The Center of the World

by Andreas Steinhöfel

  “Tereza?”

  “Mm?”

  “Are you happy with Pascal?”

  “Sometimes more and sometimes less. But happy enough to move to Holland with her, in case you—Phil! Don’t, don’t cry, little one.”

  I sniff against the crook of her elbow and imagine I can detect the almonds that her red hair used to smell of. But it’s Christmas, all the world smells of almonds, and habits change, even if it’s only in the choice of shampoo.

  After coffee, we all go off for a walk. Almost instinctively we follow the path leading along by the river to the Big Eye. In small groups we trot along behind each other through the dazzling bright winter landscape—Dianne arm in arm with Tereza and Pascal, Glass shuffling through the snow arm in arm with Michael. Gable and I bring up the rear.

  “When d’you have to go again?” I ask him.

  “New Year’s Day. I’m taking the train north, and I’ll board ship in the evening. And then I won’t be seen on dry land for a week.” He already sounds relieved even though only half his time here has gone.

  “Where are you going?”

  “America.” He gives me a sideways look—probably because he knows the effect this word has on me.

  “You could come with me, Phil. Provided, of course, that you’d like to.” I stand rooted to the spot. I can only stare at Gable.

  “It’s a big freighter,” he goes on. “Cars, electronic instruments, I don’t know what else. I’ve never been interested in the cargo.”

  “I could … You mean I could simply come along too?”

  “There’s always room for an extra pair of hands.” Gable grins. “Apart from which I know the captain.”

  “What about school?”

  He looks at me as if he’s concerned for my sanity. “You cannot be serious!”

  I can’t remember the last time I was so excited. My heart is racing, beating fast like a tireless engine, and already I’m thinking of ships, of mighty turbines and powerful propellers churning up the sea. “Well … I’ll think about it, OK?”

  “Take your time.”

  “And Glass mustn’t know about it yet.”

  “That’s up to you.”

  On the way back Michael moves off on his own. He leaves Glass with the other women and walks along close to the riverbank. He’s smiling and looks down at the ground, lost in thought, taking big strides and sometimes kicking into the snow like a little boy. At some point he laughs out loud for no apparent reason, making me wonder at what stage this man, whom my mother is getting to love more day by day, learned to have no fear of being alone.

  Back at Visible I go to my room and look at the old map of the world. I remove all the green pins marking the oceans and the continents, more than twenty of them, and pin them on to the map of North America all the way down the East Coast. I take two steps back and consider the green winding ribbon that glows at me like a promise. I have dreamed about accompanying Gable more times than I can remember. But I was a child at the time, and the thought of going to sea amounted to no more than a desire for crazy adventures, the longing for the broad view into eternity.

  If you go now; I hear Paleiko whisper, it’s like running away. Taking flight.

  No, it’s not.

  You think it would be a fresh start? How can it be when you have nowhere near finished things here?

  Give me time.

  Even if it would be like taking flight, I’ve only to think of Gable’s scar to know that there are certain things you can’t escape from. He’s taken his disappointment with him ail the way round the world, just as Glass brought Number Three with her to Visible. Gable’s scar has always disturbed me because the crazy self-inflicted renewal of this disfigurement has taken hold of his entire body and soul. Only … over the past few days I have constantly tried to get a glimpse of it. But Gable always wears long-sleeved sweaters or shirts, and contrary to his habit on previous visits to Visible he no longer runs around in Visible with a bare chest on his way to the bathroom. I have a vague feeling that he no longer wishes to see the scar himself.

  Things change, Paleiko.

  Just like Tereza changing her shampoo? You can’t force changes, my friend. Or would you go just the same if it wasn’t America but some other country?

  Maybe.

  You want to look for him, don’t you? That was the first thing you thought of when Gable made you the offer. Number Three.

  Yes.

  D’you think that’s a good idea?

  For goodness sake, be quiet, Paleiko. You’re dead. Just because I still haven’t found the red stone from your forehead—

  Wrong! I’ll never die, Phil. That’s the blessing and the curse of Tereza’s present. I’ll always be with you.

  Yes, as a guardian. But I can look after myself.

  Quod erat demonstrandum. Who was it said that?

  Deciding is easy. But I’m still putting off talking to Glass about it because I’m afraid she’ll raise objections and try talking me out of my travel plans. But I tell Dianne about it. Her reaction is to screw up her eyes as if a speck of dust had got in. “Does Glass know about it?”

  I shake my head.

  “It’s a good idea,’’ Dianne says drily.

  “And that’s all?”

  “D’you expect me to burst into tears?” She shoots me a glance, expressing distrust or care, I’m not sure which. “You will come back sometime, won’t you?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Well. That’s it, then.”

  The next day I go to Gable and tell him I accept his offer. His delight—a round of tiny sparks dancing in his eyes, a glow that sweeps across his face—is balm for my soul. He rushed to the phone, and in the space of half an hour everything’s arranged. We’re leaving Visible together on January first.

  “You can still change your mind,” says Gable while the look in his eyes urges me not to.

  “No, I’m coming with you.” I look at him, slightly uncertain. “But I may stay in America for a while.”

  “I thought as much.” He places a hand on my shoulder. “Once you’ve done what you set out to do, you can join me again at any time, Phil. I’ll show you the world.”

  “Yes. The world.”

  Once Handel brought two pictures along to a lesson. One of them showed a green landscape, like a crater, that no one in the class could identify—the best suggestions were an abandoned meadow following the death of three cows, a meteor landing on an alien planet, and a bird’s-eye view of a rainforest. The second picture was a maple leaf. The first was a magnified version of the second. I may not always have heeded the advice that Handel associated with these two images, but I’ve never forgotten it: things look clearer from a distance. And what I need above all at the moment is to see things clearly.

  Two days before New Year’s I can’t stand it any longer. Glass, Michael, and Gable have set out for some unknown destination early in the afternoon. Dianne and I could have joined them, but we both declined. I wanted to be on my own, but by now I’m fed up with my own company. Dianne appears unexpectedly as I’m pulling on my boots in the hall.

  “Where are you off to?”

  “To the clinic, to Nicholas.”

  She looks puzzled. “Didn’t he say he doesn’t want you to visit him?”

  “Don’t care. I’m going all the same.”

  Dianne reflects for a moment. Then with a decisive movement she reaches for her coat. “All right, I’ll come with you.”

  “To the clinic?”

  “Yes, but not to Nicholas,” she adds, noting my look of irritation. “There’s something I need to show you before you disappear with Gable.”

  More than that she won’t say.

  We take the bus. As I ask the driver for two tickets, she slips in beside me. I stare in surprise as she pulls out a season ticket and shows it to the driver. I suddenly remember that summer day when Nicholas spoke to me in the library, shortly after I’d seen Dianne arguing with Kora before getting on the bus.


  “OK,” I sigh once we’ve sat down. “Are you going to tell me right away, or d’you want to surprise me?”

  “I’d prefer to wait until we get there.”

  “I don’t like surprises.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  The bus crawls along at a snail’s pace through the snow-covered countryside. It stops at each village, but few people get in or out. There are little Christmas trees decorated with Christmas lights in front gardens. People wrapped in heavy overcoats are out and about, with children pulling sleds along behind them. The sky promises more snow. I look away and down at my hands. I’ve never enjoyed the run-up to New Year’s, considering it an unreal time, enforced waiting in a no-man’s-land on the border between yesterday and tomorrow.

  “I’m going to miss you,” says Dianne as we approach the town.

  “I should hope so.”

  “Seriously, I mean it, Phil.” She places a hand on my knee. “The past few years have been really shitty between the two of us. And now just as I’m getting the feeling that things could improve, you’re disappearing.”

  “Will you cope here on your own?”

  “I’m not alone. I’ve got Kora, and I’ve got Visible and Glass.” She brushes aside my look of surprise. “You’re thinking that there’ll be nothing for it once you’re gone, that I’ll have to talk to her, aren’t you? Because we’ll be dependent on each other or something of the sort.”

  I nod.

  “Could be that I’ll do it.” Dianne looks out of the window. “What did you think of that Dennis?”

  “Quite nice. Attractive. Very brave.”

  “Me too.” She draws little patterns in the condensation on the window. “Funny, isn’t it? He’s coming again. In about two weeks.”

  “To Visible?”

  She nods.

  We get out at the bus terminal. The clinic lies beyond the town, nestling between hills, roads snaking along them. The nearer we get to our destination, the more anxious I become. Nicholas is lying somewhere in this gigantic complex. At the reception I ask for his room number, then I follow Dianne. The confusing number of corridors and passages leading through the hospital like an anthill that so terrified me when I was there as a jug ears have lost nothing of their labyrinthine character. Dianne threads her way through without looking left or right. With a sleepwalker’s assurance she finds the correct turnings, stairways, and locked doors that open automatically with a quiet hiss by means of unseen floor electronic sensors. It’s crazy, but at any moment I expect to bump into the senior nurse, Marthe, and have to explain to her that her onetime jug ears has long since stopped wearing strange girls’ nighties but has taken to other boys’ pajamas. That certainly wouldn’t please her—Lord God, no way. I shake my head and push the thought aside.

  At some point Dianne and I are standing in front of a wide closed door fitted with two glass windows. Dianne presses a bell.

  “Are we in the right place?” I look at the sign next to the door. “Intensive care?”

  “Yes. Wait a minute.”

  The door opens with a brief hum. Dianne enters. Through the window I see her talking to a young nurse in a small office, gesticulating with her arms in my direction. The nurse firmly shakes her head. Dianne gets worked up—her voice carries to where I’m standing, but I can’t catch what she’s saying. An older doctor comes up, and Dianne shakes his hand. Their gestures and the way they’re speaking to each other suggests intimacy as if they’ve known each other for years. The doctor looks me over briefly through the window, nods, and disappears from view. Seconds later there is another humming noise.

  “Here, put this on,” Dianne greets me inside the door. “Regulations.” She hands me a blue gown, then slips into one of her own and ties it up at the back.

  I’m less handy than she is and fumble with the tapes. How often has Dianne been here, I wonder, in this station, put on a sterile gown like this, while I was under the impression that she’d been going off for walks? Twice a week, at least, dozens of times a year, and how many years has it been going on? My God.

  “OK,” Dianne says. “Come on.”

  The background noise is muted. The sound of bleeps from various monitors fills the room along with the pneumatic hissing of unfamiliar machines and a distant gurgling glugging, all very faint, as are the mumbled exchanges between doctors and nurses. No object throws a shadow under the cold neon light that falls vertically from numerous tubes. White screens, strategically placed, shield the patients hidden behind them from the curious gaze of visitors.

  The bed that Dianne leads me to stands as if forgotten in the far corner, furthest away from the nurses’ office. Lying in it is a boy. His eyes are closed. The bare arms lie on the cover like leafless branches.

  “He doesn’t always look this bad,” says Dianne almost apologetically. “The business with the tubes, I mean. There’s a central attachment, but sometimes …”

  Attached to the lips with tape, a heavy tube leads from the boy’s mouth to a machine, with a monitor across which green wavy lines run continuously from left to right like in a time warp. A thinner tube, transparent and filled with yellow-brown fluid, runs into the boy’s nose.

  The body is so emaciated that its sharp outlines hardly bulge through the blanket reaching up to his chest.

  “This is Zephyr,” Dianne says softly, as if afraid to wake the boy. He does actually look as if he’s merely asleep; his cheeks are even rosy. His chest rises and falls in the painfully accurate rhythm regulated by the machine, filling his lungs with oxygen and thereby preventing suffocation. He has light brown very close-cropped hair and a face without any sharply defined features, as if the coma had condemned him to eternal childhood.

  “Zephyr,” I repeat quietly. “That’s not his real name, is it?”

  “No. There’s that ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! / I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!’ Yuh, well, sounds a bit kitschy, I guess.” Dianne looks at me. “His name is Jan.”

  In some remote recess of my memory a bell sounds a soft alarm. Jan—that’s a name I’ve heard once, briefly, a long time ago.

  “How … how did he come to be here?”

  “He had an accident.”

  “Not recently, or what?”

  “No.” Dianne has moved over to the bed. “More than three years ago, in the summer.”

  She stretches out a hand and strokes Zephyr’s cheek. There is such gentleness in the action that I look away. I ought to be jealous of this boy, lying in a coma on the border between sleep and death. In some way, without knowing it, he’s taken my sister away from me.

  “He was riding his bike,” says Dianne. “And there was a storm. It was so violent it blew bricks off Visible’s roof. Afterwards Glass had to have it patched up all over the place. And at the back of the garden one of the statues even fell over, the angel with a sword, you know the one?”

  “Yes.”

  I look at the tubes, the cannulas inserted into the back of the boy’s hands, looking as if they’re growing out of them; artificial veins and drips distributed over the surface, drip-feeding fluid nourishment and anticoagulant.

  “He was on his way to see me at Visible, says Dianne. “I’d only got to know him a few weeks before. You were away then with Gable in Greece.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “You weren’t there, Phil. You just weren’t there.

  I put my arms round her and hold her close. She doesn’t cry, but her body shakes, as if her heartbeats had somehow made their way to the outside and were beating on the surface of her skin. I wasn’t there for her, neither before Zephyr’s accident nor after. I let myself be carried away by the perfume of cypresses, while Dianne was getting entangled in her love for a boy who would never again look at her, touch her, or kiss her. I think of the letters she wrote, all those letters …

  “I’ve been visiting him at least twice a week,” Dianne whispers into my shoulder. “I thought, without m
e … I thought he’d die without me. Crazy, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “It was so easy to love him. He couldn’t defend himself. But by the time it was over I’d already forgotten what color his eyes were.” She detaches herself from my embrace. “Glass was against it. But that it came to an end was thanks to Kora. She gave me a talking to.”

  “Down by the river?” I grin, although I’m feeling shabby. Shabby and small. Small and treacherous. “Looks as if your friend stood by you better than your brother.”

  “Yes.”

  A painful silence follows. Dianne looks at me unblinkingly. I wish I could read that look, but we’ve lived in different worlds too long for that. At last I look down at the floor in embarrassment. The fact that she’s brought me here is both a reproach and evidence of trust. Nothing has been lost, but we need a lot of time. It will be up to me to write letters to Dianne, letters from all over the world.

  “You still want to go to Nicholas,” she says at last.

  “Yes.” I hesitate, then I point to Zephyr. “Is he going to … I mean, is there any chance that he’ll ever recover?”

  “No, he’s dead,” Dianne answers soberly. “If the life support were turned off, it would be over. But his parents won’t allow it.”

  “You know them?”

  “Very well, as it happens.”

  “Why do they let their son stay hooked up to this machine?”

  “Because they love him.”

  “Seems very selfish.”

  Dianne shrugs. “Love always is, isn’t it?”

  She stays with Zephyr. We’re to meet again later at the main door. I leave the intensive care section, and as I pass along the complex layout of the hospital passages that don’t seem to follow any logic, I think of the color of Nicholas’s eyes and begin to wonder whether it’s such a good idea to visit him against his express wishes.

  As I expected, Glass is not exactly enthralled at the idea of my shooting off to America in the company of Gable. She doesn’t question my decision, but I can see her thoughts ticking away behind her forehead. I take her presumed displeasure for normal maternal anxiety, but there is more to it than that. Right up until New Year’s Eve Glass holds back. I must be blind, because I don’t notice that all this time, just like me, she is constantly thinking about Number Three.