by Mariana Leky
“That’s Martin,” I said. Martin and I were four years old in the picture. Selma had taken it at carnival. I was dressed up as a violet with Elsbeth’s much-too-large violet hat on my head. Martin was a strawberry. The optician had draped artificial turf over his shoulders and was a convincing flower bed. He carried Martin in his arms.
“The bookcase is crooked,” Frederik said without taking his eyes from the photograph.
“Are you hungry?” I asked.
“Very.”
“I had an idea. There’s a Japanese restaurant here that serves a dish called Buddhist fasting meal, so I thought—”
“To be honest,” Frederik said, “what I really want are french fries. French fries with ketchup.”
* * *
We walked through the county seat, Alaska between us, and I was amazed that people weren’t staring at Frederik and his beauty, that there weren’t car accidents, that people didn’t crane their necks and run into lampposts, that a couple passing us, deep in conversation, didn’t forever lose the thread of their thoughts. A few people looked at us out of the corner of their eyes, but only because of his cowl.
We went into a snack bar. There were two high tables and a slot machine. A television suspended over one of the two tables blared. The slot machine flashed and tootled. It smelled of old fat.
“It’s nice here,” Frederik said, and he meant it.
Frederik ate four servings of fries. “Would you like some more?” he kept asking after I’d finished my serving, holding out a fry speared on a plastic fork. “They’re excellent.”
Just then Al Bano and Romina Power appeared on the television overhead, singing “Felicità.” “That reminds me: How are things with your mom and the ice-cream parlor owner?” Frederik asked, pouring another packet of ketchup over his fries.
“Good. But I think my mother still loves my father.”
“Excellent. And your father?”
“He’s traveling.”
“And that optician? Did he tell your grandmother?”
“No.”
“Excellent,” Frederik said, shoving five fries into his mouth at the same time.
I smiled at him. “So, what do you eat in Japan?”
“Mostly rice with not much else,” he answered, wiping ketchup from the corner of his mouth. “Is there any Coke left? Hang on, I’ll get us another Coke.”
Frederik stood up and went to the refrigerated case next to the register, passing the man at the slot machine, who didn’t even turn to look at him. Suddenly I was glad we were going to go to the village. That way there would be people who could attest that Frederik had really been here. The man playing the slot machine and the snack bar owner were not reliable witnesses. They were, unbelievably, busy with other things than Frederik, busy with a gambling machine and a deep-fat fryer.
When Frederik was back at the table with me, he beamed at me with his light-colored eyes—which, as the optician would later tell me, were a shade of cyan blue—as if the Coke were some hidden treasure. He held a bottle out to me. I took it and noticed I was no longer trembling. How nice it is that you’re here, I thought. Frederik laughed and leaned backward. “It’s nice to be here,” he said, in a relieved tone, as if he hadn’t been at all sure.
* * *
We spent the night an arm’s length away from each other; he was lying on the couch, I in my bed. The cowl lay draped over the chair like a ghost who had fainted. I’d been afraid that underneath it, Frederik might be wearing special Buddhist underwear that looked like a sumo wrestler’s belt, but he wore what ordinary people do.
Frederik had moved the fold-out couch so he wouldn’t have to look at the crooked bookcase. We both stared at the ceiling as if someone had announced that in a few minutes a prizewinning documentary would be shown on it. I didn’t know how noticeably I was not sleeping until at some point Frederik said, “You need to sleep, Luisa.”
“But I’m not making any noise.”
“I can hear you not making any noise from here.”
* * *
In the middle of the night, as Frederik and I were patiently waiting for the documentary to be screened on the ceiling, my mother woke with a start in Alberto’s bed.
It was three o’clock in the morning. Alberto was not next to her. He often got up at night to compose new ice-cream sundaes in the parlor downstairs. My mother looked at the empty space next to her and the blanket that had been thrown aside. It took her a moment to realize that something else was missing besides Alberto.
It was the eternal question of whether or not she should leave my father. The question had disappeared, and my mother suddenly knew for certain that it would never come back, because in the moment that she had sat bolt upright, she had left my father.
She sank back on the pillows and looked at the dark, bare light bulb over Alberto’s bed.
You can live for years with a gnawing question, you can let it hollow you out, and then have it disappear in a flash, in a single moment of waking with a start. My mother left my father; the fact that he had left her already some time before didn’t change a thing. My mother was in a different time zone and so, from her point of view, she had left him first.
Naturally my father noticed. He noticed it far away in Siberia, and he called her from a pay phone the very second she woke with a start, but he didn’t reach her because she was sitting in Alberto’s bed, leaving him. My father was left in the Siberian phone booth listening to an endless ringing tone, and in the apartment below, Selma covered her head with her pillow because the phone on the floor above kept ringing and ringing and ringing.
After she had woken with a start, my mother could not get back to sleep. She got dressed and passed Alberto without a word on her way out of the ice-cream parlor and into the silent village. She looked at the closed faces of the houses she had known by heart for decades, and only then, for the first time, did they truly seem familiar to her. As she walked through the streets, the space she had gained with the question’s disappearance began to expand around her.
My mother’s fingertips, which had been cold for as long as she could remember, suddenly felt warm. My mother wasn’t good at getting separated, but she was very good at being separated.
She walked through the village streets for a long time, longer than our village actually is, but she was so delighted with all the space she suddenly had, that at six in the morning she couldn’t wait any longer. She went to the phone booth next to the village shop. The neon sign over the door was just flickering on; the supplier was parking his truck in front of the shop.
* * *
Frederik and I woke with a start when the telephone rang. I was alarmed because I knew that at such an hour the phone only rings for cases of unpostponable death or unpostponable love, and everything unpostponable about love was lying on my sofa right then. I thought: Someone has died.
“I’m sorry to wake you two, Luisa,” my mother said, “but I absolutely have to tell you something. I’ve left your father. I’m alone now.” She said it with the excitement others say, “I’ve just met someone.”
“Congratulations,” I said.
“And I wanted to tell you…” My mother gave a heavy sigh. “I wanted to tell you that I’m very sorry I was never really there for you.”
I rubbed a hand over my face. My mother could just as well have apologized for the weather. Because I didn’t know what else to say, I said, “Well, that’s how it was.”
My mother looked at the delivery truck. The supplier was pushing a cart as tall as he was, stacked with boxes of groceries and covered with a gray tarp, into the store. He stopped halfway through the doorway to tie his shoelaces. And if Elsbeth had appeared just then and said, “Look, Astrid, it looks exactly like a monstrous gray wall of regret, before which we will all eventually kneel,” my mother would have said, “Yes, that’s exactly what it looks like.”
“That’s something I’ll have to live with,” my mother said into the handset.
“Yes, I’m living with it, too. I have been for a while. Everything’s fine, actually.”
“Get some more sleep, Luisy,” my mother said, and I did want to sleep right then, very much, as did Frederik. We didn’t want to wait for the documentary a minute longer, but as soon as I hung up, the telephone rang again. Once again it wasn’t death but love.
“What is it now?” I asked.
“It’s me,” my father said.
“Did something happen?”
“No.”
“Then why are you calling so early?”
“I can’t reach Astrid and I wanted to tell you something.”
“I’m very sorry that I was never really there for you,” I said.
“What?” my father asked. “You’ve always been there for me.”
“It was a joke.”
“What? I can’t really understand you. The connection’s very bad. What I … what I wanted to tell you—”
“Are you drunk?”
“Yes. I wanted to tell you: I had to leave your mother back then. I didn’t have a choice. You can’t stay with someone who is always asking herself if she should leave you.”
“Are you sure you haven’t spoken to Mama?”
“No,” my father exclaimed. “I told you, I can’t reach her.”
“And why did you want to tell me this?”
“Because I can’t reach your mother,” he said, crackling.
“I’m not very reachable at the moment, either, Papa.”
“Just one more thing, Luisy. When people in Siberia go into the forest and then fan out alone, they call each other’s names regularly and the others call back, ‘Yes, I’m here.’ That way they can all be sure that no one is being threatened by a Siberian bear. And now I can’t reach Astrid.”
“I have company right now, and not the company of a Siberian bear.”
“Oh God, Luisa, I’m sorry. I forgot. Tell him hello for me.”
I hung up and went back to my room. I stretched out on the bed, pulled the blankets up to my chin, and looked over at Frederik. “You look like the most exhausted person in the world,” he said with concern.
“My father can’t reach my mother because she left him after he’d left her because she was always asking herself if she should leave him,” I said. “And he says hello.”
“Can’t they leave you out of it?” Frederik asked, and lay back down. “Give me your hand.”
I scooted to the edge of my bed and stretched my arm out. It was just the right length for Frederik to hold my hand. We lay there holding hands.
“Shall we drive to the village tomorrow?” I asked.
“Yes, I’d like to,” he answered.
We lay there like that until Frederik finally fell asleep and his hand slipped from mine.
SIXTY-FIVE PERCENT
Frederik and I sat in my car. It was pouring rain and the windshield wipers wagged furiously back and forth. “I can hardly see a thing,” I said.
Frederik leaned toward me and wiped the windshield with his sleeve. He was humming a song I didn’t recognize. I thought of the list I’d carried around the village in the hope that more of the points would be observed than just the new pair of pants, which I had, in fact, bought. I leaned forward, very close to the streaming, fogged-up windshield as if there were something on it to decipher. Alaska, asleep on the back seat, found it all very cozy.
“Breathe, Luisa,” Frederik said, and cleared another patch for me to see through. The optician had been repeating this constantly since he’d started reading books on Buddhism.
“I’ve been breathing all my life,” I said.
Frederik put his hand on my stomach. “Yes, but into here. You shouldn’t breathe only with your upper body.”
Selma was right. I’d been confusing two things. Frederik was bowling me over, but not like a bailiff or a heart attack, and, as directed by my list, I was not drawing a blank. Here it is, I thought, that famous here-and-now the optician was always talking about. Here I was, although I could hardly see a thing, right in the middle of the here-and-now instead of in my usual when-and-if. I took Frederik’s hand and there was a loud bang. I was sure one of the bands around my heart had snapped, but it was a piston.
* * *
Frederik ran through the pouring rain to a phone booth, Selma’s number in hand, to let her know that we would be late and to ask her to use the optician’s German automobile club card to send a mechanic. Alaska and I waited in the car, and suddenly I noticed my feet were getting wet. I looked down. A deep puddle had formed around the clutch and the gas and brake pedals. I looked in the footwell of the back seat and saw water there, too. I got out and circled the car with Alaska, without knowing exactly what I was looking for.
Frederik returned soaking wet. Below his jacket, his cowl stuck to his legs. I opened the car door and pointed at the puddle. He leaned over the driver’s seat. “How did that get in here?”
“I don’t have the slightest idea,” I said. “All of a sudden it was just there. I thought it was better to get out of the car, because of the electricity.”
We stood on the shoulder in the November cold, completely drenched, and I thought of a passage the optician had read to Selma and me about finding beauty in every single moment. I tapped Frederik’s arm and pointed at the asphalt. “Look at the beautiful colors in that puddle.”
“I’m afraid that’s oil,” he said.
The mechanic came and was in a very good mood. “Is it carnival already?” he said with a laugh, pointing at Frederik’s cowl.
“It seems so,” Frederik retorted, pointing at the mechanic’s white raincoat, which looked like the gear of a forensics officer.
The mechanic examined the motor. “She’s done for,” he said. “Piston’s galled.”
“There’s water in the footwell, too, even though the car is watertight,” I said.
The mechanic raised his eyebrows and circled the car with a slowness that was not at all suited to the weather. He checked the windows, the roof, the doors. Then he slid under the car. Because I was thinking of the optician’s Buddhist sayings, I didn’t ask if he could hurry it up at all.
“Well?” Frederik asked when the mechanic slid out from under the car.
“To be honest, I can’t figure how the water is getting in,” he said in dismay. Apparently there usually wasn’t much he couldn’t figure out.
Alaska was shivering. I was shivering even more, and Frederik put his arm around me. He was shivering, too. Finally the mechanic shrugged. “Water finds a way,” he said.
“Very true,” Frederik agreed. “And now?”
“Now I’ll tow you,” he said, and attached my car to his truck.
Frederik got into my car, Alaska and I rode with the mechanic to show him the way. He had spread a tarp out for us to sit on so we wouldn’t drip over everything.
“Water finds a way, no matter how well sealed something is,” he said. The tree air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror was called Green Apple but smelled exactly like Mr. Rödder’s Blue Ocean Breeze. It struggled against the smell of wet dog as assiduously and ineffectively as the wipers struggled against the rain.
I turned and waved at Frederik. He waved back.
“Humans are sixty-five percent water,” the mechanic said.
I wiped the wet hair from my face. “Especially today,” I said.
The village sign appeared. The mechanic and Frederik stopped at the bottom of the hill. Selma and the optician were standing in front of the house under an umbrella.
ONE THOUSAND YEARS AT SEA
They had come to meet us. Selma opened a second umbrella. The optician said, “Konnichiwa,” and bowed deeply. Frederik bowed, too.
Frederik and Selma looked at each other for a very long time as they shook hands. “You don’t look like Japan at all,” Selma said. “More like Hollywood.”
The optician and I thought of the several lives one has in Buddhism, because from the way Selma and Frederik looked at each o
ther, they seemed to know each other from at least one previous life, and not just casually, but as if they had saved the world together or grown up in the same family.
“You also don’t look the way I’d pictured you,” Frederik said. “You look like someone on television, but the name escapes me.”
And that was the moment we finally also saw the resemblance. My God, he’s right, the optician and I thought, and we couldn’t understand how it had never occurred to us before.
Selma frowned, because the optician and I were staring at her as if seeing her for the first time. “Come inside, quickly,” she said, and we went into the house.
* * *
“Careful, don’t step there.” From the foyer, the optician gestured toward the area in the kitchen circled with red tape. “The floor is too weak. I marked the area.”
Frederik looked at the red outline from the hallway.
“It’s been dangerous for a while now,” the optician said. “I know it’s no state to be in.”
Frederik smiled and said, “Apparently it is,” and took off his shoes. So we all did the same.
* * *
Selma went to get him towels and a bathrobe, then we all went into the kitchen. I tried to see it for the first time as Frederik would. The yellow wallpaper; the light blue credenza with gray pleated curtains in the glass doors; the corner bench; the old, scratched wooden table; and the gray linoleum floor with the round, red-outlined area near the window—Martin had once said that on the gray floor, that area looked like the eye of a whale, an eye completely encircled by an eyelid inflammation—and the water heater over the sink, still plastered with Martin’s and my collection of Hanuta candy stickers: a grinning apple with a bite out of it that said, “Today, I had a bite”; an energetic walnut shouting, “Let’s get cracking!” I tried to see with fresh eyes the macramé owl hanging on the wall, which the shopkeeper’s wife had given Selma as a gift, and the white linen curtains that hung down precisely to the windowsill.