I crouched in the farthest corner of the porch. The shadow of the ash that grew at the corner of the house fell there in the early evening. I lay the book on my lap. Dad was pacing barefoot on the terrace, his thin calves brown and covered with a net of veins. His feet were dirty, and I could see black gunk between his toes, the kind I got sometimes.
“That pod was completely filled with pollen. There was so much of it, several pounds for sure.”
I could just barely make out dad’s words. He was muttering through the corner of his mouth, which is how I knew that he was upset, that the fruit falling had ruffled him, and mom, too.
I knew the pod he was talking about. Early in the summer, a bulge had appeared on top of a bush that grew at the back of the garden, right on its tallest branch. Over the summer, the small lump swelled into a seed pod, hard as bone. Now, at the end of the summer, and right before it fell off, the pod had grown to the size of a human head and its skin was smooth as eggshell.
We didn’t know what the plant was that the fruit was growing on. Though we’d carefully waded through herbariums and books on plants and bothered friends and relatives who knew something about gardening, we hadn’t been able to figure out what that bush was. The bush had already been there next to the fence, squatting on a patch of grass bleached by the afternoon sun, when we had bought the house a year ago—yard, garden, and all. We hadn’t noticed the plant before, because it wasn’t particularly impressive or pretty. Its wooden branches were thick as wrists, smooth, and covered with dark bark, and its leaves were the size and shape of hands, and they flapped in the wind, as if they were made of thin sheets of tin.
Because of the sound of its leaves, we named it the tin bush. Later we also started calling it the bulb bush and the pod plant.
Late in the spring, before the bulb appeared, the top branch had for a week been home to a white flower the size of a fist. It had attracted swarms of bees and other nectar-drinking insects. Sometimes the petals were completely covered by insects rummaging around in the mouth of the flower, and we had been afraid that the flower wouldn’t be able to carry the weight of all of them and would break off and fall to the ground.
But it held up after all, and when the flower finally withered, that strange bulb appeared in its place.
After that, my parents would sometimes spend their breaks sitting on a bench from where they could keep an eye on the seed pod. I, too, got into the habit of putting a ladder underneath the pod and studying it every day, carefully tapping its dark brown shell with my fingers and running my hand along its surface, which always, even during the most sweltering days, felt cool against my palm. I measured the ball diligently with a measuring tape, until I was able to tell my parents that it was swelling about half an inch a week. They told me that I didn’t have to guard it all the time, it wasn’t going anywhere, and they shook their heads when I told them I was afraid someone might steal it. It wasn’t long before the branch that the seed pod hung from started to bend under the weight of the fruit. The last weeks before the bulb fell off, the branch had been sticking sideways out of the bush looking out of place and a bit funny.
Now the pod lay split open at the base of the bush—and I hadn’t seen it fall! I closed my eyes tightly and imagined the four-inch-long stem of the fruit snapping off its base, the branch that had suddenly been freed from the weight of the bulb swinging upwards with a swoosh, and a few seconds later the seed pod hitting the rock surrounded by chickweed with a thump—and splitting open.
Dad slipped inside after mom. I scrambled out of the chair and off the porch. The kitchen window was open, I heard mom clattering the lid of a soup pot. I made my way to the path that led to the back of the garden through beds of perennials. The flower beds were in full bloom. The blazing yellows, reds, and whites weaved a scented veil around themselves. In the haze, bees and flower flies buzzed and butterflies fluttered, perching on flowers only to leap into the air again right away. The grass along the path rose all the way to the backs of my knees, because once something took root in our garden, it was allowed to grow.
A scarecrow was standing askew at the edge of the vegetable patch. Dad and I had hung empty tin cans on its arms, back, and belly. In still weather, the cans didn’t clatter. Behind the scarecrow, a belt of shrubs rippled: honeysuckle, dogwoods, and lilac. It was cool underneath the lilacs, and I had often snuck out there to rest on the hottest days. It was still so hot that my sandals stuck to the soles of my feet.
I found quite a mess at the tin bush: the seed pod halves lay on their sides on the ground. One half had rolled to the right side of the rock, the other to the left. There was pollen everywhere: on the husks and the rock, on the grass in a circle many feet wide, on the lower branches of the tin bush. I was careful not to get too close so as not to get myself dirty. Good thing it’s not windy, I thought. If there was the smallest gust of wind, the dust would be everywhere, and it would turn into paste on my sweaty skin.
As evening fell, first mom, and then dad, said they weren’t feeling well and went to lie down in bed. “Jeremias,” dad said, “We’re going to rest for a while. There’s some soup left over. It’s in the fridge. Have some in the evening if you’re hungry. And there’s bread in the cupboard.”
He closed the bedroom door and I was left all alone. It didn’t bother me, I liked being alone. Soon, there wasn’t a sound to be heard from the bedroom. I thought that my parents had fallen asleep, because they were sick and tired, but also because they were baffled by the bulb bush having dropped its fruit. Had dad even remembered to cover his head in the afternoon heat? Mom always had to remind him to wear a sun hat.
I let my parents sleep. I went to the watering barrel to skim off the soapy foam that mom and dad had left floating in net-like tiles on the surface of the water. I sharpened the sickle’s blade with the whetstone, so that dad wouldn’t have to do it in the morning. For days now, he had been planning on cutting the hay and weeds behind one of the beds of perennials. I wandered around the garden counting raw apples—one finger, one apple—but there were so many that I lost count.
In the end, I settled on just sitting quietly on a bench. I was sure that I could hear the plants growing: their roots rustling in the darkness of the soil, earthworms munching their narrow tunnels into the earth, and moles snuffling in their nests beneath the vegetable patch. Dad had told me about the life of a garden, about what happens in nature.
At eight in the evening, I got hungry. In the kitchen, I ate cold vegetable soup and sweet sourdough bread made with sunflower seeds and malt. For dessert I found some yoghurt that mom had made in the fridge.
I still couldn’t hear anything through the closed bedroom door. The whole house was very quiet, only the fridge whirred from time to time. A small bird chirped for a short while out in the garden, right under an open window. When I got to the window, the bird had already flown further away. I could now hear its nervous voice behind the hedge, coming from the shelter of the foliage.
After I’d eaten, I sat on the porch for a while and leafed through the book that I still hadn’t finished. There was a big, red picture of a sunset. As I looked at it and stroked the page with my fingers, I noticed that the sun actually was setting, bathing the crowns of the trees in crimson before dropping down behind them. It was the lightless moment before dusk. The time of shadows, I thought as I glanced around furtively. The ground began to cool, the night pressed dew onto the grass and fanned the scent of soil and moldering plants. The buzz of insects had already ceased, and the sounds of birds could no longer be heard either.
I held out on the porch for almost two hours. At half past ten it was already too dim to do anything outside, and I got goose bumps on the skin of my bare arms. I slipped a bookmark between the pages, closed the book, went inside, and knocked on my parents’ bedroom door. No answer. I knocked again, a little louder. No answer. I turned the handle and carefully pushed the door open.
Although it was dark in the room, I could see right away
that mom and dad were still sleeping. They were resting side by side on their backs, dad on the right and mom on the left, and they were holding hands. They were still wearing their gardening clothes. The stains of pollen stood out as dark patches on the fabric. Dad’s mouth was open, as it always was when he was in a deep sleep.
I tiptoed out and closed the door behind me.
It wasn’t until I got to my room upstairs and slipped under the covers that it occurred to me that dad hadn’t been snoring. He always snored when he slept on his back.
Mom and dad didn’t get out of bed the next day, or the day after that. The sickness seemed to have sapped the last shreds of their strength. Every time I peeked inside the bedroom, they were resting on their backs, holding hands, with serene faces. I was certain that when I wasn’t there to see it, they were smiling at each other, and that gave them strength to fight the sickness.
I took care of them as best I could. In the morning I would open the bedroom blinds and open the window a bit to let in the fresh air.
They needed light, that I knew. Sunlight and fresh air. The light that seeped in through the narrow gaps in the blinds made the room stripy. My parents look quite strange, pallid, blotchy, and stripy. Now and then it even seemed as if the color of the pollen stains had deepened, that the edges of the stains had spread out. Sometimes, as if with their last strength, without opening their eyes, mom and dad tried to talk to me: their eyelids quivered and the corners of their mouths twitched, and if I leaned down close to them, I could hear fragmented words: . . . food for you, Jeremias . . . don’t worry . . . this will . . . pass . . . water . . . the garden . . .
Twice a day, at one in the afternoon and at six in the evening, I stacked food on a tray and carried it to my parents’ room. I had cleared off the nightstand. Luckily I knew how to boil potatoes and fry the bits of meat that mom had stocked the freezer with during the winter. I picked salad, onions, and cabbage from the vegetable patch. There was also bread in the freezer, the good wholegrain bread that mom baked. Whatever else I needed, I got from the store: mom kept the food money in a coffee can in the back of the pantry.
But mom and dad were in such bad shape that they had no appetite. I tried to persuade them to eat, but it didn’t help. Their meals stood untouched, and stacks of trays started to pile up in the room. After a couple of days, clouds of shiny black flies burst into the air from the piles of dishes, and after buzzing in the air for a while, landed in different places all around the room: near the ceiling, on the wall, on the lampshade, on plates, on the edge of a glass of juice. The boldest of them even used my parents’ foreheads or bellies as runways.
The flies soon got used to me and didn’t get scared off. They were so fascinated by the food, so hungry, that I could get a close look as they tugged on pieces of meat or salad with their long mouths. Every once in a while, they would groom their legs or shake their wings.
Since mom and dad didn’t seem bothered by the flies, I let them be. God’s innocent creations, mom would say. Dad thought that mom was too gentle.
I had tucked mom and dad in under a woolen blanket, which usually hung over the back of the couch in the living room. I thought they might be cold, because they had felt cold when I had touched their foreheads a few days earlier. As they didn’t complain about the smell coming from the leftovers that clung to the room, I started to close the window for the night, so that they wouldn’t catch any more of a cold.
During the daytime, I worked in the garden. There was plenty of work, maybe even too much for just one person, but I did everything I could. Luckily, dad had taught me. I watered and weeded, cut the grass, and used the sickle on the hay behind the bed of perennials like dad had talked about before he got sick. After a while, I began to build a fence around the compost. Actually I just picked up where dad had left off, as he had already put up most of the posts. I hammered rails between the posts and then nailed planks upright onto the rails, leaving an inch between them. I didn’t get the planks completely straight, but I thought the fence turned out pretty good just the same. I was disappointed, though, that dad didn’t have the strength to get up and take a look at it.
In the evenings I often sat in my parents’ room and told them all the things I’d done in the garden. I knew how important the garden was to them and how they enjoyed hearing about my chores and that I was taking care of things now that they were bedridden. I tried to tell them everything as best I could, putting my heart into it and gesturing with my hands. I told them about the chirping crickets, the frogs splashing around in the small pond, and the birds that would stop by for a drink. I told them about the leopard plant’s yellow flowers and about how I’d snipped away the dried leaves and the stems of the blossoms that had already withered in the perennial bed. How I’d sawed the fence planks in the backyard on the sawbuck that dad had made, and how sawdust had piled up next to the buck, under the spot where I used the saw. I told them how handy I had been with the hammer, how neatly the nails had sunk into the rails of the fence. I described the mosquitoes that swarmed above the water barrel in the evening in the light of the setting sun.
What I didn’t tell them was how many times I had hit my finger with the hammer, that the thumb and middle finger of my left hand ached and the fingernails had turned black.
Mom and dad listened to my stories in silence with their eyes closed.
I understood that they didn’t want to waste their energy on talking, but I still wished that they would have thanked me for my hard work and that mom would have caressed my hair or cheek. One time I whispered in my mom’s ear that I missed them, but she didn’t open her eyes, just kept on sleeping. I started to feel a bit shy.
It was sweet how, day in day out, they kept holding hands without being ashamed, even though I could see. And I was so happy when, sometimes, I thought I saw one of them nod their head at me approvingly.
One day, a new plant had grown at the foot of the pod bush. A deep green sprout, four inches tall, had pushed up in the middle of the seed pod halves and the grass and the pollen plastered on the ground. I put down my watering can and bent down to examine the newcomer: would we be getting a new tin bush? I ran to tell mom and dad straight away.
The next day I found another sprout next to the first one. Then a third, and so on, until the bush was surrounded by a circle of strong, fast-growing sprouts that buried the seed pod halves beneath them.
When the phone started ringing, it almost scared me to death. It was evening and dark. I was lying in my bed hugging my teddy bear when that insistent, disturbing sound reached my ears. I sat up. I thought that a racket like that would wake the dead in their graves, as mom would sometimes say. When the noise just wouldn’t quit, I got out of bed and crept down the stairs in my t-shirt. Step after step the ringing got louder, more metallic, more insistent.
It had surely woken up mom and dad.
It felt as if the entire house was throbbing in time with the repetitive ringing, as if there was a gigantic, chiming metal heart somewhere deep inside the building. I was about to pick up the receiver when the noise stopped. I stood in the deserted hallway with my arm stretched out, certain that whoever had been calling would soon try again. That beautiful, black object attached to the wall at the height of my eyes kept silent, however.
After I peeked inside my parents’ bedroom, I pulled the telephone cord out of the socket.
It was lucky my parents hadn’t been woken up by the ringing. And it wouldn’t ever wake them up, I thought, as the plug clattered onto the floor. I made sure that the front door was locked and all the windows were closed. As I climbed back upstairs, my ears were still haunted by that metallic noise. It clanged in the walls of the hall and deepened the darkness in the corners.
I lay in bed and waited for sleep to come. I decided that I would no longer bring food to my parents. They weren’t eating, and the room was already full of trays, dishes, and cutlery. I didn’t have time to clear them up, because I had to tend the garden, though i
t would be good for them to have food when they woke up. They’d be hungry for sure.
The next morning, the smell had become so strong that I could taste it. The flies seemed to have multiplied even more, and white, lively larvae were grazing in the mold on the sides of some of the chunks of meat.
I still had to go to the room, and regularly at that, since I had to take care of the watering. Everything that grows needs moisture, as mom used to say. Water is the alpha and omega, the elixir of life.
I water the strong, deep green sprouts growing in dad’s head, in the middle of his bald spot. Mom’s right palm is also looking promisingly green, as are both of their clothes.
The pollen stains shed a moss-like fluff onto the floor, and the fluff has grown ever so thin roots through the fabric. The roots are attached to my parents’ skin and if I bend down close enough, I can see that the roots have spread their webs underneath their skin. Their veins have become so pale that they’re completely invisible.
I water them four times a week. At the same time I pick up the bits that have fallen off. One of mom’s ears plunked onto the floor yesterday, and dad’s left arm, which for the longest time was hanging over the edge of the bed, has now fallen clean off. There is a hollow in his shoulder, where the shoulder joint used to be. At the bottom of the hollow, I can see some green sprouting. I wrapped it carefully in a clean piece of cloth after I shooed away the flies.
Last spring, we covered the vegetable patch with gauze, and now it’s thriving!
Some evenings, I still spend time with mom and dad, because I know that it’s important to them. I tell them how well everything is growing in the garden and what a handsome grove of seedlings has spread out around the tin bush where the seed pod once fell. I describe the shoots that are now over nine feet tall and the white flowers that have appeared on top of them. Whenever I compliment dad on the nearly three-foot-tall bulb bush growing out of his forehead, he always looks pleased.
It Came from the North Page 19
