Winter Eyes

by Lev Raphael

  They looked enough alike to be anything.

  But this was all upset when Stefan heard from his father or saw his mother and her husband.

  “Why does he write?” Stefan asked once, staring at the postcard his father had sent from Mexico to wish him a happy fifteenth birthday. Sasha, who had been trying to smooth out a passage in a Liszt transcription, went silent at the piano.

  “I don’t know why he writes,” Stefan said evenly, holding out the card as if hoping it might disappear on its own.

  “I won’t read it,” Stefan went on, answering Sasha’s unasked question. He dropped the card on the coffee table and stretched out on the couch; Sasha went on searching at the keyboard. Stefan did not ever read his father’s letters, and he didn’t write back. For a day or two after something came for him in the mail he would be very strange: he couldn’t play—the dumb shining keys infuriated him—and he couldn’t really see or hear things around him, as if he’d become less real than usual, hardly filling the space he took up. This was when he hated anyone talking to him and would want to choke anyone who bumped into him on the street or in class. But the hatred wasn’t real either because he could see all around it; it never surged through him, in command, but was an isolated little dagger somewhere inside.

  It all went away soon, though, and he could play again, talk to Sasha, do his homework, even stand around with other people.

  “You’re so serious,” Jenny liked telling him when they were in a crowd.

  “I guess.”

  “No really, you are. Like a poet or something.”

  “I don’t write any poetry.” He winced, remembering the poem he had tried to write for Louie.

  “I didn’t say you were a poet,” she laughed, shaking her frizz of blond hair. Jenny was almost as tall as he—thin, big-nosed, with large green eyes, and with so many freckles that friends called her “Red.”

  “And even writing poetry doesn’t make you a poet,” Jenny continued instructing him, wriggling her shoulders as if she’d tasted something she wasn’t sure she liked.

  “You mean there are poets who don’t write?” Stefan asked over the laughter of some of Jenny’s friends. They’d all been clustered on a corner near the high school trying to decide what to do or not do that Friday night. These decisions usually took at least an hour; Stefan never made suggestions, just went out later if he wanted to, or stayed home if not—it didn’t much matter what he did. But he didn’t mind. George Washington was up on a hill, and he liked the way being there made him feel isolated from the city, protected in a way. It was also a bigger building than the small brick apartment houses nearby, like a medieval castle surrounded by a shabby village.

  “There must be,” Jenny asserted, perching on a car fender.

  “What do they do?” he wondered, aware that he and Jenny were being watched.

  “They live,” she murmured.

  What the hell did that mean? Jenny wouldn’t tell him, even when they got on the bus by themselves (everyone else lived near school).

  What did that mean? Did he live? Did Sasha? Well, Sasha had his students, and music, that was living. And Stefan had music too, though not in the same way as Sasha—it was rich and full for him, but not life itself, and hadn’t been, for years.

  He had Sasha too, he supposed. No, that wasn’t true—they were with each other. Together. That was as much as two people could be, together—you could never have someone. He guessed that was another thing he believed, maybe even more than that things went on.

  He was also together with Jenny, and had been—on and off—since sophomore year, though in a way he didn’t really understand; in a group kids tended to drift to each other, leaving him with Jenny—it was natural enough but it made him uneasy. He didn’t know what to say to her, or if he even wanted to say anything to Jenny. Since the other kids were mostly her friends it didn’t matter too much. He would walk along with her, in the midst of laughter and long repeated jokes he never tried to add to in case someone would mock him, not really comfortable, but not all that uncomfortable. Sometimes he’d have to talk if a question came at him.

  “Well Stefan’s dad is nice,” someone once said at the end of a long jostle of complaints about their parents.

  Stefan flushed. “I guess,” he admitted to the ring of question-filled eyes; it was as if they had to believe in at least the idea of a decent parent. Stefan couldn’t disappoint them: “He’s very nice.”

  They moved off, contented, massing at the corner. Most of their time seemed spent on corners.

  “What makes parents weird?” Jenny asked herself. “You think it’s they never get over how incredible it is, I mean having a kid and everything? Think of it.” Jenny laughed.

  He didn’t want to. Sasha was good to him and that was all he cared about. Sasha had never spanked him, didn’t argue with him, wasn’t strict with curfews, but then Stefan never really pushed Sasha, had no need to test the limits of Sasha’s tolerance because he knew they were great, knew that Sasha wanted peace at home as much as he did—demanded it, even: silently, but without wavering. So Stefan listened to kids at school complain about their parents with dread; it fascinated him to hear arguments reargued, see confrontations acted out, and it scared him too. He didn’t know why, didn’t want to know why, but he still listened.

  Even Jenny had trouble at home—her mother didn’t want her wearing jeans because “only sluts” did (that made him flush, especially the triumphant mocking way Jenny brandished the word and laughed), and her father yelled at her when she was late. Stefan didn’t like it that anyone was mean to Jenny, though he’d never been able to tell her that. It made him angry, and when he saw her parents around the neighborhood he wanted to tell them to stop it.

  That was probably the time he most strongly felt a need to speak—usually he spoke in reply to people or because it was expected. Most of what he did was because it was expected, even playing sometimes. He didn’t always want to sit at the piano; there were days when its gleaming silent bulk was like a weight on him he couldn’t escape, when his fingers rebelled and wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t play, wanted to smash at the keys, fling the music up and out into the room. Days when one more trill would make him ready to slam the lid down on his own hand to stop.

  He wanted to stop, often, but couldn’t—things went on no matter what you wanted.

  At school he did what was expected, too. He liked being lost in ranks of guys doing squat thrusts or in a class gripped by an exam no one had expected to be so hard. He didn’t want to be singled out for attention; he avoided competing, challenging anyone. No—he didn’t have what his seventh grade homeroom teacher had called “punch” and “fight.” He didn’t want to fight anyone ever; his fights were over, he felt somehow, though not sure what that meant.

  Except that he hadn’t won.

  Sasha did not ask him to have “punch,” did not push him like other parents did, except at the piano perhaps, and that was done with more charm than coercion. There was a silence between them, one that absorbed everything that’d happened before Stefan came to live there, and deadened any echoes of that time. Sasha’s carefulness was so natural by this point that it was no longer a question of tact but the way the two of them lived.

  So without anyone pushing him, Stefan did what he had to; it was simple maintenance, like dusting: you wiped it away and then it returned and there was no real change, no meaning, just the cycle.

  In his senior year even more peace signs appeared around school: on jeans, knapsacks, dug into the track, scratched onto book spines, smeared on walls and doors. Jenny and her friends bristled with the word and the sign; conversations became harsher, less specific, directed at unseen parents and Stefan had no connection with the clustering in hallways, the walkouts, the petitions. George Washington High School—a huge granite-porticoed thirties building with lawns and wings and marble used as freely as wallpaper—seemed to him to be at peace. Even at lunchtime or between classes, the shuffle and calli
ng and bells sounded dim, suggestive, fading off into the quiet of high ceilings. Sometimes walking up the long curving concrete path to the main entrance he pictured himself as a tiny plastic figure in an architectural model—he did little more than give scale. So the cries for peace in a way barely disturbed the school that was built over the ruins of a Revolutionary fort, or near them (no one seemed to know which). Yet Stefan himself was disturbed; he wanted to enter into this world that was so clear and possible. Jenny knew what to do and feel and say, and he didn’t.

  He didn’t know what to say the afternoon he came down an empty hallway to find two guys wrenching off a radiator cover and hurling it out a waiting window onto the roof of the girl’s gym. He could only stare as the strangers fled. He knew such acts were “in protest” because anything out of the ordinary that happened at school now was against the war in Vietnam.

  “They were frustrated,” Jenny explained when the guys were suspended.

  He considered that.

  “Because nothing is helping,” she went on, pulling at her hair. Jenny would sometimes lapse from her hard optimism but he didn’t point out how she was inconsistent; that didn’t seem very kind.

  “It’s not that I think it’s all right,” Jenny continued, “But I understand.”

  And he didn’t, was the unspoken comment. Jenny didn’t act as if she really expected him to be with her on this or any other issue, and she didn’t try to convert him as some of her friends did (he listened to their arguments very carefully, nodding, finishing sentences, even). He could not find in himself the still sure conviction that Jenny and growing hundreds of students at school had. The draft wasn’t too far away, people warned him when he wouldn’t sign a petition or join a committee.

  “I was thinking of some friends I have in Montreal,” Sasha said one afternoon, smoothing his hair back as he stepped to the piano.

  “What?” Stefan barely glanced up from that week’s issue of Life.

  Sasha went through some music. “If you’re drafted.”

  Stefan stopped reading.

  Sasha looked round. “You can always go live in Canada,” he explained matter-of-factly.

  “I won’t get drafted. The war’ll be over.” He couldn’t imagine it.

  Sasha sat at the piano, quiet, thoughtful. “It’s good to have somewhere to go,” he said. And Stefan didn’t disagree; he could feel Sasha thinking of other times, other years.

  Sasha began to play the slow movement of a Mozart concerto Stefan didn’t particularly like, so he went into his room. He remembered how the piano’s large night shadow had reassured him enough when he was younger. Stefan no longer venerated the piano or felt entranced by Sasha’s playing, which he’d come to see was not brilliant—far from it—warm perhaps, and certainly Sasha’s line was always singing, but Stefan had heard too many fine pianists to be able to fall under the old spell. Sasha once told him he used to listen “like an animal gaping at fire” but that seemed far away now. He was familiar with Sasha’s playing, as Sasha must be with his too; it had taken on the air of atmosphere, was as much a part of the texture of the day as a shower, or the traffic whir from Broadway.

  Also he didn’t stay to listen very often because he was beginning to have trouble looking at Sasha.

  Sasha was getting old, and it made Stefan afraid, angry, to see where at the crown of his head there was a thin spot, to watch the white hands that were now blotched and sometimes swollen. Sasha coughed in the morning, badly, got tired a lot, seemed bent and heavier and worn, as if unkind hands had plucked at his flesh. It was horrible to Stefan because he had never noticed until recently—and it was too late.

  Though what he could’ve done about it, he didn’t know. Jenny wanted his help organizing the demonstration that would begin the week-long student strike; Jenny talked about it constantly, more and more thin-voiced and pointing, though at who or what he couldn’t say. It was unpleasant to see her transformed by a force that didn’t touch him, worse—that pushed a cause between them. Jenny seemed dismally unlike herself, blurred by signatures and buttons. He began to miss her almost, especially when they were together and she launched on a new set of plans and provisions.

  “Don’t you care?” Jenny finally asked one afternoon.

  He couldn’t answer, partly because the question was too large, partly because it was harder than ever to speak to Jenny when she was more like a committee than a girl.

  “I don’t know,” Jenny shook her head, but smiled at last, as if there might be some hope.

  Even Sasha had heard: “Will you demonstrate next week?”

  Stefan hesitated; no one had asked him and he guessed everyone assumed he would—even lots of teachers would strike.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You shouldn’t, there might be trouble.”

  “How?”

  “Other demonstrators. The police.”

  “But this is America,” Stefan protested weakly, remembering the bloody students at Columbia University.

  Sasha nodded. “That’s what they always say—but look what happens!”

  Stefan squirmed, uncomfortable with Sasha’s anger.

  Sasha noticed and didn’t go on. Later that evening Sasha asked: “Have you signed any petitions?”

  “No. Why?”

  “It’s good not to,” was all Sasha said as he left to visit a neighbor. Stefan suddenly was ashamed that he hadn’t signed anything, hadn’t helped Jenny.

  The next morning he told Jenny he’d stay for her meeting after classes. That same morning a fight broke out in the cafeteria, “about the war” people were saying, but that only made him more determined to act, or at least help those who could. It was strange to be contemplating such a step, especially since a voice in him that would not be stilled murmured all day that it wouldn’t make any difference what he did.

  Most days, after the last period, school emptied as quickly as if there’d been a bomb threat; people just melted away and the only sound was the slide of pails and slushing mops, sometimes vague distant pounding that might be a hammer. Stefan saw no one on the way down to the meeting on the first floor. He stopped at one of the cool cavernous toilets that were ludicrously ceremonial in size. As he unzipped his fly he heard the door, and a rush, and then he couldn’t breathe—a hand closed over his face and then another punched him in the back. He fell, or was pushed against the urinal, utterly unable to move or shout—even in his mind—as a hand pulled at his pants and he felt far away, wondered what would happen next. He was aware of pain, someone hit him again, but he could do nothing to help himself, not even hope he would not be hurt more.

  He was kicked and punched and it was over: the same rushing noise and then the door. He lay on the small-tiled floor, eyes fixed on the white hexagons locked into each other. He noticed that a hand—his own—was slowly reaching back to where the other hand—not his own—had pulled at his pants. Stefan waited for the hand to tell him what it found: a back pocket hung loose where his wallet had been. So it was a mugging, he thought, beginning to make sense of why he lay on the floor of this dim huge toilet, still unable to move. Something in him had stopped working; Stefan did not know what that was. He had broken down—been broken down, more than mugged. No one had hit him since his father, and even his father had not hit him so many places, or kicked him either. But he had been too small then to be really hit, Stefan supposed, wondering when he would begin to feel the pain he was sure now clamored and twitched through his body—he couldn’t hear it, though, could only guess at its existence: if someone hit you there was pain whether you let it call your name or not.

  Could one person have done all that?

  Held his mouth and arms—yes his arms had been pinned, he remembered that—and pushed him down and kicked him all at once? Could one person have done all that? Two—it must have been two.

  This was more than a mugging; he had been attacked. Would they come back?

  Stefan was now afraid, and the fear brought him up on hi
s knees, which trembled, unable to hold up the stricken body. “Listen to me!” he yelled inside, but it didn’t help; he fell over, and now the pain—in his side, at his neck, in one leg—struck and made him writhe. He would throw up or faint but nothing saved him from the outraged burn and flare. He was more helpless now than before because now he struggled and there was no chance of winning. He dragged himself to a urinal, shoved his head in, reached up with one aching arm to pull and pull at the handle, drenching his head in the water. He twisted round and leaned back against the urinal, his useless crying body stretched out on the floor. The mirrors over the row of sinks weren’t long enough for him to see himself, though why this should matter now he had no idea.

  He probably slept, because the cool hall-like bathroom seemed darker to him. This meant he had to get up—”But I can’t,” he thought and yet arms and legs began to work together as if they didn’t believe him—and Stefan gradually rose from the enamel floor to stagger across and lean on a sink. So much hurt that he couldn’t decide where to place a hand first, where to look. His face was pale but unbruised, perhaps his mouth was a bit swollen? No—he was himself, unchanged; his hair lay sodden and ugly across his forehead. He dried himself with paper towels, pulling the hanging pocket completely off and then wondered where to put the scrap of denim. There—he’d left his books perched on the edge of another sink; he opened a binder and lay the pocket inside.

  His shirt and jeans were wet and grimed; he couldn’t do much about that. As for the soreness, that too was beyond him. He gathered up his books and edged to the door; it would not be so bad if he moved slowly. And so he crept out into the hall to the nearest exit and outside where the darkening sky gave him courage, or something, because the pain was less vicious. At the bus stop he tried to look ordinary, but one or two people stared at him, and when he pulled himself onto the neon-lit bus he could feel stirring and turning. He fell into the furthermost seat.