The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “But why did the prince kiss Sleeping Beauty?” Dianne wanted to know.

  “Because he was in love.”

  “How could he be in love with Sleeping Beauty when he didn’t even know her?”

  “Because that’s how things just happen sometimes.” Tereza closed the book of fairy stories and let herself sink back against the burgundy upholstery of the armchair, promptly making part of its stuffing shoot out with an indignant creak. As she leaned back the light of the candles on our bedside table made her eyes seem no more than two gleaming silver-gray specks.

  Dianne pulled at one of her earlobes thoughtfully, her lower lip pouting, visibly dissatisfied with Tereza’s answer. I couldn’t understand her disbelief. She was being utterly unromantic. For the prince to love Sleeping Beauty was a law of nature, and you simply didn’t question laws of nature. What bothered me was a problem of a much more practical nature. “Where do they live now, the prince and Sleeping Beauty?” “What d’you mean?”

  “You said they lived happily ever after.”

  “Oh, I see …” Now it was Tereza’s turn to pluck at her earlobe. “Well, I expect they live in a beautiful castle.”

  “Like the one on the castle hill in the town?”

  “No, that’s far too small and crummy. Real princes and princesses have to have at least … well, let’s say about a hundred rooms.”

  A daring thought began forming in my head. “Tereza, are there a hundred rooms in Visible?”

  “Definitely,” came the answer from the burgundy armchair. “At the very least.”

  My head was spinning. “Then maybe Sleeping Beauty and the prince have been living here all the time, and we just haven’t seen them yet.”

  Dianne gave a skeptical snort.

  “Could be,” said Tereza. And then, after a lengthy pause that drove me nearly wild, she added: “Now that I come to think about it, I’m really quite certain that you’re right.”

  I threw back the blanket, jumped out of bed, and ran across the cold parquet floor in my bare feet. Very cautiously I opened the bedroom door and peeked down the corridor expectantly. To the left and right the corridor disappeared in the impenetrable dark. Not a sign of either Sleeping Beauty, the handsome prince, or the royal household awakened after one hundred years’ sleep. I slammed the door in disappointment and stormed back to bed.

  “Really?” I whispered. “Here in the house?”

  Tereza nodded earnestly and bent down over us. Her gaze slowly moved up toward the ceiling and then back down again just as slowly. She spoke so softly that I wasn’t sure whether I was actually hearing the words or just reading her lips. “If you ask me, Sleeping Beauty and her prince do live up there in the attic. They live there, in love forever. But there’s one thing they don’t have. D’you know what it is?”

  Dianne and I both shook our heads. As I hung on Tereza’s words in suspense, waiting for her to say more, it suddenly came to me that we would never be able to visit Sleeping Beauty and the prince. Up to now, Dianne and I had never been up into the attic. At night there were terrifying sounds rampaging about up there—dormice, martens, or squirrels, Glass maintained, or possibly even mice. But Dianne and I weren’t stupid. We knew perfectly well that those noises were made by nightmarish creatures, the most monstrous of monsters, who ever since the beginning of time had been just waiting for two little idiots like us to go up into the attic so that they could use their stumpy yellow teeth to bite our stupid heads off.

  “Come on, tell us!” I thumped Tereza on the knee with my list. “Tell us, what is it they don’t have?”

  “Sleeping Beauty and the prince don’t have … popcorn!” yelled Tereza, and in an instant Dianne and I had pushed her aside, shrieking our way ahead of her to the kitchen, which was soon filled with the smell of melted butter and the snapping little pops of bursting corn.

  Going up into the bewitched attic was simply not an issue. But as I couldn’t stop thinking about the story of Sleeping Beauty, the next day I pressed Dianne into playing a game where we acted it out. We ransacked Glass’s wardrobe and used everything that fell into our hands—brightly colored semitransparent lengths of fabric that our mother used for tying up her hair, short skirts, nylon stockings in every conceivable color, belts with all manner of decorations—to dress ourselves up in fantastic costumes. We ran out into the garden, returning with armfuls of wild scented roses that we spread all over the bedroom. We took makeup, lipstick, and powder and painted our faces.

  But in spite of all these preparations Sleeping Beauty never did get to have its premiere, and that was all because of Dianne. I used all my powers of persuasion to talk her round, but she stubbornly shook her waxen powdered face, which I had taken such care to make up, and kept her scarlet lips firmly pressed together. She simply could not bring herself to climb onto our mother’s bed, where I lay, and wake me with a kiss.

  That evening, incensed and close to tears, I complained about this to Tereza, and she put her arms round me. She let me bury my face in her red hair, which smelled comfortingly of oranges and almonds. “Don’t let it upset you, Phil,” she whispered. “I know just how you feel. You know, I always wanted to be the prince. But no one ever let me.”

  “Why not?”

  “That’s a damn good question, my little one.” Tereza loosened her embrace and took my face in her hands. She kissed me on the forehead, then ruffled my hair with one hand and asked, “Has anyone ever told you how sweet your sticking-out ears make you look?”

  Nicholas is so good at sports that the school is toying with the idea of providing him with a personal trainer. His specialty is long-distance running. Soon everyone is calling him the Runner.

  He has a sports class early on Thursday afternoons, immediately after my track and field athletics lesson. For the next three weeks, instead of going straight home after my class at the sports ground at the edge of the town, I wait there for a further hour. I shower, change, and go and sit in the shade on one of the spectator benches with an open book on my knees and pretend to be reading.

  The country is in the grip of summer. The days are blindingly brilliant, sharpening every contour, so that a single blade of grass looks like a green spear and the sky like crystal-clear water, so that only the force of gravity stops you from plunging into it.

  Staring straight ahead into space, the Runner covers lap after lap on the rust-red track, apparently with the greatest of ease. It’s fun to watch him. Normally his shoulders are imperceptibly hunched forward, as if constantly on the alert to defend himself if need be. But as he runs, every sign of tension falls away. He appears to float; his strides don’t raise the minutest grains of sand, giving the impression that his feet don’t actually make contact with the ground.

  Just as the Runner doesn’t seem to be aware of my presence on the sports ground, he likewise doesn’t seem to notice me surreptitiously looking at him in school. Math is the only subject where we’re in the same class.

  In order to attract Nicholas’s attention, I decide to listen to Handel as he drifts from mathematics to philosophy and mental acrobatics. I activate the left half of my brain and do my best to keep up my end in the discussions that arise from time to time, which Handel registers with one knowing eyebrow quizzically raised but which totally escapes the notice of the Runner.

  It doesn’t take long for me to feel like a complete idiot.

  Before Kat has a chance to run a critical examination of my suddenly awakened interest in discourses about emotion and reason, it has come to an end. After three weeks of observation sessions at the sports field, I put a stop to those as well. I get the feeling that in that time I have become personally acquainted with every single leg muscle belonging to the Runner. He proves to be just as reticent, if not as monosyllabic as I originally judged him to be. Contrary to my expectations, he doesn’t prove to be a loner, though. Nicholas never needs to be the one to start a conversation; it’s the others who approach him of their own accord. When questioned, he
gives short but interested replies, accompanied by a noncommittal smile, so there is never the uncomfortable feeling that he may have felt in any way bothered. It’s only when he goes off to run that he sets himself apart. Then he avoids any kind of conversation and stands alone at the edge of the track, nervously limbering up, as he waits for the starting signal. From that moment on, each of his movements is as predictable as those of a mechanical wind-up doll. Running absorbs him utterly. Not until he passes the finish line and with lips firmly pressed together casts a brief glance—never satisfied—at the stopwatch does he change back to his usual self. Then he joins the other pupils and shortly after leaves the sports field, laughing and jostling shoulders with the rest of them.

  Good athletes are always popular. Admirers buzz around Nicholas like bees around a honey pot.

  “Types like that arouse primordial instincts,” is Kat’s comment as she sees me watching him. “The pack, you know.”

  “What d’you mean by the pack?”

  “It relies on the fastest and strongest member of the pack to survive. That’s why women are also attracted to guys like that.” She grins. “They can scent good genetic material.”

  “If it’s only that, then why didn’t you stay with Thomas?”

  “Oh, don’t be so stupid!” she snaps angrily. “What I just said was true of the Stone Age. Meanwhile, there’s far more to it than that. Or do you still see mankind running around in packs?”

  “Well, to be honest …”

  “A culture develops only when reason enters the stage. Mind over muscle, diplomacy in place of brute force.” She nods, agreeing with herself.

  “You sound like Handel.”

  Kat shakes her head. “No, in this case like my father in one of his liberal onsets. And he’s right.”

  The reasons for the Runner’s popularity are more or less all the same to me. Fact is, he has friends. The jaunty ease of Nicholas’s manner with others, making them Hock around him and bond with him, has a corrosive effect on me in a very short time. Love takes longer. It is slow in coming, like a creeping sickness, and takes hold around my heart like the ivy that almost suffocates Visible in the summertime.

  ________

  Years ago Wolf was the only boy with whom—for a short while—I entered into a kind of friendship. He had the most expressionless eyes I had ever seen, and was really and truly mad. His soul was broken and cold as liquid nitrogen.

  The Battle of the Big Eye had won Dianne and me respect; after that we were never bothered again. But at the same time it effectively barred the way to our making friends—Dianne’s arrow had sunk deep into the flesh of the Little People, and it was as if it discharged a black poison at regular intervals to remind everyone that we were dangerous and to be avoided at all costs. If at night we figured in the dreams of other children—as I firmly believed we did—it was not as heroes, but as fearsome nightmarish creatures. In the daytime the young dreamers nervously avoided us, and the passing of time did nothing to change this.

  I persuaded myself that I didn’t need the friendship of other children or miss it. Neither was true. Kat was the first to resist the restrictions her parents tried to impose on her. I didn’t get to know her properly until later. And Dianne was often not enough for me. Sometimes I would catch myself silently comparing her with a boy of my age, with whom I could wander through the fields, to whom I might confide my secrets as we each grazed our knees.

  It was the whispering that went on as we entered the next year that drew my attention to Wolf, a pale boy who always seemed as if he wasn’t quite all there, small for his age, who kept his distance from the other children and seemed to be the same kind of loner as I myself was. “He lives alone with his father” went the brief comments in the playground during recess. “His mother killed herself.”

  In class he sat alone at a table, just as I likewise sat alone. I watched him. He appeared strangely immobile and feeble. He often seemed to be looking straight through the other pupils at some invisible horizon miles away. Finally, with a pounding heart, I spoke to him and asked whether he would like to sit next to me. Wolf examined me through hooded distrustful eyes.

  “Why?” he wanted to know.

  “My father is dead,” I said.

  For weeks on end I was afraid that Wolf might discover the lie and I would once again be just as alone as before. But he never asked me about my supposedly dead father; it was enough to have me as a friend. It was not in his nature to ask about things, and he didn’t talk much at all, which suited me fine. At the same time he refused to answer certain questions. When I wanted to know where he had got the key for the old school cellar from, which he presented me with one day in his quiet level fashion, he just shook his head without saying a word. He had dry, flaxen blond hair that I would have liked to touch.

  We went down to the cellar many times, always in the afternoon, when we could be sure that the school was deserted. The entrance was behind the main school building, a low wooden door with iron hinges speckled with rust, and—judging by the overgrown vegetation in front of it—it probably hadn’t been opened for ages. There was a light switch behind the door, but it didn’t work. Not until you had gone down by way of a rickety staircase and groped about fifteen feet through total darkness and astonishing cold was there another switch on one of the walls. When you switched it on, you found yourself in a strange alien world.

  Rotten wooden walls were all that divided up the cellar into rooms. Naked bulbs shone on countless piles of discarded books, battered atlases, and faded wall maps long since overtaken by history. Down here time had come to an unexpected standstill. Everything breathed decay; even the air tasted old, dusty, and gray.

  “There aren’t even any spiders down here,” Wolf once observed.

  I struggled with myself for a long time before stealing two of the ancient wall charts. One of them was an opened-out geodetic view of the globe, and the other showed North America. Wolf helped me to roll up the maps. I let my finger trace along the East Coast of the United States. Boston was one of the many fat red dots. I took both the maps with me to Visible. No one was going to miss them.

  It was only on our second visit that Wolf and I discovered the display cabinets standing in the far corner of the cellar. Staring out at us through the glass doors were the sad, false eyes of stuffed animals, their fur mangy with bald patches, their plumage dull and faded. There were fragile little skeletons, many different colored birds’ eggs, and broken bees’ honeycombs, thin as parchment. But what most fascinated us was a row of tall glass cylinders filled with a pale yellow fluid, sealed to make them airtight. They contained fish and rats, frogs and birds, whose bodies and heads had been opened up to reveal chestnut-sized knotty brains, strange organs, and intertwined innards, all faded to a uniform gray.

  With this discovery, Wolf lost interest in all the other objects stored in the cellar.

  He was invariably drawn to these display cabinets, where his fingers would leave greasy marks as he followed the tracery of collapsed blood vessels and branching networks of fine nerves. On one occasion I laughed out loud, I don’t remember why. Wolf started as if I had slapped him. He waved his arms, his face turning bright red. “You must keep quiet,’’ he hissed, “or you’ll wake them up. They’re sleeping.”

  That night I dreamed of animals staring at me from dead, milk-white button eyes. They wriggled and twisted their open bodies, trying desperately to gasp for air in this yellow broth that preserved them for eternity. I woke up screaming and saw the pale face of Dianne bending over me. “That’s what comes from leaving me on my own all the time,” she whispered.

  She got back into her bed, turned on her side, and pointedly turned her back to me. I felt miserable, because in the past weeks I had indeed neglected her, but my bad conscience was outweighed by the desire, the longing, the need for Wolf’s friendship.

  He invited me to his house, where he showed me a picture of his mother, a black-and-white photo of a beautiful young wom
an with long blond hair almost down to her hips. She had killed herself when Wolf was five years old—had lain down on her bed and with the same scissors first cut off her long hair and then opened the arteries running from her elbow to her wrist. Wolf had sat beside her motionless, his lap covered with blond locks, and watched as his mother’s life ebbed away into a stained sheet.

  There were times, sometimes lasting mere seconds, when I fancied Wolf was reliving that day; his normally hooded eyes clouded over completely, and he was utterly unapproachable. I only noticed these moments because I sat next to him, while our teacher took them for inattention. Once I asked him whether he missed his dead mother as much as I missed my dead father—the purpose of the question merely stemming from the desire to refresh my lie from time to time.

  “She isn’t dead,” answered Wolf, placing a hand on my shoulder as if speaking to an uncomprehending child. “She’s only gone to sleep. When she wakes up again, I’m going to give her back her hair.”

  Now I understood why Wolf was so fascinated by the dead creatures in the display cases. I also realized that he was completely mad, and on more than one occasion Paleiko whispered to me, urging me to keep away from this blond boy whose rare smiles were more fleeting than the beating of a hummingbird’s wing. But Wolf was my only friend. Just knowing he existed filled me with a hitherto unknown feeling of happiness that I didn’t want to give up for anything in the world. He never let me know what I meant to him. Maybe he just needed someone to accompany him from time to time on his excursions into darkness.

  Wolf’s father was a pale-skinned, taciturn man who, since the death of his wife, hid himself away from the world, and consequently I rarely got to see him. He never seemed to laugh, and I never saw him touch Wolf affectionately. If he was aware—which I doubt—that his son had linked up with the most insignificant pariah in town, it made no odds to him. He owned an air gun, and Wolf and I would often take this weapon out, collecting old tin cans and other garbage on the way, set these lifeless targets up on ledges or tree stumps, and shoot at them. Every time Wolf aimed he would whisper, “Bang!” It was a harmless but forbidden form of amusement, its main attraction being the thrill of expecting to be caught out at it.