Memory Wall: Stories

by Anthony Doerr

  There are sturgeon in the river. Or there’s one. There’s at least one.

  They all gone, Allie, he says. You only break your heart more with this fishing. You only make yourself more lonely.

  So what, Grandpa, you don’t believe in anything you can’t see? You believe we don’t have souls? You put a cross on every headstone you make, but you think the only thing that happens to us when we die is that we turn into mud?

  For a while we watch the kid throw and catch his tennis ball. He never misses. Grandpa Z says, I come to Kansas. I ride airplane. I see tops of clouds. No people up there. No gates, no Jesus. Your mother and father are in the sky sitting on clouds? You think this?

  I look back at Mishap, who’s curled up in the hatchback against the rain. Maybe, I say. Maybe I think something like that.

  I make friends with a girl named Laima and another girl named Asta. They watch Boy Meets Grill, too. Their parents are not dead. Their mothers yell at them for shaving their legs and tell them things like, I really wish you wouldn’t chew your hangnails like that, Laima, or, Your skirt is way too short, Asta.

  At night I lie in bed with Grandpa Z’s unpainted plaster slowly cracking all around me and no shade on the window and Mrs. Sabo’s machine wheezing next door and stars creeping imperceptibly across the windowpane and reread the part in my Emily Dickinson biography when she says, “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.” People still remember Emily Dickinson said that, but when I try to remember a sentence Mom or Dad said I can’t remember a single one. They probably said a million sentences to me before they died but tonight it seems all I have are prayers and clichés. When I shut my eyes I see Mom and Dad at church, Mom holding a little maroon songbook, Dad’s little yachting belt and penny loafers. He leans over to whisper something to me—a little girl standing in the pew beside him. But when his mouth opens, no sound comes out.

  The willows along the river turn yellow. Our history teacher takes us on a field trip to the KGB museum in Vilnius. The KGB used to cram five or six prisoners into a room the size of a phone booth. They also had cells where prisoners had to stand for days in three inches of water with no place to sit or lie down. Did you know the arms of straitjackets used to be twelve or fourteen feet long? They’d knot them behind your back.

  Late one night Mrs. Sabo and I watch a program about a tribe in South America. It shows a naked old guy roasting a yam on a stick. Then it shows a young guy in corduroys riding a moped. The young guy, the narrator lady tells us, is the old guy’s grandson. No one wants to do the traditional tribe stuff anymore, the narrator lady says. The old people sit around on their haunches looking gloomy and the youngsters ride buses and move to the cities and listen to cassette tapes. None of the young people want to speak the original language, the narrator says, and no one bothers to teach it to their babies. The village used to have 150 people. All but six have moved away and are speaking Spanish now.

  At the end the narrator says the tribe’s old language has a word for standing in the rain looking at the back of a person you love. She says it has another word for shooting an arrow into an animal poorly, so that it hurts the animal more than is necessary. To call a person this word, in the old language, the lady says, is the worst sort of curse you could imagine.

  Fog swirls outside the windows. Mrs. Sabo stands and disconnects herself from her machine and takes a bottle of Juozo beer from the refrigerator. Then she goes out the front door and walks into the yard and stands at the far edge of the porch light and pours some beer into her cupped hand. She holds it out for a long time, and I’m wondering if Mrs. Sabo has finally drifted off the edge until out of the mist comes a white horse and it drinks the beer right out of her cupped hand and then Mrs. Sabo presses her forehead against the horse’s big face and the two of them stay like that for a long time.

  That night I dream my molars come loose. My mouth fills with teeth. I know before I open my eyes that Mrs. Sabo is dead. People come over all day long. Her son leaves the windows and doors open for three days so that her soul can escape. At night I walk over to her house and sit with him and he smokes cigarettes and I watch cooking shows.

  You are okay? he says in Lithuanian, two nights after she’s gone. I shrug. I’m worried that if I open my mouth something wretched will come out. He doesn’t say anything else.

  The following day Grandpa drives me home from school and looks at me a long time and tells me he wants to go fishing.

  Really? I say.

  Really, he says. He walks across the field with me; he lets me bait his hook. For three straight afternoons we fish together. He tells me the chemical plant where Mrs. Sabo worked used to make cement and fertilizer and sulfuric acid, and under the Soviets some days the river would turn mustard yellow. He tells me that the farms here were collectives, where many families worked a large area, and that’s why the houses are in clusters and not spread out, each to its own plot, like farmhouses in Kansas.

  On the fourth day, I’m fishing with a chicken carcass when my line goes tight. I count to three and try to yank my rod up. It doesn’t budge. It’s a feeling like I’ve hooked into the river bottom itself, like I’m trying to pull up the bedrock of Lithuania.

  Grandpa Z looks over at my line and then at me.

  Snagged? he says. My arms feel like they’re going to tear off. The current pulls the boat slowly downstream and soon the line is so tight drops are sizzling off it. Every once in a while a little line cranks off the reel. That’s all that happens. If I were to let go of my rod, it would shoot upriver.

  Something pulls at me and the boat pulls at it and we stay like that for a long time, locked in a tug-of-war, my little fishing line holding the entire boat and me and Mishap and Grandpa Z steady against the current, as if I’ve hooked into a big, impossible plug of sadness resting on the bottom of the river.

  You pull, I whisper to myself. Then you crank. Like Mrs. Sabo did. Pull, crank, pull, crank.

  I try. My arms feel like they’re disappearing. The boat rocks. Mishap pants. A bright silver wind comes down the river. It smells like wet pine trees. I close my eyes. I think about the new family that’s moving into our house, some new Mom hanging her clothes in Mom’s closet, some new Dad calling to her from Dad’s office, some teenage son tacking posters to my walls. I think about how Grandpa Z says the sky is blue because it’s dusty and octopuses can unscrew the tops off jars and starfish have eyes at the tips of their arms. I think: No matter what happens, no matter how wretched and gloomy everything can get, at least Mrs. Sabo got to feel this.

  Grandpa Z says, It’s not a snag. He says it twice. I open my eyes. Bubbles are rising from whatever is on the other end of my line. It’s as if I’m going to separate at the waist. But gradually, eventually, I seem to be gaining some ground. The boat rocks as I pull it a yard upstream. I heave the rod up, crank in a couple turns of line.

  Pull, then crank. Pull, then crank. We skid another yard upstream. Grandpa Z’s eyes seem about to bulge out of their sockets.

  It’s not a fish. I know it’s not a fish. It’s just a big lump of memory at the bottom of the River Nemunas. I say a prayer Dad taught me about God being in the light and the water and the rocks, about God’s mercy enduring forever. I say it quickly to myself, hissing it out through my lips, and pull then crank, pull then crank, God is in the light, God is in the water, God is in the rocks, and I can feel Mishap scrabbling around the boat with his little claws and I can even feel his heart beating in his chest, a little bright fist opening and closing, and I can feel the river pulling past the boat, its tributaries like fingernails dragging through the entire country, all of Lithuania draining into this one artery, five hundred sliding miles of water, all the way to the Baltic, which Grandpa Z says is the coldest sea in Europe, and something occurs to me that will probably seem obvious to you but that I never thought about before: A river never stops. Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, forgetting, sleeping, mourning, dying—the rivers are still ru
nning.

  Grandpa Z shouts. Something is surfacing twenty feet away from the boat. It comes up without hurrying, like a submarine, as if from a dream: breathtakingly huge, the size of a desk. It’s a fish.

  I can see four barbells under his snout, like snakes. I see his fog-colored belly. I see the big hook stuck through his jaw. He moves slowly, and eases his head back and forth, like a horse shaking off a wasp.

  He is huge. He is tremendous. He is ten feet long.

  Erketas, says Grandpa Z.

  I can’t hold it anymore, I say.

  Grandpa Z says, You can.

  Pull, crank. Breathe in light, breathe out color. The sturgeon comes to us upside down. His mouth sucks and opens, sucks and opens. His back is covered with armor. He looks fifty thousand years old.

  For a full minute the fish floats beside the boat like a soft white railroad tie, the boat rocking gently, no Mrs. Sabo, no Mom and Dad, no tape measures or hanging scales, no photographs, my arms ablaze with pain and Mishap barking and Grandpa Z looking down as if he’s looking over the rim of a cloud and is witnessing a resurrection. The sturgeon’s gills open and close. The flesh inside is a brilliant, impossible crimson.

  I hold him there for maybe ten more seconds. Who else sees him? The cows? The trees? Then Grandpa Z leans over, unfolds his pocketknife, and cuts the line. The fish floats beside the boat for a few seconds, stunned and sleepy. He doesn’t flick his tail, doesn’t flex his huge body. He simply sinks out of sight.

  Mishap goes quiet. The boat wobbles and starts downriver. The river pours on and on. I think of those photos of Mom, as tall and thin as a blade of grass, a bike rider, a swimmer, a stranger, a suntanned sixth-grader who might still come pedaling up the driveway of her father’s house some afternoon with a jump rope over her shoulder. I think of Mrs. Sabo, how her memories slipped away one by one into the twilight and left her here in a house in a field in the middle of Lithuania waiting for skinny, ravenous Giltine to carry her to a garden on the other side of the sky.

  I feel the tiniest lightening. Like one pound out of a thousand has been lifted off my shoulders. Grandpa Z dips his hands in the water and rubs them together. I can see each drop of water falling off his fingertips. I can see them falling in perfect spheres and reflecting back tiny pieces of light before returning to the river.

  We hardly ever talk about the fish. It’s there between us, something we share. Maybe we believe talking about it will ruin it. Grandpa Z spends his evenings etching Mrs. Sabo’s face into her tombstone. Her son has offered several times to pay but Grandpa does it for free. He puts her on the granite without her glasses and her eyes look small and naked and girlish. He draws a lace-collared dress up tight around her throat and pearls around that, and he renders her hair in cotton-candy loops. It really is a very good job. It rains on the day they put it over her grave.

  In November our whole school takes a bus to Plokštinė, an abandoned underground Soviet missile base where the Russians used to keep nukes. It looks like a grassy field, hemmed with birch, with an oversized pitcher’s mound in each corner. There are no admission fees, no tourists, just a few signs in English and Lithuanian and a single strand of barbed wire—all that remains of seven layers of alarms, electric fences, razor cable, Dobermans, searchlights, and machine gun emplacements.

  We go down a staircase in the center of the field. Electric bulbs dangle from cracked ceilings. The walls are cramped and rusty. I pass a tiny bunkroom and a pair of generators with their guts torn out. Then a dripping black corridor, clotted with puddles. Eventually I reach a railing. The ceiling is belled out: One of the pitcher’s mounds must be directly above me. I shine my flashlight ninety feet down. The bottom of the silo is all rust and shadows and echoes.

  Here, not so long ago, they kept a thermonuclear ballistic missile as big as a tractor trailer. The iron collar around the rim of the hole has the 360 degrees of a compass painted around its circumference. Easier, I suppose, to aim for a compass heading than for Frankfurt.

  The urge to know scrapes against the inability to know. What was Mrs. Sabo’s life like? What was my mother’s? We peer at the past through murky water; all we can see are shapes and figures. How much is real? And how much is merely threads and tombstones?

  On the way home Lithuanian kids jostle in the seats around me, smelling of body odor. A stork flaps across a field in the last of the daylight. The boy beside me tells me to keep my eyes out the window, that to see a white horse at dusk is the best possible kind of luck.

  Don’t tell me how to grieve. Don’t tell me ghosts fade away eventually, like they do in movies, waving goodbye with see-through hands. Lots of things fade away but ghosts like these don’t, heartbreak like this doesn’t. The axe blade is still as sharp and real inside me as it was six months ago.

  I do my homework and feed my dog and say my prayers. Grandpa Z learns a little more English, I learn a little more Lithuanian, and soon both of us can talk in the past tense. And when I start to feel the Big Sadness cutting me up inside I try to remember Mrs. Sabo and the garden that is the afterworld and I watch the birds fly south in their flocks.

  The sturgeon we caught was pale and armored and beautiful, splotched all over with age and lice. He was a big soft-boned hermit living at the bottom of a deep hole in a river that pours on and on like a green ghost through the fields of Lithuania. Is he an orphan like me? Does he spend all day every day searching for some brother he can recognize? And yet, wasn’t he so gentle when I got him close to the boat? Wasn’t he just as patient as a horse? Wasn’t he just about as noble as anything?

  Jesus, Dad used to say, is a golden boat on a long, dark river. That’s one thing I can remember him saying.

  It’s quiet in Lithuania in November, and awful dark. I lie on my grandfather’s bed and clutch Mishap and breathe in light and breathe out color. The house groans. I pray for Mom and Dad and Mrs. Sabo and Grandpa Z. I pray for those South American tribespeople on the television and their vanishing language. I pray for the lonely sturgeon, a monster, a lunker, last elder of a dying nation, drowsing in the bluest, deepest chambers of the River Nemunas.

  Out the window it starts to snow.

  Afterworld

  1.

  In a tall house in a yard of thistles eleven girls wake on the floor of eleven bedrooms. They yawn, press their foreheads to windowpanes. Up and down the surrounding blocks, terrace houses stand in four- and five-story rows. In some, roofs have collapsed. In others, façades have crumbled away to reveal inner beams, empty rooms, green pools of rainwater. The few windows that still have glass in their frames reflect back rectangles of sky.

  Saplings grow from ruptures in the street. Flights of pink-rimmed clouds sail overhead.

  A three-year-old named Anita Weiss calls hello down the stairwell. Twice, three times. One story below, another girl replies. Two older girls go from floor to floor collecting everyone. Five-year-old Ilouka Croner. Eight-year-old Bela Cohn. Inga Hoffman and Hanelore Goldschmidt and her older sister Regina. Nearsighted Else Dessau.

  Downstairs they find no furniture, no toilets, no doors on the cupboards, no draperies over the windows. The sinks are unplumbed. Ulcerations of paint blister the walls. House martins loop past cracked windowpanes. The girls sit in what was once a parlor in the strengthening daylight. All wear dresses of mismatched sizes. Most are barefoot. Some yawn; some rub their eyes. Some flex their arms and fingers as if they have been fitted with new limbs.

  “What is this place?”

  “They said there would be promenades. Gardens.”

  The youngest peer out into the thistles. The oldest frown and search their memories. Several sense something recently settled there, something ghastly, something that might come alive if they poke at it too much.

  Nine-year-old Hanelore Goldschmidt treads down the staircase with her hands cupped in front of her. She scans the faces in the parlor.

  “Where’s Esther? Is Esther here?”

  No one answers. A tiny paw, pok
ing out between Hanelore’s fingers, trembles visibly.

  Inga Hoffman says, “Is that a mouse?”

  Else Dessau says, “Has anyone seen my glasses?”

  Regina Goldschmidt says, “They can bite, you know.”

  Hanelore whispers into her hands.

  Regina says, “Keep it away from the little ones.”

  Several of the girls glance continually toward the doorways. Expecting Frau Cohen with her housedress and apron to stride in and clap her hands and make an announcement. Get a broom. Get a mop. She who rests rusts. Breakfast will be served in twenty minutes. Her skirts smelling of camphor. Four dozen of her cabbage rolls browning in a skillet.

  But Frau Cohen does not come through the doorway.

  The last to come downstairs is sixteen-year-old Miriam Ingrid Bergen. She walks to the front door and opens it and stands looking out. In the dawn light a block away through the haphazard trestle of saplings a single doe steps lightly. It pauses; it twitches its long ears toward Miriam. Then it steps behind a tree and vanishes.

  No entryway, no front walk. No paths trampled through the thistles. There are only the blank faces of the neighboring houses and lank curtains of ivy dangling from gutters and a single gull floating above the broken street. And the light, which seems to carry thousands of miles before it passes over the rooftops in an obliterating silence.

  Miriam turns. “We’re dead,” she says. “I’m sure of it.”

  2.

  Esther Gramm is born in 1927 in Hamburg, Germany. Her mother’s labor is long and harrowing. For several minutes Esther is trapped inside the birth canal without oxygen. Her mother dies of complications; Esther is left with a quarter-inch scar inside her left temporal lobe.

  Her father drowns in a canal four years later. Esther is bundled across the city at night: snow over the jetties, vapor rising from the holes in sewer lids. One-horse carriages scuttle along through the falling white.

  The Hirschfeld Trust Girls’ Orphanage at Number 30 Papendam is a five-story rowhouse in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood. In its dormitories a dozen girls sleep on folding cots. They wear their hair in tandem plaits; they wear matching black stockings and shin-length dresses. They walk to gymnastics class on Tuesday evenings, repair their clothes on Wednesday evenings, weave matzah baskets on Thursday evenings. Every morning the House Directress, Frau Cohen, listens to the girls read in synchrony from donated readers. Little Solomon is sweeping the coal bin. Little Isaac is pulling his wagon.