Leaving Berlin

by Britt Holmström

  “You’re right,” agrees Serena. “I say we need assault weapons. And a hand grenade or two.”

  By this time Frank’s tie has sweat marks and hangs crooked. Serena leans out the car window to point this out.

  Frank blushes. He’s a shy man.

  “Don’t forget to fasten your seat belt,” interrupts Hester. “And put that Kleenex box in the back, otherwise it’ll slide around the dashboard. Now then, are you sure you’ll be comfortable wearing those jeans?”

  “I’d be more comfortable if you’d turn on the fucking air conditioning.”

  “Oh, watch your language, Serena. Keep your window rolled down instead. No sense wasting money when fresh air is free. But don’t roll it down all the way, it’ll get too windy.”

  It’s approaching thirty degrees already. The humidity level reached a hundred and ten percent weeks ago. The air is a sodden sheet intent on embalming Serena. She would be much better off in a summer dress, she knows that, but she decided on jeans because Hester keeps pointing out that it’s not proper for a woman Serena’s age to wear denim. Serena is thirty-six.

  Frank leans in to kiss Hester good-bye. One peck later they both blush violently.

  Hester is still blushing, smiling to herself, when they pull out of the driveway and head north towards the intersection that will eventually take them out of the city towards new horizons.

  It’s Hester’s habit to stop at green lights to be on the safe side whenever intuition tells her the orange light is coming on.

  She’s oblivious to the honking of car horns. A great fan of talk radio, she never wants to listen to music. She finds the noise distracting. During the news she comments respectfully on events, on politicians and the wisdom of their words.

  “Shut the fuck up, Hester, I’m counting trees. Four million seven hundred and ninety-four thousand three hundred and twenty nine, four million seven . . . .”

  “Oh, stop it, Serena. It’s not . . . ”

  “ . . . hundred and ninety-four thousand three hundred and thirty. You almost made me lose count.”

  Hour after hour through never ending forest Hester never exceeds a speed of eighty-five kilometres per hour. Whenever they reach an overtaking lane, the mile long tail of cars that have accumulated behind them go flying by, drivers flipping Hester the finger. Every hour spent in the car Serena fears for her life.

  In a diner in northern Ontario a great hairy hulk of a man — four times the size of Frank — strides up to their table, glares hard at Hester, points an accusing digit and growls, “You, lady, are a goddamn menace on the road.”

  Hester stirs her coffee meticulously, careful not to spill, smiling a smile that exhibits nothing but human compassion. “It’s better to arrive safely a bit later, than not arrive at all, don’t you think?”

  The man’s face says that were Hester not a pint-sized female, he would drag her outside by the hair and beat the crap out of her. As it is, he merely shakes his head and leaves. Serena watches him stride over to a massive eighteen-wheeler parked on the other side of the gas station. It’s the same rig that strained in vain to get by them earlier, going up a steep hill before the overtaking lane petered out.

  The trucker spits, climbs up into the driver’s seat, lights a cigarette and drives off to get a safe headway over Hester, who is telling Serena not to order dessert as it will give her indigestion and make her sluggish.

  Serena orders apple pie and ice cream, too busy being contrary to notice Hester’s hand trembling as she lifts her cup.

  The crust of the pie is made of cardboard, the bits of fruit in the filling held together with Elmer’s glue, but Serena forces down every last crumb to prove a point. Walking behind Hester to the car, she reaches under her shirt to unbutton her jeans.

  They sweat their way through interminable tunnels of dense forest and rocky outcrops of the Canadian Shield, each day more monotonous than the previous. The roof of the car is too low, Serena can’t see much of the sky, can barely sense its presence. On both sides of the road, there are only trees, trees and more goddamn trees, interspersed with rock face. Sometimes there’s rock face, rock face and more goddamn rock face, interspersed with trees.

  Once in a while, for a bit of relief, they’re rewarded with a generous view of Lake Superior. The sight of it is what prevents Serena from bashing her head to a bloody pulp against the front windshield. Lake Superior, she reflects, is a magnificent lake as well as a lucky one. It owns a lot of sky. She imagines lying sprawled in a boat bobbing in solitude on its peaceful centre, no land in sight, looking up to where there exists nothing but clouds on a canvas of what would be blue, had the scorching sun not bleached it white. No Hester, no Honda, no talk radio, just the soft sound of water gurgling against the boat.

  The thought makes her want to wail and ululate.

  Hester, too, admires the panorama and says seven times what a treat it is to live in a country with a fine lake like that. But to stop more than the once to take a picture would be to waste time when they have a perfectly good view from the privacy of their car.

  “If you’d step on the damn gas once in a while we wouldn’t waste any time at all.”

  If the needle on the speedometer dares creep above eighty-five while Serena is driving, Hester breaks into a predictable lecture on road safety. Once, outside Dryden, Serena gets pissed off enough to step on the gas until the car shoots down the road at a hundred and twenty, overtaking cars, trucks and campers where there is no overtaking lane, cars coming from the opposite direction veering wildly. Hester’s face goes white with terror. She screams, then starts to sob.

  The rebellion — too short a thrill — ends with Serena apologizing half-heartedly, but it does add a small spark to the pointlessness of that particular afternoon.

  As an added bonus, Hester is very quiet that entire evening.

  When Serena has given up hope, the forest begins to shrink. The trees grow shorter, their numbers diminish. Soon they are gone altogether.

  In blessed relief a great land opens up, stretching flat and golden to a very, very distant horizon. Above it the sky arches to infinity. It’s a sky far more immense, far more blue, than the soiled one Serena is used to. Here she can see the edge of the world, can actually see where the sky bends down and touches the curve of the planet. It makes her heart beat so fast and hard she can hardly breathe. How she wants that sky! She wants to stand on that horizon, arms outstretched, embracing it in gratitude, begging it to rain on her, cool her off! Cleanse her and make her new, make her pure, put her ever so gently in a state of grace.

  As Hester never exceeds eighty-five kilometres per hour and doesn’t want to drive for too long each day, the four-day trip takes five and a half days. Six evenings of watching reruns in the roadside motels Frank has marked for them in the CAA book.

  It is late afternoon when Hester’s Honda Civic pulls into a driveway on Elphinstone Street in Regina and they are greeted by a small white-haired woman peering confused from the crumbling front steps of the small bungalow she had moved into thirty-one years earlier. She has no idea who the two women in the car are, does not recall that Emmett’s niece’s daughter (“Esther, did you say, dear?”) called two weeks earlier to suggest a reunion, but she is ready to welcome them if they are family, and as they say they are, who is she to argue? The two women look respectable and decent.

  Inviting them in, she offers them a glass of milk and a tuna salad sandwich, only to discover that she has no tuna. Hester offers to drive to the nearest store to buy a can of tuna and a jar of mayonnaise, after discreetly throwing out the jar in the fridge. It is two years out of date, she later confides to Serena whom she leaves behind to assist Aunt Hilda, should assistance be required. Serena helps her aged relative set the small Formica table in the kitchen with cracked plastic mugs featuring Christmas trees and dinner plates of Royal Doulton bone china with a rose patterned gilded edge.

  “Whose girls are you, did you say?” Aunt Hilda keeps asking, putting a soupspo
on by each plate. Under the impression that they have just arrived from Minneapolis she wants to know if it is their first visit to Canada.

  Serena has to shout her answers to be heard over the noise of the TV in the living room.

  They spend the night in a motel. Aunt Hilda had not understood that Hester’s plans included staying a few nights in her house. As it was, the spare bedroom was full of boxes and old clothes, including an empty birdcage on a dresser beside an ancient sewing machine. There was no spare bed. Somewhere in the jumble might have been the photo albums Hester had planned to leaf through with a helpful Aunt Hilda by her side identifying different blood relations preserved in black and white.

  They leave for Minneapolis the next morning, after Hester places a call to Social Services to ask that somebody look in on a Mrs. Hilda Skaerstad on Elphinstone Street. Then it is another two day prison sentence in the confinement of the four-door sauna under that all-encompassing sky Serena has fallen madly in love with and does not want to live without.

  By the time they reach St. Paul two days later, Serena feels a calm so deep and still it has her worried.

  “You go check in, Hester,” she tells her sister in the Best Western parking lot. Her voice is angelic. “I’ll get a cart and take care of the luggage.”

  The Laura Jane Musser Plaza at the great hulking Minnesota History Centre offers a view of an urban valley that sprawls unrestrained until halted by the big ugly Xcel Energy Centre straight ahead of where Serena is sitting. Over her left shoulder rises the downtown St. Paul skyline, looming new skyscrapers, old church towers cowering in their shadow. And in the foreground, a sinister old red brick building with the letters “Catholic Charities” painted in fading white letters on the roof.

  Serena imagines Hester in a nun’s habit, supervising starving, sore-infested orphans sewing their daily quota of postal sacks, telling them helpfully that their stitches are uneven.

  On the other side of the valley, on its own private hill, sits the cathedral of St. Paul like a precious stone in a cheap ring. Above it shreds of clouds hurry towards downtown, grey and thinning, rapidly wearing out. There will be no rain today either.

  It’s the day after their arrival. Hester has long since disappeared into the hushed library section of the building, clutching two notebooks and six pens. Like her first day at school. Earlier on, passing time in the gift shop on the ground floor, Serena considered buying a bumper sticker that read WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN NEVER MAKE HISTORY, a quote by somebody named Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who she probably ought to have heard of. But buying it would have been dishonest. She is a well-behaved woman, that’s her problem.

  She could have bought it for that other Laurel, the free one, to stick on her canoe.

  Instead she bought a Cabin-Cooking Cookbook. She has no use for it, but it seemed the kind of item one ought to buy in a gift shop in the Midwest, land of pioneers. It might come in handy should she ever feel like marinating a moose or stuffing a beaver.

  Also, she felt it a duty to purchase at least one souvenir in the gift shop. If nobody buys these gifts, she reasoned — and nice gifts they are, all attractively displayed — such shops will be forced to close down, and then where would one ease one’s holiday boredom? At least a cookbook is useful. She could have chosen an eight-inch birch bark canoe.

  Leaving the gift shop she walked across the central circle to the cafeteria. The stone floor was so smooth and shiny she could see her reflection in it. She felt a strong urge to kick her shoes off and slide around on it, skate with her arms stretched out, shriek like the moon-faced aliens outside her kitchen window back home.

  She refrained and headed for the cafeteria in an adult manner. Got a coffee and — because she’s on holiday and she can if she wants to — two giant muffins, an apple-cinnamon and a chocolate-walnut, still warm from the oven. With her loot on a tray, she walked upstairs to the outside plaza. There was a free table at the very end beside two women eating fruit salad out of plastic containers.

  This is where she now sits, eating her apple-cinnamon muffin. It’s a terrific muffin, moist and warm, full of apple chunks. From her table she has a clear view of the face of the older of the two women at the next table. It blocks most of the view of the ugly Catholic Charity building where Hester was a nun in a previous life.

  The woman has a round face that has long since settled into a harmonious expression. The bouquets of laugh lines around her eyes are nothing but attractive. Her hair is short and grey, thick and springy. She seems entirely at home in the rotundity of her body. This is what impresses Serena about her, this at-homeness in herself. The woman’s sleeveless sundress exposes her generous upper arms. The flesh on her right arm wobbles slightly when she lifts her glass of water. She looks like a woman unburdened by regrets.

  The woman’s younger companion looks equally relaxed — at least from behind. There’s no tension in her slim tanned shoulders. Serena guesses they are mother and daughter of the get-along variety. They sit without talking for long periods. Their silence is undemanding.

  At the table behind them, a young man is studying, a pile of books before him, sunshine on his face. He’s drinking mineral water and eating a baguette with ham and cheese. Once in a while he looks up and gives the woman with the laugh lines a quick glance before returning to his reading, as though he draws reassurance from the solidity of her presence.

  Breaking the silence, the woman’s younger companion, reining in some interesting reflection, leans forward and begins to talk in a low voice. Whatever she is sharing makes her older companion laugh. The younger woman joins in the laughter.

  “It reminds me of when we drove through Montenegro once,” the older woman says when they’re done laughing. She doesn’t bother keeping her voice down, she has nothing to hide. “This was way back when it was still called Yugoslavia.

  Ages ago, the kids were still small. We were on our way down to Greece from Paris, to visit Jim’s aunt Esther who was married to a Greek businessman, they’re both dead now, and we’d spent the last few days driving down the Dalmatian coast. It was absolutely beautiful, by the way, but people drove like freaking maniacs, speeding up to overtake in the wrong lane on hairpin curves, coming right at you. I was scared witless.

  “Then, just after Dubrovnik, we turned left and drove up this steep mountainside full of more hairpin curves, and I mean hairpin, up and up until we arrived in a different landscape. It was like we’d travelled back in time several centuries.

  “Later that day, somewhere in Montenegro, we stopped for a break in this weird and wild uninhabited place. It was a kind of disturbing little happening.”

  “How so?” asks her companion, leaning back, tilting her head, settling in for the story.

  The shadow of a small cloud passes over the terrace. Serena, pretending to be deep in her new cookbook, has been caught up in the story from the word go. She, too, settles in. She’s no longer hungry, but curbs her impatience by starting in on her second muffin.

  “Well, we stopped beside the road near a very deep canyon, or crack in the earth, I’m not sure what the proper term would be, I never saw anything like it. We didn’t even know it was there until we strolled off the road and damn near fell into it. There wasn’t any fence or sign or anything, and the sides were as steep as walls. And then, down at the very bottom, and it looked a mile deep, we see this lake completely covered with water lilies, it was just so amazing, hidden right there in a crack in the earth. I tell you, it was such an incredible sight it damn near made me weep. White flowers infused with pink and purple. Absolutely effing gorgeous. You know, the photo of me and the kids on the wall in my den? That’s where Jim took it. Unfortunately you can’t see the bottom of the canyon.”

  So they are not mother and daughter.

  “I know the one.”

  “Are you sure I never told you this?”

  “Trust me, Liz, I would have remembered.”

  “Well, anyway, it was the usual roadside break. Lily went
to pee behind a bush. Alex wanted me to peel him an orange, then ate half of it and threw the rest down to the water lilies. It was so far down you couldn’t hear it splash.

  “Anyway, while we were there a large van drove up and parked a bit further down from us. An old-fashioned sort of van with English licence plates, a bit rusty. A large family. Mom, Dad, grandparents, several kids, that kind of thing, came spilling out, obviously stopping for a break, but we didn’t pay much attention to them.

  “Then as we were walking along the rim of the canyon admiring its water lilies, we heard the mom of the English crew shout that it was time to get going, so they all piled into the van and continued south. And that was that, or so we thought.

  “A while later we got into our car to drive off in the same direction, which was southeast to the capital of Montenegro. Titograd it was called back then. But just as we were pulling out, who do we see but the grandpa of the group come tottering up the slope from the canyon. First a black peaked cap appeared, followed by his head, then his upper body dressed in a knitted cardigan, next his legs dressed in black pants and last his feet. He was wearing green rubber boots. That’s how I’ll always remember him, appearing bit by bit, hat, cardigan, pants, green rubber boots, looking happy, then perplexed, finding his family and the van gone, standing forlorn looking about.”

  “Did you stop?”

  “No, because by the time it occurred to me that we ought to, Jim had stepped on it, wanting to get to Greece as soon as possible. ‘The old guy’s not our business,’ he said. He was sure they’d come back for him. ‘What if they don’t?’ I said. ‘I can’t see them not coming back,’ was his response. ‘People don’t go depositing aged relatives by the side of the road in foreign countries, do they?’ He was right, I suppose.”

  “Did they?”

  “Did they what? Come back, you mean? I’ve no idea. We didn’t pass their van at any point. Odd, don’t you think?”