The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  It’s one of those hot, sky-blue days that taste of vanilla ice cream and summer and future, when your heart beats faster for no apparent reason, and when you’re prepared to swear any oath that friendships never end.

  chapter 3

  the

  broader

  view

  When I get back to Visible and close the front door behind me, I hear the distant murmur of voices coming from the kitchen, followed by nervous laughter. Forget the milk I was going to take. Glass is obviously with a client.

  “The UFO.”

  I jump to one side and very nearly lose my balance. Right next to me a gaunt figure has emerged from nowhere and is eyeing me coolly.

  “Dianne! You nearly scared me to death!”

  She doesn’t react as if my sudden demise would bother her too much. As I see it, she’s always trying hard to avoid reacting to anything. Her straight black hair is scraped back carelessly from her face. She is pale, and as ever, regardless of the summer heat, she wears an outsized black turtleneck sweater far too big for her and a floor-length dun-colored skirt.

  “Why are you eavesdropping again?” I whisper. “You know Glass doesn’t like it.”

  Dianne shrugs. I’ve often wondered what she gets out of listening in sneakily to the stories these women clients tell. There was a time when we used to do so together purely out of childish curiosity. I soon gave up, first because I lacked a deeper understanding of what these conversations between Glass and her women clients were all about, and then because all that sobbing and crying, the tantrums and the yells of vengeance, gradually began to sound the same. But maybe Dianne just keeps on listening as a way of keeping in touch with the world through other people’s emotions.

  “Don’t get caught,” I advise her.

  She gives a dismissive wave of her hand without looking at me.

  “I’m not stupid, Phil.”

  Glass feels bound to observe a sort of confidentiality. She doesn’t say much about her clients, whom she advises mostly on weekends or in the evenings, after she gets home from her job in Tereza’s lawyer’s office. She does not ask for payment for listening to these women, but most of them leave money in gratitude without being asked, small or large amounts, that Glass puts firmly aside for unforeseen expenses—for a rainy day—occasionally reminding Dianne and me of the fact. This explains Rosella, the enormous pink china piggy bank that sits proudly at the center of the kitchen table, with a smile of eternal happiness etched under its fat snout. Glass had bought Rosella at a flea market for next to nothing because its left ear was missing.

  “How long’s the UFO been here?” I whisper.

  “Half an hour.” Dianne still doesn’t look at me. “She wants a divorce.”

  “She won’t do it.” I take off my trainers and place them on the bottom stair. “She’s been talking about it for ever, and keeps putting it off.”

  “She’d have been better off if she had done it. Her husband is a filthy pig. He’s screwing another woman, and the UFO is stupid enough to wash the sheets afterward.”

  “Whatever turns you on. By the way, I’ve just been into town. Met up with Kat.”

  Dianne turns round and silent as smoke glides toward the kitchen to hear better. I really don’t know why I keep on trying to get her interested in my doings. In the unlikely event that she isn’t totally indifferent to Glass and me, my sister certainly doesn’t give any sign of it. Dianne has always been withdrawn, but over the last few years her existence is like an insect trapped in amber. We talk to each other less and less. There was a time when we used to explore the countryside together, wander through the woods, follow the course of the river until our feet were sore. Now when Dianne leaves the house, she’s alone; she stays away for hours on end, and if I ask her where she goes on her solitary walks, she doesn’t answer. Our conversations fizzle out after we exchange small talk.

  I go upstairs, pursued by the UFO’s laughter.

  The UFO’s name is Irene. Two years ago, when her husband had already been cheating on her for a good while and loneliness and despair were gnawing away at her like moths, she announced that on a mild summer’s night she had taken photos of unidentified flying objects. The grainy, slightly smudged black-and-white photos allegedly supporting her claim did indeed show a few mysterious white blobs against a dark background. They caused considerable excitement in the town, for after the photos had gone through the hands of all the neighbors and acquaintances, Irene—by now drunk with success—allowed herself to be talked into passing them on to the local press. They were published in the weekend issue of the regional newspaper under the banner headline “UFOs Overhead?” A week later a reader’s letter from Dr. Hoffmann, the town’s one and only gynecologist, maintained that these images were ultrasound scans of a female uterus. While chatting to the regulars in the local bar, after a few pints he indicated that in actual fact these were images of Irene’s uterus; God alone knew how the copies of the scans had come into her possession, and she must have had copies made. It really isn’t for me to say that Dr. Hoffmann has deep furrows running down either side of his nostrils, recalling my long-standing suspicion of Dr. Eisbert, executioner of countless jug ears, and so this was a confirmation of such furrows being the sure sign of someone being a liar.

  When Glass heard about the whole affair, she was equally incensed by the indiscretion of the gynecologist as by the term female uterus. In a letter to the gynecologist (that was never answered) she wrote that he deserved a kick in the masculine balls for gross biological ignorance and to have his license to practice removed. There was someone else who felt the need to take even more drastic action, for a few days later a message in poison-green spray paint adorned Hoffmann’s office premises, urging in unmistakable terms that the damned woman-hater should have his willy chopped off. This in turn led to a policeman turning up early one evening at Visible, a slightly spotty young man in uniform whose extreme nervousness revealed itself in his flushed face and constant fidgeting with his tight shirt collar, but above all by excessive secretion of saliva. This flow of saliva compelled him to pause frequently while speaking, because he kept having to swallow.

  “This communication comes from you, right?” he said, even as he stood outside the front door, brandishing the letter Glass had sent to Dr. Hoffmann.

  “You bet your sweet little ass it did,” replied Glass, prompting the officer’s first bout of hiccups.

  She led the man into the kitchen and asked whether he had come on an official inquiry, and when he answered in the negative, she insisted on Dianne and me being present. Then she set about making tea, and there followed half an hour of conversation, that was highly instructive for me, with Glass doing most of the talking, mainly dealing with male sexual organs, their general functions, and their potential maltreatment by insulted women.

  At some point the young officer, who had meanwhile introduced himself as Mr. Acer, undid the top button of his shirt.

  “I’m now asking you perfectly frankly,” he finally asked, “whether the graffiti on the wall of the doctor’s house was your handiwork.”

  “And I’m asking you perfectly frankly,” retorted Glass, her words unleashing his final attack of hiccups, “whether I look like the sort of woman to waste raw materials in a public place.”

  Dianne, like me, had listened to the conversation without batting an eyelid. We must have seemed quite spooky to the policeman, as we sat next to each other at the table without moving a muscle, breathing almost soundlessly, and all in all conveying the impression of waxworks intent on murder. In front of us on the table stood Rosella. With her friendly snout, missing left ear, and big eyes, she was the only neutral object to enter the bewildered officer’s field of vision in the course of the questioning. But he stared at this harmless piggy bank as if he expected even the pink piece of china to sprout fangs at any moment.

  When Acer finally left Visible, he was like someone on the run; he staggered and stumbled down the drive and disappear
ed into the rust-red sunset like some lone drunken sheriff in an old western movie. He had left his tea untouched. I never told Dianne that weeks later, while hunting for a patch to mend my bicycle tire, I had come across a can of poison-green spray paint in the woodshed behind the house—but I was mighty proud of her.

  As far as Irene was concerned, by some crazy male logic elevating her on the spot from victim to culprit, she was disgraced, and this is how she came to be a case for Glass. Sooner or later every unfortunate woman from the town or its immediate surroundings who couldn’t afford an expensive psychiatrist or cheap lover became a case for Glass.

  “It’s a kind of life insurance, darling,” Glass once explained to me. “So long as they’re afraid I might spill the beans about their petty secrets, I have that lot over there eating out of my hand.”

  She refers to the residents of the town as “that lot over there” because they live on the other side of the river. For me they are the Little People—a term from my nursery days, when I used to think of people who frightened me as tiny, lifeless dolls.

  We’d never been on good terms with the Little People. Anyone who doesn’t come from an old, established family is regarded with suspicion by the townspeople, and this can persist for generations. But right from the start Glass had to face up to more than mere suspicion. Once she started bringing men back with her to Visible every now and again, and because she made no secret of the rapid turnover in her love life, she was met with open hostility. She received offensive letters and obscene phone calls. Once after she had driven into town to do some shopping, she found the paint of her car scratched. She’d only been in the shop for ten minutes; when she came out again, she found the word whohre scratched in large unmistakable letters on the driver’s door. Glass stuck a piece of cardboard below the scratch marks on which she wrote in thick black letters: Whore is spelled with only one h. She drove for a whole hour with it through every street in the town, her right foot down hard on the gas pedal, honking loudly, with murder in her eyes. Later, as things came full circle and Glass began selling the nuggets of wisdom learned in the main from her lovers to her women clients, battered by fate or the violence of their husbands, she was granted a grudging kind of teeth-grinding tolerance. There were fewer letters and phone calls, and finally they stopped altogether. But then as now, it would never have occurred to anyone to include her in the great ballyhoo of the annual town festival, let alone offer her the chairmanship of the local rose growers’ association.

  For a long time Dianne and I were spared any animosity. That lot over there regarded us as pitiful little creatures who’d had the misfortune to be dumped in this world by a mother who was far too young and totally irresponsible. But we didn’t belong to her world—not because we deliberately didn’t want to, but because we felt that we were different. I couldn’t really even have said in what way, whether from inborn arrogance, acquired aversion, deeply buried insecurity, or a combination of all of these. The fact remained that we felt as if there was a glass wall separating us from that lot over there, young and old alike, and that we would have subjected them to the meticulous study of scientists researching the life of ants had we only had the necessary patience to do so. As things stood, we couldn’t have cared less about them.

  The reverse was not true. Our peers were afraid of Dianne and me, and like all groundless fear, this too proved fertile soil for superstition. During recess at school, our classmates would whisper to each other that one glance from me could turn anyone to stone, a single word from Dianne made the person concerned turn scarlet, or a fleeting touch from our hands would render them speechless. But the kids never went so far as to attack us physically—apart from one single occasion, the Battle of the Big Eye, when Dianne saw to it that they lost the desire for any further battles once and for all—though they mocked us with swear words that were every bit as painful as blows. In the end we clammed up like oysters that keep their pearls safe from robbers.

  “Children are wax in the hands of the world,” said Tereza when I told her about it. “Open books with empty pages, waiting to be written on by us grown-ups. For the rest of your life you’ll never get rid of what’s on the first pages.”

  I knew she was right, for I could see how books were written. There were some classmates who were brought to school every morning by their mothers and fetched again at lunchtime. These were the mothers who sized us up and then fantasized about us in whispers to their children, after which the children would look at us pityingly or disconcertedly when we turned up at school in the morning with our shabby school bags, sometimes soaked to the skin without umbrellas or galoshes, or then without a warm coat or gloves, frozen to the bone in the icy winter weather. In the eyes of these mothers and their children, Glass was obviously a bad mother whose indifference caused Dianne and me to suffer dreadfully. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that Glass allowed us the space on which we both insisted loudly, sometimes amid tearful protests. If we didn’t wear coats or gloves, it was because we had taken it into our heads to defy the winter. That snow and cold emerged victorious in this unequal battle was of secondary importance. Anyway, we warmed up in the evenings when, wrapped in blankets, we would sit with Glass on the threadbare sofa snuggled up to one another, our feet hidden in thick woolen socks, with the tall bare room lit by Bickering candles and the open fire. There Glass drummed into us: Be strong and defend yourselves. Anyone who hurts you, hurt them hack twice over or keep out of their way, but never let anyone tell you how you ought to live. I love you as you are.

  She gave us the feeling that we were different and unique, and the idea that I should envy other children for their protective, whispering mothers never even entered my head. What I did envy them for hugely was their fathers. It wasn’t that I didn’t feel sufficiently protected by Glass, even if it did take Dianne and me quite a few years before we learned to face down that lot over there in the same stubborn thick-skinned way our mother did. No, what I wanted was a kind of second authority, an outward-looking, tangible image of the willpower and tenacity that Glass possessed. Glass may have been steering the ship of our lives, but she simply wasn’t able, at least so I thought, to cope with the sails at the same time. Since there was no prospect far and wide of a father prepared to take on this task, and Glass was not making any moves to make one of her lovers responsible, I was looking for a substitute. I found him in Gable.

  Gable is the only relation that Glass is prepared to talk about and whom I have ever clapped eyes on. He stems from a distant branch of the family, from which he ran away as a youngster—a rebellious black sheep for whom, like Stella, the view of the world could never be broad enough. At the age of sixteen he signed up on the first available ship in the nearest port and unknowingly established the tradition, later followed by Glass, of seeking rescue from emerging problems by escaping across the open seas.

  “He’s a mariner, darling.”

  “Is that something like a pirate?”

  “Pirate, merchant seaman, smuggler, fisherman, freebooter … he’s a bit of everything.”

  So—a mariner. Gable’s appearance gives no hint that he has spent the best part of his life at sea. It’s useless to search the features of his broad coarse face for traces that such an existence is supposed to leave behind: tanned weather-beaten skin, dark brows, deeply scored furrows. His stocky body is like a muscular athletes in top condition but lacks the sluggishness that sometimes comes with it, and despite heavy labor his powerful hands bear no signs of calluses. The only striking peculiarity is a scar disfiguring his upper arm, the sight of which filled me with horror as a child. The scar is large and deep and creeps along below the skin like a pink, rampant web. In the past it often seemed to me that it had a life of its own, for when Gable used to come and see us, its shape seemed to have changed from one visit to the next, like an ameba stretching out its pseudopods in different directions, growing fractionally in the process.

  It’s nothing unusual for Gable to pitch up at Vis
ible two or three times a year, often as not without warning. He’s almost exactly ten years older than Glass, which makes me think that he sees her as a kind of little sister who needs to have an eye kept on her from time to time. This makes Glass wild. Gable’s regular offers of money are turned down with equal regularity. I know from Glass that Gable was married for a short while and lived with his wife somewhere out on the West Coast of America. At some stage both the marriage and the home were abandoned. The name of the wife is Alexa, and she left Gable at around the time that Dianne and I were born at the other end of the world. Alexa couldn’t put up with Gable’s restlessness—the ocean had a magnetic attraction for him, like the moon for howling dogs—and worse still, in emotional terms he was like a block of ice. Maybe things would have been different for the two of them if Alexa had accompanied her husband on his voyages.

  Whenever Gable visits he brings us presents. When I was little I would get enormously excited by these little tokens, and later on they would thrill me to bits, all because they came from the sea. Gable used to give virtually unpronounceable names of different coastlines or islands to each of these presents—names that rolled across my tongue like softly shimmering pearls, when I repeated them. Tongatapu—a black, mysteriously shiny fan-shaped coral. Semisopochnoi— dried seahorses with hard little brown bodies. Kiritimati—a piece of driftwood encrusted with age-old shells. Once it was a crab’s giant pincers, vivid red, as if sprinkled with drops of fire.

  Dianne categorically refused to accept these precious gifts. Early on I never saw her get closer to him than about ten feet—it was as if he was surrounded by an invisible barrier of electric energy, and she didn’t want to step across its boundaries. On the other hand, what Dianne did have in common with Gable was a strange kind of reserve—they could both suddenly cut out of a conversation and withdraw into themselves, which I found terribly irritating—but then, of course, it was just this reserve that prevented my sister and Gable from baiting each other. As soon as Gable left us, Dianne would come to life again, and on more than one occasion we would then fight over the treasures he had left us, in which she had pretended to have no interest whatsoever until his departure but now coveted.