Читать книгу Diving the Wrecks - magdalena zschokke - Страница 3

From the top of the Ferris wheel, she could see all the way to Hawaii—at least that’s how it felt. Actually there was nothing but water and a golden path of sunlight from the beach to the horizon. The ocean lay metal-blue and undulating, the long swells slow and steady. There were no whitecaps, and the smooth expanse was dotted with patches of dark, glossy kelp near the rocks. A sea lion popped its head up and looked steadily in her direction with its round, soulful eyes.

“I know you,” it said. Her heart swelled with a happiness that was too big to contain, and she let out a large breath. The sunlight was hot in her hair, and she could feel warmth all the way into her bones. The world was beautiful, and she was at peace.

The wheel started moving again, and she glided gently down, closer to the earth. The screams from the roller coaster riders rose and fell, and waves of warm, greasy air wafted past—now popcorn, now hot dogs, now cotton candy. Suddenly she felt ravenous and decided she would buy a fried artichoke heart as soon as the Ferris wheel ride was over. She leaned over the safety bar of her basket and looked toward the beach.

She watched a gang of teenagers posing and strutting for each other down by the waterline. Two of the males picked up a bikini-clad female by the arms and legs, and started swinging her back and forth. The blood-curdling, high-pitched screams from multiple girls formed a sound cloud around the teens, and then the captured girl sailed in a graceful arc into the water. Like a murder of agitated crows, her companions pattered back and forth, agitated, cackling, squealing, and protesting, half-hoping to be tossed, half-worried that they would be.

A short distance up the beach, two little boys were intent on burying their friend in the sand, and a toddler in nappies was unsteadily heading for the wet sand where the water broke gently and pushed a white line of foam in front of it.

All at once the basket she was in bucked roughly, and, when she grabbed for the bar to steady herself, it was gone. She looked down between her legs and stared at a dark endless hole below her. She could not see any ground but she knew what was coming. She was falling, crashing toward a hardwood floor with plugs that looked like buttons, and her breath left her in a scream.

She found herself sitting up in bed in the dark and stuffy master bedroom she had shared with Manfred for many years. Rolling over, she could make out the white double moons of his buttocks as he bent to pull on his underwear. The terror of the wood floor had evaporated, and she realized that the rocking of her Ferris wheel cage had been him getting out of bed. She exhaled and lay back down. She wanted so badly to get back to the Ferris wheel in warm California … away from here.

“Emma, time to get up. I have an early meeting!”

She grunted something unintelligible, even to herself, and dropped her bare feet on the wood floor. Though there was a rag rug under her feet, the cold shot up through her all the way to her diaphragm. She gasped, slipped her feet into her old felt slippers, and grabbed her dressing gown from the back of a chair.

While Manfred shaved, she put on the coffee in the kitchen and went to wake the boys. She turned on the ceiling light in their room and walked through to open the drapes. Ron lay on his back with his eyes open, staring at the underside of the upper bunk without acknowledging her arrival. Karl was completely invisible under the duvet and groaned disconsolately when she pulled the covers away from him. She returned to the kitchen, put out mugs and bowls, and sat down at the kitchen table with her hands wrapped around a mug of hot water, remembering what a lovely time she’d been having only moments ago.

How she wished she could’ve stayed in her dream. For years she lay awake in the middle of the night, listening to Manfred snore, envying him his sleep. For as long as she could remember, she had shot out of nightmares and then stayed awake. The first years of her marriage she had tried to make herself fall back to sleep by cuddling up to Manfred, but there had been too many mornings when he awoke grumpy, blaming her for robbing him of his needed rest.

When Karl had been born, she had stayed up with him, nursed him, changed him, and slept only in snatches while she held him in the crook of her arm. Ron had been a colicky baby, requiring much walking and soothing, but it gave her interrupted nights a reason and left little time for the nightmares.

After they moved to this apartment, they acquired a television, which sat in the living room. She had gotten into the habit of watching late-night shows that often were reruns of old movies or infomercials, but her favorites were travel shows. It was one of the travel programs that had taken her to California and the boardwalk in Santa Cruz with its Ferris wheel overlooking the beach. The segment had aired more than once. Each time she had watched it sitting close to the television with the volume down low, inhaling every sound and color from the images on the screen. She’d conjured up the smell of cotton candy, hot dogs, and fried foods from her childhood memories of county fairs, and the smell of the ocean was still with her from a long-ago holiday at the North Sea. After her third viewing, she could not just see and hear the scenes—she could smell California.

Her late-night TV watching helped ease her resentment over her sleeping husband and also filled some time. However, perhaps more importantly, it changed her dreams. Now, in addition to her usual nightmares, she sometimes dreamed of exotic places. These new dreams became as real to her as her daily life, and, after having spent the night in an exotic dream, the following day would be soft and underlaid with hope.

Despite her Ferris wheel ride, today was not one of those. The boys had delayed their morning preparations until they were late for school. Manfred had left for his meeting in a bad mood: She had forgotten to pick up his dry cleaning, and his favorite tie had a food stain on it, although he still put it on. Her promise to have the cleaning picked up by the time he came home for lunch did little to change his mood.

She herded the boys out of the apartment and left behind them without cleaning up the kitchen. Her hair was still wild and stood up in back, but she figured the wind would take care of that. She kissed the boys at the apartment door—she was no longer permitted to kiss them on the street—and made sure the door clicked shut behind her. She followed the echoes of the boys’ footsteps down the three floors of the apartment house.

Crossing the intersection at the light, Emma followed a group of students ahead of her and headed for the meadow near the top of the train station. When she passed the church near her house, she turned her head away.

A year ago, her friend, Irene, had asked her why she did it. “I don’t do that,” she said.

“But you do. You and I have been walking around town forever, and any time you get near a church you turn your head away. What’s with that?”

“I have a visceral aversion to church. It makes me get sick and I throw up.”

“Oh, come on. Sure, it’s boring; it might smell bad, be hard on your sitz-bones—but throwing up? I mean, I know the stories about crucifixion are hard for tender ears but really …”

“You don’t understand,” Emma said. “My father’s idea of religion was, well, let’s say hands on and punitive. We went to church every Sunday and prayed before every meal and before bed. I haven’t been inside one since before the kids were born.”

They hadn’t talked about it further, but the conversation had triggered something and her nightmares had gotten so bad that Manfred had insisted she visit a psychiatrist for sleeping meds. The treatment didn’t help much, but Emma decided that the peace, resulting from Manfred’s satisfaction at her following his request, was worth it.

Now she passed the black plastic coffins for recycling. They were big enough to be loaded onto the back of 18-wheelers. There was one for paper, one for cardboard, and one for plastic. Her favorite was the glass one. On the side it sported round portholes with directions for what was to be deposited: green glass in one, colorless glass in another, brown glass in the third. Emma indulged herself in fantasizing about odd glass that could not be recycled: What about blue medicine bottles? Or white milk bottles? Or the sand-colored earthenware flasks that held Matteus vinho verde?

Before she could come up with more non-categorizable oddball types of glass, she had reached the Schanze, the meadow with its view of the alps. The alps were hazy, gray shapes in the distance, more like stage props than mountains, keeping the horizon in check. In summer, when the weather was clear, the meadow was jam-packed with students lounging on the grass, eating, studying, and playing music. Now it was bare and empty. She took the elevator down into the underground train-transit area.

The din, as always, was a physical assault. Trains ran overhead, sounding like thunder. There was the sharp clatter of wheeled bags being rattled over the anti-skid metal crossbars on the ramps. People were talking on cell phones, shouting to be heard over all the noise. The cleaning machines, like giant boxes on wheels, zoomed in and out between the pillars that supported the ceiling. The harsh neon light hurt Emma’s eyes, and she walked with her head down, following the white raised lines for the blind.

She had once talked about these lines with a friend and asked him, “Where do blind people go? The lines go straight through the station and up to the tram stop. No detours for them.”

He’d said, “I’ve never thought about it, but it’s true. No bar stop, no snack, no nothing. How do they find …? Well, I suppose, they’d track a beer or a snack kiosk with their noses, but the toilets in this country aren’t allowed to smell. So, I guess blind people are meant to go directly to the bus stop. What if we invented a system where the lines included information on the kind of store you’re passing?”

Emma remembered they’d gotten quite giddy making up ways to inform persons with canes what place they were passing. “Bumps,” she had suggested. “One for a café, two for a restaurant, three for a clothing store.”

“Canes that pick up a radio frequency running through the white stripes. Like a guided audio tour in a museum.”

“Satellite beams that give you a verbal map …”

She smiled remembering that conversation. Then she frowned. That friend had committed suicide a few years later. He had hung himself in his closet at home, and, whenever she thought of him, she wondered if she could’ve done something to save him. With a frisson of fear and excitement, sometimes she thought that, instead of saving him, she might have joined him had he only asked.

The rat-a-tat-tat of carry-on bags brought her back to the present. Between the trains and the rattling wheels of luggage and official carts, one might think an earthquake was happening. If this were the country of her dreams, California, most likely it would be time to run or duck. But here the earth did not shiver. Here all was solid.

A couple of nights earlier, she had watched a show on Rome where people whistled, laughed, and talked to each other along the old cobblestone alleys and in the cafes on the plaza. Now, she was looking into grim faces and hearing determined marching steps that paused for no one. Eyes front, her fellow citizens seemed to be on a mission. This was no country for idlers.

Her nostrils filled with the scent of paper, cardboard, and the dusty smell of electric space heaters as she walked by a news kiosk. The two middle-aged ladies behind the counter stared sourly out from behind their mountains of papers, chewing gum, candies, and cigarettes. Even the people buying snacks looked sour, and the men drinking beer looked aggrieved. They stood at the tall metal tables not looking at anybody, downing their beer as if it was medicine.

She figured she probably looked just as grim. It was hard to smile when your face felt frozen, and everything was gray. Maybe the men looked as though they were ingesting medicine because it was not yet nine o’clock on a Monday morning, and one should most certainly not look like one drank beer for fun at such an early hour.

When she was still a student, Emma had worked in a kiosk for a month. The kiosk had been so depressing and boring she had spent most of the day thinking about pain-free ways to commit suicide. It was the only job she had been able to get. Her typing was two-fingered; she was not qualified to be a waitress or work in a store; and it seemed there was nothing she was good at. She’d gotten As in Latin and history, but that was useless for all practical purposes. So, she had signed up to work in a kiosk. Her shift started at six, when it was still dark. Within minutes of opening the shutters, a truck delivered newspapers and magazines, which had to be unpacked and stacked for the early morning customers. Then the old magazines were taken off the rack and tied for the next morning’s pickup. Mostly her work consisted of unpacking and stacking chewing gum, chocolates, and cigarettes so there would never be an empty slot.

Emma often wondered why she hadn’t, at least, enjoyed the free chocolates or reading the trashy novels. Maybe she had. Yet, mostly she remembered how she dreaded the long empty hours when all she could think about was death. She could still feel that emptiness. People had purchased their papers, cigarettes, or chocolates without looking at her, as though she were nothing more than a dispensing machine.

She double-backed to the kiosk and picked up a candy bar. She smiled at the gray-haired woman as she held it out.

“How are you this morning?” Emma asked.

“Hmmph,” the woman grumbled with a frown and added, “one franc fifty.”

Emma paid and left. She hardly ever passed a kiosk without flashing back to those memories—empty days with nothing but hopelessness and a dank, dark future of unpacking cigarette cartons, unemployable for anything more meaningful. Some days she stopped, trying to make a connection with the people behind the counters.

And when they rejected her validation, as this woman had done, it gave Emma a shiver of satisfaction: She had been right. She was nothing but a cipher, and, if she weren’t such a coward, she would have ended up in the closet along with her friend. It was like picking a scab. The ache was a delicious and shameful reminder that she was still alive.