Читать книгу Diving the Wrecks - magdalena zschokke - Страница 8

Back in the apartment, after forcing herself across the threshold, she dumped the bags on the kitchen table, then hurried to the back of the hall, opening doors on her way and switching on all the lights. The Polanski movie again: This hallway really was creepy. She stopped, puzzled. Why was she flashing back to that movie? Once upon a time, years ago, she had thought of her life in terms of movie plots. Now she suddenly wondered when and why she had stopped thinking that way. Somehow the thought made her go cold all over.

Their bedroom was the at the back of the apartment. It sported windows on two walls: One overlooked the street, and the other offered a view directly into the bedroom of the apartment acoss the back alley. The woman who lived there was about her own age and religiously aired out her bed linens. Once a week on Mondays, the duvet and pillows lay across the open window for several hours. When it rained, the duvet was piled on chairs as near to the open window as the rain allowed. When they first moved in, Emma had joked to Manfred about how glad she always was to know when it was Monday. She had no idea, even after seven years of living across from those duvets, what her neighbor’s name was. The husband was a pudgy, balding man, who, when she encountered him outside, always seemed rather abstracted.

The window across the alley was closed. The curtains of thick, dark-blue brocade were drawn. Emma stood for a while before she drew her own drapes. She wondered what it would be like to watch her and Manfred. Nothing very interesting, she concluded: no sex with open windows; hardly any sex, period; and no yelling fights, at least not loud enough to be heard. Probably her neighbor concluded as she did: Her neighbors were boring people living a boring life with their boring children, making sure a new generation of boring citizens would never be tempted to step out of line.

“I bet you’d never stick it out here,” she said to Stacey, “but you know, nobody’s exactly what they seem.” For an instant she was tempted to give Stacey some serious baggage to make her more real but decided against it. Stacey rode a Harley. She was blond, and her life was good.

She stepped back and felt the pressure of the dark hallway behind her. She tore open the curtain again and opened the window as far as it went. She did the same to the window on the other wall, turned on both bedside lamps, and left the bedroom. Across the hall, she opened the door to the bathroom and turned on the light there as well. This didn’t help much because the only light in the bathroom came from two bulbs over the sink. There were no windows. She knew that if Manfred were to walk in, he’d declare her seriously deranged. Why would anyone turn lights on for no reason? It was wasteful; it was bad role modeling; and it would invite strangers to spy.

The bathroom was one of the most depressing aspects of the place. Narrow, mean, and always dank, it smelled unpleasantly of mold and old sweat no matter how often she scrubbed the whole room down. Its saving grace in a household with four people was that no one was tempted to hang out and take long baths, so the wait for a spot at the sink or in the shower was usually quite short. Next to it was the door to the toilet, but she didn’t bother to open that. It, too, had no window, and its ceiling light was dim enough to barely allow reading while sitting on the toilet, which hung on the back wall as far from the door as the long, narrow room allowed.

Next to their bedroom was the boys’ room. She opened that door, switched on the light, and flung open the window, which overlooked the side street. The gray ribbon of concrete was empty of moving cars, but parked up on both sides and right below the window, the glass dome of the bicycle shed gleamed, reflecting the gray sky. When they first put up the shed, she was pleased. For once, there was something not square, not stone or concrete, something curvy and open. The shed looked like the choral dome they used for concerts to improve the sound in the gymnasium. But soon the shed lost its luster. It had turned into yet another neighborhood chore: One week you cleaned the stairway; one week you polished the mail boxes; and one week you cleaned the glass dome of rain spots, bird poop, and other disfigurements. That same week you swept the sidewalk. Typed, printed, and assigned meticulously, the chores list hung in the basement next to the laundry schedule.

By now, the bicycle dome stood as a memorial to her lack of neighborly spirit. All too often, the house manager, Mrs. Meyer, had to either remind Emma of her missed duty or, worse, went to redo the chore Emma had so pathetically mangled. It wasn’t that she deliberately missed spots or smeared the bird droppings, it was … what? She just didn’t see them? Manfred had asked her. Her friend, Julia, from downstairs had asked her. She herself kept wondering what it was, but it kept happening. Mrs. Meyer had tried to shame her by redoing the job, but, even while she felt seriously ashamed, she didn’t seem to achieve anything more satisfactory the next time.

She averted her gaze from the gleaming dome. It must have been Mrs. Meyer’s week to clean it. She turned from the window and surveyed the disaster zone of the kids’ bedroom. Their bunk beds were unmade. Karl’s duvet cover hung halfway down, as if he’d slid down from the upper bed on his way out the door. Toys were strewn haphazardly, and yesterday’s clothes lay in dejected heaps. She bent down and picked up the discards, folded those that could be reused, and piled the dirty ones by the door to be taken to the laundry bin.

Whenever either of the boys went on sleepovers, Emma would check out the other boys’ bedrooms. Other kids seemed to have a place for everything with everything in its place—just one more thing she didn’t seem able to manage. Of course, maybe those boys had to scramble to clean up their room as much as hers did whenever they invited someone over. And then her bedroom ended up looking like a disaster area, because so much of the kids’ belongings had to be evicted in order to clear enough floor space for a bunch of sleeping bags.

She tugged on Karl’s duvet and shook his pillows. Then she sat on the lower bunk bed and found herself clutching Ron’s teddy bear. The bear was going bald on the side of his head where Ron would use him for a pillow, and one of his eyes was loose. She patted his ragged fur as if to smooth it and remembered when the bear had first arrived. It had been Ronnie’s third birthday, which he spent sitting on his godfather’s lap, and, when it was time for bed, he had asked to be adopted by Ron.

“I don’t want to live here anymore,” he had said. “I want to go with him.”

She and Manfred had a huge fight that night. Manfred had accused her of being in love with Ron. He had paced the room, defiantly stating, ”Now he’s stealing my son as well. I won’t allow it!” She had ridiculed his fear, had thrown his affairs in his face, and threatened to take his sons away for good. For days she couldn’t sleep, because she was so afraid he would retaliate. Instead, he had been quiet and unusually attentive. After a while, life settled back to its routine. They did not talk often of Ron, and he was not part of their dinner circles.

In middle school, Ron and Emma had been best friends. She knew he thought he was in love with her, and she wished she could have said the same. Although she trusted him, liked him, and felt smart, beautiful, and desirable around him, she recoiled from his touch.

He had gone to England while she wandered about the university looking for a passion, looking for salvation. They had lost contact for several years, and, by the time Emma found herself pregnant with her second son, he had been employed at the American embassy. He had been pleased to be asked to act as Ronnie’s godfather. Ron turned out to have a real touch with children and generally brought the favored presents.

Now she backed out of the room, her arms full of dirty clothes, which she dropped into the laundry basket in the linen closet. She crossed the hallway and entered the dining room. There, too, she opened the window, which in the real estate brochure promised “a brilliant view to the Alps.” Mostly, the window simply looked over the larger noisy road, across rows and rows of similar apartment blocks to the southwest of town, and a distant white haze. Still, the window was large and gave the room an airy feeling that in winter often turned into a rather frigid draft. No matter how much she tried to plug the door and window, the air whistled through and made their feet feel as if they were sitting in cold water.

This room also contained a TV and a settee with reading lamp. An overhead chandelier loomed over the dining table. It was one of Manfred’s inherited pieces and consisted of metal curlicues, bulbs made to look like candles, and twenty glass diamonds, which reflected the fake candlelight. Emma knew the exact number of glass diamonds because she dusted them at least once a month. Manfred insisted his mother had dusted them weekly, and that the chandelier lacked brilliance due to her lack of attention.

She switched on the TV, as well as the reading light, and muted the sound. At least some flickering color would come through. All that light illuminated the incongruity of the place. The antiseptic white walls shrouded the heavy, dark wood German furniture: an armoire with heavy bulbous feet like a gouty matron at a ball and a sideboard almost black with age, which diminished the ridiculous Ikea table like a barge tied up to a paper boat. Emma had never understood why Manfred wanted to live with his parents’ furniture. The pieces were depressing, unsuited to the apartment, and generally unused. All the sideboard drawers were empty except for one that held his family’s silver. The armoire, for winter and rain coats, was not used, because the door stuck. If you left a coat in there for any time at all, it came out smelling of spoiled meat. Emma could never open it without a twinge of fear that this time she would discover the source of the smell, and it would turn out to be the corpse of Grandma—or worse.

She stepped back into the hallway, breathing hard as if she had been running. The hallway was still gloomy, the coats glowered, and the walls looked as though the devil’s hands might reach out any minute just like the movie. Emma sank onto the stool at the entrance, placed there for putting on shoes, and covered her face with her hands. It was hopeless. The place was dark and unwelcoming, and some days, like today, she simply couldn’t stand it.

All at once she practically tossed the food into the refrigerator, left those items that didn’t need refrigeration on the table, and dumped Manfred’s clothes on their bed. She stuck one arm into her coat, wrapped a scarf around her neck, and was out the door before she realized she’d left the lights on and the windows open. She shrugged. It would only be a minute. She ran down the stairs, swinging past the landings by holding on to the newel posts.

Two blocks over, she banged open the door to the secondhand store and charged in. The dusty old man behind the counter looked up sharply as if he expected to be robbed, but she didn’t have time to apologize. There! It was still there! A huge glass aquarium, as big as a baby crib, complete with light and pump and a sign assuring her it was all in working order. It had sat in that dusty room for weeks. She had often passed it wondering how it could have ended up there and what had been in it before.

The old man looked at her aghast, and, when he recognized her, he asked, “Are you all right? What’s burning?” His milky, white eyes looked past her at the door, but it had not broken, and she closed it carefully behind her.