by Mariana Leky
“So he can pray for Elsbeth?”
“No,” the optician said, “because he knows about animals.”
* * *
After the call, Palm got right into his car. He drove a long way, to the large, weather-beaten fortress he had visited a few times with Martin, on the few days he hadn’t been drunk.
And while Selma and I clutched our mugs and the optician smoked one cigarette after another in front of the hospital door, Palm parked his car, took his flashlight from the trunk, and shoved it in under his belt. Palm’s lights were always good, he knew about illumination.
He looked for an unlocked door but couldn’t find one. The low door on the back of the tower looked very weather-beaten, but its padlock was sturdy. Palm started to shake the door.
After Martin’s death, Palm was drained of his rage and, with it, his strength, because the two always went together in Palm. He looked around and cleared his throat.
“Please open, door,” he said, and shook it, but the door was a good one that could not be so easily shaken, despite its worn-down appearance. “Is this the best you can do?,” it seemed to be taunting him. “It’s going to take more than this, you feeble hunter.” Palm started to shake the door harder and harder. He shook the door like a Tatort detective gone mad shaking the shoulder of a criminal who won’t reveal where he hid his kidnapping victim. Palm became heated.
“Open up, you goddamn piece of shit,” he croaked more than shouted; his voice was no longer used to being loud. “Or I’ll blow you away,” he added for good measure.
The padlock held, but the door burst in two.
Palm exhaled and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. He turned on his flashlight, stepped over what was left of the door, and climbed the flight of stairs that led all the way to the top of the tower. He reached into his pants pocket to make sure he’d brought the sharpest knife he owned.
* * *
We were still waiting as Palm ran up the hospital corridor toward us an hour later. At the same time a doctor came toward us from the other direction. He was in no hurry, walking slowly to gain time before it abruptly stood still.
The winded Palm and the unhurried doctor reached us simultaneously. Selma, the optician, and I stood up, because an invisible person said, “Please rise.”
“She didn’t make it,” the doctor said.
Selma put her hand over her mouth, the optician fell back into his chair and buried his face in his hands, and Palm opened his fist, which we now noticed was covered with blood.
A small piece of meat fell onto the linoleum. It fell right in front of the doctor’s white shoe, which made a strange noise, a kind of squeak.
“What in heaven’s name is that?” the doctor shouted. How could he have known: Who recognizes a bat’s heart at first glance?
* * *
It was raining on Elsbeth’s funeral. It rained as hard as it had on the day Frederik visited me, and from above, all the unfurled black umbrellas huddling around Elsbeth’s grave looked like a giant ink blot.
I held Selma’s hand in mine. Her shoulders shook with sobs.
“Elsbeth told me that it’s good for the person being buried if it rains on the coffin,” I whispered into Selma’s ear.
Selma looked at me. Her face was swollen and wet. “But not this hard,” she said.
The raindrops pelted the ornaments on the coffin lid. Selma had insisted we buy a lavishly decorated model, given that Elsbeth had always cultivated a lavish appearance. When the funeral director had named the price and the optician asked if it wasn’t possible to reduce the price somewhat, the funeral director announced triumphantly that one shouldn’t haggle over the price of a coffin or the person being buried would never find rest. “I know because Elsbeth told me,” he said.
* * *
Strictly speaking, Elsbeth’s house had not been hers for a long time. It was owned by a bank in the county seat, and now that she was dead, the house had to lose all traces of her as quickly as possible.
My father helped us empty it. He had just returned from some desert and was about to leave for another. Alaska impeded our work because he kept jumping around my father to get him to put down the cartons he was carrying and pet him.
While packing, I found Elsbeth’s photo album with black-and-white pictures of young Elsbeth, Heinrich, and Selma. I knew these pictures by heart; Elsbeth had often shown them to Martin and me. One was of Selma and Heinrich pointing to an empty lot on which our house would be built. Martin and I were never able to understand how Elsbeth and Selma had ever been so young or how my grandfather had once been in this world and our house had not.
My mother also helped us, and it was as if my parents had decided to stage a box-carrying competition. If my mother saw my father carrying two boxes at once, she picked up three. If my father saw my mother with three boxes, he lifted four. When my mother finally tried to carry five boxes at once, the top one fell in the garden and burst open. Sunflower-yellow notebooks were scattered on Elsbeth’s lawn and one had fallen open.
The shopkeeper set down Elsbeth’s iron and picked the notebook up. “Sex with Renata blows my mind,” he read. “What on earth is this?”
The optician took the notebook from his hand and snapped it shut.
“Nothing,” he said, “it’s nothing.”
He gathered the notebooks into a pile, added some dried leaves, took his lighter from his jacket pocket, and lit it on fire. While the flames licked at the sunflower-yellow covers and the pages filled with writing, the optician looked up at the sky.
“Look, Elsbeth,” he whispered. “Renata will soon be just a dusting of ash.”
Selma came out of Elsbeth’s house. She had kept her composure all day long and, to the extent she could, had impassively helped pack things up and carry them outside. She only lost her composure when putting Elsbeth’s slippers, standing under the telephone side table as always, in a plastic bag.
Selma pushed her wheelchair, its seat covered with glass jars full of herbs and powders, the uses of which were a complete mystery to us. Selma thought for a moment and then tipped it all onto the small fire at the optician’s feet, all the cures for a broken heart, for constipation, for people who refused to die after their deaths, for toothache, sweaty feet, bankruptcy, and gallstones, all the aids for easy births, for restful sleep, and to make someone fall in love with a person he could not love.
“Without Elsbeth, none of this is any help,” she said.
* * *
Selma kept Elsbeth’s photo album. She kept the piece of carpet Elsbeth always stuck between her stomach and the steering wheel when driving, and her slippers. She put Elsbeth’s slippers under the living room sofa, on which I lay awake all night after Elsbeth’s funeral.
I turned on the light and picked up one of the slippers. It was impossible to guess what the original color had been. I looked at the landscape that had formed on Elsbeth’s slipper over the years. The uneven, furrowed rubber sole, the inner hollows caused by her bunions, the glistening black hollow made by her heel.
I didn’t cut and run. I put Elsbeth’s slipper back under the sofa, next to the other one. I took a piece of paper and wrote: “I hereby affirm that we are not made for each other.” I wrote it as solemnly as other people sign a marriage certificate.
PART THREE
ENDLESS EXPANSES
Ever since my father started traveling, he would give Selma a book of photographs of whatever country he happened to be in for her birthday. Selma no longer shelved these books without looking at them, as she had before; now she studied them carefully. She wanted to form a picture in her mind of what her son was seeing.
After the birthday guests were gone, Selma sat in the armchair with her new book of photographs and the optician settled down on the red couch opposite her. The captions in the books were usually in English, and for that the optician was considered the resident expert—ever since he had translated song lyrics for Martin and me. He watched Selma as she read or he look
ed at the old fir trees outside the window, their branches swaying in the wind that always blew here. And he waited. He waited until Selma looked at him over the top of her reading glasses and asked about English words she didn’t know. He knew them.
On her seventy-second birthday, Selma sat with a book of photographs of New Zealand on her lap, and it seemed to her that she had just unpacked her last birthday book a few days before.
It’s true that time goes faster the older you are, Selma thought, and felt that this wasn’t a very good arrangement. Selma wished that her sense of time would grow old with her, that it would develop a limp, but the opposite was true. Selma’s sense of time behaved like a racehorse.
“What does New Zealand’s amazing faunal biodiversity mean?” Selma asked.
“Astonishing variety of animal species,” the optician explained.
In the village below, the shopkeeper was moving the cartons of milk from the back shelf on the right to the back shelf on the left. My father came to visit us. He brought shawls of Genoan velvet. I wrote Frederik. Frederik wrote me. One of the mayor’s pigs escaped and the optician caught it.
Meanwhile, the trees in the Uhlheck lost the green from their leaves and let them fall. Not much later, the shopkeeper’s warehouse roof collapsed under the weight of a heavy snowfall that, heavy as it was, nonetheless melted in an instant, according to Selma’s sense of time. Then, in the twinkling of an eye, the trees in the Uhlheck grew new leaves and in the same twinkling of an eye, Selma was celebrating her seventy-third birthday with a book of photographs of Argentina on her lap.
“What does untamed nature mean?” she asked.
And the optician replied, “Uncontrolled wilderness.”
* * *
I wrote Frederik. Frederik wrote me. We wrote each other despite or perhaps even because of my affirmation, and even though our letters had to travel halfway around the world, even though they were prey to all sorts of technical and human error, they dependably arrived at their respective destinations, albeit with a certain delay.
“The twin from the upper village, the one who’s the mailman, put newborn cats in a bag and drowned them in the Apfelbach,” I wrote Frederik.
Two weeks later his answer arrived. “Drowning cats brings very bad karma.”
“Couldn’t we talk on the phone sometime?” I asked in a letter, and, as expected, he answered that phone calls were very complicated.
* * *
Even though it wasn’t anatomically possible, I tried to transform love, at least into something modest and manageable. That, too, was complicated, but because I didn’t see Frederik and never spoke with him, it wasn’t hard to pretend, with time, that it was manageable.
The optician often asked how things were with Frederik. “We write,” I said, and the optician found that wasn’t an adequate answer to his question.
“But you love him,” he said as I sat on his examination stool for a vision test because my eyes always hurt whenever I read fine print.
“No,” I replied, “not anymore.”
The vision chart behind the optician fell to the floor. He went into the back room to get another.
“I made this one just for you,” he said.
It read:
You cannot always
choose
which
adventure
you’re made for
I leaned forward. “I need glasses,” I said.
* * *
Mr. Rödder sprayed Blue Ocean Breeze on Alaska, Marlies complained to the shopkeeper about the frozen vegetables, and my father came to visit. He looked more and more like Heinrich. Little by little my father’s facial features had started to shift like a landmass slowly sliding toward his father’s face.
“How strange,” he said, grabbing his nose, “and yet I’m much older than he ever was.”
On my twenty-fifth birthday, when the candles stood close together on my cake, the optician said, “Happy birthday. Be glad that they all still fit on one cake. For me, we’d need half the bakery.”
“Close your eyes,” Selma said. She put a chain of blue gemstones around my neck.
“The stones are cyan blue, by the way,” the optician said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Happy birthday, dear Luisa,” Frederik wrote. “I have the feeling that someone who hopefully means well has seated us at opposite ends of the same table. However, it’s a table that is 9,000 kilometers long (with those dimensions I think we could call it a banquet table) and although we can’t see each other, I know you’re at the other end.”
The optician looked at me steadily. “The stones are cyan blue,” he repeated.
“Yes, thanks, I got it,” I said.
* * *
“What does the impressive Greenland ice deposits mean?” Selma asked on her next birthday, and the optician translated it for her.
Palm quoted Bible passages, the optician thought up connections between things that had nothing to do with each other (gravel and hairdos, orange juice and Alaska), and Marlies covered the already opaque window in her front door with packing paper. I moved the still-unpacked bookshelf Frederik had given me four years earlier from one corner of the room to the other. The mayor’s daughter and Farmer Häubel’s great-grandson had their sixth child, and I got my first pair of glasses. Then came a total solar eclipse.
The optician had never had so many customers in his life. People came from the county seat and the surrounding villages, where the solar eclipse glasses had sold out immediately. I helped the optician at his store; he had bright red cheeks and a hoarse voice from so many customers. The twin from the upper village, the one who was not the mailman, tried to resell his pair for eighty marks, but no one was interested.
We watched the eclipse from the Uhlheck. The entire village was there; the mayor took a group photograph. When the sun was completely blacked out, Palm took off his glasses and looked directly at the circular blackness unprotected. “What are you doing?” Selma cried in alarm, and put her hand over Palm’s eyes.
“The glasses don’t let any light through,” Palm objected.
“That’s the whole point,” Selma explained, but because her fingers were so crooked, Palm could see through them. Then time shifted to a new millennium.
“To think I lived long enough to witness this,” Selma said. “But if time keeps racing this fast, I may well see the next millennium.”
“I worry that gravity will disappear with the change to the new millennium,” I wrote to Frederik.
We celebrated the new year in the community center. The optician and the shopkeeper spent the entire evening setting off fireworks; from above, our village looked like a ship in distress. Behind the building, near the toilets, I drunkenly kissed the drunken twin from the upper village, the one who was the mailman. I kissed him despite his bad karma and because everything was spinning from the sparkling wine, but I stopped as soon as he said, “Luisa, you’re as hot as a Roman candle.”
Gravity did not disappear. Nothing changed except for the actor who had played Melissa in Selma’s television series for decades was suddenly replaced by another. Selma acknowledged this with an irritated snort. Then she looked at me and said, “Something has to happen.”
“What?”
“Go out with that nice young man sometime, the one from your trade school. What’s his name again?”
“Andreas,” I said.
* * *
Selma asked the optician what enormous population density meant, and he translated it for her. It was in a book about New York. The optician bought heat patches for his lower back. The deliveryman pushed his gray-covered cart to the shop door and my father came to visit. He brought me a scimitar, which I gave to Mr. Rödder as a gift. The twin from the upper village, the one who was not the mailman, set crazy Hassel’s farmhouse on fire and didn’t get caught, and Selma and I stood looking at a tree on the bank of the Apfelbach and wondered if Elsbeth was right about ivy on a tree trunk actually b
eing a person climbing toward redemption and, if so, who it was. The optician said it was a shame we didn’t know anyone who was a stamp collector, since we had so many marvelous stamps we’d received with the photography books sent from all over the world and the letters from Japan.
I taught the Häubel children how to tie their shoes on our front steps, Friedhelm married the widow from the House of Contemplation, and on his express wish we all sang, Oh, you lovely Westerwald, in front of the registry office—at the wedding the twin from the upper village, the one who was the mailman, asked if I wanted to kiss some more, since he was unattached at the moment—and that winter Palm made a discovery. He was on his way to Selma’s with some Bible passages when he saw her gripping my arm tightly, trying in vain to make her way down the snow-covered slope in front of her house without constantly coming close to falling. Palm watched her, thought for a while, and went home. That evening he came back with two vegetable graters. He tied them to the soles of Selma’s winter boots with florist’s wire.
“Brilliant, Palm,” we said.
“Brilliant,” Frederik wrote two weeks later, and we almost slapped Palm on the back, but that wasn’t allowed.
* * *
“Endless expanses,” the optician said when Selma asked him, a book of photographs of Australia open on her lap, what vastness meant.
Selma pushed her wheelchair over the Uhlheck, Marlies complained about a book recommendation, Palm quoted Bible passages, and the optician tentatively asked if they hadn’t already gotten through the entire Bible. “A long time ago,” Palm said, “but each passage can be interpreted a thousand different ways,” and one night the twin from the upper village, the one who wasn’t the mailman, broke into the bookstore.