Julia was still lying on the mattress and chatting away. Her mood had definitely improved. Max, who now had the tin of cookies balanced on the stack of comics, lay down beside Julia and began to read and chew. Since there was room on Julia’s other side, I lay down beside them and said, “Odd to find such a house in a barley field, isn’t it?”
“It’s not that odd. Mama told me all about it.”
“Your mama?”
“Sure, my mama. She said that there are places in the fields where nothing grows, where there’s only sand. I think it has something to do with the ice age.”
“The ice age, huh? But still, that’s no reason for anyone to put up a house here.”
“I don’t know, Mascha. You’ve got to keep the tools somewhere.”
“You mean like a thresher?”
“Maybe a very small one.”
“This mattress was here when I found the house. Who needs a house with a mattress in it in the middle of a field? Did you see the grate over the window?”
“Maybe someone was locked up here. A princess?”
“Yeah, or a dragon.”
“Or a grain thief. He was locked up right here in the field. Not bad.”
Then Julia got quiet all of a sudden. After a while, she said if she had a house like this, she’d be here all the time. It had been different for me. It had been fun to clean the house up and furnish it. In the beginning, it had been fun just to be here—to read, listen to music, do nothing. The first few times, it was great. But then I realized I was even more alone here than I was at home with my deadly silent father, even more alone than I was in my grandparents’ neighborhood, as empty as it was. More time alone wasn’t what I needed, no thanks. And since I’d noticed that, I stopped coming so often. The best thing about the house was that it was there and that it was mine, whether I went there or not.
Max laughed out loud. His laughter sounded bright and happy, not like the laughter of someone who now and then fought with invisible friends. He took one cookie after the next from the tin, which now lay on his belly, and read the comics with shining eyes. Julia was also eating the cookies, and she suddenly wanted to know if I had my music with me. I gave her my music player, and she put in the earbuds and turned Leonard Cohen up so loud I could hear him, too.
I closed my eyes and whispered, “Baby, I’ve been waiting, I’ve been waiting night and day.” It was my father’s favorite song, “Waiting for the Miracle.” I lay there and held my breath. With my eyes closed, I could see my father sitting excitedly in our kitchen and explaining the lyrics to me. I could hear him saying how there was this man who was in love with a woman and had been waiting for the longest time. He really didn’t love her but he still wanted to marry her.
I lay there on the mattress, which was as old and musty as the house, listening to Max’s laughter and Leonard’s miracle. The whole time my father was sitting at our kitchen table, waiting for a miracle himself, but it wasn’t ever going to come. He must have known that. Back when we first listened to that song together, my father had had tears in his eyes, and for a couple days afterward he holed himself up in his office. He was a person who cried. You never knew when he was going to lose it again. Sometimes all it took was a song. The odd thing was, as I lay there beside Julia and Max, my weeping father no longer made me feel sad. In the end, I thought the thing about the miracle never happening was different from what he’d said. Miracles really did exist—
• • •
When I woke up, everything was quiet. I don’t know when I fell asleep or if Julia and Max had still been awake, but now they were asleep, and they looked so peaceful, the complete opposite of what they had been before.
I stood up, feeling groggy like I did when I slept too late in the morning. My eyes were burning. My head was still asleep. Only my legs were awake. But they might as well have been fast asleep, too. I didn’t need them at the moment. I stood there, barely daring to breathe, in case it woke up Julia and Max. Max looked like a little kid. He breathed calmly and evenly, snoring quietly every now and then and twitching in his sleep. He was lying on his back and had a comic on his belly, along with about a thousand crumbs and the empty cookie tin. Julia still had the earbuds in her ears, but the music had stopped playing a long time ago. She was curled up, but not like someone who was afraid. More like someone who no longer had anything to fear, because there was someone standing guard outside.
And that was when I got the idea that I could protect them. I turned and crept to the door. Outside, the sun was lower and cast flickering shadows across the field. There was a light wind blowing, sending small yellow and gray waves through the barley. There was the sound of blackbirds and a car horn in the distance. There was my beating heart.
I closed the door.
Turned the key twice in the lock.
And then I ran.
19
On the way back to my grandparents’ house, my cheeks were on fire, and it wasn’t from the heat that still hung over the neighborhood. There were so many things I needed to think about, and it was amazing the way they all passed through my head in the short time it took me to run back. But most of all, I kept thinking I had saved Julia and Max, or at least I was about to. They wouldn’t have to be afraid of anyone. I had taken care of that.
I ran and thought and ran and glowed. I was so happy that at one point, I almost fell down, but I wouldn’t have cared if I had. Everything was going to be different now, all because I had locked the door of the blue house. There was a solution now, and I hadn’t even needed to plan it. It just happened. No one would ever throw Max against a wall again, or hurt Julia’s stomach, no one. I could have gone on thinking all this for hours, if I hadn’t suddenly reached the house and come up against my grandmother’s irritated gaze.
“Mascha, you’re late! We were going to have a cookout tonight!”
My grandparents were sitting outside in the garden and had already begun to eat. I joined them and realized I was starving. But what about Julia and Max? They must be hungry, too, especially Max, who seemed to be made up entirely of hunger and rage. I thought about the cookies they had both eaten, and that calmed me down a bit. Cookies were better than nothing.
On the plate in the middle of our garden table there were hamburgers, and there was plenty of potato salad, too. Grandma always acted as if she were eating something at dinnertime, but really she only just picked at her food. And though my stomach was empty and growled loudly a couple of times, suddenly I could only pretend I was eating too. All I could think about was Julia and Max and how much better everything was going to be.
I didn’t eat a bite. Normally, my grandmother would have said, Why don’t you eat, child? It’s no wonder you’re so small! But that night she was busy asking me why I had been so late getting home instead, and whether I had seen those children.
“Uh, what children do you mean, Grandma?”
“The Brandner children you play with so much.”
“Oh, them. They were only at the playground for a little while today. Then they left.”
“Just the other day it seemed like they were so important to you.”
“Yeah, we don’t hang out as much anymore.”
“Well, I have my knitting club tonight, and afterward we’re going out for a glass of wine. And Grandpa is meeting up with his regulars at the bar. Will you be all right alone?”
“Sure. I’m really tired. I think I’ll go to bed early.”
“Good, then we’ll see you at breakfast. And now, will you eat something?”
I had never been a good liar before. Before that afternoon at the blue house. Usually, whenever I tried to tell a lie, I got stuck somewhere in the story, because when you’re lying, you have to make so many details line up. Really, all of them. Usually, I got embarrassed and stumbled over my lies.
Today was totally different. I was shocked at how easily
and smoothly my lies flowed out of me, almost like the truth. When my grandmother had brought her plate into the kitchen and came back out into the garden, I was half-expecting her to say, All right, Mascha, we’re onto you. What have you done with the Brandner children? But she didn’t, she just reminded me to put the leftover hamburgers in the freezer and the potato salad in the fridge.
Which of course I didn’t do. I waited till my grandmother had left and my grandfather had pulled the door closed behind him, and then I packed up the hamburgers, which weren’t warm anymore, into a plastic container, and the potato salad into another one. From the cabinet, I took three bottles of water and two of my grandfather’s chocolate bars, one semisweet and the other with nuts and raisins. I stuffed it all in my backpack along with two spoons, a wool blanket and two stuffed animals that my grandparents had kept in the guest room for years.
I’d seen in a movie once how someone who wanted to sneak out of his house at night stuffed his sheets to make it look like he was lying there asleep, so that’s what I did, using all the T-shirts and pants that I could find in my suitcase. It probably wasn’t even necessary, since my grandparents never looked in on me, but they might have made an exception that night, so I did it, just to be safe. I left the window of the guest room open, so I would be able to get back inside later. Luckily, my grandparents lived in a bungalow-style house, with everything on one floor.
Just as I was about to leave the house, it occurred to me that it would be dark in a couple of hours. In the blue house it would be pitch-black, which Julia and Max would definitely not like. I wouldn’t have liked it either. I grabbed my grandfather’s heavy old flashlight from the hall drawer and jammed it into my bag. Then, finally, I took off.
There was this pounding, pounding in my chest.
Everything else was quiet, just the sound of someone laughing in the distance. A dog barked. The night smelled of flowers and grilled meat.
20
There was a shortcut to the barley field, a more hidden way than the one I had taken with Julia and Max, but I decided to go the long way, through the neighborhood. Something drew me to the Brandners’ house. I was curious to see what a house looked like where two adults had just discovered that their children were missing.
I saw more than the house. In front of the open door stood a thin woman who seemed afraid, almost like an animal. Under one of her eyes there was a large purple-yellow bruise, and when I looked at her, she quickly covered it with her long hair. From inside, I heard someone yelling: “They’ll be sorry when they do come home! They’ll find out a thing or two!” The woman saw that I’d heard it. She squeezed her eyes shut, sighed, turned around and went into the house. So that was her. Julia and Max’s mother. They’ll be sorry when they do come home! I could have told Mr. Brandner that he didn’t have to worry about that anymore. They wouldn’t be coming home.
I ran through the playground, passed the last few houses of the neighborhood and continued through the cornfield till I reached the enormous barley field. The sun hung low and orange. The whole sky was glowing, and here and there a crow flew across all the gorgeous colors. I was so happy for Julia and Max. They must have realized by now how good everything was going to be.
As I opened the door of the little house and went inside, I was nearly sick from an odor that hadn’t been there before. It smelled like someone had crapped his pants, and I suddenly realized there was no bathroom. My gaze fell on the bucket in the corner, and I knew where the smell came from. Only then did I see their eyes, all four of them. Two of them were looking at me afraid. What I saw in the other two eyes was something entirely different—it was flat-out rage.
21
Where were you?” screamed Julia. “Where did you go, wherewereyouwherewereyou?”
I was glad I had locked the door behind me, or the two of them would have run away.
“Are you insane, are you an idiot, Mascha, why did you do that, why did you lock us in?”
Julia came at me right away, reached up to my shoulders and shook me, while Max said nothing, sat on the mattress and did nothing. He had his hands over his ears, but he must have been able to hear everything, because he flinched every time Julia spoke.
“Mascha, how could you lock us up like that? Are you crazy?”
“Um, so, just let me tell you what’s going on. You have to listen to me!”
“What do you mean, listen to you? Just imagine what Daddy’s going to do to us when we get home this late.”
“He won’t do anything. He knows you’re here.”
Perhaps the recommended course for those who don’t lie well should simply be to start doing it, because starting with the second lie, everything becomes easy. You can calmly explain why the sky is blue, even if you have no clue. At least it was that way with me for my second lie. It just fell straight out of my mouth. Unfortunately, it was also completely idiotic. No one in the world would have fallen for it. I hadn’t really thought about what I was going to say. I hadn’t had the time. I’d just said something, anything, to make Julia stop. And she’d stopped, too. The second I said it, Julia fell silent. Then she asked, “What?”
I had two and a half seconds.
Two and a half seconds to think up a story that would make my lie believable, for why in the world would Julia and Max’s father ever be okay with his kids living in a barley field? It would have to be a story that made everything make sense, it would have to be the best story there’d ever been, and for two and a half seconds the characters in it swirled around in my brain—my grandparents with their evening glasses of wine and my father back home at the kitchen table and the bellowing Mr. Brandner and above all Mrs. Brandner, standing in front of her house afraid with her eyes closed, Mrs. Brandner with the purple-yellow face, Mrs. Brandner—
And then I knew what I had to say. I took a breath and blurted out, “Your mother had to go to the hospital.” It was easy to say it, and it must have been easy to believe it, too, because Max began to whimper and Julia’s face got serious and stiff.
“How do you know that?” she asked. “Mama’s fine!”
“I bumped into your father on the way home, and he told me.”
“What did he say? Did you see her? Was she bleeding again? Did she look bad?”
“She was already in the car. I didn’t see her. Your father wanted to leave right away and was glad that he’d seen me.”
“Mama.”
“Julia, there’s definitely nothing serious wrong with your mother. She just needed to go to the hospital to get checked out or something. And your dad asked me to look after you.”
“Here?”
“You can’t come to my Grandma and Grandpa’s because they’re not there right now. You have to stay here for now.”
“But it stinks here, Mascha. Max is scared, and me, too. And we’re hungry. Do you have anything to eat?”
“Yep, your parents were grilling, and your dad asked me to bring you some.”
“Mascha, I don’t get it. Usually we’re always alone with Daddy when he . . . when Mama . . . when something’s up with Mama.”
“I don’t know why he asked me. There was no one else there. I wondered about it too.”
So I didn’t have to go on any longer, I began pulling the plastic containers out of my backpack, and Julia looked at them, confused.
“Mascha, where are those containers from? Ours are different.”
I pretended like I didn’t hear the question and brought out the water and chocolate. It was darker now, but we didn’t need lights yet, so I left the flashlight in the bag, just took the spoons and handed them out.
Julia sat down beside her brother on the mattress and divided up the food so that each container had the same amount of potatoes and hamburgers. Max spooned up the potato salad hungrily but it seemed he was afraid of the hamburgers. First, he poked at one carefully with his index finger, then final
ly took a bite and ate it slowly.
Julia ate carefully, too, but with her it seemed less out of fear than that she was using manners that were way too formal for the little house and its smell. I realized that Max had snatched up one of the chocolate bars without my seeing it, and was now sitting on it. I hoped he had picked the nuts-and-raisins one, since the dark one wasn’t really sweet enough to even count as chocolate. I probably shouldn’t have even brought it.
As I watched Julia and Max eat, the small patch of blue behind them grew darker, the sky all cut to bits by the bars on the window. The soda can on the shelf was empty. I thought about the hot, sticky liquid and pushed one of the bottles of water toward the mattress. Julia grabbed it and drank it half down.
Then I smelled it again.
The stink that I knew from the subways at home.
I couldn’t imagine anything more revolting than the bucket that stood in the corner, unless it was taking it in my hand, going outside and emptying it. But I had to do it. Otherwise, there was no way Julia and Max could stay there. The two of them were eating without paying any attention to me. I breathed through my mouth as I took up the bucket and unlocked the door. I dumped it out as quickly as I could into the field and hoped the barley wouldn’t later be used to brew my grandfather’s beer.
When I returned to the house, everything was just the same, only dimmer. Julia saw me and the bucket in my hand and said quietly, “Thank you.”
You Can't See the Elephants Page 5