“When there’s nothing left to hold on to, you cling to the old rituals.” Nicholas grips my hand in his firm grasp and pushes it down onto the mattress. “Roll over onto your stomach.”
“Be careful… .”
With someone as reticent as Nicholas it’s hard to tell when he’s withdrawn even further into himself. All the same, in the days that follow I get the impression that his rare kisses are becoming even rarer and the touching less. It’s only the sex that remains the same—a hunger that can’t be satisfied.
The weathermen didn’t get it wrong—it turns into a freezing cold winter. By the middle of December there’s already a thin bluish white covering of ice over the pool at the bottom of the garden, which I haven’t been down to since the summer. Now and again some powdery snow falls, but it’s never more than a ragged veil blown against tree trunks and the walls of houses by a Siberian wind, where it clings like a dusting of icing sugar. Everything freezes solid. Frost bites deep into the soil and seals the earth with an armor plating of invisible ice. Perhaps it’s the unbearable cold that makes Dianne decide to shed her own armor.
On Saturday afternoon she tracks me down in the room that Michael and I have transformed into a carpenter’s workshop.
“Phil, have you got a moment?”
“Does it have to be now?”
My hands and clothes are spattered with green paint. The display cabinet, Nicholas’s Christmas present, is finished at last and thanks to Michael’s help looks really professional. I deliberated for a long time whether to leave the beautifully grained wood as it is or to give it a coat of paint. In the end I decided to paint it with a coat of matte lacquer.
“I can come back later,” says Dianne. She looks at the cabinet. “Nice color.”
“I was thinking of yellow at first.’’
“Green’s OK.”
“Green like the paint on Hoffmann’s consulting room?”
She grins. “Yes. Sort of.”
I get back to work. Dianne stays standing in the doorway watching me. I apply one, two strokes with the brush, then I give in and lower it with a sigh.
“OK, then. What’s it all about?”
“D’you still want to know what the problem is between Glass and me?”
I almost drop the brush. I’m completely taken by surprise. She could have asked me in just the same innocent way whether I prefer coffee with or without milk. All I can do is nod.
“Then come with me.”
One of the pearls of wisdom that Glass sells her clients like chocolates with sweet or plain fillings according to taste is that there’s a time and a place for everything. Could be that Dianne has taken this piece of wisdom to heart, but I don’t ask her. My curiosity outweighs my interest in her motives. I follow her along the corridor and into the cold entrance hall, surprised to find us making for the library. Dianne goes straight up to one of the shelves, takes out one of the leather-bound herbaries compiled by Tereza’s father, and opens it—hardly needs to open it because the pages almost fall open of their own accord at a certain place.
Suddenly the feeling hits me forcibly that it was a mistake to have followed Dianne here. Then comes the longing to turn on my heel and run away, the awareness that I never should have asked my sister questions without being prepared for the most terrible answers. She points at five purple-black tiny nail-shaped seeds attached to the page with a nearly transparent strip of adhesive tape.
“What’s that?”
“Secale cornutum. Ergot. Not really a plant, but a fungus. I still have almost a whole jarful of it.”
“Dianne, I—” But of course there’s no stopping her now; the words are as good as uttered.
“Ergot contains an alkaloid. In small doses it causes cramps, especially cramps in the involuntary musculature. Midwives have used it for hundreds of years to induce or increase contractions.”
Glass lost the baby at the end of January, almost exactly four weeks to the day after she had revealed to me on the bridge over the frozen river that she was pregnant. It happened at night; Dianne and I were woken by her screams. Outside it was snowing unremittingly for days on end, the world was clothed in white, and a wind was blowing, not very violently, but loud enough to make me think afterward that I might have not heard Glass screaming the first two or three times. Not that it would have made any difference.
“Phil! Phiiiiiilllll … !”
I informed the emergency service. I didn’t need to hunt for the telephone number—Glass had drummed it into me and Dianne almost as soon as we’d learned to say the word telephone. She’d even taught us the secret maneuver that every schoolchild in America can perform, a kind of hold that can prevent someone from choking on a food morsel by removing the foreign body stuck in the esophagus. Glass had warned us about bleach and detergents, tablets, ointments and lotions, about nasty men, nasty women, about knives, forks, scissors, lightbulbs, everything to protect us, and now she was the one too late to be protected.
It was only later that it occurred to me to phone Tereza as well. By the time she arrived at Visible the walls of the entrance hall were already reflecting the rotating blue light of the ambulance, standing in the drive with the engine running. Snow was blowing in through the open front door, snaking in glittering lines across the cold tiled floor. I sat cowering at the foot of the stairs and cried, because I thought Glass was bound to die.
“What’s happened?” asked Tereza, as breathless as if she’d run all the way to Visible. She was wearing old-fashioned red and blue striped pajamas with an open coat thrown over them. She must have driven like the devil.
“She wasn’t feeling well already this afternoon.”
“Where’s Dianne?”
“Upstairs. She’s cleaning up.”
“She’s … ?” It took a moment for Tereza to understand. “Oh, my God, Phil …”
She embraced me briefly, then ran upstairs. She left a trail of ice-cold air behind her like an invisible train. Outside the ambulance was driving off. I didn’t move from the spot. If I just stayed sitting here and didn’t move, then Glass would stay alive. I began to cry again.
In the late afternoon, shortly after Glass had complained of feeling nauseous, the contractions had begun. They set in as suddenly as the cold that spreads through the countryside just before a hailstorm. Glass had filled a water bottle with hot water and taken it to bed, and remained lying there stoically, even when the contractions began to get worse and she exchanged the water bottle for a bag filled with ice cubes, which did just as little to help. This time she had to pay for her reluctance to call on help from outside and inform a doctor right away.
It was a few minutes before Tereza came back downstairs again. She glided slowly down the staircase, holding Dianne by one hand, and in the other a crumpled sheet with a red stain soaking through in one place. Diannes lips were pursed tight. Her eyes were glassy. Something glittered and shone. With every step my sister took down the stairs, the halfmoon-shaped pendant I had given her for Christmas fell against her heavy dark sweater.
“What’s in there?” I whispered, pointing at the sheet.
“Nothing a child needs to know,” said Tereza.
I’d never seen her so pale before. God alone knows what my mother’s bedroom looked like, God and Glass and Dianne and Tereza.
“Go and pack a few things, Phil, and you too, Dianne. Clothes, toothbrush.”
“What sort of clothes?”
“Anything. Hurry now.”
As we packed not a word passed between Dianne and me. I was worried because her arms were rising and falling in exactly the same mechanical way as I imagined the movements of the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, which Tereza had read to us. I knew Dianne disapproved of the men who used to come and visit Glass. Which was why Glass and I had feared that she might react strongly when told about a baby. Strangely enough, she had accepted it quite calmly—she hadn’t burst into tears of joy, but there’d been no screams of horror, either. It must have been
wishful thinking on my part, but I had assumed that secretly she was actually looking forward to the baby, maybe like a doll, for soon after she began behaving really affectionately, plumping up cushions for Glass before she sank onto the sofa by the chimney, making her endless cups of tea, and preparing breakfast and supper for her.
The front door was still open when we came out of our rooms and back downstairs into the entrance hall. It was dreadfully cold. All the warmth seemed to have left Visible along with Glass. Tereza was sitting on the staircase, on the same step where I’d been sitting before. The red sheet had disappeared. She bundled Dianne and me into her car, took us with her, and put us up in her apartment. Next day she sent for two men from a cleaning firm to go to Visible.
“How long are we going to stay with you?’’ I asked her the first evening. The three of us were sitting on the convertible couch that Tereza had opened out for Dianne and me in the living room. The light from a standard lamp threw long shadows against the walls, and Dianne stared at these shadows as if she could bring the pattern of the black outlines to life with her glassy gaze.
“Till Glass is allowed to leave the hospital,” said Tereza. “Maybe even a bit longer. As long as you like.”
I snuggled up to her. I never wanted to go back home again. I was fully convinced that Visible would collapse on top of me because the walls and the timbers of the house could not bear the misfortune that had befallen my mother. That first night I dreamed I was back in the old cellar at school. I was standing in front of a row of glass jars filled with formaldehyde. The jars had been carefully dusted, and in one of them, as if weightless in the dirty yellow fluid, floated a delicately veined sleeping baby, its tiny fists pressed into its face, the little legs curled up. Suddenly the fluid turned red and the baby opened its eyes and screamed. It had the same big blue eyes as Glass.
Dianne slept beside me like a stone. But Tereza heard me crying and came to me. Straightaway she took me into her own bed and spoke to me comfortingly.
“Imagine life as a huge house with lots of rooms, Phil. Some of these rooms are empty, and others are full of junk. Some are big and filled with light, and others are dark and hide terror and grief. And from time to time—but only from time to time, mind you—the door to one of these scary rooms opens and you have to look inside, whether you want to or not. That makes you terribly frightened, like now. So you know what you do then?”
I shook my head.
“Then you imagine it’s your life—your house, with your rooms. You have the keys, Phil. So you just shut the door of that scary room.”
“And I throw the key away!”
“No, you mustn’t do that, ever,” replied Tereza. “Because one day you may realize that this scary room is the only way you can reach a bigger, more beautiful part of the house. And then you’ll need the key. You can lock out your fear for a while, but at some point you have to face up to it.”
“When I’m bigger?”
“Bigger and braver, my little one.” Tereza stroked my temples with the back of her hand. “And perhaps not on your own anymore.”
I couldn’t wait to visit my mother in the hospital, because I wanted to see with my own eyes that she was still alive. But because she had lost a lot of blood and something had gone wrong with her abdomen, Glass was ordered total rest, and so only Tereza was allowed to see her for the first few days. And so, for all the reassurance offered me by Tereza that the worst was over, I continued to worry. Up to now I had believed there was nothing worse than life without a father. Now I was consumed by the nightmare prospect of a life without parents— if Glass hadn’t survived the miscarriage, Dianne and I would have been orphans. Something akin to gratitude welled up inside me. The baby, a brother or sister, was lost, but Glass was still there. But despite the knowledge that if she had died Tereza would have raised heaven and hell to keep custody of us, the thought of life without my mother filled me with a terror that I was never to shake off completely. Weeks after her return home, I was still inventing scenarios of Glass meeting her death in the wildest ways, and these fantasies would repeatedly surface, recalling the cloth that Tereza had carried down the staircase at Visible, the crumpled sheet with the glaring red bloodstain. I had visions of Glass wrapped up in it like a toga or a sari, covered with it like a shroud; I saw it in the form of a hideous turban wound round her head.
Tereza did her utmost to keep Dianne and me occupied. On the third or fourth day she bundled us into the car early in the morning and set out on a drive, lasting hours, to a big city, only to end up in front of the closed gates of the zoo where she’d wanted to take us.
“Zoos are shut in winter,” was Dianne’s laconic observation. It was the first sentence she’d uttered since the terrible night at Visible. I gave a sigh of relief. Up to now I’d been uncertain whether she simply couldn’t find the words to communicate or whether the shock of witnessing the event had robbed her of the power of speech. It was only Tereza’s relaxed reaction to her silence that had reassured me somewhat.
“Of course,” said Tereza. “Of course zoos are shut in winter.” She sat down on a snow-covered bench and burst into tears.
I would have liked to comfort her, put an arm round her, but instinctively shrank from doing so. Something in Tereza rejected any form of sympathy.
Glass was more than a friend for her, and love never dies; at best it changes. Tereza had to let out her grief on her own. I looked at her red hair hanging limply, the tiny holes in the snow at her feet made by her tears, and thought back to the stormy night when we’d buried her father, how Tereza had dropped to her knees on the dirty wet earth of the burial mound and howled her grief at the sky, and I felt a lump rising in my throat. At this moment I’d have given a kingdom for a bagful of jelly bears.
When at last the day came that Dianne and I were allowed to pay Glass a brief visit, I was so wild with excitement that Tereza threatened to go and buy a dog leash and put it round my neck. But all that was required to calm me down was the sight of my mother. Glass was lying limp and pale in her bed in a room that seemed distinctly too cold to me, with a penetrating smell that brought back unpleasant memories. She could barely raise her head to greet us. She’d also been too weak to prevent Tereza from registering her as a private patient. Dianne and I sat in silence on the edge of the bed next to Glass for a while; I took her hand, which was surprisingly warm, squeezed it without getting an answering squeeze, and all the same for that moment I was blissfully happy. At some point she fell asleep.
“Will she get completely better?” asked Dianne as we left the hospital with Tereza.
“Yes, but it’ll take a while.”
It took months, well into the summer. Physically Glass recovered relatively quickly, and after ten days she was back at Visible. But it was as if a black web had unfurled over her spirit and retreated only slowly and hesitantly. When the last remnant had dropped away, she appeared to be the same old Glass, but by then I knew her well enough to realize that she had only regained sufficient strength to cover her eyes with blinkers.
From the day Glass came out of hospital, Dianne was a changed person. She blossomed and emanated an inner light. For weeks her face had been pale, and now for the first time a flush of color came back. She was lovingly attentive to Glass. Just as she had been before the miscarriage, once again Dianne now turned into care personified, and moreover proved an exemplary nurse. First thing in the morning she would scurry into the freezing cold kitchen, prepare food, make tea all day long, run soothing baths in the bathroom, read aloud to Glass from the newspaper, and do her very best to cheer our mother up, even if it was to no avail.
It didn’t take long for me to consider her an angel.
“I put it in her tea, in small doses, so that she wouldn’t taste it,” said Dianne. “In case it had a taste. I never tried it myself.”
She closes the herbary, puts it back on the shelf in its allotted place, and remains standing there. I see the back of her head and her back, bent fo
rward a little, as if expecting blows. Her arms stretch out to either side; her hands cling to the spines of a few books.
“That’s all there is to it,” I hear her say quietly. “Now you know why Glass hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you.”
My own voice suddenly sounds like that of a stranger. I don’t know what has hit me harder, Dianne’s confession or the almost casual way she has delivered it. I feel as if my entire body has been scooped out with a knife.
“Yes, Phil, she does.” Dianne turns round to me. I’ve never seen her eyes look so dark. “Don’t you understand, I could have killed her! I had no idea what sort of doses to give!”
“How did she find out?”
“She didn’t. At least not by herself.” Dianne moves slowly toward the French doors, where the wind is flinging snow crystals against the glass. They rattle on the panes like hailstones. “At one point we had a row. You were in Greece with Gable. We really let fly at each other—it was because … oh, it really doesn’t matter what. Anyway, one thing led to another. Glass was screaming and threw a tantrum, and then I couldn’t stop myself from telling her. Just flung it at her.”
“God, Dianne …”
“It’s got nothing to do with God.” Again she’s speaking very coolly, as if talking about two strangers. “That did it. She made me show her the herbary, and then for months she’d be huddled here in the library gawping at the wretched leather tome. I tried a hundred different ways to prove to her I was sorry, but she just withdrew totally.”
“Can you blame her?”
“Phil, I’m not proud of what I did, believe me.”
“You were jealous.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson!” One corner of Diannes mouth curls scornfully downwards. “Of course I was jealous! I was only thirteen years old, and a few years before that Glass had pushed me so far that I’d climbed up on the roof, just because I couldn’t think of any other way to protest against her and scare her to death at the same time, and there are probably ten more reasons I could think of to excuse myself. But I am sorry.”
The Center of the World Page 29
