by Dennis Bock
Beside us Ruby sits talking to herself. A family of dolls spread out before her, presents from Uncle Helmut and his wife in Frankfurt. I got a boomerang and a drafting set. She picks up the baby doll. “This is Gertrude,” she says to herself. “But she doesn’t mind when you call her ‘Bertha,’ either.” Then there’s a soft moan from the kitchen, like the sound of a child blubbering. My father looks over his shoulder. His finger curls in the middle of the Danube.
Ruby and I are assigned a spare bedroom with a view looking up to the mountains. But by the time we get in there to sleep, it’s too dark to see. I sleep on the cot my father’s brought up from the basement. It smells musty, like rain and earth and snails. Before the lights go out I notice the wallpaper, green and red cartoon horses standing like people, holding each other around the waist. The checked curtains blow into hollow mouths over the open window. After the lights go out I think about Willy. I imagine a yellow gas caught in his lungs, playing his limbs like a marionette’s. I think about the handful of medicine he took at the supper table. I wonder if his pills have anything to do with us. A cuckoo clock ticks over Ruby’s bed, on the wall that separates my parents’ room from ours. I think about the story my mother told us on the drive here. How Willy fought in the war, and the Christmas Eve truce when time stopped. Before I fall asleep I hear talking coming from my parents’ room. But I don’t hear what it is they’re saying. I dream about horses stuck in mud up to their chests, unfathoming eyes turned upward.
The next day after breakfast we hike up the side of the valley. We stop to rest often, for Willy mostly. But for my mother and Ruby, too. Not because they’re tired but because they keep wandering off the trail to pick the blue bell-like Enzian that grow over these mountains. My father carries the picnic basket in his right hand, his camera looped around his neck. It’s a hot day and he’s not saying much. When Ruby and my mother disappear into the woods for the first time, he grows a pained look on his face. He looks over to the opposite side of the valley and snaps some shots, then sits down on a rock and waits. He fiddles with his camera and looks at his watch. I know he’s thinking about the part of the country we’re not going to be able to see because of this stopover, the storms we’ll miss back home. He wants to get in the Opel. He wants to see castles and shipyards. His people no longer live here. His father’s back in Kingston, himself now an immigrant like my parents in the only place I know. He can still visit friends here. He likes seeing his old buddies from school. He hasn’t seen them for years. But it’s not the same. He’s got new friends, a new life somewhere else.
Willy leans on his cane. I’m waiting a short distance up the trail. When Ruby and my mother finally come out from the trees, Ruby runs over to Willy and gives him a flower. He blushes and spins in a slow clumsy circle, smiling, and says, “Danke schön, Kanada.” As we ascend we turn our heads to watch the valley deepen below. It takes us two hours to get to the top. I keep running ahead, thinking I’ll have a better chance at discovering a deer posing among the pine trees if I forge on alone, without the chatter of a clumsy hiking party and the click of an old man’s walking stick. I double back, panting. Ruby’s holding Willy’s elbow as they walk, prattling on to him in English. He smiles, understanding nothing.
When we reach the top Willy leans over and says into my ear: “Say something. Yell something.” My German’s just good enough. He wants an echo. He wants to show me how his brain works, how the gas feels inside. The farm’s a brown dot at the far end of the valley. The laneway we drove over yesterday snakes its way over the green valley floor and disappears behind a hill where it meets up with the road that leads eventually to Munich. He leans back on his cane and waits, Ruby’s flower wilting in his fine skeletal hand. For a moment there’s only our breathing and the snapping eye of my father’s camera.
“Which way’s the Berlin Wall?” I ask my father.
“East,” he says, without removing his eye from the viewfinder.
Willy gestures to our right, beyond the farm, makes a small pointing circle with his cane. He’s heard the word “Berlin.”
“Wunderbar,” my mother says under her breath. She’s looking in the direction of France. Ruby’s holding the bouquet of deep-blue flowers they’ve taken from the woods. Willy leans into my ear again.
“What will you say?” he asks. I taste his old man’s breath, notice white stubble on his chin. I wonder at the depth of his illness. Will he die while we’re still guests in his house? A grunt of expectation comes from his throat.
With all my might.
“Help!”
The echo draws back over us from the other side. My lungs burn. My father, at first startled, looks pleased. My mother turns around quickly and looks at me. My voice returns to me weakly from the other side, changed somehow, a bridge of voices crisscrossing over the valley floor. Willy’s smiling, his demonstration complete.
At night we sit outside on folding wooden chairs and watch the shadows lengthen over the hills. The evening consumes the new black hair on the shins of my outstretched legs. Ruby’s at the foot of the picnic table, warming up. When she’s ready, she stands before us and begins a simplified version of the floor routine she’s been working on since last winter. A series of front and back handsprings, cartwheels, and somersaults. Even now, after supper and in the fading evening light, she moves like a dancer does, as soundlessly and quick as the bats feeding low in the air over our heads.
My mother holds Willy’s hand as they watch the routine. I wonder if he knows what’s going on. He’s filled up on those pills again. I imagine they’ve brought him back to where he wants to be, thinned the yellow cloud in his lungs. As Ruby spins through the air I slip around to the back of the house and down into the basement where my mattress comes from. It’s dark down here, but I find the light switch and begin looking around. There’s a wall of jam jars to the right of the stairs. I want to find something to take home with me. An old gun from the war, a bayonet or hand grenade. Old soldiers keep things like that. I pick up one of the jars from the shelf and brush off the dust with my sleeve. Windfall. I peer through the warped glass and see two pickled lizards. There are dozens of jars, within each a snake or turtle or a few mice or small birds, at least a pair of unhatched eggs or frozen amber-tinged insects. Every jar has a date marked on a piece of tape stuck to the lid: 24. Juni 1958; 17. August 1943; 4. Oktober 1969. The oldest from April of 1931. The animals hang in a clear copper-coloured liquid. Sediment churns around the tail of a salamander, the swirl of an escaping fish. I open it and sniff in the fumes, rich and sweet, like the fumes of an outboard motor.
On Friday we drive down to Munich to see the Olympic stadium. Willy comes with us. Earlier I heard my parents talking about whether or not he should come. My father said he wanted to make it a family affair. I know he doesn’t want to wait for the old-man steps. My mother reminded him he was family, then walked away briskly, arms crossed over her chest.
The stadium’s bigger than it looked on TV last year. Ruby says she’ll do her floor routine in a place as grand as this someday. The Montreal Games are only three years away. Enormous concrete ribs arch over our heads and meet at a single point stories above.
“It’s like walking into a whale,” Ruby says, pointing to the circle of sky above our heads. “That’s the blowhole.” On the track below two black men practise take-off on the starting blocks. USA is printed in red, white, and blue on the backs of their tracksuits. An older white man stands on the grass beside the runners and fires a pistol at the blue sky through the blowhole. I don’t recognize the moment’s pause between the shot and the runners’ reactions. But they’re already up and running when Willy finally flinches at the noise of the gun firing.
After the stadium we walk around the centre of Munich, taking pictures, poking our heads into the silent air of cathedrals. I place my hands on the Madonna’s crying cheeks, cool as a river. In the bright sunlight our mother points
to things she hasn’t seen in years, the green tree-filled parks and pathways that have turned into banks and insurance companies since she was a girl. In Marienplatz, the main square, we drink lemonade and buy mustard-covered pretzels as big as my father’s hand. To eat them we sit at the edge of the Fischbrunnen fountain, our five backs to a statue of a spitting carp. According to the lore about this place, a couple of Pfennig tossed into the water behind us will make us rich someday. My father digs in, hands me and Ruby one coin each. Ruby throws hers in and bounces up and down, her eyes closed in mighty prayer. I fight the urge to whip mine at the carp and finally launch it off my thumb and watch it hit the water and flutter to the bottom. I sit in the shade my father casts, the fountain’s mist cooling my sunburned neck. Willy sits to my left, silently.
My father’s already snapped some photos of us standing in front of the fountain. Now he asks an American lady to shoot us and takes a spot beside my mother. The woman holding my father’s Nikon looks like the blonde woman on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Behind the camera she chews a purple hunk of gum, taking her time as she fits the five of us into this single moment in time. “Cheese,” she says finally and in unison we reply. A second later Willy’s voice joins our photograph, weak and in another language.
“Your mother’s part of the country isn’t the only interesting part of Germany,” my father says quietly, his hand on my moist neck. “How about we go somewhere with water? More water than this fountain. Maybe even the Mediterranean. You’ve never sailed on salt water. It keeps the boat higher. It’s more buoyant.” I know my mother’s listening. She doesn’t say anything. I see her looking at Willy. He’s looking at the cane between his knees. But I can’t help wondering. I want to taste salt water.
That night I hear crying through the bedroom wall. Ruby’s already asleep. I listen to the hard words I remember from last summer when my mother’s brother came to visit us in Canada; then the whispers and low tones my mother shared with Willy the first night here around the kitchen table. Then silence, and the sound of crickets returns.
“Come on,” I say, leading Ruby down the stairs to the basement. We’ve already been here three days. My father’s taken to washing the car every afternoon in anticipation of our release. My mother waits hand and foot on Willy. Ulla likes us being here. It gives her someone to talk to. She and my mother cook together and go for long walks in the pasture when Willy takes his afternoon nap, the time of day Ruby and I are told to be quiet around the house. I’ve been coming down here every day to check on the jam jars. They’re dust-free now, wiped clean on pant legs and shirts. The light of the single bulb hanging from the rafters holds the small animals in trumpet-coloured suspension.
“Take this one,” I say. “And this one. Can you carry three?”
“I can carry more than you,” Ruby says. It’s after dark now. The grown-ups are around front sitting in the folding chairs. “Take as many as you can but don’t drop them or you’ll get the Mustard Brain disease.”
“But they’re dead little things,” she says.
There are seven jars between us. We walk over the compound, past the Opel. Its rims shine in the moonlight, the waiting getaway car. The barn emerges like a silent train from the dark, a blacker shape against the grey night. We walk downhill without talking, the jars pressed against our chests. There’s the sound of our footsteps against the touch of darkness and small waves riding against the lids of our Jars.
“It’s okay here,” I say. “Put them down.” I fumble in my pocket, take out the pack of matches. “You’re not going to say anything. Promise again. Remember that Mom and Dad hate tattlers.” I wait for her complicity before I show her the matches. I strike one between us and her face appears before me as though slipped out from between black curtains. She doesn’t say anything. I throw the match down to the ground, the curtains close again over her face.
“These’ll burn good,” I say, unscrewing the lid of the first jar. The smell of gasoline. “Spaz-head won’t even notice them gone.” I pour the contents over the ground. “It’s just dead animals.”
I tell Ruby to stand back. “Okay. Where are you now?” I ask carefully. I want to make sure her voice is far enough away and that the rest of the jars are a safe distance from the dampened grass. “Get ready,” I say, then strike the match and wait a moment for it to flare, watch the flame begin to crawl down the stick. In one motion I step back and throw the match over the puddle and a low blue carpet of fire spreads at our feet, peels the darkness away from Ruby’s face beside me. In the middle of the flame one of Willy’s dead things shows its teeth. Hisses at the little pyro I’ve become. We do the seven jars slowly, methodically, like criminals disposing of the evidence. When we’re finished I return the empty jars to the basement. The perfect crime.
The next day before breakfast I go and check out the fire pit. It’s a big black scar on the grass. A chemical smell hangs in the air. Not all the bones have disintegrated. I nudge them with a stick and make out a small claw. But the vandalism is off the beaten track, well away from Willy’s daily wanderings. I could burn a car out here and get away with it.
After lunch we find the stacks of money. Piles of it in the barn loft. Old notes from before the First World War. There must be millions’ worth. The rich promise of the fountain in Munich. But I know right away that it’s worthless. It’s fifty years old, the same stuff Uncle Helmut showed us in Frankfurt, the broad, page-sized notes turned back to paper by hyperinflation after Willy’s side lost the war. “You could wipe your bum with it,” Uncle Helmut had whispered in my ear and laughed.
“What can we do with it?” Ruby says.
“We can set up a bank,” I say, turning a bundle over in my hand. “We can make our own country and make a bank. This is our official currency.” We’re both kneeling in the loft, a group of pigeons on the highest beam above us, looking down and cooing demurely. The boxes we’ve cleared away are scattered around us. We count notes the whole morning. I get a calculator from the glove compartment of the car. Our eyes get sore and the batteries run dry just under eight million Reichsmark. We play at buying boats and houses and small islands off the California coast. I have a house in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge. I buy an airplane. I buy my school back home and fire all the teachers. Ruby lives on a ranch on Pluto with a pool full of dolphins and sea lions. She makes friends with them and hires all the best scientists in the universe to discover their secret language and teach it to her.
At supper we sit with the dignity that comes easily to the incredibly rich. We are millionaires. We own entire planets. We smile at one another, kick each other under the table when the other starts to laugh. We’re on the verge of exploding. If the secret ends, our wealth evaporates. We both know that Ruby’s the one who’s going to give it away, sooner or later. She can’t control herself when it comes to this kind of game. This is a fun secret. The other kind, the burning-dead-animals kind is not a fun secret. But our mirth flies out the window when Ulla rolls Willy’s pills out in front of him. They lie there, little robins’ eggs, perfect blue pebbles. I feel like winging them across the room with a flick of a finger, beaning my father in the chest or clacking one against the window above the sink. This is our fifth day here, but none of us is comfortable with this ritual. Willy forms a colourful circle with his medicine and begins to work backwards. His clawed finger is the minute hand of a clock ticking in reverse. He starts at eleven. The claw rises, twisted fingernail, drops the pill onto his tongue, swallows. Sip of tea. Ten, nine, eight, all the way round the face of the clock, one after another. My mother has stopped trying to divert us. We sit still except for Ulla, who continues on with her meal, unmoved. My father rolls his eyes, shrugs his shoulders at me. I know where he wants to be. He wants to be on the wind somewhere off the coast of France sailing with a pack of dolphins or playing his accordion with his band back home. But my mother wants to stay put. I have to try harder, she says. “
Spend time with Willy,” she said the second day. “He’s the last I have.” I’d heard her say to my father that she didn’t want to see her brother, living only a few dozen kilo metres from here. She said she wasn’t ready to meet him again after last summer. After she saw what he turned out to be.
“I have no one left,” she said to me. “Just Willy and he won’t be here forever.”
“But I don’t speak German.”
“That’s an excuse. Your German’s fine. You’ll regret it when you’re older.” She placed her hand on my neck and kissed my forehead.
My father’s people are the ones who say the past is passed. You can’t go back. And you shouldn’t try. We saw what happened two summers ago, when my father’s parents wanted to get remarried to celebrate their anniversary and nothing went right. Leave well enough alone. But this is my mother’s turn at it. She’s giving it a go. Digging for artifacts. Maybe my dad’s just trying to save her from the inevitable. Maybe he’s learned his lesson. His father lost a wife in the trying.
