The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  After a long silence, the doctor said, “I’m certain you still have a calling, Werner. You’re a priest. It’s obvious to me.”

  The priest put his hands over his ears. He did not know why. He was remembering a woman just now: the clerk at a greengrocer in a French mountain town where he had stayed one summer as an aimless university student before he had received his calling. Every other day, he did his shopping there. In his second week, he had tried to buy a melon from her. At the counter, she said this one wasn’t ready. It was for the Americans, who didn’t know any better. Come outside and she would pick one for him. She found another from the same pile. Its shriveled stem showed the vine had given all it could and died. To be picked by her, or to have the doctor tell him he was certain he still had a calling—simply to be recognized—was the one earthly reassurance for which he still longed. He had wanted it forever. The hope of ever getting it continually from one inimitable human being to whom you were always a you, never a somebody or a type—this hope was what he had given away to God when he had agreed to his calling and pledged never to marry another person.

  The two men had beaten sex nearly to death already. The priest fell asleep for a few seconds and awoke again. He said, “I think he comprehends German quite well already but he hasn’t spoken a word of it. It’s when they need something extracted from him that they call me. He won’t speak to anyone else. Always English. Always alone. I bet you wish you could get your filthy symbol-grubbing hands on him. But you wouldn’t squeeze out a syllable.”

  “You’re angry with me?” said the analyst.

  “Not really,” Werner said, “it’s only transference. I do wish you would despise me and condescend a little for my being a religious person.”

  The ancient analyst, however, had steadfastly neglected to treat the priest’s religion as a plague. This had surprised the priest, then disturbed him. He had counted on a jousting match over religion with an atheist adversary, the sort of dispute he could engage by rote. By refusing to fight, the analyst had forced him to examine and admit his true motivation in coming here:

  Something had gone wrong in his relationship with other people. The boy had made it plain. The priest had not wanted advice or—he recoiled at the word—therapy. He had wanted old-fashioned analysis. He had sat face-to-face for the first meeting with the analyst, had folded his arms crookedly, had spoken without interruption for three listless quarters of an hour summarizing a childhood that he really did believe, as he was describing it, included no special shocks or reversals. “As you see, nothing of interest to a man of your profession,” he concluded with sincere relief. “I have no justification in coming here.” Whereupon the analyst suggested that having had a mother crushed to death by a cellar ceiling during a Soviet air raid in Breslau when he was seven, and having spent two days and nights under the rubble with her before he was dug out, and finding in this now “nothing of interest” was itself interesting, and worthy of study.

  “Hate is endless,” the doctor now said but interrupted himself. “I wonder, does he mistake you for God?”

  “He mistakes me for a priest, unfortunately.”

  “You’re very angry?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “With the boy?”

  “The woman wants to take him to Holland. What court won’t laugh her back into her broom closet? Stop it with the boy, I asked you.”

  “You’re angry with him.”

  “It’s too ridiculous.”

  “Or with me?”

  “Only as a stand in for—” He put a pillow on his eyes like the toddler who hides his head under a blanket and believes his whole self invisible. “I’m angry with the Lord,” he said.

  “You mistake me for God.”

  “My emotions pretend, that’s all.”

  “You pretend to hate the boy,” the analyst hypothesized.

  “Yes, I do. I pretend, like a game.”

  “A kindergarten game. The kind you play before it becomes necessary to a game that someone should win and someone should lose.”

  “I feel trapped, under a weight in the dark, thirsty, as though—as though I were breathing dust—all from hating him.”

  “Hate is endless—” the analyst began again.

  “So you said.”

  “—but love is referring to a number of days.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “YOU HAD NO BUSINESS LYING to him about that woman’s intentions,” the priest said to Miss Fuchs, the director of the kinderheim, while he paced her office. “You twisted him up like a phone cord. I had to unplug him from the wall and let him dangle and spin until all his knots were out.”

  Miss Fuchs, happy and implacable, sat behind her desk and said, “It isn’t a lie that the woman’s intentions in entering his room will be to clean it. He needn’t know right away that she hopes for anything further. They say he keeps a collection of bees in that room. We should simply accept this, I suppose? Dead bees, Father?”

  “He talks English to those bees when he thinks no one can hear. ‘This is your wing,’ he says. ‘This is your butt, where you make poison. But if you use the poison, you will die.’”

  “She will come in and explain why he must not keep bees in the room. And they will begin a relationship of direction and trust.”

  “He sees right through you, if darkly. He tore his paper today erasing some mistake in the mathematics lesson, right after you talked to him. The teacher taped it back together, but he was so ashamed that for the rest of the morning he hid his face in his shirt. He had made a little progress, but now—don’t you titter at me! You don’t understand how timid and zealous and insatiable he is. Once he thinks he’s understood something he won’t let it go. He’s like an ancient astronomer. He’s looking at the same data as the rest of us, but he comes up with entirely different systems to account for how they work. All internally consistent. Elegant sometimes. He told the bees they were in Heaven, so he’d saved some honey from his lunch for them. Because in Heaven many things go backward. The bees did not make honey for people; therefore, he must bring honey to them.”

  “Oh, please,” Miss Fuchs said with annoying patience. “He’ll be shy of her. And then like any child he’ll get used to her and forget to be shy. Perhaps you misunderstand childhood.”

  The priest made a grisly smile, showing his dark teeth. The wrinkles from the corners of his eyes spread through his temples and around his scalp like feathers from a carnival mask.

  “People have played games on him all year,” he said. “Did you hear about the collection those little sadists took up? They put a pastry bag full of ten-cent pieces in his cubby with a contract. It said, ‘We wish to offer you’—whatever the sum was—for which they wanted him to go back home. Of course he didn’t know exactly what they were saying, but he got the gist.”

  Miss Fuchs took from the bowl on her coffee table a cashew and threw it at her mouth, keeping the hand there as though to prevent herself from making a flip remark.

  “The teacher was beside herself,” the priest continued manically. “I told her it was only the natural sadism of little children. Well, Willy, game as he is, bought a cigarette lighter with the money. And showed it off. One of the older children must have sold it to him. Of course he wouldn’t tell which. Yet again, the teacher called me. I had to sit up with him all afternoon watching him try to make the lighter go. How could I have taken it away? Absolutely every kid in the class had signed the document. And the ringleader was that girl from Ulm who we used to think was on his side against the barbarians.”

  Miss Fuchs chewed and swallowed her nut. She said, “You should have told him that there is a lid for every pot.”

  In one breath the priest spat out: “Can’t they send one of the interns into the shower with him to shampoo his hair? That’s what the other kids make fun of, his hair smells like a French
dog.” The priest’s eyelids drooped. He had eaten too many of her stale cookies on an empty stomach, and insulin deluged his brain. He lay down on her sofa.

  Miss Fuchs emitted a sound like a cuckoo bird and got up. She stood over him as though, having succeeded in knocking him down, she might tie him to the sofa and gag him.

  The priest waved her away and cursed the cookies. “But I should have told him about the lid and the pot,” he said torpidly. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning,” she said, “that someday Willy would meet a person to whom he would recount that interlude, and this person would shake with rage on Willy’s behalf because she would love him.”

  The priest lay still a moment, watching the beech fire in Miss Fuchs’s hearth.

  “I hear he answers to ‘Wilhelm’ now too,” she said. “That’s progress.”

  “You know, I have a younger brother who our mother never . . . nursed.” The priest closed his eyes and slipped off his shoes. He breathed with deliberation. “By the time he came along it was just a bottle. Sometimes raw egg in the bottle. He has nothing to do with us anymore. Reupholsters furniture in Cologne. Somewhat autistic. Has a manner of standing askance when you talk to him as if he’s staring at you with his ear. I mean, I think Willy—anything might still happen to him. You don’t appreciate how dangerous a woman’s love is to a boy when she offers it uncertainly.”

  “Poor Willy. Why not smother him yourself, you pity him so?”

  “I don’t pity him. . . .” He seemed to sleep a minute, and she went to the fire and dropped on it the rest of the cellophane bag of cookies. The smoke smelled briefly of industrial pollution and anise.

  “I don’t pity him,” the priest said, waking up. “I resent how much of my time he absorbs. He gave that Doina, the Romanian, a little cat he’d caught with a half-empty tin of liver paste and a fruit box. I had to pay to have the animal disposed of. He’d already given the cat a name.”

  “Oh yes, now I understand,” she said. “Someone kept calling her on the hall phone in the girl’s dormitory. She was telling about how ‘Jack’ was doing.”

  “Never once before had the two of them discussed animals or pets. It was a love gift. Poor Doina,” he said.

  “Oh, Doina didn’t care. The cat gave her hives. She wanted it rendered into food for some other creature. She didn’t want to mother it, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Which brings me back—” the priest said, reviving.

  “Now, look,” Miss Fuchs said.

  “No, you look. He will drive that woman mad in half an hour. Does she even know how he got here?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “He is a delicate flower, our Willy.”

  “We are speaking of a professional housecleaner. She charges thirty-five euros an hour, not that it’s your business to know. I tried her out myself. Spick-and-span,” she used the English phrase. “He’ll never suspect.”

  “She’s trying him on like a shoe.”

  “You needn’t put it that way, Father. I simply went in there and asked him, ‘What’s this mess? I’ll get a lady to clean it.’”

  “It’s not just that he can’t clean his room. You don’t understand how ashamed he is that he doesn’t know how to clean his room. Of all the ruses—”

  “You must promise to ignore her hairdo, which is eccentric, or anyway, please be fair. Style is only style. But clean is clean. Did I mention she’s Dutch? She’s living here for now, but she won’t keep him here.”

  “I know all about her kind.”

  “He could have a new life. Wherever he belongs, it surely isn’t Hamburg.”

  “You sang her his wretched lifesong and manipulated her.”

  “No, Father. I didn’t need to. She saw him at the airport.”

  “I beg your pardon,” the priest said pointedly.

  “When he got here.”

  “What, in the terminal?”

  “She’d never considered an adoption before, and—”

  “In the terminal?”

  “—and she tracked us down. I tried her out. Mildew had been growing in the grating of my kitchen exhaust. I said nothing about it; I just assigned her the kitchen and waited to see how she would do. When I returned, the room was spick-and-span. She had disassembled the grating and soaked it in degreasing solution.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” he shouted.

  “Before you ask, there is a husband, or there was and they’re remarrying—I can’t remember. My memory anymore . . .” she said, insouciant, tapping her head.

  The priest looked at her.

  “Be not afraid, Father. We agree on the husband.”

  “I am afraid,” he enunciated, “of impulsive, fickle people. Willy isn’t a diet magazine at the cash register. Look! A crying child! Maybe if I take him home it will cure my tinnitus and restore my will to live.”

  “I said, ‘Be not afraid,’” Miss Fuchs said.

  “And Willy will be afraid too, the whole time she’s in the room. He’ll be terrified she’s getting ready to give up in disgust. Or he’ll know she’s shopping.”

  This gave Miss Fuchs, who knew her scripture, having been born a Protestant, occasion to quote from a small Bible she had in her purse, as she was just then coming from Mass at another parish. To bring a Bible to Catholic Mass is to bring one’s own groceries to a dinner party, but in her long life she had found it more efficient to be rude and superior if need be than to allow the frigidity of less competent people to foil one’s excellent plans. She read, “Be not afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you and you sit on scorpions.”

  * * *

  • • •

  JANIS STILL LAY in bed on Saturday before breakfast when his door opened and the trespasser came into his room. She set to work without acknowledging him, spritzing the large window with the distinctively sharp-smelling chemical used evidently everywhere in creation to clean glass. Each pane merited a separate sheet of newspaper, which, folded back on itself two times, left a dry surface for the final polishing. She paid special attention to the corners, where, as he knew from his own studies, less exacting housekeepers had left a dusty film in which the limbs and wings of the smallest of insects had accumulated. In the hierarchy of smells, the smell of glass cleaner belonged to the most elevated rank, along with the smell of a mother’s hair dryer on its hottest setting, and of pancake batter (however, not after it made contact with the pan: a nice smell in its own way but by no means the same). He breathed the aroma of the cleaner slowly and deeply, imitating the involuntary breath of sleep; but really he was scrutinizing the trespasser’s every motion through the lashes of his eyes, which he made to seem closed but in fact were not. She confused him to look at: on the one side her head was shaven; on the top and on the other side she had the white hair of an old person. Except whiter than that. And both eyes were the fancy-painted eyes of a young adult or teenager, and she had bright ruddy skin like Doina’s when she ran in the cold. Perhaps the trespasser was only half dead and half still living.

  The reasons it did not immediately occur to him to object to her trespassing were several. Fear of her was not one of them. First, she had already got to work before he had quite decided he was awake. Second, she was good at cleaning, and whenever a person was good at something a sort of jar grew around that person, which let you and others see them do their task but which forbid interruption. By the same principle, dogs, always excellent at eating, must never be petted while they ate. Third, the trespasser believed Janis was asleep. Or rather, she acted as if she believed him asleep. Or rather, she acted as if he were too small to notice. Or no—she acted as if she knew for a fact he wasn’t there, because he had died and his body had been taken away, and she was preparing the room for its next occupant. The prospect that he had become a ghost even to the creatures in Heaven became so te
rrible that he sat up and coughed. She only went on scrubbing the upper edge of the window molding, a surface his investigations had shown him was furry with dust, like the pelt of a dormouse.

  Ghosts make all sorts of indistinct house noises, so to clarify the sort of being he was, he stretched and did his most exact impression of a human boy yawning as he woke up in the morning.

  She wrung her rag in her bucket. He yawned again, angrily.

  Then, thank goodness, she spoke to him, and he knew that like the priest she was one of God’s chief agents because she did not address him in the language of Heaven but in American. “There, he’s up at last,” she said, her eyes stuck to her work. “How did Willy sleep?”

  Of course he didn’t answer. He counted five fingers on one hand and five on the other, as though ghosts could be distinguished from people this way.

  She then did what the priest would never have dared. In general the children volunteered their dirty clothes on Wednesday mornings for the laundry interns, although Janis had maybe forgotten of late, and maybe felt too embarrassed the next week to put the clothes, by then all the dirtier, in the hall for everybody to see, and maybe by the week after that his clothes were even dirtier and maybe he therefore neglected once more to put them out. In any case, the trespasser now went to his chest of drawers and opened them. She made a little phony sound of surprise to find his shirts in there. Yes, the shirts were wrinkled. And yes, there were sand and dirt and urine dribble and bits of snot in them. But when she said she was going to take them away to wash them rather than framing this as a proposition they might discuss (not that he would have discussed it), he knew she was the new tester. Always, there was a new one. Always in some new disguise with some new challenge to his understanding of the laws. No one gets to take anything away from you that you have. Yet into a basket she dropped the clothes, the clothes that were plainly his, that he had. He was very angry but did not show it except by counting his toes and then his fingers again with an exclusive focus to give her an idea how it felt to be treated as though you were a ghost. He shouldn’t have been so angry with her. She was only carrying out the mission she had been assigned.