But when I got back that night—from shooting a few posed photos outside the city from Erwin’s time in Crete—the door had blown wide open and broken the string. Darius was gone.
I went into a frenzy. I looked through every floor that day, knocking on doors, and walked the neighbourhood for nearly two weeks, asking everyone, “Persische Katze? Persische Katze?” I printed photos of Darius and pasted them around the streets, carried them with me. For weeks I left my door open, enough that he could squeeze back in. When I wasn’t out working, I sat in the room, afraid and quiet. I didn’t say a word there, besides nein, to the old woman with the keys who knocked softly at my door every few days to ask if I’d found him yet.
Eventually, one day in late September, I thought I saw him. There was a white cat walking along the short flat roof of a warehouse, maybe two blocks away. I was frozen in the window watching, wanting nothing more than to open the window and literally fly to him, grab him, and throttle him with my belated, angry love. But I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that.
Because it wasn’t until he was outside of that tiny room that I realized that living in that boiling coffin was cruel. I saw that he was alive—alive outside the life I’d been forcing upon him. So I didn’t fly to him. I unfroze. I let the boundaries of my life widen a little.
I started to take some food out, every now and again, to the alley behind the warehouse. Three times he visited me and his bowl. When he came, mewing, I moved away from him as he tried to head-butt his love to me. On the third visit I realized that Darius was happy, no longer slashing at me, and he wasn’t hungry. He was no longer himself. I stopped going to visit him, and I never touched him again.
With the darkroom a red-lit skull, I feel Mother’s studio floor creaking upstairs, reaching out for me, and I use the sound to leave the property—to open the door and walk out past the fence to the sidewalk and away from the house into the cool, bright day. As I make it away, toward Portage, I smell smoke but don’t turn around. I know what is after me.
I’m riled up, but I’m in motion. I flutter in and out, from midnight then back to midday now. I make it to Vimy Ridge Park, and it is midnight in a different park, and Genny is with me, and I’m a man again. We are breaking into the Assiniboine Park Zoo, through a secret flaw in the perimeter that only Genny’s friend Jack knows about. He has brought a boy, and once we get in, we splinter off into pairs of shadows, toward the enclosures, eyes open for anyone still here. We go to the gibbons and I bend Genny over the railing and slip a hand up her dress.
“Pardon me,” someone says, and it is sunny, and I step from the middle of the path, step off to the edge and keep walking and watching myself and Genny in the zoo. I feel sick.
I remember how far I felt from my body that night, how deep I hid in my body to let such crudeness happen. How far sex can alienate me from my skin. The gibbons were asleep, but I remember making eye contact with one who came to the little window to inspect us: little eyes, little hands, at the edge of the light.
I remember how far apart and incompatible Genny and I felt then, how quiet we were, how unintimate our touching was. How I knew Genny was aroused by him—me—but that she also wanted him not to be the way I was wearing my body. How I refused to let her touch me back, because I felt so far from being the man I was. How I felt that her touch would shatter what little certainty I held. How our bodies got along while our hearts were hiding, deep and silent. How we didn’t talk, until I asked her to let me sneak into her room and sleep with her, and she told me no. I remember, two nights later, how she picked me up from Mother’s house and only drove three blocks before she pulled over and started to cry. How I rubbed her back, and then tried to slip my hand down her pants, and she told me, tears taking over her face, to get out of her car. Oh, how she’d yelled at me. Oh, how I’d earned it.
I open my eyes, and open them again, at the other side of Vimy Ridge Park, in the light. I take a few seconds to anchor myself in the present and then jaywalk across Portage avenue like an old pro, as I had done so many nights with Tom, waiting on the median and hoping none of the headlights marooning us there were cops.
The gas station. I walk inside and turn around to the closing door and another night, a few weeks later. Genny’s car is parked at the pump: I’m in the passenger seat, and she’s filling up. I’m looking down at my chest, my hands, the strap of Mother’s camera around my neck. I put my hand to my chest and I’m here, inside the station, touching the binder, grazing down to my belly. I watch myself in the car, watch myself lift the camera and look directly into its lens, and I think that nobody will ever see me like that. Full of a sad and naive hope. And then Genny gets back in the car.
“Excuse me?”
Genny pulls away with me, pulls away with me and that letter in my luggage, pulls away from this city for a promised forever, and the sun fills in after our absence. Nobody is at the pump.
“Sorry,” I say, as I walk over to the counter, reaching into my back pocket for my wallet.
“Can I help you?” the attendant asks.
“Yes. Please. I’d like a gas can. And gas for it.”
During those few months when Darius was missing, when I left my door open, two mice began to explore my room. After I found Darius, they would squeeze their gaunt little bodies under the door in the evenings, just after dinner. One after the other, the mice would cram themselves in, their ears flapping out from their heads when they peeked out the other side, noses wriggling. Then I returned from a work trip down south to find they had moved permanently into a near-empty coffee filter can.
The building I’d been staying in—the hotel—had somehow been spared the destruction of the Allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943 for Operation Gomorrah—a horror I had no knowledge of before I came to Germany. I’d been surprised when I flew into the city at dawn almost half a year before to see some districts still with rubble from the bombing. All the buildings around mine were new, with bigger apartments, because after the bombs there were fewer tenants to fill them. Erwin showed me a photograph of the area from 1948, when he came to Hamburg from Berlin, three years after he’d given his testimony at Nuremberg against the commander he’d served under in Crete in 1941.
In the photo Erwin showed me of Hamburg, the destruction was widespread to the point of being sublime. Erwin was shocked that I hadn’t known about it, about the near fifty thousand civilians killed almost overnight. He was surprised how little information about atrocities the Allied powers perpetrated actually reached their public, whereas the German people were reminded of nothing more regularly than their complicity in the cruelty of the war.
Erwin had come to Hamburg to help clean up and rebuild the city. While working, he picked up a camera for the first time in five years, to help document the state of the city and track the progress of the cleanup. Even in 1948 they were still finding bodies, unidentifiable through both time and fire. Erwin told me that seeing the dead only became more difficult the more he did it.
“The expected is what destroys you,” he said, looking down at the photograph where my little apartment building stood out as a towering strip in the waste. His fingers traced the glossy print, smudging it. “When you know you’re going to find something, something horrible, and then you find it, you’re still in no way prepared.”
I still remember what Erwin said, as Erna was singing in the other room and Georg was clomping down the stairs with German music popping from the Walkman strapped to his head. Georg stopped to stare at us sitting quietly in the little circle of the lamp’s light. I couldn’t see Erwin’s face in the dark, so I looked up at Georg’s, at his young doppel.
“It’s a rare and horrible thing, Sofia, when the world becomes exactly what you think it is.”
I lived in that tiny room for another five months after seeing that photo, living on the small salary I got for assisting Erwin and whatever extra I made from my freelance work for the German press and foreign and domestic fashion magazines. That whole time,
the air felt explosive. Volatile. Yet that little room, with the mice who slept in a coffee can, that room felt holy. The apartment was a sepulchre surrounded by death and danger but not filled up with it. It was surrounded by places that were haunted and replaced by the foundations of the dead.
When I moved out, to the extra room in Erwin’s house, I put the lid on the coffee can and poked holes in it. The mice had babies in there with them by then, the mother nursing them. Erwin drove me down to the Elbe, to a natural green patch at the edges of the city. I walked down toward the riverbank with the can, opened it, and placed it in the shadow of a cool grassy mound. I’d heard the little squeaking on the drive there, but now, in the wild, they were silent. I didn’t wait to see the mice emerge, twitching, from the shelter. I went back to the car and we went home.
A few cars pass me as I’m trying to find the best way to get the nozzle of the gas can into the tank of my car, as the fumes circulate through me. A man has been squinting out at me from a window of the house I’m parked in front of. I’m trying to forget he’s there.
I am back in the moment of the car, set upon by memories with claws. Genny and I are pulling away from the city in her car, and she is also pulling away from dropping me off after the zoo and leaving me in the exhaust, and she is also sitting on her bed as I climb up to her window, and I am also at her front door, a few days after she yelled at me in the car, after she drove away from me, and I am knocking. I don’t care if her mother is home, or her sister; I am here and I need to talk to her. I’m in a dress. My knuckles are reddening. I am not a man. Not that one. She should be able to see that.
Her car is the only one in the driveway. There are lights on in the house. If I were to look behind me, I’d see my car and me fuelling up. Him. Me trying hard to feel at home in my inflexible body.
But she doesn’t come to the door. There is the smell of gas. There are eyes in the windows, looking at me. I am sure that the whole neighbourhood is watching, and I’m sure that this is what clued in Genny’s mother, what got us tied up and away from one another when our escape was most imminent, when being in touch mattered most.
When Genny wrote that letter.
Someone honks at me and I’m out of the dress and in my body, feeling naked and off target. The passenger-side window of a truck rolls down: “Al! More car troubles?”
It’s Blaine. He is smiling at me, and I try so hard to be here and now and polite.
“Different car, different troubles,” I say, lowering the can that has been empty for who knows how long.
“One of those weeks?”
I just smile at him.
“How’s your mother doing? In Ste. Agathe, right?”
I can hear her voice, calling out to me, but I pretend that I can’t, that I’m here. “She’s well. You know how it goes.”
Blaine checks his mirrors and notices that a car has turned down onto Ethelbert, coming our way. I remember the squinting man and want to run away. “I do know. You need any help?”
I notice the blond dog hair covering the empty passenger seat, which has several shadeless, bulbless lamps sitting on it. I count five.
“She was just a little thirsty,” I say, closing the tank and putting my hand on the car’s roof, falling back, as somewhere I’m turning around to Mother’s car, and it is too cold tonight for this dress. I don’t know how Mother found me here, at Genny’s. Genny hasn’t answered the door, but Mother’s here, with her car idling. She is looking right at me, calling to me: “You, come on, let’s leave.”
My car door opens, and I get inside. Blaine is gone, down the street, turning onto Wolseley. I am her, Hedy, and I turn on the car and pull away from the house, without looking at the front window.
There I am, sitting beside me, in a dress and quietly crying. Hair to my ears. Made up but alone. I put my hand on the centre console, which doesn’t exist in my car, and I reach out and take my hand. We hold it as we drive, keeping our eyes on the road ahead.
As much as you appreciate the blankness at the top of the stairs, the blankness almost hurts the most. It is in blankness that intensity lies: the emotional blanknesses in your censored past, the years of quiet between yourself and Mother, the years of silence between yourself and yourself. Though the blankness lets you breathe, it also removes from you any tangible excuse for why you would choose to breathe at all. Sometimes when you come up here, the doors of the armoire open and close a little, like lungs. Sometimes you walk up the stairs and the armoire turns to you, seemingly staring. Once, it bull-rushed you, and you leapt up out of the memory palace.
Here, all the absence trembles. The doors judder in their jambs. Sometimes the armoire does not breathe but begins, slowly, to spit up clothes onto the floor. Those are the times when you walk through the palace far too aware of the blankness of your own body, and you want nothing else but to wear something. But what the armoire spits up is all the things that you don’t want, that don’t suit you, and as soon as you realize this the armoire explodes into cottons, synthetics, hosiery—whatever is least suitable. You begin to be pulled under, toques and tops grasping at your feet while nylon stockings wrap themselves around your throat. Nothing can stop them, and you can’t even make your way out of the palace until they’ve got you under their surf. Until you’re deep enough to not see the light. Until you’re deep enough to give up on air, and your lungs are a furious pair of empty canvases in empty frames.
Only then can you open your eyes to the real world, to your little darkroom in Minneapolis, or the dimly lit living room of Mother’s house at night. Only then can you open yourself up to knowing how unpopulated your numb world still is to you. How a heartbeat can pummel you forward, further into more blank time, and horror.
I didn’t drive back to the house. I turned away, toward the Neighbourhood Bookstore & Café on Ruby. I disappeared from the passenger seat as I turned right instead of left on Wolseley. Before I got out of the car, without privacy, I pulled the binder down onto my belly. I breathed. I let my hair fall down, grabbed the purse I keep under the passenger seat, went inside, and bought a coffee—this coffee—and sat down here.
The walls are coated with shelves of used books. I’ve got my phone out, logged in to the free Wi-Fi, the pile of list-filled papers in front of me. Without a bra, I feel visible and comical.
The shelves of used non-fiction beside me seem to loom like some kind of blatant symbol. An emptied-out body, well worn, or a bandage covered in dry blood. A wedding ring bought from a pawn shop. This list of things in Mother’s house.
The boy who sold me my coffee comes out from behind the counter and wipes a clean table with a dirty wet rag, smiling at me, each one of his lips half my age but together trying to add up, curving, to build a bridge to me. My chest is obvious in the tight black shirt, but it’s me. I smile without teeth.
He’s at that lonely age, that lonely age I feel like I’ve been a hundred times.
On my phone I try to ignore the wave of email notifications from the last week as I open the browser and check out Craigslist, Kijiji, the online classifieds of local newspapers—anywhere someone might request things: wanted, needed. Nobody is looking for most of the things in Mother’s house. There’s a radio behind the counter, transitioning from music to talk, but I can hardly hear it. The boy gives up on me, goes back there, and switches between stations until it’s music again. He sits there, looks down at his phone, sighing. I look up between swipes of my own.
I wonder how old he is. I swipe and swipe, past pages looking for information about missing people and pages looking subtly—and unsubtly—for sex. Then hit a few that I save the phone numbers for: a father asking for a twin bed for his growing family, a group of artists looking for any sort of spare, old art-making equipment. I look up and the boy, blond hair ruffled, short, is almost eating his fingers as he sits perched behind the counter, scrolling through his phone, like a breathing Rodin.
I get up with my emptying cup, walk along the shelved spines of fic
tion, as he switches radio stations again at a new pop song he didn’t want to hear. At the CBC public station he pauses for a few seconds, and the voices seems to be talking about the body found in the river again. As I get to the counter, the boy has his back to me, rapt, until he notices me standing behind him and switches back to music.
I hold out my cup to him. “How old are you?”
He almost jumps at the question. “Sixteen,” he says, pouring the coffee and not looking up at me, face going flush. Seeming so sixteen, so completely sixteen. The ages of both his lips actually adding up only to two-thirds of me. The boy hands me the coffee and looks over at the cakes and sandwiches in the glass case beside him. He doesn’t look me in the eye; he looks from the case to my hands. “Would you like anything else?”
I want to tell him to turn the radio station back, but I don’t. He switched it off for a reason I’ve no right to question. “No,” I say. “Thank you.” He smiles in my direction as the bell on the door pings.
Back at my table, the shelves full of doctored versions of real life turn their backs to me. I finish the coffee, repack my purse, and get up. I look at the bookshelf, but no titles make it into my head. The front door itches at me. I turn to the boy at the counter, and the boy is gone.
I get out the door. The wind hits me and I shoulder my purse and move toward my car. I get inside and turn away from the house—yet again—before circling back. I park in front, run inside to grab Mother’s old Leica, and run back out. There is a huge cloud of smoke coming for me, I know, rolling down the stairs like a boulder.
I get back in the car and drive, turning away from the house, only this time I am turning toward Mother.
Time—time away, time unknown—can do strange things. A bright moment can wait and, in waiting, become inconsequential. A blip can become a blimp as time bloats it forth. A smile can be re-evaluated, depending on the day, the week, and any meaningless action can either be lost completely in the fog of yester or amass meaning, furious and new.
Vanishing Monuments Page 16
