by Ursula Pflug
We went to an old bar close to my hotel. The Ear Inn is ungentrified, old school and full of neighbourhood types. Why, I asked, was she in New York? Was she going to NYU for graduate work?
She asked me about you, and once again a cold wave of fear (what size animal?) came over me. It was not fear that they would find you, it was the other fear: that they would find me. It was partly because of this fear that I left Berlin for Paris in the first place, even though I did not leave the work. I would make myself invisible, and work on Invisibility. I did not want to be found before I finished. And in this plan, at least, I succeeded.
I think.
One grows too weary for fear.
Karina had known all along, she confessed, she had always worked with us. She just hadn’t been able to tell us, so that we could all be safer. She had kept her involvement invisible, even from us. She beat us at our own game.
Maybe.
Involvement in what?
In stopping it.
In helping us stay invisible.
At least that is what she said.
She also spoke my thoughts aloud: I came to New York because it is hard to breathe anywhere he breathed.
Was she reading my mind or had I spoken it, written it somewhere? And is there already a technology for mind reading that I don’t know about yet? Or did we just feel the same way?
Yes, she slept with you too. I didn’t mind. You were like that. Many women could sleep with you and not only did we not hate each other we also didn’t hate you.
Maybe she didn’t come to New York for the reason she said but to keep tabs on me. Taxi driver, yeah right.
She was wearing the jacket like yours. Did I ever tell about the jacket? It was like this:
Leaving Paradise and trying to hail a cab, we often got Karina, you and I. At first it was coincidence. But the coincidence, after repeating itself so many times, like links in a chain, transmuted into pattern, and she would come looking for us.
Paradise would close, and we would pour out the gates, waves in the deluge of aftermath. We would ignore the line of taxis waiting like vultures, looking for Karina, and if she wasn’t there we would wait, knowing she would be soon. Seeing us she would honk her horn like a trumpet and we would limp over to her, a collective Jonah to his whale, a killer to the hangman of his choice. You, me and your hangers on. Movement people, artists, lawyers.
And she would take us home.
Why did we let her?
I met her once outside of her work. It was in January, during the Winter Schluss Verkauf at KaDeWe, the year-end sales. It was in the men’s department. There was a jacket of the softest black leather. There were others of course but it was the only one of such an exquisite cut, so masterfully sewn together. Reaching for it at the same time we found unexpectedly one another’s hands. Our fingers brushed and strangely I took her hand instead of withdrawing from the awkwardness, the transgression, touching a stranger in public. Maybe some part of me knew that I knew her. Maybe my fingers knew.
And we looked up, away from the jackets, and into each other’s eyes, mine blue, hers green. Strangely we did not let go, not immediately, even though we did not know one another yet. I couldn’t place her, this red-haired girl with a clear strong face wearing, I now saw, a look of such confused recognition it could only have mirrored my own. I felt (or maybe my fingers felt) the connection to be more than the superficial circumstances it generally turns out to be in such situations. I didn’t think of the obvious which, by its plainness had assumed a cloak of—I must say it—invisibility.
“Ich kenne dich,” I said, as people do.
“Ja näturlich, aber von wo?”
As people do, we listed all the places we might possibly have met. It gave us no clue, for of course she and I could never both be in the same place on any given night—if she was at the same play or art opening or party or just drinking at Paradise then she wouldn’t be available to drive us home and listen to every word we said. Finally, as I should have at first, I asked her what she did. She told me she was a taxi driver and only then did I exclaim, “Du! Du! Du fährst uns nachhause vom Paradise!”
It all seems so obvious now—she always drove us; she was in KaDeWe that day. She saw me on the L train in lower Manhattan, going back to the west side. It seems strange, erstaunlich, that I didn’t see it sooner, not just who she was in the department store in West Berlin that winter day now years ago, but all of it. And as to her? Who knows?
When she drove taxi she wore makeup and her hair pulled away from her face but in the department store it spilled down the shoulders of her scruffy sweater in waves; some women dress up to shop but she was not one of them. And of course, the context was unusual. My second excuse, or maybe she knew an invisibility spell I didn’t know. If we’re not recognized, it’s as good as being invisible, isn’t it? At least to those who do in fact know us.
There were always certain things I saw that you didn’t see, and I realize now it is why you kept me close. That and you liked my coding. That and you liked me in bed. But if you kept me close, I’d help to keep you safe, because I saw things you didn’t see. Like so many leaders, it was hard for you to find people who didn’t need to put you on a pedestal. Many leaders of course, wish for this, for adulation. But you had been saved once or twice or three times by women and men who didn’t worship you particularly but saw things coming you didn’t see. And so you kept us close. None of us were trained bodyguards or agents. We were just people with a good eye for things, with good minds that noticed.
At the Ear Inn Karina said, “Of course I listened, why would I not? I could not help you erase your steps if I didn’t know what you were doing.”
“And where we were doing it.”
“They buried him in the jacket.”
I hadn’t known and wondered if she had a photo, one in any case I wouldn’t have wanted to look at. “There were two,” I said, “on the same hanger, one on top of the other, the same size, it was so odd.”
“Yes, I remember. In KaDeWe in Berlin im Winter,” she said in the Deutschlich we both affected. “The year after die Wende.”
After the wall came down we migrated to the east, young people from all over the world, and rented acres of loft in Prenzlauer Berg without amenities or heating for pennies and pretended we were making art.
I remember I didn’t try the jacket on. I was tired and wanted to go home. (I was living in your flat at that time.) If it didn’t fit you, or you didn’t like it, you could bring it back. But Karina tried one on. “Is it for your husband?” I asked, for I noticed she wore a ring.
“No,” she beamed. “Nür für mich allein.” A beautiful present for herself. Blue angel, she looked good in a man’s jacket, so good. “If the second one doesn’t fit him, you can wear it and then we can be twins.”
“I was just thinking that.” As if I could touch the mirror and merge with her.
They buried you in the second one. In East Berlin. I wasn’t there because no one could find me in Paris. I’d wanted complete quiet, radio silence while I finished the work. But because of it I can’t be sure. And I don’t ask for a photograph.
Now I can never go back to Germany, although why should it matter? The day I met you, that is the tattoo that unlike the others I can never have removed.
Karina.
What side is she on?
But she may too forever wonder the same thing about me, and in the end we can never know the truth of one another, but perhaps the only truth is this—maybe we both just want to be with someone who knew you, who had touched you, who had let you in.
We will go to Mexico together, to Oaxaca. Taking turns wearing the remaining jacket until it is worn through in many places. And then I will find somewhere else to go. Zusammen, oder vielleicht allein.
As If Leaves Could Hide Invisible Beings
ANGELIQUE DOES IT
ALONE once a week, winter and summer. In summer she takes off all her clothes, wades through the mud, shoots off into the middle where she can no longer stand, treads water for a few moments, then turns around and swims back. She looks for a grassy spot on which to dry off, one not shaded by cedars, relatively free of rocks and deadfall. She smokes one cigarette before she gets dressed. She likes being naked in nature too much to give it up. Still, the thought always niggles: what if a strange man comes across her lying naked on the grass beside the Ouse, far from shouting distance? Not likely; deer season is in November.
Once when she arrived at the river there was a black bear on the other side, investigating something in the shallows. Angelique knew the bear probably wouldn’t cross to attack her, but all the same she ran all the way back. The trail was knotted with deadfall, rocks, and roots. She only slowed for breath when she’d reached the back pasture, out in the open again. Her heart hammering, she listened for the dog, didn’t hear him. The bear could eat her dog instead of her. That would be okay.
Angelique used to think the bear chased her all the way to the village. It was time to leave the farm, the bear was telling her.
Or maybe it was the fairies.
They were not a thing you saw, but a thing you felt. Angelique acknowledged their presence with an organ she’d never known she had, as if a gigantic eye had just been blasted open by their presence. Part mockery, part dare, there they were, hiding under the cabbage leaves. Full of shame, stooped and bent and dirty and poor and tiny and magic and otherworldly, they shaded their eyes with their hands, staring up at this giantess who had so rudely interrupted them.
“Go away,” they said.
But how could she, for it was her garden after all and needed weeding?
They tried to hide under the leaves. It was pathetic really, as if leaves could hide invisible beings, which of course they can’t.
“We don’t want to be seen,” they said. “Not yet, and not by you.”
“Too bad,” Angelique said.
What she meant was: I couldn’t stop seeing you if I wanted. Now that I can, it’s not like I can put the ability back in its lock box for you must understand that’s quite impossible. Shutting her new enormous eye, her ear, for she couldn’t really see them and they spoke not in words but in meanings and feelings sent from one to another and now to Angelique as well by some kind of faerie short wave radio. Angelique stared and stared, felt and felt with whatever the new organ was. Went inside and put on a soup to simmer. Set out dinner for the family. Read the children Tolkien before bed.
Pretending things were normal didn’t really work, because as almost everyone knows, you can’t go back if there is no back to go to. It had been erased, back had. Permanently. Or so it felt, for they were still there the next day and the day after and the day after that. At times Angelique even admitted she liked it, because at least this feeling of strange and fertile newness was, well, new, if quite impossible and a little creepy, but things had after all been boring for longer than she could remember.
sss
In the dream she came to a village where a ring of beautiful old houses shared a huge common garden. The garden was wild and overgrown and better because of it, at its heart a deep still enchantment. Angelique approached a house and knocked with a brass knocker and the door opened and she went in and then it swung shut behind her. The door swung shut and then they were there as they’d always been; she’d felt them a moment before they’d made themselves known: a door opening, an eye beginning to open, another eye closing to make way for the first. They advanced from all sides, imprisoning Angelique in a sleep so deep and old she knew the door would never open again; she’d never ever be able to leave. This was a spell as binding as being born: once invoked it could never be broken except by dying. It was over now. Everything she’d ever thought life was for was over, irrevocably and forever. A spell as deep as dream, as sleep, no, deeper, a sleep perhaps which had two doors: first, the door into ordinary waking life, now slammed irrevocably shut, and then the other. The one they’d taken her through, locking the first.
And so Angelique and Mort picked up and moved. Angelique built a new garden and planted it and then they came, and there were more of them than there had ever been at the farm. Eventually she got used to them and didn’t worry about being crazy anymore and even got to like them and as she did they seemed to change, but it was Angelique who was changing.
sss
Since their move she wonders whether men still snowmobile on the Ouse, whether the ice ever gets thick enough anymore. Angelique always went the day after, when their trails had not yet been covered by new snow. Once she found part of a deer carcass on the frozen river, half eaten by coyotes. Farther on, a loose leg, its knee socket gruesomely mobile, which her dog found fascinating. On the way home she came upon a little hunting shack, barely larger than an outhouse, but with a window and a chimney. Angelique was afraid to look into the window. What if someone was inside? And why was she both brave and foolish enough to leave the trail?
Angelique still goes on long walks alone, except on the country roads around the village. The Ouse runs through her backyard now, home to blue herons, snapping turtles, otters and a beaver which, like the Pleistocene Castoroides, is almost the size of a sub-compact car. In the village she doesn’t have to worry about people raping her or shooting her accidentally, even in deer season.
Smoking; skinny dipping alone; walking off trail; bears: it seems these things don’t frighten Angelique as much as they do other women, even if they should. What frightens Angelique is something else. Like Angelique’s mother, only in England, Virginia sunk stones into her pockets, submerged herself in the first Ouse.
Home from her walks, Angelique removes stones from her pockets and lines them up on the windowsill beside the postcards of her mother’s drawings. The stones are not from here, not from now; they tell the story of a different kind of life. Angelique counts the stones sometimes. One for each child, one for herself, one for Mort. Because of this, one day the river’s name will have a new meaning, the meaning of a stream that winds its way between worlds.
The Dreams of Trees
THERE WERE SEVERAL PAIRS of knee-high green rubber boots on the mat, including a pair that belonged to Sandrine and three that were Randy’s. They were the kind of boots people wore to go fishing or hunting, with a felt lining. It wasn’t possible to buy them in the city at all. She took her own shoes off by the door as she always did. Because of this almost universal rural habit, Sandrine thought, country houses generally had clean floors even when inhabited almost entirely by men.
Changing from boots into slippers, Sandrine remembered with some dismay that her husband’s name wasn’t Randy at all; it was Mike. Said husband was sitting at the table working on the crossword puzzle. He looked up and measured her with a lingering elevator glance from head to toe and toe to head. He didn’t say a word but gave her the slightest of nods, after which he got up and put on the kettle for tea. When it was done they sat at the table and drank it.
Watching him work on his crossword she knew with a dead certainty he wasn’t called Mike—not Mike nor Randy, either. She wished he would speak and give away his name. How could she forget such a thing? It wasn’t as if she was eighty-two and had dementia. She was a young woman, thirty-four, in possession of a nice house in a small Ontario town and two beautiful small children who were away for the weekend, visiting their paternal grandmother two towns over.
She also had an unusually attractive husband whose name she’d forgotten. How could that be? She knew he’d been grating on her nerves lately, to the point where she’d been indulging in escape fantasies. Was forgetting his name some kind of karmic retribution for her unkind thoughts? Sandrine did a quick mental check: had she been in a car accident or recently suffered some other serious bump to her head? Was her aphasia caused by a concussion? Alas, none of these seemed true. She simply di
dn’t know.
Just as strangely and suddenly as her husband’s name had fled, Sandrine saw in her mind’s eye diagonals of green lozenges printed onto the back of the upholstery of the seat in front of her. It was a childhood memory. She’d been on the train with her father in North Africa. She didn’t think of the trip often and wondered why the memory was chasing her now, taking over, hanging on, not giving up. Looking out the window at the purple-black watchman hollyhocks guarding the vegetable beds, Sandrine wondered whether she would ever remember the trip again. Memory was a strange and fickle thing. She should make a note before the image fled, perhaps on the back of the phone bill that sat on the kitchen table, with its varnished veneer top and white lacquered legs.
Sandrine looked at her husband and smiled; he was so gorgeous it was hard not to. He smiled back and bent over his crossword as if he welcomed the silence. That’s what being married for a long time got you: the possibility of making and drinking tea all without needing to speak. Sandrine figured it for a good thing, most days.
She remembered camels she’d seen, slurping out of buckets at an oasis near Djerba. At some point her father had gotten off to go on an important visit alone, and the train had sped on through the night without him. Sandrine remembered sitting alone in her seat, trying to converse with strangers in languages she didn’t know well, wishing for blankets, more money, apples, friends, all of the above. In the end she’d fallen asleep counting lozenges, noticing their patterns, how they repeated. She’d written in her journal, but not about pomegranates or camels or the magical train ride itself. Instead she’d described the strange upholstery on the back of the seat in front of her. Sandrine had been so young at the time, a child really, thirteen or so, scribbling in a notebook that might still be in a carton in the attic. If she saw it, would she even recognize the book? Why was she thinking of it now?
She’d learned that often enough the timing and content of certain thoughts had significance. Djerba, the Island of Dreams, was in Tunisia, a country she had visited at thirteen with her father. He had wanted her to see the place of her birth and after her mother had died had used part of the insurance money to pay for the trip. Had their train really crossed the old Roman causeway to Djerba, or had they taken a bus or taxi for this last leg of the journey? It was all so long ago she wasn’t sure. Maybe the train had been a dream train, just as Djerba had been Ulysses’s Isle of the Lotus Eaters.
