My Mother's Lover and Other Stories

by Sumana Roy

  ‘Then it’s not completely true that everything in Wurzburg is visible from the castle up here, right?’ I’m teasing her – I sense a sudden affection for her that takes me by surprise – but she is serious.

  ‘I am sorry. I come here for the view. As a child, I was fascinated by NASA photos of how the earth looked from the moon, and when I first came here six years ago, all those images from my school books came back to me. This castle was Wurzburg’s moon. I see this view from my window every morning and evening – it’s unchanging...’

  ‘Like we see only one face of the moon from the earth, you see only this face of the castle...’

  ‘Yes, I’ve had the same thought myself.’ Then, pulling me by the hand, she says, ‘Let’s go. I’ll show you something that I’ve never shown anyone before.’

  I don’t know why I’m not excited by the prospect of becoming the owner of her secret. I’m borderline-bored.

  We take the stairs. An aged woman is trying to get a pram down to the garden. I check to see if there’s a baby in it – my instinct to help is balanced by the rust-coloured shawl that I’ve wrapped around my head to avoid the wind from sneaking into my ears. I feel like a Muslim woman, suddenly self-conscious, as white men and women in this Catholic town pass by and try hard to look like they are unbothered by my religion. I feel as fake as them – I’m not Muslim and they are not tolerant. I might be taken for a kidnapper, a baby-snatcher, and so I look away. Paulina is saying something that I cannot hear.

  I feel happy to be alone in the midst of this crowd of tourists. I note the things that are more important to me than the Marienberg Fortress – how does it really matter to me, this baroque home of prince-bishops for more than five hundred years? I’m indifferent to monuments. It’s not my politics but my temperament – as a child, I preferred spending long afternoons watching processions of black ants to trips to zoos in Calcutta and Darjeeling. Even architecture, which I’ve begun to see as the only kind of art that capitalism will allow to survive, seems far less interesting to me than what is affecting my body: a thin breeze; heels on stone; singing. Yes, someone singing, someone invisible (all music is, of course, invisible or, at least, once was). The music is clothing us.

  ‘Who’s that singing?’ I ask Paulina.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says, ‘I’ve never heard it before.’

  ‘I thought it was part of the light-and-sound display,’ I say as a joke, though I almost half-believe it. ‘What is it that you wanted to show me?’ I ask, uninterested. I’m hungry. I’d rather be eating a hot meal than doing culture.

  ‘I first came here when I was twelve,’ she begins.

  Background. Context. Always the English professor. The words vibrate in the godown of my mouth. I suppress a yawn. I miss sentences. As if the castle’s history wasn’t enough, I will now have to deal with her personal history. Childhoods are as unnecessary and annoying as history. I’ve seen both take over literature. I pretend to act as patient with her as I am with the historical novel. ‘Sorry?’ I say, because I’ve missed too much to be able to create even a semblance of a narrative.

  ‘My grandparents brought me here. It was summer.’ She stresses ‘summer’ and then stops. Summer becomes a thing of the past, like her childhood. As if it won’t ever return again.

  The male singer’s voice hits the stone, it hits us. Something breaks in both. It nudges Paulina to speak, long minutes after she stopped at ‘summer’. ‘I’ve heard this voice before,’ she says.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘On the radio perhaps?’ I say, just to keep the flow of words moving, like a game of table tennis. If we stop, the game ends. If we stop talking, something will end. I don’t know what that is, but I can sense that something will. Perhaps the song will end? Does history end with the end of a song?

  Paulina shakes her head. I feel like a student. Neither of us knows why we’ve stopped walking.

  ‘Your secret?’ I prod, and the question fuels our footsteps.

  Paulina turns to look back a few times, as if she were expecting someone to join us. It could be a coincidence but it’s one I can’t help noticing. She looks back only when the song seems to be on the verge of ending. As soon as she does that, the volume revs up, as if her backward glance were an electronic button. If we were younger – and if she was a friend and not an acquaintance in a foreign land – I might have teased her about it.

  She points to something, as if by mistake, not half-heartedly, not even absent-mindedly, but as if she were possessed. It’s not clear what she wants me to see. I follow her as one follows a poor thief – lazily, without greed.

  ‘I hid something when I came here as a girl of twelve,’ she says, smiling, as if trying to convince herself of this piece of truth.

  ‘We always leave behind a part of ourselves wherever...’

  ‘Only in my case it’s literally true,’ she says, interrupting me.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I almost exclaim, though I’m not really invested.

  ‘I hid a tooth here.’ She’s giggling. It washes away all accumulated feet-ache. A strand of blonde hair sticks to her teeth. She continues laughing. I can’t stop looking at her – she’s suddenly become attractive, as attractive as vulnerability.

  ‘Where?’ I ask after some time, as if it was a task.

  ‘I’m looking for the place,’ she says, rubbing the ground with her right foot, almost like a dog.

  ‘Do you take a look at it every time you come here?’ I ask.

  ‘NO!’ She says, as if I’ve said something scary.

  I don’t say anything. I miss having Wi-Fi on my phone. I take it out, hoping, impossibly, to see an open Internet connection. I pretend I’m not with her when she bends down and looks at the line of decorative bushes. My elbow behaves like a walking stick, giving me support. Soon I’m leaning on the wall, my face in my hands, my head like a globe on stilts. Only, the world is in front of me. The river, indifferent to everything, including its own safety, is marching along. I’m suddenly jealous of it – it is as amoral as memory.

  ‘Why do the ducks never leave the shore? Why do they float near the margins of the Main?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says. ‘I mean, I’m not sure where I kept the tooth.’

  ‘You lost a milk tooth at twelve? Is that common among Germans, I mean Caucasians? Indians get their permanent set of teeth by nine, I think.’

  ‘It wasn’t my milk tooth.’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘Let me find it first.’

  I begin to associate this sternness and stubbornness with all German women. But I don’t really care. I’m leaving for home tomorrow.

  People pass by. Their gazes are mostly sterile, untouched by curiosity. It is as if life were a hospital and they are doing everything they can to maintain good health. How can they not turn to look at a woman on her fours, digging the soil with her hands? If it was India, the crowd would’ve joined her by now.

  ‘Maybe it wasn’t here. Some other place...’ I say. I really am not interested in her tooth.

  ‘No, I remember it distinctly.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A man slapped me.’

  ‘What? Who?’

  ‘A stranger.’

  ‘A stranger?’

  ‘I mean – a singer. My German and English... They sound the same sometimes.’

  ‘A singer slapped you? Why?’

  An airplane divides the sky over our heads into two, almost equally. The white smoke on this business-blue sky looks like the trail of a nail mark on dry skin. I look at the cambium-like mark on my ring finger. The ring is gone, the giver of the ring gone before that. I look away from my hand to the trees in the distance. They are shedding their leaves. How easy they make it seem – the art of losing isn’t hard to master. What is my loss compared to Paulina’s? She lost an adult tooth at twelve. It can compare only to the hardship of losing a parent at a very young age. That silly – and wrong –
analogy makes me turn backwards. There she is – Paulina, digging for her tooth like an orphan might dig a parent’s grave.

  ‘Have you found it?’ I ask, sincerely interested for the first time.

  She shakes her small head.

  ‘If this is the very spot you say it is, what could have happened to it? It’s dissolved into the earth perhaps?’

  ‘The sun is the giver of life. But it is also the killer of life. Anything that lives in the sun will have to die. Everything. That is why I planted it inside the earth, to protect it from the sun. You know about bunkers, don’t you? Hitler’s bunker, Saddam Hussein’s? The darkness of the soil preserves things,’ she says, without looking at me, as if I was the darkness that had betrayed her trust.

  I want to ask her whether she knew all of this at twelve or whether this knowledge is only retrospective. Instead, I sit down beside her. I try to look at her face from the corner of my eye. Is she going to have a breakdown? Then I allow my eyes to rush back from that blurred territory to her fingers. I notice the dirt in her fingernails, but it’s a weak moment for my politics: I notice that even European soil is fairer than Indian soil.

  ‘You think that the man who slapped you and broke your tooth could’ve taken it away?’ I ask, like a lab assistant who feels useless unless he’s speculating aloud in the presence of his superior.

  ‘We’d come from the Residence, to where the prince-bishops moved, from this castle here, in the mid-nineteenth century. It was summer. I’d played in the garden, after getting lost in the south wing of the palace. It’s gigantic – one of the largest in Europe, a hundred and seventy metres long – and it’s easy to get lost. While everyone was taken by the grandeur and opulence of the gold and the mirrors and art on the ceilings which I couldn’t see with my neck craned – I lay down on the floor and decided to look at it, angering my grandma whose voice was louder than the guide’s. I was curious about where the toilets could be. I feel ashamed that I had no sense of history. I had no idea that attached bathrooms were very recent, but I was surprised that these dazzling rooms had no toilets in their vicinity. Also – and this is the first time I’m sharing this with someone; I couldn’t have obviously told my grandparents – I was addicted to the taste of toothpaste then. I was curious to see which brand of toothpaste they used...’

  ‘You’re still addicted to toothpaste, aren’t you?’ I ask. I have no idea why I say that.

  ‘How do you know?’ she asks, standing up from her haunches, dusting away the sand from her hands.

  I smile. ‘I’m not sure,’ I say, making it sound like a quote. Her words now almost a refrain.

  ‘There are these lovely statues in the garden adjoining the palace – statues of two little boys playing with each other, wrestling, fighting, climbing trees, eating grapes, one even trying to gorge out the other’s eye...’

  ‘What are they doing there? Paedophiles in that palace?’ I ask. The memory of a priest runs through my mind. Dark hands taking off the safety pin from the pleats of my mini-sari. Saraswati Puja, when even the tiniest Bengali girl wears a sari. How old was I then? Sixth grade. Twelve years old.

  ‘No, I didn’t mean that. It’s possible, I know – we now know what happens in monasteries all across the world, right? – but I wasn’t thinking of that. I wanted to be like those little boy-statues. They didn’t have to go to school. They were always playing.’ She takes out the phone from her jacket. ‘I’d completely forgotten this. Good that I set an alarm on my phone. I have a meeting with Sebald at 3 today. But we still have an hour to go.’

  ‘Enough time to find a tooth,’ I say, smiling.

  Paulina opens her bag and begins emptying out its contents. For a moment I have the sense of watching a video on YouTube – a live demonstration of the genre What’s inside your bag? Instead of a table is the earth. Surely things couldn’t be precious if you kept them on the ground? My middle-class self rises to annotate this observation. Small vials of creams and potions, two lip balms, keys, cards, a baby toothbrush, and something that she hides immediately in her left hand before I can see it.

  ‘I thought I had a pen,’ she says feebly.

  I suppress a bad joke – is she writing a note to the absent tooth, to say that it didn’t keep its appointment? – and ask, ‘What do you need it for? I might have one.’

  ‘To dig,’ she says matter-of-factly.

  I don’t bother to look. I’m not going to sacrifice my pen for her whimsy about excavating her tooth.

  She’s poking the soil with the nose of a long key. ‘The singing has stopped, hasn’t it?’ she asks.

  It has, indeed.

  ‘Good!’ she smiles, like a child, for only a child can live completely in the present.

  ‘Why did you bury your tooth, Paulina? And why did he...?’

  She is no longer where she was. I’m suddenly running to catch up with her. She’s talking to strangers in this strange language which I can only presume is German. I don’t understand a word, but the nervous energy trapped in it reminds me of the desperation of lost children to find their parents at fairs in India. It’s almost as if I’ve seen a proverb come alive.

  I stand behind her, preparing to hold her if she fell down or backwards. I don’t know why I have such a thought – Paulina certainly hasn’t given me any indication of being unsteady on her feet. She suddenly begins laughing. I, unable to guess the reason behind her laughter, investigate her teeth – which of these is a false tooth? The next thought follows so closely on its heels that I’m unable to keep it away. Does a false tooth imply false laughter too?

  ‘Freud associated dreams of losing one’s tooth with sexuality, you know,’ she says.

  I know. I have recurring dreams about losing teeth. My roommate used to complain about my teeth chattering in my sleep. I want to say something about the past being the sexiest thing in this country. ‘Which tooth, Paulina?’ I ask instead, looking at her.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she says.

  ‘A front tooth?’ I ask, feeling mine with my tongue.

  Paulina can’t hear me. She doesn’t hear anyone. She behaves like a Brownian particle, hitting against surfaces, deflecting from them, a life of velocity. Now she’s standing close to the wall again, staring at the Main. She looks back for a second. A group of sombre tourists pass by – they look like students walking towards the exam hall. She blows her nose.

  ‘You see that bridge on the Main? See, those are the patron saints of Wurzburg. Do you see the Japanese couple there – the woman in a velvet top – drinking wine? It’s a tradition here – to stand on the bridge and drink wine.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Why are there so many Japanese tourists in Wurzburg?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  She returns to me intermittently, answering my queries as if I was conducting a survey. She’s treating space as if it were time, moving to places when she’s actually trying to recover her past from them. It’s an old formula – I recognise it from the way I used to feel on my wedding anniversaries.

  ‘Frank. I think that was the name.’

  ‘Whose?’ I ask.

  ‘The singer.’

  ‘Frank Sinatra broke your tooth?’ I say, conjuring laughter. But it vanishes before my teeth can be bared to the air.

  ‘Sin? Yes, it’s a sin to...’ She doesn’t complete her sentence.

  Paulina runs, faster than anyone I know, so fast that it seems she might flow out of land on to the river. I find my eyes crinkling at the thought – the pain it’ll cause water, how the skin of water will puncture from the implosion. I begin running after her, pulling my red scarf like a parachute. Things begin dropping from her bag – the zip is open. I collect them like someone who’d been training to collect these things all her life. Things that I hadn’t seen until a moment ago grow familiar to me, like things from history suddenly do – a monument returns to its hairy life as a house, cutlery in museums becomes creatures touched by spit.


  Something unfamiliar drops out of the bag. It’s a tiny steel jar.

  Paulina’s disappeared and my feet are tired.

  I am curious. It’s only a jar. An image speeds through my mind – Paulina hiding something urgently. Is it this? The lid is tight. My fingers, slightly numb from the cold, are inefficient. I turn it clockwise and anti-clockwise. It doesn’t yield. German jar! I taunt it, sure that there’s some invisible technology keeping secrets from me. Soon the oldest technology reveals its contents to me – the jar falls from my hands. It lies there on the floor, its stomach burst, like a coconut. But instead of water, there are tiny white skulls on the ground! I’m scared, I’m shocked, I’m nervous. I panic. I kneel down, deciding to pick them up, before I’m accused of killing children and preserving their tiny skulls. But this tiny? Are these Jewish skulls? I wonder for a moment. I’m not wearing my glasses (I wanted a few photos of myself without glasses, but Paulina has disappeared; there’ll be no photos to post on Facebook, alas), and so I hold a skull close to my eyes.

  No! These are not skulls. How could they be? They are teeth, old teeth, old baby teeth, the tiny hillocks and undulations on them resembling the sockets on skulls. Jewish teeth? I ask myself again. I try to think of one Jewish child whose teeth these could be. I fail. I’ve seen only adult Jews, smiling and successful, no Jewish babies.

  And then the name of the only Jewish child I know slaps my memory.

  Are these Anne Frank’s teeth? Is this the ‘Frank’ Paulina meant? Or Frankfurt, from where Anne Frank’s father moved his family to Amsterdam?

  I feel my thoughts turning into a ghost. My palms are beginning to sweat, my socks are cold, from soaking the panic leaking out of my soles. I wipe my upper lip. I never liked history. But this? History is the fourth dimension of life in this country. It surfaces everywhere – as guilt, as memory, as tourism. Everything in Germany is supposed to have a history; it is almost illegal to forget anything. Everything must be preserved, and preserved in a manner that keeps the dignity of the object intact. Two days ago, I saw a student – I think her name was Diana – wrapping her chewed gum in a tissue paper. It seemed like this thing that she’d throw into the trash bin a few minutes later was being archived as well. Yes, this country is an archive!