Nicholas looks at me skeptically. “Does she know that we …”
“Yes.”
“And it doesn’t matter to her?”
“Nothing’s ever mattered to her. She’s, well, different from other mothers, I guess.”
“Yes, so I’ve heard.” He chews on his lower lip. “Being seen with her apparently doesn’t exactly enhance one’s reputation.”
“Sleeping with Glass doesn’t enhance one’s reputation, but in your case there’s hardly likely to be any danger of that,” says Kat drily.
“Are you quite sure?”
“QED.”
“What?”
“Quod erat demonstrandum. ”
“Erzt, in this case.” Nicholas grins and points across the schoolyard without letting Kat out of his sight. “But not here, in front of all these people, surely?”
“Guess you’ll have to sort that out with Glass, not me,” counters Kat.
“Well, then.” For a second he is hesitant. Maybe he’s thrown by the gawping from all sides, which he cannot know is aimed not at him but at me, the witch’s son with the weird sister. “What d’you say we all go out sometime together? I could ask my father to let me borrow his car.”
I’m taken by surprise. “You have a driving license?”
He nods. I don’t like having my nose rubbed in the fact that Nicholas is a year older than me and that he’s repeating this school year. His having a license only serves to emphasize that he has the edge in experience over me. At least that’s how I see it.
“Today?”
“No, sometime soon. I’ll have to put in some groundwork first. My father doesn’t like lending his car.”
“Super idea,” says Kat. “The knight on the white steed whisks us away from the dreary gray of the little dying town.” “He’ll do just that, but first he will wend his way into the dreary gray of this little old school.” Nicholas looks at his watch. “I have to go. See you later in Handel’s class.”
He moves off and mingles with the pupils streaming in through the main entrance. I really wish for once he’d turn back to me, wave, anything.
It’s good to know Kat is beside me. She puts an arm around my waist and pulls me close to her. We form a small island in the surging waves of pupils thronging into the building from all sides.
“Does he always just leave you standing like that?”
“Yes.”
“No kiss?”
“No.”
“Well, in your place, I’d insist… .”
Then something strange happens.
Every voice and sound suddenly stops. The air dissolves into liquid glass that casts waves. Standing beside the bicycle shelter, his face as red as a beetroot, is Thomas, looking straight at Kat and me. He is quivering with pent-up energy, a lighthouse radiating jealousy. And through the open door I catch sight of Wolf inside the building, deathly pale, a thin hand on the banister staircase leading up to the first floor. The crowd of pupils parts around him like the surf around a rock. I stand there paralyzed, as if frozen to the ground.
“Kat?” I whisper.
Someone’s walking over my grave. That’s how Glass would describe a flash of premonition. I get a different feeling. It’s a bit like how my scars itch before a change in the weather. I can’t put a finger on it; it’s just a presentiment, some age-old instinct. But at that very moment something is set in motion. It’s irrevocable and final. I think of a herd of galloping wild animals with trampled grass and dark earth flying up from under their sharp hooves.
“Phil.” A voice penetrates the silence. “Phil?”
“Hm?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, come on, then. Let’s go inside.”
Kat releases me from her hug and pulls me after her. Thomas and Wolf have disappeared like ghosts.
A week later, by which time I was no longer counting on Nicholas even remembering, he asks whether Glass would still like to meet him. He says he’ll come in the late afternoon, as soon as he’s finished training at the running track. I call Glass at her law firm and ask her to be home on time.
Nicholas arrives at Visible shortly before her. We’re still both standing in the entrance hall when Glass storms through the door on stiletto heels wearing one of these sober serious secretary suits with a snowy white blouse that she absolutely loathes but which Tereza positively insists on. Right away I see she’s brought home a mound of paperwork. I can tell not so much from the briefcase full to bursting point under her arm as from the undecided way she’s dithering about—rather like a squirrel faced with a tree full of available holes, trying to make up its mind in which to store its supplies.
“Give me an hour, darlings,” she calls over to us, “then I’ll make us some tea, OK?”
Darlings. She probably now sees me in this impossible plural of two halves blended into one blissful unit that she herself detests so much. She rushes past us, frantically fumbling in her briefcase as she goes.
“Mum!”
“Hm?”
“I want you to meet Nicholas.”
“Oh.” Glass comes to an abrupt halt, spins round, and stretches out her free hand to Nicholas. “Good to meet you, Nick. Sorry, my head’s in a fog today.”
“Please take your time, ma’am.”
“How formal you are in this country!” she calls back over her shoulder as she clatters on her way. “Just call me Glass, OK?”
I fill in the time by showing Nicholas round Visible. I would never have believed that anything could impress or surprise him. But now he follows me like a little boy on his first visit to a fairground. Unlike Kat, who swept along with the natural arrogance of a conqueror without looking to left or right on her first visit, Nicholas views Visible with near reverence. He insists on my showing him every single detail. I take him everywhere, allowing him to go into every room from the cellar to the attic, with the exception of my own room and those of Dianne and Glass. While I tell him stuff about the house and its history, Nicholas touches the walls, the wooden beams, the worn banisters, attentively studies the photos of Stella stuck all over the wails, and listens to the creaking of the well-worn floorboards beneath our feet. I’m pleased that he moves so carefully, as if Visible was a sleeping creature, not to be woken. He remains standing for a long time in the library, taking in the tall shelves and their contents, Dianne’s herbaries, the few books left behind by Stella and the many by Tereza’s father. He spends longest looking at the threadbare red armchair, my story throne.
We go down the rickety staircase behind the library into the garden, where waist-high dry yellow grass bends and waves like seaweed in the cool autumn wind and the sandstone statues stand in imperturbable silence. We look up at the house, at the wide cracks and slits and the noticeably stained plasterwork, which the evergreen ivy scarcely hides.
“Well, what do you think?” I say. “When will the walls cave in on us?”
“Never,” replies Nicholas softly. “Houses like this are built to last forever. It’s beautiful, Phil!”
Five minutes later we’re sitting at the kitchen table, under the imperturbable gaze of Rosella, as Glass battles like a prizefighter trying to pry a couple of tea bags out of the packet. She has changed clothes and is wearing jogging pants and a top that look as if they’ve been dug up from the props basket of some cheap TV soap. I’m excited and don’t know why. I ought not to care what impression Nicholas makes on Glass. Nor for that matter should it make any difference to me what her opinion of Nicholas will be—after all, apart from Michael, she’s never asked me my opinion about any of her men.
“How d’you like Visible, Nick?” Glass has at last succeeded in dropping the tea bags into the teapot, and sits down at the table with us.
“Wonderful,” says Nicholas. “I’d like to buy it from you on the spot. The garden must be fantastic in summer.”
“I gave up the garden long ago. Weeds everywhere, and all kinds of creatures crawling
about in it.” Glass wrinkles her nose. “Did Phil ever tell you the business with the snake?”
“Mom, please, I—”
“Don’t ‘Mom’ or ‘please’ me.”
The kettle whistles. Glass goes over to the stove. Nicholas grins at me across the kitchen table. I smirk and make a helpless gesture. The prospect of Glass dishing up that old childhood story is horribly embarrassing. Before she even starts, I know she’ll exaggerate hugely. She can’t help herself.
“I was busy in the garden, pulling up weeds and that sort of stuff. Phil and Dianne were there,” she begins as she pours hot water into the teapot. “They were still very small and were getting under my feet with their little plastic spades and rakes and buckets. It was really hard to know where to begin in that jungle, with fallen boughs and broken branches and undergrowth all over the place.”
I don’t like thinking back to that day. It was at the time when Glass had tried to wrest Visible’s garden back from the wilderness, the futile attempt that had ended up with Glass employing Martin—Martin of the towels, Martin with his unending laughter, Martin and his smell of summer and garden soil.
“So there was this tree trunk,” Glass continues, sitting down at the table again. “Actually, it was only part of a tree trunk. Maybe it had been cut down for firewood ages ago and then left there—no idea. And I’m thinking, You can do it, it can’t be that heavy, so I roll it over, intending to move it off the grass.”
Nicholas nods.
“And then there was a snake lying under it, coiled up tight. It was black with these light vertical markings, a—what’s it called again, darling?”
“A viper.”
“Exactly. Viper. And suddenly”—I shrink as Glass suddenly shoots both hands into the air—“it wasn’t coiled anymore, it was a rope jerking up in the grass! And it hissed and I screamed. …”
“It only darted its tongue, Mom.”
Her arms drop, and my objection is swept aside with a single flick of the wrist. Glass begins pouring the tea. “And then it comes shooting toward me, hiss, hiss, and I tell you, Nick, this creature was enormous!”
“Glass!”
“E-normous!”
Even then I had sensed that the snake—more of a feeble relative of the truly venomous American vipers, and whose bite, as I later discovered, was never lethal unless you happen to have a weak heart or poor circulation—must have been far more afraid of us than Glass, Dianne, or I was of it. It was only reacting instinctively as it signaled its readiness to defend itself by opening its jaws wide, and it would probably have cleared off if only we had left it in peace. Apart from that, Glass was wearing rubber boots. Nothing could have happened to her, even if the snake had bitten, but that didn’t stop our mother from screaming. It was this terrible scream that made Dianne and me go for it.
“Phil and Dianne hacked it into little pieces,” continues Glass chattily. She blows into her cup. “With their rakes and their spades. They fell on the creature like lunatics. Quite quick about it too. Lots of teeny-weeny pieces. Sugar, Nick?”
Nicholas laughs and passes her his cup. I’m hoping he thinks Glass has a tendency to ironic exaggeration. It would be embarrassing for me if he knew that she meant every single word quite seriously, has set the scene like a second-rate actress from one of her beloved soap operas. She carries on babbling and prattling for half an hour more, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and Nicholas must realize that she’s flirting with him outrageously. That at least can be explained later on—its instinctive with her. Glass flirts with all men and is nearly always successful at it. It is the inexhaustible source of her self-confidence.
It’s hardly any surprise to that Nicholas tells me, as we go upstairs soon after, how much he likes my mother.
“She’s quite young, isn’t she?”
“She’s thirty-four.”
“Then she was a teenager when you were born.”
“Yes.”
“Where was your father?”
“No idea. I don’t know him. He walked out on Glass.”
“What a fool.”
And no further questions relating to Number Three. Another hurdle overcome. Relieved, I guide Nicholas into my bedroom. He looks round very intently.
Looking at the familiar through someone else’s eyes sharpens your own perception. All of a sudden I feel like a stranger in my own room. It’s large and as high-ceilinged as all the other rooms in Visible: two bay windows, no curtains, very light. In one corner is the tiled stove, with a few logs from the last cold spell. On the worn parquet floor is my mattress, covered in gleaming bedlinen (one day Glass discovered a chest in the cellar containing dozens of white sheets). On the floor beside the mattress is a small cheap lamp, the only one to light the room, and next to it my telephone. Books are piled up against the wall. There’s a wide rickety bookcase with two whole shelves reserved for the treasured oceanic pieces I’ve received from Gable over the years. The others are an assembly of dust-covered remnants from my childhood. In among threadbare furry animals and a few toy cars Paleiko peers out like a tired black comma. At some point I brought a worm-eaten old desk up here from Visible’s simply inexhaustible cellar and placed it under one of the two bay windows. A sole chair stands in front of it. For someone with few friends, there’s no call for providing seating for visitors.
“Where’s your gear?”
“In a closet outside in the corridor. I can’t bear armoires.”
“Really?” Whenever Nicholas smiles, like now, it makes my heart give a leap. “Nor can I.”
The white-painted walls are hung with pictures that Gable has brought me and dozens of postcards he’s sent me from all over the world. Most of the space is taken up by the two enormous old torn display panels I stole from the cellar at school in the company of Wolf—the pinpricked world map, covered in creases and frayed at the edges, and the map of North America, spattered with spots of brown mold.
Nicholas goes toward the bookshelf, stretches out a determined hand, and takes down one of the two potbellied glass jars with a screw-top lid from the upper shelf. I can’t help grinning. “A sweet jar,” I explain. “I’ve got two of them, and Dianne has one.”
“Do I get to see her as well?”
“Probably not.”
I can’t possibly tell him about what went on last night without going into details. Everything is so intractably intertwined. It would take too many explanations, in turn requiring further clarifications, and in spite of every effort to keep the ten or twenty threads of a very long story separate, it might just end up with a highly confusing Gordian knot. In any case I can’t just go over Dianne’s head.
“She’s asleep, I expect. Something stupid happened last week. She’s still staying home and doesn’t want to see anyone, because—”
Nicholas cuts me short. “I heard about it. Where do these jars come from?”
What I find surprising is not that he’s aware of the far-reaching bush telegraph of the Little People but how nonchalantly he dismisses the whole affair, thereby freeing me from the wretchedness of having to unravel it for him.
“From an old man,” I reply in relief.
“Grandfather?”
“No. Someone in the town I knew as a child and was very fond of.”
Nicholas looks at the glass for a long time, tracing a wavy line over its dusty surface with his index finger. A faraway look of deep concentration appears on his face. It’s almost as if he’s listening to the inside of the glass, as if his eyes, like his finger, are trying to find the countless images reflected on its surfaces that have long since turned cloudy.
“Tell me about the old man and his glass jars.”
“You’d just be bored.”
“Oh, QED.” Nicholas smiles. “Or maybe not?”
I believe I was terrified by most of the Little People because they just seemed so unreal to me, as intangible as the two-dimensional figures in a black and white movie. They all had the same transparency I was later
to discover in the figure of Mrs. Hebeler, for example: skins that had life flickering through them without apparently having any hold on them. When I was a child the residents of the town seemed strangely bloodless to me, and with the same unhealthy pallor as the face of Tereza’s father bare of makeup and with a badly stitched-up jaw. There were exceptions, of course. Annie Glosser was one of them, but long before Annie—two years, to be precise—there was Mr. Troht.
Mr. Troht ran a gloomy, unsuccessful grocery store that only really brightened up when the door opened with a creaking sound because it had such tiny perpetually filthy windows. An old-fashioned bell would then promptly tinkle. Everything in Mr. Troht’s shop seemed utterly old-fashioned, both the contents and the owner. There was a giant cash register, covered with all kinds of embellishments, that looked like it was made of cast iron, and its drawer would spring open with the terrifying sound of a snapping crocodile jaw. On the wall behind the sales counter was a round clock with a cracked porcelain face and wonderfully ornate metal hour and minute hands that never appeared to move.
Mr. Troht himself had such a tiny head that I could hardly believe it could contain a full-grown brain. I decided that at some point this head must have been bigger, probably in Mr. Troht’s incredibly distant youth; with age it then shrank and became as wrinkled as a discarded potato. However, Mr. Troht’s eyes were enormous, admittedly only when he decided to open them wide. But that happened only rarely; most of the time they were screwed up into two small slits, for Mr. Troht was extremely shortsighted and wore glasses with lenses as thick as a finger, which he appeared to clean as seldom as the windowpanes of his shop—in effect never. Presumably because he was virtually blind, there was only one single, dim lightbulb, which gave just enough light to reveal itself. In a word, Mr. Troht lived in a world of profound darkness. Yet when the door of the shop opened, the darkness was illuminated. Then light would fall, like a magic beam from a conjurer’s wand, onto the object of my longing: a row of potbellied jars, each tapering upward to a narrowing neck with a screw top. They stood right next to the cash register and displayed small, round sweets for sale in all colors of the rainbow. Glass sometimes took Dianne and me to this shop, just to show us the brightly colored sweets or to smell them— it seemed to me they even smelled like a rainbow—but she very rarely bought anything there, because to her regret Mr. Troht didn’t stock any ready-prepared foods.
The Center of the World Page 22
