by Lily Pond
The youngest of the group, a lean Japanese man appearing to be in his early thirties, stood up. He wore only black clothing and his hair and eyes were black as well. He bowed slightly. “I am … I do … ano. … butoh.” He talked hesitantly, making broad gestures with his pale hands in the firelight. “I … make dance …” He waved his hand to include the whole, cold, wilderness night. “I make into dance—yes?” His listeners nodded yes. “Not so easy make dance,” he said, smiling, then bowed again and sat down.
Mollis looked briefly at the man who sat next to her on the log. As he looked back she thought he looked startled so she turned away. The other woman didn’t appear to be around the campfire. No one else seemed to have anything to say. Mollis felt she must say something, if only because it was so unlike her.
Fingers tingling with quick nervousness, she said, “I have never done anything like this,” then realized that was really all she had to say, and it was enough, and it felt good. She breathed a deep sigh of relief, and then there was a very long silence, and then, without talking, everyone got up and went into their tents for the night.
The next day was overcast, making the quality of the silence different, less muffled. Occasional snow flurries fell, drawing pale lines against the clouded wood, and mists held the mountain tops. The only sounds were footsteps, the spash and chutter of them, the birds who stayed, a waterfall far in the distance. What little wind there was was a quiet one and there were all different shades of gray from the day before. Patterns of fallen pine needles traced the white ground.
Mollis realized she felt she was walking in a dream, a dream in black and white, a long dream not of her making. Her vision clarified amid the sharp contrasts. She could see individual snowflakes resting on the boughs of trees. She could hear the unseen running legs of deer. She could smell the snow. She felt the blood running through her hands, felt her skin contain her, and her parka as it held her skin. As long as the day was, she didn’t feel it; it carried her along, a white hand offering her the way.
But when the day’s walk was done, she was glad to rest, she realized, and glad, too, that the sky finally cleared, and was a pure black peppered with the silver of stars: and one shot across! And then another!
“It’s the Leonids,” a voice said, looking up too.
Mollis tore her eyes away from the sky to look at who had spoken to her. It was the same man who had seemed startled to see her the day before. He was a small man, not much taller than she was, and wiry, from what she could tell in his large down parka. He looked away from the sky for a second, smiled at her, and then they both looked back up.
“They’re on a thirty-three year cycle,” he went on. “Nineteen ninety-nine there’s supposed to be more than one a minute.”
“How beautiful.”
“It’ll be incredible. ’D be great to be up here for that.”
Mollis felt the wintry air on her face, and turned back to the fire.
“This could get addictive, huh?” he said, turning too. “Winter hiking. Amazingly beautiful.”
By the crackling light of the huge fire, Mollis could see that his jacket and his tightly curled hair were the same dark rust. She smiled in agreement.
He stuck out his hand. “Charles. … Chuck. … Chuck Duchins. If I had my cards with me you’d see the picture of the duck on it. Might as well call me Duck. Everybody does.” He grinned. His smile was odd, his teeth too similar in color and shape, looking filed at the bottom like a line straight across. By the firelight, Mollis could see his face scarred from past acne. His forehead was high. And his black eyes seemed both agitated and filled with constant wonder.
Mollis pulled her hand out from her coat where she had tucked it. “Mollis.”
“Like Alchemilla Mollis?”
“You know it? Yes. My mother was a gardener.”
“I know all that stuff. Million details. Have to. I write for a living.”
“Oh. What do you write about?”
“Everything. … Nature, and computers, mostly. Articles. For magazines.”
“My husband works with computers.” She regretted it the instant she said it. Just the mention of him made him loom where he had not been for two days now. She looked away, then turned back towards him. “May I ask you a question?”
“Sure! Shoot!”
“Well. … Last night? When I looked at you? I thought you looked surprised to see me. …”
“Caught that, eh? Pretty sharp. Well, you’re right. It’s strange. I kind of thought you looked a lot like my sister, but now that I really look at you, I see you really don’t. I don’t know what it is. There was something familiar.”
Hearing this made Mollis feel happy, though she couldn’t quite identify why.
That night she dreamed of stars falling like snow, and Duck saying, “We are all fragile as light.”
Mollis felt she could go blind with the beauty of the up-reaching, snow-laden branches meeting the rays of the sun pouring over the peaks of the mountains, and when she breathed in, she brought it all inside her. By the end of the third day she was the closest thing to ecstatic she’d been in her life, but for the day that Iris came. Iris. How glad she was she’d be seeing her tomorrow.
The last hour or so of the hike, the sky had clouded up and it had begun to drizzle. As the hikers had been warned of this possible eventuality, they all put on their rain slickers. If anything, the rain had warmed the temperature up a little, but it had also made the ground less crisp, and made the day seem to get dark even earlier.
That night, the group was to stay in a lodge. They arrived by four, having walked less lingeringly through the gloom, as though the speed of the city had begun to return to their bodies.
They all seemed a little embarrassed to be so relieved to arrive at the large old stone lodge. There was a main room, where they would meet for what was promised to be the only really gourmet meal of the trip, and tiny private rooms for each of the hikers, each with its own enormous tub—something very much appreciated after a three-day winter hike.
Mollis went to her room, removed all her heavy and damp outer clothing, and lay on her back on the small bed—on top of the woolen blankets, hands under her head on the starched white pillow. Inside, it was different. She didn’t feel as far away from home as she had outside. And here she felt alone, something she was unfamiliar with. It was uncomfortable. Tomorrow she had to go back. As it contracted back into itself, Mollis realized her body had expanded. Was that relaxation? But she was losing it. She was compacting again. Soon she would hardly be able to breathe, or maybe she would just forget how, again. The conversation with Duck the night before seemed like something she’d read somewhere in a newspaper on a train; it had nothing to do with her. She wiggled her toes as they adjusted to the room’s temperature, and lay there for quite a while.
Someone tapped on her door.
Duck stood there. She looked up at him and he smiled very subtly. He offered her his hand, and she hesitated, looked up at him. He shook his head and raised his palms to her. She took a deep breath. He offered his hand again, and she followed.
There was nothing romantic in his movements. He took her to his room, closed the door behind them. He went over and began to fill the large tub, testing the water for hot, but not too hot. Then, unseductively, and very quietly, he began to get undressed. She did as well.
The hot water smelled and felt like balm and blessing. Offering her the sponge he turned away from her and offered her his back. Steam rose from the tub. After three days of no talking, the silence felt natural. After three days of tuning in to the sounds around them, the sounds of the water sounded like music.
She lathered the sponge and washed him. He was so compact, and so brown. Though she’d never bathed with Steven, she knew him to be pale, somewhat fleshy, even his back. The soapy water made Duck’s skin appear to shine, but she touched it only with the sponge. She washed the back of his neck and his shoulders, then down along his spine, and the back of his ri
bs. When she paused, he stood up and turned around, motioning for her to turn around. And then he washed her back; she felt the rub of the sponge along her shoulder blades, on her shoulders, on the back of her neck, and then between her shoulder blades and down her spine and along the whole of her back.
When he stopped she opened her eyes and saw that he was again offering his hand, for her to turn around.
She turned around again, without standing up, and now they faced each other. He reached around to add some more hot water to the tub, then turned back again. When she met his eyes, what she saw there was deep kindness. He still had the sponge. He washed her shoulders, her neck, her arms. He washed her breasts and her stomach, and then he handed her the sponge. She washed his chest, his arms, his shoulders. She didn’t think she’d ever been so relaxed in her whole life. She felt almost like crying. They stood up, emptied the tub and showered off the remaining soap. He wrapped her in his thick white robe, and then accompanied her to her room. At her door they stopped, and they looked each other in the eyes, and he bowed with his head, ever so slightly. Then she went in, and was asleep as soon as she was under the covers.
It wasn’t until she was driving home that Mollis realized how unusual was what had happened the night before. And after three days of silence. She realized there was nothing in her that could evaluate it, so she simply wouldn’t. It was another grey, rainy day, but there wasn’t too much traffic.
Absently, Mollis turned on the radio—music! Suddenly the car was filled with the sounds of a piano concerto. One tone followed the next in a manner that seemed to stroke her neck, to fill her chest, to glove her hands, one beautiful sound after another.
My God, she thought. What is this? Mollis was hearing music for the first time. A flush went through her. Music had always seemed so extravagant, so not-of-her-world, so disallowed. Now it astonished her.
This stringing together of sounds—what great pleasure it causes, she thought. The concerto finished, and a voice came on to name the piece, but the voice itself seemed senseless this morning; she changed the station.
Singing, with guitars! Twanging sounds filled the car—and is that an accordion? Mollis laughed out loud. How astonishing this was! How could anyone ever feel let down in a world with pianos and accordions? The rest of the ride home she rode the music, the windows of her car became movie screens to accompany the sound track, the whole passing world seemed to orchestrate itself around whatever tunes she played on the radio.
Wave
Eléni Sikélianòs
I’ll shake out the bees
for you,
I’ll bind you
with strands of thick grasses
& break
open the river
to feed you
I’ll tempt the marsh
till your mouth
falls apart
till your frozen
green nipples thaw
the glacier-drift,
till your Lake
is my love, my wave, till you take it
at the crest
The Winter Field
Eric Mecklenburg
THE PERCOSET TABLET the golf-pro’s wife had left on his bar as a tip would make Adam feel better if it didn’t hurt his stomach. The sugar from the grape Fanta would keep him from getting sick in Warren’s back seat. By the time they reached the Polish border—they were driving to Poznan for lunch—everything would be fine.
To live in Berlin is to live with a palpable weight, an extra few atmospheres of pressure that you’re unaware of until you leave; even a hundred yards’ walk beyond the border brought a drop in pressure, like stepping out of a classroom during a mid-term exam. Warren drove them across the band of no-man’s-land that separated the city from the former East Germany. Where the double wall had stood last year, machine-gun towers and hoops of razor wires and floodlit mined corridors of grass, nothing more than a green rabbit meadow, a place for Germans to exercise their purebred dogs, remained. Beyond this boundary, the eastern houses were older, thick and stained like the people who lived in them. Yes, thought Adam, it is good to get out of the city, even with this girl.
Claire leaned her round cheek against Adam’s shoulder. She smoothed her hand along his leg. He didn’t want her to stop though there was no hope in her action. Her short brown bob, her small ear, her full protruding lips, to kiss her was to want to eat her. Look how beautiful she is, he thought. Look how perfect she seems. Not worn, not tired and colorless like Nadia in the front seat, but clean. She gave off a sort of domestic light, rather like a moonlit suburban backyard watched from a kitchen window. She was the remembered feeling of a Sunday before he’d learned to drink, when he’d shaken hands with the minister and stood free on the stairs above the parking lot. She was as pure as glacier water sucked from the wood of a raised canoe paddle. How could such a thing have happened to her? What was he doing with her? He felt a thickness in his throat and tried to concentrate on what passed outside: a house, a dozen large yellowing houses, an old woman smoking a cigarette, a jeep full of Russian soldiers, a green door, a young mother pushing a baby carriage, a heap of coal spilled on the brick sidewalk.
In Potsdam, posters advertised a show in which a naked woman swam in a pool of sharks. “Come See the Horror,” the signs said in monster movie script. “She Dives In Alive, But Will She Come Out?”
“She dives in alive,” Adam whispered to Claire. He touched her hand. “You could do that job. With your delicious body, you could get rich swimming in a pool of sharks.” He smiled. He thought of her poised at the end of her bed, the lights from the street coming through her window, her hands behind her back unhooking her bra, and he felt as if he were sinking. He thought of her face, a face as soft as cream as lace cups gave way to her breasts and he wondered if there had been an expression of hope in the tilt of her eyes, or of fear.
“What makes you think I haven’t done that already? Maybe I am rich, you wouldn’t know.” She opened the ashtray in the door handle, checked inside, clicked it shut.
“What makes you think you’re not swimming with sharks now?” he said. He shifted against the leather seat. There seemed no way to be comfortable.
“Because, you’re not like that. You said you aren’t like that.”
“When did I say that?”
“I heard you say that.”
He watched her mouth as she spoke and imagined how it must have looked when she was younger. How young had she been? He thought of the hand that had held the cigarette against the skin of her thigh. He tried to imagine someone forcing her. Why should it anger him? Perhaps she was using her problem to test him. Perhaps it wasn’t a problem at all, like the girl in London who had encouraged him, her meat-pie and cider breath, her hand squeezing him through his jeans in some doorway as he’d kissed from the perfumed opening of her collar, up the tight skin of her neck, under her long black hair to where her ear should have been. He had laughed so hard then, and touched the vacancy of her disfigurement with his tongue, because an ear is not much to lose. Not enough to cause trouble.
Claire gripped his thumb in her fist, and looked up at him, lips parted enough that he could see her teeth. He wanted to lick those teeth. “You are not as tough as you think you are,” she said, holding his thumb.
“I guess,” he said, and turned to the front. “Hey, Warren, what do you think about that show?”
Nadia answered for him. “Stupid,” she said. It was one of the few words of English she’d mastered. Warren could say some things in Russian, he claimed he could order goulash, for instance, but mostly their communication was based on nodding and pointing. Warren had brought her home with him from a school trip to Moscow. Adam didn’t need to know more.
“Stupid?” Warren said.
“Stupid.”
Warren smiled. He looked like a drunk but he didn’t drink. A man of average height with pinched shoulders and hound-like eyes, pocked cheeks, a porous, intelligent nose, he might have once been a junky. No
w he drank cola at Adam’s bar. “It’s probably not sharks. It’s probably a big sturgeon or something.”
“No. It’s shark,” Nadia said.
“Small shark?” Warren asked, showing her with his hands.
“No. Big. I saw it in Moscow.”
“Does the woman get killed?” Adam asked.
“Nyet,” she said.
Claire reached up, turned Adam’s head to her with fingers on his chin. She kissed him, quickly. Smiled. With her hand still on his chin, she forced him to look down at her. She did not look damaged. She did not look damaged at all. She looked like what he wanted.
“Your tongue tastes purple,” she said.
He kissed her forehead, the soft clarity of her hair. He wanted to turn away but not to pull away. He wanted to look out the window.
“Come here to me,” she said.
“No, let go of me.”
“Okay,” she said. She averted her face but leaned her body against him. He wished he had asked a different woman, that he knew of some way to disentangle himself from this damaged girl. One of the bar waitresses would’ve been better. For them, at least, there was hope. They cared little for talk or soap and wanted nothing from him except sex—but that seemed to be all they wanted from any man. At least it was something. Their love was combative, sick and delicious like beer shot with cognac and unfiltered cigarettes, like a mentholated ass fuck over a barstool after closing, or a hot coffee blow job in the keg-cooler. While golfers waited for gin and beers, ice cubes melted in his crack. These women hurt his head and gave him diseases. They left him with bruises, carpet burns on his knees, bitten nipples and shoulders, unsteady limbs. They dismissed him from their shoddy apartments when all he wanted was a shower, and to fall asleep with his head against their drunken breasts. Those mornings came without scrambled eggs or sleep. They came with nothing good and made even daylight hurt, though he loved them. His lungs would crackle like brown paper as he waited for some bus. He was twenty-five. He wasn’t supposed to feel like this.
