by Craig Nova
This was his life’s work, and she realized that he had brought her into it, as though he were allowing her to walk around inside him, in what he cared about and what he thought was beautiful, and in that moment of clear understanding, which again was almost impossible to articulate, she was left shaking with the realization: it was like everything else that had gone on between them. Now, though, in the scent of the flowers she was able to say what that promise was. Yes, she thought, of course …
“It’s exciting here,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s the heat. The dampness.”
They moved farther down the line of orchids, which were white and red, the petals tumbling from some of the larger plants, and then she stopped at one the size of a hand, yellow as a daffodil. The sun came through the mist. The nipples sprayed that warm vapor.
A bench had been put back into the recesses of the hothouse, and they sat on it, the two of them watching the clouds of mist, the bright purple flowers, the pink ones, the massive bulbs of an orchid that trapped insects by emitting the most delicious fragrance. In the clouds of mist they could smell it, which was like a perfume that a woman had touched behind her ear. He makes everything seem all right, she thought. He lets me get away from those hours of doubt and the misery of being flawed.
“Are you upset?” he said.
“It’s not that exactly,” she said. “I’m just a little teary.”
Droplets of water were released and the vapor turned white, like fog, aside from those places where the cloud of it was penetrated by the bars of sunlight.
“Everything about us seems unseen,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there.”
She bit her lip.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m not going to ruin this by crying.”
“Oh,” he said. “Crying isn’t going to ruin anything.”
The copper tubes sprayed more water, and the droplets moved through the air with a peculiar, anxious movement, as though they were minute insects that had just hatched and instantly knew that they were about to be preyed upon. After a while he reached up and picked one of the orchids and held it out for her.
“Oh,” she said. “You shouldn’t do that.”
“I know,” he said. “But that just makes it better.”
“Is that what you think of me?” she said. “Something you shouldn’t do?”
“No,” he said. “But there are times when I wish you were forbidden. Anything this good should be forbidden. And so it makes it better.”
“Oh,” she said, “you say that to all the girls.”
“Jesus,” said Felix. “Look at the size of that one. See him? What do you think he wants?”
“Why don’t you find out?” said Gaelle. She looked at her feet when she spoke.
Down the avenue the lights were coming on and the cars made a plaintive, almost bovine mooing with their horns. Felix walked over to Karl, and when they stood side by side, Felix looked like a scale model, about one-third the size of the larger man. They both wore gray and brown clothes, had haircuts that had been done with a pair of scissors in a hurry, and both had gray skin that was scarred by acne. They walked with a plodding, subdued gait.
Gaelle guessed she had enough energy to be curious about why she wasn’t running away, but not enough to do so. Maybe she didn’t run because that would make all of this seem real. She stood there, trembling.
“I have to talk to you first?” said Karl to Felix. “About her?”
“Yes,” said Felix. His snaggled teeth showed when he smiled. “I’m here to help. Why, if there’s anything you want, you can just ask me.”
“All right,” said Karl. “How much?”
“Would you like to take her someplace?” said Felix.
“You could say that,” said Karl.
“Where’s your car? Are you going to get a taxi? We know a driver,” said Felix. “I can suggest a hotel, too. Reasonable, clean as a whistle.”
“We’ll just go back in the park,” said Karl.
“Well, my friend, she isn’t so keen on that,” Felix said. “It’s hard on her dignity to be off in the park like that. If you don’t object, that’s going to be more.”
“Tell me,” said Karl. “Give me the price.”
They agreed. Karl took the money out of his pocket and passed it over, the bills looking in his hand about the size of a theater ticket. Felix took the notes, put them in his pocket, not the one with the other money. He’d do that later when he was alone. Then he turned toward Gaelle and said, “It’s OK. The gentleman and I are agreed.”
“Hi,” she said. “It’s been a while.”
“Not so long,” he said. “Time goes by pretty fast.”
“How’s Mani?” she said.
Karl shrugged.
“The same,” he said.
She guessed he wouldn’t need a knife, and she was almost disappointed that the reality of the moment was so different from what she had imagined. She looked at his hands. That’s how it would be done. His hands.
When she turned her head, her scar was silky and luminescent, like still water at dusk. The groove in the middle of her upper lip showed clearly in the light from the street, deep and smooth, youthful and beguiling, so much at odds with the shadows of the park. She stood in front of him, her head down as she tried to decide if she was abandoning herself or getting ready to fight: the two seemed bound together, since as she put her head down, she wanted to use her attractiveness to get control of this.
Karl wanted to get close to her, but he hesitated. He was sure, though, that if he stepped back, if he turned away, he would instantly have a sense of loss. He stared at the groove in her lip. It seemed intimate to him, as though she were naked and her beauty revealed an unexpected hope. You’ve seen it before, he thought. So what’s different now?
She’s getting ready to disappear, thought Karl.
Up until this moment he had lived in a plodding way and had sat in the Bar Restaurant until he was told what to do. At one time he had worked for the railroad, and he had done his job with a steady, machinelike precision, spreading gravel, leveling the ties with their odor of creosote. Everything had been dull, more or less. Now, he stood there and blinked.
“So what do you want?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
He blushed. The sudden heat made him wonder if he had gotten sick, like his brother who had gone to Africa and had returned to Berlin with malaria. He stared at her scar with a shock of recognition: he had never been more certain of anything. The delicacy of her shape, the fineness of her features, the smallness of her figure and hips, the thinness of her legs, all seemed more feminine and ethereal because of the scar, which, in the most personal way possible, he understood. It bound them together. He leaned closer and smelled an orchidlike whiff of perfume and her slight, sweaty aroma. It seemed to come from her blouse, her neck and shoulders.
He had the impulse to take her hand, and for a moment he thought he had the sense not to do that, but then he reached down anyway. She put her hand out, too, and glanced up at him, and thought, That’s right. His hands.
A vibrant flow ran from her hand into his and he was uncertain where he ended and where she began. He apprehended this sensation as a kind of buzzing, a soft one to be sure, although the power of it frightened him.
“You want to take a walk?” she said.
“I guess so,” he said.
They went along the paths among the dark trees, and after about a hundred yards they came to a small clearing where there was a bronze statue of a man in robes, holding an open book. A bench stood at the side of the clearing, and the two of them sat down. Gaelle kept looking around, but she didn’t let go of his hand, and he was beginning to think that she was holding it sincerely, too, as though even that small touch in the darkness was reassuring to her. As though she were asking him for something. She trembled there, on the bench, looking down.
He knew what he was supposed to do. The fir
st thing was to find out if she had said anything about Breiter. Had she told anyone, and if so, who? Had Gaelle mentioned that Mani and Karl did this on their own, separate from the party?
They sat there. At the side of the clearing one of the park’s decorative lamps came on. He had felt suspended but anchored by her diminutive presence, as though some invisible line ran from him to her. He was reminded of his childhood when he lived in a small town outside of Berlin and how he had flown a kite: he remembered the air, the cool breeze, the tug of the string against his hand, and as he stood at the bottom, watching the kite move this way and that way, small up there at that distance, he had experienced a small, keen, and pleasurable buoyancy in his chest. He felt that now. It had been a long time since he had felt buoyant. He wasn’t cheerful now, but something very close to it: the more he gave into the touch of her hand and that lightness the more excited he became, stiff in his pants. Could she see it?
Gaelle felt a tightening that she thought was fear, although it could have been more complicated than that. How long had it been since she had felt a sense of warmth, a kind of flow? Recently she had been so fatigued and frightened that she had gone through a barrier and come out on the other side. And, as she thought it was coming, that he was going to take her back into the dark where she would be obliterated, her excitement seemed to grow. Self-loathing, she thought, such self-loathing. In the midst of this she felt that place where she had so thoroughly relegated the desire to be loved, a weight in her interior life, and now this presence, this essence opened and left her looking at this large, ugly man. Oh, no, she thought. Not now.
He had often been ashamed of his size and his battered face. People got on the S-Bahn and looked at him and glanced away, as though they had seen a dead dog in the road. He stood up to this with a blunt, distant gaze that had protected him, but as he glanced down now he realized that the same thing must have happened to her every time she got on the train. He had been able to take this isolation when he thought that he was alone in the world, that no one else had to endure this the way he did, but she had obviously had this experience, too. The shock of it left him almost disoriented. Whatever he had depended upon in the past had vanished, and he was left with the constant, reassuring buzz of her hand against his.
“So, what do you want?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said.
She went through a list of what she could do, or would do, although some of these acts were more expensive than others. She spoke with a quiet whisper, almost as though she had forgotten what the words meant, or what these acts really were. Instead she seemed to concentrate on his enormous hand.
“I need a minute,” he said.
“Sure,” she said. “Take your time.”
He looked over her head into the shadows under the trees. That was where he thought he was going to do it. It was hard to see, and the blue-gray dusk made everything appear to be part of the same substance. It was difficult to separate one thing from another, a tree, say, from someone’s leg.
“I guess I want to talk,” he said.
“What about?” she said. “Is there something you want to do I haven’t mentioned?”
“It’s not like that,” he said.
“Well, what’s it like?” she said.
“Do you feel it?” he said.
“Feel what?” he said.
“Like there’s something running from my hand into yours,” he said.
“Not really,” she said.
“Try to feel it,” he said. “Close your eyes.”
“I don’t want to close my eyes,” she said.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
Isn’t that the sign, she thought, isn’t that the beginning?
With a feeling of complete surrender, she put her head down and closed her eyes. He felt her fingers, which were half the size of his, tighten against his hand. This tightening increased that buoyant sensation, and at the same time, as a contradiction, he seemed to be more real than before. No, he thought. Not more real, more important. Their hands, where they touched, became warmer. He supposed she thought he was just another creep who held hands with women like her, and that she would start laughing, or worse, play with him in a kind of insincere, mercenary way, but instead she just sat there with her eyes closed.
Then he thought, She knows what I came for.
He put the trembling tip of his finger against the groove in her lip.
“I feel something,” she said.
Then he leaned back against the bench, which like everything else was too small for him. It hit him halfway down his back, not up on the shoulders where he wanted to be supported. He watched the approach of the darkness, the trees and leaves disappearing, the cones of park lights becoming more clear, the benches, the line of the top of the foliage as it vanished.
She glanced up at him.
“You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?” she said.
“No,” he said. He shook his head.
“You know I’m scared and you’re having fun with it,” she said. “That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Oh, no,” he said.
He shook his head and tried to take her hand more completely, more gently. She began to pull away, but then stopped.
“You know what I came to do, don’t you?” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
He had always thought one of his strengths was the ability to say nothing. It came in handy when people pleaded and promised things and tried to get him to abandon the job he was supposed to do. Now he realized that didn’t come from strength, but from the inability to speak. So, he sat there, looking at her, his silence surrounding him so completely that it was like a miasma, a stink of incapacity.
“That’s what I’m supposed to do,” he said. “But I don’t know …”
“That’s all you’ve got to say?” she said.
“I don’t talk,” he said.
“Really?” she said.
“I don’t talk very well,” he said.
“So what do you do?” she said.
He noticed that she left her hand in his. Then he tried to think of something to say. What did he do? He took orders. He waited. He did what other people wanted him to do. And as he went through these items he thought, isn’t that what she did? Waited, took orders, did things that she spent a lot of effort trying to forget.
“Have you ever thought you were just going to do your job and then something happens? …”
“Mostly I do my job,” she said.
“But you see what I mean?” he said. “You could feel funny.”
“I was feeling funny earlier,” she said.
“Were you?” he said. “Like what?”
“A little dizzy,” she said. “You know.”
They sat together for a while longer, and then, as though blurting something out in an unfamiliar fashion, almost as though speaking a language he only half knew, he said, “I’ve got an ugly face.”
She looked up at him.
“So what?” she said.
“How can you say that?” he said.
“It doesn’t matter to me,” she said.
He felt so light that he was afraid to let go of her hand, since he might float away, not actually, not physically, but mentally, like madness. He started trembling.
Then she turned and looked at him.
“What are you going to do?” she said.
“First I was supposed to ask if you told anyone about Breiter.”
“But that was only the first part, right?” she said.
“Yes, that was the first part,” he said. “Then I was supposed to do the next thing.”
It was the last part of the evening, and as the light bled away, the essence of what he was supposed to do seemed to tint the dark trees. They could almost smell it: the horror of the devastation of a human being. In the middle of it he felt the slight, tender, insistent movement of her hand as she put it back into his. The warm return of it, which was like th
e sensation of trust itself, left him with an increasing sense of lightness and importance, too. If nothing else, he realized what the touch of her hand meant to him: he hadn’t really thought that anything was important, and now that he had a hint of this possibility, he wanted a little time to consider it.
In the instant that she realized it wasn’t going to happen, the fear, the terror, the anticipation, the surrender seemed to wash through her with a tingling rush, and she was left holding his hand and leaning against him.
“Hmmmmm,” she said.
Then he thought, Just do your job. This is just some doubt, some silly thing that happens to everyone. He wasn’t sure about that, since he had never really talked to anyone else who had to do what he did. Mostly, it was something he had been quiet about, just as everyone else who had the same experience was quiet about it. Then he stood up.
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?” she said.
“We’ve got to have something to eat,” he said. “Will you come with me? I know a place not far from here.”
She looked up at him. It almost hurt her neck, but then, in a moment of frankness in which she couldn’t tell if she had really felt something in her hand, too, aside from a momentary release from terror, she said, “All right.”
They walked out of the park. He was shy about taking her hand, and so they went out the way they had come, keeping a little distance, just like their business had been done. Felix was waiting with his inquisitive expression, as though trying to decide if this enormous man was going to become a regular. That was the ticket: a steady, repeating group.
“I’m hungry,” said Gaelle.
“We’re going to get something to eat,” said Karl.
“No kidding?” said Felix. “Well, of course. Won’t that be nice for a treat? Well, I’ll stay around here. You know, set some things up.”
Then he watched as they walked along the sidewalk, Karl’s shoulders so large and broad he seemed like a door that was being moved down the street, and Gaelle next to him, seeming waiflike by comparison.
They went into a restaurant and took a table at the back. It was a medium-priced restaurant with checkered tablecloths and a waiter in a white shirt and a small black tie. The waiter gave them a quick, indeterminate glance, as though trying to decide whether to let them eat, but after Karl’s keen expression of warning, the waiter bent over and waved them in, ushering them toward their table.
