The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  Our strange friendship came to an end when we discovered a bird’s nest on one of our expeditions. The nest had been built in a forked branch much too close to the floor of the wood. Five young blackbirds were sitting in it, and the parent bird was nowhere to be seen. The nestlings were crouching down, and it was only when I gently touched the edge of the nest with my finger that they stretched out their necks and opened their hungry beaks. “Oh, look, Wolf, how cute!” I said.

  “Bang!” came the monotone whisper, and with a flash from the muzzle that Wolf aimed at the first defenseless down-covered back, the tiny body burst open with a spurt of blood and torn flesh.

  I stood as if frozen to the spot as Wolf reloaded and shot, reloaded and shot; to this day I don’t know why I didn’t hurl myself at him to stop him. Finally he let the gun drop. Then he sat down on the ground and began to cry. “Poor little birds,” he wailed, “poor little birds.”

  And something happened to his forehead: it became furrowed, but it didn’t look as if Wolf had anything whatsoever to do with this. No, it appeared much more as if his forehead was being moved, as if an invisible, bitter wind was sweeping across the face and was creating deep waves between the hairline and the eyebrows.

  The sight of this utterly horrified me. I left Wolf under the tree and ran and stumbled back to Visible, overcome with the fiercest shame. There I locked myself into the bathroom and cried for hours on end, not for the five extinguished lives of the birds but for the extinguished life of my one and only friend, Wolf.

  Later on, tired and exhausted, I went to the bedroom that Dianne and I shared, and took Paleiko from his appointed place on the shelf. “Why ever did he do that?” I whispered.

  Because he is very, very unhappy, Paleiko replied. His misery has made him sick. Sick at heart and sick in his head.

  Cant he go to a doctor?

  Maybe, but a doctor can help him only if Wolf wants to be helped.

  And why doesn’t he?

  Because his grief won’t allow him to.

  That same day I decided to leave the room that Dianne and I shared and have one to myself. I took my bed apart, in order to reassemble it in my new abode, but then changed my mind and just took the mattress with me. I took the various parts of the bed up to the attic, which I entered for the first time, my heart pounding. Spiderwebs hung between the dusty wooden beams, from which gray wasps’ nests dangled like small balloons that crackled at the slightest touch and crumbled into dust. I found ancient pieces of broken furniture, stacks of yellowed journals and boxes, and cartons filled with useless junk. I didn’t find either Sleeping Beauty or her prince. If they had ever existed up here, they’d probably been spirited away by Wolf to his dark domain.

  We are standing under the leafy canopy of an ancient chestnut tree in the schoolyard. Kat is sipping milk from a plastic cup. Sunlight seeps through the matte green foliage and falls on her blond hair. August is slowly coming to an end, and the days are getting noticeably shorter. Summer is fading and losing its vigor.

  “He collects stuff,” I say.

  “What?”

  “The Runner. He collects some kind of stuff.”

  I point at Nicholas, who is standing aside from the general break-time tumult with a couple of boys from our year, undoubtedly members of his ever-expanding fan club. Last weekend he came in first in the long-distance event at the regional trials.

  “I’ve noticed it several times,” I continue. “Once on the way to the sports ground, then here in the schoolyard. The other day he even fished something out of the wastepaper basket in the classroom.”

  “What was it?”

  “Don’t know. I was always too far away.”

  “You’re mad, you know.”

  “Am not.”

  As if he heard what we were saying, and to prove Kat wrong, Nicholas drops to his knees without moving away from his circle of admirers. He looks as if he’s just going to tie a shoelace. His right hand reaches for something on the ground beside him; as he stands up again, his hand disappears in his trouser pocket. The entire operation is so casual, without any attempt at concealment, that I’m hardly surprised that neither Kat nor anyone else has noticed. It’s like that famous story by Edgar Allan Poe where a number of people are hunting desperately for an important letter, turning a room upside down several times over, only to find in the end that the document has been stuck in a picture frame on the wall all along, for everyone to see.

  “Well?”

  “Could be chestnuts,” she says, unmoved. “He ought to leave those to the younger kids.”

  I point upward, to one of the trees. “They don’t start coming down for another week at the earliest.”

  Kat shrugs indifferently. “D’you want me to drop my milk cup at his feet? Maybe he’ll pick that up too. Save me going to the trash can.”

  “That’s definitely not what he’s after.”

  It’s not litter he’s collecting. There’s all kinds of stuff lying around in the schoolyard. Things that have been carelessly dropped or lost. You just have to take the trouble to look properly—a button here, there a comb with broken teeth, a pencil stub, a book of matches, a small lapel pin, maybe a dime. I’m certain that nothing escapes Nicholas’s beady eye. But he’s choosy, and it’s a mystery what criteria he applies for either ignoring one of these objects or picking it up and pocketing it.

  “What d’you think he does with these things?”

  “Why don’t you ask him if you’re so interested? Or don’t you dare?” The bell goes for the end of recess, mingling with the sound of Kat crushing her plastic carton.

  “What’s up? Aren’t you coming?”

  I follow her in silence. Without knowing it, her question has hit my major problem of the moment right on the nail: I’ve stopped trying to make The Runner notice me. All the same, all my thoughts incessantly and obstinately appear to center on the tip of a compass needle that unfailingly stays pointed at Nicholas with stubborn persistence. He has been spooking my dreams for quite a while now. In the daytime, I lose myself in fantasies in which his arms enclose me, or his long legs, which work like well-oiled pistons on the track, rub against mine. I kiss his slender hands, which remind me almost painfully of those of Kyle, the wood-carver. At night I suddenly wake up, convinced that he has just now been standing by my bed, bending over me; blinking in the darkness, I search for his face with its sculptured lines and the glowing eyes. I don’t dare to speak to him. For fear of a rebuff, I prolong my wait.

  During the next lesson, Handel puts a further damper on my unfulfilled desires. “Now take a close look, ladies and gentlemen, and tell me what you see,” he challenges us as once again he imposes one of his notorious intellectual digressions on the math class.

  He minces to one side. Sticky tape attaches a poster to the board—a glossy double-spread photo of a naked woman, characterless, plastic, and yet arousing, of the kind to be found in any men’s magazine. Chairs scrape noisily and the class resounds with enthusiastic whistles.

  “Why don’t I see any naked men?” objects Kat beside me, loud enough for Handel to hear. He gives the merest suggestion of a slightly ironic bow in her direction, which is met with a gracious nod from Kat. I’m aware that for years he has been monitoring Kat’s progress in violin playing from a distance with approval.

  “Where did you get that pinup?” someone calls out from a back row.

  “Never mind.” The answer comes with a snort of displeasure. Handel spreads his plump lingers and with a dramatic gesture raises both arms as if to bless the class. “What do you see?”

  Nicholas’s verdict is to disregard the poster and study his fingernails instead. Handel lowers his fat hands in order to stick three more posters on the board in rapid succession. A reproduction of an Expressionist painting, hard-edged surfaces and colors, seemingly born of feverish ravings. An advertisement for an insurance company—a family with a child in front of their home, and a lively dog romping in a poison-green garden. Finally a gr
ainy enlargement of a photograph of a coastal scene—cliffs like the fangs of a long-extinct creature, the sea one seething blue mass.

  “You must learn to abstract,” says Handel. He has stepped beside the board, his hands folded, his index fingers nervously tapping each other. “Look behind things, distrust the superficial. Do not let yourselves be deceived, and do not deceive yourselves. What do you see?”

  What I see is Nicholas slowly closing his dark eyes and nodding.

  I often look at the two wall charts taken five years ago from the old school cellar, North America and the world. At the time, after the frightening incident with Wolf that prompted my move to the first floor of Visible, I immediately hung the maps on a wall in my new room. I dug out all the postcards that Gable had ever sent us and began to hunt for all the exotic places they referred to on the map of the world, marking them with red-topped pins. I stuck green pins into countries and towns, oceans, and islands that I wanted to visit sometime, either because of their beautifully mysterious-sounding names or simply because they had famous buildings or wonders of nature to admire. Each green pin was a visual affirmation for me of my intention one day to turn my back on the town and on Visible.

  On the opposite wall, sitting in his special place up on a shelf, is Paleiko, staring straight across the room at these maps. His big-eyed white gaze from the black of his Moor’s face is full of disbelief and distrust. The crystal embedded in his forehead sparkles like a small star. Paleiko hasn’t opened his mouth for years—and never will again, of that I am sure. And yet I sometimes believe I can see his lips move in a dark whisper.

  You’ll never do it, Phil.

  Yes, I will, you lousy spoilsport.

  I’ll believe it when I see it.

  You can’t see anything. You’re blind; your eyes are just white blobs of color on black porcelain. What’s to stop me from disappearing from here?

  Every single additional day that you spend here. You’re getting used to the world of the Little People. Your footprints are sinking deeper with every step you take here. Your horizon shrinks each time you look out of the window.

  You can’t judge. I’m stronger than you think, Paleiko.

  You’re weaker than you think.

  Sorry, old friend, I don’t see it that way.

  Really? Then you’re the one who’s blind, Phil.

  I don’t like Paleiko’s distrustful gaze, nor do I trust his admonishing criticisms. The simplest thing would be to turn the doll around to stop it seeing the two maps and, best of all, me. But I don’t do so, because I believe that Tereza gave Paleiko to me for a good reason. Those who don’t learn to watch out for themselves need a guardian to watch over them.

  chapter 7

  on board the nautilus

  The library at Visible is huge, flooded with light at all times of year, thanks to wide double French doors. Wooden strips divide the glass up into a lattice, but the paint on the dividing strips has long since flaked off. Grimy glass panes that haven’t been cleaned for an eternity split the daylight passing through into radiant oblique shafts—Glass calls this phenomenon “God’s Angers” because they resemble the fanned-out sunbeams that fall on the land on some days when the clouds suddenly open out, as if skimming it with laser beams.

  The French doors open out onto a small terrace bordered by a marble balustrade. Three wide steps lead down from here to the rear part of the garden. The steps are cracked and over the years and decades weeds and tender creepers have lodged in the gaps and worked their way patiently toward the glass doors, where in summertime they sway like a green carpet. In winter wind-driven drifts of snow pile up against the doors.

  Inside the library innumerable shelves cover each wall up to the high ceiling. When Glass arrived in Visible the bookshelves were practically empty, covered by nothing but dust and twenty to thirty well-thumbed novels. Stella had been no great bookworm. But at some time there must have been real books here, for the smell of leather-bound volumes and moldering, yellowed paper hangs in the air.

  When Dianne and I discovered the library we instantly seized on it as our playroom. We chalked hopscotch squares on the parquet floor, which groaned and creaked at each jump. Later, when the game had lost its charm and the chalk marks were smudged beyond recognition, I would often make my way to the library on my own. I would stand in the middle of the high-ceilinged room, bathing in the light of God’s fingers, and picture to myself the shelves magically filling up. I had only to close my eyes; as soon as I opened them again, there would be thousands of books, squeezed in together cover to cover, each one a treasure awaiting discovery.

  For a long time the shelves remained as empty as when I had first seen them. The few picture books that Glass brought with her when she returned home exhausted after work didn’t seem worthy of a place in the library. I didn’t have any other books of my own, and Stella’s novels were uninteresting to a child. Seated in the burgundy armchair, Tereza used to read us stories and fairy tales every night by candlelight; observing my rapt attention, she advised me to quench my thirst for more by visiting the town’s library.

  I soon began to bring whole armfuls of books to Visible, and I placed the old armchair in the middle of the library. I made this shabby armchair my throne; seated on it, I would be the creator of worlds, king in the eye of a storm of stories that produced a whirlwind of life around me as I read the books. The backs of the bookshelves splintered apart under the sword thrusts of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table; thundering black waves high as houses crashed around Moby Dick, the white whale, as he rose out of the parquet floor; the tiny dwarfs of Liliput threw pin-sized grappling hooks toward me; and on board the Nautilus, side by side with Captain Nemo, I explored the depths of a cold, terrifying world twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

  Sometimes it was easy to escape from reality. I could totally cut it out for days, sometimes for weeks on end. The books I borrowed transported me into adventures that were as vivid and different from one another as the tales of the Thousand and One Nights, and always had the same effect: they enveloped me like a protective cloak and hid me from the Little People, from the world out there. This was the reason I loved the library. For me it was the center of the world.

  Ironically it was to be the books owned by Dianne that eventually filled some of the shelves—not books in the true sense, but about three dozen massive hand-bound volumes with soft leather covers whose pages concealed one of Diannes secretively hoarded treasures: the herbaries of Tereza’s father. Countless plants from all over the world were assembled in them, minute details from the colorful cosmos of botanical life, meticulously pressed and cataloged more than twenty years earlier by the professor in a work of painstaking research.

  The herbaries were among the few things of value that Tereza had kept from her late father’s possessions. A lot of furniture and all sorts of bits and pieces either had been sold or ended up dumped. Tereza hated reminders. In her opinion they kept people nailed down in the past and prevented them from moving on. As she declared ever more frequently on our summer walks together that Dianne showed an unflagging interest in plants that went far beyond the mere knowledge of their names, she forthwith handed over the herbaries to her.

  Dianne couldn’t be separated from these volumes. Not a week went by when she didn’t make her way to the library, where she would carefully dust the old tomes before stretching out on her stomach to leaf through them for hours on end. As she did so, she would usually have a world atlas at her side—the only present she had ever accepted from Gable—to track down the exact places where the native and exotic plants had been found. The names of the continents and countries, besides a wealth of other information, were entered on each of the pages next to the pressed plants—the exact place of origin, the growth period, the composition and particular features of the soil, the components of the flower head, foliage, and roots, and their pharmaceutical uses. Eventually Dianne began collecting plants herself, and soon her own herbaries
were taking their place on the high shelves alongside those already there. A small room diagonally opposite the library gradually filled up with utensils needed for collecting, classifying, and pressing: a specimen container, a plant press, a variety of magnifying glasses, and even a small microscope, a birthday present from Glass that Dianne had asked for. Several compartments on a wobbly old set of shelves housed brightly colored small pots and screw-top glass jars filled with crushed leaves, dried pieces of root, and plant seeds. Every one of them was labeled in Dianne’s childish scrawl. I would often sneak into this room to admire the treasures respectfully and study the Latin names on the labels, but I never touched anything. Even more often I would stand in front of the bookshelves in the library and aimlessly look through the many herbaries, not from any scientific interest but simply attracted by their beauty and color. I still do so today, and when I feel like reading I prefer the library by far to any of the other rooms in Visible.

  Three years ago Glass also began to go to the library, in which she had previously shown not the slightest interest. On my wanderings in the garden, I can observe her through the double glass doors. She sits on my story throne, her hands loosely resting on its arms. She always turns to the herbaries, with her eyes sometimes open, but mostly closed; at such times I’m never quite sure whether she’s asleep or just day-dreaming. Since I never see her turning the pages of a book or one of the herbaries, I assume that she’s just after some peace and quiet—although there any number of other rooms in Visible, where she could find both. Glass is the rarest visitor to this room, where stories begin and end.