The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nicholas, I want to feel I’m safe with you! Is that so hard to understand? And I can’t be with someone who claims to need me but is ready to drop me at any time. I’m worth more than that.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “Go. Just go.”

  He remains rooted to the spot. And there it is. For a brief moment the armor plating that Nicholas surrounds himself with opens up. I see it in his gaze that flickers like a startled, frightened bird. Fear grips me so intensely that my knees threaten to give way. The beautiful face, normally so controlled and unmoved, now changes expression several times within seconds, just as if invisible hands were pulling a series of Greek tragedy masks over it of in rapid succession—fear gives way to helpless despair, childlike surprise, flickering hatred.

  “No.”

  And then the moment passes. Nicholas is once more in complete control. His face relaxes. Whatever it was that rose briefly to the surface has sunk deep down again. But everything has changed, first making my heart miss a beat and then beat faster, so that I’m now desperate to take back everything I said.

  I go toward Nicholas and stretch out my hand.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  My hearing and seeing coincide. What I hear is a dry crack, as if a branch has given way somewhere and snapped under the weight of the snow covering it. What I see is Nicholas’s right eye opening above the pupil before his head jerks to one side as if hit by some invisible blow, and he collapses into the snow.

  He screams. Oh, God, he screams loud enough to make the heavens tear apart and the earth open up. And above his screams I hear words, words I’ve heard once before, life completing a dreadful full circle. Suddenly I can smell the nearby river, it’s summer, the air smells of algae and butterbur, and somewhere there’s a flash of pink and silver as a rainbow trout shoots away through the foaming water below the Big Eye.

  “He’s—”

  “Ohhh …”

  “Get away!”

  Nicholas is lying in the snow clasping his right eye with both hands. I fall on my knees in front of him.

  “Let me … Nicholas! Take your hands away!”

  “Noooo … !”

  “Nicholas, let me see!”

  There’s hardly any blood, just pale, clear fluid. It sticks to his gloves, it oozes from what a moment ago was still an eye and now looks like a squashed small flower. Nicholas clamps his hands back to his face, doubles up, and writhes in the snow, yelling. Then I hear the crackling sound of rapid steps running away. I spring up and dash off.

  Ten yards ahead snow sprinkles down from some of the fruit tree branches that reach right down to the meadow. The branches bang against each other and close, obscuring a shadow disappearing out of sight. There’s the stack of cut logs, brown and wet, and tall enough to hide behind quite easily. I chase round the pile.

  Wolf is cowering on the ground and stares at me, his eyes a ghastly clear gray. He’s wearing neither jacket or coat, just a painfully thin striped shirt. Blond curly hair falls heavily over his forehead, tangled and wiry with a life of its own. The air gun lies across his arms, and Wolf slowly rocks himself to and fro with it. His hands are frozen, the veins standing out purple from his skin. His mouth moves; his blue lips croon the same three words over and over again across the glittering snow, barely audible above the hideous screams of Nicholas: “The poor Runner, the poor Runner, the poor Runner …”

  When I whisper his name, I feel ashes in my mouth. When I call up his image, ice settles on my thoughts. When I imagine myself stroking him, scalpels cut my fingers and hands open.

  He was taken to the same clinic where Kat and I first met, two hours away from me by car. He refuses to see me or take my phone calls. He doesn’t want me to utter his name again. I’m history. I don’t know how to reach Kat at her holiday resort. I don’t know whether I really want to either.

  I learn from his mother that the eye is damaged beyond repair, making it blind, but that the bullet from Wolf’s air gun was removed from the back of the right eye socket and did not cause any further harm. His mother is a very unhappy woman. Her loneliness cloaks her like the stink of decay. I introduced myself to her as a school friend of her son’s. I don’t meet his father.

  The bullet was meant for me, and only intended as a warning shot, according to what Thomas told the police. I don’t discover how he got to Wolf and how he managed to win him over. Once he had wormed his way into Wolf’s heart and mind, it wouldn’t have taken much persuasion to turn Wolf into the willing tool of his own jealousy. Day after day they had waited for me outside Visible, waiting in the freezing cold, till they saw me leave with Nicholas and followed us. Thomas couldn’t have guessed that by the time Wolf fired the shot he would already have turned the gun away from me and aimed at the boy beside me. And maybe he wouldn’t have cared.

  chapter 17

  talking

  in the

  dark

  It doesn’t stop snowing for days. People are getting excited at the prospect of a white Christmas, and Glass keeps putting on Stella’s ancient scratchy record of the soulful relevant Bing Crosby song. Streets become impassable for a while, and outlying districts are cut off. The massive weight of the snow brings down whole trees or makes them lean dangerously to one side, and every now and again there is a threatening rumble of protest from Visible’s roof.

  Gable shows up at Visible two days before Christmas Eve, and on his arrival the weather turns. As he stands at the door in the early afternoon, his sailor’s kit bag over his shoulder, it stops snowing. It’s almost as if Gable has tumbled out of the sky accompanied by a thousand stars—suddenly the day is unbelievably bright and clear, the air motionless and the sunshine warm. The screams of delight that Glass greets him with travel all the way up to my room, where I’m abandoning myself to dark thoughts about guilt and atonement, love and death. I’ve been staring at the wall for hours, trying to make my eyes bore a hole into Visible’s masonry. The image of a horrific flower swims before my eyes, opening and closing in unending time-lapse frames, and with each completed loop spews this clear, gall-like fluid from its shattered center.

  Apart from general expressions of shock and regret, reactions to what took place are somewhat varied. In characteristic fashion Glass’s view was a sober one. Nothing and no one, she maintained, was of sufficient importance to bring the world to a standstill. I should count myself lucky that the accident—and after all, it was an accident, wasn’t it, darling?— with Nicholas occurred at a point when I happened to be morally at a very low ebb. She very politely pointed out that although she had every sympathy for my wish once again to remain shut away in my room wrangling with my destiny, she was in no way inclined to support my gloomy contemplation of my navel with constant deliveries of food and drink.

  Both Michael and Tereza had offered to represent Nicholas in court if he or his parents decided, as might be expected, to institute legal proceedings against Thomas. I told both of them that they would have to go straight to Nicholas if they were interested in the case, as I had no wish to concern myself any further with the matter. I was by no means polite, and later regretted my behavior. I apologized to them, and hated them afterward for being understanding.

  Pascal earned penalty points from all sides with her observation that the best thing would be for all men to be issued guns—that way the world would soon be rid of one huge problem. Dianne couldn’t help grinning when I told her. Apart from that, to my relief my sister kept her opinions to herself.

  The loudest reactions came from across the river. It’s grotesque, but then I hadn’t really expected anything different: not knowing any better, the Little People blame me for what happened. Thomas spread some filthy story about me, and I couldn’t help thinking of Irene, the unfortunate UFO, and her tormentor, Dr. Hoffman, and the role reversal of victim and culprit. I received several anonymous letters all bearing the local postmark. Two of them were written b
y hand. For the third, someone had gone to the lengths of cutting up the local paper, extracting individual words and several capital letters, and rearranging them into an alphabet of hatred, something new to me but long familiar to Tereza and Pascal.

  Now when I hear Glass kicking up a racket, I jump out of bed, rush downstairs to the entrance hall, miss the bottom step, and sprain my left ankle. My yells of pain mingle with Gable’s laughter until at last the floodgates open and I lean against Gable’s chest and his comforting murmurs, needing no words, for he sounds as if he’s brought the ocean with him. His hands glide across my head, stroke my back, my shoulders and arms. Gable knows exactly what to do. Under his touch the first wounds gradually begin to heal.

  Yet Nicholas remains present. Its not concrete memories that persist in my consciousness; the only image that repeatedly appears before me with inescapable clarity is the ghastly sight of his burst eye. Other than that there is just the feeling of irreparable loss, and the vague thought of having narrowly escaped a punishment actually intended for me rather than Nicholas, and which I believed I had deserved. There are times when I manage to suppress these thoughts, but even then Nicholas is still there. He stands in the dark corner of an otherwise brightly lit room and is only waiting to step forward out of the shadows. When it all gets too much for me, I close the door to this room, turn the key, and remove it, just as Tereza told me to do years ago when dreams of bloodstained sheets and worry about Glass had robbed me of sleep. But I don’t know where to keep the key. Its weight is heavier than all the memories put together.

  One of Glass’s long-held wishes is for once in her life to see the whole of Visible lit up in the full blaze of Christmas lights. She dreams of strings of Technicolor Christmas lights framing the front door and every single window, stretching across the façade and roof, and encircling the railings and uprights of the veranda. Every little ridge and each of the tiny bull’s-eye window-panes in the miniature towers that Dianne and I never looked out of as children, because of our fear of the attic, was to be decorated.

  “Now that I think about it, the trees could be lit up as well,” she said to Michael as the three of us were decorating the Christmas tree in the room with the fireplace. “I really don’t know what you find so great about these smelly wax candles. And what’s more, they’re dangerous.”

  “Leave me out of your tacky American gimmicks,” Michael replies from the top of a wobbly wooden ladder. “A real tree has to have real candles!”

  “I didn’t want a real tree!” says Glass grumpily. “We’ve managed very well all these years with our plastic one, haven’t we, Phil? Now it’s stuck down in the cellar and—”

  “Pass me the wire,” Michael interrupts her with a grin. “I wouldn’t put it past you to serve hamburgers under the tree.” “We’re having chicken and roast potatoes,” Glass declares importantly. She hands Michael the wire. “Provided Gable’s in luck down at the supermarket and there’s still one left.”

  I could hardly believe my ears when Dianne announced she was going to accompany Gable to do the shopping. And yet it fits with the change that I’ve observed coming over her in the last weeks and months. Dianne has become gentler and more approachable.

  “Oh, Michael, it’s beautiful!” Glass beams. Previously she would never have shown her delight as openly as she does now when the decoration of the Christmas tree, a magnificent specimen over six feet high, is complete.

  “Just wait until we’ve lit the candles,” says Michael. “You won’t believe your eyes. Electric candles indeed!” He shakes his head in mock horror.

  “All right, all right!” says Glass. “Phil, would you put that record on again, the one with—”

  “I know.”

  To the strains of “White Christmas” and Glass’s off-key accompaniment, I distribute plates round the room piled with the Christmas biscuits that Pascal has baked for us by the ton. A blazing fire crackles in the chimney. Michael has arranged branches of pine and orange peel in front of it, filling the whole room with the aroma of a spice store. All that’s missing is gifts at the foot of the Christmas tree. We’ve decided against them. This time even Gable has arrived empty-handed, which suits me fine—I depend on his hands. I don’t know what it is or how he does it, but when he puts his arms round me—which he frequently does—it somehow makes me feel better. For the first time I have a sense of what Michael must mean to Glass.

  When Gable and Dianne return home from shopping, Glass shuts herself away in the kitchen: Operation Christmas Chicken. The outcome is no culinary revelation but looks and tastes acceptable.

  “Good,” mutters Michael appreciatively.

  “Just good?” asks Glass defensively across the table.

  “It’s superb. The mother of all roast chickens.” It would never occur to Michael to criticize the shortcomings of the Christmas menu. He had this enviable unerring sensitivity to other peoples weaknesses. I feel a painful stab thinking of Kat, who’s the exact opposite in this respect.

  Michael’s eyes light up when shortly afterward he lights the candles on the Christmas tree. The room is bathed in a warm glow, though it can’t compare with the beams of happiness radiating from Glass. She goes over to Michael and gives him such a long kiss, it’s almost painful to watch the two of them. Tootling away in the background are the scratchy sounds of “White Christmas,” and I’m considering how many different ways there might be of murdering Bing Crosby.

  Then we sit round the Bickering fireplace, Glass, Michael, and Gable on the ancient beat-up sofa, Dianne and I on kitchen chairs, and listen to Gable, who untiringly tells us about the hopelessness of the people living in the slums of Calcutta, of the poverty and hunger in the small Pacific island states, the names of which were all new to me, of the horror that infested South-East Asia like the plague following the civil war there. He talks about the death of countless cultures brought about by ships landing on every distant shore over the centuries, that were then presented to their European princes and monarchs.

  It’s the first time I’ve heard Gable speak of such things, that first time he shows that there’s more to his life than the filigree beauty of black coral fans or dried seahorses.

  Later, when everyone’s gone to bed, I go and fetch the parcel Nicholas left for me and take it down back to the fireside. Single flames flicker up from time to time out of the embers. The wires and Christmas baubles on the tree reflect the dying glow from the fire. The parcel weighs heavy in my hands. For days I’ve been on the point of opening it, driven by curiosity, but for some reason I’ve stuck to the promise I made to Nicholas not to open it before Christmas. Now I kneel down in front of the fireplace and undo the gift wrapping with trembling fingers.

  It’s a book with a blank cover, bound either by Nicholas himself or goodness knows who. It contains thirty-six stories, two of which I already know. I hastily leaf through them, scan a few sentences, and read the titles, and the museum of lost things springs up in front of me.

  Butterfly’s Wings

  The Knife That Cut Itself

  The Ship Without …

  I slam the book shut. Then after a moment’s hesitation I open it again, tear out the pages one by one, and feed them into the hissing embers in the grate.

  Tongues of flame lick slowly across the black letters and white spaces in between. Then the odd page suddenly flares up and then crumples as if in pain before the paper burns away. I start as I hear a rustling sound behind me.

  “Still up?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t sleep either.” Dianne has slipped down beside me. She crouches and points at the fire where the last pages of the book have just crumbled to ashes.

  “What was that?”

  “Nicholas.”

  “A present for you?”

  I shake my head. Dianne puts an arm round my shoulder, I weep, then I start talking, and we stay like that in front of the fireplace until the last embers have died away.

  On Christmas Day Tereza
and Pascal appear. They arrive in the early afternoon and in seconds the whole of Visible resounds with their yells and squabbles and shrieks of laughter in their attempts to prepare a Christmas goose stuffed with apples and raisins. They transform the kitchen into a battlefield and whisk a five-course menu onto the table that Glass graciously pronounces fantastic. All the same she eyes the bird suspiciously.

  “My God, the poor thing looks frightful!” She points to the spread-eagled thighs of the goose, covered in crispy brown skin. “So obscene and so dead.”

  She herself would never cook anything bigger than a chicken, having been compelled as a child to watch a turkey being slaughtered—a gory bloodbath, if she is to be believed.

  Pascal winks across at her—since she knows Glass to be in safe hands with Michael the situation between the two of them has eased noticeably—and is already making snapping motions with the poultry shears. “It was only a little mannikin, I believe. No need to get upset.”

  Michael and Gable look at each other, and both roll their eyes at the same moment. They’ve only known each other a few days but are already getting on famously in this strange way, unfathomable to me, that most men have—with few words in an unquestioning, silent agreement about God and the world and probably about women as well.

  “It’s just as much a puzzle to me as to you,” Tereza confides to me in the kitchen where we’re making tea and coffee after the meal. “Put two men who don’t know each other in a room, and they circle around each other quickly and sniff each other, just like dogs.”

  “And then?”

  “Then they’ll either go for each other’s throats or the two of them will terrorize the neighborhood with their barking.”

  I watch as Tereza stacks cups and saucers on a tray. As yet I haven’t tackled her about her plans to move. This would be the right moment, but I shy away from doing so—the childish belief that nothing will happen as long as you don’t talk about it is deeply embedded in me.