What You Can See from Here

by Mariana Leky

  My hands stopped trembling. “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks so much.”

  “No problem,” Frederik said.

  “Alaska’s fine. Are things fine with you, too?”

  “Things are always fine with me,” Frederik said. “And you?”

  I leaned my forehead against the window. “Can you see anything?” I asked.

  “Yes, the sun is shining. I have a view of the wooden hut. Its roof is covered with moss. Behind it are mountains. I can see the waterfall.”

  “I can’t see anything,” I said, “it’s pitch-dark. What time is it?”

  “It’s ten in the morning.”

  “It’s two in the morning here.”

  Frederik laughed and said, “We should find something to agree on.”

  I sat on the windowsill. The blank my mind kept drawing sat beside me and said in a voice like Marlies’s: “Here I am. It’ll never work. Get used to it.”

  “What can’t you see?” Frederik asked.

  “The fir tree outside the living room window,” I answered. “The sumac next to it. Cows in the meadow across the way. The apple tree and the bridge.”

  The living room door that had been left ajar opened. Alaska came in and curled up at my feet. I stood up and stuck my hands in his old fur. I tried to look out the window again but only saw myself all blurry. I closed my eyes. If I can’t get past this blankness, then that will be it, I thought, and life will take a wrong turn.

  “Are you still there?” Frederik asked.

  Things cannot disappear if you don’t look at them, the optician had said, or something like that, and I wondered if they can disappear if you speak to them.

  “Yes, I’m sorry. I’m just drawing a blank. I’m very blurry.”

  Frederik cleared his throat. “Your name is Luisa and I’m sure you have a last name, too. You’re twenty-two years old. Your best friend died because he leaned against a door on the local train that wasn’t properly shut. That was twelve years ago. Whenever your grandmother dreams of an okapi, someone dies soon after. Your father believes you can only become yourself somewhere far from home, so he’s traveling. Your mother has a flower shop and is having an affair with the owner of an ice-cream parlor whose name is Alberto. The optician took a saw to the posts of the hunting blind in the meadow because he wanted to kill the hunter. This optician is in love with your grandmother but won’t tell her. You’re doing a bookseller apprenticeship.”

  I opened my eyes and smiled at myself in the windowpane. “The connection is very good,” I said.

  “Pretty good,” Frederik said, “there’s just a faint rustling.”

  I paced around the living room with the telephone. The cable followed me but the blankness didn’t.

  “Have you done your walking meditation yet today?” I asked.

  “No, but I did my sitting meditation. Early. For ninety minutes.”

  I thought of the optician and his slipped disks from his sedentary occupation.

  “Doesn’t it hurt?”

  “Yes,” Frederik said, “it’s very uncomfortable. But that doesn’t matter.”

  “Why did you become a monk?”

  “Because it seemed right. Why did you become a bookseller?”

  “Things worked out that way.”

  “That’s good, too, if that’s how things work out,” Frederik said.

  “Do you always wear that black robe?”

  “Almost always.”

  “Doesn’t it itch?”

  “No,” Frederik said, “it really doesn’t. Luisa, it’s really nice to talk to you, but unfortunately I have to go now.”

  “More meditating?”

  “No, I’ve got to climb onto the roof and clear away the moss.”

  I stopped in front of the section marked in red.

  Frederik took up the opening sentence for me but not the closing one. I had to carry that one myself. I carried it until the very last minute of our conversation.

  “All right, then, take care of yourself, Luisa,” Frederik said.

  I held one foot over the red-marked section. “I’d like to see you again,” I said.

  Frederik was silent. He was silent for so long, I was worried he had suddenly turned to stone and become a mountain named after him.

  “You’re very good at sticking your foot in the door at the last minute,” he said. He suddenly sounded very serious. “I have to think it over,” he said. “I’ll give you a call.”

  “But how?” I asked, because he didn’t know my telephone number, but he had already hung up.

  When Selma opened the door wearing a flowered ankle-length nightgown and a hairnet to keep her hairdo safe during the night, I was still balanced on one leg with my foot hovering over the red-marked section.

  “What on earth are you doing?” she asked, grabbing me by the shoulders and turning me around as if I were sleepwalking.

  “I’m wide awake,” I said. I held the receiver out to her. “Japan was on the line.”

  “That was certainly a highlight in this phone’s life,” she said, and took the receiver from my hand. Then with her shoulder she nudged me across the living room toward the sofa. I was as lively as if we were dancing a polonaise.

  “He’s going to think over whether we should see each other again,” I said, and sat on the sofa.

  “Maybe you should think it over, too,” Selma said, and sat down next to me. The hairnet made her forehead look like it was barred.

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s so far away,” Selma said. We sat very close. We were dreadfully flowery.

  “Almost everyone is far away,” I said.

  “Exactly, it would be nice to have someone nearby for a change. All I’m saying is that you should keep in mind the fact that it might not work out.”

  “It will work out,” I said, “you can count on it.”

  And fourteen days later, a letter arrived.

  * * *

  The widow in the neighboring village brought it to Selma’s on a Saturday. “I have an airmail letter for you, Luisa,” she said. She spoke very loudly, and I wondered if it was a delayed side effect of too much primal scream therapy. She held out a light-blue envelope as light as a feather. Beneath the many brightly colored, flowered stamps were lines in very even handwriting:

  To

  Luisa

  c/o Selma (in the next village)

  c/o The House of Contemplation

  Fichtenweg 3

  57327 Weyersroth

  ドイツ—Germany

  “I must say, it’s a rather bold address,” the widow bellowed. “It’s almost longer than the entire card. He writes that he has thought things over. He’ll be back in Germany at the end of the year and you can see each other then. And he sends his best, this Mr. Frederik does.”

  “Did you open the envelope?” Selma asked.

  “I didn’t need to,” she thundered, and turned the letter over, holding it up to the ceiling light. The envelope was so thin and the ink on the paper inside so black that you could read everything.

  EXPIRATION DATES

  My father came for a visit in September. As always, he suddenly appeared at the door with a deep tan and matted hair, wearing shoes that still had remains of an African desert or the Mongolian steppe stuck in their treads, and carrying a backpack with mold stains left by arctic snow. As always, before he’d even crossed the threshold he said, “I’ll have to leave again tomorrow,” as if it were a magic spell that allowed him to enter.

  Now that he was constantly traveling, my father always wore two wristwatches. One showed the time in the country he was traveling in at the moment, the other was set to Central European time. “That way I always have you with me,” he said.

  He seemed larger than life when he stopped in to see us now and again, and he took up so much space that we had to rearrange ourselves like pieces of furniture that suddenly found themselves in a smaller apartment. We kept bumping into each other. We stood in corners while my father rec
ounted his adventures with sweeping gestures and flashing eyes. He told them in a very loud voice as if he always had to shout over a stormy sea or into a desert wind for the last months.

  Alaska was overjoyed to see my father. He didn’t move from my father’s side and suddenly looked younger. He leapt around my father and his tail never stopped wagging. Because Alaska was so big, his tail swept cups and newspapers off the coffee table and a flowerpot off the kitchen windowsill. “It’s amazing what love can do,” Selma said as we swept up shards and dirt behind Alaska. “I may be wrong, but I believe Alaska has grown a bit in the last half hour.”

  “And? How are things with all of you?” my father asked.

  He said it with an undertone of regret, as if he weren’t asking about our lives but the progress of a common cold or an especially boring village community meeting he had skipped.

  “How are things with the Buddhist?”

  “He’s coming to visit soon,” I said.

  “Dr. Maschke swears by Buddhism,” my father said, and pulled a plastic bag out of his backpack, “letting go and all that. You should talk to him about Buddhism sometime, Luisa, I’m sure he’d like that.”

  My father tipped the contents of the plastic bag onto Selma’s kitchen table. There were presents wrapped in Arabic newspapers. Selma unwrapped a light green sequined caftan.

  “How very nice,” she said, and carefully pulled the shimmering caftan over her hairdo and down her long body. Her light brown orthopedic shoes peeked out from under the glittering material.

  The optician received a jar of Tunisian honey and I got a saddlebag. “It’s real camel leather,” my father said.

  “How practical,” the optician remarked.

  My mother wasn’t there. Her gift lay unopened on the kitchen table.

  * * *

  That evening we sat on the front stoop. My father took up the whole bottom step, Alaska lay at his feet, and Selma, the optician, and I sat on the top step behind my father. My father smoked clove cigarettes, tilted his head back, and gazed at the stars. “Isn’t it amazing that you see the same stars no matter where you are in the world? Crazy, isn’t it?” he asked, and because it was a lovely thought, the optician swallowed the comment that this was not, strictly speaking, true.

  Selma was not looking up at the stars but at my father’s head. She adjusted her glasses and leaned so far forward that her nose touched the tips of his hair. “You have lice,” she announced.

  “Oh shit,” my father said.

  “I still have a lice comb from the children somewhere,” Selma said, and went inside to look for the comb she had used to comb lice from Martin’s and my heads.

  I gazed up into the sky with my father. “Have you been to Japan yet?” I asked.

  “No,” he answered, “Japan doesn’t interest me so much. But Dr. Maschke swears by Buddhism.”

  Selma came back with the lice comb, a bathing cap, and a plastic bottle. “I even found some lice shampoo,” she said.

  “Is it still good?” the optician asked. “It’s at least fifteen years old.”

  My father took the shampoo bottle out of Selma’s hand and looked it over. “There’s no expiration date,” he said.

  “Well, then,” Selma said, and unscrewed the top, because she believed that anything without a listed expiration date can’t expire.

  Selma massaged the shampoo into my father’s hair and combed it back. With his gleaming hair, he looked like Rock Hudson. He gazed back up at the stars. “It’s crazy,” he said.

  “Hold your head straight, please,” Selma said. “I’m going to pull the bathing cap on. The shampoo has to work overnight.” It was Elsbeth’s bathing cap, the purple one with frills that Selma had borrowed many years before and never given back. “Sorry, it’s the only one I’ve got,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” my father said.

  Selma put her hands in the bathing cap to stretch it out and small tears immediately formed between the frills. The bathing cap had clearly passed its expiration date, even though there was none listed.

  My father patted the cap on his head and turned to face me. “Well?” he asked.

  I laughed. “Very fetching,” I said.

  “Where is Astrid?” my father asked. Selma, the optician, and I looked at each other. We didn’t know if my father knew that my mother was in a relationship with the owner of the ice-cream parlor.

  “She should be home soon,” I said. “She’s at the ice-cream parlor.”

  “She is?” my father replied, and we knew he didn’t know.

  When my mother drove up the hill a few minutes later and the glare from her headlights swept over us, Selma laid her hand on my father’s shoulder and said, “Peter, my dear, it’s like this. Astrid has, in the meantime, also let a bit of the world in.”

  My mother got out of the car and stopped abruptly when she saw my father. Then she came toward us. She was carrying a small tray wrapped in paper. My father stood up.

  “Hello, Astrid,” he said.

  My mother looked at my father in the bathing cap, then at Selma in her caftan. “You two can wear absolutely anything,” she said.

  My father wanted to hug her, but she quickly held out her hand. Then she unwrapped the tray, which held three cups with three scoops of ice cream each, already starting to melt.

  “That looks delicious,” my father said.

  “Unfortunately, I only brought three. I had no idea you were here.”

  “You can have mine,” I said to my father.

  “No,” my mother said, “please come upstairs with me, Peter, I have something to tell you.”

  My father followed her into the house. We heard them climbing the stairs to the upper apartment.

  “Poor Peter,” Selma said. “Let’s hope he can handle it.”

  We left our ice cream to melt. The optician reached for the crushed pack of clove cigarettes my father had left behind and lit one. It tasted like he was smoking Astrid’s flower shop.

  Selma had known in theory that the optician smoked since shortly after Martin’s death, but he had never done it in front of her. She watched him, fascinated, like a child seeing an adult pee standing up for the first time. The optician did not enjoy the cigarette—not because it tasted like flowers but because Selma was watching him with such fascination. “Please don’t stare at me like that,” he said.

  “I can’t get my head around you smoking,” she said, and kept staring.

  The optician sighed. “Well, I can’t with you watching me,” he said, and put the cigarette out. Some things have to be kept secret from Selma, he thought.

  * * *

  After twenty minutes my father came back down and sat on the steps with us. He scratched his head under the bathing cap with his index finger. It was so tight, it didn’t slip. “Good,” he said, “good.”

  “What do you mean by ‘good’?” Selma asked, and stroked my father’s back.

  “I mean because everything is taken care of, and that’s good.”

  He reached for the clove cigarettes. I wondered if the news about my mother and Alberto had to sink in overnight. But that wasn’t it. My father never mentioned Alberto again. He slept on Selma’s red couch, washed the lice shampoo out of his hair the next day, and packed his freshly washed, still-damp clothes into his backpack. “I’m off again,” he said. “It was nice here with you.”

  In the blink of an eye Alaska was once again as old as he actually was.

  * * *

  “Ah, here you are,” Mr. Rödder said, and his eyebrows, as agitated as ever, drew together in a frown. “It’s high time. Marlies Klamp came in again today and said that she didn’t like your latest recommendations, either. It’s a shame, Luisa, a shame. If things continue like this—”

  “I’ve brought you something,” I said, and handed the saddlebag to Mr. Rödder. His face immediately brightened.

  “My goodness, Luisa, it’s beautiful,” he whispered, caressing the leather. “Is it really for me?”
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  “It’s for you,” I said. “It’s genuine camel leather.”

  “I don’t know what to say,” Mr. Rödder said. “You know what? We’ll hang it over the travel-writing shelves. How did you find this treasure?”

  “Connections,” I said.

  * * *

  When I climbed onto the stepstool to hang the saddlebag over the travel section, my mother suddenly appeared next to me. I put the bag onto a shelf.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. My mother was wearing a dark blue scarf with long gold fringes around her shoulders. Looking down at her head, I could see the gray roots in her dyed-black hair.

  “It didn’t make the slightest difference to him,” my mother said, as if she had given my father an expensive present that didn’t please him at all.

  IVY FROM ELSBETH’S POINT OF VIEW

  “Luisa will have a visitor from Japan soon,” Selma said to Elsbeth in October, and made her swear not to tell a soul, because she didn’t know if it was all right with me for her to tell anyone. Elsbeth was able to keep the secret all the way to the general store.

  Elsbeth had brought the shopkeeper one of my mother’s Autumn Dreams because he liked to hang seasonal decorations in his shop. And she needed a mousetrap. The shopkeeper was just moving the alcoholic beverages next to the cash register to better keep an eye on them. The twins from the upper village had stolen schnapps more than once.

  “If you burn dirt from the cemetery in a frying pan, the thief will bring back what he stole,” Elsbeth told him. “Or you could just put mousetraps between the bottles. I need one, by the way.”

  When the shopkeeper brought Elsbeth a mousetrap and asked her how she was, it burst out of her. “Luisa is going to have a visitor from Japan, a Buddhist monk.”

  “Now, that’s something,” the shopkeeper said, and walked Elsbeth to the cash register. “Are they celibate?”

  “No idea,” Elsbeth said, and examined the mousetrap. It was the kind that broke the mouse’s neck. “I am, at any rate.”