Outside, the remaining light was pooling in the west. Night would come and then morning again. Years later, she would be fraught with the loss of her brother’s words when most of his correspondence to the family would turn to ash. Her younger sister would inherit the letters from their parents. Russian troops would set fire to the building in which her sister lived, revenge for an assassination attempt on the Russian governor of Warsaw. A piano Fryderyk had played on would bubble, then catch fire. The portraits would burn down to the frames, and then the frames too, would burn.
In the carriage, Ludwika closed her eyes for a while. She held the glass jar for such a long time, her fingers began numbing, making her feel as though the jar were not in her grasp. When she opened her eyes again, everyone in the carriage was asleep. She peered outside and spotted bats swooping at the edges of the light cast by the carriage’s lanterns. In and out with a quickness that made her wonder if they existed. Beyond them she could see nothing, but recognized the scent of home.
Book Information
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Franz Neumann
Published by Stories & Novels, an imprint of Copy & Design.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
Second edition
ISBN: 978-0-9834350-1-3
Author Information
Franz Neumann is the author of the novels The Path Of All That Falls and Streams At Night and the story collections Promises Of The Head To The Heart and Facts About Blakey.
His stories have been published in The Southern Review, Water-Stone Review, Fugue, Salon, Confrontation, North Atlantic Review, Chiron Review, Ascent, and elsewhere.
Website: storiesandnovels.com
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Bonus Content
On the following pages you’ll find a story from the collection Promises Of The Head To The Heart, as well as a story from the collection Facts About Blakey, both available from Amazon.
Turn the page and enjoy.
PROMISES OF THE HEAD TO THE HEART
Dear Mr. Photographer,
Yes, Italy. Now, before you start cursing me, consider this: how many car thieves tell you where your car is, and do so in a hand-written letter? (Hold this page up to the light and you’ll see a watermark in the silhouette of a palace. Not our palace, but a nice touch, right?) No car thief would, of course, which is my roundabout way of saying I’m not really a car thief. True thieves don’t mail you back your keys, enclose a map, and fill up the tank for you. You’re welcome, by the way.
I can certainly understand how being in possession of your car for a few days could make me seem like a thief. And, if I’m going to be honest with you in this letter (and I am, 100%), there was a section of road there where I felt I might be stealing. It was when I figured out how to turn on the seat warmers (we were driving south through the Alps). But see the part above. About the keys and a map being in this envelope. If anything, I’m a borrower. Incidentally, the we in “we were driving south through the Alps” doesn’t refer to Elisa, as I’m sure you know—if you’ve had the decency to follow up with her and her injuries. I had a male companion. The quiet, silent type.
So you won’t be taken aback when you get into your BMW: the stains on the passenger seat should come out, no problem. Oh, and you’re down one pistol.
I’m going to give you some more tidbits about me now, so just…just sit tight. You may, of course, have already jumped to the map, grabbed the keys, and hurled these pages into the trash. I’ll never know. My words could be fluttering about the surface of a Munich dump or expunged in an incinerator. But hear me out. After all, I had your BMW washed and did I mention the full tank? What’s the rush that you can’t spare a few minutes to read a few pages? The car will be there when you get there. The dump’s not going anywhere.
Here’s an idea: if you’re not in the mood to read my letter now, maybe you could read it on the train to Venice or on a flight there—you seem the flying type. Are you at the airport gate now, or are you in the air? I’m picturing you in first class, up there at 30,000 feet, belt loosened. You’re flying down on a Tuesday afternoon. A glass of something strong is on your fold-down tray, a magazine or two unread on the empty seat beside you, courtesy Lufthansa. I hope you booked a window seat. I can’t get enough of seeing the world shrunk down so small you can see cars but not people, like there’s not a being below to hold the problems our brains are sopped wet with. If only everything would stay distant and miniature when our feet are on the ground. If only we were giants.
Where was I? The palace: where I ended up with your car keys. I had such terrible runs the day before. If you’re ever in the town near the palace again, note the cute little cafe in the square, to the left of the town clock. Don’t order the Schnitzel. That’s left if you’re standing in front of the clock. But for all I know, it may be the same story for the cafe on the right. I mention this episode only to point out that it’s the small navigational choices that determine the course of our lives. Had I eaten elsewhere, we wouldn’t be having this conversation, as it were. Stomach bacteria can maneuver the most strong-willed body.
But I wanted to see more of Schwarzwald Palace than its miserably cold public bathroom, so I came back the next day, the day we met. The English line was long by the time I arrived by shuttle. Same with the French line. The fat Italians were all huddled under yellow translucent ponchos, like eggs in cellophaned Easter baskets. Do you have Easter baskets over here? Probably. Where’d we have gotten such a silly idea from?
I saw that the Chinese-language tour was starting so I switched allegiance rather than wait, even though I don’t understand a lick of Chinese. No matter. Facts are never crystalline for long, and tour-facts are a sub-category I’ve found to be especially fleeting. Might as well be Chinese, as the saying goes. In China, the saying is it’s like chicken intestines, which makes no sense. The docent led us down into the kitchen where she pointed out an enormous elevating mechanism that can bring a fully laid-out table to the dining room above. You might want to consider it for a photo shoot. Maybe place some models on the table as it’s going up. Think about it. This particular docent, should you ever have her as your guide, is a young Chinese-German woman with crazy-wide eyes. Widely spaced, I mean. She’d make a great model except she’s short and that’s a no-no, right? But she’d be a knock-out going up that table.
You know, it’s strange: I’ve only thought of Chinese people living outside China as being Chinese Americans, in the same way there are Greek Americans or Cuban Americans. Until I started traveling, it never occurred to me that there are Chinese folks whose native tongue is German. Just between the two of us, though, isn’t Chinese an awful-sounding language? All gnashed and slurred and swooning. During the tour, the docent threw out occasional guttural German words between the Chinese plosives. Having taken German in college, I was probably the only one there who understood those words. Strange how, despite all those many thousand intricate characters, Chinese still lacks the pin-pointedness of an illustrious compound German noun.
You know, it crosses my mind now that you might try steam-cleaning your BMW. Can leather be steam-cleaned? I imagine so. All those cows standing in rain and sun, year after year. It must be okay.
I’d planned to do Europe last summer, but my two daughters sent me on a tour of New England to smother my plans. I was cancer-free, but they didn’t like the idea of their mom being by herself in the Old World
. And yet a quiet man on our bus’ tour group choked on a maple syrup candy as we left a farm outside Bangor (which sounds like it should be in India, right? Well, maybe not to you, but to an American like me it does.) I remember the way the man’s toupee separated from his head as he lay flat in the aisle of the bus, unconscious. It looked like his brain was coming loose at a seam, ready to spill out onto all those crisp new pairs of helpless white shoes in the bus, mine included. I belong to the last generation of toupee-wearers—not that I wear a wig anymore, but men of my age, I mean. The last generation of watch wearers. The last generation of newspaper readers. Still. Good riddance to poor disguises, to time leading you by the wrist, to inky fingertips.
This summer, though, I was adamant about seeing Europe, finally. My youngest daughter wanted to accompany me, but that girl can hardly use a public restroom without wiping her backside down afterwards with antibacterial gel. Beside which, she has her babies to make. She doesn’t have the vacation time or money anyway. Between us: she shouldn’t have waited. Twins are statistically more probable at her age. I’m a twin, though I’m adopted and never found out who my brother is/was, only that he lives/lived somewhere in Europe. Look: I don’t care if the thought crosses your mind that you’re a stand-in for my unknown brother. So what. You are, of course, generations too young. Maybe you’re my nephew. I’m kidding, of course, though I did mention to my youngest daughter when she was still wanting to come with me that maybe she should find some nice Italian or French genes here and bring them back as innocently as a bauble, no one the wiser. I was jesting, of course. Still, if you saw that boyfriend of hers you’d be on my side. He’s nice enough, but that hairline! Those ears! Think of the children! Love has a way of undoing a million generations of steady progress. He must have one hell of a great tongue, because I walked in on him when he was changing, once. Goodness.
Oh, before I forget. The man in our Vermont tour? The one in the loose toupee, who choked on a maple syrup candy? He died. I don’t know why it’s necessary to tell you, but it is. He didn’t choke to death, but died a few months later, from what I don’t know, but it was probably the same illness that made him quiet. Maybe he was hoping to choke to death on a maple syrup candy. There are worse ways. When I was doing my nursing studies, I worked in hospice, though they didn’t call it that, then. It kept me upbeat, surprisingly. I saw that one day I, too, would have morphine dripping into me and be wishing, purely wishing, that I was young again, back in some squandered corner of my youth. Back then, any personal illness was but a projection; I could return to the current moment and go outdoors after my shift and be free to live for years and years. The day I realize I’ve lost the magical ability to project and then pull back will be my last. To which, you think, raising your hand for the stewardess’ attention and another glass of something strong, who cares? No one but me. No one, eventually, but you. No one, eventually, but no one.
Funny thing: the widow of the choking man sent me a package with a sweater she’d borrowed during the bus trip. I wonder if she’d have returned the sweater if her husband hadn’t died?
I feel we’re getting along, you and I. Gosh, I hope you’re happy to hear from me. Were we to ever meet again, I could picture the two of us in some ivy-lined courtyard laughing this off over chilled wine. You’d wear Birkenstocks over black socks and have a soft spot for this old American woman. But if you’re angry still, you should be careful. Anger is just regret with a microphone. Someone said that. Maybe it was me.
You’re still flying, aren’t you? As much as I like flying, it occurs to me now that there’s a downside to being up at 30,000 feet. It’s lifeless up there. Think: how else could pilots carpet bomb enemies, carpet bombing being, incidentally, the most infuriatingly inaccurate term for a thing itself. You, of course, are in the cradle of Lufthansa and I’m there with you, in words. And, admittedly, I’ve been looking at one too many placards showing bombed-out German cities from the war.
Slaughterhouse—now there’s an honest word.
So it goes.
While my mind’s on blood—perhaps you should have the car professionally cleaned. The car will probably need more than steam. Some kind of leather-safe chemical treatment. Oh, and about the odor: it’s only overwhelming if you put your nose right down into the leather. Notice that when the leather’s cold there’s only a slight scent. DO NOT TURN ON THE SEAT WARMER! Apart from that, it’s more the stain that’s noticeable. The floor mats, I imagine, can be replaced. You can probably get the floor re-carpeted.
Before returning to this letter this morning, I wrote a couple of postcards. So far I’ve sent postcards from London, where I visited an Edvard Munch exhibition in the National Gallery; from aboard a ferry to Munch’s homeland of Norway, where winter still held its own; and another postcard while heading south-east through Sweden and back west across to Denmark to get the heck away from snow. This was last month, in April/May. In Denmark, I headed to Copenhagen because the marzipan bar I ate on the train was from Copenhagen, and then I dawdled a week in Copenhagen because it was warm and there was a puppet festival and I remembered having bought my youngest grandchild a puppet on her last birthday. I purchased another, this one much finer and with real hair, and had it shipped back to the States, the States being one of those weirdly common phrases that you can only use when you’re in absentia.
The festival offered puppetry classes and I soon found myself performing for children. I played a villager in one scene, off to the side of the master puppeteers on the street stage. After a few days, I could make my marionette raise his hand to scratch his forehead, and walk a couple paces to the left and right, and put both arms at his sides. One of the master puppeteers could make his character saunter over to mine, embrace my marionette and plant a kiss. It’s much harder than it looks. But then, so is every kiss, every movement. We take oodles for granted. I know: blah, blah, blah.
For days afterward I imagined a slight tug of strings on my own limbs.
We packed the crowds in tight. Hundreds of people in town squares so beautiful it made you want to cry at what America doesn’t have. And the thing lacking isn’t history but a kind of liberation. Here, in Europe, you’re all peasants occupying castles and palaces, living like queens and kings. It’s a grand illusion.
The next city on the troupe’s tour was Berlin, so I went there ahead of them. There, I finished a nonfiction book I’d picked up called Beer!, which led me to think of Octoberfest, even though October was somewhere on the other side of the sun. I abandoned the idea of waiting for the troupe and instead took the train south to Munich. I strolled around the perimeter of the large Theresienwiese where the Octoberfest is held, but which now featured BMX bikers going up and down rolling dirt hills of a shape you never see in nature. The monotony of young people’s pursuits never ceases to astound me. I read that the average young person accumulates ten thousand hours in front of video games by the time they’re old enough to wish those hours back. Think of the talents never even budded, the abilities forever replaced by artificial gloaming. All that missed sex. Every generation shakes their head at the next, but come on now.
That same evening, in Munich, I watched a TV show being filmed down a narrow shop-lined street. I observed for so long that I was given a role as an extra. I think it was a police drama of some sort. Look out for woman reading guidebook in the background in the coming weeks and you may spot me—if I’m not cut out. The book they gave me to read was a travel guide and I kept looking at the picture of Schwarzwald Palace through all the takes. It was the first guide book I’d held on the trip. From the start of my trip, I’d made a decision to travel by chance. So when a guidebook was thrust into my hands with a picture of the Palace on the cover, I took it—the book and the sign.
I left Munich and headed toward Schwarzwald via Bad Reichenhall. There, at midnight on my birthday, I broke into an outdoor spa and swam in my birthday suit through the grand outdoor pool, then walked naked through the inhalatorium where water tri
ckled down a wall of blackthorn twigs. It was primordially refreshing, like every cell in my body was remembering the brine from which we all climbed, those eons ago. The next day I paid for a loaf of bread while shoplifting cheese medallions that sat against my chest like cold coins, there where my left breast used to be. I hadn’t shoplifted since I was fourteen. I was giddy. I spent the day in a park carving fat slices from the bread and consuming them with the cheese in a dizzyingly delicious lunch. I met a man in the park there. He was walking his dog and was fishing around in his pockets for a plastic bag to pick up his dog’s turds. I waved the plastic bag the bread and cheese had been in in his direction and ended up sharing my modest picnic with him. He was a long-retired, widowed chemistry teacher. He spoke lovingly of Pennsylvania, where he’d attended graduate school many decades ago. I enjoyed watching him eat shoplifted cheese. He kissed me and groped my vacant breast and was so startled I felt obliged to lift up my shirt to show him the breast that remained. This one he went after like an infant. I slept with him in a shady corner of the park while his dog, tied to a tree, punctured the tires of my rented bicycle in two quick sighs.
It turns out that a partner—however temporary—grunting words of pleasure in a foreign language is disconcerting. Ja, ja, mein Gott! Mein Gott is right. It’s up there with all the other things I never considered, like German-native Chinese. The chemistry teacher was nice enough to accompany me back to the bike rental office, pushing my flat-tired bicycle for me as though he was a strongman, the weight of his arms pressing the tires flat against the cobblestones. I should mention that up to now I have not been the kind of woman who picks up men in parks. Nor shoplifts, or breaks into spas after hours. And you know what? My loss. I’ve left far too much fruit to rot on the tree. And though I’m trying, it’s hard to eat that much fruit so late in the season. The sweetness makes your teeth hurt. Also, peppermint skin creme is not a good lubricant. I tingled for days.
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