What You Can See from Here

by Mariana Leky

  Selma’s eyes were watery. Perhaps the first thing to go was one’s eye color. She dozed off, she woke again, her hands clawed at the sides of her bed as if she wanted to hold on to it tight. Then she suddenly gave us an irritated look, as if she didn’t know who we were, and said, “I’d like to speak to my son.”

  I put my hand over my mouth and began to weep. At that moment, I’d have given everything I had to be someone else, to be a receptionist who could connect Selma with her son immediately.

  For four hours, until dawn broke, Selma tossed and turned in bed; for four hours she didn’t recognize us, and then, at the last moment, she recognized us again; she took my hand and I laid my thumb on her inner wrist, on her pulse like before. Selma’s heartbeat raced; the world raced just before it was about to stand still.

  Selma put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled my head onto her chest, on her humid nightgown, and stroked my hair.

  “You invented the world,” I whispered.

  “No,” Selma said, “that was you,” and those were her last words.

  HENRY, THE COACH IS BREAKING

  Selma stood in the Uhlheck. She was wearing a flowered, ankle-length nightgown and looking at her old feet in the grass. She stood there exactly as she had with an okapi in the dreams that meant some life would soon be over. But there was no okapi in sight, only the trees, the fields, and the wind that always blew here.

  And just as Selma asked herself why she had been put here without an okapi, someone emerged from between the trees, someone who moved without a sound and simply stepped out of the undergrowth. He came nearer, and Selma realized who it was. She ran to him as quickly as she could and wasn’t at all surprised that it was very quickly indeed, that she could run as fast as a sense of time that hadn’t aged.

  Then she stopped abruptly, thinking that you can’t just fall into someone’s arms after more than fifty years, no matter how much you want to, because that person might crumble into dust.

  “Here you are,” Heinrich said. “It’s about time.”

  Heinrich’s hair, which for decades had been light in the afterimage behind Selma’s eyelids, was now black, as in real life, and his eyes were light again. “You’re in color,” Selma said, and then, after a few moments of silence, “and you’re so young.”

  “Unfortunately, that couldn’t be avoided,” Heinrich said.

  Selma looked around. “I’m old,” she announced.

  “Fortunately,” Heinrich said, smiling.

  He smiled exactly as he had on the day he turned back to wave at Selma one very last time, on the day he said, Don’t worry, we’ll be together again soon, I know we will, Selma, I know we will.

  “It took longer than expected,” Heinrich said.

  Selma looked at the Uhlheck. The light was somehow silvery, like it had been during the eclipse.

  She stepped closer to Heinrich. “Will you help me?” asked Selma, who had never before asked for help. “Will you help me?”

  She spoke as if she were requesting Heinrich’s help taking off her coat.

  Heinrich opened his arms and Selma fell into them. She embraced Heinrich’s still-young body, Heinrich embraced Selma’s body that had lived for more than eighty years as tightly as he had when she was young, and Selma could only feel those parts of her body that were touching Heinrich’s. For example, she couldn’t feel her right shoulder anymore, just as she had lost sensation in it for a time after Martin’s death, when she carried me around day in, day out. This time it was different. This time her shoulder wasn’t numb. This time her shoulder seemed to have vanished.

  “I can’t feel my shoulder anymore,” Selma said into Heinrich’s neck, which smelled exactly as it had in his life, of mint and faintly of filterless Camels.

  “That’s how it should be,” Heinrich said, his mouth against her neck, “that’s exactly how it should be, Selma,” and his hands stroked her back, her hair, her arms. Selma trembled. It was a trembling she couldn’t locate. She didn’t know what exactly was trembling, she simply trembled.

  And then Heinrich said to her what Selma had said to me when I was five years old and had climbed too high in a tree in the Uhlheck. Selma could see the tree very well from where she stood. I didn’t know how to climb down. Selma had raised herself on her tiptoes, stretched her arms up, and held me tight while I still clutched the branch.

  “Let go,” she’d said, “I’m here.”

  OKAPIA JOHNSTONI

  “Dear Frederik, Selma is dead,” I’d wanted to write, right away, on the morning after Selma’s death, but I stopped after “Dear Frederik” because no one should write it, no one should set it down, as long as my father still didn’t know.

  I wasn’t the right person to tell my father; my mother should be the one.

  “Of course,” she said, but when my father called on the afternoon following Selma’s death, she wasn’t there. She was out organizing Selma’s funeral, so I had no choice but to be the right one.

  When I heard the phone ring, I pictured my father somewhere far, far away at a public telephone with a terrible connection through which he couldn’t understand anything other than “Selma” and “dead.”

  “It’s me,” my father said. “Good news, Luisy: I was able to get a flight for today.”

  “Papa,” I said.

  “Can you understand me?” he asked. “There’s something I absolutely have to tell you.”

  “There’s something I have to tell you, too.”

  “Luisa, I have seen an actual okapi. A real one. Here in the rain forest. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful animal.”

  I pressed my free hand over my mouth, so my father couldn’t hear me weeping. I felt like someone watching a tree fall and thinking, This tree will only really be felled once it’s lying on the ground, and there’s still time until then.

  “Its full name is Okapia johnstoni, after the man who discovered it, Harry Johnston,” my father explained, “and you know what? He didn’t even discover it! In his entire life, he never actually saw an okapi, only parts of it, the skull and the pelt. But he never set eyes on a complete okapi.”

  “Papa,” I said through the fingers of the hand over my mouth and I thought, Papa, you have to be quiet now. You have to let the world in.

  “Isn’t that something?” my father asked. “In her life, Selma saw more complete okapis than its discoverer. Maybe she’s actually the one who discovered the okapi.” He laughed. “How’s she doing? I’ll be there tomorrow evening.”

  I took my hand away from my mouth and said, “She died last night.”

  Then the only sound was the noise such a sentence makes when it is said very far away from the place where it must be heard.

  “No,” my father said. I heard his hand with the receiver sink and then rise again. I heard my father’s voice repeating softly, “But I’ll be there tomorrow evening, tomorrow evening I’ll be there.”

  SINCE YOU’RE ALREADY LYING HERE

  “Dear Frederik,” I wrote, sitting at Selma’s kitchen table, “Selma is dead. She liked you very much. The only thing she didn’t like about you was your time zone. Perhaps we weren’t actually made for each other. That’s not so bad. None of an okapi’s parts belong together and it’s still extraordinarily beautiful…” I wrote no more because the optician appeared beside me and said, “It’s time.”

  The optician and I stood in front of Selma’s full-length mirror in the entryway, I in a black dress, the optician in his good suit, which had grown ever larger with time. The optician held his Employee of the Month badge up to his lapel. “Should I?” he asked, and looked at me in the mirror with tear-filled eyes. “Do you think it would be funny?”

  “Yes,” I said, and tried to wipe away the mascara that had spread all over my face from so much crying, “very funny.”

  * * *

  It rained on Selma’s funeral, but only very lightly. The entire village came, and half of the neighboring village as well. My mother made the wreaths. Durin
g the brief address given by the pastor from the county seat, my mother and father held hands, because at a burial it’s natural for those who loved each other for a long time to hold hands, and for the duration of a funeral the fact that they no longer love each other is irrelevant.

  As always, Alaska was overjoyed to see my father. He could not pull himself together at all and jumped up on my father again and again, his tail wagging wildly, and because he was an animal, we couldn’t explain that sometimes pure joy is not appropriate.

  I stood between Palm and the optician. Palm looked completely scrubbed. His face was red and his blond hair was plastered onto his head, with one strand sticking up. It was hard to step close to Selma’s grave. It felt like we were wading in a river against the current. Palm threw a rose into the grave. The optician and I threw handfuls of dirt.

  * * *

  Afterward the village gathered in the community center. I’d baked for three days. There were piles of cake slices on high tables and I was embarrassed that they were so dry. The shopkeeper patted me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. Since Selma’s dead, it’s very fitting that we all have a dull taste in our mouths.”

  My mother was standing with my father at one of the high tables when Alberto joined them. He put his arm around my mother’s shoulders. I looked at my father. Apparently, the fact that two people who loved each other for a long time no longer do is really only irrelevant at the side of an open grave.

  I sat down next to the optician on one of the wooden benches lining the walls. Palm sat on his left, holding a glass. We didn’t know if it contained more than just orange juice. I leaned against the optician’s shoulder and he rested his cheek on my head. We looked like the two little screech owls that had slept, huddled together in our chimney, every day one summer.

  “Now we’re all alone,” I said.

  The optician put his arm around me and pulled me closer. “No one is alone as long as he can still say we,” he whispered, then kissed the top of my head. “I’m going to get some fresh air, all right?”

  I nodded.

  “Come, Alaska,” he said, and Alaska slowly rose. It took a while for something that large and that ancient to stand all the way up.

  * * *

  The optician walked with Alaska to the end of the village and into the forest. There he lay down.

  In his good suit, he stretched out on the damp, old leaves. Alaska lay down next to him. The optician crossed his arms under his head, looked at the sky etched with branches and treetops, and blinked in the drizzle.

  Again the optician thought of the sentence he’d been ruminating on alone and with others for so long: When we look at something, it can disappear from our sight, but if we do not try to see this something, it cannot disappear. His inner voices had never tried to explain it to him. Why should they? “Since you’re already lying here,” they now told him, “you might as well die, too. It won’t make any difference.”

  The optician sat bolt upright, so abruptly and orthopedically wrong that he felt a stab of pain in his lower back.

  “I’ve got it,” he shouted.

  And Alaska stood up, probably because he noticed it was a solemn moment.

  “It’s about differentiating,” the optician said. “To look means to differentiate.” He patted Alaska’s head. “I could have figured it out earlier, Alaska, given my profession. Listen: if we don’t try to differentiate something from everything else around us, then it can’t disappear. Because it’s not separate. Because it hasn’t been detached from everything else, it’s still there.” Because he was so excited, he asked Alaska, “Do you understand?” and was surprised that Alaska didn’t reply, “Of course, I understand perfectly. Please go on.”

  Selma doesn’t disappear if I don’t try to see her, the optician thought. And what he wanted most was to run to Selma and explain it to her.

  THE OPPOSITE IS TRUE

  “Can I do anything for you?” my mother asked after we’d left the community center. “Maybe you’d like an ice cream?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll just go for a walk.”

  I walked to the edge of the village, to Marlies’s house. She hadn’t come to the funeral. I was worried something might have happened to her, because nothing could stop her from coming to Selma’s funeral—not even she herself. Of that I was certain.

  I walked through her garden gate, past her soggy mail, and made a circle around the bee nest. I didn’t bother ringing the doorbell, but went straight to the kitchen window at the back of the house. As always, it was ajar. I peeked inside. My heart immediately started racing. I looked away and put a hand over my heart. Calm down, I thought, she can’t be serious, and then I looked inside again.

  Marlies, in her Norwegian sweater and underpants, sat on a kitchen chair. She was holding Palm’s shotgun under her chin.

  “Marlies,” I said through the opening in the window, “you can’t be serious.”

  She wasn’t at all surprised to hear my voice, as if I’d already been standing there for hours.

  “Marlies? Are you listening? There’s been enough dying. Death hasn’t exactly made himself scarce recently. I strongly recommend you don’t throw yourself at him.”

  “Your recommendations are always shit,” Marlies said.

  She sat directly under the hook on which her aunt, that bad-tempered, intolerable woman, had hanged herself.

  “How did you get ahold of Palm’s gun?”

  “Palm was drunk. He slept so soundly, I could have cleaned out his entire house. Now get lost. It’s time to put an end to it all.” Marlies looked at me. Her eyes were wilder than Palm’s used to be.

  Of course, I thought. It is time to put an end to it all when you put all you’ve got into making sure no one wants to visit. When you haven’t chosen any of the things that surround you. When you don’t like anything, not any suggestions, no frozen dishes, not a single item in the gift shop, it certainly has to end sometime when everything is all blurry.

  I had always thought that time passed Marlies by because her days were all identical and left no trace. But that wasn’t true. Time did pass for her, and the worst was: it passed pointlessly.

  I leaned my head against the open window. “Please let me in.”

  “Disappear. Just go away.”

  I thought of Martin and what he wrote in my poetry album. He had leafed through it to the last page and written in his neat, child’s handwriting: “At the very end I’ve taken root / to keep all others from falling out.” When Elsbeth sent us to Marlies’s house afterward because someone had to check on sad Marlies, Martin showed her his entry and said, “Just like you, right? You took root at the end.”

  Marlies didn’t understand. But Martin was convinced that Marlies must have moved to the end of the village and was so intolerable because she’d been invented to keep any criminals from attacking us from behind.

  I’d asked Marlies to write in my poetry album that day as well. She reluctantly opened the album, flipped past the optician’s entry, “Boulders can be crushed and mountains can be scaled, but you cannot be forgotten, you are nonpareil,” my father’s entry, “The brown bear lives in Siberia, in Africa lives the gnu, the black boar lives in Sicily, in my heart there’s only you,” she flipped past Elsbeth’s entry, “Be happy and full of joy, like a puppy with a brand-new toy,” and the shopkeeper’s, “Why must you always roam? The good is near at hand. If you learn to catch happiness, you’ll never need to leave this land,” and my mother’s, “Only love knows how to become rich by giving to others.” She ignored Selma’s entry, “Not every day is Sunday, nor every meal a feast, but you can still be happy and see your life increase,” and when she finally found a blank page, she wrote in pencil “Greetings, M.”

  “Martin believed you would save us all,” I said softly.

  “That worked out really well,” Marlies called, “especially for Martin. And for Selma.”

  “But Selma was over eighty.”

  “She left me in pe
ace,” Marlies said, her voice breaking slightly. She cleared her throat. “Selma was the only one out of all of you who always left me in peace.”

  “And she still will.”

  “Get out of here,” Marlies said quietly. “I can already see Death. He’s coming for me.”

  I’d had enough. “Okay, Marlies, you’re right. It’s time to put an end to it all.”

  Marlies’s curtain rod fell down. The left side had come undone. The curtains hung diagonally at the window.

  There’s always something falling around here, I thought, there are a lot of things that aren’t properly fastened. And suddenly I thought of Selma asking me if I’d noticed anything when the macramé owl in her kitchen fell off the wall after I’d said that my life was in order.

  Marlies stared out the window. I thought she was staring because of the crooked curtain rod, but that wasn’t true.

  “He is coming, Death is coming right for me,” she said.

  I turned around and saw what she was staring at: a man in a long black robe walking through her garden straight toward us. I took a step back and stumbled against the wall.

  “That’s not Death,” I said, “it’s Frederik.”

  He stopped a few steps from me. “Did I come at a bad time?”

  “Frederik,” I said.

  “It’s me,” he said, and smiled. “You wear glasses now.”

  “Frederik,” I said again, as if a person becomes more real the more you address him.

  “I had a very bad feeling, and when the optician called me, I set out right away,” he said, as if he had come from the next village.

  “All the way here,” I said.

  “Yes, it’s still less complicated than a phone call. Luisa, I’m very sorry that Selma has died.”