At night he saw stars. There were more than he’d ever seen here. He didn’t sleep. He’d parked the Fiorino on Fernewaldstraße, he sat in the cab, now and then he ran his hand over the cloth. Enni, he said. The bird was silent. He stared into this old blackness, he thought of the irony with which he’d been told as a child of the bomber squadrons they’d called pathfinders, the “Christmas trees” dropped from twenty thousand feet that had bathed the countryside and the cities and the pit frames of Westphalia in a magical light, cascades of magnesium light that could be seen even through curtains and bedroom windows. Nothing helped against those bombs, that torrent of explosions that was only an echo compared to the havoc wreaked by our own bombers, plaguing, choking, shooting—something as immeasurable as the beauty of these lights, which were followed only by detonation, fire. He’d been told of those flames as if they had also somehow been the last of the light. And then there was just the hope of those first years, when everything was still in transition and the men didn’t come to stay, but rather to become something completely different after the pit, as if they had life after life after life that they could bore down to as through the unfeeling stone, as if there were something waiting for them beyond the walls of the estate, something of which later all that remained was the sense that they had long forgotten it.
It was another time, and those who had been there passed it on, this fear, as if it were still the same long night.
He lay on the truck bed, and he felt his back, but he didn’t want a hotel. The friendliness, the unfamiliar rooms. Carpets that swallowed his steps. Sometimes he’d been almost glad to be back on deck: the language was more direct, rough, you could believe in it. He waited until it was light, a first blue edge over the houses. The feed, which he weighed in his hands, and the basket with its old emblem. Waclaw could see the illuminated windows in the distance, the low, narrow rooms. What it had meant to come into the same kitchen every day, to sit in the warmth on the pine bench, the green beans from the garden, his father’s cough, the daily sound of curtain rods at half past nine. There, at the narrow table behind the cupboard, still sat the boy who’d walked that day to the edge of the estate, hunched in silence over his math homework.
The streetlights turned off before it was even light. He took the basket from the seat, pressed it against his side, and walked up the slag heap, where the ground next to the paths was dug up and the early buzz of the city still quiet. As if with the pigeon he could get to another, earlier world, a source Alois was still drawing from.
All was quiet on the slope. He thought: Just let her have drunk enough. He walked slowly. The sun was to his left and still low, wind blew over the bare crest. He heard Enni’s claws on the floor of the box, he slipped, for a moment the basket tilted. He set it on his knee and let the pigeon pick a few nuts through the bars. He walked on. There were hot slag heaps that still smoldered deep within. The last warmth of this big animal, whose breath they’d so long feared.
And then there was a hot stabbing between his shoulder blades, bits of sawdust floated around him, and he watched the pigeon rise in a wide curve over the gray, sleeping land. Just a bird that rose, until it headed in a direction, two o’clock, south, in a sky where the light shimmered like asphalt and the stoplights drew an orange stripe under the clouds. He stood with a few grains between his fingers, and he saw her for the last time.
Waclaw didn’t want to descend from this slag heap. There was no descent. Time wasn’t a ski slope that one could simply go down again. One could only continue up into this fog; he had a vague memory that it hadn’t always been so. That they’d once told each other things. Nights in which they’d talked until it grew light. Milena, their inner Königsberg. Places they’d known together. As if it were enough to simply talk about it. The magnetic sense was supposed to be in the beak too, the seat of language. The homing instinct. They didn’t know exactly. At some point everything broke off. Don’t come anymore. The city lay flat. He thought of the sharp eyes of birds of prey. The hoods that the falconers pulled off their heads.
28
A Pierrot
And it was the weariness and midday and the bells that he’d heard how many times that drove him like a piece of livestock down the eroded slope, thirsty, and somewhat fearful of this sky, which now stretched out on all sides.
His hands trembled when he tried to unlock the Fiorino. He set the basket on the truck bed. He didn’t know where to go. For a moment he thought he would call Sharam, and the Persian would pick up the phone, put on his circular glasses, and tell him what to do, where they could meet. It had all gone badly, but all was not yet lost. He would give him the name of someone who could help him. Rotterdam, a job in Rotterdam and a friend of Sharam’s who would pick him up from the airport, those tight embraces where they always clapped each other a bit too hard on the shoulders, on like that forever, like the clapperboard in a film, and all the recorded material that they carried around with them, all that could never be told. It would be Sharam’s old voice, and it would be the old trust between them, the Persian would point him in a new direction, as if that were all he needed.
He walked through Fuhlenbrock, down Sterkrader Straße and past Gleiwitzer Platz, where the big mine administration buildings were, until he reached the town hall. There were waffles and cotton candy in the square, metallic balloons, a few stands. The noise of bumper cars droned from the edge of the square, it smelled of grilled meat. A few pumpkins lay on a trestle table in front of the brick building, someone had painted Harvest Festival in blue on a cloth. He heard a man hawking raffle tickets, for a while he watched the thin metal arms that grasped at little stuffed animals in glass boxes.
It made Waclaw think of the dancing bear on the Curonian Spit. It had pawed lethargically at the air, an excruciatingly hot summer day, a flute player and next to him the caricaturist who sketched Waclaw with charcoal. His face in the drawing was a sad grimace with hanging cheeks and hollows under the eyes, in the time just after Milena. He was tired. Now and then he looked at the sky, into the trees, and at the ledges where the city pigeons sat. The bumper cars were loud, he walked between the stalls, and then he saw him sitting on a crate, the Pierrot, a white clown. He wore a faux-silk robe, and his eyebrows were high black lines on his whitewashed face. He watched a stocky juggler next to him with concentration: six balls, eight, that he kept in the air.
Waclaw stopped and looked at the balls that circled and leaped back and forth. Children had gathered, he could look past them, they all stared at the invisible connection, everything was easy, as if by flying the balls became something else. Then suddenly the juggler faltered and had trouble keeping all the balls up. Waclaw stood still. The plane trees rustled. The Pierrot looked up, his eyebrows seemed to lift even higher, for a moment what he was watching turned to chaos, a few balls shot high up in the air, and then finally fell. But when they fell, they were simply balls, dumb oranges. The balls rolled across the bleak stone slabs of the square, then the children chased after them. The whole scene set itself up again. The town hall, the curved lampposts from the sixties, the smell of bratwurst. And he didn’t know why, but Waclaw was angry at the juggler. The Pierrot, too, had disappeared behind one of the huts.
He now realized that he hadn’t slept. He went back to the small hotel, it was from the nineties, with furniture made of wire and glass, and black wardrobes. Again he paid for one night, and the hotel owner looked at him.
You didn’t even take the key last time, he said.
No, Waclaw said.
This time he fell into bed. He didn’t open the curtains that hung over the panes like a white veil, as if he were a bride, or the world were a bride, or neither of those things. He lay on his back, and he woke up in the same position, one hand under his lumbar vertebrae, when it had long been dark. He didn’t turn the light on, and he didn’t get fresh water for the bird.
Somewhere in the hall a door opened, someone walked past his room, and then it was quiet again. He remembered
the feeling of folding his things on his hotel bed on that first evening, before the first shift on the water. Through a screened window he could hear the gulls shrieking. He walked down the narrow street to the beach, strangely exhilarated. People were driving on the left, and he wasn’t sure where he was supposed to walk. A wide bay, the sand was dark, and a distant sun gleamed on the cliffs. The new clothes were unfamiliar on his skin, the stiffness of the pants and the seam of the shirt, which he felt with every step. The wind fell on his face like a damp cloth. He breathed it all in deep. A bit of trash danced between the rocks. That night he didn’t call Milena, and he couldn’t tell her what it was that he’d found out there.
Later there had been other nights. A pub near Aberdeen, fishermen, deep-sea fishermen and oil people. A helicopter had crashed, it had flipped in the air and had crashed engine-first into the water. It was the memorial service for the boys, young punks, engineers, who hadn’t made it in the six-degree water of the North Sea, and they were both there, Waclaw and Mátyás, and they knew that this was different from the artificial smoke and the wave machines from the exercises they had to pass every few years—twelve-seaters, upside down in the training pool. They stood at the bar, it was loud and cramped, and they were there too. It was different from the cities in their safe silence: as if someone had torn away their skin, and something else, something like a soul, showed through. That’s what he’d thought. That this word only had a meaning among them. Among the exhaustion and among people who meant something to one another, if only for a night. He’d never felt so much himself, so close to something inside him capable of loving, grieving, forgiving. Maybe they were nothing but a bunch of drunks, maybe there’d be a harsh smell in the morning, and the mop in the water, dirty, stinking of that night, maybe the smell would even remain.
Now he sometimes wished it were so, that there were this place they could all return to, where for a moment they might recognize one another: fragile, vulnerable, and here only for a brief time, though they already knew the dates when they were set to go out again. A helicopter had crashed into the North Sea, they heard the deep voice of Iggy Pop, the music was briefly interrupted, nothing more.
Behind the lace curtains the darkness seemed to be made of a thousand tiny holes. The pillow smelled like flowery fabric softener and the carpet smelled old; it was night. The night was specially marked on all the charts—unsounded area—a place where sound sank and never came back.
Cheap beer at the gas station. In the morning he walked down, drank two bottles, but the beer grew warm and flat, and he left the rest under the mirror in the bathroom, brightly illuminated.
And he knew the lattice fences and he knew the low hedges as he walked back north to pick up the Fiorino. The pet store was gone too. The way felt long. The estates. He thought of the paper cutouts in windows, the wood-trimmed gables, the only decoration in front of the tall pines. The great care of the women, who stayed home after the first child, populating their flower stands with orchids, living in apartments with serving hatches, now and then a round of tennis at the company club, days faded and silent like the fruit in a rum pot. Women who later rested a hand on the wall when climbing the stairs and felt how cold that wall was.
Some of the houses still looked like the old ones, but they’d been renovated, little roofs built over the front doors, the plaster freshly painted. Grapevines ran riot on the walls. He remembered how they’d stood at the stoplight back then, he and Milena, the shipping company van filled with their things. He was slightly dizzy, and he turned onto smaller streets a few times and looked around as if he were searching for something but couldn’t remember what it was. It wasn’t the pigeons, it was something other than the eternal waiting.
He washed the windows of the pickup at a gas station. With long, exaggerated motions and too much water, as if all that mattered were getting off the summer’s flies, his own unreal figure on the wet glass. He didn’t feel drunk, he had the Mary medallion on a string around his neck, something in him was stretched to the breaking point. He didn’t want to wait. The pigeon basket sat on the seat, it was empty in a different way than it had been in the previous days. All those years, as if absence always had to be the larger portion.
It was spring when his father had gone down for the last time, and a silence had hung over the streets, no different than now. There had been fewer cars on the road, laundry hung on the line to dry at the neighbors’ houses, white sheets, the first sprouts of green, the whole house had smelled of cake, it was just before Easter. He sat out in the loft and watched through the bushes as his father came up Aegidistraße. His mother awaited him in the garden. In Waclaw’s memory the scene was soundless, like in a silent film, though he was sitting there with the pigeons. Perhaps he had looked away for a moment, but when he looked up again his mother, who had just been standing there happily in her flowered dress, had a hand in front of her mouth and had begun to sob quietly. She held up a knee pad, worn down and full of black streaks, and she held it in front of her as if trying to reconcile it with the man who stood before her with collapsed shoulders, embarrassed, suppressing a slight cough. You could still see that he’d once been strong. In more than twenty years working down the pit, his father had never brought anything home with him. His mother looked at the overused gear and slowly shook her head. Over the next days she gave the knee pads, miner’s apron, and helmet a wide berth. Waclaw’s father sat behind the house in the first spring sunshine. All that light. As if he had emerged from a much longer winter.
He opened the Fiorino. He pushed the seat back and ran a hand over the steering wheel. That morning he’d felt the feathers again, they were soft in his hand, and he felt something in them crack very softly. As if some resistance were giving way. He didn’t look. He could feel it. He could feel the silence over the houses, the same silence. He had lain on his side and looked through the curtains, in the direction where there were no mountains and no more houses that stood hard against the slope, as if they wanted to be part of something larger. He’d clenched the bit of blanket tightly in his hand and wrung it like a neck, he could feel the feathers.
And he remembered the night with Patrícia, in which the silence and dryness of the countryside had been almost like heavy rain, as they’d left the station behind them and walked away from the voices, the restaurant and her red Honda, which they’d driven in the ditch next to the road, while people flashed their brights at them and a tractor-trailer whooshed past, huge in the night, huge against the stars, as if they were only remnants, something that had managed to stay alive in the voracious night, and they walked arm in arm, entwined, the two of them and the schnapps, like the warm waft of something that let them continue on, without turning around, without asking questions, into a tenderness, perhaps, that was new, that they could believe in for a few moments, entwined, hot, until the intoxication and the darkness withdrew, to look in the first early light almost scornfully at the two bodies that lay there next to each other, sweaty and unfamiliar, two unfamiliar smells and nothing left to cling to.
His shirt stuck to the seat of the Fiorino, he ran a hand over the steering wheel. A minibus stopped in front of the gas tank, and a few girls with red-and-blue team jackets got out and walked toward the shop. Their hair was braided. A man with a small bouquet of flowers held the door for them. One of them curtsied, and they laughed. When they were inside, he saw the man take a flask out of his inside jacket pocket. Waclaw could see the way he reeled. The clouds broke and the light crossed the washed-out concrete of the entrance and wandered through the green of the hedges. He didn’t want to wait.
29
Rodlo
Next to the door stood a concrete tub for flowers, a gray mass with stones pressed into it. Every window in the house had curtains at half height, the stone slabs were swept and there was not a leaf on the meadow. A single maple stood there, red-topped.
Who’s there?
Wenzel. It’s Wenzel.
The buzzer sounded. Printed
doormats. Cats. Welcome. On the third floor, the door was open a crack. The black-and-white stone stairwell. He stopped in front of the door.
It was hot and it smelled of lunch, of cabbage.
Rodlo had gotten heavy, he had an unshaven, doughy face. He was pale. Those gray eyes.
Wenzel?
He nodded.
Can you tell her something from me?
What do you mean?
Rodlo wore loose jeans, above which a round belly was visible; he looked shorter, and his fingertips were yellow. He seemed to consider.
Lina? he said then, softly. Do you mean her? Lina-Milena?
When he said it, it sounded like a song. He smiled as he said the words. But only briefly. Then it looked like Rodlo’s round shoulders fell even farther forward, toward a point far in front of him on the floor.
Lina-Milena, he said softly.
You don’t know, then?
He looked at Waclaw.
She—must have a new number, Waclaw said, did she move? He paused.
She always wanted to move.
He tried to smile, but Rodlo didn’t look at him.
They didn’t tell you anything? Didn’t you have that post office box? Come in, he said. Please come in.
Rodlo came toward him and touched his shoulder from the side, but Waclaw just stood there and then sat on the stairs that led from the third to the fourth floor. The railing was next to him and Rodlo was in front of him, talking at him, she’s not there anymore, Wenzel, do you not know? But he sat there as if it were another staircase, and he didn’t hear, and finally Rodlo went inside and came back with a bottle of grain alcohol and he held it under Waclaw’s nose, but he said, I won’t drink, and Rodlo looked at him and said, it’s not your fault, it was a trailer, a blind spot.
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