by Mariana Leky
I wanted to go to him, but I was afraid to move. I thought that if I moved even just a centimeter from the window, Marlies would pull the trigger.
“I have to stand right here,” I said.
“No, you don’t,” Marlies called.
Frederik came up to me. He looked exactly as he had ten years ago. Only the fine web of wrinkles that showed when he smiled was new. I gestured with my head at the window behind me. Frederik looked.
“Don’t look in here,” Marlies shouted, “it’s none of your business.”
“Should I go get someone?” Frederik whispered in shock, but the only person I could think of was Selma.
“She won’t do it as long as I stand here, so I’m standing here,” I said.
“But we can’t stand here forever,” Frederik said, and I was happy he said we.
I took his hand.
A red-and-white crossing signal had fallen on the tracks at the station when I said to Martin that I didn’t believe in Selma’s dream. A vision chart had fallen from the wall when the optician said, “But you love him,” and I replied, “No, not anymore.”
I glanced at Marlies, who looked crossed out behind the half-fallen curtain rod. She hadn’t changed position. She sat there with her chin on the muzzle and her hand near the trigger. Marlies would not let me in. She wouldn’t open a single one of her five locks and she wouldn’t let us talk her into coming out of her house because my recommendations were always shit.
Marlies had to be extracted in a different way, I thought, and thought also that you can’t always choose which adventure you’re made for. I took a deep breath.
“Frederik,” I said, “it was nice of you to come by, but it’s not such a good time.”
Behind Marlies an air freshener taped to the wall fell to the floor. It fell without a sound.
“What?” Frederik said.
He wanted to let go of my hand, but I held it tight.
“We could talk on the phone once in a while. You always like calling me.”
A framed piece of embroidery Marlies had made for her aunt as a child fell to the floor. The glass shattered. Marlies gave it a glance, then put her chin back on the muzzle of the shotgun.
Frederik looked at me the way someone looks when the world no longer makes any sense and decides it’s better to stay away from it. Stay here, I thought, don’t go now. I thought it with all my strength. Marlies shouted, “Stop jabbering and go away.”
“Marlies is my best friend,” I said.
Nothing fell.
I repeated it with more emphasis. “Marlies is my best friend,” but nothing moved.
“You, Frederik, are a very pushy person,” I said, and the cast-iron pan hanging over the stove behind Marlies fell down. Marlies whirled around, and I held Frederik’s hand as tight as I could. “I’m absolutely convinced that we don’t belong together,” I said, and Marlies’s kitchen shelves collapsed with all the tins of canned peas. Marlies dropped the shotgun and jumped up. And Frederik, who had been looking back and forth from me to Marlies, now looked only at me. He looked at me and flinched slightly every time something fell, but he no longer looked away. “There’s no one I’ve ever not loved as much as you,” I said, and the wall cupboard full of greasy dishes fell with an earsplitting crash. “I’d like a small Secret Love without whipped cream,” I said, and the ceiling lamp that had hung next to the hook on which Marlies’s aunt had hanged herself fell with a bang and sent glass splinters flying. Marlies, whose door sported too many locks, ran to the window, flung it open, and climbed out over the curtain rod.
For a moment she looked like she might run blindly into the forest, but she remained standing next to us in her Norwegian sweater and her underpants.
“What was that?” she asked, her entire body trembling. “And why has it stopped?”
“Did you listen to me, Frederik?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. Frederik had gone pale, too. “I didn’t know you loved me, at least not like that.”
Marlies wrapped her arms around herself.
“I knew,” she said.
“I need to get some air,” Frederik said softly. He turned and without another word set off across the meadow toward the forest.
I watched him walk away. I felt as if I’d lifted something it was anatomically impossible to lift.
“Come, Marlies,” I said, “let’s get you some pants. And shoes.”
“I’m not going in there again,” she whispered, “and you aren’t, either.”
“Fine,” I said. I got Marlies’s rubber boots that were standing outside on her front doorstep. “Get in,” I said. Marlies steadied herself with a hand on my shoulder and slipped her bare feet into the rubber boots.
“Let’s go look for the optician, okay?” I asked, and put my arm around her shoulders.
“Hands off,” Marlies said, but she came with me.
“Let’s find the optician,” I said as we walked through the twilight, down the street, and across the meadow, “and then we’ll go to Selma’s and eat something. And you’ll sleep there tonight. So will I. Frederik, too. I’m sure he’ll come back soon. He just needs some peace and quiet. And the optician can sleep at Selma’s, too. We’ll put all the mattresses in the living room. Selma would like that. I don’t know if we have enough pillows. My father sleeps upstairs and my mother at Alberto’s. I’ll pan-fry some potatoes. My fried potatoes are really good. The sofa cushions will work as pillows. I’m sure Frederik will come back soon. We could ask Palm if he wants to come over. Do you like fried potatoes? Where is Palm, actually? Maybe the shopkeeper wants to come over, too. Are you cold? The shopkeeper could bring a bottle of wine. Although, that’s probably not a good idea because of Palm. Where is he, actually?”
Marlies stumbled along beside me. “Could you please stop talking?” she asked.
FREDERIK
Frederik did not come back until it was night. I waited for him in the kitchen.
“Where did you go?” I asked, and for a second I imagined he might have visited Dr. Maschke, as Alaska had once.
“Everywhere,” Frederik replied.
He ate three helpings of cold fried potatoes. There was hardly a sound aside from my father’s footsteps in the upstairs apartment, where he had withdrawn right after Selma’s funeral. No one was allowed upstairs except Alaska. Alaska finally was what Dr. Maschke had invented him for years ago, a furry, externalized pain.
“How is he?” I asked Alaska now and again when he came downstairs so someone would take him for a walk, and Alaska would give me a look suggesting that in this case he was happy to respect his duty of confidentiality.
Frederik washed his plate, then followed me down the hallway to the living room. Just before the door, he took hold of my wrist. I turned to face him.
“You always confuse everything,” he said.
I looked at him. Frederik was all worked up. He held my wrist very tightly.
“Always is a bit much,” I said. “This is only the third time we’ve ever seen each other.”
That didn’t change a thing. People you don’t see can be particularly good at being involved in a life that is playing out far away and creating disorder, like invisible ghosts pushing precious things over. Besides, Frederik and I had written each other at least once a week for ten years.
He let go of my wrist and opened the living room door. The optician and I had set up a mattress camp. The optician was stretched out on the sofa. Three mattresses lay on the floor next to him. Marlies was asleep on the middle one. She was completely enveloped in Selma’s comforter. She looked like a giant flowery caterpillar and she snored.
* * *
A few hours earlier, when Marlies lay down, the optician crouched next to her in his blue-and-white-striped pajamas and watched as she wrapped herself in the comforter. “Are you going to do it again, Marlies?” he had asked. “Because if there’s the slightest danger that you’ll do it again, we’re going to show up at your house every five minutes, asking how you’re
doing.” The optician bent down over Marlies, trying to look like a particularly malevolent imp.
“We’d never leave you in peace again,” he said. “We would unscrew all your locks and smoke the bees out of your mailbox. And every night”—here the optician had to force himself—“you’d have to sleep at one of our homes.” He bent even lower, the tip of his nose almost touching her assaulted hair. “You would, to be precise, have to move in with one of us.” Marlies sat bolt upright. The optician just managed to pull his head away in time.
“Never,” Marlies said.
“Then it’s all settled,” the optician announced, and made himself comfortable on the sofa.
* * *
I lay down on Marlies’s right, Frederik on her left. The optician, on the sofa, sat up and reached for his glasses.
“How nice that you were able to come, dear Frederik,” he whispered. “By the way, I found out what the sentence about things disappearing means. Shall I explain it to you?”
“Please,” Frederik answered softly, and the optician explained that looking meant differentiating, that something can’t disappear if you don’t try to differentiate it from everything else.
Frederik nodded but said nothing. The optician looked at him attentively. He couldn’t tell if Frederik now understood the sentence or if he himself was still the only one around who understood. For a moment the optician felt very lonely, as if he lived far away on a tiny planet, his only company a grateful sentence, which felt understood only by the optician.
Frederik was abstracted, it struck the optician, too. He was so abstracted, the optician worried that Frederik might become undifferentiated overnight. He waited until Frederik had shaken out his pillow, then he said, “If you’d like, I can examine the voices in your head tomorrow. There’s a revolutionary new method from Japan.”
Frederik smiled. “They’re not so bad,” he said.
At some point, the optician fell asleep. Everyone but Frederik and I was sleeping. I could hear on the other side of Marlies how he wasn’t sleeping.
I stood up and stepped over Marlies toward him. Frederik’s head was right next to Selma’s open bedroom door. I closed it, sat down, and leaned against it.
“You’re not at all blurry, Luisa,” Frederik said softly without looking at me. “You are crystal clear.”
“You are blurry,” I whispered.
Frederik nodded and ran a hand over his bald head. “And drawing a blank as well,” he whispered back.
I thought of my first telephone conversation with him, how he helped me get unstuck. “Your name is Frederik. You’re actually from Hessen. You’re now thirty-five years old. You live in a Buddhist monastery in Japan. A few of the monks there are so old, they probably knew Buddha personally. They taught you how to clean, how to sit, how to sow and reap, how to be silent. You always know what needs to be done. You’re actually always doing fine. And most important, you know how to welcome your thoughts. That’s a trick that no one here has mastered as well as you. You can say one thousand years at sea, one thousand years in the mountains in Japanese. You’re almost always hungry. You can’t bear to see something stand crookedly. It’s very important to you that everything be in its place. You’re nine thousand kilometers away. You’re seated at a banquet table across from me.”
Frederik slipped his arm out from under his head, pulled me to him, and rested his forehead against mine. “I love you, too, Luisa, and have for a very long time now,” he said softly. “Maybe not for a thousand years, but close. It’s easier to see from the other end of the world. And now I’m afraid my entire life will be upended.” He studied me and looked like the most exhausted person in the world. “Three meetings are enough to know it’s forever,” he whispered, “you can believe me.”
The completely swaddled Marlies sat up abruptly. “Could you two stop?” she asked loudly, waking the optician.
“Is it morning already?” he asked, confused, groping for his glasses.
“No,” I said, “it’s still night.”
Marlies fell backward onto her mattress. The optician laboriously made himself comfortable. Frederik turned off the light above him on the coffee table. We looked at each other even though we couldn’t see one another.
“I’m going to sleep now,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve slept for three days.”
He lay down and turned his back to me. Maybe it’s a trick you learn in the monastery, I thought, how to fall asleep even though your life is on the point of being upended. I leaned against Selma’s bedroom door and waited for my eyes to get used to the dark and for my head to get used to what Frederik had said. I heard Frederik fall asleep. He was wrapped up just like Marlies, but less flowered, and I was happy to sit there the entire night, next to Frederik and the truth of his love that had slipped out. At one point the sleeping optician’s hand fell off the sofa onto Frederik’s bald head and rested there.
* * *
When we woke up and went into Selma’s kitchen, it became clear to us that we would never get used to not being greeted there by Selma. The optician said, “I’d like to go into my perimeter.”
“I’d like to go for a walk now,” I said. “And you two?”
I looked at Marlies and Frederik. Frederik was leaning against the kitchen doorframe in his robe. Marlies was standing in front of the kitchen table as if she had been put there by someone for the dubious reason that he didn’t know where else to put her.
Marlies crossed her arms in front of her chest and said, “I don’t want anything at all,” and the optician rolled his eyes. He’d had the faint hope the night before that Marlies would become a new person overnight, because life starts anew when you don’t fire a shot at the last moment after all. He’d thought that you immediately start to appreciate the smaller things, the play of light in the branches of the apple tree, for example. But just as before, Marlies looked like she’d received both an unexpected surcharge and a burst pipe. Marlies had dodged Death but not herself, the optician realized—he had not taken into account earlier that certain changes don’t like to be pushed even if threatened at gunpoint.
“There is no nothing anymore, Marlies,” he said rather pointedly. “It has more or less canceled itself out.”
Marlies glared at the optician and he glared back. Frederik pushed off the doorframe and said, “I’d like to do some cleaning. May I?”
Before, Selma’s kitchen had always been sparkling clean. Once her hands became deformed, she couldn’t manage the same level of cleanliness and wouldn’t let anyone help her. There were spots on the floor and piles of trodden crumbs gathered around the feet of the table legs. Dust bunnies multiplied under the kitchen bench, dark shadows had formed around the handles of the cupboards and the refrigerator, around the knobs on the gas stove, and the glass doors of the credenza were plastered with fingerprints.
“But not right this minute,” I said. “Don’t you want breakfast first? You’re always hungry, after all.”
The optician pulled Marlies and me out of the kitchen by our sleeves. “Let him, it will do him good,” he said. He took his coat from Selma’s closet. “Every illumination begins and ends with cleaning the floor. Maybe afterward he can think of connections between things that don’t belong together.” The optician smiled at me in Selma’s mirror. “And you can let them fall apart again as you like.”
He patted me on the shoulder and said, “See you later.”
Marlies came with me, and that alone proved the optician wrong, because it had never before been possible to take a walk with Marlies. She wore one of Selma’s dresses, one of Selma’s blouses, and one of Selma’s coats. When we turned onto the Uhlheck, I hesitated because it was the first time I had ever walked there without Selma. Marlies looked at me out of the corner of her eye.
“I’ll go first,” she said, as if it were a matter of chasing away criminals about to attack us head-on.
She stopped in the middle of the Uhlheck, where you can see the village. “It was an eart
hquake,” Marlies said, looking at her house. “An earthquake that only shook my house.” She looked at me. “Isn’t that something?”
I nodded. Then we walked on to the House of Contemplation and past it. We walked in single file and didn’t say a single word to each other, exactly as Marlies wanted.
* * *
Meanwhile, Frederik stood in the middle of the kitchen and took several deep breaths. It was finally quiet, so quiet he thought he could hear Selma’s traveling alarm clock ticking in the bedroom, the traveling alarm clock that never went on a single trip and perhaps ticked so loud to draw attention to its bungled existence.
Frederik started cleaning the kitchen. He took out all the dishes, all the cutlery, all the pots, pans, and bowls, all the provisions from Selma’s credenza. He got a ladder from the garage and wiped the lampshade inside and out. In it lay three dead moths. Frederik picked them up carefully, carried them into the garden in the hollow of his hand, and buried them there.
He cleaned all the cupboards, top to bottom, inside and out. He leaned far into the refrigerator and the oven. He took a pile of paper from the kitchen bench, the optician’s book on Buddhism, old shopping lists and flyers in which Selma had circled especially good deals. In the pile lay a letter.
Dear Frederik, 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 …
Frederik folded up the letter and put it in the pocket of his robe. He put the book and flyers on the kitchen table and shook out the cushions.
He washed the dishes and the cutlery. He wiped off containers of flour, sugar, and preserves, polished glasses, scrubbed pots and pans. He dried everything carefully and put it all back in the cupboards. He cleaned the windows, the window frames, and the door from all sides. Then he put the ladder back in the garage.