Читать книгу Diving the Wrecks - magdalena zschokke - Страница 6

The four-story building of native sandstone had been built in the sixties, and cleaned and sandblasted several times since. It looked clean, anonymous, and boring. Every time she saw it, she had a sinking feeling. She hated the building, and she dreaded having to go in. The door opened from the inside, and Mrs. Meyer stepped through. They greeted each other, and Emma hurried past.

Inside, the hallway smelled faintly of stale air, cooked cabbage, and soap. The stairwell to the basement was open, and she could hear the washing machine going. Tuesday! Tomorrow was her washday. She really had to remember. She climbed the stairs and noticed dirt on the stone steps, not just in the corners, but clumps of it having fallen off someone’s shoes. It had been her turn to sweep the stairwell the previous Saturday. She’d done it though, hadn’t she?

Then she remembered. Saturday had been a very bad day. She’d stayed in bed ’til noon with a terrible headache, and, in the afternoon, she had to do a school project with her younger son that involved plastic bottles and soap powder. She hadn’t swept! Right after lunch, she would come out and get rid of that mud. Where had it come from anyway? It hadn’t rained for days. Mud clumps? Who could have brought them in? No wonder Mrs. Meyer looked at her in an odd way.

She passed the second floor landing, and her eyes lingered on the apartment door on the left. The Meyers made a point of decorating for the season and now were getting ready for Easter. A plastic bunny sat on the top shelf of a shoe rack. They each had three pairs of shoes neatly stacked: his on the bottom, hers on the shelf above his. The decorations were on the top shelf.

The bunny perched on a nest of vine wood. For the Christmas season, Emma knew that the nest served as a manger. Now the fat bunny teetered there, looking evil and cross-eyed. He stared down on a colony of smaller rabbits arranged to look like a family at a picnic. There was momma rabbit, several babies arranged around a plastic carrot and, for some reason, a couple of red potatoes, and, farther afield, plastic greenery, and colored eggs.

A woven basket held several decorated eggs that Emma recognized. There were a few Emma had bought them, supposedly hand painted in Russia. There was one egg Mr. Meyer had painted in his younger years. It was made to look like a devil’s face, and he claimed it was the egg that had won him the annual egg-crunching tournament. And if that were true, he had cheated. Emma had lifted it one day and knew that it was a clay egg. Two others, delicately edged with acid on a brown onion-skin background were Mrs. Meyer’s inheritance from her father, who, according to her recollections, had to have been a most wonderful man. Emma knew that Mrs. Meyer’s mother had killed herself when the girl had been in her teens. Possibly Mr. Meyer had been a better father than husband.

By now she had reached her own landing. The apartment across from her own had recently changed hands, and she didn’t know her neighbors yet. She knew they were foreign and came from some Eastern Block country, Serbia or somewhere. They were young and without children. He seemed sullen and she afraid whenever Emma ran into either of them in the hallway.

She slotted the key into her front door while slipping off her shoes and pushed the door open. The apartment was still, empty, and cold. The dark hallway, as always, made her catch her breath, and she flipped the light switch before stepping in. All the doors were shut the way she had left them before going out. On the left was the door to the kitchen and, directly across from it, was the dining room. She opened both to admit as much light as possible. Despite the ceiling fixture, a dim one-bulb affair in a curlicue hood which made her think of a meringue pie, the hallway was always dark. The thin light trickling through the kitchen window did nothing to lighten the hallway. Instead, it made it more frightening by creating shadows. She had once described it to a friend as part of the set for Rosemary’s Baby, the nightmare hallway where hands would reach out for Rosemary when she walked by on her way to meeting the devil. And, although her friend swore the hallway came from the movie Repulsion, Emma stuck by her own memory. What remained the truth was that entering her own home was a terrifying act of defeating herself.

Emma shook herself into action. She hung her coat on the coat rack next to the kitchen door where a selection of outdoor items had claimed space, much of it long unused. There was a man’s hat from a long-forgotten dinner party. There were several scarves from a couple of seasons ago when they had all been into scarves, the more colorful the better. There were two or three plastic raincoats, one so tiny she doubted even her younger son would be able to squeeze into it.

”I will clean out this rack along with the kids’ closets this week. I’ll start right after I sweep the stairs.” She promised this out loud, convinced it would make her follow through. Although it wasn’t always so, she kept doing it—just in case.

She had left the apartment door open and now heard the thunder of children’s feet coming up the stairs. The sound propelled her into the kitchen, shoving the apartment door closed with one foot on the way past. Most likely it was her upstairs neighbors’ kids; their school let out ten minutes earlier than her own. She noticed the flashing light on the answering machine and pressed the button. Manfred wasn’t going to make it home for lunch. She breathed a sigh of relief and immediately felt a stab of guilt. She had forgotten his dry cleaning again!

“Thank God, he’s not coming home. I’m going right after lunch,” she promised.

In the kitchen, she switched on the electric kettle on her way to the refrigerator, then wondered if there was any water left in it but decided to check the fridge first. There was nothing in it but some leftover salad, bottles of ketchup and vinegar, jars of pickles, and tubes of mayonnaise and mustard. She remembered she had gone out this morning to do two errands: groceries and dry cleaning. Then she’d been sidetracked by trying to see color, the tropical reef in the river, and meeting Andy. With her head still in the refrigerator, she suddenly wondered where the idea about the reef had come from. It was a more visceral experience certainly than a mere dream could be. She’d never been to a tropical island, never snorkeled on a reef. It had to have been in a movie or maybe an aquarium somewhere.

The teakettle was making a strangled hissing sound. She slammed the refrigerator shut and lifted the kettle off its electric base, taking it over to the sink. When she ran water into the pot through the spout, it wheezed and steamed. There had been no water in it. She wondered if electric kettles could be melted if they ran dry. Someone should invent one that shut itself off when there was no water in it … a mind could do that. Otherwise, if you shot too much electricity through it, it would boil dry.

The kettle full, she set it back on its base and flipped the switch. She headed for the cabinet that held dry food and found a package of Maggi instant mashed potatoes. “Time to buy more,” she reminded herself and dumped the contents into a bowl, then settled at the kitchen sink to wait. She switched the radio on to her favorite oldies station, and “Sitting on the dock of the Bay” drifted in, filling the kitchen with sound.

“Ahhh, perfect—sitting and waiting,” she told herself and hummed along, trying to discern the words. They had something to do with California, which finally brought back her dream: the roller coaster, the pacified ocean, the bright sun—a romantic place if there ever was one. She wondered who she would be if she were living in California. It didn’t seem as if people there had to cook lunch. All they did was go to restaurants, fast-food places, and took picnics to the beach.

Would she be efficient there? Would she remember to do things? She was sure that, if she lived in California, she wouldn’t be home to cook at noon. They served school lunches there. Or was that another rumor?

The door banged open and hit the wall. “Hi, Mom,” she heard in stereo. Ron and Karl had arrived together. Although they were three years apart in age, they still played together like puppies when they were at home. In the outside world when they were among their friends, they kept apart, particularly Karl, being too cool to hang out with his little brother. Their shoes hit the floor with dull thumps.

“Hang up your coats,” she shouted even though she could already hear a swooshing sound of jackets tossed in the direction of the coat rack and sliding down the wall to the floor. The next instant, the boys were in the kitchen like a dense tornado sucking up all the available air. Emma had noticed she often felt the urge to open the windows when the boys came storming in from the outside. Not only did the air implode, space itself felt denser. It was just like the science project Ron had been working on—the “storm in a bottle” project. She could see herself being sucked in.

She placed a couple of bowls in front of the two boys. The mashed potatoes were watery, since she was all out of milk, but she had provided the ketchup bottle. The boys squirted the red goo happily on top of the mounds and ate without complaints.

The next hour flew by in a concert of talk, questions, fights, and laughter. Emma participated, refereed, and soothed in turn. Then the shoes clumped back down the stairs, and the apartment fell silent for the afternoon. Emma sat at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. She knew she loved them, but sometimes they were either too much, or she was not enough. Having Manfred home was no help because, especially recently, he was more needy than his sons. It seemed his office at the central railroad distribution station was going through some kind of reorganization, and the tension made him irritable. It wasn’t likely he would lose his job, but the uncertainty caused his ulcers to act up, which caused him to be more impatient with his co-workers than usual, which, in turn, made him more worried and his ulcers bleed, and so on.

They had been married for nearly thirteen years, and Emma couldn’t exactly remember why she had agreed to his proposel or how it happened. She remembered he made her feel she was loved, that she was important, and he said that, with her, he’d be a better man.

He was a teaching assistant at the university where she was a first-year student, and he played the cello. That was one thing she loved about him. She had convinced herself that a man who could play an instrument with so much feeling had to be a good man. Other than that, she hadn’t liked him very much. In retrospect, all she could say for sure was that she had fallen in love with his love for her.

One day, early on, they had a fight. The reason had long since disappeared; possibly it was because of one of his frequent flirtations. All she truly remembered was being very angry with him and feeling wronged. She’d been at his flat, and, as so often happened, they’d gone to bed. She had hated him intensely and visualized the sum of her hatred and anger as a bright flame inside her chest while he labored above her. She concentrated on his wide, flat feet, his spatulate hands, and his hairless chest with breasts many women would envy. She sent her hatred out to all the parts of her body, lying unmoving on her back, burning him with hatred and disgust. She was sure he’d pull back scorched, but all he did was pump away at her and increase his speed until finally he gasped and rolled off her. He hadn’t noticed.

She never forgot the dismay that hit her like a physical punch. She could recall the feeling of utter invisibility and loneliness, as if she had just been violated by a total stranger, as if the man who now lay sweating and spent next to her might as well have been an alien. She had never told him about it, and when he had asked to marry her, she had agreed, listlessly.

Primarily she agreed because she had the suspicion she was pregnant, which turned out to be the case, and they were married in a civil service two months later. Now, here they were after all these years. Manfred kept having flings, and, while she frequently knew about them, she didn’t mind because it meant he left her to herself. It seemed to make him happier, which made homelife easier.

She often wondered who she would have become had she listened to her parents. They hadn’t wanted her to marry him. What if she’d refused him, tossed his ring back at him after his first infidelity, and gone on to have a life? Her father would not have disinherited her. Her parents might have remained part of her life and possibly given her money to emigrate. She liked to imagine herself in America, but her visualization of a life there was always a bit hazy. Would she teach? Would she be married? If so, would there be an English-speaking Manfred?

Today, she went further. She didn’t have to be a mother. She could have become a sheriff on a motorcycle. Motorcycles were a California thing. They were for riding the lonely highways and for breaking free. They were everything Switzerland wasn’t. She would change her name and become someone called Stacey.

She saw herself riding alone on the freeway in her immaculately-ironed tan uniform, dark wraparound shades, and black motorcycle boots. She would catch the bad guys, give tickets for speeding, and protect the women whose husbands beat them up. She would be a crack shot, too, she was sure.

The phone rang, and she let the machine pick it up.

“Hello, Mrs. Willener. This is Dr. Menckell. I had you down for an appointment this afternoon at two, and it is now fifteen minutes past. Do I have a wrong date, or are you indisposed? Would you give me a call at your leisure? Thank you.”

“Damn!” It was her psychiatrist. She had completely forgotten.

Okay, the man was forgettable. She imagined him now to take her mind off her lapse. He was gray and shaped like a fireplug with hardly any indentation for either waist or neck. His thin hair was plastered tightly against his scalp in a comb-over so slick it almost looked painted on. His nose was thin and pointed but small. His lips were thin. His hands, thin and shapeless, had fingers that looked soft and boneless like those of a Renaissance painter’s model. He spoke with very little inflection and never moved from behind his desk … not even to shake her hand.

She had never seen him standing. Even the first time she had gone to see him, he sat behind his square desk with its low front that allowed only a peek at the toes of his shoes. He had waved her to a seat and started speaking.

“You have been referred to me by your personal physician,” he intoned. “She tells me you are having trouble sleeping, and I might be able to help. My fees are the standard one hundred francs. If you need to cancel an appointment, I need a twenty-four-hour advance notice, or you will be charged. I do not deal with insurance directly. However, you will most likely have the cost reimbursed when you send in the paperwork. I will sign the forms, and it should not cause any problems. I suggest we meet twice a week to begin with, and, after an interval of six weeks, we will revisit this arrangement as needed.”

It was true that her primary physician had sent her to see him. She hadn’t been prepared for his coldness. He wasn’t interested in her. He made her feel shallow and ungrateful. He didn’t allow for the possibility that she was uncomfortable with him or that, simply, they were not a good match. Yet, she had meekly submitted to him precisely because of this coldness. After all, he was the doctor. She needed help, and, obviously, she was not a very good judge of people—just look at Manfred …

She now envisioned his office which was on the ground floor of an old Victorian building on a quiet tree-lined street. As in a bygone era, the building was divided: part living quarters, part medical suite. His house filled her with the same dread her apartment block did. It was dead. Although the garden was meticulously maintained, the grossly-oversized philodendron were carefully staked and spaced so precisely they might as well have been plastic. Nothing moved. Nothing smelled. Nothing exuded joy. At least, that was how she explained her dread to herself.

She wondered about a wife. Every so often she could hear something bang behind the wall. Was the wife beating a carpet or running a vacuum cleaner into a piece of furniture? He never seemed to hear, or at least he did not flinch, did not admit to any exterior life. Since he was so gray and forgettable, she could not imagine him expressing any passion, not even anger. She didn’t think he ever took his clothes off or had sex, and, for sure, he would be constipated, sitting all day as he did.

So, she had forgotten her appointment. Most likely they would have to deal with it for the next three or four sessions: aggressive passivity, undermining of authority. Didn’t she want to get better? Ever since she stopped taking the pills he had prescribed, their sessions had become even more unpleasant. All she wanted to say was, “I don’t like you. You’re not helping. I don’t want to come back.” However, Manfred made her promise to stick it out for six months; her physician had strongly urged her, and she knew she had to do something. Her life was falling apart, and she couldn’t seem to get off the ride.

Instead of dealing with the message, she slipped it into her coat, wrapped one of the colorful scarves around her neck, and, grabbing her keys and wallet, left the apartment. Her shoes felt cold and wet, but she didn’t want to change into another pair. Her other cold-weather shoes would have to be checked for spiders or other small bugs that might have made a home there. She hadn’t worn any other pair for weeks.

She walked the three blocks to the supermarket where the lights were bright, and people purposefully moved down the aisles. It was mostly women at this time of day. There were a few old men, retirees looking for the companionship of busy citizens. She grabbed a basket and headed left. Chocolates in bars, in powders, in cookies: It seemed there was no end of chocolate-related food items. She put a box of truffles into her bag, then bread, milk. She remembered the instant mashed potatoes, some wine, and cheese.

By the time she reached the fresh fruit and vegetable aisle, she was flagging. She could not think of anything she might wish to eat or cook. She couldn’t remember what fruit was still at home, or what vegetable the kids ate this week. It changed so fast. One week, it was carrots. The next week, they spat at carrots, but were willing to try some string beans. Then it was corn. Tomatoes! That was it. They were eating tomatoes just now. Maybe she could make spaghetti with red sauce. If she added lots of garlic, they would all be healthy.

God only knew whether Manfred would even come home, or, if he did, whether he’d eat with them. The week before, one of his co-workers had gotten him started on a yogurt and oatmeal diet for his ulcers. He’d eaten nothing but that until he became so bored that he went out and bought a huge steak, which he cooked and ate by himself in the kitchen while she was putting the kids to bed. Then, he’d groaned all night in pain.

Emma came around the corner of the oil-vinegar-condiment aisle and was blinded by an expanse of bright, primary-colored pyramids. The fresh produce assaulted her with its full-color spectrum, displayed like so many precious jewels, glistening with water pearls, and promising untold taste experiences. There were the green grapes, the mauve plums, olive-colored kiwi, bright-yellow kumquats, and subtler-yellow Asian pears. Pumpkins, in oranges of a painter’s dream, were piled alongside their smaller color cousins, the persimmon. Blood-red pomegranates, as well as mottled green cantaloupe, and the spiky greens of pineapple sat next to bulbous pink grapefruit. She tottered, assailed by the display. One could buy fruit from Mexico, Asia, and the Americas with names as exotic as the colors.

There was one corner, however, with sad-looking apples hailed as locally-grown, organic fruit and, therefore, particularly recommended. Next to the pineapples from Hawaii, the avocados from Israel, and the oranges from Greece, the apples looked so sad and pathetic. Emma bought a couple of pounds, because she felt bad for them. Like orphans, the poor little things laid there, shriveling by the minute.

With a sigh of relief, she joined a queue and set her basket on the floor. The man in front of her held tightly to his shopping cart, which held nothing but a loaf of plastic bread and a lightbulb. Her eyes traveled to his grizzled neck with its creases as deep as trenches. Idly, she wondered how the man would wash there and decided he probably didn’t bother all that much. His coat was shabby, and she could see several grease stains on the forearms of the sleeves. The man grumbled to himself and once turned back and said, “You mind not standing so close?”

Emma at first glanced behind her to see who he could have meant, but the middle-aged woman behind her was busy checking the items in her cart and had clearly not been paying attention. Looking around at the other counters, nobody except for a spotty teenager seemed to have noticed the interchange. The teenager, with spikes coming out of his nostrils and upper and lower lips, sneered. Emma wasn’t sure whether it was at her or the old man who had moved a couple of steps forward in his process to the exit.

Emma made sure to stay back and leave a gap, which caused the woman behind her to bump the cart into Emma’s legs. Neither spoke, and soon the line settled back into the aimlessness of waiting. “Like purgatory,” Emma thought. “You’d stand in line for centuries, and all movement would be an empty trading of places. Religion hadn’t invented it for the future. We all suffer it daily.”

When it was her turn to place her purchases on the belt, she realized she’d forgotten to buy meat for dinner, as well as cereal for breakfast. Manfred would certainly want his flax-seed flakes. He would be cross tomorrow, but she could not face another stint in purgatory. She grabbed her plastic bags—having, once again, forgotten to bring along a tote bag, which caused the clerk to sigh disapprovingly—and began walking quickly through the automatic door into the gray, flat, afternoon light.

The man from the checkout line was sitting on the wall across from the entrance, his shabby straw shopping bag between his feet. He glanced at her and glanced away as though he’d never seen her before. Obviously, she only existed in his world as an encroaching presence in a checkout line.