The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “Just a moment.”

  At first I think he’s going to tie a shoelace as he stops suddenly and bends down. Then I see him picking something up from the path. It’s a barrette made of dull brown tortoiseshell with a twisted grip.

  “Why d’you do that?”

  “What?”

  He’s already straightened up and spirits the barrette away in his trouser pocket.

  “Collect old stuff. I’ve often seen you do it.”

  Nicholas shrugs. “Just because. Might come in handy. To give away as a present.”

  “If you keep everything you find lying around, you must have a whole store full.”

  “Yup, maybe I do.”

  Barely half an hour later, as we arrive at the professor’s house, the first raindrops come hurtling down violently from the sky like suicide bombers ready for anything. All the same, I first lead Nicholas around the house.

  There I stand still next to him. He looks around almost reverently.

  It’s not the house—which is unremarkable, a two-story gabled building, hardly distinguishable from those around it, standing in extensive grounds—but the garden that immediately attracts attention. Its upkeep by two gardeners from out of town costs Tereza a tidy sum year on year. From early spring to the end of summer it’s a riot of blossom, color, and fragrance; in autumn the garden glows, as if gold and bronze have been raining down from heaven. It is breathtaking. The professor made it his life’s ambition to surround himself with a microcosm of the flora of this world, insofar as they can flourish in our climate, and over the years and decades he created this minor miracle. This garden is a living, breathing creature, growing lush and rampant, climbing and twining; everything flourishes, is fertile and fruitful. Trees and shrubs stand alone or in clumps, with smaller plants grouped together in beds, making splashes of color in the landscape or in the shade of giant ferns. Dianne often comes here; thanks to the professor’s herbaries given her by Tereza, she knows the names of all these plants by heart. There are miniature plants among them whose filigree beauty is visible only when viewed at ground level right up close, for it’s possible to inspect their miniature leaves and blooms only from that vantage point. They are sheltered by giant redwood trees, whose spreading branches look like poles stuck horizontally into their trunks; in our latitudes such trees never reach the height of over three hundred feet that they attain in America.

  By now we’re both soaked to the skin, but, undeterred by the rain, Nicholas continues to inspect the house, the grounds, the garden. He points to a spot, not far from a drooping maple with blood-red foliage, where the ground is slightly uneven. I hear Dianne’s childhood voice saying, This looks like the earth has had hiccups. The little hillock is covered with plant stems snapped off halfway with leaves withering to musty brown.

  “What grows there in the summer?”

  “Delphiniums,” I answer, “and campanula.”

  Nicholas looks at me inquiringly.

  “I just know,” I say, taking the door key from my trouser pocket and jiggling it in front of his nose. “Well, are you coming inside?”

  He nods. As we walk round the house, he looks up at the façade and asks: “Who does all this belong to?”

  Tereza found her father’s will in one of the drawers of his fine, old-fashioned ornate russet-colored cherrywood desk. The previous day the professor’s mortal remains had been removed from the house by H. Hendriks, the town’s one and only undertaker, in a zinc container—a battered container, as Tereza told us later, a container, moreover, with one of the four carrying handles missing, making the removal of the dead professor a wobbly affair. The stout H. Hendriks and his assistant, a pale young man with a constantly bobbing Adam’s apple, had sighed and sworn like Trojans—most irreverently, to Tereza’s way of thinking—but she hadn’t had the energy to complain about it.

  The aged professor had gone to bed two nights before, fallen asleep, and simply not woken up again. At least that was what his housekeeper had concluded, having discovered the corpse in the morning, by now turned quite cold. Telephoning Tereza immediately to inform her, she kept on saying over and over again what a merciful death this was, not, God knows, granted to everyone, a truly merciful death. The housekeeper’s name was Elsie. She had been a loyal servant to the professor since time immemorial. Elsie was one of the Little People and was quite literally small—barely four feet one in height, she was only just tall enough to be able to reach the mantelpiece without having to stand on a stool to dust it. On the telephone she had sounded like an old hand at composing “sudden and unexpected” press announcements. At the other end of the line Tereza was bawling her eyes out.

  Now Tereza was sitting on the floor in front of the open desk drawers, surrounded by mounds of papers, some recent and some yellowed with age, her eyes following the urgent swoop of her father’s handwriting with its curlicues of old-fashioned script, which he had refused to modify during his life. She was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and self-pity— she had visited her father only seldom, and now that he was dead the time for visiting was finally over. Many times she had resolved to inform her loving but morally strict begetter that she loved only women, and then had lacked the courage. Now she could never put right her failure to do so, and thus the absolution she had craved would remain eternally denied her.

  In his will the professor had given explicit instructions for his funeral: no cremation and no Christian burial. He wished to be buried on his own land—more precisely, among his beloved plants.

  As a nature lover, he did not want a coffin.

  It was a wish that Tereza accepted without raising an eyebrow, and proposed to carry out regardless of the circumstances. Of course, she realized that in so doing she would have problems with the relevant authorities. Burying a corpse without a coffin in some old garden went not only against established Christian traditions but in this instance more crucially against state health regulations. No one would appreciate brewing up their morning coffee with drinking water containing dissolved particles of a botany professor emeritus reduced to fluid that had entered the water table, or to be sprinkled with them under the shower. Tereza had to think of something.

  “Bizarre,” Glass and Tereza agreed years later as they recalled the story for Dianne and me to refresh our memories, for after all we had been there when it came to fulfilling the sacred last wishes of the professor. It was summer now, and we were sitting on the veranda at Visible drinking fruit cup. “The body had already been taken away,” recalled Glass, “in this rickety old tin bath. Otherwise we could have just buried him and then reported the old gentleman missing. That way we would have spared ourselves a load of trouble.”

  In that case it would also have been necessary to keep the old housekeeper quiet. Elsie had worshiped the professor— Tereza assumed she had actually secretly been in love with him, as if it was a law of nature that sooner or later every housekeeper must lose her heart to her employer. But regardless of what Elsie’s true feelings were, no one—could have persuaded the little woman to agree to a hush-hush burial, that was for sure.

  When a pale-looking Tereza turned up at Visible in the evening after the removal of the corpse to ask Glass for advice, Dianne and I were promptly fed with cereal and put to bed. We were too young—four years old—to understand what was going on. But we were old enough to sense that Tereza was beside herself with grief, although she made every effort to put on a brave face. She seemed to ooze grief from every pore; her red hair had lost its usual luster, and the black bags under her eyes looked as if she’d applied them with coal dust.

  Tereza and Glass talked far into the night, drinking red wine, and the smell of their innumerable cigarettes penetrated into the farthest corners of Visible. They came up with plans, thought up scenarios, abandoned one idea after another; finally they agreed on a suggestion of Glass’s and went to bed. When I went into the bedroom next morning, I found the two women with their arms and legs wound around each other, even their fi
ngers interlaced, locked together like Siamese twins. Sunlight filtered through the window, setting Tereza’s long hair, which lay fanned out over my mother’s pale skin, ablaze like orange-red flames. Tereza must have heard me come into the room, for she opened her eyes and looked at me for a long time. Her gaze was filled with the unique pain that can be transmitted to a four-year-old—a childhood pain that had neither beginning nor end and cut deep into my heart, so that I turned on my heel and ran down to the kitchen, where I tried to set the table with trembling hands.

  After breakfast—fruit juice, masses of coffee, and even more mineral water to deal with their hangover—Tereza went off to consult her doctor, who had no problem with making her out a prescription for an effective, fast-acting sleeping powder. Two hours later she was back in Visible, and we all piled into the car and drove to the supermarket, where first of all Dianne and I were handed a jumbo-sized bag of jelly bears to keep us quiet. While we stuffed our pockets full, piling up reserves before wolfing more down, Tereza and Glass were buying a pickax, two spades, and three fifty-pound sacks of potatoes. Then we were frog-marched to the ladies’ underwear department. Here Tereza kept discreetly out of the way. The Little People knew her father had died, and she didn’t want to attract any inquisitive glances. Dianne and I held hands, sticky from the sweets, and looked on as Glass rummaged through a range of white lace-edged underwear.

  “I owed Tereza,” said Glass, justifying her decision, as we sat on the veranda that evening. “Of course it was by far the biggest sacrifice I was ever prepared to make for anyone, but after all, where would we all be without Tereza?”

  The white lacy underwear was all she had on under the shabby knee-length overcoat she’d worn on the journey from America when late that evening she stood in front of the mortician’s and rang at the door to rouse the stout—and, more significant, unmarried—H. Hendriks. Tereza had parked the car at the street corner, and we could see Glass bracing herself against the wind that was whistling down the street and Hendriks opening the door to her. The coat flapped like the torn sail of a stranded little boat. It promised to be a stormy night—in more ways than one.

  “What’s Glass doing there?” asked Dianne.

  “She’s visiting that fat man,” said Tereza. “The fat man’s been looking after my dead papa, and now we’re going to collect him.”

  “What for?”

  “Because we want to bury him, sweetie. Dead people get buried.”

  It had turned cold, so cold that Tereza had to wipe the windshield clear with the sleeve of her jacket from time to time, and the stormy sky threatened rain. From where we were sitting in the backseat Dianne and I could see the mortician’s small window display. To this day I cannot think of a more depressing sight than the few items available for a funeral director to put on show as the insignia of his trade— velvet-lined coffins made of wood or synthetic materials that always look somehow too short, urns enthroned on pedestals like lonely little kings, and somewhere in among these a poster announcing that burials at sea can also be undertaken, peace be to you, and are you insured for such a worst-case scenario?

  It obviously wasn’t a worst-case scenario, as Glass explained to H. Hendriks inside the house, that had driven her to call on him in such weather; rather, it was the professor, one of her family’s few old friends.

  “What I said to Hendriks,” she told us that summer evening on the veranda, “was something to the effect that I wanted to take leave of the old man, but in private, not at the cemetery in front of all those people. Surely he would understand.”

  It was a classic example of how even a bad reputation can have its uses.

  As the stout H. Hendriks listened to Glass, his eyes kept wandering from her face to the spot above her bosom, where the coat was gaping open slightly to offer a clear view of the white lace. Glass let him lead her through the house, where he lived all alone; the assistant with the bobbing Adam’s apple was there only in the daytime. H. Hendriks hesitated when Glass insisted on seeing the rooms where he washed the corpses, dressed them, and made them up.

  “This isn’t at all usual,” he blathered.

  “But then you’re not the usual kind of man either—are you?” trilled Glass, and H. Hendriks swallowed and nodded and set himself in motion like a heavyweight version of a wind-up doll.

  The tiled room that he led Glass into contained two massive closed dark oak coffins supported on simple wooden trestles. They were alike as two peas in a pod. Glass was confused—as if death followed a precisely calculated timetable of one dead body per day or per week, she had naturally assumed that she would encounter only Tereza’s father in Hendrik’s funeral parlor. Now she pointed timidly at the coffin on the left.

  “Is that … ?”

  H. Hendricks nodded solemnly.

  “And is he all ready and correct … prepared, is that how you put it, for burial? Or will the coffin be opened again?”

  “It stays closed,” replied Hendricks firmly. “The daughter’s instructions.”

  Glass nodded. Any other reply would have been a signal for her to take her leave immediately. She took a deep breath in and then let it out, and as if by accident her coat slipped open, further revealing more of her bosom. An uncertain gleam crept into Hendrik’s eyes, while Glass folded her hands, observing a moment’s silence as if in prayer—she was indeed praying, but not, as H. Hendriks must have thought, for the dead professor—and then she asked the stout man, who was teetering agitatedly on tiptoe, if he could let her have something to drink.

  “Water?” he offered innocently.

  “Vodka,” said Glass drily.

  H. Hendriks led her through the house to his living room, where he hurriedly and awkwardly produced a full bottle of vodka and two glasses, immediately filling them to the brim. Glass sat down on a sofa incredibly overloaded with plush cushions, pulled up the hem of her coat, and crossed her legs. She announced that she was already feeling much better and asked Hendriks to bring her a teeny sip of water.

  “Embarrassing!” Glass shook herself in recollection of her appearance in the role of seductress. “More embarrassing than anything, my acting the dumb airhead, I can tell you!”

  As the mortician was on his way to the kitchen, she tipped the sleeping powder prescribed by Tereza’s family doctor into his drink. She didn’t know whether the powder would alter the taste of the vodka, and H. Hendriks didn’t give himself a chance to find out. Scarcely had he returned from the kitchen and sat down in cozy familiarity next to Glass when, excited as he was, he downed his vodka in one single gulp. To Glass’s huge relief the powder began to take effect before H. Hendriks had a chance to fling himself at her on the couch or elsewhere, and worked with such force that it positively flung the stout man backward into the sofa cushions.

  Glass heaved a sigh of relief, raising her glass in the direction of the tiled room, where the professor lay at rest in the coffin either on the left or the right, and knocked back her first glass of vodka that evening.

  Meanwhile Tereza had been waiting patiently out in the car for boredom to send Dianne and me to sleep at some stage. Which didn’t happen—there was impending excitement in the air, big things about to happen, at least as great as the second half-empty jumbo bag of jelly bears that lay on the backseat between us. Rain was falling on the roof of the car, and from time to time the soft hum of the windshield wipers would mingle with the monotonous drumming of the rain.

  “We’re off,” whispered Tereza as the front door finally opened and Glass beckoned to us. As we slid past her through the entrance to the funeral parlor, I noticed goose pimples on my mother’s bare legs. Glass was holding her second glass of vodka in one hand.

  No sooner had the door clicked shut than Tereza grabbed her by the shoulders and gave her a searching look.

  “And did you … ?”

  “No.”

  With a tender caress she pushed a strand of hair away from Glass’s face and kissed her softly on the cheek. “All the same
, thanks.”

  “Anytime.” Glass grinned.

  Later on I imagined having heard a whispering and mumbling greeting us in the funeral parlor, distant echoes of wailing and lamenting that over years and years seeped into the respectable display in the shop front. Silence reigned in the presence of the dead. Only by listening closely could a disturbing, repeated whistling sound be heard.

  “What’s that?” asked Dianne.

  “That’s the fat man,” said Tereza. “He’s sleeping.”

  “If he’s asleep, he can’t watch over your papa.”

  “That’s why we’re here now, sweetie. Glass, show us the way, will you?”

  We moved through the half-light. There didn’t seem to be any visible sources of light in this house. Light was simply there, coming from everywhere and nowhere, and it was neither bright nor dim—it was simply the most lightless light that I’d ever seen. Soon we were all four standing in the tiled room, and here there was light, horribly cold light, neon light that beamed down from the ceiling as we looked respectfully at the two highly polished oak coffins.

  “There aren’t any real nails in them, only a kind of screw,” Glass explained to Tereza, who had suddenly grown very quiet. “They’ll just pop out of the wood. Smooth as butter.”

  “Which one is it?” asked Tereza soberly.

  “The one on the left. I think.”

  “Glass!”

  “OK, OK, I’m sure! It’s on the left.”

  The pins did not pop out smooth as butter. The noise they made as they were being removed put an abrupt end to the deathly silence. It rang in our ears like the rattling of machine-gun fire. The nerve-racking echo rolled around the tiled room like thunder. At last the lid came away from the coffin.

  “Full pay for a job half done,” said Tereza when she’d inspected the inside of the coffin. “I ought to sue the pig.” Her face didn’t show the slightest emotion. Only her voice expressed outrage. Curious to see what was upsetting Tereza so much, Dianne and I stretched our necks, but we were too small to be able to look over the edge of the coffin.