by Dennis Bock
It was different when his thoughts turned inward. He wondered if she wasn’t right about everything—the baby, the future, their life here in a home for the blind in a country that condemned you for the language you spoke. He thought about the secret he held from her as he listened to the lake on those nights, the house completely still and quiet, and tried to imagine explaining to her that first, pure impulse that had pushed him on in his plan to save Germany. Wouldn’t she see this now as the root cause that had led to the end of a city and her daughter’s death? He could not tell her for the deep remorse and shame it raised in him, and for the fear of her condemnation.
ELSER BEGAN CONSULTATIONS IN May with the ophthalmologist named Ridley. The doctor had already spoken to the group of likely candidates. He’d narrowed the list down to eighteen and collected them together in the library in the east wing. He was developing a new technique that was not yet accepted by his peers, though it would be one day, he said.
Elser stood at the back of the room and listened to the man’s presentation.
In the early days of his blindness he’d been able to see faces from his past in his mind’s eye. Now, months later, these images began to fail him. His sister. His mother. They too became ghosts, like the atonement girls who were only ever half there, always quietly stepping away.
He understood almost nothing of what the doctor said. Afterwards he returned to the library and found Ridley standing by a window.
“You’re DeGroote, the Dutchman,” Ridley said.
“Yes.”
“Soon to be a father, I hear. Congratulations.”
Elser told him that he’d understood very little of his presentation, but that he’d like to see his son or daughter one day. If only for that reason, if only for a day, he’d do whatever necessary. It was a simple and moving plea. For the next two hours Ridley attempted to explain the procedure, stopping often to ask if he was being understood. He backtracked, explained again, repeated himself—all this in a patient and forgiving voice.
Ridley had discovered something crucial during the terrible months he’d treated fighter pilots from the 601 Squadron wounded during the Battle of Britain. After acrylic plastics started being used in the Spitfire canopy, he went on—yes, do you understand canopy?—he’d noticed less inflammation in the damaged eye. “Plastic instead of glass, you understand? That’s what made the difference.” The damage was there, of course, when the shards from the canopy entered the eye, but the plastic caused no inflammation. Just tearing of the cornea. It was the unique qualities found in the acrylic plastics that inspired his research and tests now, he said. He was developing a new intraocular lens made of plastic similar to the plastic used in the Spitfire canopy.
“Do you understand?”
Elser was not at all confident he’d grasped the mechanics of the procedure, but he said that he was ready to do what was required.
THE MAJORITY OF THE patients at Mercy House had suffered the permanent retinal damage of flash blindness. They would never see again. “But cataracts are a completely different story,” Ridley said at their second consultation. “A physical barrier, nothing more. We’ve removed these for centuries, with varying degrees of success. A disc of protein obstructs vision, as it has in your case, and your wife’s case. The new idea is this: we replace the cataract with the artificial lens. Acrylic, you understand, is the difference. A plastic lens, not glass. Science makes its greatest advances in wartime. One of the great ironies of our times.”
They were seated across from each other in the wood-and-plaster cottage that Ridley used as his consultation and operating rooms. He got up and came around from his side of the desk, took hold of Elser’s right hand, and placed it on a globe-sized model of the human eye.
“The mystery of sight at your fingertips,” he said.
He told him the names of these parts of the eye as he led Elser’s fingers over the puzzle—the cornea, the aqueous humour, the iris, the lens.
He would make the incision here through which he’d remove the cataract, then irrigate the remaining lens fragments, washing them out from under the aqueous humour, here, he said, directing Elser’s fingers, and implant the new lens and seal the incision with stitching. Simple and miraculous, he said.
“Two hours per eye, perhaps. And after a forty-eight-hour recovery period the bandages will come off and then you will see your newborn.”
IN EARLY JULY, FIVE days before he was to undergo his surgery, Rosa leaned forward in mid-sentence and began to breathe in shortened, strained breaths. She placed her weight against the bureau, causing it to shift and bump against the wall. An anguished sound emerged from deep in her throat.
Elser helped her into their bed, covered her with a blanket, and went to tell the sisters that the baby was on its way.
After he returned, he sat at Rosa’s bedside while Sister Evelyn assessed the situation. She told him they’d call if they needed him, but he was to leave the room now, he would only get in the way here. He held Rosa’s hand and told her he’d be close by, downstairs, just a few rooms away.
On the main floor he paced nervously until well past midnight. He was alone. There was nothing to do. He stood at a window, waiting helplessly, listening to the lake at the bottom of the property. The sound was smooth and rhythmical, like calm, steady breathing.
His wife’s muted cries punctuated the silence of the sleeping house soon after that. They sent waves of fear through his heart. Undisturbed, the other residents of the house slept on. He went back upstairs after the cries stopped but the nurses shooed him away a second time.
BEFORE DAWN SISTER EVELYN found him slumped in a chair by the fireplace, half asleep. She told him the hot water tank was not refilling fast enough. Rosa had been in the bath for hours. He was to fetch some hot water up from the scullery, and he was to go at once.
It was a small errand he took pleasure in, finally able to do something useful. He knew the house well enough, its vast rooms and narrow corridors.
He found the door to the pantry off the kitchen and tapped his cane down the flight of stairs. It was a place he’d never been before, reserved as it was for the atonement girls who served there. The steps were tricky going for a blind man, steeper than the others in the house, he found. With great care he felt his way to the bottom of the staircase, then stood a moment, listening.
A woman’s voice called out. “Yes? Who is it?” she said.
She would not be used to seeing anyone this early in the day, he knew, let alone a resident. He didn’t approach.
“Sister Evelyn sent me. For hot water. My wife—”
He knew she was frightened and stopped speaking mid-sentence. She was studying his face, he imagined, wondering about the dangers of him coming down here and about the punishment she’d receive for having anything at all to do with him. He repeated that it was Sister Evelyn who’d sent him, that permission had been granted, and then he heard her footsteps on the stone floor and a moment later the sound of a cauldron being filled with water and lifted and set on the cast-iron stovetop.
He came forward a few steps and waited at the door and listened as she moved about the scullery. He wanted to tell her that she needn’t be afraid of him and that she could tell him what she knew about the world out there. Was it as bad here for people like us as they said? He wanted to ask a hundred questions about the town and the country he’d been brought to, and about her, this silent German girl who’d been forbidden to speak her language, but he could not be sure she wouldn’t betray him for the prize of discovering his secret.
She lifted the cauldron off the stovetop and placed it on the floor at his feet, as he had suspected she would, its swing handle positioned upwards. She would do what she could to avoid having their hands touch, even in passing the pot from one to another, so afraid of the cancers that seemed to touch most of them here.
He took it without a word and carried the boiling water upstairs to where a nursing sister met him in the hallway outside their room.
She took the cauldron and said they would find him when there was news.
He tapped his way back down to the main floor and settled in the chair he’d been roused from half an hour earlier. He heard movement upstairs, creaking floors and bedroom doors opening and closing.
The house was waking up.
Just after seven, Sisters Cecilia and Harriette entered the parlour and he stood and asked if they wouldn’t go see for him if there was any news. Sister Harriette left him in the company of Sister Cecilia, who sat with him in silence until two ladies, Mrs. Larson and Mrs. Starmer, came downstairs and suggested he join them for breakfast in the dining hall.
“Best stay busy at a time like this,” one of them said.
“A watched pot never boils,” the other said.
He did not know the idiom, of course, which they began to explain to him as they carried him on into their morning.
An hour later Sister Caroline came with the news. The mother was fine.
“Your wife is a strong woman,” she said, taking his arm and leading him from the dining hall to a room on the second floor.
“Your wife is resting upstairs,” the sister said. “This is your daughter.”
She placed the newborn in his arms, and when his stiffness grew apparent she positioned his hands for him and he thanked her.
The sister waited a moment, already heartbroken.
“To this place of damnation good things rarely come,” she said.
He heard the motion of her hand performing the four movements in the sign of the cross.
“What is it?” he said.
“It’s not for us to understand God’s will, but we must bear it nonetheless.”
She took one of his hands out from under the child, slowly, giving him time to adjust his hold, and placed his fingers on the deformity.
STILL SHAKEN, HE JOINED Rosa in their room on the third floor and sat at her bedside and tried to think of something to say. They sat in silence for a time. It was as if neither of them would ever speak again or feel anything other than the searing grief that cut them now.
Their daughter was healthy otherwise, he wanted to say, there was that at least. They could make do, teach her to live a normal life. It was an absurd thought. He knew nothing about normal life anymore. It was too far behind him in a remote and vanishing world. He held her as she wept and wondered why God had chosen to punish her and the child and not him and only him for the horror he’d caused.
There was nothing to say, there could be no consolation. The embrace was silent, each lost in their thoughts, until one of the sisters brought the baby in for a feeding.
The helpless creature was crying when the sister gave her to Rosa, propped up now in the bed, but the crying fell silent when she began to nurse and the suckling and small panting between gulps brought Elser’s heart to the top of his throat. After the baby was finished he held her in his arms, silently pacing the room, while Rosa tried to rest.
Next to the bed that night, he listened to his wife and daughter sleep. He drifted off once and awoke to the sound of the contented suckling that again helped him to believe that the sense of defeat that had consumed them might eventually lift. In it he heard an appetite for life, a hunger that ignored hesitation or doubt, the pure instinct to travel forward. What he felt was something that approached happiness and the simple pleasure of fatherhood. It surprised him. He wanted to share this tenderness with his wife. He wanted to reach through the darkness to touch her and to communicate the startling thought that here in the ruins of their life they’d found the simple blessed possibility that would offer them courage and joy and make disappear for them all the dangers that awaited.
SHE HEARD HIS BREATHING deepen into the slow rhythm of sleep and whispered his name three times to be sure. She felt under her pillow for the glass ampule she’d taken from the medical bag that had been left untended that day and cracked it open with her teeth.
He did not wake up. The baby didn’t stir.
She felt the cold begin to crawl through her veins almost immediately after taking the liquid on her tongue. She’d bargained with God, negotiated with men, and pleaded with doctors. Nothing had helped. Neither God nor man had listened, and so she would provide her own answer. Courage did not fail her this time. She asked her daughter’s forgiveness as she lay waiting. One day she’d understand, perhaps even wonder how her mother had held on for so long in such a world. With her last breath the broken ampule rolled from her hand.
THE CAUSE OF DEATH would not be spoken of, the sisters decided, and so when Sister Evelyn brought Lina Teufel up to the screened-in verandah on the second floor that morning, she mentioned only that the man’s wife had died in the night.
Lina knew only that motherhood meant a price was to be paid, sometimes as high as the one exacted of the poor woman whose child she was handed that day. Her own suffering had been nowhere as severe as this child’s mother’s, she knew. The birth of her son Thomas had been uneventful, agonizing beyond measure, but natural after all. It was a grim understanding for Lina when she knew at last that having her son would not make her life better, or bring fulfillment, or cause her to love her husband more. The child was work. Endless work. And this while the duties at Mercy House asked more and more of her. The old German woman who came down from the camp every morning to look after Thomas helped some, but she was a hardened Berliner who chose not to disguise her suspicion of this woman who lived in town and ate decent food for the simple reason that she’d married a half-German.
The nursing had always been difficult, at times agonizing, but it was the silent killer Lina feared when she held the woman’s child at her breast that first morning, deformed as it was, and when the baby was finished, she buttoned her uniform back up to the neck and passed it to Sister Evelyn. She got up and prepared to leave. She was trembling and at the point of tears.
“That will be all,” the sister said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Lina said, as she’d been taught.
Elser recognized her voice from the scullery two nights ago and heard the door open and her footsteps moving down the hallway, stepping quickly, and then running.
1960
Muriel was wearing a formless grey jumper and dark stockings the day Dr. Ridley introduced us at Mercy House. He’d walked me along that creaking hallway to a room filled with books, and there I saw a tall girl of about my brother’s age standing at the window. She turned and saw me and said that thing about me being the younger one, which seemed to register an attitude somewhere between disappointment and resignation, and I shrugged with embarrassment.
She was taller than me by half a head, her eyes searching and intelligent, and what I felt more than the disappointing fact that I’d let her down as the younger of two brothers was the confusing thrill that I’d discovered someone of roughly my own age living here, who, oddly, was not blind.
“I’ll be thirteen this summer, anyway,” I said, eager just then to hurry along my birthday. She didn’t seem friendly in the least, or at all impressed that I was here. She shrugged her shoulders and said she’d turned fifteen just a few weeks ago.
“Muriel’s never met anyone her own age before—much less a boy,” Dr. Ridley said.
She’d lived in the hospice her whole life, I learned later, but at this point, still knowing next to nothing about her, I decided we were two peas in a pod. If anything, she was even more of an outcast than I was. You only had to look at that defiant, sullen face to know that she felt the same way about people as I did—that quick as a whip they’d round on you for an easy laugh in the schoolyard, find some difference to exploit as best they could, or push your face in the mud for the sin of sticking up for yourself.
“So, it would seem you’re a novelty here, son,” Dr. Ridley said. “Muriel might just have to pinch you to believe you’re real.”
“I’ve seen them down there a million times. Throwing stones and branches and spying on us,” she told the doctor.
“I’d rue the day a
boy loses his curiosity to know the world,” Dr. Ridley said.
I was embarrassed to be caught out so quickly, to understand that she knew who I was and what my brother and I were always up to when we peered over the stone wall, watching the house. As we stood staring at each other for ten long seconds of silence before Sister Catherine returned to ask for Dr. Ridley’s assistance, I recognized in her something that I’d never seen in anyone else before. She was even more desperate and helpless than I was, it seemed, and I believed I’d finally found someone who might become a friend.
“I wonder about those two sometimes,” Muriel said, mooning her eyes with great delight once the doctor and the sister were gone. The absence of adults, something she hardly knew, seemed exciting to her. And it was as if in an instant she’d deemed me worthy of her confidence, though I didn’t fully grasp why, or what she was implying. What did she wonder about them? I thought.
“I watch people around here,” she said. “There’s always something going on that they want to hide from you.”
Her irreverence baffled and alarmed me. It was also thrilling. I’d never heard anyone talk like that, let alone a boy or a girl, and the private lives of adults had always struck me as the last thing on earth you wanted to think about as a kid.
