Jeff and Russell are both lawyers, still living in Calgary, their hometown. Not because they are particularly obedient; they take after their mother.
Next time she calls Kevin, she will ask if he still has that bear of his. Tooley. Ask him if he remembers where it came from. (Did they buy it for him? She can’t recall.)
Craig will know, but Craig is in Canada. Craig talks to Kevin all the time. He calls him from work. They talk regularly, and they e-mail back and forth on a daily basis. Only if Joan asks, does her husband tell her what Kevin is up too. If she reminds him that Kevin is her son too, he just looks at her with his own brand of hostile amusement.
Joan and Craig do not eat supper together very often anymore. They blame it on their hectic schedules, things getting in the way, meetings and such. But once in a blue moon they dutifully sit down for a meal, giving it a chance, trying their best to make amicable conversation with the aid of a good bottle of wine.
“Kevin should be back in Canada soon, shouldn’t he?” she asked the last time they had supper one on one. It was in a Thai restaurant; she so seldom has time to cook.
“Oh, he’s been back for a couple of weeks,” replied Craig, twirling his pad Thai noodles.
“He has? How is he?”
“He’s just fine.”
“What’s he up to?”
“Right now he’s at home working on his thesis, but he’s going back to Uzbekistan in the fall for another stint.”
“Oh. For how long?”
“I’m not sure. For the winter, I think.”
“I see.”
Joan looks out the window onto the old meadow. At first it’s just a blur. She blinks. Blinks some more. As it slowly comes into focus, she sees how drenched in flowers it is, wildflowers blue and white, red and yellow. It was yesterday too, but today the flowers appear more abundant, more vivid. Mossy boulders lie like sleeping trolls among the flowers. A rabbit sits on one of them, its nose twitching.
The meadow slopes down to a row of crooked pear trees growing along the crumbling stone wall to the east. Their branches droop with the burden of excess fruit. It’s been a benign season. Behind the wall — it’s as mossy as the boulders — over to the right, there is a secret clearing where, according to Abigail, a golden carpet of primroses grows thick in the spring.
Joan has no idea what a primrose looks like.
Beyond the clearing a heedless little river dances and skips, ever sure of itself, gaining momentum on its journey to the open sea.
CHARMED
* * *
EMMA WAS YOUNG WHEN THEY FIRST MET, but not as young as Pierre. Pierre was so painfully conscious of his lack of years, the fact that he was legally a child still, that he was forced to lie. When Emma said she had recently turned nineteen, Pierre, not batting an eyelid, claimed that, well, what do you know, so had he.
The truth was he had turned seventeen less than a week earlier, an accomplishment so unimpressive he had not dared reveal it for fear of being shunned. A cowardly attitude for a social rebel and freethinker, and don’t think he wasn’t aware of the irony.
But he was right. She would have shunned him. Called him a presumptuous beanpole of a brat.
When Pierre revealed the truth three years later (he was basically honest, only in no hurry about it), Emma had the grace to receive the revelation as an endearing offering rather than a desperate lie begging for retroactive forgiveness.
These days she thinks: Oh, that nonconformist, avant-garde Pierre! That one-of-a-kind Pierre! He would have been so easy to forgive no matter how grisly his crime.
Not that Pierre would ever commit a grisly crime.
He came sauntering into the second-rate art school one night, straight out of a dimension Emma had until then been ignorant of. Half an hour late for class, and unperturbed by the tardiness, he suddenly stood among them, dressed in purple velvet pants that looked like they had been painted onto his long skinny legs. So relaxed he appeared slightly somnambulant, he politely announced to the room at large that his name was Pierre, that he was a new student, and say, where is the teacher? Is it too late to register?
It was hard to tell if his calm was due to confidence or indifference.
“Can I help you?” Gunnar had come scooting from his office. Gunnar was the art teacher. His voice sounded threatening. When he disapproved of something, two sharp creases appeared between his black bushy eyebrows, making him look demonic. That evening the creases grew deep as soon as he laid eyes on purple-legged Pierre standing with arms crossed in the middle of the room, gazing about like a potential buyer of the property, large sleepy eyes sliding over the sixteen students busy at their easels, each one more preoccupied with trying to look artistic than with actually producing anything with artistic merit.
Suddenly the newcomer stopped looking sleepy and became too distracted to pay attention to what Gunnar was saying. The reason for the distraction was Emma, or, as she had her back to him, Emma’s long black hair. It began pulling at Pierre’s eyeballs in a peculiar manner, and then — once her appearance got proper hold of his attention — hypnotized him.
“EXCUSE ME!” roared Gunnar. The creases between his eyebrows deepened as he reached up and tapped Pierre on shoulder.
“Huh?” Genuinely surprised, Pierre peered down to discover a pissed-off demon fuming at him. “I’d like to enroll,” he informed it.
“Then come with me to the office,” ordered Gunnar, frown intact.
Pierre would later confess to Emma’s friend Helen — who would never tell Emma — that he fell in love with Emma even before he saw her face. There was something about the way her hair hung halfway down her back, so heavy and thick — and later, when he took a few more steps into the room and saw her face in profile, the way her bangs flopped into her eyes.
It had reminded him of a wild, ungroomed pony, he said.
Helen hated ponies after that.
Pierre was too absorbed beholding Emma’s hair that night to notice her staggering lack of talent. The nude on her canvas had swelled towards the edges like dough spreading unrestrained due to an excess of yeast. The peculiar dimensions looked nothing like the bored naked woman perched on a barstool on the podium waiting for the next cigarette break.
When Pierre eventually did acknowledge the boundless distance between Emma and artistic genius, he merely concluded that this irrelevant detail had nothing to do with Emma’s special essence. The way he saw it, there were too many artistic geniuses milling about the world as it was, but only one Emma.
Emma had always considered herself the artistic type and did not see why she should let a lack of talent stand between herself and artistic expression, for if she did, how would she ever develop any latent gift?
Pierre, not shy by nature, became so preoccupied simply watching her during those first few classes that it tied his tongue in a knot. He could not think of anything interesting to say. A truly extreme situation.
It took two weeks before he worked up the nerve to start a conversation with the wild-haired pony who by then was busy adding various shades of purple to her nude. The purples gave the swelling curves on her canvas the appearance of a rotting carcass. Strong emotions crashed inside Pierre like a stormy sea. It was tricky, for while these emotions made him feel giddily alive, his internal tidal waves had to remain nonchalantly hidden. Starting a conversation that exhibited obvious indifference required concentration. He had to make it clear to her that her response — or lack thereof, heaven forbid — did not matter to his emotional well-being.
Emma, knowing nothing of Pierre’s inner hurricanes, and suffering no unforeseen weather patterns herself, explained to him on the Thursday evening when he took the first step and admired her hair out loud, that she was part gypsy, which was why her hair was so black.
It was a story she was fond of telling. Sometimes she claimed to be the adopted offspring of Spanish aristocrats killed in a car accident when holidaying in Scandinavia. The version depended entirely on her mo
od and the gullibility of the listener.
She was neither part gypsy nor an orphaned Spanish aristocrat, but the lies were romantic, and romantic allure is not to be sneezed at. Adhering to the unyielding fact that she was just another kid on the block was simply tedious. Certain truths are irrelevant. Emma merely refurbishing her ancestry for the benefit of mankind. The world was too full of ordinary people as it was.
With Pierre she used the gypsy variant, sensing it would have been his preferred choice had he been able to choose.
If Pierre believed her — he said he did — it was because he felt like it.
Her natural hair colour was a common working-class brown. It would, she was convinced, not have held Pierre’s attention. (It is true. It would not.) As it lacked poetry, she never revealed this fact, not even retroactively, not wanting to mar his illusions. For make no mistake, Pierre was a master illusionist. That was his charm. He created illusions with acute attention to detail, the overall effect being that there was much more to Pierre than first met the eye.
Ordinary people and tedious facts held no place in Pierre’s dimension either. It was a place deliciously free from restraint, but full of possibilities, an Aladdin’s lamp that he invited very few people to rub against.
The first time he spoke to Emma, he dragged his right hand through his dark shoulder-length hair and she noticed the ring on his finger. In its solid silver custody sat imbedded a sizeable chunk of green amber full of shadows and secrets and something that looked like a prehistoric species of ant. Emma grabbed his hand and asked where he got that amazing ring. Leaving his hand in hers, he wanted to stroke her wrist with his thumb. It would have been so easy to give in.
But Pierre did not give in. He might have been young, but he was no weakling. He pulled himself together and told her about a silversmith he knew. Down by the coast, he said, halfway between Ystad and Simrishamn, thereabouts, down by the Baltic Sea where the winds are salty, there’s an old man in an ancient limestone cottage who makes jewelry. He works alone in his studio, close to shore, the waves of a restless sea crashing almost onto his front step. Obliging, Pierre let her lift up his hand, turning the ring to the light so she could get a closer look. The amber had dark secret areas and a bright patch like a tiny meadow filled with sunshine.
“Is that an ant?”
“Yes,” confirmed Pierre, “that is an ant. A peculiar kind of ant, for sure. At least part of one.”
Emma studied the large stone for a long time that evening, imagining the sea tossing and turning, the wind howling, the old man working alone in his cottage by flickering candlelight when the storm killed the electricity. And she thought, as she watched the light play with the stone’s secret, that there must be times when the sea is calm and the man leaves his work bench and goes for walks on the beach. Looking for gifts of amber that the Baltic Sea has washed onto shore for him to find.
If creating special effects came naturally to Pierre or if he at worked at it, Emma did not bother to determine, for what did it matter? It was such effortless magic, why pick at it?
Pierre’s family, unlike most of the people Emma knew, was not working class. They lived in an old apartment in an area of the city that had once again become fashionable. It was many-roomed and had high ceilings, but was more or less unadorned and purposely so, full of echoing empty spaces and modern pieces of furniture with sharp angles. The two oversized paintings in the living room were ultramodern, showing little, offering nothing to an eye hungry for meaning. That’s because they were status symbols, Pierre explained during Emma’s first visit. He was delighted that she viewed them with contempt.
“My mother loves status symbols,” he said. “She thinks they define her.”
“And do they?”
“Unfortunately.”
In the kitchen where Pierre got them a bottle of orange juice there were two refrigerators side by side, one for fancier food and one for ordinary everyday food. There was not a great deal of food in the one assigned to common comestibles. The other one was padlocked.
Emma’s family lived in a much smaller, two-bedroom apartment where china figurines decorated the linen cupboard and sports magazines and women’s weeklies lay scattered on the coffee table beside the ashtray that held her father’s pipe. Her mother’s knitting nested in one of the chairs. Emma had to share a bedroom with her brother and his smelly soccer shirts.
They only had one refrigerator, not nearly as big as the ones in Peter’s kitchen, but it was full of food.
She did not tell Pierre this.
On the door to Pierre’s room hung an old-fashioned sign that read: Café Unwirklich. Café Unreal. It was shaped like a cloud, smoky and shapeless. Pierre admitted to having stolen it in Munich the previous summer.
How?
By standing on a friend’s shoulder, detaching it with a screwdriver.
Where did he get the screwdriver?
He had stolen it in a department store earlier that day, with that very purpose in mind.
And nobody tried to stop him stealing the sign in the middle of a public place?
Well, it was late at night, there weren’t many people about, just two drunks who kept cheering him on. Also, it wasn’t a very nice place, the unreal café, full of loud, pretentious people, too disappointingly real. But he had taken a liking to the sign. Had decided he deserved it more than they did.
He kept to himself the fact that he had been barely sixteen at the time, on a school trip.
Emma had to agree that the sign was totally suitable, for stepping into Pierre’s room from the stark trendiness of the rest of the apartment was like leaving cold reality behind. Even though the room was not very large, the dimension that was Pierre’s appeared limitless.
The most capacious piece of furniture was an old-fashioned dresser, bowlegged and imposing, covered in twirling patterns of purple, red, orange, green and some colours that Emma was sure did not exist outside Pierre’s room. He had painted it himself, he confessed, paying respectful attention to detail, having sensed at a young age that beautiful objects would be important to him, a buffer between him and the mundane.
“These purple bits,” he pointed out, “are all different body shapes. And see this orange pattern? All animal shapes. Notice how beautifully they fit together with all the stars and moons and clouds in between?”
“It must have taken you forever.” Emma’s shining eyes pleased him no end.
“It seemed like it. I stayed up late every night until it was done. Twenty-two nights. But it was worth it, don’t you think?”
“Oh, I do,” she sighed. “I do.”
That Pierre! Such a fantasist!
The top of the dresser was crammed with what Pierre referred to as objets d’enchantement. Who else but Pierre would keep a glass slipper on the dresser, claiming it belonged to Cinderella? A fragile piece of footwear three inches long?
“Did she really have such small feet?”
“Yes,” said Pierre, “Cinderella had very small feet. Like you, Emma-gemma.”
“I’m a size 38,” said Emma.
“To me your feet look very small,” said Pierre.
Beside the slipper sat a wooden box. It was painted in the same uninhibited colours and patterns as the dresser and looked like a rectangular outgrowth of it. The box contained his Viking jewelry. Rare and precious-looking replicas of original, excavated pieces.
Where had he found them?
Here and there.
There was a Byzantine coin made into a pendant for a necklace, though it lacked a chain, a bracelet braided with thick strands of silver, a small animal shaped with silver wire “unearthed just outside the village where my grandmother was born.” Pierre was unsure if it was a deer, but agreed that it looked like one despite the strange horns.
The fourth piece was a clasp, presumably meant for a shawl or a belt, a twisted slim golden band, heart-shaped with a curl at the tip. He held it up to Emma who was wearing a red and yellow scarf. “Do you wan
t to try it on?”
“Can I?”
“Of course you can.”
What she wanted to ask was, “Can I keep it, can I, can I? Can I be special too? Please?”
What he wanted to say was, “You can keep it if you stay with me forever.”
She handed it back to him and he returned it to the box and slowly closed the lid.
There were several other containers, all made of wood, each one painted in colours that would make a rainbow blanch with envy. Some were shaped like sea chests, others like caskets and snuffboxes of various sizes. On the floor, near the door, a large clay amphora sat lodged in an umbrella stand. It contained all the marbles Pierre had won as a child. He had been the unchallenged champion of his neighbourhood. On her first visit he invited Emma to try and lift it. It did not budge. He gave her a marble instead, one of the biggest ones, a smooth globe full of purple and yellow swirls. It rolled around in the palm of her hand, cold at first, then warming up as if it had decided it liked her.
The walls in his world were painted green — like a forest in spring, said Pierre, full of the lightness of hope — and hung with paintings that resembled some kind of psychedelic folk art. Each painting was signed by Pierre, the earliest one dating back six years. In their midst hung an MFF soccer shirt, its back to the room, displaying the number nine.
In the window between two yellow begonias stood a vase of flowers surrounded by statuettes of stocky peasants dancing. The bouquet on that first visit consisted of a thick dark gold circle of marigolds surrounded by pale blue forget-me-nots. A red rose had been placed in the centre of the arrangement, making the bouquet look like a single flower, the forget-me-nots providing a becoming lace edge.
Emma had never met anybody her age, male or female, who kept fresh flowers in their room. “You really do live in unreality, don’t you?” she asked, her eyes wide, not disappointing him.
Leaving Berlin Page 23