The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “What for?”

  He pointed in the direction of the beach. It was a moonless night, and the white sand formed a faintly luminous strip. A shadow emerged. It moved and came toward the ship, took a step into the water, and waited. Fear rushed down into my stomach like a plumb line; I felt dizzy as I suddenly heard the cooing and luring whispers of the harbor whores.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Surprise,” said Gable. I felt his hand on my shoulder pushing me forward gently, as if afraid to hurt me. The next moment water was surging round my hips, my thighs, my ankles. Five paces, ten—the shadow remained a shadow. Then I stood before him. It was a boy my age, maybe a bit older.

  My body no longer seemed to belong to me. It was drained, weightless.

  “Hello,” whispered the boy in Greek. “Come.”

  I took hold of the hand held out to me; it was dry and warm. He moved through the night with such certain steps that after hesitating briefly I let him lead me forward. With each step I felt the sand running between my bare toes; it was still warm. Maybe it never cooled down completely but remained warm until the summer was over, though I couldn’t imagine that the summer would ever come to an end here. There was an insistent sweet smell wafting through the air like boiling honey, and we left the sea behind us until the beating of the waves on the beach was no more than a distant murmur, a dreamlike echo, a promise repeated to infinity.

  When the boy suddenly came to a standstill and let go of me, panic swept over me, fear of the dark. Then I felt his hands on my shoulders, his lips on my neck. I quivered as if struck by an electric shock. He kissed me and whispered, whispered and kissed. I tilted my neck against my shoulder. He moved it back, as if he wanted to look into my eyes, and we stood like that for a while, close together, mouth to mouth. His tongue was firm and rough, like a cat’s; he tasted faintly of aniseed. Then he slid his hands down along the back of my legs and came to rest in the hollows of my knees. My hands dropped to his shoulders. His skin was as cool as if the sun had never reached it. I slid my hands through his hair. I melted, turning into fire and water, sand and ash.

  Later he disappeared into the night without a sound. A moment ago he’d been there, and now he was gone without a word of goodbye, like one of the many men Glass had brought to Visible.

  I turned onto my back and stared up into the night sky. As a rule, it was clear and strewn with stars I couldn’t see at home; here the Milky Way seemed to touch the earth. But now all above me was black, and it was as if the missing light of the stars was making the resinous smell of the air even more intense. I felt like a vessel, only I couldn’t tell whether this vessel had been emptied or filled. In the far distance there came a muffled roll of thunder.

  I found the way back to the ship, following the noise of the surf and then the waterline. At first I went slowly, then faster and faster; eventually each of my footprints pounded furiously into the sand. The little ship lay motionless in the sea like a dark nutshell, with a single lamp glowing on board. Gable was already waiting for me. I clambered over a few stones, seized the hand he stretched out to me across the railing, and let him pull me on deck.

  “Why didn’t you give me longer?” I barked at him as soon as I stood in front of him. “Why just two hours?”

  “Two hours, two days, two years … it’s never long enough,” replied Gable, and reduced me to silence by pointing up at the ship’s rigging. “Look.”

  Above the tips of the masts an unearthly weak flickering was flashing and dancing—not a deep blue, as might have been expected, but a pinkish color.

  “What is it?” I whispered.

  “St. Elmo’s fire. A thunderstorm’s brewing.”

  Isolated flames died out amid the crackle of static, immediately replaced by others. The air was filled with a threatening rustling sound, suddenly followed by a barely perceptible smell of ozone.

  Something deep inside me rushed up like a wave. I began sobbing uncontrollably, and Gable took me in his arms. He held me for a long while, and as I burrowed my face into his chest, he rocked me and mumbled words I didn’t understand. “Gable,” I said at last, “where’s Alexa?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “D’you miss her?”

  “Every day, Phil. Every day and every night.”

  I moved away from him, wiped the back of my hand across my nose, and sniffed. “Why did you separate?”

  Gable shrugged his shoulders. “I expect it was my fault. She was so calm and settled, and I couldn’t bear that. Still, I did buy a house, but I never felt right there.”

  “Was that in America?”

  “California.” He nodded. “Not far from the coast, not far from the Pacific, and yet still too far away from it. I’m not made for dry land. I felt like a prisoner in that house, like a tiger in its cage, you know? Had a job in a shipyard, but that wasn’t for me. We kept getting at each other more and more, Alexa and I.” He shook his head. “God, we were such kids! You had to provoke her to the limit before she’d react, but then when she did …”

  His right hand sprang to life. It slid slowly up his left elbow, feeling and searching for a place on his upper arm.

  “One day … Alexa was standing at the counter in the kitchen, cutting up vegetables. I can’t remember what we were arguing about, every word we threw at each other—it had turned into a war zone. We were screaming at each other, and one word led to another. Alexa became furious, and well, yes, she had this knife …”

  His hand finally reached the disfiguring scar that had scared me, even as a child.

  “I think she was more terrified than I was,” Gable continued. “It hardly hurt; it was just a small wound, barely worth mentioning.”

  But it left a big scar.

  And a deep one.

  “When Alexa left, I sold the house along with everything in it. I burned every letter I’d ever had from her, every photo I’d taken of her. I destroyed everything.” Gable gave a short laugh. “I even played with the idea of torching the house. I didn’t want to keep anything that reminded me of her. Not at first. I knew she wouldn’t come back.”

  He leaned on the railing with both hands. I saw his fingers tense. “Then everything changed, and the only thing I had left of her was this little scar. I was afraid that one day that would disappear as well. That’s why once a year I regularly take a knife …”

  I couldn’t bear it. I went below deck. The breaking dawn let enough light in through the portholes for me to study my face in the cloudy mirror. I touched my mouth, cheeks, and ears. I wondered whether the color of a person’s eyes changes after the first time he’s had sex with another person, or whether the milky gleaming light I thought I’d discovered in them had always been there. Outside little waves slapped against the keel; I heard Gable’s lonely footsteps ceaselessly taking him up and down along the deck.

  I can still see myself in this dull mirror. I can still taste the sea. I sense the approaching thunderstorm and the sultriness it drives ahead of it, the pinkish light of St. Elmo’s fire dancing across the ropes and sails. I listen to the soft beating of the waves, and above me the creaking of the worn planks under the footfalls of a man who repeatedly wounds himself because he’s in love.

  “In love? Don’t you think that’s a bit heavy?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you hardly know each other,” Tereza says.

  “I’ve known him for weeks.”

  “By sight, if I got you right.”

  “But we’ve …”

  “Screwed. So what?”

  Pascal’s words. She’s balancing a tray with a steaming teapot, delicate cups, and a dish of biscuits on it. Tereza sits on an enormous sofa covered with an Alcantara rug that dominates the otherwise almost empty living room—spacious, light, with few but very select pieces of furniture. Tereza has a Hair for transforming the little money she earns in her practice into impressively good taste. Pascal places the tray on a low table that looks as if it’s the product of a Japanese
designer high on drugs—which it may well be—and sits down beside Tereza. I’m sitting opposite them, sunk in a deep leather armchair.

  Whenever I see Tereza and Pascal together, I can hardly believe they’re a couple. Tereza’s soft peaches-and-cream beauty is in stark contrast to the coarseness of Pascal, whose hands are too large and legs too thickset for such a small body; her dull, tangled hair always looks as if a family of rats has nested in it overnight.

  “You can have instant sex with almost anyone.” Pascal pursues the subject.

  “Rubbish!”

  “But love is something that only grows with time. Believe an old woman. Biscuit?” She holds out the tray to me with a smile, and I don’t give a damn whether the smile is genuine or affected—in either case I feel like wiping it off her face.

  “No, thanks.”

  She pours the tea. All her movements are jerky. In profile her forehead and the bridge of her nose form one continuous downward line. Pascal maintains that as a small girl she stood looking out at sea, day in, day out, with the wind blowing across her as if she was a part of the sand dunes. It’s this little girl that I feel I can sometimes make out under the unattractive outer shell, a kind of flickering and shimmering that sometimes flashes out, as Pascal moves or—a reflex she’s never abandoned—with an almost defiant gesture she attempts to push back her formerly long but now razor-cut stubbly hair behind her ears. At such times I get the feeling that this friend of Tereza’s is a kind of frog princess, still waiting for the magic wand to transform her.

  Tereza has never made much fuss about her affairs. The little I know about her relationships with women stems from Glass. For a long time she was a victim of her own attractiveness, which other women chose to find inhibiting or even, as Tereza put it on the rare occasions when she used a swear word, too bloody feminine. Since she didn’t consider herself either strikingly strong or particularly weak in the early days, Tereza didn’t want either to dominate others or be the submissive one; what she was looking for was nothing more than a suitable counterpart to her own character, which enjoyed an equilibrium of self-assurance as enviable as it is rare. As far as that was concerned, Pascal wanted to give the lie to Tereza’s assumptions by her sheer physical presence and her gruff manner, but Tereza never tired of asserting that under the rough exterior a gentle loving core lay hidden.

  Up to now I’ve managed to detect precious little of it.

  “So what sort of things did he say, your Nicholas?” Tereza asked calmly.

  “Or do, after you … you know, were finished.”

  “He got dressed.” I can feel the blood rushing to my head under Pascal’s grinning gaze. “I mean, we got dressed, and then I was in a complete, well, muddle. The whole time I was terrified that someone might come into the changing room and catch us.”

  “Horny feeling, eh?” Pascal takes a sip of tea from the fine porcelain cup, which appears too flimsy between her huge hands. She bites into a biscuit, leans back, and carries on talking with her mouth full. “I know about that. Sex in the open, in the fields, in the woods, in a meadow. Turns me on just to think of it.”

  When Tereza blushes, like now, it reminds me how reticent she must appear to people who don’t know her; it’s only among close friends or in court trials, as I know from Glass, that she opens up. Then she sends out energy like a firework; then every word that leaves her mouth is like a deadly missile.

  “And he didn’t say anything else?” she asks me.

  I shake my head and mutter, “ ‘See you tomorrow, at school’ … something like that, and …” I take a deep breath. Now it’s my turn to blush. “And that he wants to see me again, but we don’t know where.”

  “OK,” says Tereza simply. She knows I’d like the key to her late father’s house, which she’s been letting out for the last thirteen years, since her father died, over the summer to holidaymakers who might otherwise end up in the town among the Little People; in the autumn and winter the house is empty.

  “Why don’t you meet at Visible, you and your boyfriend?” asks Pascal.

  “Because I don’t want Glass or Dianne to find out.”

  “About your affair?”

  “About the sex part, if you must know.”

  “Oh ho … d’you make that much noise, the two of you?”

  “Not as loud as a cow in heat out in the fields.”

  Pascal’s laugh sounds like a trumpet fanfare.

  I ought to feel pleased that Tereza gives me the key to the house, enabling the Runner and me to meet whenever we feel like it, unseen, alone. Yet it’s all so … unsatisfying. After a brief initial hesitation our bodies reacted to each other like well-tuned machines. I didn’t take my eyes off Nicholas for a second, searching his almost immobile face and looking into his eyes, which narrowed only for an instant as he came into my hand. I don’t exactly know what I expected. No declaration of love, that’s for sure, or the heavens opening to shower me with rose-red petals. But nor did I expect Nicholas to turn away from me so abruptly as he then did, as if the sex had just been an incidental interlude, somehow slotted in between his running, showering, and getting dressed—like a chemical experiment where an acid and a base are poured into water to precipitate some kind of salt. Although he assured me he wanted to carry on seeing me, I had rushed—overwhelmed by sudden panic—to catch the next bus for Tereza’s place, with a cold feeling in my limbs that I hadn’t been able to shake off since I’d been with Nicholas.

  Now I do reach for a biscuit, nibble at it listlessly, and drink half a cup of tea that does nothing to warm me up. Tereza and Pascal say nothing. I can feel them staring at me, watching me, so I get up and go to the window and look out. Tereza’s apartment is on the fourth floor of a lavishly refurbished old building with a stucco façade, in a street full of lavishly renovated old buildings with stucco façades. Down on the sidewalk, in between expensive automobiles and carefully staked trees lining the edge of the road, a few children are tearing about playing ball, regardless of the shining puddles of rainwater everywhere.

  “What’s up? Have you just come here to mope?” comes Pascal’s voice behind me.

  “Oh, shut it.”

  “You know, there’s no point in sulking just because the first guy you have it off with doesn’t turn out to be Prince Charming on a white steed.”

  “You do have such a romantic way of putting things!”

  Tereza has stepped up behind me. She places a hand on my shoulder. “Well, now,” she says, “where’s the problem?”

  “Don’t know.”

  I feel her warm breath between my shoulders and wish I could remain standing there forever, taking in the almond scent of her hair and watching the children playing in the street.

  “Why don’t you just give him more time, Phil?”

  “He’s had enough, hasn’t he?” I mumble.

  I hear Pascal give a quiet laugh. “Seems to me our little one has the same problem as Glass. He’s afraid the thing might be over before it’s even started.”

  Fury rushes up inside me faster than the mercury in a thermometer suddenly exposed to heat. I release myself from Tereza’s embrace and swing round.

  “When I’m in need of an analyst, I’ll come to you, Pascal. Meanwhile just do me a favor and leave me alone!”

  Unmoved, Pascal reaches for another biscuit. Even an earthquake probably wouldn’t shake her stoic indifference. “You’re just as much of a sissy as Glass. She’s done a good job on you.”

  Suddenly I hate her, her and her dragging Dutch accent that gives every one of her words a special emphasis and makes her—how, I don’t know—unassailable. “D’you mind telling me what actually gives you the right to talk like that?”

  Pascal shrugs and points to the table. “I’m entitled to criticize anyone who eats my biscuits.”

  “Your biscuits taste of shit! And you can keep your jealousy to yourself. Glass has had a lot to put up with.”

  She raises a finger. “Oh, yes? What? I thought s
he doesn’t talk about it.” With a sideways glance at Tereza she adds sarcastically, “Except of course with her best friend.”

  “Glass isn’t obliged to talk to anyone about anything!” I shout at her.

  “Sure thing. And have you ever thought about what a wonderful scenario she’s created as a result? The poor mother who experienced such a trauma that it’s prevented her from having a normal relationship with anyone for all eternity?”

  I’ve no idea why she’s provoking me like this. I’d really love to smash the grin off her fat face.

  “That’s enough now, Pascal,’ says Tereza quietly.

  “Why? He asked my opinion, didn’t he?”

  “That’s a matter of interpretation.”

  “A matter of interpretation? What’s that supposed to mean? Am I on trial here all of a sudden, or what?”

  “I’ll give you the key, Phil.” Tereza turns away and leaves the room, which suddenly seems far too big without her.

  Pascal jumps up and storms after her in a rage. “You haven’t answered my question, Your Honor!”

  “Pascal, please …”

  By the time I leave the house with the key to the professor’s house in my trouser pocket, the two are in the middle of a blazing row. In the street the kids are still racing around. I feel like snatching their ball away from them and tearing it into a thousand little pieces.

  When I want to be on my own, I go down to a pool in the center of a clearing at the far end of Visible’s garden, bordering on the woods. The clearing is hidden and inaccessible, with tall trees, dog rose, and thick hedges of blackthorn growing all around, as well as elder bushes, whose white spring blossoms look like airborne foam. The pool is almost circular. It’s obviously fed by an underground source such as an artesian well, as the water level drops only a few inches even during very hot summers. The water is black. It’s only toward midday, when the sun is so high that light falls down vertically through the treetops, that the water lightens up—a dull glimmer, like the polished surface of an opal lying hidden in moss. To this day the very faint traces of a narrow beaten path are still just visible leading through the grass and moss around the water, evidence that someone must have known and loved this place long before me.