The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  Three days before Glass arrived at Visible, my aunt Stella’s broad view on the world proved her undoing. She was cleaning the windows on the second floor when she fell to the drive below, where the postman found her next day. With her head resting on one arm and her legs slightly drawn up, she looked as if she was asleep. She had broken her neck. Later Glass found the cable she herself had wired from onboard ship, and the draft of a reply her older, only sister had been unable to send. Baby, looking forward to you and your offspring. Love, Stella.

  Stella’s death affected Glass deeply. She had idolized her sister, even after she had left America. Their mother had died young of the Big C, as Glass put it, and their father had shown more interest in alcohol than in the fate of his daughters. The fact that both of them disappeared to Europe was met with drunken indifference. No one knew what had become of him. Once when I asked Glass about my grandfather, her curt reply was that the continent of America had swallowed him, and she hoped it would not spew him up again. After her initial mourning over Stella, she adopted a pragmatic attitude to her death. One of her favorite sayings was “As one door closes, another opens.” Death had taken Stella from her but given her Tereza instead: not such a bad exchange.

  The municipal authorities appointed a local lawyer to go through the dead American woman’s papers to establish whether there were any relatives overseas. Too busy to go himself, the man sent a trainee assistant to Visible, a young woman with long red hair, who, once she had got over her quite understandable initial fright, set about helping the two new additions to the family enter the world with impressive efficiency. (Tereza was a city girl but had turned her back on her hometown years earlier to go and study law somewhere in the northern mountain region.)

  On the bitterly cold night preceding Dianne’s and my birth, Tereza had brought her own sleeping bag and bedded down at Visible, intending to stay there until she had completed her search. Here she found what she was looking for, as Stella had indeed left a will. In it she appointed Glass as sole heir to Visible and her entire estate. Things were not straightforward, there were legal complications—Glass was underage, she was an American, and she did not have a residence permit. The fact that she spoke only English didn’t make matters any easier.

  Tereza took Glass under her wing and pleaded her case with the lawyer. The man was fond of Tereza and took a liking to Glass, and he had friends who in turn had friends in high places. Blind eyes were turned and rules bent, regulations were carefully bypassed and favorable documents drafted. In the end Glass was allowed to stay, but that was only the beginning. Stella had left very little liquid cash, but this was money Glass desperately needed. There was no question of putting Visible up for sale. The house was more than just her legacy from Stella; it was a roof over her head and a haven for her tiny new family. Once again, it was Tereza who saved the day. Through friends at the university she found Glass a job that consisted of dealing with a mound of English correspondence and summarizing articles from international specialist journals.

  A year before Tereza completed her studies, her father, a widower for many years, died. He was quite well known as a professor emeritus of botany, the only academic the town had ever produced. Overnight Tereza became wealthy but homeless. She disliked living alone in her father’s home, and so she regularly spent the college vacations at Visible. She looked after Dianne and me while Glass first attended language courses and then trained at night school as a secretary.

  By this time Dianne and I were four years old and trusting as young puppies. We had instantly taken Tereza to our hearts. In return she ruined our milk teeth with popcorn that she prepared for us every evening before putting us to bed. We would chew the sweet sticky stuff from cracked brightly colored dishes as Tereza read us fairy tales. She would usually nod off over the book, and then we would cover her with a woolen blanket and stick bits of corn up her nose.

  Our love for her was blended with respect—after all, like the witches in the fairy tales, Tereza did have red hair. She could reduce us to tiny panic-stricken bundles when she threatened to turn us into frogs.

  With her exams behind her, Tereza went to work in a lawyer’s office. Two years on she had gained enough experience to set up her own practice in the second largest town in the region, and naturally she needed a secretary. The timing was perfect. Dianne and I were just about to start grade school, so Glass could work half days. Later, when we had learned how to look after ourselves, she took on the job full time. Then she would get into her car (the old Ford that had belonged to Tereza’s father) in the mornings, and come back home in the evening, and always bring us some small present—poison-green lollipops, a little picture book, a record that was quickly played to death.

  When Dianne and I got home from school, we used to heat up the meals prepared for us the day before. We didn’t need to be supervised or urged to do our schoolwork. Almost all our free time was spent out of doors, in the jungle of a garden and in the woods bordering the estate or by the river nearby. Glass took pride in our independence. As she pointed out more than once, our existence depended on her working, so Dianne and I didn’t dare confide in her and tell her how frightened we were of Visible, left all alone in that big house. All those rooms tucked away in nooks and crannies, many of them never used, the immeasurably long and winding corridors, the high walls that gave off endless echoes at the faintest footstep—all this was scary. Visible was spooky, a gloomy, empty shell, and we were never more terrified than when Glass suggested we play hide-and-seek there. Dianne and I shared a bedroom on the ground floor; later on, when we had come to appreciate the privacy offered by the calm and peace of the upper floors, each of us moved into a room of our own up there. I took over a room with an unbroken view stretching beyond the river up to the town on the slopes of the castle hill, whose summit was crowned by an unimpressive early medieval fortress. It was in this room that I came to realize how different my personality must be from Stella’s, for the view through the tall windows into the world beyond was never broad enough for me.

  The cold shower has woken me up. I pull on my shorts and T-shirt and walk along the labyrinthine passage to the curving staircase that leads down to the entrance hall. There is no sight or sound of Dianne or Glass. Maybe they have succumbed to the oppressive summer air and taken a siesta.

  As soon as I step outside, the heat hits me. I grab my bicycle, propped up against the wall, and let myself freewheel down the bumpy unmade driveway.

  The garden resembles a field of waving corn. On either side of the drive, grass several meters high fights with the colorful meadow flowers for a place in the sun. Rampaging ivy clings to the bark of the old fruit trees and poplars, clambering up along the branches and across the gutters to the house, and tumbles down in cascades from there.

  During her first five or six years at Visible, Glass had attempted to tame this wilderness and conquer the jungle by planting some sort of garden. Her battle dress consisted of a green kitchen overall, pink rubber gloves, and boots the same color. Her armory was an array of garden implements enough to transform the entire Nevada desert into fertile soil. Dianne and I, equipped with miniature rakes, spades, and plastic buckets, clustered around her legs when our mother moved into battle, and always stayed near her. But all the weeding, raking, and hoeing was to no avail; the heroic battle against the persistent army of weeds was doomed to failure.

  “As if Nature’s ganged up against me,” Glass complained as she sat at the kitchen table in the evenings, exhausted and worn out, her hands covered in blisters despite the rubber gloves. “These damned plants—they refuse to grow where I want them to, and spread like wildfire just where I want to get rid of them.”

  So Glass engaged a gardener by the hour. Martin was not much older than her—a young man with black hair and brilliant green eyes. God only knows where he came from, and that’s exactly where he disappeared to. Right from the start, Dianne made no bones about the fact that she couldn’t stand him, and avoided him
accordingly, but I was enthralled by Martin. When he used to come into the cool kitchen after work on hot summer days, Glass would hand him iced lemonade, and I would bury my face in his sweat-soaked vest. I loved his scent; he smelled of grass and the wide blue sky. As he spoke to Glass he would run his hands down my neck. His fingers had a soft and pleasant touch, in spite of the hard gardening. Later he would tell me stories as he showered, laughing at the end of each sentence; his skin glistened with beads of water, and I would sit on the lid of the toilet, my head propped in my hands and look at his strong arms, his broad suntanned shoulders, and the place where his slender legs joined. Secretly, I used to take the towel he dried himself with to bed with me and use it as a blanket. That Glass took him into her bed filled me with previously unknown pangs of jealousy, keeping me awake for nights on end.

  If Dianne took all this in, I wasn’t aware of it. It was only many years later that I gradually realized that at the time not a single detail had escaped her and that my twin sister had spent sleepless nights just as I had done, if for a completely different reason—Dianne hated Glass having affairs with men.

  chapter 2

  dumbo

  on the

  tower

  Kat and I are sitting side by side on the castle wall. Our legs dangle over the edge of the parapet, and a warm current of air drifts upward. Below us lies the town, spread out like a brightly colored map, fringed by wooded hills and enclosed by the triple bend of the shimmering blue ribbon of the river. In the three weeks Kat was away, I was often drawn to this spot. I find it reassuring to see the world in miniature.

  “No violin lesson today?”

  “Not the first day home. But I still had to practice.” Kat gives me a sidelong glance. “Believe it or not, I really missed playing.”

  “Couldn’t you have taken the thing with you?”

  Kat shakes her head, as if reflecting in total bewilderment. “You know, I once saw something on television about Malta— the bridge between Africa and Europe. Crusaders and all that stuff. And windmills. They showed the windmills on television. Oh, and those godawful little crocheted mats they make everywhere all the time …”

  “And the guys, the Maltese, what were they like?”

  She gives me a shove, almost enough to catapult me into space. Free fall from fifty feet above the ground, and soft landing in a bed of tall stinging nettles.

  “Hey… !”

  “Serves you right. Christ, here I am, pouring out my soul, and all you can think of is the guys!”

  “Go on.”

  She grins, revealing a wide gap between her front teeth that has defied years of wearing a retainer at night. “They were hideous, with big, fat asses—satisfied? Apart from which, Daddy was watching me like a hawk, even if I had felt like it… .”

  “You wouldn’t have let anyone stop you. Not even your father.”

  “Oh, come on, you know what I mean.” She gives me another shove.

  “Careful, right? Anyone would think you’re good at choosing friends.”

  “He drove Mama totally nuts as usual, he really did. Culture overkill and all that. You’re lucky you don’t have a father…”

  Kat’s eyes are fixed on an indefinite spot somewhere beyond the horizon. She knows she can’t expect me to answer. When it comes to father, any father, I’m at a loss—I’m not up to handling the subject. I don’t even like to think about it. If I do, then I get the kind of feeling that fills me at the thought of falling off this wall. The difference being that if I fell, I’d know what was waiting for me down below.

  As if she guessed what I was thinking, Kat says, “Why d’you never say anything about your Number Three?”

  “Because there’s nothing to say,” I snap back. Up to now, whenever she’s asked me about my father, I’ve always given her a monosyllabic answer. And if it’s left to me, I won’t change.

  “Oh, come on … anything.”

  “Glass has never spoken about him.”

  “Really?”

  “She’s …” As I search for the right words I look out at the red rooftops of the town glowing in the sunlight. Above them the air is shimmering, held in rippling suspension by the heat haze. “She’s drawn a line under all that. The life she had in America is something she’s never talked about with Dianne and me. OK, I do know a little about my grandparents, but it’s boring stuff about boring people.”

  _______

  Sometime in the first half of the last century our ancestors left Europe for America, unhappy with the political and economic situation in their home country. They crossed the Atlantic in rotten hulks, weathering storms and cold, hunger and sickness, and very soon their descendants spread like dandelion seeds blown by the wind right across the continent, which they called Gods Own Land, Home of the Brave, Land of the Free. And brave they certainly were, as well as free, but they had never really put down roots. A few had ended up in the large up-and-coming cities. But the majority by far, fired by the pioneering spirit and desire for freedom and undeterred by obstacles, made the arduous trek for the frontier, the mythical borderlands in the West, beyond which—so they believed— the end of the rainbow awaited them.

  “And my father … ,” I go on. “It’s not as if I’ve never tried asking about him. But Glass simply clams up.”

  “Does it bug you?”

  “In a way, yes,” I admit reluctantly. The fact that Number Three had walked out on her is the only reason I know that drove my mother across the Big Pond. “It’s so … incomplete.”

  I think back to the list I found by chance a few years ago in among Glass’s papers, a list of all the men she’d had, neatly numbered with names and dates, when I assumed Glass had slept with them. In one place there was just a number. It was easy to work back from the date when Dianne and I were born to the date written next to Number Three.

  I’ve no idea whether that list still exists today. At the time it consisted of about fifty entries. Whether that was few or many, I was in no position to judge. Spread over about ten years, fifty affairs really didn’t seem to amount to that much, but it could well have something to do with the fact that very few of the men—in the event that Glass brought them home at all—ever turned up more than once at Visible. As far as I can remember, their faces merge into one another like gray phantom sketches, vague and interchangeable. They played no part in my life, and so even when they did have names, at the end of the day they meant no more to me than they did to Glass—just names on a piece of paper. Of course there are exceptions—Martin with the green eyes and smelling of garden soil is one of them, and later on there was Kyle, the wood-carver with the beautiful hands—but towering above all the exceptions is the nameless man who appeared on the list as Number Three.

  “Would you like to have one? A father?” Kat has picked some moss out of the cracks in the wall and is rolling it between her fingers into a small green ball. “I mean, do you somehow miss him?”

  “What d’you mean, miss him?” I snap at her. “I’ve never even known him.”

  Kat knows very well that she’s dabbling in dangerous waters. She can be a real bitch.

  She knows how to touch a raw nerve, trampling where no psychiatrist would dare to tread. Black holes. Get too near them, and before you know it they swallow you up.

  But what I consider black holes, Kat calls “blank spots on the map of your psyche.” She patiently fills in these spots whenever the occasion arises, and is blissfully unaware of overstepping boundaries in doing so.

  Like now, for instance.

  “At any rate, you do know he lives in America,” she keeps on, burrowing away.

  “America’s a big place,” I snap. “And that he’s alive is pure conjecture. And now do me a favor and shut it.”

  “OK. Truce.”

  She throws the wad of moss away with a deft flick of her fingers, and it goes sailing down through the warm air, landing at the foot of the wall among the clumps of stinging nettles. I get a placatory close-up of the ga
p-toothed smile. “Ice cream?”

  The summer before I started school, Glass decided something had to be done about my ears.

  “They’re too big,” she explained. “And they stand out. You look like Dumbo.”

  We were sitting on a quilt by the riverbank, sheltered from the afternoon sun by tall clumps of impatiens, far away from the town and its inhabitants. My mother reached into a cool bag filled with drinks and sticky peanut butter sandwiches, took out a bottle of Coke, and put it to her lips. Once she’d put it down, there was no escape.

  The fact that she didn’t like my ears filled me with alarm. I looked across at Dianne, who was standing up to her knees in the sluggish water, hunting for snails on the underside of flat stones. No one would have taken us for twins, if only because—as it suddenly struck me—Dianne had utterly unremarkable ears.

  “Who’s Dumbo?’’ I asked cautiously.

  “An elephant.” Glass placed the Coke bottle back in the cool bag. “His ears trailed along the ground, so when he was running he kept tripping over them. They were just too big.”

  Dianne waded out of the river and, nimbly jumping over a few stones, clambered through the waist-high grass. The next moment, without a word, she pushed a stone with an unusually pretty pink snail stuck to it under Glass’s nose.

  “Oh, God, take it away!” shrieked Glass in disgust. I can’t stand those slimy creatures.”

  Glass lay back, closed her eyes, and consequently did not see Dianne marching back to the river to look for more slimy specimens, meanwhile sticking the snail experimentally into her left ear. Into her normal-sized left ear that did not stick out, as I noticed enviously.

  I remained sitting on the blanket, overcome by the most dreadful premonitions. I waited for Glass to return to the subject—to explain what you did with overlarge, sticking-out ears so that they didn’t trail along the ground—but she’d fallen asleep, and as she didn’t mention it again on the way home, I somewhat hesitantly considered the matter settled.