later,” I called. The door closed and I bowed to Alaska because there was no other audience around. I bowed the way Martin would after lifting a stick over his head. Anyhow, I did stick my foot in the door, and I did teach Frederik about an animal that nothing can top.
* * *
Alaska and I ran all the way back to our village. Selma and the optician, who had been sitting on the front steps of our house, jumped up and ran to meet us. “You’re here,” they cried, “thank goodness, where have you been?” Alaska didn’t answer and I didn’t answer, either, because I was out of breath.
When Selma and the optician were done welcoming Alaska home, they looked up at me. “What’s the matter with you?” Selma asked, because I obviously looked as if I’d just barely managed to free Alaska from violent criminals who had been about to turn him into an animal experiment and me into something similar.
“He’s a monk,” I said, “a Buddhist monk. He lives in Japan.”
“Who?” the optician asked.
“Hang on,” Selma said, because it was Tuesday and the deer had appeared at the edge of the forest. Selma now gave Palm free rein with everything except the deer. For a long time, it had been a different deer than before. Another deer had taken over the original deer’s role ages ago, but unlike changing actors in her television series, it made no difference to Selma. She went to the garage, opened the door, and slammed it shut with all her strength. The deer disappeared, Selma came back to the front steps and sat down next to the optician. They looked at me expectantly as if I had announced that I was about to recite a poem.
“Well, who?” the optician asked.
I told them about the monks who had burst out of the underbrush, about the monk in the middle who was Frederik, about Hessen and Japan and how I stuck my foot in the door of the House of Contemplation at the very last minute. I recounted it all breathlessly as if I were still running on the spot.
“But what is a Buddhist monk from Japan doing here, of all places?” the optician asked.
“Walking meditation,” I said solemnly.
I held my forearm out to both of them the way my father’s patients had held their arms out for blood samples to be taken. “We have to write it down before it gets smudged. Have you ever seen such a long number?”
“The longer the number, the farther a
way the person,” Selma said.
We went back to the house and sat at the kitchen table. Because she was so happy to have him home, Selma held Alaska on her lap. He hadn’t been held on anyone’s lap since he was full-grown; Selma was completely hidden behind him.
Next to me, the optician took his fountain pen from the breast pocket of his shirt and put on his reading glasses. I placed my forearm on the table in front of him and he began copying down the numbers onto a piece of paper. It took a while.
“I’m sure this number has a lovely melody,” he said. Selma had recently had to replace her rotary telephone and now had a phone with buttons and with accompanying beeps.
“Yes, probably the wedding march,” Selma said from behind Alaska.
The optician was done writing and he blew on the ink so it wouldn’t smudge.
“Thanks,” I said. I stood up and pinned the number on the bulletin board over Selma’s refrigerator.
The optician and I stood before the telephone number the way we’d once stood in front of the train station where he had taught Martin and me how to tell time and had explained how time zones work.
“I don’t know,” Selma said, still completely hidden behind Alaska, so that it looked like Alaska was ventriloquizing. “Couldn’t it have been somebody nearby? That nice boy from your vocational school, maybe?”
“Unfortunately not,” I said.
The new telephone rang. I ran to it and picked up the receiver. I knew it was my father before he’d even had a chance to say, “Hello, the connection is terrible.”
“I found him, Papa,” I said, “and the dog, too.”
I JUST WANTED TO ASK HOW ALASKA IS DOING
When you desperately want to call someone but dread it just as much, you suddenly notice how many telephones there are. There was the new touch-tone telephone in Selma’s living room, and in the living room one floor above it was my mother’s elegant, slender phone. There was the telephone in the optician’s back room, the telephone covered in hunter-green velvet on Elsbeth’s side table. There was the telephone in my apartment in the county seat, the one next to the cash register in Mr. Rödder’s bookstore. There was a yellow phone booth on the way from my apartment to the bookstore. “We’re ready,” all these telephones said, “it’s up to you.”
The optician was also ready. The day after Frederik had burst from the underbrush, he had come into the bookstore with a list of books about Buddhism. We didn’t have a single one in stock. When Mr. Rödder called the distributor to place the order, both he and the sales rep despaired over the Japanese names. Mr. Rödder shouted the letters into the receiver as if the distributor were out on the high seas.
When the books arrived, the optician sat down with them and a highlighter at Selma’s kitchen table. He read with intense concentration and marked many passages, murmuring all the while, “Selma, I’m telling you, this is all absolutely wonderful.”
Selma sat across from the optician. She had darned socks, filled out bank transfer forms, and was gluing stamps to envelopes, smoothing the stamps with the index finger on her crooked left hand. She always does everything as if for the first or last time, the optician thought. Then he said, “Did you know that there is no ‘I’? The so-called I is nothing but a swinging door through which the breath passes in and out?”
“You’re a swinging door with very red cheeks,” Selma replied.
“Just breathe,” the optician said.
“I’ve been breathing all my life.”
“Yes, but now do it right,” the optician said, and inhaled and exhaled deeply. “Here it says that every illumination begins and ends with cleaning the floor. Did you know that?”
“I didn’t know that, but I should certainly hope it would,” Selma said.
“And did you know that nothing is ever truly lost?”
Selma looked at the optician. Then she put the last stamped envelope on top of the others and stood up. “You know, I’ve got enough to do with Palm’s explications. It would be nice if you didn’t start explicating, too.”
“Sorry,” the optician said. He read further. “Just one more thing, Selma,” he said a minute later. “It’ll be very quick. Listen to this: When we look at something, it can disappear from our sight, but if we do not try to see this something, it cannot disappear. I don’t understand. Do you?”
“No,” Selma said, and added that it would be fine with her if the optician disappeared at this point, which couldn’t be all that difficult since he has no “I.” The optician, however, stayed where he was and kept underlining passages.
“When Luisa calls him, she absolutely must ask him what it means,” he murmured, and just then I telephoned Selma.
“Well? Have you called him yet?” she asked.
“Of course not,” I replied.
I hadn’t called Frederik yet because I was afraid I’d get stuck. With anything important, I always suddenly got stuck. I almost failed my graduation exam. I failed my first driving test: my mind stalled, so the car did, too. Mr. Rödder hired me despite my mind going blank during my interview; no one else had applied.
“I decided I’d rather call you,” I told Selma. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” Selma said, “but the optician isn’t. He claims he’s a swinging door.”
“Tell her she should ask him about disappearing,” the optician called out.
“And you’re supposed to ask the monk how it is that you can’t see something if you’re not trying to see it. Or something like that,” Selma said.
“So she hasn’t called him yet?” the optician asked.
“No,” Selma whispered.
“In Buddhism, there’s often great emphasis on non-action,” the optician said.
“I’ll come over this evening,” I said. When I arrived at Selma’s, the optician was still reading at the kitchen table and Selma was busy with a potato masher, mashing potatoes as if she wanted to prove that things very well could disappear.
“Do I seem unstuck right now?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the optician, who was too engrossed in his reading to listen.
“Yes,” said Selma, who was too engrossed in mashing potatoes to listen.
“Then I’ll do it, I’ll call him now,” I said.
“Good,” Selma and the optician said, the one not looking up from the potatoes mashed beyond recognition, the other not looking up from his thoroughly highlighted reading.
I went into the living room, picked up the receiver, and started dialing. When I was about halfway through the number, the optician stormed into the room and cut off the call.
“Don’t do it,” he said.
I stared at him.
“Different time zone,” he said. “It’s four in the morning there.”
* * *
I spent the night in Selma’s living room on the fold-out couch, a red corduroy monstrosity. I often spent the night either with Selma in the ground-floor apartment or with my mother on the floor above. Nights at Selma’s in the village, unlike those in the county seat, were as uncompromisingly silent and dark as nights should be.
I woke at two in the morning. I turned on the small lamp on the side table, stood up, and went to the window, skirting the dangerously weak sections on the floor that the optician had marked with red. It was dark outside. I couldn’t see anything except my own blurred image in the windowpane. I was wearing one of Selma’s nightgowns, blurry, ankle-length, and flowered.
I calculated eight hours ahead. If I don’t call now, I thought, I never will, and time would shift forever and I’ll never see him again. I took the rolled-up phone cord from the hook and carried the phone to the window. I dialed Frederik’s number.
It rang for a very long time, as if the ring had to struggle laboriously all the way to Japan: from here to the county seat—which was difficult enough—then over the Carpathian Mountains, the Ukrainian plain, the Caspian Sea, across Russia, Kazakhstan, and China. Just when I was becoming convinced that it was impossible f
or a ring to make it from the Westerwald all the way to Japan, someone picked up on the other end of the line.
“Moshi moshi,” said a cheerful voice. It sounded like the name of a children’s game.
“Hello,” I said in English, “I’m sorry. I don’t speak Japanese. My name is Luisa and I’m calling from Germany.”
“No problem,” the cheerful voice said. “Hello.”
“I would like to speak to Frederik,” I said into the receiver in the darkness before the window, “to Monk Frederik.” And it sounded like I wanted to speak to a mountain named after Frederik.
“No problem,” the voice said again, and I liked the way there apparently seemed to be so few problems in Japan.
For a very long time I heard nothing but rustling. While the cheerful voice was looking for Frederik, I looked for a cheerful opening sentence. I should have thought of it earlier. I should have worked on a first-rate opening sentence with Selma and the optician, but now it was too late. Now there weren’t even any second-rate opening sentences to be found in the thicket of darkness outside the window. “Hello, Frederik,” I thought, “I have a technical question about Buddhism; Hello, Frederik, so, how was your flight?; Hello, Frederik, about Hessen…” Another monk who wasn’t Frederik came on the line.
“Hello,” he said, “how can I help you?”
“Hello,” I said, and explained that I wanted to speak with Monk Frederik.
The monk passed the receiver to yet another monk, still not Frederik, and so it continued until I’d said hello to six monks. The last monk also said, “No problem.” Then in the background I heard rapid steps and I knew they were Frederik’s.
“Yes?” he said.
I gripped the receiver in both hands. “Hello,” I said, and then nothing more.
“Hello, Luisa,” Frederik said, and because it was so obvious, he understood right away that I didn’t have an opening sentence. In the blink of an eye, he took over and simply pretended he had called me.
“Hello,” he said, “it’s Frederik. I just wanted to ask how Alaska is doing.”