The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  I discovered the pool as a small boy in short pants, armed with a stick, when I set out to explore the terrain. At the time a statue seemed to be pointing the way, the stone figure of an angel with a sword. There were many such statues on the estate; occasionally some disheveled hikers, mostly summer holidaymakers, came knocking in the hope of buying them from Glass, who would invariably refuse. Like the angel with the sword, most had suffered the effects of time; often one or another of their extremities was missing—an arm, a foot or a leg, sometimes the head—to be found lying in the tall grass some distance away if you took the trouble to look for it.

  The angel stood at a precarious angle in front of a tall hedge of flowering blackthorn. The places where it wasn’t overgrown with lichen were covered with a network of fine grayish lines produced by weathering and the hundred changes of the seasons. It was leaning to one side so much that it looked to me as if it was about to fall over at any moment, plunging its sword into the soil. Although it was only a head taller than I was, it looked enormous to me because of the breadth of the outstretched wings spreading from its shoulders.

  I grasped my stick firmly in my sweaty hands, feeling the summer air weighing heavily on my shoulders. I gazed up in awe into the angel’s blind eyes, imagining that they were inspecting me closely, and let my eyes follow the downward droop of the wings and the sharp folds of the drapery, carved from light-colored stone, and marveled at the sword. Then I noticed a gap in the hedge behind the angel, just big enough for a rabbit to pass through. On a sudden impulse I circled the angel at a respectful distance, dropped to my knees, and crawled through the hedge.

  My initial delight after I fought my way into the open on the other side of the hedge and saw the pool changed to uneasy fear at the sight of the dark water. It was a fear that changed to horror when I attempted to find out how deep the water was. To do so I used the piece of string, over fifty feet in length, wound round the stick that had once been attached to a dragon kite given to me by Tereza, which had got blown away by the wind last autumn. I attached a stone to the end of the string and allowed it to sink into the water. Slowly and continuously the string unwound. At last it was all used up. The stick jerked for a moment as it tautened and the stone came to a halt on its slow free fall.

  “Fifty feet,” I whispered to myself, and gave a start as a rustling went through the leaves of the surrounding trees, as if in agreement. “And it still hasn’t reached the—”

  A second jerk shot along the stick, so sudden and unexpected that it all but pulled me into the water. Someone— something—was pulling and straining at the string. The stick slid out of my hands, sharply tearing the skin off my palms, splashed onto the black surface of the pond, and was swallowed up by it. Concentric circles spread out—too fast, it seemed to me—from the place where it had disappeared. The ripples shot across the water, bouncing against the edge of the pond in a flash, as if someone in that moment had fast-forwarded time. I gasped for breath, flung myself backward, and with pounding heart scrambled as far as I could away from the edge of the pool. I thought I heard a groaning in the leaves of the surrounding trees. My hands hurt. Blackthorn twigs scratched and pierced my back as I stared out at the pool, waiting for the water to bubble up and reveal something rising out of the water—something dark, dark and ancient, ancient and very evil. When nothing happened, I felt my way back to the edge of the water slowly, inch by inch.

  Nothing.

  Black water.

  I waited a long time, half an hour, maybe even a whole hour, without a sign of even the slightest ripple breaking the surface. The stick had disappeared. I decided never to go back to the pool but did so all the same, time after time. What’s more, I now called it my pool, maybe because fear and terror were the price I had paid for its discovery. When I asked him what was hidden in the pool, Paleiko once again proved distinctly unhelpful with his vague answers. He gave me the obvious but also unacceptable advice not to dive any deeper than was necessary to uncover its secret.

  To this day I’ve never dared to get into the water and swim in it. To this day I’m the only person who knows about the pool—neither Dianne nor Glass knows about the clearing, and I never told Kat about it, not even when I was a kid, as if I was already aware at that time that everyone needs secrets.

  Now I get undressed. My body seems to have changed; everything is changed. Shoes, socks, trousers, and T-shirt land in a random heap. I go down on my knees and dip a hand into the dark water. It closes over my wrist like mercury.

  The pool remains still.

  I sit down, stretch out my legs, and let my feet dangle in the water just below the surface, still warm from the rain that’s just fallen. After a moment I push myself forward slowly and glide into the blackness.

  I swim a few strokes, then, turning over onto my back, let myself drift across the pool. I look up into the leaves of the overarching treetops. A wind comes up, rushing through the boughs and branches, chasing raindrops down from the leaves. Their soft staccato drumming echoes all around me as they fall. Small rippling waves shoot across the surface. I shiver. Turning onto my stomach, I take a deep breath, shut my eyes, and let myself sink. Cold water closes over my head. I sink down, deeper and deeper, but even as my lungs are beginning to hurt, pleading with me to surface again, I still cannot touch bottom with my feet.

  Glass couldn’t miss the gleam in my eyes when I returned from Greece, deeply tanned and with straw-blond hair, but she didn’t question me outright. The only things she asked about were how I had got on with Gable, how the sea lit up before the sun went down, whether I had seen sharks, whether I’d eaten olives. But a knowing smile played around her mouth, the way I remembered from the times when after Tereza’s visits she would innocently ask us whether Dianne and I had been eating popcorn against her wishes (not too seriously meant). I smiled back. I should have worked out for myself beforehand that she’d had a hand in this and had asked Gable for his help. She had a real flair for choosing birthday presents.

  Dianne was even more taciturn than ever; I got the impression that she had withdrawn even further into herself during my absence. The atmosphere between her and Glass was tense, their interaction almost frosty, restricted to formalities. When they came across each other, the air seemed to fill with static; for days on end I waited in vain for a storm to clear the air. Something must have happened between the two of them during the past four weeks; whatever it was, no one told me. To ask Glass about it was pointless, for unless she decided to talk to me about it of her own accord I wasn’t going to find out. I assumed Dianne would be more accessible, but I was wrong.

  “Nothing’s happened,” she said as I caught her outside her room and asked. “Nothing. We had a row, that’s all.”

  “What about?”

  “It’s between Glass and me. Nothing to do with you, Phil.”

  “Yes, it is so! After all, I have to live with the two of you. The atmosphere between you two makes me want to throw up.”

  “So what?” She tried to slip past me through the door into her room. “It’ll get better again.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Her arrogance made me see red. “You know what, Dianne? You’re getting to be just like Glass. That’s exactly what she would have—”

  I only just managed to avoid her hand as it shot out at me without warning. “Don’t you ever say that again!” Dianne hissed into my face. “Never, Phil.”

  Nothing was the same as before. Even the lichen-covered angel guarding the entrance to the pool had finally toppled over in my absence. The arm with the sword stuck up out of the tall grass at an unfortunate angle, hurled there by a storm that had raged for two whole days and nights. The same storm had torn innumerable tiles from Visible’s roof, which now lay strewn around the ground like splintered shells. Glass had placed tin pails in the attic as a short-term solution. To have a new roof installed, as she originally intended, was out of the question for financial reasons. She decided to have the damage repaired piecemeal; as a res
ult, Visible’s roof looked like a patchwork quilt.

  Another victim of this storm, as Kat related to me at our first meeting after my return, was one of the Little People. A boy in the year above us, whom I didn’t know but vaguely remembered from Kat’s description, had been riding his bike along the country road and had been swept up by a violent gust of wind and hurled against an oncoming car. He was in the intensive care unit of the same clinic where Kat and I had been operated on as children; there was no knowing whether he was ever likely to regain consciousness.

  None of these events could really touch me. At first I kept my own experience to myself; I didn’t tell Kat about it until the following winter, when she had taken up with Thomas and insisted that I’d better get a move on if I wanted to lose my virginity before she did. She was furious because I’d waited so long before telling her, and didn’t calm down until she’d dragged the very last detail out of me.

  “If you don’t even know his name,” she ended up by saying, “then it doesn’t really count, does it?”

  She was reassured. Some unknown boy in Greece, the most fleeting of encounters—that was no challenge to her.

  I spent endless days alone at the edge of the pool. After seeing the enormous expanse of the sea in all its bright blue depth in some places off the coast, the black water of the pool seemed foul and brackish to me, and even more unfathomable and terrifying than ever. I kept on and on trying to conjure up before my eyes my encounter with the boy, yet the more I tried, the more blurred and hazy the memory became, and I saw nothing more than my own reflection on the surface of the pool. Gable had been right—no amount of time in the world would have been long enough.

  I regretted not possessing anything that would have made the days and—far more important—that one night tangible for me. When Gable appeared at our door a few weeks after my return, the same knowing smile in his eyes that he’d had as he pulled me back on board the ship, the only present he brought me was a little cypress, dug up complete with its root ball. I hardly knew how to thank him. My heart overflowed. I planted the cypress in the garden below the window of my bedroom. Sometimes the tangy smell it gave out at night would wake me, and at the moment of waking, in that short instant of shaking off sleep and adjusting to wakefulness, I would think that the memory had returned.

  It didn’t take long for me to realize that Dianne, who hadn’t asked me anything about my trip and my experiences, was clearly jealous. Whenever I went to water the cypress during the sweltering heat of those last summer weeks, I noticed that my sister had got there before me.

  chapter 10

  solanum

  “Your friend, the headmaster’s daughter, Kat … ?”

  “Yes?”

  “You haven’t said anything to her about us, have you?”

  “Not yet.”

  “She’s jealous.”

  “You can tell?”

  “I think she doesn’t like me.”

  Nicholas tilts his head to one side and shuts his eyes. We’re sitting side by side on a wooden bench by the river. The sky is cloudy, a sad, uniform expanse of gray that doesn’t match my boisterous mood. One good thing about the inhospitable weather, though—at least it’s keeping the Little People indoors. Far and wide there’s not a single person to be seen out walking, no children playing, no pensioners out with their dogs. We’re alone. Coots paddle busily through the water, little black boats with pointed red beaks crowding through the dried reeds, making lightning dives and seconds later bobbing up again like huge corks to the surface of the water. “Why are you working at the library?”

  “I need a job,” says Nicholas, his eyes still closed. “My parents have money, but they keep me short.”

  At school it’s been hard for me, harder than expected, to ignore him and just devote myself to Kat as usual. I kept on wanting to stare at Nicholas. Like I’m doing now. Wanted to touch him, kiss him, tear his clothes off him; there at school, in the classroom, in the toilets, in the schoolyard. In front of everyone, so what. In front of Kat, so what. She’s presumably totally unaware of what’s going on between the Runner and me and can be left in ignorance for a while longer. I’d better let her know, sooner rather than later, though, and to hell with the consequences.

  “Why did you run away from boarding school?”

  Now Nicholas opens his eyes, turns to me, and smiles. As if he knows that by turning this dark, magnetic smile on me he can calm me, lull me into silence. As if he knows that his gaze has the same effect on me as my mother’s siren song has on her clients. I suddenly realize all the things I’m lacking that prevent me from getting a more satisfying answer out of him than just this smile: lacking any fear of rejection, like Glass; Kat’s insistent, adventurous courage, which she uses to expose any blanks in the souls of her fellow creatures; Tereza’s sober expertise and calm. I possess none or far too few of any of these qualities. All the same, I continue to pester Nicholas with my questioning.

  “Were you there for long?”

  “Too long. Like forever.”

  “What made your parents—”

  He interrupts me, raising a hand. “The same reason that makes most parents dump their kids. They want peace and quiet. To follow their careers. It’s all too much for them because you haven’t turned out to be the cute toy you were intended to be.”

  “I thought people end up in boarding school because they’re too difficult.”

  “There’s always some excuse.”

  “What was it in your case?”

  “As I said, something or other.” Nicholas runs a hand through his hair. Every one of his movements electrifies me. His lips have this wonderful swooping curve with edges so sharply defined they seem they might cut if kissed. “In any case, I was hardly ever at home. Or in town. Man, this dead hole …” He shakes his head and gives me a questioning look. “How on earth can you stand it?”

  “They do great vanilla ice cream.”

  “And how much of that d’you need to stop you going out of your head?”

  Time and again Kat and I have thought about what it would be like to turn our backs on the town someday. Nicholas did so long ago. The fact that external circumstances forced him into it doesn’t make his arrogance any less valid. To be written off once again here must be another sore point, a further backward step.

  “What do your parents do?”

  “ ‘My daddy’s rich and my ma is good-looking,’ ” he sings softly. “Summertime,” Gershwin. Then he grins at me. “You’re American, aren’t you? You’ve got a crazy twin sister who once hunted down small boys with a bow and arrow. The big boys are your mother’s department, although she does render services for the spiritual welfare of her women fellow citizens.” Nicholas points straight across the river in the direction of Visible. “And you live in that enormous old house over there by the forest.”

  “Says who?”

  “My esteemed colleague with the scraped-back hair, Mrs. Hubeler. And presumably anyone else in town you care to ask.”

  He doesn’t have any brothers or sisters himself. His father is director of a large metal processing factory, somewhere in the region. His mother sits at home all day long, either drinking or knocking back pills to avoid thinking why fate has washed her up on the shores of this godforsaken backwater.

  “Platitudes,” Nicholas says with a shrug, rounding off the short list, and adds disparagingly, “And pretty painful, at that.”

  “Platitudes have to come from somewhere.” Over the years, Glass has had dozens of clients like his mother. Maybe his mother is one of her clients. But there’d be no point in asking Glass whether she was; she’d never tell me.

  “Well, at any rate it doesn’t sound as if you’re on the best of terms, you and your mother.”

  “Maybe not.”

  And maybe the same goes for his father. If all Nicholas wanted was any old job, he could surely go and work afternoons in the factory, at the machines, or in the office in management.

  After
a long pause, with neither of us saying anything, just staring out at the river, I say, “I saw you once, here in the town. Quite a while back.”

  “Really?”

  “Four years ago. In winter. You were standing on the steps in front of the church.”

  “Must have been in the Christmas holidays. I don’t remember.”

  He doesn’t sound in the least interested. I had hoped he’d remember our first encounter; now I feel a stab of disappointment. And gradually the uncomfortable feeling creeps over me that it’s just me asking the questions and keeping the conversation going. He’s a fake, I hear Kat saying. Plays the Lone Ranger—hard on the outside, sensitive on the inside. He’s actually weak, on the outside and boring inside.

  Perhaps I ought to ask fewer questions and go on the offensive instead, deeds instead of words. I reflect whether to place an arm around the Runner and must have started to make a move, which he perceives out of the corner of his eye, because he immediately shifts away from me a little.

  “No … please.”

  “All right.”

  “Sorry, I—”

  “It’s OK.”

  Another moments silence would be more than I could bear. Nicholas laughs as I present him with the key given me by Tereza. Laughs out loud as if relieved, and then suddenly stops, and his eyes widen as if seeing me for the first time or as if he’s about to kiss me with those sharp-edged lips. Which in fact he doesn’t do, although there’s nobody nearby who could see us.

  “You’re going to turn into a very good-looking guy one of these days, Phil, d’you know that?”

  “Er, thanks … much appreciated.”

  “Shall we go?”

  He gets up from the bench and starts walking. It’s as if he knew which direction we have to follow. I walk along beside him, concentrating on the sound of our footsteps on the narrow asphalt path in order to suppress the impulse to grasp Nicholas by the hand or lay my arm around his hip or shoulder.