Halfway through the evening—the hare a jumble of bones, the foggy glasses, and the decanter nearly empty—there was a flash of lightning above the sea. It flickered blue between the clouds and you could hear a distant rumbling of thunder. We looked outside. Coe wondered why a thunderstorm at sea was always so different than inland, and my mother remembered how, in her youth, lightning had struck in the village. Just then the door opened and the black-clad figure of my grandmother appeared. She stood in the doorway with the cologne-soaked handkerchief over her mouth and stared, wide-eyed, at the candlelit scene.
“Julia!” she said. “The parachute!”
My mother shot out of her chair. Her glass fell. A red stain began spreading over the tablecloth.
“Mama,” she cried.
“Ma’am,” said Coe. He got to his feet, his left hand on his chest. “My sincerest apologies. It was never my intention to…blow in here…so unannounced.”
“The parachute!” cried my grandmother again. “Julia, you’ve got to hide the parachute!”
“The weather,” said Coe. “Took me by surprise. Terrible storm.”
I stared at him in amazement.
My mother laid her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Everything’s been taken care of, Mama.”
My grandmother stared a few seconds more at the visitor and then allowed my mother to lead her out of the room.
“My mother has hardening of the arteries,” she said, when she returned. “She’s very confused.” She raised her glass and only noticed that it was empty when she was about to take a sip. I stood up and poured her another drink. She took a large gulp, nearly choked, and dabbed at her lips with the napkin. When her eyes fell on the wine stain on the tablecloth, she jerked her head away.
There was a lengthy silence, during which I tried to figure out what was going on. Things somehow weren’t what they ought to be. I couldn’t put it into words, but it reminded me of a doubly exposed photograph, in which you saw two images: one real, and the other a faint echo of the first.
As I sat there brooding, I felt my eyes growing heavy. The walk on the beach, the glass of wine, and the steady swaying of the candle flames were beginning to take effect. It wasn’t long before my mother saw my head nodding and sent me upstairs. I protested feebly, but there wasn’t any point. She wouldn’t be contradicted and I was too tired to offer much resistance. I shook Coe’s hand and kissed my mother and headed for my room.
When I got upstairs I was just barely able to lay my clothes on the back of a chair. I must have fallen asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
THAT NIGHT I WAS AWAKENED by the slamming of the front door. It was nearly midnight, I had slept less than two hours, but I sat bolt upright in bed and was wide awake. I went to the window and looked outside, where, as I had expected, there was nothing to see. Without knowing why and without thinking, I threw on my clothes and sneaked out the door. On the stairs, I could feel a clammy chill moving through the house. The front door stood wide open and with every gust of wind it banged against the doorframe. The latch had been pulled out, so it couldn’t fall shut. Coe’s and my mother’s coats were missing from the coatrack. I pulled on my jacket and boots and walked to the door. Then I suddenly remembered my grandfather’s flashlight and I ran to his room to get it.
When I came back into the hallway, my grandmother was standing on the stairs. Her long gray hair hung down over the shawl she wore over her white nightgown and for a moment she looked like the ghost of my mother.
“The parachute,” I said. It was the first thing that came to my mind. I’d barely uttered the words, when all of a sudden I began to understand. The doubly exposed picture I’d thought of before became clear: one of the images, the most recent one, dissolved and what was left, a still life from the past, came into focus.
“I have to go bury the parachute.”
My grandmother pulled the shawl tighter around her and nodded, relieved.
“Go back to sleep. I’ll take care of everything.”
She turned around and walked back up the stairs. I waited until the white of her nightgown was smothered by the darkness and I had heard the click of her bedroom door.
Outside in the cone of light from my flashlight I saw puddles and small meandering streams that barely hid a crisscross of footprints that seemed to lead to the beach. The rain was pouring down so hard that I couldn’t keep my eyes open unless I bowed my head. But I knew these surroundings like the back of my hand, and even in the darkness and the rain I had no trouble finding my way to the beach.
There must have been a moon hiding behind the clouds, but it wasn’t much use to me. Now and then a thin patch slipped past in the blanket of clouds and a stain appeared in the sky, but that stain never grew to be more than a vague suggestion of moonlight. And so it was dark and wet and wet and dark.
My first guess was the bunker, since that was the only dry place for miles around, but there was no one there. Even the mother cat and her kittens had disappeared. I shone my flashlight over the gray walls, the obscene drawings and carvings that, in the glow of the flashlight, suddenly looked prehistoric.
When I left the bunker, my back bent, my head bowed, a pair of shoes appeared in the glow of the flashlight. My fear lasted only a moment. I didn’t need to raise my head or shine upward. I knew who belonged to those feet.
Wet and windblown, the collar of his coat held together with both hands and his hair plastered around his face, was my father. He looked at me, shook his head, and then motioned toward the bunker.
When we were crouched down across from each other, our backs to the wall, the flashlight like a cold campfire between the bottles and cigarette butts on the ground, he pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his coat pocket, fished out a rain-soaked Lucky, and lit it. The cigarette went out after two puffs. He looked at it for a moment and then tossed it away.
“What,” he said, “is going on here?”
I took a deep breath and began telling him what had happened in the last few hours, how we had found Coe on the beach, that I had skinned and roasted a hare, that we had eaten, and how, later that night, I had been woken up by the front door blowing open and shut. I said nothing about the parachute or my grandmother.
My father listened silently and when I’d finished, told me that he had arrived on the last train, got lost in the rain, warmed up in a café with coffee and a glass of cognac, and finally, around midnight, had arrived at my grandparents’ house. The door stood open. There was no one downstairs, my mother’s room was empty and the bed unslept in, I was sound asleep. So he had gone back outside, in search. Seeing as how he didn’t know the surroundings as well as I did, he had wandered around for a long time in the wet darkness before ending up at the bunker.
We sat opposite each other and stared at the wet sand between us. My father seemed to be thinking. The thumb and middle finger of his left hand massaged his temples and his eyes were closed.
“You go back,” he said after a while, “I’ll keep looking.”
I didn’t think that was a very good idea. Two would see more than one, and I knew the dunes far better than he did. Besides, I was wide awake and could never fall back to sleep knowing that my entire family was roaming around, through wind and rain, in the dead of night. My father nodded thoughtfully. Then he shook his head and beckoned.
It’s funny how you can always see the surf, even on a rainy night. The crests of the waves, when we got to the beach, looked like pale ghosts trying to escape from a hellish darkness, and you could clearly hear, even in the pouring rain, their deep, muffled groans. My father’s hand lay on my left shoulder and every now and then, as we walked along the tidemark, he steered me so that the beams of the flashlight fell here, then there.
We plodded left, so that we would be walking against the wind and rain, and walked half an hour without seeing anything but sand and water and darkness. Then, when we could just make out the lighthouse at the mouth of the harbor, we slowed down and turned our backs to
the wind. My father drew his hand through his wet hair, brushing it out of his eyes.
“Why don’t we walk back through the dunes?” I yelled against the wind. “We’ll be sheltered from the rain, and it’ll give us a chance to look around there.”
But the dunes weren’t much better than the beach. We had a hard time finding the path, and once we did, the sand was so soft and wet that it was another hour before we spotted the bunker. I shone my flashlight, which was growing steadily weaker, inside, and then we headed back for the house.
Downstairs, in the sun lounge, the lights were on. The glow from the windows beckoned to us, and suddenly I felt how cold and wet and tired I was. I shivered in my windbreaker. My face was numb and my legs were so wet that my trousers chafed my skin. We went up to the windows and saw Coe sitting in an armchair, slumped, his head hung low. My mother sat in front of him on the ground, her hair loose and dark with rain. For a minute, maybe less, we looked at this strange tableau. Then my father raised his hand and tapped on the glass.
Four
SOMETIMES A CHILD—ELBOWS ON THE WORKBENCH, chin cupped in his or her hands, eyes locked on the ball—asks me if “it” is for sale.
“It,” I say, “it is mine.”
Nine boys and two girls, all of them of exotic ethnic descent, all of them speak the kind of hip urban lingo that keeps reminding me of rusty barbed wire. Eleven faces that look up and wait for me to tell The Story, the story of How It Was and How It Began. It. I pick it up, weigh it, and feign deep thoughts that have drifted off, far away, long ago, a different world, when we were good and the summers long and hot. Sticky tubes of glue are being dropped, brushes laid aside. Mouths open, eyes glaze over. Behind those eleven faces an eyebrow curves in a woman’s face: an immaculate little black comma over a large almond-shaped eye.
“Long ago,” I say, as I sample the gathering. “Very long ago, when you weren’t born yet…”
“When we still lived in Morocco,” yells one.
“Turkey!” yells another.
“Pa. Ra. Ma. Ri. Bo!” roars yet another one.
“Somalia,” whispers number four.
I raise my hand. “A long time ago indeed, very long ago, there was a man who could fly.”
There is a skeptical quality in Nur’s brow that spills into her eyes. She lifts her glass and blows on her tea, quite aware of the effect it has on me.
One moment of speechlessness. Then I shiver and speak.
It all started with one little boy who came to the shop and, looking around and noticing the sand-colored Dakota, asked if it was for sale, finished that is. I looked him over, got the smallest box from the shelves, ripped the shrink-wrap with my nail, and got the little bag out. “Look,” I said. “That’s it. Twenty, thirty parts. It’ll take about an hour. Perhaps you can find someone to help you.” His face told me that there was no one.
The neighborhood has changed. The families of old, with their 2.3 children and the steaming pot of tea that waits after school, have disappeared. Twenty years ago you’d see blue-haired little old ladies in knitted suits doing their shopping. Now it’s Turks, Moroccans, Cape Verdeans, Hindustani, Chinese, and God knows where they all come from. And there are the single mothers, and fathers. The sort of families, anyway, that don’t have the time to indulge in good and wholesome handiwork. The shoe shops with their beige old ladies’ shoes have been replaced by twenty-four-hour Chinese restaurants, Islamic butchers, and Moroccan bakers. And where once the faint smell of office stationers lingered, with their dusty displays of pencils and faded notebooks, now one would smell fresh coriander, the heavy sweetness of Turkish pastry, and the red-hot kitchens of The Great Wall and Asian Glories.
That was what I was thinking of, the neighborhood and how it, and I, had grown and changed, and I looked at the boy and suddenly told him to return next Wednesday. I would try to round up a few more kids and we would build together. He shot me a look that was at the same time incredulous and surprised. Only after he’d left, while I was cutting a mold on the workbench, did I realize what I had done. I put the knife down and stared at the kites that hung from the ceiling, the sewing machine and the fluorescent yellow thread that ran through the needle, the spools, neatly lined up, the rolls of fabric along the wall, and I thought: the time has gone when a man could invite a couple of kids from the neighborhood for a glass of lemonade and some wholesome handiwork without getting his face in the papers. “Who the hell do you think you are?” I yelled into the empty space. “Baden-Powell?”
But my initial hesitation didn’t save me and now they’re here: eleven children, their mouths open, sitting around a workbench that’s cluttered with shears, Stanley knives, pieces of nylon fabric, and loose threads. They’re fingering glasses of Coke now, the silence for the first time since they came in so complete that it’s almost audible.
I’ve told that story before, the one about the man who could fly. The boy who picked up the sphere has reached out before to touch the thick glass. It doesn’t seem to matter. It’s not the story; it’s the way it’s told.
“A sculptor and his son were imprisoned on an island,” I say, “where the sculptor had to work for the king. The king had everything he desired. Gold overflowed his treasure chamber, a hundred beautiful girls with hair as black as the night and faces like the full moon served him at his table, dressed him in the morning, and entertained him as they danced in the evening in front of the fire in the great hall, and every night fifty strong men painted a new sky on the ceiling and fresh trees on the pillars, so that it seemed as if the clouds moved and the trees grew. One thing was missing: a wife. The king could have taken any of the beautiful girls for a wife, of course, and all of them would probably have been more than happy to be chosen, but the king wanted beauty to surpass anything he’d ever seen, and as he saw the hundred beautiful girls every day, dancing and singing and serving him, none of them would do. That is why he had called for a sculptor, to make a statue of the fairest woman in the world. At first the sculptor felt very honored, but after one of the girls had told him what the king had in mind, he’d started thinking of ways to escape. ‘Dear sculptor,’ the girl had said, ‘you must know that the king is a mighty sorcerer who wants to bring your statue to life to marry her. No one in the world must know, and so he will kill you after you’re finished.’ That frightened the sculptor. Not because he feared death—he was old and famous and life had been good to him—but he had brought his son with him to the island, to work as his assistant, and the boy was just thirteen. And then there was something else. After he’d been chiseling the huge block of marble for a few weeks, he had discovered that it was not just a statue he was sculpting. One night he had entered the studio and the light of the moon, which came from far away, over the sea, was soft and blue. It skimmed, no: it flowed like water, over the shoulder of the statue, smoothly caressing the curve of the neck, the coastal line of her jaw, her cheek, the planes of her temples. There, in the moonlit dark, was his mother.
“The king had asked him to carve a statue of the most beautiful woman ever and the marble had brought forth his mother.
“The next day he was in his studio, holding the smallest of his chisels, and pretended not to hear the king when he entered. Satisfaction and envy fought each other in the king’s face as he looked at the marble foot that appeared from under the great piece of cloth that covered most of the statue. ‘Almost finished, master sculptor?’ His voice rang through the high room. The artist turned around and wiped the dust from his brows. ‘It’s hard to tell, my lord. It’s not finding the shape that’s the hardest, but bringing it forth.’ A deep frown wrinkled the king’s brow. He walked toward the statue and reached out to remove the cloth, but the sculptor blocked his way. ‘Forgive me, but it isn’t finished yet.’ The ruler of the island turned away with a hurt look on his face. ‘But how long will it take, master?’ he asked. The old sculptor thought for a while and finally said: ‘It could be days. It could be months.’ The king gasped for air,
like a fish out of water. ‘But with a chisel like that!’ he roared. The artist looked at it and nodded. Then he said: ‘My lord, how do you rule your country? With an army, or with a few well-placed servants?’ The king stared at him for a while, then left the dusty studio, muttering as he went.”
I drink my tea. This is the sign. Eleven staring faces suddenly remember their Cokes and juice. Behind the raised glasses the smoky arabesque of Nur’s Marlboro Light ascends.
“Days, weeks went by, and every time the king visited the sculptor’s studio, the old man was hacking away with a chisel no bigger than a teaspoon. And every time, the king, snorting with rage, returned to the great hall, where he would yell at his master onion peeler or the royal sock mender. The king’s mood gradually worsened. He’d lost his appetite and nights he lay awake, even though the beautiful girls sat around his bed and sang and softly strummed the strings of their lutes and lyres. And when he finally, after hours of tossing and turning, closed his eyes, he invariably saw the pale marble figure from the studio floating through the dark corridors of the palace, till it was quite close, which was when he saw that it was faceless.
“It was autumn and the painted trees on the pillars shed their leaves; the sky on the ceiling of the great hall turned gray and moved like a sea of lead.
“One day the old sculptor asked his son to join him. It was a windy day and they sat on the wide windowsill, looking out over the bay that lapped at the foot of the palace walls and stretched out into the sea.
“‘Listen, boy,’ the father said. ‘The king will throw in one of his dungeons, or worse, once the statue is finished. I have designed a scheme to save us, however, but it will fail unless you do exactly as told.’ The boy nodded and listened to his father, who began to tell his plan.
“A few days later the artist sent word to the king that he was ready to show his work. The king, three of his most loyal servants trailing behind him, hurried through the palace corridors, his robes streaming. His dignity didn’t allow him to run, but that was what he really wanted to do. The windows of the studio were hung with heavy curtains. A few chandeliers shed their light on a figure that was almost completely hidden by a curtain hanging from a cord between two walls. The king and his servants stopped abruptly when they saw all this. The sculptor raised his hand and cried: ‘Right there, Your Majesty. Not any farther!’ The king’s face clouded over. ‘My statue, master sculptor,’ he said. ‘Show me my statue.’ The artist nodded and said: ‘Our statue, my lord, and you will see it. But alone. Send your servants away, so that you will truly be the first one in the world to see the most beautiful woman.’ The king stared long and hard at the sculptor, then sent his companions away. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and curtly nodded. The sculptor accompanied him to an armchair and the king reluctantly sat down. ‘No more dallying, master. Show me the statue.’ The old man nodded, stepped back, and bowed his head.
The Dream Room Page 7
