The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

“Man, have you forgotten? The guy from the boarding school.”

  “Is that why you’re so edgy?”

  “I can feel it, Phil.” She takes my hand and plants it on her left breast and holds it in place. “Just there. This guy is going to make my life change course!”

  “What have you got in there? A compass?”

  “My heart’s in there, you idiot! My tiny heart that’s longing for love.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Two girls pass us and start giggling stupidly. I pull my hand away.

  “The other day you were singing quite a different tune. The other day the most you wanted was a guy who—”

  “The other day, the other day … That’s a million years ago, Phil! He who thinks changes his mind.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Nietzsche.”

  “Who’s Nietzsche? Is he good-looking?”

  A shock of blond hair appears beside us, pushes past me, and the next moment has disappeared in the crowd.

  Kat cranes her neck and looks for him. “Hey, wasn’t that Wolf?”

  “Yes, it was Wolf. What is it? Can we go in now?” I bend down to pick up my bag.

  “That guy gives me the creeps. He looks like a serial killer.”

  “Leave him alone, Kat, OK?”

  “Oh, excuse me!” She gives me a mocking smile. “I’d forgotten that you once had a thing with him.”

  “I did not! We were just friends, and that’s long ago. He probably doesn’t even remember who I am.”

  “You yourself said he was a nut case.”

  “Yes, he’s a sad sack, and now for heaven’s sake focus on your little heart, and leave me alone!”

  “My, my! We are touchy today.” She nudges a little boy from a lower grade who’s just caught up with her. “He is touchy today, don’t you think?”

  The boy shrinks back in terror, like a snail withdrawing its horns, and rushes off.

  “Come on, now.” I’ve had enough of Kat’s squabbling. “You can look for the new guy during recess.”

  “Don’t even need to.” She ambles along beside me, and even the sound of the school bell doesn’t make her speed up. “We’re taking the same class. I’ve been having a bit of a rummage through Daddy’s files.”

  “Which class?”

  “Handel. Didn’t you get a timetable?”

  “Didn’t look at it.”

  Handel is the math teacher. The fact that he bears the same name as one of the greatest Baroque composers prompts him every now and again to spout about the relationship between music and mathematics and then go on about how a deeper understanding of these two abstract disciplines is linked to their both being processed in the left side of the brain.

  “The faculty of abstraction, ladies and gentlemen, is the basis of all reason, consequently of enlightenment. Reason, logic—anyone who does not cultivate this quality is as much at the mercy of his emotions as Neanderthal man was to the forces of nature. Deep down he will be unable to shake off the superstition that thunder and lightning are signs of divine wrath. He will, ladies and gentlemen, forever cower!”

  I am lousy at math, and unlike Kat I’m not particularly musical, and the explanations that Handel loves getting tied up in are frequently so abstract that after the fourth or fifth sentence I can hardly keep up, as a result of which I am bound to conclude that the left side of my brain must be atrophied— even if I do find myself distinctly at odds with the idea of cowering. Maybe Glass could give him remedial instruction and explain that the left side of American brains functions differently.

  “I’ve been thinking,” announced Kat as we cross the main building and reach the modern annex. Ahead of us pupils are fanning out toward different classrooms. “What would happen—just suppose—if one of these days you really did fall in love with a guy?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “Well, would you keep it a secret, or what? After all, no one here knows that you’re gay.”

  “Why don’t you try shouting a bit louder, so everyone will know?”

  “Oh, come on, tell me.”

  “I wouldn’t keep anything secret. Just saying it sounds totally stupid.”

  “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  Don’t I just—and how! It’s one of the blank areas on the map of my soul. Furious, I feel cornered and stop dead.

  “Kat, I don’t live on another planet, OK? I know perfectly well that this one-horse dump would be up in arms if I turned up with a boyfriend—which I would, if I had one. I also know that some sort of guardians of public morality would slip white hoods over their heads and come riding up on cattle to Visible at night and nail a dead cat to our door. And you should know that I wouldn’t give a shit!’’

  I walk on, faster than before. Kat trots along beside me. “No need to get so wound up! It was just a question.”

  A question she quite deliberately aimed right below the belt—the answer has to be theoretical. Turning up with a boyfriend is an experiment that’s still waiting to happen. It’ll be no picnic, that’s for sure—Tereza once assured me of that, and she should know—but it’s not something I’m scared of. The wary aura that’s enveloped and protected Dianne and me for years, ever since the Battle of the Big Eye, has never quite faded away. And I’m not helpless, I can defend myself. But aside from that, would I be able to live with being labeled? Well, I’ve had that all my life.

  “You know, in this case being open takes two, Phil.” Kat won’t let go. “What would you do if you had a boyfriend who wasn’t keen on being got at and who … I mean, well, would prefer to keep a relationship quiet?”

  “Relationship? That sounds like getting married.”

  “And you sound like your mother.”

  “Glass would never let a word like marry past her lips. She considers it obscene.”

  “Matter of opinion, don’t you think?” says Kat. “These people here consider it obscene that there are other things she puts in her mouth instead.”

  “The people here”—and I point to pupils arriving late and rushing past on either side of us—“are old enough to have their own opinions. What do they need to go dragging around their parents’ prejudices for?”

  “Because it’s easier than thinking for themselves.”

  “Does that also come from Nietzsche?”

  “No, from me.”

  We’ve reached the classroom. Kat with her great flair for dramatic entrances lets me go first so that she can then let the door slam violently behind her, with the result that twenty pairs of eyes send us startled looks, and the same number of mouths, which up to that moment had been prattling away cheerfully, now drop wide open.

  “Oh, yeah, Madam Headmistress!” a mocking voice calls from somewhere.

  “And the top of the morning to you too, toe rag,” Kat calls out across the classroom, switching the laughter in her favor. As conversations start up again we look for a table with two empty chairs. We’ve just sat down when the door swings open and Handel enters the room.

  There’s no denying that Handel also bears one of the distinctive hallmarks of the Baroque—namely, a certain amplitude and rotundity. He carries his protruding belly—witness to his love of the choice pleasures of the table—before him, obliging him to walk with small, almost mincing steps. The resulting impression of physical lethargy is hugely misleading—it is in direct contrast to his brilliant mental agility.

  Handel is not alone. He is followed by the newcomer, walking far enough behind him to demonstrate that he has not attached himself to the teacher’s shirttails from any lack of confidence. He stops when he gets to the blackboard, and I can see him only in profile. Handel purses his lips and gestures to the class to quiet down. If the degree of his popularity can be judged by the uproar greeting his arrival in the classroom, he is hugely popular. When the noise has died down, he nods to the new arrival, who now turns to the class.

  “Nocholas,” he briefly introduces himself, without adding his surname. Barely half those present
take any notice. I take a look at his face, and as my stomach shoots down to my knees at the speed of an elevator out of control, I think: At last—now I know who you are.

  When we were thirteen I gave Dianne a silver pendant for Christmas that I had come across while poking around in the cellar at Visible in among rotten wooden boxes and moldering cardboard cartons. In return I received a snow globe that Dianne maintained she had also found, without mentioning where. Maybe both of us scored such a hit with our presents because neither of us had given much thought to whether or not they would please the other.

  As far as the pendant—a sickle-shaped half moon—was concerned, Dianne acted as if it had always belonged to her and had just gone missing for a while. The silver was a bit tarnished, so she took it to a jeweler, who cleaned it till it shone, and talked my sister into buying a matching chain. A few small spots that the jeweler had been unable to remove stayed on the moon, but this didn’t diminish Dianne’s surprisingly overt delight with the present.

  For my part, I had scarcely unwrapped the snow globe when something strangely magical happened that cast a spell over me for days. Wherever I found myself standing or sitting I never tired of looking at the silvery white cloud that rose when I shook the globe. As soon as the shimmering snowstorm settled, a small dark house became visible, with orange-red flames shooting out from its tiny doors and windows. And what happened was that a few of the falling snowflakes would always settle on the darting tongues of flame. This was the contrast that fascinated me. How could something keep burning when snow was falling on it? What sort of flames were these that weren’t put out by cold or ice? When I asked Paleiko about it, he replied in such a soft whisper that I couldn’t understand him.

  A few days after the Christmas festivities Glass took me into town. Small clouds emerged each time we breathed out as we trudged across the freshly fallen snow through the silent wood. It was already getting dark when we reached the middle of the bridge leading across the stream.

  “Iced over,” said Glass. She placed her hands on the railing. From the corner of my eyes I could see she was sizing me up.

  I looked down at the rippled blue-gray ice reflecting the light from the street lamps.

  Broken reeds and bundles of lifeless grass coated with hoarfrost lined the banks.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Glass.

  “Nothing.”

  “You can’t think about nothing.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  I was thinking that the frozen stream was like a runway. Two or three years ago I might perhaps still have thought that an airplane might cut through the dark clouds of the winter sky and come in to land, propellers whirring. Out would step my father, who would whisk me off to America. Other children spent Christmas with their fathers.

  Glass sniffed noisily. Her hands tightened round the railing. “I’m pregnant, Phil, three months,” she said. “I want to have the baby. That’s not going to please your sister.”

  My skin tingled in the cold air. I knew that I was supposed to be glad. Instead what I felt was the sort of sympathy you have for a fledgling that has fallen out of the nest. All I could think was that just like Dianne and me, the baby would have no father.

  I remembered Martin’s green eyes, the smell of dark garden soil that had clung to him. I wished he was the father, or Kyle, whose beautiful hands had carved Dianne’s bow. But both men had disappeared years ago.

  “Dianne is bound to notice,” I said to Glass. “As soon as you get a big belly.”

  “I’ve no intention of keeping it secret from her.” She sounded almost furious. “But she doesn’t have to know right away, OK?”

  I nodded, knowing full well that by agreeing I was making myself her accomplice, and returned to staring down at the ice. If you looked hard enough, you could make out flattened air bubbles slowly drifting below. Then I looked up expectantly at the sky, but the dense cloud cover did not part.

  By the time we reached the marketplace it had started to snow again. The snow was falling so thickly that it muffled every sound, even softening the noise of cars gliding along through the streets as if in a time warp. Car headlights cast an eerie yellow light. From their position on the tall pedestal of the war memorial, two soldiers looked down on Glass and me with cold lifeless eyes. Most of the shop windows still had their Christmas displays, looking out of place. The holiday crush was over; by now people’s thoughts had turned to New Years.

  I stuck close to Glass. She wandered aimlessly from shop to shop, her cheeks flushed bright red and eyes glittering, apparently oblivious to the sidelong disapproving glances thrown at her by some of the passers-by. I was embarrassed that everybody knew her and that the Little People disliked her, and irritated that she clearly couldn’t care less. We were approaching the church at the northern end of the marketplace leading up to the castle hill when one of Glass’s clients crossed the road and recognized my mother. Instantly the woman drew her head down so that it disappeared inside her large coat collar, like a tortoise withdrawing into its shell. Nervously I slid my left hand into my coat pocket and felt for the smooth cool glass of the snow globe, which I’d been dragging around with me for days, and looked in another direction.

  That’s how I caught sight of the boy.

  Just a few feet away from Glass and me, he was standing at the top of the three steps leading up to the church door. As soon as he realized I was looking at him, a hint of a smile crossed his face. He was taller than me, and possibly a little older. Black hair tumbling across a white forehead. Eyes as dark as Dianne’s, and incredibly red lips.

  Glass had followed my gaze. With a sudden movement she raised her arm, beckoning the boy. There was no way he could not have noticed her, for she was standing right next to me. But he didn’t respond to her wave. He remained in front of the church door, still and motionless as a waxwork. He had stopped smiling, but his eyes shone brightly, burning holes in my coat.

  “Glass, stop that!’’

  My voice sounded strange to me. Glass laughed and waved once more. I reached for her outstretched arm, missed it, slipped on the icy pavement, and fell full length on the street. I could taste blood—I had bitten my lower lip—and, cursing, wished Glass to hell. By the time I managed to get to my feet again, my face bright red with shame, the boy had disappeared.

  “What was that for?” I barked at Glass. I was furious and confused. The incident was so embarrassing that I could have killed her. “Why did you wave at him?”

  Instead of answering, Glass pointed at a man and a woman plowing through the driving snow like leaves drifting in the wind. The man had a misshapen body and dragged his left leg as he walked. The woman’s face, half concealed by a fur cap, seemed to consist of parts that didn’t fit together, as if assembled by a drunken puppet master. Her mouth was barely visible, a hole no bigger than a dime, her breathing a faint whisper.

  “Just look at those poor wretches,” said Glass softly. And in a louder voice, “This town is a bloody sewer.”

  I had no idea what she meant by this, but her condescending tone of voice scared me. She placed her hands on my shoulders, bent down to me, and nodded in the direction of the man and woman disappearing behind a wall of snow, just like the burning house in the glass globe when I would shake it.

  “These people,” said Glass with a movement encompassing the entire marketplace, “have been sticking together for hundreds of years, and regard this as perfectly normal. But these same people will hate you when sooner or later you fall in love with a boy.”

  I was still furious with her. But I knew she was telling the truth. Visible was a magical place and Glass was an unusual mother, and the two together created laws that did not apply out here among the Little People. Up to then I had thought that Glass had taken me with her in order to tell me on the quiet that she was pregnant.

  But there would have been plenty of other opportunities to do so. Now I was wondering whether the point and purpose of our walk was to demonstra
te her contempt for Those Out There. As I recalled the expression on her face when she had spoken about the Little People, I shuddered.

  On the way home neither of us said a word. Not until we got home did I muster up all my courage and spoke to Glass.

  “Why did you wave to that boy?”

  She slipped off her boots, shook her long hair, and pulled it back at the neck as she reflected. “Because I could see that you fancied him,” she answered at last. “There is such a thing as love at first sight, you know. That can make you forget the cold and the winter.”

  “Have you ever fallen in love at first sight?”

  She straightened her shoulders. “A long time ago. Come on, I’ll make us a hot chocolate, darling.”

  Carelessly throwing her boots into a corner of the closet, Glass disappeared down the unlit hallway. She could find her way in the dark like a cat. As I took off my coat, I wondered whether she had been referring to my father.

  Then all other thoughts disappeared. My hands were scrabbling about deep in my coat pockets in the hunt for the snow globe, but all they came up with were a couple of snotty paper tissues. A second attempt proved equally unsuccessful. The snow globe had disappeared. I panicked. It must have rolled out of my pocket when I fell. The TV was blaring from Dianne’s room. She wouldn’t care if I’d lost her Christmas present, but I did. I shut my eyes to recall the image of the snow globe and waited for the piercing feeling of loss. Instead what drifted before my eyes, clear as a photo, was the face of the boy with the gleaming eyes, and my heart skipped a beat.

  I kept my shoes and coat on and ran back to the marketplace. All worries about the Little People were forgotten. I searched everywhere, but the snowstorm globe was nowhere to be seen or found.

  I’ve never forgotten that—you love in order to forget the cold and chase the winter away.

  It’s midnight before the storm breaks. It started building up in the morning and after that hung uncertain and leaden over the town. I put out the light in my room and stand at the window, listening to the rain come drumming down, washing away the dust from the trees and the sultriness from the air. Visible itself seems to be taking deep breaths of the cool air; it’s as if a sigh of relief is passing through the house. I start as the floorboards creak just in front of the door to my room. Outside ghostly flashes light up the sky; an unreal light illuminates each tree and gives each roof ridge on the other side of the stream new, sharp contours.