Poached Egg on Toast

by Frances Itani

  Would her replacement take the room over the butcher shop? Through the café, across the passsage, up the stairs? The owners, the Muellers, owned both butcher shop and café. The director’s office had sent her there; whether or not the room had been inspected, she did not know. But if she had never before known the smell of flesh, she knew it now. How it assailed, first and always, the front of the nostrils, surprising, making her suck in a breath before she could stop herself. And the reminders of clot, bone, haunch, thigh—being hung, dripped, sawed, hacked. Cold cuts for breakfast every morning. Her stomach reeled as she came down the stairs each day, groping for Frau Mueller’s strong coffee, aiming to smother the pervasion of Fleisch.

  She tilted her chair towards the front of the café so that she would not have to watch Herr Mueller’s elderly parents, Oma and Opa, at the next table. If cold cuts were served for breakfast, they were also served at the evening meal. Midday it was always the pig, the calf. It was too much to think about, all that flesh hauled in from refrigerated storage at the back of the shop. Oma and Opa were digging into their Schmalz, their broad knives bringing up thick portions of seasoned lard from the blue-grey pottery. Now they would be spreading it on their Brot. They would be sipping at their wine and spreading Schmalz on their Brot.

  An airmail letter is propped against the tray of cold cuts on the table. It must have arrived in the afternoon mail. Frau Mueller grins as she sets a bowl of soup before Ruth. She disapproves of Ruth excluding Schmalz from her diet, but she also willingly serves the soup.

  “Von Ihrem Mann?”

  She is pointing to the letter. Ruth’s head creates an ambiguous movement, which might mean affirmation or negation. Frau Mueller may think what she likes about the letter, the husband, the man. There had been a man, a husband, ein Mann. Sometimes Ruth would like to sit opposite Frau Mueller in the quiet hours between meals when the café is empty, and deliver herself of every intimate detail of the husband, the letter, the marriage, the man. Her limited German does not permit this. It is something the landlady, however, would like to know. Because she cannot know, she creates her own stories about Ruth—Frau Doktor Stephens, Frau Professor Stephens. She tells these stories to her life-long friend, Frau Mohn, who comes to the café every day during the quiet hours—the way Ruth would if she could sit with Frau Mueller and speak fluent German. Frau Mohn has a daughter, Trudi, who has had brain damage since birth. Trudi must be pushed in a special chair, and she sits, wheeled up to the table, while her mother and Frau Mueller are talking. There are days when she seems to listen, even to understand. The two old friends glance at her from time to time, saying, “Look at that. Just look at that. You’d think she knows exactly what we are saying.” When attention is drawn to Trudi, she begins to make loud agitated noises and pulls at her dress and her body, as if trying to pluck something from herself. Often, she is quieted by Orna, who, from the butcher shop, brings a thick piece of smoked sausage which Trudi sucks and drools on. In the shopping basket that accompanies her everywhere, Frau Mohn carries several absorbent bibs large enough to fit a thirty-four-year-old, and these she changes from time to time, gently and considerately. Both Frau Mueller and Frau Mohn love Trudi deeply; she is a special child, sent to them to share through blood and friendship. What they have learned is this: one does not get through life without suffering in one way or another. Trudi is part of their suffering and their love.

  The letter is so far unopened. It might be from Taig. Ruth met Taig two years ago when she worked at the busiest library in Montreal. The meeting was at a book sale, a Saturday morning, a line of people stretched two city blocks and out of sight around the corner towards the hill. Taig had been searching in the basement room for copies of Old Norse books. He’d stood at Ruth’s side and related, in the midst of the crowd, a legend of Lapland which he had read: A woman walking alone on a path in the woods came face to face with a large bear. It was almost dark; no one was nearby and she knew that no help was at hand. She was frightened, but stood very still, waiting. The bear began to walk towards her. Suddenly, she knew what she had to do. She knew from the stories of her grandparents. She raised her thick skirts and showed the bear that she was a woman. She revealed herself. That is what Taig said. “She revealed herself.” The bear stood on its hind legs, came closer, dropped down and sniffed at her. Then it turned and left the path.

  Ruth did not know why Taig told her the story or why she had stood and listened. She did know that he did not find any Norse books that day and she did go out for coffee with him after the basement room was cleared of every musty book. Later in the week, Taig invited her to a special screening of Citizen Kane at the Museum of Fine Arts. They sat in a room of modern art on low canvas folding stools, which Taig had thought to bring. A collapsible screen had been set up at one end of the room. After the film, Taig took Ruth to his apartment, where he made coffee and an omelette. He told her that he’d had cancer of the lung, that he’d once been a heavy smoker, that the affected lung had been removed. He had lived one year and five months without a new lesion. He told her this in a quiet undespairing voice that seemed to say she should know these things from the beginning.

  Much of the time, she sat in her room. There was a single window over the table where she wrote letters, and this looked down on an inner courtyard where the meat trucks drove in and out every day. The dead animals were hoisted to shoulders, the skin blanched and hairless and pressed to the close-fitting smocks of the workers. Moments after the trucks drove off, the ring of the saw began. The saw and the cleaver, buzz and hack, buzz and hack, until the sounds pervaded her innermost dreams. One day, from the centre drawer of her bureau, she pulled a cotton handkerchief that lay beneath layers of clothing. She held the handkerchief to her face and smelled raw meat that had penetrated even there.

  When she was not in her room, she could be found in the Canadian library, an old war building from Hitler’s time. Literature was in the basement, and the only tables and chairs where one could work were in a drab cement corridor. She taught two classes, one in the late afternoon, the other, one evening a week. Most of her students were Canadians who had full-time government jobs and who could not attend class at any other time. She was the only English professor on staff, but she did not really have an office. There was an administrative office, and she could go there with any problems and to pick up her pay, but she never saw other faculty members except at infrequent meetings called by the Director of Overseas Studies. The few professors were mostly young men and women who wished to spend a year or two in Europe, who travelled, who were not interested in spending time with one another. Ruth did not enjoy travelling and had not yet left the city since her arrival at the beginning of last term.

  Several of her students were Americans drawn from a large overseas pool that seemed to wash over most of southwestern Germany Occasionally, some of them stopped by the café. One day, she had tea with Mr. Berkuson, who worked as a dental assistant in the local American clinic. She spilled her tea across the table, and though Mr. Berkuson had been kind, and helped to mop it up, and ordered another from Frau Mueller, Ruth had been upset. She excused herself by telling him that she suffered from an inner ear problem. “Now why did I say that?” she asked herself. When she stood to go to her room, she became dizzy and she almost lost her balance.

  The letter might be from Martin. She’d been married to Martin for nineteen years, before he left her for a woman who was exactly that—nineteen—and who wore faded pink cotton skirts which hung to slim ankles. The young woman giggled at everything Martin had to say. When Ruth had been nineteen, she and Martin carried on a courtship that spanned two thousand miles while they studied at separate universities in Canada. They wrote passionate, endearing letters to each other. The relationship between them was created almost to perfection on paper. She had kept Martin’s letters, and never asked if he had kept hers. But in the last year they were together, one day while in the basement, she noticed a plastic shoebag hanging from a nail ne
ar Martin’s workbench. She pulled it down, and sat in a heap of laundry on the floor while she went through the contents. Every one of her letters was there, smoothed down and arranged in chronological order.

  At first, she laughed when she began to read her own words, sitting there in the dirty clothes, looking on like a second self. She began to have a sense of being able to predict what was coming next, even though she had truly forgotten what she had written. It had been like meeting a reverse echo of herself. But the laughter unexpectedly turned. She began to realize the intensity of the love and dependency and loneliness she had sent through these lines. She had to force herself to continue, knowing she was experiencing loss, knowing that since that time, something deep and final had been allowed to slip away.

  I have made plans to come to Europe, the letter will say. I thought I’d visit you in that wonderful old city. I’ll be travelling alone. Jennifer left some time ago.

  No more than that. Ruth would have to make of it what she could.

  The Golden Lion across the street attracts more customers than does Mueller’s café in the evenings. The owner buys his meat from Mueller’s butcher shop. One can hear laughter and song coming from the heavily timbered dining room, and these sounds drift across the street and up to Ruth’s room like notes of music separating from a main overture. At times, Ruth would like to go there for her evening meal, but that would be seen as being disloyal. In any case, her meals are included in the weekly charge she pays to Frau Mueller.

  If she stands at the bottom of the stairs behind the half-closed door, she can hear the others as they take their places. The two old women who wear high crocheted collars arrive together, sit together, appear to live together and do not cook meals at home. They do not speak to each other throughout the meal.

  Ruth’s place has become, by habit, the table at the rear of the café, and it is from here that she watches the changing light outside in the street. At the other tables are: a balding mar, Herr Koch, who crosses one knee over the other and reads the papers during the meal. He wears a grey suit with baggy trousers and wide cuffs. He is, Ruth thinks, a travelling salesman. There is Herr Knopf, who has a round face and white whiskers and who is overweight. He drums his fingers on the table and hums to himself, playing, revising some inner tune. Frau Montag is thin and wispy and piles her white hair high on her head. She sits next to the window. When the butcher shop closes for the evening, Oma and Opa come through the passage and into the dining room to sit at the family table. Herr Mueller the younger and Frau Mueller, his wife, are last to sit down. He is the cook and Frau Mueller serves. His elderly parents help out only in the butcher shop, not in the café. They sleep in a room upstairs, next to Ruth, who is the only one who boards.

  There is a letter at Ruth’s table, propped against a tray of cold cuts. It is from Canada, an air letter. Frau Mueller expresses interest in the letter as she serves Ruth’s soup.

  “Von Ihrem Mann?”

  When Ruth first moved to Germany, she did not know that the word for husband was Mann. The translation of “my husband” would be “my man.” My man. Did she have a man? She had once tried to explain to Frau Mueller, who thought this most important, about her Mann. There had been confusion about husband or friend, and she does not know if Frau Mueller now thinks she is married or unmarried. Perhaps, when Ruth reads this letter, she will smile to Frau Mueller and say, “Mein Mann.”

  The letter will be from Taig. Sometimes she thinks Taig is the only person who knows her real self. The self who worked at the library in Montreal before she resigned and took the teaching position at the university. One of the reasons she resigned was because of the man she worked for, Vivien. He wore white shoes and carried an enormous bunch of keys on a spring attachment at his belt. He was forever snapping the keys in and out of this apparatus. He also walked as if his head were surrounded by a cloud of bees—that is, he was preoccupied, buzzing to himself. For these reasons and the other, main reason—that he was unapproachable—the staff, mostly women, managed on its own. It was the kind of place where Ruth and the others milled about the main desk, swarming out and into the stacks with carts of books ready to be shelved, bound, repaired, cast off.

  Yes, Taig knew her real self. How, when she had free time, she would go to the biography shelves and take down certain books, turn the pages to the centre photographs and inspect the faces of the great writers—Chekhov, for instance, with his serious mouth and semi-amused wide eyes; or Virginia Woolf and the look of distraction the camera stole from her as she leaned into a doorway, holding a cigarette between her bony fingers.

  Later, Ruth and Taig had gone to bed in his darkened apartment, slipping beneath the covers like shy children. She woke in the night crying out because she dreamed that Taig’s remaining good lung had to be removed, too.

  She and Taig had laughed about Vivien. She’d told Taig about looking at the faces of the great writers, and he had told her of Orwell writing that at fifty, everyone has the face he deserves. They laughed even harder because Taig was exactly that, fifty. They’d tried to think of all the faces they had known, and they had held each other, half laughing, half crying, for all of the reasons they would never be sure of and would never be able to say.

  In the letter, Taig will have written: Come back. I invite you to come back. We will lie together and hold each other and tell each other wonderful stories. And everything will be right again.

  She had gone back, once, to Martin. It was between Sherri and Jennifer. He had invited her, and she had gone. He had moved west, by then, to Vancouver. He’d even sent the ticket, a round trip in case she changed her mind and wanted to return to Montreal. It was this detail, the return ticket, that convinced her to go. She would feel free, unbound; she would see how Martin had changed and how things had changed between them. “I know I will not stay,” she told the mirror the morning she flew to the west. She did not, of course, give up her apartment.

  She still does not know whether what happened was surprising or not surprising at all. She and Martin spent the next week in bed—most of the week. They got up occasionally to eat, shower, but never left his apartment. It was as if each had been starved for that part of the other and there was no satisfying that starvation. They rarely talked. He did tell her about Sherri. How he’d become exasperated with her leaving empty tuna tins about, and how she splattered the bathroom mirror. A boyfriend he did not know about came one evening to collect Sherri’s belongings.

  Ruth felt that she had nothing to tell. Certainly not about her work, which was not at all satisfactory at the time; and nothing of men, because that was before Taig.

  On the seventh day, Ruth woke early and began to pack her suitcase. Even before she finished, Martin began to clean his apartment. He changed the sheets and wiped all traces of her from the sink; he tidied the table, brought out his office papers and scattered them across the desk in the living room. A photograph that had been prominently displayed all week had disappeared. It was taken the year they were married. Martin was seated; Ruth was standing behind him and leaning slightly forward. Her arms were draped possessively about his neck. She saw in her mind that she could easily have pulled her arms upward and choked him. But why would she have done such a thing? She did not know. She knew only that in the absence of the photograph, the scene had been made vivid and possible.

  By the time Ruth placed her luggage beside the door, every trace of her was wiped clean. She was at first astonished, and then depressed, at how quickly this had been accomplished. Martin had banished her before she’d even left. And this she never did forgive.

  In the dining room, it always seems as if someone has said, “Hush!” Even Oma and Opa, after all their years together, have little to say. Frau Mueller and her husband banter back and forth; they try to bully their diners into conversation. But an unvoiced direction sifts over the room. “Hush! “

  The only time there is real human noise, noise of contact, is during the day when Frau Mohn wheels Trudi
through the door and pushes her to a table, removing anything Trudi might grab at quickly—serviettes, salt, coasters, ashtrays. Frau Mohn and Frau Mueller are swift, swifter than Trudi; they have been guarding her for thirty-four years. Nothing bad will happen to Trudi while they are alive.

  Some afternoons when Frau Mohn arrives, she surprises Frau Mueller by wearing a fancy dress. Frau Mueller comes out from behind the counter; she bows and laughs delightedly. Her speech is formal.

  “Guten Tag, Frau Mohn. Wie geht es Ihnen?”

  Her friend bows in return and lifts Trudi’s hand as if to help her bend forward in her chair. Frau Mohn giggles as she twirls in awkward heels; she picks up the hem of her dress to perform an eloquent and saucy curtsey.

  The year the war ended, Frau Mueller and Frau Mohn were seventeen years old. They learned of a food called peanut butter from the American soldiers who were billeted in their side-byside homes. One of the soldiers had been mean, ugly, had tried to put his hand up their skirts. They had finally told his officer, after weeks of hiding, of locking their doors, avoiding any room that held the man. The officer had punished the soldier, and they had been all right after that.

  After the soldiers left, the two women never saw or tasted peanut butter again. They still laugh about peanut butter, how it made the teeth stick together. Now, each of them wears dentures paid for by their country’s health care. And once a year, Trudi is sent to a special home while Frau Mohn has one entire week only for herself.

  Frau Mueller and Frau Mohn discuss their Frau Professor, their roomer, for they share responsibility for the woman who had once been seen to bury her face in her handkerchief when the door of her room was ajar.

  Is she married? Is she not married? Perhaps she will be getting married. She does not wear a ring. She wears no jewellery, or surprisingly little. Letters arrive. She never opens them immediately; she always takes them to her room. A letter will sit unopened on the table throughout the evening meal. Is she happy? Is she unhappy? Frau Mueller and Frau Mohn would like her to be happy. They think that she will soon be getting married. Her fiancé might be coming to meet her here in their historic city. Perhaps that is why she spilled her tea the day she was sitting with another man, the American. The American had been kind; he had put his own hands in the slop rags with Frau Mueller, after he mopped up the tea.