The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  Each time he visited us, Gable never tired of declaring that this was the last time he would come ashore, as he felt ill at ease and couldn’t cope on land. As a child, I envied him for being a grown-up. His home was the seas and the oceans. He found his bearings from the stars and the way the waves rippled under the wind that blows only in a certain part of the world, from foreign smells and the changing colors of the water—brilliant blue and turquoise that promise land ahead, a gleam like greenish black ink where underwater ravines plunge to impenetrable depths.

  “Won’t you take me with you?” I would regularly beg him.

  “One day. If Glass allows it.”

  Glass had brought Dianne and me up to be bilingual, but I didn’t need to speak to Gable in English. He could speak more languages than there were seas in the world, and his voice was also as deep as an ocean.

  At night I used to take Paleiko to bed with me. No sooner had Tereza given me the black china doll than her promise came true—he spoke to me. Admittedly Tereza hadn’t warned me that Paleiko could talk incessantly, that he had an opinion about everything and would bombard me with well-meant advice that was often as unintelligible as the answers he gave to questions I asked him.

  “When will Glass let me go with Gable?” I whispered. Embedded in Paleiko’s forehead was a pink stone, a small piece of crystal. I imagined I saw it light up when the cold china mannikin answered: When you’re ready, my little friend. When you’re ready.

  I seized on Gable as the father I’d always wanted, who would not only take me in his arms to comfort and protect me but also led a dazzlingly exotic life, with whom one could survive adventures of the kind that made my wildest dreams pale in comparison. I was crazy about the tales Gable told. When he described his voyages at sea, it made the ocean come alive for me. I could feel the pitching of the ship under my feet and the sun burning my skin, or be shaken by violent storms that tore the sky to shreds like a fine silk cloth. Every time Gable left I would be miserable and restless for days; I’d stroke the corals he left behind, lick the salt off the little dried seahorses, and lose myself in daydreams in which I accompanied Gable on his voyages. And whenever I asked Glass when she was finally going to let me go with him, she would listen to her inner self for a moment before answering, “Not yet.”

  chapter 4

  the battle

  of the

  big eye

  In summer the kitchen at Visible is transformed into an aquarium. The ivy presses against the windows outside, so the light coming in passes through a kind of green filter, making you involuntarily take a deep breath as you enter the room.

  Glass is standing at the stove, where she is frantically shaking a frying pan. The air smells of burnt bacon and scrambled eggs. I can only see her back and her blond hair, pinned up carelessly.

  “What are you up to?”

  “What does it look like? First day back at school after vacation. I’m trying to be a good mother.”

  “Seventeen years too late.”

  “Thanks a million, darling.” She turns round to me. “Is Dianne coming down for breakfast as well? Will she want scrambled eggs too, or something—cornflakes?”

  “She’s never eaten scrambled eggs.” I sit down at the massive ancient wooden table that takes up the center of the kitchen. “Or cornflakes either. I’ve no idea what she eats, probably nothing at all.”

  “That’s all because of TV.” She scrapes the contents of the pan onto a plate. “Those American programs are crawling with skeletal women who all weigh less than eighty pounds, and over half that is in their silicone tits! I sometimes think the whole of California is one big anorexia commercial.” “Glass, it’s you who watches those programs, not Dianne.” “Then she should, as a warning.” The plate is shoved under my nose. “I mean, she is painfully thin, don’t you think?” “How can you tell in the kind of gear she wears?”

  Glass sits down opposite me. She herself doesn’t have breakfast till she gets to the office; at home she just drinks vast amounts of tea. “I’ll be home a bit late tonight,” she announces over the edge of her cup.

  “Mm …” I poke around in the scrambled egg in search of a strip of unburnt bacon. “Who is it?”

  “Couldn’t it be that I’m simply doing overtime?”

  “Come on, where did you meet him?”

  She grins. “At the office. He’s one of Tereza’s briefs, a dishy-looking fraud case.”

  She blows carefully into her tea. Sometimes I forget she’s my mother, she’s so young.

  “Fraud? Is he the guilty party or the victim?”

  “Now, have I ever hooked up with a criminal?”

  “A couple of them looked like criminals.” I strike lucky and spear a piece of bacon with my fork. “What does Tereza have to say about it?”

  Tereza is far more than just her boss. She is absolutely everything for Glass—understanding mother confessor and friend, safe haven among the breakers when life gets too stormy.

  “She says the guy is a bad character because he doesn’t do his shoelaces up properly—or something of the sort. Apparently that’s an unmistakable sign.” Glass turns up her nose indignantly. “She’s probably just jealous.”

  “Of the guy?” The scrambled egg is so salty, I push it to the side of the plate. “You’re crazy.”

  “Old love never dies, darling.”

  “Neither does vanity, it seems. You’ve been out of the picture for a long time. Tereza has Pascal.” Tereza and her girlfriend have been cohabiting for over four years.

  “You’re probably right.” Glass looks thoughtfully out of one of the green-lit windows. “You know, you should have seen her when she helped me out when I was in the shit. At least once a week she’d be standing at the door, always looking … somehow all over the place. Her red hair was so wild, you know. And then those gray eyes, so provocative, I v as really impressed by her. At first she always used to come with a mound of papers. Then she started coming more and more often, just for a visit, in between times. By then, of course, she was already head over heels in love with me.”

  All that was long ago. I know my mother never had a relationship with Tereza—Tereza’s name isn’t on the list. There’s no woman on the list.

  Glass looks at her watch, gulps down the rest of the tea, and stands up. “I’ve got to be off.”

  “Have fun tonight.”

  “Sure thing.” She smoothes down her skirt, runs her hand through her hair, and sails out of the kitchen. “But not too much, for starters.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “I’m going to be thirty-four, darling,” she calls from the corridor. “Makes a woman start thinking.”

  I wait until I hear the front door close and the car start, then I tip the rest of the breakfast into the garbage and go upstairs to pack my bag.

  As I pass by the bathroom, the door is open a crack, and I look in—discreetly. Although God knows Glass can hardly be accused of having brought us up to be in any way prudish, Dianne doesn’t like being seen naked.

  Motionless, her arms hanging down limply, my sister is standing under the shower with eyes closed, her straight black hair sticking to her neck. Glass was right—Dianne is painfully thin. I am shocked at her emaciated form, normally cleverly concealed under outsized shirts and sweaters. At the same time, I find her beautiful. Her protruding hip bones catch the falling water like a bowl and let it pour down between her legs. Her breasts are tiny and brilliant white, almost imperceptible apart from the minute nipples. Above her left collarbone, starting at the neck and ending at the shoulder, is a finger-length red scar.

  “D’you still ever think of it?” Dianne has opened her eyes and caught sight of me through the water curtain. “About the battle and the Hulk?”

  “Sometimes, yes.” My voice sounds cracked. I feel caught out. I’m ashamed of standing here sneakily watching my sister.

  “Beat it, Phil.” She raises a hand and lays it protectively over the flaming red scar, as if that w
as the only nakedness she had to hide. “Go on, piss off!”

  The Battle of the Big Eye took place on a glorious bright summer’s day, not far from the spot by the river where three years earlier Glass had decided that something had to be done about my protruding ears.

  Dianne and I had been out for three hours, exchanging the depressing atmosphere of Visible for the open country and the broad sky. Glass must have been home a long time, but she wouldn’t miss us until it started to get dark. The corn in the fields stood tall and yellow; the sweet scent of freshly mown hay mingled with the slightly musty smell of drying algae rising from the nearby river.

  “At Big Eye,” said Dianne, “there are trout.”

  “So? Everyone knows that.”

  Big Eye lay about a mile downstream from Visible. The name sounded imposing, but we applied it to nothing more than the outlet pipe of an underground stream, diverted long ago, that actually looked more like a gaping mouth than an eye. “We could catch one.”

  “What with? With that?” I pointed to the bow of polished wood and the arrow that went with it, the only one she had— a smooth branch sharpened to a point but without a barb.

  “I can shoot with it,” she said huffily. “I’ve practiced.”

  The bow was a present from a man by the name of Kyle, whom Glass had brought along in the early summer. His angular face, dominated by deep blue eyes, had made an unforgettable impression on me, because Kyle had paid us more attention than just ruffling our hair in an impersonal way, which was the usual kind of notice that most of our mothers lovers took of us. What’s more, he was an Englishman; Glass had muttered something about his being a member of the British Allied forces who had deserted from the army. We thought this terribly romantic.

  Kyle arrived with an olive-green rucksack and stayed at Visible for almost four weeks. Long enough for Dianne and me to get used to him; too long for Glass, who finally slammed on the emergency brake. She wasn’t interested in a long-term relationship.

  One evening Glass hadn’t yet got back from work, and we were sitting on the verandah, Kyle in a sun-bleached wicker chair, with Dianne and me at his feet. The cool air was filled with the chirping of the first shy crickets. Kyle had broken off a branch of an ash tree from behind the house and was sliding the blade of an army knife along the bark. He had strikingly fine hands with long, powerful fingers.

  “Ash,” said Kyle, “is a wood that lasts. Something this house, and you and your mother, are in desperate need of.” A heap of fine fresh green shavings began to pile up around his feet. “Stability? D’you know what that means? Something that lasts.”

  I scarcely paid attention to his words. I was watching the bark shavings fly downward and the slender fingers guiding the knife like a delicate surgical instrument.

  “Something that lasts,” repeated Dianne in a serious voice.

  Kyle nodded and carried on working without a word. Finally he carefully rubbed the bare branch dry with a piece of cloth, then cut notches all the way round the top and bottom ends and attached a leathery cord that he dug out from the inexhaustible contents of his rucksack. “Who wants it? Phil?”

  I shook my head.

  “Dianne?”

  She nodded and accepted the bow reverently. Her large eyes were shining in admiration both for the weapon and for the man who had made it. “Tomorrow,” he promised, “I’ll carve you an arrow to go with it.”

  To Dianne’s huge disappointment he didn’t get to fulfill his promise. That night we heard Glass and Kyle having a flaming row. Doors were flung open and slammed shut furiously. By the next morning the wood-carver with the beautiful hands and his green rucksack had disappeared. However, Kyle had left a farewell present—his army knife—and in the days that followed, Dianne was hardly to be seen. She had set out on the quest for an arrow worthy of her bow, and eventually struck lucky.

  “Where have you been practicing?” I now asked her.

  With a wide sweep of her arm she said, “In the woods.”

  We kept close to the riverbank, where the ground was soft and as densely overgrown as a jungle. The sultry air swarmed with all kinds of insects. Just one year ago, it suddenly went through my mind, Dianne had only to stretch out her hand for beetles and ladybirds to come and settle on it. She’d held an almost uncanny attraction for all manner of creatures, until Glass put a stop to it one night that I don’t like to think back to. She wasn’t able to curb her love of plants, however.

  Dianne used her bow to push aside the tangled undergrowth and strike a path to let us through. “Meadowsweet, valerian, comfrey.” She listed the names of all the pungent-smelling plants that Tereza had taught us on extended walks. “Touch-me-not, butterbur—Petasites hybrides—but only the leaves.”

  We battled our way through the brush for a quarter of an hour. Then, on the riverbank opposite, from its gaping black hole we saw the Big Eye staring at us fifteen feet away. Rising as tall as a man was the pipe at the center of a mound sparsely covered with vegetation. The mound was artificial, its sole purpose being to hold the pipe, from which melted snow and ice would shoot out in springtime like lava from a volcano. Now in the summer the stream had shrunk to no more than a rivulet that dribbled harmlessly into the river.

  “We’ve got to get across.”

  We left our shoes and socks behind on the bank and waded through the clear water up to our calves toward the Big Eye. From time to time single minnows shot out from under flat stones on the riverbed. The nearer we got to the crater-shaped funnel formed by the water falling down from the pipe, the deeper the water got. Soon it reached up to over our knees and lapped at the hem of Dianne’s thin white summer dress.

  Her hand shot up. “Stop!”

  Cautiously I stepped beside her to the edge of the funnel. “There’s one. A whopper!”

  As if weightless, the dark fish was floating halfway up the gravelly hollow. Idly it flipped its tail fin. From time to time it turned over on its side, its scales catching the sunlight in a silver-pink gleam.

  “A rainbow trout!”

  Dianne just nodded, not taking her eyes off the fish for a second. Intently she stretched out the bow, the arrow on the bowstring.

  “Will you get it?”

  “Bang in the middle. Don’t move.”

  She had as little knowledge of physics as I did; she didn’t know that water bends light. The arrow zoomed silently from the cord, missing its target by several inches. It left a trace of tiny bubbles under the surface of the water that bobbed about wildly as the fish shot away in a last flash of pearly pink.

  “Shit,” hissed Dianne.

  “I thought you’d practiced.”

  Some way away from us, the arrow bobbed up again. It spun round on the surface of the water for a moment before the current seized it and slowly bore it away. “I’ve only got the one. I’ll get it back.”

  Further up-river, the water became shallower, and at that point there was a wide ford, with flat stones placed at intervals, where at one time horse-drawn wagons had clattered across. Immediately behind the ford the river bent sharply to the left, and alders and clumps of tall reeds hid it from view.

  I followed Dianne as far as the ford, over which the arrow had by now happily sped on its way. Beyond the ford the water became deeper once more and the riverbed far more stony. I stayed standing where I was, laughing as she splashed through the river, her dress bunched up and the bow in one hand, making up the distance, when a shrill voice rang out across the water:

  “There they are, that filthy cunt’s brats.”

  I ducked and turned around, terrified. Standing on the ridge above the Big Eye was a group of children. There could have been six or seven of them; it was hard to make out, as they had the sun behind them and their outlines blurred into one another. But unmistakable was the one who was leading them on. It was the Hulk. He stood slightly to one side, his fat hands on his hips, and he was spraying aggression like sparks from a blazing firecracker.

  Everyone kne
w the Hulk. At school he made himself unpleasantly conspicuous, not just because of his high voice, which was in sharp contrast to his bulk and strength, but because essentially he was a brutal thug, feared by all those to whom he denied the favor of being included among his friends. Neither Dianne or I was a friend of his. Up to now we had imagined that we weren’t his enemies either.

  “Dianne?” I whispered. She must have seen the children, heard the Hulk. But she wasn’t there anymore; she had disappeared beyond the bend in the river.

  Done a runner; I thought. My legs seemed paralyzed, my feet frozen solid in the suddenly icy water. The phalanx of children fanned out, and now I could count them. Including the Hulk, there were seven of them. I knew some of them by sight.

  “The girl’s done a runner.”

  “We’ll still get her.”

  They let the Hulk take the lead. He was leader of the pack, he had the right to attack the prey; the others would have to content themselves with pathetic pickings. Nimbly the Hulk slid down the sandy hillock. Then he slowed down and, crossing the ford at an almost leisurely pace, advanced toward me. He was a whole head taller than me, and when he finally stood in front of me, I had to look up at him.

  “Your mother’s a filthy cunt. You know that, don’t you?”

  When he spoke quietly, his voice sounded less shrill. I noticed a tiny corner missing from one of his incisors. His nose was spotted with freckles.

  “Say it: ‘My mother is a filthy cunt.’ ”

  I shook my head. He was going to beat me up no matter what happened, and he wasn’t likely to fight fair. I was about to get a thrashing worse that I had ever imagined in my worst nightmares. The Hulk was going to kill me, and I wasn’t going to defend myself for fear that I might hurt him—an insane idea. But all these terrors couldn’t dispel the thought that my sister had dropped me in it and run away.