What You Can See from Here

by Mariana Leky

  When he closed the garage door, he took an involuntary look at the meadow on the forest’s edge to check if the deer that had to be chased away for its own good happened to be standing there. Frederik knew exactly what had to be done or not done in and around Selma’s house. He had learned it in the letters, the more than seven hundred letters.

  He went back into the house. His head had been empty the entire time, as devoid of thought as only Frederik knew how to make it. When he opened the door, he was struck by a question, namely if when you enter an old house, the old house also enters you.

  In the cubby at the end of the hallway, Frederik found a vacuum cleaner leaning against the drying rack on which Selma had hung laundry exactly as laundry should be hung.

  Frederik went back to the kitchen and vacuumed the floor. My mother suddenly appeared in the doorway.

  He turned off the vacuum.

  “Hello,” she said, “where is everybody?”

  “There’s no one here right now,” Frederik said, and gestured at the ceiling: “Except your husband. He’s upstairs.”

  “Once again, I’m too late,” my mother said. She leaned against the doorframe with a sigh. “Do you know the feeling? Of being too late?”

  “From before, I do,” Frederik said. “Where I live now, we’re all very punctual.”

  “I can believe that.” My mother looked around the kitchen. “You’re also here at exactly the right time.”

  Her eyes fell on the optician’s book lying on the kitchen table. She picked it up. “I write poems now. I’ll bring you one sometime,” she said, assuming that Frederik would stay long enough that he could be brought things sometime.

  She opened the optician’s book. Out of habit, the book opened to the passage the optician had often opened to because it held his favorite sentence, underlined multiple times. “Even a continual mistake can be Zen,” my mother read out loud. “My God, I think I’m a Buddhist, too.”

  She looked at her watch. “If I leave now, I’ll actually get to Alberto’s on time.”

  Frederik smiled. “Then go,” he said.

  My mother hesitated. “Or should I check on Peter? What do you think?”

  Frederik was sure there was no need to worry about my father. “Your husband is mourning and doesn’t want to be disturbed in his grief,” Frederik wanted to say, but since my mother didn’t know that he knew my father very well from my letters, he was afraid she would find such a sentence presumptuous. Frederik only noticed how much he knew about all of us from my letters now that he was trying to hide it.

  “I’ll be here in case anything happens,” he said. “I’ll be here cleaning.”

  “That’s good. Both are,” my mother said, and she left.

  The vacuum cleaner was missing the attachment to reach the farthest corners. Frederik ran a hand brush over the stove, the refrigerator, the sink, the credenza, around the legs of the kitchen table. Then he crawled under the bench and swept the baseboards.

  At one spot under the kitchen bench, the wood had pulled away from the wall, and a pearl was stuck in the gap between the wall and the baseboard. It was Selma’s lost earring, but despite all the letters, Frederik couldn’t know that. The pearl was a bit too large and a bit too artificial. You could see the seam where the two halves had been joined together, as on a globe. At one point there were barely recognizable traces of glue where the earring post had been attached. Frederik rolled the pearl between thumb and forefinger. A small, blind globe in pearl white.

  He put the false pearl down next to him and wanted to clean the rest of the baseboard, but the pearl started to move. It rolled purposefully away, across the kitchen, and under the credenza.

  Frederik watched it roll. He crawled out from under the kitchen bench, knelt before the credenza, and felt around beneath it with his hand, but he had to stretch out and stick his arm in up to his shoulder until he could reach it. He stood up, looked at the pearl, and then at the linoleum.

  “The floor is slanted,” he said, because some things are so obvious you have to say them out loud, even if no one is listening. He took a step to the right, as if the floor were so tilted you immediately lost your balance.

  And because the floor’s slant concerned Frederik so much, he didn’t notice that he was standing with one leg right in the middle of the spot outlined in red, which everyone automatically avoided and which the optician always pointed out emphatically, as if the risk were not one of breaking through to the basement, but all the way to Japan, to the void, or to the beginning of the world.

  No one had stood there for a very long time. So long that the spot on the floor didn’t have any idea what was happening to it.

  * * *

  Selma had stood there when my parents brought me to her for the first time. My mother had put me in Selma’s arms, and everyone—the shopkeeper, Elsbeth, Marlies, and the optician—had gathered around Selma and me and bent over me as if I were something in fine print. Everyone was silent until Elsbeth said, “She looks like her grandfather. No question.” The optician found that I looked like Selma. The shopkeeper said that I looked like Elsbeth, at which Elsbeth blushed and asked, “Really? Do you really think so?” Marlies, a schoolgirl at the time, said, “She doesn’t look like anyone.” My father said that he had to agree with Elsbeth. Beyond a doubt I looked like his father, and Selma looked at my mother, who was standing at the edge of the group and had remained quiet the entire time.

  “She looks like her mother,” Selma said, and then the doorbell rang and rang. Palm was standing outside the door, breathless and with disheveled hair. “It’s a boy,” he shouted, and hugged the optician. “His name is Martin. Come see him, all of you.”

  * * *

  My father had stood there, in a very young version of himself, and looked out the window, searching for the correct answers. Selma sat behind him on the kitchen bench, asking practice questions for his medical school exam. Suddenly my father turned around and said, “When I finish, I’m going to start a practice here.” He smiled at Selma and said, “I’ll settle here, near you.”

  When there’s no farm for children to take over, Selma knew, they need to be encouraged to go out into the world. Selma didn’t have a farm. She only had herself and a crooked house that might well collapse before anyone could take it over. She knew that going out into the world would be important, particularly for my father. She knew she should encourage him, but instead of encouragement, all she found within herself was relief that her son would stay here, near her. That’s why she stood up and went to stand next to my father by the window and stroked his back. “Do that, Peter,” she said, “settle here, that will be exactly the right thing,” because it was the only thing she could find within herself. Staying put was always exactly right. Staying put.

  * * *

  Selma had stood there, in a very young version of herself, holding her son in her arms, Selma, with no part of her yet in the slightest deformed. She saw Elsbeth climbing up the hill, in a very young version of herself, Elsbeth still slim, climbing unusually slowly, unusually bowed, as if she were walking against a current to which she would have happily abandoned herself in exhaustion. And Selma knew then that Heinrich was dead. She knew it even before Elsbeth stepped into the kitchen and said, “Selma, unfortunately I have to tell you that my brother—” and she could not get any further.

  * * *

  Selma had stood there just a few days earlier. With her son in her arms she had looked at the newspaper photograph that Heinrich had hung on the kitchen wall. “That’s an okapi, my little Peter,” she said. “Your papa discovered it. In the newspaper, that is. It’s the most comical animal in the world.” She kissed his head and said, “Tonight I dreamed of one. I dreamed that I was standing in the Uhlheck with an okapi. In my nightgown. Imagine.” She pressed her nose into her son’s stomach and both of them giggled.

  * * *

  Heinrich had stood in that spot. From it he had watched the shopkeeper go, the last, rather drunk, of
Heinrich’s birthday guests to leave. It was his first birthday in his own house. Heinrich lit a cigarette and blew the smoke out the window into the night. He looked over the meadow and the slope that bordered the forest, the trees swaying in the wind that always blew.

  Behind him Selma was picking up the bottles and glasses from the kitchen table. Without a thought, she put a piece of chocolate in her mouth and drank the rest of Elsbeth’s cherry brandy, which was still on the table. “This is delicious,” Selma said to Heinrich. She went up to him and wrapped her arms around his chest from behind. “Is there such a thing? Cherry-brandy-flavored chocolate?”

  Heinrich tossed his cigarette out the window, turned, and took Selma in his arms. “I don’t know,” he said, “but if not, you definitely should invent it.” He pulled her close. Selma kissed his mouth, his throat, his neck.

  “My heart is racing,” she said, smiling.

  “As it should be,” Heinrich replied, lifting her up, one arm under her back, the other under her knees. Selma laughed, and Heinrich wanted to carry her into the bedroom, but they only got as far as the living room.

  * * *

  And Heinrich had lain in that spot, on his stomach, looking in great concentration over the floor that had just been laid. His chin almost touching the planks, he looked from one corner of the room to the other. Then he looked up at his best friend, standing next to him completely covered in dust, who had helped him with every step, with measuring, ordering, laying the planks, everything.

  “Hey,” Heinrich said, “is it slanted? Take a look. You can judge, as a trained optician.”

  The optician tried to clean his dust-covered glasses with his dust-covered undershirt, lay down next to Heinrich, and looked across the floor.

  “Now that you mention it,” he said, “yes. But if you don’t know, it’s not at all noticeable.”

  They both gazed over the floor as if it were an unusual landscape. Then the optician knocked on the spot where they had just lain. “But I do think these boards are too thin.”

  “Where?” Heinrich asked, as if he didn’t know, as if the optician hadn’t said again and again: “These boards are too thin.”

  “Right here, where we were just lying.”

  Heinrich had walked back and forth across the boards and jumped up and down. “Naw, it’s good enough,” he said, and to prove it, he kept jumping, so hard that the optician, lying on the floor, bounced up and down. “It’ll hold forever. Trust me.”

  * * *

  Frederik did not break through. Not into the basement, not to Japan, and certainly not into the void. He stood there, kept his balance, and felt pleasantly heavy, as if one automatically grew heavier when standing on places that had been unjustly labeled for years as dangerously weak.

  He looked out the window to see Marlies, the optician, and me. We had collected the optician from his perimeter on our way back through the village and were just climbing the hill. The optician and I had each taken one of Marlies’s arms. We were moving slowly because we were trying to teach Marlies how to play Hat, Stick, Umbrella, and Marlies refused to learn. Frederik watched us again and again advance three steps, then stop and take one forward, one back, and one to the side. He heard us say, “Come on, Marlies, join in,” and Marlies answer, “Not a chance.”

  I waved at Frederik and he waved back.

  Now lift your feet from the floor, Frederik thought. Step away, open the door, let everyone in.

  But because Frederik was so heavy, we were quicker. We came into the kitchen as Frederik was still standing with one foot on the dangerously weak section. The optician stared at him. Frederik raised his eyebrows. “What’s wrong?” he asked, then looked down at his feet. “Oh,” he said, finally noticing where he was standing. He came up to me and extended his hand holding the false pearl. “I found something,” he said.

  EPILOGUE

  “We really need to go,” the optician called.

  He was leaning against his old Passat, in front of the house, at the foot of the hill, waiting. He sighed and looked up at the sky. It was morning and very clear.

  Marlies and Dr. Maschke walked down the street. They stopped next to the optician and looked at him with concern. “What on earth is the matter?” Marlies asked.

  “Oh, that,” the optician said, and wiped his cheeks with the sleeve of his jacket. Since early morning, tears had been continually streaming down his face even though he was convinced he wasn’t crying. “I don’t know, they just keep dripping on their own. I’m guessing it’s some defect in my tear ducts due to age. Or an allergic reaction.”

  “Or sadness,” Dr. Maschke suggested.

  “Has she already left?” Marlies asked.

  “No, I’m about to give her a ride,” the optician said. He looked at Dr. Maschke. “Luisa is flying to Australia today. In other words, practically to the middle of the Indian Ocean,” he said, as if Dr. Maschke didn’t already know, as if he hadn’t been telling everyone he met for weeks.

  “Yes, I’m aware,” Dr. Maschke replied, handing the optician a handkerchief.

  “She’s flying because of the endless expanse,” the optician recited what I’d told him, “and because she decided to do it.” He said it the same way he had recited the sentence about disappearing, the one no one had been able to explain to him.

  The optician blew his nose thoroughly. “We really need to go,” he called again in a slightly lower voice.

  * * *

  “I’ll be right there,” I called down from the front door of the house on the hill. Frederik helped me hoist my enormous backpack onto my shoulders. “Time to go,” he said.

  He was covered with paint. He’d been repainting the living room while I ran back and forth, packing the last few things.

  “I’m definitely coming back,” I said, “in exactly four weeks. You can count on me.”

  “I do,” Frederik said.

  “And you’ll still be here?”

  “Yes,” he said, “right here. Although I might be in the kitchen. I very likely will, actually.”

  I kissed him. “And then we’ll see,” I whispered into his ear.

  He smiled. “Yes, then we’ll see.”

  “If anything happens, you have my number,” I said, and Frederik wiped white paint off my chin.

  “I very much have your number,” he said, because I’d taped notepaper with my cell phone number all over the house.

  Frederik looked at me. He saw that I was trying not to ask a question I’d already asked one hundred times for the one hundred and first time.

  “Yes, I’ll remember Alaska’s pills.”

  “And no one dies,” I said.

  “No, no one dies.”

  I let go of Frederik’s hand and walked down the hill, turning around again and again to wave at him. It was a morning in summer. I was brightly illuminated.

  Frederik watched me go, then closed his eyes. Behind his lids he saw a static afterimage, the frozen movement of a last wave, a frozen smile, and everything that was actually light was dark to his inner eye, and everything that was dark appeared very bright.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Enormous thanks to Gisela Leky, Robert Leky, Jan Strathmann, and Jan Valk. And to Tilman Rammstedt, who accompanied this book from the first idea to the epilogue.

  * * *

  For their helpful advice, I thank Christian Dillo, René Michaelsen, Cornel Müller, Bernhard Quast, Gernot Reich, and the Röseler optical shop in Berlin.

  * * *

  Certain themes from this novel were first aired in the radio play Der Buddhist und ich (The Buddhist and I), WDR, 2012.

  A Note About the Author

  Mariana Leky was born in Cologne and currently makes her home in Berlin. After training as a bookseller, she studied cultural journalism at the University of Hildesheim. Though she is one of very few members of her family who are not psychologists, she still writes a monthly column for the magazine Psychologie Heute. Her books have earned numerous prizes, including t
he Allegra Prize, the Lower Saxony Literary Advancement Award, and the Advancement Prize for Young Artists from the State of North Rhine-Westphalia. Before being published in twenty-one languages, What You Can See from Here was named the German Booksellers’ Favorite Book of the Year and became a runaway bestseller. You can sign up for email updates here.

  A Note About the Translator

  Tess Lewis is a writer and translator from the French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Walter Benjamin, Klaus Merz, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Christine Angot, Pascal Bruckner, and Jean-Luc Benoziglio.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One

  Meadow, Meadow

  The Optician’s Love

  An As-Yet-Undiscovered Land Mammal

  Mon Chéri

  With Deepest Sympathies

  Sex with Renata Blows my Mind

  It’s Beautiful Here

  Employee of the Month

  The Twenty-Ninth Hour

  Part Two

  Someone Outside

  Open the Door

  It’s Like This

  I Just Wanted to Ask how Alaska is Doing

  Expiration Dates

  Ivy from Elsbeth’s Point of View

  Felicità

  Sixty-Five Percent

  One Thousand Years at Sea

  The Blue Whale’s Heavy Heart

  Bioluminescence

  Animals can Sense these Things

  See Above

  No New Information

  Part Three

  Endless Expanses

  Chasing Away the Deer

  On Intimate Terms with the World