Читать книгу The Sunflower Forest - Torey Hayden, Torey Hayden - Страница 11

When I was very young, we lived in west Texas for a while. I don’t remember much about it. I was only about three at the time. I don’t recall anything about the house at all. I do, however, remember that there was no yard at the back of the house. The ground just stretched away from the back porch down a hill and out on to alkali flats before dissolving into the interminable plains. Sitting on the porch, I used to look out over the landscape and think to myself that if I could only see far enough, the plains would stretch all the way to the ocean and on the other side was Madrid, Spain. Why Madrid, Spain, I don’t know. How I even knew there was such a place, when I was that age, I don’t know either. But that was one of only two clear memories of the house in west Texas. My other memory was of the sunflowers.

Down on the alkali flats below the hill grew sunflowers. They may have been wild ones, springing up after the summer downpours had flooded the flats. Or maybe they were cultivated. My memory doesn’t serve me there. What I do remember is sitting on the porch and looking down on all those sunflowers.

They were beautiful from the hill. The big golden heads would track the sun through the day, and that made them seem as if they were looking at me part of the time and looking away the other. Sometimes children would come and play there. From where I was sitting on the hill, I could see them, small as insects, disappear amid the flowers and the huge heads would nod and sway as the children ran among them. Laughter would ride up the hill on the wind.

I longed to go down there myself. The sunflowers beckoned to me welcomingly. Certainly I didn’t have permission the day I did go. I remember slipping down the rough prairie grass of the hillside, keeping low to the ground to stay out of Mama’s sight, in case she glanced out the window. Then I ran across the flats and into the shadows of the flowers. My biggest concern was not getting caught.

When I ran among the sunflowers, I discovered they were gigantic, a veritable forest, not small, the way they appeared from the hilltop. The flowers were high above my head, and before I realized what was happening, I was deep among the tall stalks. With each step I took, the green-and-gold wilderness closed silently behind me. In no time at all, I was lost, trapped.

I screamed.

I flailed about amid the sunflowers, hysterical, crying in terror to get out. The flowers went on and on in all directions, and I could not escape. Panic-stricken, I thrashed and screamed and was swallowed up.

Mama found me. From the house on the hilltop she could hear my terrified crying. She’d come crashing in among the sunflowers, bending them aside, pushing them down. They were even taller than she was.

In her hurried slide down the hillside to reach me, she had slipped and scraped her knee. I remember clutching frantically at her and tasting blood mixed with my tears. She pulled my fingers apart and lifted me up on her shoulders so that my head was above the flowers and she carried me out.

What I remember with brittle sharpness is that final moment, being on my mama’s shoulders. I remember turning and looking back at the forest closing behind us, the flowers bright in the Texas sun, and innocent and heartless.

For my mother, however, sunflowers had an entirely different connotation. They were of almost mystical significance for her. Sunflowers had grown wild in the back garden of their cottage in Wales after the war. The way Mama talked about it, it was easy to tell that she perceived the appearance of those unexpected sunflowers as practically a religious experience. They were the sign of her resurrection, and she knew she had managed to pass through her season in Hell.

My mother loved to tell us about those years in Wales. They were among her very best stories, spun out in epic, almost myth-like proportions, laced with lyrical descriptions of an aged land. I loved them above all the others, not only because she made them so beautiful to listen to, but also because they were the only stories about her life after the war that had the same magnificence as her tales of Lébény and her girlhood. They reassured me that she still had the capacity to be happy and that all her joy had not been dragged from her by the horrors of the war.

The translated name of the cottage was Forest of Flowers. It was high up a mountainside in north Wales. Mama always told us how she and Daddy had had to climb the last half mile to the cottage on a small, steep path. I had a very romantic image of Forest of Flowers in my mind. I could see the narrow, meandering trail passing through sun-dappled woods, the forest floor a carpet of snowdrops and bluebells and populated with little Thumpers and Bambis. And there in the clearing, like Snow White’s cottage, was Mama’s holly hedge and the winter jasmine and the quaint wooden arch, all leading up to the whitewashed Forest of Flowers.

Those were her sunflower years.

In Kansas, sunflowers are grown commercially. If you go out in the late summer along the small country roads in western Kansas, you’ll come upon field after field of flowers, a sea of golden, nodding heads. In the time since we’d moved to Kansas, it had become a family ritual to drive out every few weeks to watch the progress of the sunflower fields from planting in March to harvesting in mid-autumn. In spite of that childhood experience, which still came back to me in nightmares, I enjoyed these journeys, although I never could bring myself to walk down the narrow rows between the stalks, planted in military straightness, the way Mama and Megan did. For my mother especially this observation of the sunflower crop was a most pleasurable way of marking the year. The sunflowers were the single redeeming feature of Kansas for my mother.

By mid-March the ground underfoot was spongy and smelled of newness. The sun had grown surprisingly hot in the space of a few weeks. It was a Saturday afternoon, but despite the weather, I was in my room studying. On the next Monday we were having an exam in calculus, and I’d be the first to admit that calculus was not my best subject. It wasn’t going to be an easy test either. Mrs Browder told us on the previous Friday that she was intending to give us a set of ten problems and we had to solve eight of them. So I was frantically going back over old assignments to make sure I knew how to do them.

Mama came to the open door of my room. ‘I feel like a walk,’ she announced.

This caught me completely unawares because my mother had not been out of the yard since the end of January. I turned from my desk to see her standing in the doorway. She was dressed in old tan corduroys and a plaid shirt. She had one of Dad’s pullovers on, and her hair tied back with a yarn ribbon. She smiled at me, knowing, I think, that she’d surprised me.

‘They’ll be starting to put the sunflowers in,’ she said. ‘And I want to walk out and see.’

‘Mama, it’s quite a walk. Most of those fields are at least a couple of miles away or more. If you wait until Daddy comes home, I’m sure he’ll take you out in the car.’

She remained in the doorway. She had a small smile that gave her a look of amusement. ‘Come with me, baby. We can walk that far. It’s such a beautiful day, and I’m longing to move my legs.’

‘We don’t even know for sure if they’re putting them in the same fields as last year. I think we ought to wait for Dad.’

‘I have cobwebs in my legs. Come along with me. I want to walk.’

I turned back to my books for a moment. ‘I can’t, really, Mama. I have a calculus test on Monday morning. And I honestly think I might not pass it. Not if I don’t study; because I don’t understand how to do all these problems. In half of them I can’t even tell what they’re looking for.’

She continued to stand there, silent but insistent. It was difficult ever to deny my mother things.

‘Maybe Daddy can take us all out in the car tomorrow,’ I said. ‘We could have a picnic. Why don’t we do that?’

Mama still had the small smile on her face. She looked young to me then, standing there in those old clothes. She had an ageless quality to her facial expressions that made it very difficult for people to guess her age.

‘What about Megs?’ I suggested when it became apparent Mama wasn’t going to give up the idea. Megan was downstairs doing something in the kitchen. I knew because I’d been hearing her throughout my studying. Megan never had been what you could call a quiet child. ‘I bet Meggie would love to go with you. Why don’t you ask her?’

Mama considered that. She waited a moment longer in case I was going to change my mind. Finally, satisfied that I wasn’t, she turned and left.

I could hear them preparing downstairs, fixing a picnic of fruit and soft drinks. Mama was talking in Hungarian, her voice full and undulant. Megan was beside herself with excitement, and her glee floated up the stairs in squeally, high-pitched syllables.

From my window I watched them leave together. They had the little knapsack with them. Bulky in Dad’s brown sweater, Mama strode off down the street, moving purposefully, like one of Odin’s Valkyries. Megan flitted around her like a small, dark wraith.

‘Where’s your mama?’ my father asked when he returned from work mid-afternoon.

‘She and Megs went to see the farmers putting in the sunflowers,’ I replied. He had come upstairs, still carrying a bag of groceries in one arm. He was in his blue work coveralls and had his cap on. He set the bag down on my bed. Taking off his cap, he ran his fingers through his hair. It stood straight up.

‘Mama asked me to go,’ I said, ‘but I have this test on Monday to study for.’

‘That’s an awful long way,’ he said.

‘That’s what I told her. I said you’d probably take her out in the car, if she’d only wait till you got back. But you know how Mama is. She wanted it right then.’

He wandered over to the window and pulled back the curtain. ‘It’s been such a long time since she’s been out,’ he said, more to himself than to me. Then he turned in my direction. ‘Did she say where she was going?’

‘No.’

I knew what he was thinking, even though he didn’t say it. He was thinking I should have asked her specifically, that I had been irresponsible to let my mother wander off with Megan without finding out at least which way they planned to go. It had not occurred to me until just that moment that Mama might have had no idea of where she was going. That was the problem with Mama. Like the time she had dismantled the refrigerator because it wasn’t working. Mama would set her mind to do something and she’d do it, not caring whatsoever that she had no clue about how to go about it. The sheer pleasure of action was enough for her, even when her willingness to tackle something far outweighed her actual knowledge of what was involved. Suddenly the simple Saturday afternoon walk seemed fraught with every kind of possible disaster.

‘Maybe I should take the car and go look for them,’ Dad said thoughtfully.

‘I don’t think you need to do that,’ I said. ‘If they get lost, they can call. Megan’d know to do that.’

‘Do they have any money with them?’

Again, I realized I hadn’t checked. ‘Well, they could go to a farmhouse and use the phone there.’

‘How long have they been gone?’

‘Since about one.’

My father sighed. ‘She’s been inside all winter. She should have waited.’ Letting the curtain fall back into place, he went over and picked up the bag of groceries from the bed. ‘Well, I’ll give them until five. If they’re not back by then, I’ll take the car out and look for them.’

There was no need to worry. At 4.30 the storm door slammed, and I heard the sound of Mama’s voice calling for my father. When I came downstairs, I found them embracing, involved in one of those chaste but terribly long, complete-with-droning-bees-sound-effects kisses that they got into. Dad never said anything to her about being gone without telling him. Instead, he told her that Mr Hughson from the garage had paid him double overtime for working Saturday afternoon and that he’d bought us steaks for supper.

When it became obvious that I’d get stuck helping with the meal if I stayed downstairs, I returned to my room to study. Megan had gone thundering up the stairs past me when I’d first come down, so on my way back to my room, I stopped at her door. It was shut.

‘Can I come in, Megs?’ I asked and opened the door without waiting for an answer. ‘How was it? Did you and Mama find any sunflowers being planted?’

Megan was crying. She was sitting on the edge of her bed and had her stuffed tiger cat shoved against her mouth to block the noise.

‘Whatever’s wrong with you?’ I asked in surprise.

‘Nothing,’ she said and furiously mopped her face. I came over and sat down on the bed beside her. That immediately caused her to throw the stuffed animal down and get up. She crossed to the window. Reaching for a rubber band on the window ledge, she lifted her hair up and put the band around it. I remained on the bed.

‘Megs?’

Another prolonged effort to stop the tears. I waited.

‘Lesley, who’s Klaus?’ She turned to look at me.

‘Klaus who?’

Tears flooded her eyes again. ‘That’s what I’m asking you, dummy.’

We stared at one another in silence. She had snot running over her upper lip.

‘What are you talking about, Megan?’

‘Well, you know we went out? We were walking on this road by the creek. By those fields where you and me got the fireflies last summer, remember? Anyway, there was this little boy there. He was playing in the underbrush.’

Megan paused. She came over to the bed and picked up the tiger cat again. Taking its two forelegs, one in each of her hands, she held it out in front of her and gazed at it. ‘All of a sudden,’ she said pensively to the cat, ‘Mama looks at this kid and she says to me in this really excited voice, “There’s Klaus!” You could just tell from the way she said it, she was super excited.’ Megan looked above the stuffed animal’s head to me. ‘I mean, really, really super excited, Les. She shouted, “Klaus, Klaus, come here!” And this little kid looks up and he sees her and of course, ’cause he hears this lady yelling at him, he gets this scared look and he takes off down into the underbrush. And Mama’s hollering “Klaus! Klaus!” after him.’

‘What did he look like? Did you know him?’

The tears reappeared and Megan paused a moment to quell them. Pressing the tiger cat to her chest, she sat down on the bed beside me. ‘He was just some little kid. I don’t know who. He was just little. Maybe five or something. He was wearing overalls and one of those brown jackets that’s got the flannel lining inside. And he had this really white hair.’

‘What did Mama do then?’ I asked. ‘After he ran away?’

‘We were on the road. So she ran down the road a little way, and I ran after her. Then she turned to me and said, “Maybe he doesn’t understand German.” See, she had shouted at him in German. So then she shouts at this kid in English. Same thing. “Klaus, come back here.” But the little boy was on the other side of the fence by then and he was still running. She stopped when she got to the fence. But she kept yelling for him to come back.’

I shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Megs. Really, I wouldn’t. It’s not worth getting so upset about. It’s probably just one of Mama’s funny things.’

‘But she kept saying to me, “He must not speak German. They must have raised him here.”’

‘Look, don’t worry about it. You know how Mama is sometimes.’

‘But who is Klaus?’

‘I don’t know, kiddo.’

‘Where would Mama know him from?’

‘Like I said, it’s probably nothing at all. Just a funny idea of hers. Maybe somebody she remembers from before. You know. From Germany or somewhere. I wouldn’t get all upset about it.’

‘You weren’t there. You don’t know what it was like.’

‘Just the same, I wouldn’t worry about it.’

‘But who is he?’

‘Megan, I said I don’t know. I don’t. I’ve never even heard of anyone around here named Klaus. So don’t cry about it anymore, OK? It’s probably nothing.’

‘You know what she said, though? She said to him, “Klaus, come back here. It’s Mama. Come back, it’s me, Mama.”’

Megan remained upset. I was unable to talk her out of it, and she was unable to forget it. She stayed up in her room and told my father that she was sick in her stomach when he came up to see why she hadn’t come to supper. She put on her pyjamas and crawled under the covers and stayed there. I didn’t bother her. Nor did I tell Dad what had happened. If it was one of Mama’s imaginings, there was not much to be done about it, and I saw no point in upsetting him too. And I couldn’t fathom what else it could be.

All through supper and into the evening, I watched Mama closely and wondered. That was a strange thing for her to do. Even by Mama’s standards, it was weird. I wondered what she could have been thinking of.

If anything, my mother was more buoyant that evening than she had been in months. The wind had burned the skin along her cheekbones, giving her a ruddy, healthy look. She had removed the yarn tie, and her hair lay thick and pale over her shoulders, catching the glow of the kitchen light as she moved. She and my father joked around. While he was drying the dishes, he flicked her playfully with the dish towel, and she squealed like a schoolgirl. Later, they went upstairs, hand in hand, and left me to watch television by myself.

Mama was pacing. I woke slowly to the sound, not quite realizing it wasn’t part of my dream until I was fully awake. I turned to look at the alarm clock. Four-fourteen. Putting the pillow over my head, I tried to shut out the sound.

Mama had always had trouble sleeping. Her insomnia was periodic. Sometimes she’d go seven or eight months without difficulties, then she’d start waking up in the night and be unable to go back to sleep. She said it was her back. Her back would ache, and she couldn’t sleep because of the pain. Then she’d go to the doctor for a prescription, sometimes for her back, sometimes for the insomnia. Nothing worked for long. If she was in the midst of one of her wakeful periods, she woke up, pills or no pills.

‘Mama, what’s the matter?’ I stood at the bottom of the stairs. She was by the living-room window. In her long cotton nightgown, she looked like a ghost in the darkness. The only light came from the glowing end of her cigarette.

When I spoke, she started and turned. I came farther into the room and bent down to switch on one of the table lamps. She squinted in the sudden brightness.

‘Can’t you sleep?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘What’s wrong?’

At first she did not respond. Then slowly she dragged a hand up and touched the small of her back. ‘It’s just the old hurt, Liebes. I shouldn’t have walked so far today. I overdid it. That’s all.’

‘Do you want me to rub it for you? You want to go up to my room and lie down on the bed? I think we’ve got some rubbing alcohol.’

She shook her head.

Shivering in the pre-dawn chill, I watched her. Her hair, mussed from sleep, splayed over her gown. She had broad shoulders, which the gown emphasized. I noticed she was losing weight again. Long-term dysentery during the war had played havoc with her system, and she still suffered frequent, severe bouts of diarrhoea; consequently, she never could keep weight on, even with her prodigious appetite. And when she did gain weight and was well within the norms for someone her height, she still looked underweight. Her skin fitted loosely, making her always appear too thin.

‘Shall I make you a cup of hot milk, Mama?’

No answer.

‘A cup of tea? Would you like a cup of tea? India tea, maybe? I wouldn’t mind a cup myself. How ’bout if I fix you one too?’

‘No thanks,’ she said. She kept her back to me and watched out the window. I doubted that she could see much, because the lamplight obscured any view into the darkness beyond the glass. But she watched anyway, absorbed.

I noticed her feet were bare. ‘Mama, come sit down. It’s too cold for you over there. Cripes, I’m freezing.’

Her eyes remained focused on some point in the darkness.

‘Mama, was ist los?’ I asked. She was always most comfortable in German. Even more so than Hungarian, I believe. German had been her language with Mutti, the one of nursery rhymes and children’s songs and a mother’s secret words for her small daughter. We never could settle on a language in our family. Mama slid back and forth at will between German, Hungarian and English, often in the same conversation. But it was German she took comfort from.

Still she gazed at the glass. Bringing a hand up, she scratched along the side of her face in a slow, pensive motion and then dropped her hand and locked it behind her back. In the reflection of the glass, I saw her eyes narrow, as if she were seeing something out there, and her forehead wrinkled into a frown of concentration.

‘I saw him,’ she said very, very softly.

‘Wer, Mama?’ I asked.

She said nothing.

‘Wer, Mama? Klaus?’

Sharply, she turned and looked at me.

‘I know about him. Megan told me about him this afternoon.’

She sighed and once again turned away from me. I saw she was shivering too.

‘Mama, come away from the window. It’s too cold there for you. Here, take the afghan.’

She didn’t move.

I had the afghan around my shoulders. Bringing it over, I tried to hand it to her but she didn’t take it. So I wrapped it back around myself. My stomach felt sick, and I thought perhaps Megan really did have something and I had caught it. I almost hoped so. Then my mother would have to take care of me.

‘I saw him,’ she whispered, her breath clouding the glass. ‘I’ve found him. The Scheisskerle, they could not keep him hidden from me.’

‘What, Mama?’

‘Him,’ she said, nodding her head slightly at the window. ‘The bastards, they thought I’d never find him. The stupid swine. They thought they’d had the better of me. But they never did. I’ve found him now.’

‘Who, Mama?’

‘Mein Sohn.’