by Mariana Leky
“It would be good to know,” the shopkeeper said, “in case Luisa is in love with him.”
“Who’s celibate?” asked Farmer Häubel’s granddaughter, who had just walked into the store.
“I am,” Elsbeth said.
“And the monk from Japan Luisa’s in love with,” the shopkeeper added, counting out the money for the Autumn Dream into Elsbeth’s hand.
“He must be incredibly handsome,” Elsbeth said.
“Then he certainly isn’t celibate,” Farmer Häubel’s granddaughter said, and Elsbeth objected indignantly that it had nothing to do with looks.
“How do you know that?” asked the shopkeeper. “Have you seen him? Are there photographs?”
“No, unfortunately not,” Elsbeth replied, “but that’s what Luisa told Selma.”
The optician came up to them carrying a package of frozen fish casserole, enough for exactly one person, and warm compresses for his back. “Listen to this,” he said. “When we look at something, it can disappear from our sight, but if we do not try to see this something, it cannot disappear. Do you understand it?”
“That’s the most inventive justification for shoplifting that I’ve ever heard,” the shopkeeper said.
Elsbeth held the mousetrap out toward the optician. “Did you know that dead mice can actually help with eye complaints?” she asked. “I can bring some to you in your store if I catch any.”
“Thanks, but no,” the optician said.
“Luisa is in love with a Buddhist in Japan who is not celibate and is coming to visit in three weeks,” Farmer Häubel’s granddaughter said.
“I have no comment,” the optician replied. “That’s Luisa’s business. Don’t you have anything better to do than get involved in her business?”
“No,” the shopkeeper and Farmer Häubel’s granddaughter said in chorus.
“Unfortunately,” Elsbeth said.
The optician sighed. “That she’s in love with him is a bit of an exaggeration, she hardly knows him.”
“But you don’t need to know someone to love them,” Elsbeth said.
“Do you know more?” Farmer Häubel’s granddaughter asked.
“Of course,” said the optician. He cleared his throat. “Knowledge is living in unwavering serenity.”
The shopkeeper packed the optician’s heat patches into a bag. “Now, that sounds a lot like celibacy,” he remarked.
* * *
The optician walked around reciting his quotes and annoying everyone in the village every bit as much as Friedhelm had with his song about the lovely Westerwald.
The optician had been trying to use Buddhism to get the upper hand with his inner voices when they became insufferably loud, especially after ten o’clock at night. But it didn’t work any better than trying to tame them with the smoky sayings on postcards from the county seat.
At ten o’clock, after setting his corduroy slippers on the bedside rug, the optician stretched out on his bed, which was big enough for exactly one person.
When the optician was a child, his mother had always told him that if he put all his worries into his slippers at night, they wouldn’t be there in the morning. It had never worked, because his inner voices believed themselves better than mere worries that would be satisfied with slippers as lodgings.
The voices regularly reproached the optician for everything he’d done wrong or hadn’t done at all. They chose random events from every period of his life and threw them at his slipperless feet. It didn’t matter to them in the slightest that these were things he hadn’t done precisely because the voices had advised against doing them; they reproached him with everything he hadn’t done whether or not it was on account of them.
“When you were six you didn’t jump over the Apfelbach River, even though everyone else did,” they rebuked him, for example.
“But you told me it was a bad idea,” the optician objected.
“That’s completely irrelevant,” they replied. It was always the voices and not the optician who decided what was relevant.
Their favorite topic was Selma. “How long has it been now, that you haven’t dared tell her you love her?” they smirked.
“You know exactly how long,” the optician said. “No one knows better than you.”
“Tell us,” they insisted.
“But you always advised me not to,” the optician exclaimed.
When the voices were too lazy to come up with a concrete example—usually around midnight—they used words like everything, nothing, never, and always, with which they could easily jostle the optician, especially since he had grown old. Always and never are especially hard to shoo away at an advanced age.
“You’ve never been bold enough to do anything; you’ve never really dared,” the voices said.
They were so clear and resolute that sometimes the optician could hardly believe the people around him, like Selma, couldn’t hear them. The optician recalled Elsbeth’s deceased husband, who had suffered from deafening tinnitus and, utterly worn out, had finally broken down in tears on my father’s examination table and held his ear very close to my father’s. “Can’t you hear it?” Elsbeth’s husband had asked in despair. “How is it possible that you can’t hear it?”
“Shut up,” the optician said tentatively, then turned onto his side and concentrated on his slippers, neatly lined up on the bedside rug.
“You’ve never really dared to do anything,” the voices said.
“Yes, because you always told me not to!” the optician shouted, and the voices repeated that this was irrelevant: the results were what mattered. And so it went on, all night long. And so the following morning resulted in an ever more exhausted optician, eviscerated by his inner voices, slumped over on his examination stool, trying to lift the weight of always and never until he finally stuck his head into the arc perimeter. It was the only place the voices could not enter.
Now, ever since Frederik had appeared, the optician kept a book on Buddhism on his night table, and when the voices started in on Selma and never and always, the optician opened it to one of the passages he’d underlined. “I am the river,” he would say, “and you are leaves floating by on my current.”
“Speaking of rivers,” the voices replied, “the only thing we have to say is: Apfelbach.”
“I am the sky,” the optician said, “and you are just clouds floating by.”
“Wrong, optician,” they answered, “no one is the sky, and you’re the cloud, a rather ragged one at that, and we’re the wind that blows you around.”
* * *
In early November, when I still didn’t know that there would be a change in plans and Frederik would be there the next day, I went through the village with a list. I started with Marlies, to get the worst over with first.
“No one’s home,” Marlies shouted through her closed front door.
“Please, Marlies, it will be quick,” I said.
“There’s no one home, deal with it,” she shouted back.
I walked around the house and looked in the kitchen window. Marlies sat at her table, as always in only a Norwegian sweater and her underwear. She was in her mid-thirties now but looked younger. Something preserved Marlies.
I leaned on the wall next to the slightly open window. “Marlies,” I said through the gap, “I’ve got a visitor from Japan coming soon.”
“I couldn’t care less,” Marlies said.
“I know,” I said. “I just wanted to ask: In case you happen to meet my visitor, could you … could you be a bit more approachable? A little nicer? Just briefly. I’d really appreciate it.”
I heard Marlies light a Peer 100, and soon after a puff of smoke blew toward me out the window.
“I’m not friendly, deal with it,” she said.
I sighed. “Okay, Marlies. Otherwise are things all right with you?”
“Never better,” Marlies replied. “And now, goodbye.”
“So long,” I said, then pushed off the wall and went to see Els
beth, who was standing in her garden looking at an ivy-covered apple tree, her arms crossed below her enormous breasts.
It was the same tree she had tried to blow the leaves off of after Martin’s death. When they fell on their own that autumn, Elsbeth had kicked the trunk and, tears flowing, had said that it was too late now, they could just as well have stayed on the branches.
Elsbeth pointed at the ivy. “I really want to get rid of the stuff, but I also really don’t,” she murmured. The pruning shears were propped up against the trunk of the tree.
“Why wouldn’t you?” I asked.
“Sometimes ivy is an enchanted person, and when he reaches the top of the tree, he is freed from the spell,” Elsbeth explained.
“Speaking of superstition…” I began.
“The question is, do I release the person or the tree?”
The ivy was already entwined around the top part of the trunk.
“I’d choose the tree,” I said. “If it’s a person, then he’s already half free. That’s more than can be said for the rest of us.”
Elsbeth patted my cheek with her pudgy hand. “You sound more and more like Selma,” she said, and picked up the pruning shears.
“Elsbeth,” I said, “I’ve got a visitor from Japan coming soon and I wanted to ask you if you could talk about superstition as little as possible.”
“But why?” Elsbeth asked, and reluctantly started to clear the ivy. With each snip, she apologized to the person who the ivy might actually be.
“Because it’s odd,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” Elsbeth said. “But wouldn’t it be much odder if I didn’t say anything about superstitions?” As she snipped, she said, “I’m sorry, dear possible person.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said. “You can talk about other things.”
“About what?”
“About the turbulent preparations for the Christmas party in the community center,” I suggested, “about the debate over holding it in the afternoon or the evening.”
“That doesn’t really sound very interesting,” Elsbeth said. “But, fine. I won’t say anything superstitious.” She apologized to another ivy root. “I hope I won’t forget. Here, take this.”
She pressed the shears into my hand, closed her eyes, took two big steps forward and two back.
“What was that?” I asked, and Elsbeth said, “It helps against forgetfulness.”
* * *
I found the optician with his head in the arc perimeter. Selma was there. She had brought him some cake and was perched on the edge of the table with the phoropter, with which Martin and I had believed you could see the future.
“It’s just Luisa,” she said when the bells on the door jingled, so the optician would know it wasn’t a customer and he could safely keep his head in the instrument and signal to the little dots that he had seen them.
“Could you take Alaska with you today?” Selma asked. “I’ll be at the doctor’s all day tomorrow.” Selma’s deformed hands shone with the pain relief ointment she had rubbed into them.
“Of course,” I said. “I wanted to ask you two something.”
“Shoot,” the optician said.
“I wanted to ask you not to ask Frederik too many questions about Buddhism.”
The optician took his head out of the perimeter and spun on his stool to face me. “But why not?”
“Because he won’t be here on duty,” I said, and thought of my father, who, when he was still a practicing doctor, was constantly being approached on the street, in the ice-cream parlor, and even in Dr. Maschke’s waiting room, for advice on symptoms.
“What’s that list you’ve got there?” the optician asked. I held my spiral notebook out to him, and he read out loud:
Marlies: nicer
Optician: no Buddhism
Elsbeth: less superstition
Selma: less skeptical
Palm: fewer Bible quotations
Mama: less absent-seeming
Me: draw fewer blanks, less timid, less anxious, new pair of pants
The optician pressed his hands against his lower back. “I thought Buddhism was about authenticity,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “but not necessarily ours.”
“New pair of pants is good,” Selma said.
“Why no Bible quotations?” the optician asked.
“I thought that might irritate him, as a Buddhist,” I said, as if Buddhism and Christianity were rival football teams.
“I thought he wasn’t here on duty,” the optician said, and Selma added, “And I thought nothing irritated Buddhists. But maybe I really should be a bit less skeptical.”
“By the way, Buddhism is also about giving up control,” the optician said, and stuck his head back in the perimeter.
“Come, let’s go for a walk,” Selma said to me. “It’s almost half past six and I think you desperately need some fresh air.”
We crossed the Uhlheck. It was blustery, the forest rustled. We had turned up our coat collars and the wind blew my hair into my face. Selma maneuvered her wheelchair over the soggy path.
Selma was no longer very steady on her feet, but she refused to give up her daily walk in the Uhlheck, so she had gotten herself a wheelchair with thick tires like those on mountain bikes. Selma would not let anyone push her. She would always bump along beside me in her wheelchair for a while, then she would get up and push it like a walker.
While Selma let her thoughts wander, she read mine, which, especially since Frederik’s visit was approaching, refused to wander anywhere; they wrapped themselves around me and the surrounding tree trunks like garlands of letters.
“Why do you worry so much?” Selma asked. “Why are you so nervous?”
I looked at the wheelchair as it struggled through the mud and said, “Henry, the coach is breaking.”
Selma looked at me from the corner of her eye. “I don’t think so,” she said.
“I’m scared he’ll think we’re all strange.”
“But he himself is strange,” Selma said. “He stumbles out of the underbrush and eats Mars bars.”
The wheelchair got bogged down with one wheel in a mud puddle. Selma shook it free. “But that’s not the only thing, is it?” she asked.
“No,” I answered. Since Frederik’s visit had been getting closer, I’d been eyeing my heart suspiciously, just as everyone in the village kept a suspicious eye on their own hearts after Selma’s dreams. My heart was not used to getting so much attention, and so raced at a disturbing pace. I remembered that the onset of a heart attack is accompanied by a tingling in the arm, but couldn’t remember which one and so both arms tingled.
“You’re confusing things,” Selma said.
Love befalls you, I thought, it arrives like the bailiff who recently appeared at Farmer Leidig’s house in the neighboring village. Love comes in, I thought, slaps a seal on everything you have, and announces: “None of this belongs to you anymore.”
“You’re confusing things, Luisa,” Selma said again. “That’s not love, that’s death.”
She put her arm around me, and it looked like she was pushing me and the wheelchair through the mud. “And there’s a slight difference between them,” she said, and smiled. “A few people have returned from the kingdom of love.”
* * *
While Selma and I were walking in the Uhlheck, the optician was checking the countless lenses in his phoropter. Naturally he couldn’t see with this phoropter that Mr. Rödder would complain about Alaska the next day and lavishly spray the room with Blue Ocean Breeze. He couldn’t see that there would be a change in plans or that my defective, garrulous answering machine would be speechless at the news that Frederik was arriving early, that he was already as good as here. The optician couldn’t see that I would run to meet Frederik or that on the landing we wouldn’t know how or whether we should hug each other. He couldn’t see how Frederik would laugh and say, “You’re looking at me as if I were the devil himself. It’s just me, Fr
ederik. We talked on the phone.”
* * *
And if he could see it, he didn’t say anything.
FELICITÀ
“You’re early,” I said to Frederik when we met on the doorstep to my apartment building, and it was the dumbest possible opening sentence.
“I know, I’m sorry,” he said, “something was rescheduled. You’re shivering, you’re trembling, even.”
“It’s perfectly normal. I do this all the time.”
A salt dough wreath fell from one of the apartment doors across the hall and broke into a thousand pieces. Frederik looked at the shards, then back at me.
“Nothing’s fastened very well here,” I said.
Frederik was looking at me with an attention and friendliness that was almost unbearable.
“Come on in,” I said, opening the door.
Two boxes filled with things from my father’s medical office took up nearly all of my tiny entryway. He had spread his possessions widely. A few of his boxes were in Elsbeth’s basement, a few were in my apartment, but most were at Selma’s.
Alaska stood in the entryway, too, and it was as tight as if we’d crowded into a closet. Frederik tried to bend down to Alaska but there wasn’t enough room.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing at a clear plastic box on top of the cardboard boxes.
“Instruments for the ears, nose, and throat.”
“Is there another room in your apartment?”
“Here,” I said, pushing Frederik into my studio.
I tried to picture my studio the way Frederik was seeing it for the first time: the fold-out couch covered with a blanket for Alaska, the bookcase that had been in my childhood bedroom, the bed that was just a mattress on a slat frame, advance reading copies piled in a corner. Frederik glanced at the shelves and looked away quickly before heading determinedly over to a small photograph on the wall. The photograph was the only thing in the entire apartment I hadn’t dusted.
“That’s the way it is with guests,” Selma had said once. “You clean your entire home and your visitor goes straight to the one spot you missed.”