He went to the sink for a glass of water, to cure his laugh and the cough that followed it. As he drank, he looked out the back window, over the yards behind Fifth Street and the abutting yards behind Sixth Street. Down below, on the other side of the block-long stockade fence, the Miller family had ventured out into the yard with baby Eloise. In the time between gusts, they were examining the damage to the old well, the top of which had tumbled into a pile of stones. A summer of baking and a summer of rain must have loosened everything, and all it took was a day of wind to knock things about. There was Ed Miller, peering down the hole, and there was Alice Miller, holding the baby, when a blast of wind—up here Jack Hewlett could see and hear but not feel it—tore limbs from trees and tore shutters from houses and tore Eloise from her mother’s arms and into the air and across the yard. He must have made a noise, because Stanley rushed to peer over his shoulder just in time to see the baby, her pink face and her white dress, go flying over the garden and over the next yard and finally into the Blunts’ yard, where, just as she arced down, there he was, Mayor Blunt, running toward the child. He caught her in his arms.
Hewlett heard Stanley inhale sharply. Neither man moved.
The mayor had been outside alone—presumably inspecting the maple that had fallen across his yard, the one that, were it still standing, the baby would have blown straight into—but now his wife ran out, and his son, and Stella. The two men watched from above as Stella leaned over the baby, covering her own mouth. Her mother’s hand was on her back, and Hewlett wondered if she was crying, and—if she was—how she’d explain it. Well, who wouldn’t cry at a baby landing in their yard?
The wind took a break, and Mayor Blunt handed the baby to Stella and wrapped his coat around her front, covering them both. Hewlett imagined what the man would have said: something about “You know I can never hold a baby right.” Or “This should be good practice for you!” And the mayor led a procession around the front of the house and down the street to the Millers’. Hewlett hadn’t thought to look back to the Millers for a while—they weren’t in their yard. Ed Miller had scaled the fence to the lawn between his and the Blunts’ and was running through the bushes, around the trees, behind the shed. Alice Miller stood out front, hands to her head, shouting for help. She ran toward the Blunts when she saw them, but she couldn’t have known what was under Stella’s coat until the mayor pulled it back, chest puffed out, proud of his miracle. He handed the baby back himself. Alice Miller covered the infant with kisses and raced her into the house, Mayor and Mrs. Blunt following. Stella stayed out on the walk a minute, looking at the sky. What she was thinking, Hewlett couldn’t even guess.
“Well,” Stanley said. “Pardon the expression, but Jesus Christ.” The carrot and peeler, still in his hands, were shaking.
Hewlett wanted to run down, to see if Stella was all right, to make sure the baby wasn’t hurt. But he wasn’t a doctor. And he couldn’t leave Stanley alone, couldn’t let him think of checking on the pool. So he just said, “I think we’ve seen the hand of God.” He wasn’t at all sure this was true. Part of him wondered if he hadn’t seen a miracle at all but its precise and brutal opposite—a failure of some kind, or the evidence of chaos. Whatever he’d just seen, it troubled him deeply. Was God in the wind, blowing that baby back to Stella where she belonged? Or was God in the catch, in the impossible coincidence of the mayor being in the right spot, in the return of the child to the Millers? Or—and this was the thing about a crack in faith, he knew, the way one small fissure could spread and crumble the whole thing into a pile of rocks—was God in neither place?
Stanley put his carrot down and turned. His face was soft and astonished, blue eyes open wider than Hewlett had ever seen them. He looked like a man who’d just survived an auto crash, a man who’d taken part in something bizarre and terrifying, not just witnessed it from above. “It’s not true, is it?” Stanley spoke slowly, working something out. “What I said before, about Nineveh. We’re—we’re all where we’re supposed to be. I was supposed to wind up here.” He braced himself on the counter, as if he expected God to blow him across town next. “A beast brought Jonah to Nineveh, and a beast brought me here.”
Hewlett said what he’d said so many times before. “The thing is to be listening when God speaks.”
By the time Reverend Hewlett walked home that night by way of the old pool, Davis Thoms and Bernie Lake were down there mixing batch after batch of cement and pouring it into the hole. For the first time in more than a year, there was both enough water to mix the stuff, and not so much water falling from the sky that it would turn to soup.
He continued toward the parsonage. The wind was done. It had simply left town.
It was so strange to be outside without the roar of wind or rain, without the feel of air or water ripping at his skin, that Reverend Hewlett stood awhile on his own porch feeling that he was floating in the midst of vast and empty space. Everywhere he turned, there was nothing. No baking sun, no drenching storm, no raging wind. There were people coming out of houses, and people going into houses, and people walking from one store to the next. And people picking up branches, and people sweeping up glass. As if they’d been directed to do these things.
All this happened a very long time ago. And it’s hard now to argue that what happened so far back wasn’t inevitable. If the elephant hadn’t died, there wouldn’t be, on top of the old swimming pool, the playground that originally had some other name but quickly became known as Elephant Park; and the Little Fork High School football team would not be the Mammoths; and Stanley Tack wouldn’t have stayed in town, and the son he had with the Beedleman girl (she was expecting already that day of the windstorm, she just hadn’t told him yet) wouldn’t have married Eloise Miller, and today the town of Little Fork wouldn’t be half-full of Tacks of various generations, all descended (though they none of them know it) from a fire eater.
Jack Hewlett might not have given up the cloth and returned home to be with his girl, with Annette, who’d waited for him even after her letters stopped—only to be drafted two months later, no longer clergy, no longer exempt from war. He might not have died in France, a bullet through his lung. But who’s to say that the outcome of that battle—even of the entire war—hadn’t hinged, in one way or another, on the bravery of one man? He was, after all, an exceptional soldier. He took orders well.
Or at least it can be said: This world is the one made by the death of that elephant.
The Sunday following the storm, Reverend Hewlett looked out from the pulpit at his battered congregation. There were black eyes and broken arms from the wind, and the women with husbands stationed overseas were exhausted from cleaning up their own yards and their elderly neighbors’ besides. It was a good town that way. These people believed in things. Eloise Miller, unhurt and pink, slept in her mother’s arms through the service. A green bonnet framed her face.
Hewlett, under his robe, was thin. He’d lost five pounds that week. His stomach felt empty even when it was full, so why bother to fill it?
Stanley Tack held hands with the Beedleman girl. For the first time, he joined the hymns. He opened the book of prayer.
Stella Blunt looked pale and tired. Hewlett tried to catch her eye. He felt he owed her at least a look, one she’d be able to interpret later, tomorrow morning, or whenever it was that the citizens of Little Fork would find the parsonage deserted.
If he owed anything to Stanley Tack, he’d already given it. Hadn’t he handed the man his own faith? It was in safer hands now than his own.
He said, “Let us read from Paul’s letter to the Romans: Whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified.”
He said, “Let us lift up our hearts.”
OTHER BRANDS OF POISON
(FIRST LEGEND)
Whether or not there were, at that moment, Jews hiding in the house at the
lake, no one can now remember. The point is that there had been, and there would be again; and even if there was not now a human ballast holding that house to the shore, surely there were other things as incriminating. Likewise, it is unclear from this far in the future if the soldiers were even German, or if they were the Russian liberators who so soon became the Russian occupiers. That summer, in that part of Hungary, both were equally likely.
The soldiers pounded at the door looking for whatever it is nineteen-year-old boys in uniform are always looking for: food, lodging, sex, warmth, inebriation, water. In other words: the closest subconscious approximation of their mothers.
They found at this particular house an eight-year-old boy, and a woman too formidable to rape. They found kohlrabi soup and ate it, and they found the boy’s swing set, a four-legged frame standing right in the water, with a swing to jump from and a slide that ended beneath the surface. They left their clothes on the shore and swung from the top bar and broke the whole thing. If no one has exhumed its bones, it is still at the bottom of Lake Balaton. When night fell and there was insufficient firewood, they tore books apart and threw those on the fire. They demanded socks. The woman said, “Would you prefer a lady’s size or a small boy’s?”
That boy stood half-inside a kitchen cabinet, his fingers curled around the handle, his heel kicking the canned fruit he hoped they wouldn’t take. If the story is hazy, seventy years later, that is because it is his. If the details are strangely specific—the dialogue, the type of soup—that is because they are mine.
By the time their flasks ran out, the soldiers were drunk enough to insist on more alcohol, but the woman told them she herself was out and her son did not drink. They began a Russian drinking song, or perhaps a German one, depending on your version of the story.
One undisputed fact: They saw on the kitchen table the large bottle of black ink that had been the boy’s birthday present—a rare gift, dearly bought—and the drunkest soldier announced he had found the alcohol.
The woman told the truth. “That is ink,” she said, “you idiots.” But the soldier opened the top, got an astringent whiff, and declared her a liar and a slut. With his friends pounding the table, he guzzled the entire bottle, and then—friends laughing, pointing, demanding a camera—sputtered black and coughed black and wiped black ink down his arms.
The woman said, “I am a writer. I have plenty more such drinks for you upstairs. Perhaps you’d like a typewriter ribbon.”
The soldier cursed her with black teeth and tongue and lips, his face an abyss. He was already ashen as he stumbled to the door.
My grandmother claimed for the rest of her life that she once killed a soldier with a bottle of ink. Is it possible he did more than empty his stomach in the bushes? I could ask a doctor the effects of eight ounces of cheap ink on top of alcohol and months of hard living.
But if this were your family legacy—this ridiculous assertion of the might and violence of ink, this blatant and beautiful falsehood—could you change it? Would you dare?
THE BRIEFCASE
He thought how strange that a political prisoner, marched through town in a line, chained to the man behind and chained to the man ahead, should take comfort in the fact that all this had happened before. He thought of other chains of men on other islands of the earth, and he thought how since there have been men, there have been prisoners. He thought of mankind as a line of miserable monkeys chained at the wrist, dragging each other back into the ground.
In the early morning of December 1 the sun was finally warming them all, enough that they could walk faster. With his left hand, he adjusted the loop of steel that cuffed his right hand to the line of doomed men. He was starved, his wrist was thin, his body was cold: The cuff slipped off. In one breath he looked back to the man behind him and forward to the man limping ahead, and knew that neither saw his naked, red wrist; each saw only his own mother weeping in a kitchen, his own love on a bed in white sheets and sunlight.
He walked in step to the end of the block.
Before the war this man had been a chef, and his one crime was feeding the people who sat at his tables in clouds of smoke and talked politics. He served them the wine that fueled their underground newspaper, their aborted revolution. And after the night his restaurant disappeared in fire, he had run and hidden and gone without food—he who had roasted ducks until the meat jumped from the bone, he who had evaporated three bottles of wine into one pot of cream soup, he who had peeled the skin from small pumpkins with a twist of his hand.
And here was his hand, twisted free of the chain, and here he was running and crawling, until he was through a doorway. It was a building of empty classrooms—part of the university he never attended. He watched out the bottom corner of a second-story window as the young soldiers stopped the line, counted ninety-nine men, shouted to each other, shouted at the prisoners in the panicked voices of children who barely filled the shoulders of their uniforms. One soldier, a bigger one, a louder one, stopped a man walking by, a man in a suit, with a briefcase, a beard. Some sort of professor. The soldiers stripped him of his coat, his shirt, his leather case, cuffed him to the chain. They marched again. And as soon as they had passed—no, not that soon; many minutes later, when he had the stomach—the chef ran down to the street and collected the man’s briefcase, coat, and shirt.
In the alley, the chef crouched and buttoned the professor’s shirt over his own ribs. When he opened the briefcase, papers flew out, a thousand doves flailing against the walls of the alley. The chef ran after them, stopped them with his feet and arms, herded them back into the case—pages of numbers, of arrows and notes and hand-drawn star maps. Here were business cards: a professor of physics. Envelopes showed his name and address—information that might have been useful in some other lifetime, one in which the chef could ring the bell of this man’s house and explain to his wife about empty chains, empty wrists, empty classrooms. And here was a note from that wife about the sandwich she had packed him. There was no sandwich left. Here were graded papers, a fall syllabus, the typed draft of an exam. The extra question at the end, a strange one: “Using modern astronomical data, construct, to the best of your ability, a proof that the sun actually revolves around the earth.”
The chef knew nothing of physics. He understood chemistry only insofar as it related to the baking times of bread at various elevations. His knowledge of biology was limited to the deboning of chickens and the behavior of yeast. What did he know of moving bodies and gravity? He knew this: He had moved from his line of men, creating a vacuum—one that had sucked the professor in.
The chef sat on his bed in the widow K———’s basement and felt, in the cool leather of the briefcase, a second vacuum: Here was a vacated life. Here were salary receipts, travel records, train tickets, a small address book. And these belonged to a man whose name was not blackened like his own, a man who was not hunted. If he wanted to live through the next year, the chef would have to learn this life and fill it—and oddly, this felt not like a robbery but like an apology, a way to put the world back in balance. The professor would not die, because he himself would become the professor, and he would live.
Surely he could not teach at the university; surely he could not slip into the man’s bed unnoticed. But what was in this leather case, it seemed, had been left for him to use. These addresses of friends, this card of identification, this riddle about the inversion of the universe.
Five cities east, he gave his name as the professor’s, and grew out his beard so it would match the photograph on the card he now carried in his pocket. The two men no longer looked entirely dissimilar. To the first name in the address book, the chef had addressed a typed letter: “Am in trouble and have fled the city. Tell my dear wife I am unharmed, but for her safety do not tell her where I am. If you are able to help a poor old man, send money to the following postbox. . . . I hope to remain your friend, Professor T———.”
He’d ha
d to write this about the wife—how could he ask these men for money if she held a funeral? And what of it, if she kept her happiness another few months, another year?
The next twenty-six letters were similar in nature, and money arrived now in brown envelopes and white ones. The bills came wrapped in notes (Was his life in danger? Did he have his health?), and with the money he paid another widow for another basement, and he bought weak cigarettes. He sat on café chairs and drew diagrams of the universe, showed stars and planets looping each other in light. He felt that if he used the other papers in the briefcase, he must also make use of the question. Or perhaps he felt that if he could answer it, he could put the universe back together. And, too, it was something to fill his empty days.
He wrote in his small notebook: “The light of my cigarette is a fire like the sun. From where I sit, all the universe is equidistant from my cigarette. Ergo, my cigarette is the center of the universe. My cigarette is on earth. Ergo, the earth is the center of the universe. If all heavenly bodies move, they must therefore move in relation to the earth, and in relation to my cigarette.”
His hand ached. These words were the most he had written since school, which had ended for him at age sixteen. He had been a smart boy, even talented in languages and mathematics, but his mother had needed him to make a living. He was not blessed, like the professor, with years of scholarship and quiet offices and leather books. He was blessed instead with chicken stocks and herbs and sherry. Thirty years had passed since his last day of school, and his hand was accustomed now to wooden spoon, mandoline, paring knife, rolling pin.
Today his hands smelled of ink, when for thirty years they had smelled of leeks. They were the hands of the professor; ergo, he was the professor.
Music for Wartime Page 6
