“Celadon.” Ettrich said the unfamiliar word with surprise. It had just popped up on his tongue like an egg.
Isabelle looked at him, waiting for more. They sat in a tram holding hands while riding back into town from the Central Cemetery. Nothing had been accomplished there by visiting Petras Urbsys’s grave. Both of them were depressed and at a complete loss for what to do next.
Ettrich shook his head. “I have no idea what that word means.”
“Then why did you say it?”
“I don’t know. It came out of nowhere.”
She gave him a So what? look. But Ettrich shook his head because there was more to this. “No, you don’t understand.”
“Then tell me, Vincent.”
He paused to think and then looked at her hand in his. Removing his, he opened her fingers and laid his flat palm on top of hers. She felt something—a tickle, a thin but persistent heat. He lifted his hand. Written in the middle of her palm was the word celadon in neat block letters the exact color of the word. She gasped, closed her hand into a fist.
Ettrich began to smile. “That’s it. It means that color.”
“What does?”
“Celadon. It’s the color of those letters.” He pointed to her hand. His smile was twice as big as before.
“How do you know that, Vincent? You just said—”
“I know, I know. Hold on a minute, Fizz. I have to think this through.”
Frustrated by what had already happened that day, she was now almost angry at him for pulling this bizarre stunt and then not explaining it to her. In her irritation, Isabelle could think of nothing else to do at the moment but look again at her palm and the unfamiliar green word that had appeared there. Celadon. She wanted to rub her hand on her pants and get it off.
Vincent was silent a long time. She kept looking at him both directly and sneaking peeks to see if he was ready to say anything yet. But he continued staring out the window and didn’t look at her once.
Isabelle grew increasingly more fidgety and exasperated as the minutes passed. Her temperature rose but so did her curiosity. What was going on? She looked at the word on her palm, she looked at Vincent, she looked out the window. She did not have a clue about what was happening. But neither did she have a clue about how they were going to get out of this fix. Perhaps Vincent did know, or would when he emerged from his silence. Maybe he was really onto something that might help.
Reaching into his pocket, he took out his wallet. He removed a scrap of paper from inside. She saw a list of single words written on the paper.
“What’s that?”
“Give me your hand again.”
She frowned but did it. He looked at her and after glancing at his piece of paper, asked, “Do you know what the word hermeneutics means?”
“Herman what?”
“Perfect.” He put his open hand over hers. Again she felt that heat or tremble or whatever it was there. Nothing to make you jump or get scared, but something definitely felt.
Ettrich smiled and said, “It means interpretive, explanatory.”
“Huh?”
“Look at your hand.”
Written where celadon had been a moment ago was now hermeneutics in celadon-colored block letters. She snatched her hand back and pressed it to her chest.
Ettrich pointed to the paper. “Whenever I’m reading and come across a word I don’t know, I jot it down. When I have a chance, I look them up in a dictionary. Sometimes there’s a whole bunch of them.”
Isabelle looked at his list and saw that hermeneutics was the first word on it. “You didn’t know what it meant till you did that hand thing with me just now?”
“Exactly.” Ettrich said it encouragingly, hoping she would understand without being told what was becoming clear to him now.
“And you didn’t know what celadon meant either?”
This time he said nothing, letting her go with it, letting her think it through out loud.
“So it’s us, Vincent? Us together—not you alone, or me. Answers come when we’re together, when we’re connected?”
“Yes, I think that’s exactly what it is, Fizz.”
“Do it again. Try another.” She took the vocabulary list out of his hand and slowly read the funny-sounding second word on it. “ ‘Borborygmus.’” She stuck out her hand palm up and wiggled her fingers at him. “Come on, take it—try again.”
Ettrich took her hand and said the word. And then he laughed. “It means stomach gas. It means when your stomach rumbles because you haven’t eaten, or because it’s upset.”
“Stomach gas?” Pulling her hand away, she covered her mouth with it because she was giggling now too. When she got around to thinking about it, she took her hand from her mouth and looked at it. Written in celadon in the middle of her palm was borborygmus.
“Let me try. Let me try.” She grabbed Vincent’s hand and said, “Hudna.” Her eyes were all expectation.
He didn’t hesitate. “It’s an Arabic word. It means a temporary ceasefire. Where did that come from?”
“In an article on Israel and Palestine I read yesterday. I love that word; love the way it sounds. I kept saying it to myself—hudna, hudna.”
“But so you knew what it meant already?”
“Yes Vincent, but you didn’t. Let me do another. I love this. Anak.”
Ettrich laughed again. “Shit. It means shit in Eskimo.”
“Right!” She looked at her hand and written there was that Eskimo word for shit. “No more, that’s it. I want to keep this one.” Like a little girl, she stuck her palm in his face so he could see anak there too. He took her hand and kissed the palm.
“This is beginning to make sense to me now. Remember back at the cemetery when I saw you and Petras in his store the day he taught you how to come and get me after I died? Do you remember how that happened?”
Isabelle said, “I touched his gravestone—”
“No honey, we both touched his gravestone at the same time. Do you remember? At the same time. That’s what this is all about. Together. Two. You and me and not each of us separately.”
“But I didn’t do anything, Vincent. I didn’t do anything to make it happen. Did you? It’s not like we waved our magic wands together and things started happening. We weren’t in control of anything.”
The truth of her statement took some wind out of his sails. “You’re right, you’re right… But put that aside for a minute and only think about this: together somehow, we make these things happen. I lived for a while in your past today—I was actually there. I saw every detail and heard every word of your conversation with Petras. Then there were the definitions to those silly vocabulary words that neither of us knew before. They came as soon as I touched your hand—as soon as we were joined. Get it? When the two of us become one, things happen. Things we can’t do alone. I bet—I’m sure—it goes much farther than that.”
And it did go much farther than that, but they had to wait till later in the day to experience it. When Isabelle opened the door to their apartment, Hietzl the dog looked over from its chair across the room but didn’t get up to greet them as usual. It was angry at having been left at home when they went to the cemetery. Ettrich had explained to Hietzl that dogs weren’t allowed in cemeteries because they pissed on the gravestones and shit where they shouldn’t. Who wants a steaming pile on their final resting place? But despite the explanation, the dog only stared dolefully up at him from its place on the floor.
As they were going out earlier, Isabelle had hoisted her purse on to her shoulder and said, “It’s my fault, Hietzl. I don’t want to drive out there, so you can’t wait for us in the car. We’re taking the tram.”
Now that they had returned, the animal was giving them the cold shoulder. Not that they really noticed it because both of their minds were full of Vincent’s theory. They could talk of nothing else.
Isabelle sat at the kitchen table while Vincent prepared coffee and put the cups and cream in front of her. “
Where did celadon come from? Why did you just suddenly say that word out loud?”
He turned from searching a cupboard for sugar and shook a finger at her. “Good question. I was trying to figure it out before. But you know what? Out of nowhere.”
“But you must have seen it before. Maybe you read it somewhere. How else could you have thought that word up?”
“I don’t know, Fizz. As far as I can remember, it really is the first time I’ve ever heard of celadon. The idea about you and I combined creating a third… something that knows much more than either of us alone, came when the word did.
“Look—when we touched that gravestone at the same time suddenly I was living in your past. Then later came celadon. What’s that? The minute I took your hand I knew what it was. And at the same moment, this ‘you-and-me-makes-three’ theory came into my head. It’s not the first time I’ve had the idea. And I’m not just talking about our child either. What is it? What’s the third thing? I don’t know. But today we’ve had pretty good proof of it.”
They were silent awhile, until Ettrich brought the coffee to the table and poured some for each of them.
“There’s something else. Please don’t get pissed off.”
“Pissed off at what?” She had the cup to her mouth so that when she spoke, her breath over the hot liquid pushed smoke in front of her lips.
“At the question I’m going to ask. Tell me about Frank Obermars.”
She lowered the coffee to the table without taking a sip. Months ago when they had gotten back together, one of the first things they swore to each other was to tell the truth about everything, no matter what. Since then they’d had some difficult wrenching discussions and full-blown arguments. But she had always kept her word and told him the complete truth.
Now she was tempted to lie. She was tempted to ask “Who’s Frank Obermars?” because he wasn’t important. No, he was important in a historical sense, but not to them, not now, not anymore. Frank was over. Frank was the past. Frank was what she did when she left Ettrich and swore she would never see him again although she knew by then that she was pregnant with his child. Leaving Ettrich was the cause, Obermars was the effect.
He was a good-looking smart Dutchman who worked for Philips Electronics in Vienna. Another time they might have had a rewarding relationship. But there are people we meet in life that miss being important to us by inches, days, or heartbeats. Another place or time or emotional frame of mind and we would willingly fall into their arms; gladly take up their challenge or invitation. But as it is, we encounter them when we are discontent or content and they are not. Whatever serious chemistry might have been possible if, isn’t.
Isabelle initially reasoned that having a fast electric fling with someone clever and sexy would lessen the pain of losing Vincent. So she said yes to an invitation from Frank and went away with him for a long weekend to a beautiful lakeside village near Salzburg. Everything there was perfect. It was an enchanting place that the Dutchman had chosen carefully.
At the end of their first day there, he made love to her for three hours. Never once did a cheerless, detached look leave her face. He tried every trick and tactic he knew to please her. He had a lot of them. He was used to satisfying his lovers because he knew what women liked and he genuinely reveled in sex. But not once, not for a second, did he feel that Isabelle was there with him sharing this experience, much less enjoying it. Obermars would later remember their encounter as similar to making love to an adept prostitute. A woman who knew the right moves but if you saw her face when she didn’t know she was being watched, you’d see only a blankness there that would chill your heart.
He tried and tried until Isabelle became almost still. As soon as he stopped she rolled onto her side away from him. He thought she was going to cry but she only remained silent, which was even worse.
He asked if she was all right. She said yes. The word came out a stone. He asked if there was anything he could do. She said no, but that she wanted to return to Vienna in the morning. He could not imagine spending an entire night with her and her silence, so he offered to drive back immediately.
She turned then and looked at him. “Yes, that would be better. You’re a good guy, Frank.” She said it in English for some reason. It was the first time she had ever spoken to him in that language although she knew that he was fluent. Maybe it was because they had entered another country of the heart now. German was spoken in their Before, English in this After.
Obermars smirked and bent down to the floor to retrieve his clothes. He didn’t want to look at her because right then she was lovelier than he had ever seen her. He didn’t know if that was because she was naked or because he knew there was no chance with her. This was the one and only time he would ever see her this way. His longing and sense of utter defeat were equal. Her face glowed in the soft light of the room, the whiteness of the rumpled sheets contrasting with her tan skin.
“You look like a piece of toast,” he said, looking for his second sock. He had nothing else to lose. He could say whatever he wanted now.
“Like what?” She slowly sat up but did nothing to hide her body. He thought she would cover it after what had just happened between them and her wish to leave.
“Like a piece of toast. Your skin against those sheets. You look like a piece of golden toast on a white plate.”
She remembered that image and the look on Frank’s face when he said it. She saw the unhappiness there, the way his spirit was already moving away from her out of that lovely room, into the car, onto the road, back to Vienna where their lives would never intersect again. She didn’t care. She only wanted to go home and try to figure out a way to live the rest of her life.
“Fizz?”
She came out of her memory tunnel blinking several times at the sound of Ettrich’s voice. After a few seconds pause she asked, “What do you want to know, Vincent? How do you know about Frank?”
He pushed the sugar bowl across the table to her. “It came before, when you asked for the meaning of anak. A picture of you and him came to me at the same time as the definition of the word.”
“Oh. What picture of us?” She turned her hand over but anak was no longer written there on her skin.
“At the rest stop on the autobahn—when you had him pull over so that you could throw up.”
She put her hand over the top of the cup and instantly felt heat lick the middle of her palm. She assumed by his tone of voice that Vincent knew everything that had happened between her and Obermars. “I said I had to go to the toilet and would he please pull over. But what I really needed to do was puke.” Her voice suddenly rose almost into anger. “I had to get away from you, Vincent. My head, my body, all of it had to break away. You were over. We were over. I had to clean you out of my system or else I couldn’t have survived. So there was Frank. And I tried with him but it was a disaster. Does that make sense? Do you understand?”
“Yup. Drink your coffee.”
She looked at him suspiciously, not believing the calm and even tone of his voice. “Do we talk about Frank now or can we talk about something else? Because I want to know something, Vincent: two times today you’ve gone into my life like you were just entering a room—it was that simple. How did you do that? It’s like you just turned some doorknob and walked right in. How does it happen?”
He looked away and then turned toward her. “By talking to time.”
“Say that again.”
“You talk to time. Because it’s organic; it understands.
“Look Fizz, you asked before what I learned when I was dead. I said I didn’t know. I don’t remember much about being dead except for little pieces; fragments and fuzzy snapshots of mysterious things, images that have no meaning to me.
“But today I discovered something at the cemetery. I realized something, or understood it, or whatever, and goddamn if it didn’t work. Do you know about Lomo photography?”
“Lomo? No, what’s that?”
“Interesti
ng stuff. We used it very successfully in an advertising campaign at our agency once. Years ago in Russia, before the Iron Curtain came down, they sold this cheap little camera there called the Lomo. I think that’s the name of the company that makes them. It cost almost nothing and was really primitive. You have to wind the film advance with your thumb and I don’t think that you can even adjust the focus on it. Back in those days in Russia what could you expect? But it made it possible for everyone there who wanted one to have a camera.
“Eventually some smart guy came along with the idea of using the camera’s limitations as advantages. They began taking pictures with a Lomo without looking or framing the shot. Or they didn’t aim. They didn’t even look through the viewfinder. They took pictures from the hip, over the shoulder, or holding the camera behind their backs and snapping whatever was there, off to the side… it didn’t matter. Spontaneous, accidental, whatever way you want to do it—just shoot and shoot in every way and direction you can think of. That way, chance decides whether the pictures will be any good or not.
“And you know what? Some were. Some of them were fan-tastic. Today it’s huge—there are Lomo exhibits all over the world: Lomo galleries, clubs, websites… It’s become very popular because it works. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the pictures are awful—lousy, out of focus, dull. But one in a million is totally brilliant.
“My memories of being dead are like a big batch of Lomo photographs piled on a table. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of them are bad, out-of-focus crap. You can’t even tell what’s pictured in most of them. But today when we touched Petras’s gravestone together I found one picture in the pile that’s not only clear but beautiful.”
GLASS SOUP Page 13
