“First, on no account let him know he’s the first date you’ve ever had. That’ll make him just as nervous as you, and if a sexually aroused man is too nervous—”
“Glass, no one’s talking about sexual arousal here!”
“Second, never ask him if he loves you.”
“Why not?”
“If he says no, you’ll wish you’d never asked. If he says yes, you can’t be certain whether he’s just doing so to avoid an ugly scene. In both cases, you’ll be devastated.”
“But he might say yes and mean it.”
“How old is he?”
“Not as old as Michael.” It’s too dark to see if or how Glass reacts to this little sideswipe. “About eighteen.”
“Then he may still tell the truth.”
The floorboards creak as I shift my weight from one foot to the other. “And number three?”
“Wash under your armpits.”
“Very funny, Mom!”
“Good night, and see you at breakfast.”
“Stupid witch.”
“I love you too, darling.”
So much for motherly love, I think as I go back upstairs. If anything, the whole interlude has made me even more uneasy.
Following a sudden impulse, I run down the corridor straight up to Dianne’s room and knock on the door.
No answer.
I knock again, then carefully open the door. Dianne isn’t there. Moonlight seeps in through the curtainless windows, mirrored on the dull parquet flooring—it’s like stepping on fog. Dianne’s room is furnished even more sparsely than a doctor’s waiting room—an ancient armoire of Stella’s, a mattress on the floor covered with a plain bedspread, and beside it a small simple standard lamp. One single shelf holds a handful of books and all kinds of odds and ends. No posters or pictures on the whitewashed walls; the herbaries and books attesting to her love for plants are all in the library. In front of the window stands a rickety desk, its surface displaying an almost obsessive neatness—papers stacked edge to edge, pencils arranged in a row according to length, their sharpened points in a straight line.
It’s an unwritten law that none of us enters anyone else’s room, at least not in the person’s absence. My restlessness is the excuse I give myself for having done so. But in truth it’s sheer curiosity, prompted by Dianne’s nightly disappearance. The same curiosity makes me open the unlocked drawers of her desk.
Well, does it make yer feel good?
Yes, Annie… oh, yes!
Ever pinched money from yer mum’s purse?
Peeped under yer sister’s skirt?
Thought of naked boys and jerked yerself off?
The letters are in the middle drawer. Judging by the thickness of the envelopes that hold them, they must be fairly long. And there aren’t just two or three envelopes; there’s dozens of them, written, sealed, and never posted, for whatever reason. I eye every one of them, as if I might be able to see through them and read the contents, if only I stared long enough. Each envelope bears just one single word.
ZEPHYR
The name of a boy or a girl, a man or a woman? At any rate, it’s not someone I know or have ever heard of. Someone— maybe the girl at the bus stop—who induces Dianne to leave Visible in the middle of the night. Glass would have a fit if she ever found out. Since when has Dianne been going on these expeditions? How often has she been going out at night?
It suddenly strikes me as never before how Dianne and I have grown apart. Now, alone in her room, alone among her secrets, the letters in my hand, I have to think back to the Battle of the Big Eye. The day my sister placed herself protectively in front of me and paid for it with a stab wound seems an eternity ago. Love and loyalty are mutually dependent—at the time I took this for granted. Today there is little of either left between Dianne and me. In recent years I haven’t succeeded in any of my attempts to get close to her. But perhaps, I’m thinking now, I simply didn’t make enough of an effort, didn’t try hard enough. Last night when we were talking out on the veranda, even though it was more of an argument, at least it was something like a beginning.
I place the bundle of letters back in the drawer, move across to one of the windows, and look out at the cloudless night sky. The half moon shimmers, unreal and pale white like on overexposed photos. Mountains and valleys appear like dark ink spots on its surface. It looks so vivid that when I was a child I used to think I could reach out and grasp it.
Then I wrote: Once upon a time in the summer, there were three children, a dreamy boy with straw-colored hair and two girls, one prettier than the other, who were climbing down into the town sewer. They lost their way among the filth and sewage, and the indignant squeaking of startled rats rose out of the darkness.
The first girl began to scream loudly. She hoped that the echoes bouncing off the damp walls would show a way out of the labyrinth, but no voice was loud enough to penetrate the maze of vaulted tunnels.
The other girl spoke softly to the rats.
“Give us the silver pendant, the half moon you wear around your neck, ” demanded the Queen of the Rats. “Then one of my subjects will guide you back into the daylight. ”
“Agreed, ” replied the girl, “but let’s make a fair exchange. ”
Bowing respectfully, she handed the Queen of the Rats the pledge she had demanded, and then seized one of the creatures and blinded it, for only the blind, said the girl, find the light. That is how the three children got back to daylight.
Later the boy went back down into the sewer on his own. He had noted the route that the blind guide had taken, and so he had no difficulty in finding his way back to the spot where all hope had been lost yesterday or many weeks ago.
He had brought a knife with him. He used it to kill the rats and cut off the head of the Queen of the Rats. The pendant that he had come to fetch was undamaged. Just a few drops of black blood were left on it; they stuck to the gleaming silver and would not rub off. As the boy left the sewer, clutching the trophy in his hands, a gold light hung over the leaves on the trees.
That is how the summer came to an end.
That is how the moon got its spots.
That is how the straw-blond boy exchanged the pendant for a snow globe.
And woke up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
part two
knives
and
scars
chapter 9
gable’s
lonely
footsteps
Fog hangs over the hills, dense and heavy as the blue-gray smoke soon to rise from the fires in the fields marking the end of the potato harvest. The air is cold and tastes of withered leaves. Rain falls from the sky in broad transparent sheets. Not long now and sports will take place in the gym for the rest of the school year.
Nicholas takes his time. He runs several extra laps along the track, his gaze fixed straight ahead, the pace of his running steady, as if in harmony with the world. With the rain the track has lost its rust-red color; the sandy coating has turned a lumpy dark brown. Nicholas keeps running until the loud, raucous voices of the other pupils in the nearby changing cubicles have gone and the hot steamy air in the showers has cleared, until there’s no one left on the sports ground except him and me.
At some point he stops running, stands still, and plants his hands on his hips. He bends forward slightly from the waist. I can see his thorax going up and down, see small, swirling damp clouds of breath. The Runner spits on the ground; his feet scrape the damp sand. Only then does he raise his head, look across to the stand in my direction, and start moving.
“Glad you waited, Phil.”
I shrug. “It’s fun watching you.”
He’s standing right in front of me. He wipes the back of his hand across his forehead, where sweat and rain are indistinguishable, and looks at me searchingly, almost as if he’s spotted a lie. Then he drops his hand. “Are you coming?”
Without waiting for an answer, he turns and goes ahead. Dark stai
ns on his shirt mark the damp outlines of his spine. One behind the other, we enter the changing room, where the floor is covered with wet footprints. A forgotten clothes bag dangles from one of the clothes hooks. A cocktail of smells hangs in the air: sweat, deodorant, soap. I want to say something, anything, but it’s as if my mouth is clamped shut. Instead I watch Nicholas in silence as he gets undressed. His movements flow, smoothly, like a dancer’s. He slips out of his underpants, turns toward me, and stands in front of me naked. His body glows. I have a problem sustaining his gaze, even more of a problem not looking all the way down him. He takes a step toward me, uninhibited in his nakedness, and it’s as if light and air thicken.
“Have you showered yet?”
I nod.
He makes a strange, small movement with his hand; for a second I think he wants to put an arm round my shoulders, to draw me toward him. I begin to shiver.
“Phil?”
“Yes?”
It’s like bleeding. The rain has got heavier, and thousands of needle tips are pounding on the roof.
“Come on. Get undressed.”
I was fourteen when I was finally allowed to accompany Gable. Glass agreed to my going as a birthday present, and made far more of a fuss about the whole thing than I thought appropriate. I actually thought her permission a strange present. I’d asked for new trousers and, most important, for books, books of my own that I didn’t have to borrow under the eagle eyes of Mrs. Hebeler.
It was neither the South Seas nor the Atlantic or Indian Ocean that Gable took me to. It was none of the great oceans that I’d been dreaming of forever, but the eastern Mediterranean. After just one day on the not very open sea, my initial disappointment at the somewhat nonexotic destination gave way to huge enthusiasm. For two sunny weeks we cruised along the European coastline, and then we reached the Aegean. Gable had borrowed a medium-sized cabin cruiser from a friend who lived near Marseilles. I went on board at Marseilles after a train journey that had seemed endless, with me wishing it would never end. I’d spent most of the time staring out of the window and observing how the world seemed to grow ever larger and the sky ever higher. It was as if the entire universe was taking a deep breath in front of my eyes. I’d hardly eaten or drunk a thing, I was so excited.
Gable met me with a smile and a warm embrace. With a gesture like a king inviting me into his court, he waved me aboard. I was surprised how many people he knew, not just in France but also along the Italian coast, who were his friends. Gable had been cabin boy, ordinary seaman, and mate, and ended up as petty officer. This was how he’d made his way around the globe, and when he spoke about it, it was as if he was talking about centuries long ago.
“I used to let myself be hired by anyone who would take me. I wanted to see something of the world. But most of all I wanted freedom, and the only place to find freedom, Phil, is at sea! Four walls are no good for me, they stifle me. There’s only one thing worse—a coffin. I need wide-open spaces, an open view over the ocean. Nothing in the world can give you the illusion of vastness like the blank horizon.”
I was surprised to hear Gable using almost the same words that Stella had used to describe the vast view over the world seen from Visible. Glass had told me that Gable and Stella had never known each other, but sometimes when I looked at the photos of my aunt that were hung up in Visible, I imagined how well the two of them would have got on together, and thought that Stella would have made a far better wife for him than Alexa. She would have left Visible to go to sea with him. I pictured them as a couple—Stella with her proud, steely face and Gable with his sad eyes. Even when I was a child those eyes had puzzled me: to me they had seemed far too big for the face of a seafarer. I thought they should have been smaller, from squinting into the glistening brightness of the sunlight on the water, or from being screwed up against the wind rushing at them when the weather was rough.
Gable showed me all over the little ship. He explained the ropes and sails, which at first seemed a complete muddle, almost impossible to disentangle, until I learned to distinguish them from each other by means of their function. That was during my first days on board, which I spent half awake, half asleep. I was away from Visible, away from the town and the Little People, amid a suddenly expanded universe; the world I was familiar with had shrunk to a minute spot on a map, hardly bigger than a pinprick, and was now dominated by water. Everything seemed changed. There was even a different quality to the light, as if the distance between molecules was greater in these latitudes; it simply shone straight through everything, through hemp, timber, and steel, so that nothing seemed to have a tangible substance. The wind tasted of salt and appeared to have unpredictable strength—sometimes I got the feeling that it would take no more than a sudden breeze to sweep me away and make me drift along on it forever. Gable steered the boat over the sea on an arbitrary zigzag course. I was on a constant high. Time had forgotten us; we had no fixed destination. We often put in at tiny harbors, and time and again I was surprised how many people knew my uncle—fishermen and innkeepers and craft owners and the crews of other small boats. Some of them had a sly look. In earlier times, I decided, such men would have been pirates, lawless freebooters, answerable to no one but themselves and their desire for unconditional freedom. Incidents I’d known about up to now only from Gables stories suddenly took on reality—here was the port where he’d received minor contraband, in another he’d got drunk and subsequently come to in some alley minus his wallet; on this stretch of coast he’d watched dolphins landing a shark; further on along the coast he’d seen a drowned sponge diver brought ashore, clutching in his blue-white marble-colored balled fist not a sponge but an unbelievably enormous pearl, brought up from the deathly deep.
“These men can stay under water for up to four minutes,” Gable explained.
“How do they do it?”
“Oh, practice, I expect.” He laughed. “The whole of life is a miracle, Phil.”
As Handel explained to me weeks later, when back home I questioned him about this phenomenon, deep-sea divers can use meditation to lower their body temperature and consequently their entire metabolism to such an extent that they use less oxygen than under normal circumstances. All a matter of physics, maintained Handel in his own arbitrary way, thereby making the world one miracle the poorer for me.
Gable could spend hours motionlessly observing the changing colors and the movement of the waves on the water. He loved the Mediterranean, and it loved him. When I watched him swimming—as his broad, deeply tanned back rose out of the water following a powerful stroke of his arm and then dropped back in again, and particularly when Gable pulled himself back up aboard the cruiser—I always got the impression that the water didn’t rush at him with the same speed as it did with me or other people. It flowed and rippled off him in incredible slow motion, as if it wanted to stay attached to him as long as possible.
“I don’t know why it always keeps drawing me back,” said Gable. “Maybe because I feel best surrounded by these wide open spaces but know there’s firm land directly beyond the horizon.”
In the larger ports he introduced me to women who were recognizable as whores at a hundred paces, since they took such pains to sustain the clichés familiar from a thousand books and films that it was almost laughable. Mostly they were garishly made up, and their hair glowed in colors unknown to nature. They strutted through the docks on long legs, like storks crossed with birds of paradise, always swaying a little, as if either tired or drunk or disappointed by love, or maybe simply because their heels were too high, clattering along like joyful castanets. Silver and gold bracelets tinkled and jangled as the women flung their arms around Gable’s neck like he was some long-lost lover—and maybe that’s just what he was—and their voices were so rough that you could have grated nutmegs on them.
Some of the women touched me. On such occasions I would blush to the roots of my hair and couldn’t help thinking back to Annie Glosser’s little orange television containing the forb
idden world of thighs spread wide and fleshy pink—sporno. The whores, all of whom looked as if they’d modeled for the tiny nude transparencies in Annie’s television, squeezed my shoulders and my thin arms, as if to see whether I had enough flesh on my bones. They laughed as they did so, speaking Greek, in which Gable was able to answer almost fluently, and clutched themselves between their legs, and after an exchange of four or five sentences they would throw back their heads and laugh even more loudly and raucously. Often they would whisper something to Gable, and he would nod, looking at me, a slight smile crossing his face, his broad chin lowered almost to his chest; then he would nod a second time, and my uncertainty grew boundless. If the whores then turned back to me, talking to me loudly, I would either nod helplessly or shake my head just as helplessly. I thought I could catch a cooing and tempting tone in their voices that pursued me even in my dreams. It even excited me—not the thought of the women themselves but the disreputable air they exuded and the promise they radiated to follow it up, transform it into actions, words, and pleasure.
The reason I found being touched by the whores unpleasant was purely and simply because I believed Gable expected me to react in some way—with enthusiasm or even arousal. Every time we put into a port, I would be afraid he might ask if I’d like to spend the night with one of these women—a gift, a kind of initiation rite he considered appropriate, because I was a man or on the way to becoming one. I could hardly have been more mistaken about Gable, and yet I was proved right. To some extent.
One night we headed for an isolated bay, as it seemed, forsaken by God and man. The entire evening he had been grinning broadly without explaining what was amusing him so much. My skin had meanwhile turned as brown as dark chocolate.
“You’ve got two hours,” said Gable when he’d dropped anchor and the boat had come to a complete standstill.
The Center of the World Page 14
