No, I said, with my family it was more melancholy than neglect, after the camp nobody in our house had much zest for things like that.
A lot of water has flowed under the bridge since then, that was before you were born, he said. Some people’s lives just don’t work out and they’re always coming up with excuses. Once upon a time they had some bad luck, and they blame everything on that. Come on, you might be too young to realize it, but I’m not. Believe me, even without the camp, life wouldn’t have worked out for them.
It was New Year’s Eve. The paraputch, as my father-in-law called the extended family, was celebrating in my in-laws’ living room. I’ll never know exactly what paraputch means. For me it sounded like a gang, because the family was so large and each member was shady in his own way. And although they couldn’t stand one another, they were forever getting together. My father-in-law himself was at least two different people. He had the habit of making a nest for himself inside a person’s breast, so as to be better able to kick him in the ribs later on.
David, Olga, Valentin, Maria, George, and a few others were there. I had no idea which name went with whom. Everybody had taken off their shoes, I counted ten pairs beside the door. My father-in-law’s youngest brother came with a fat wife; his oldest brother had come with a wizened one. The middle brother was laid up at home in bed, but his wife was here with her brother and her—or his—eldest daughter and a son-in-law. The son-in-law was drunk as a skunk. No sooner had my father-in-law taken his coat than the man had to throw up in the bathroom, still wearing his hat and scarf. I did manage to fix two names in my mind that evening: Anastasia and Martin. Anastasia—like my late grandmother—was my father-in-law’s cousin. She was about fifty years old, supposedly still a virgin, and had worked as an accountant in the cookie factory for thirty years. Martin was my father-in-law’s colleague, a widowed gardener. He was supposed to make a conquest of Anastasia that New Year’s Eve.
She’s a bit of a cold fish, said my father-in-law, but there comes a point when they all unbutton their blouses.
Seven or eight times a year, when the relatives came, my father-in-law would flip the picture in the living room, to show the original paraputch: his parents with their six children. Mother and father sitting on the coach box, each holding a little girl. The boys were sitting in twos on the backs of the two chestnut horses. Every other day of the year the picture showed a white horse, on which sat a young man in glistening riding boots, carrying a short crop. This was my father-in-law, although not exactly. At that time he had a different name.
I danced with my husband, asking him not to spin me around, and we bobbed back and forth. When his father was present he kept his composure. I danced with the son-in-law, who after having thrown up was no longer as drunk as when he had arrived. He dragged his feet and lost a sock during the foxtrot. Martin picked it up and hung it on a branch of the chandelier. Then I danced with his father-in-law or uncle, and after that with the brothers of my father-in-law, and later with Martin. The old men had firm grips and didn’t talk while they danced, I had to allow them to spin me around in silence. When my father-in-law planted himself in front of me with open arms and his tie loosened at the collar, I said:
Come and sit here at the table with me, we can talk too.
Talk, he said. Dancing keeps you young.
He had just been to the bathroom and his perfume was wafting around him. He picked out one of the liqueur cherries from a small dish perched on the corner of the table. They tasted of compote and made you drunk. I had already eaten a few too many and they had clouded my head. My father-in-law popped the cherry in his mouth and sucked the red juice from his forefinger. With his other hand he signaled me to get up. He sucked on the cherry stone and pressed his hand into the small of my back, making me aware of what he had in his trousers. I was no more curious then than I was a year later when his son reported for military service, when I was putting the towels in the cupboard and he knelt down behind me and kissed my calves.
Come on, you’ll see, it will help you get over his absence.
I pressed my legs firmly together and closed the cupboard and said:
I can’t stand you.
He could of course have asked why, then he would have gotten an earful. But what he said was:
There you have it. You rack your brains to come up with ways of helping the children, and this is what you get for your pains.
He wanted to take his son’s place. That time when I offered myself to my father in place of the woman with the braid, it seemed both urgently necessary and quite possible. This time it was neither. I never let on to my husband and my mother-in-law, nor did they ever find out what I knew about the white horse, the Perfumed Commissar, and his change of name. He had already reinvented himself once, he had practice doing that. Hell would have frozen over before I would forget that. But I didn’t make any fuss, I kept my mouth shut as usual, so that their misfortune didn’t come home to roost for the whole paraputch.
By three in the morning the early hours of the New Year had already put a whole year’s worth of wrinkles on our faces. The urge to grope the flesh that had married into the family gave way to yawning. The married couples, who by mutual agreement had turned a blind eye to each other’s whereabouts that night, were regrouping. My mother-in-law was arguing with her husband because the crystal carafe was broken. The eldest daughter was arguing with her drunken husband because he had burnt two holes in his trousers with his cigarette. My husband was reproaching me for having toasted in the New Year with Martin before doing so with him, and for not even having noticed. The wizened wife was moaning that her husband had lost one of his gold cuff links. He showed all of us the one he still had on his right cuff, we searched the bathroom, the living room, and the hall and found old trouser buttons, coins, hairpins, perfume bottle caps, and lined them all up on the tablecloth. The youngest brother was arguing with his fat wife, because she had mislaid the car key. She emptied her handbag onto the table. A handkerchief, two aspirins, and a tiny St. Anthony made of rusting iron came tumbling out. He’ll help us, she said and kissed the saint.
Why don’t you eat him, said her husband, then perhaps you can work a miracle and open the car door with your finger.
Martin rested his chin on the table and gave the women’s calves another ogle. Nobody took any notice, at that time of night he no longer counted as one of the family. In the glare you could make out half a finger’s breadth of shiny silver in his hair, which was otherwise dyed brown.
Nobody found the cuff link, everyone stopped looking and went into the hall to put on their coats and shoes. Anastasia appeared with a rusty pair of tweezers from the bathroom. Her hands were dripping, the hair around her forehead was wet, and on her chin clung a drop of water.
How come you’re drinking out of your hands, asked my mother-in-law, there are plenty of glasses.
Anastasia started crying:
I’ve really got to tell all of you this, that widower was absolutely horrible, the way he treated me in the bathroom, it was very rude, completely unacceptable.
The pair of tweezers lay with the other finds on the table, looking very like the small St. Anthony, but no one kissed it. Anastasia slipped on her coat and wrenched open the door.
Wait a moment, said my father-in-law, the others are all heading out as well.
I don’t need anyone to see me home, she said.
The brother who had lost his cuff link pointed at her feet: You’re not going in your stockings, are you.
Anastasia found the car key in her shoe.
The St. Anthony brought us luck after all, said my father-in-law to his wizened daughter-in-law.
Nobody believes in it, anyway, she said.
And then she hugged Anastasia:
Martin was just trying his luck, don’t take it to heart. Who knows, something might have come of it.
By then Martin had already disappeared, no one knew how or when. He’d left his scarf hanging in the hall.
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After everybody had gone, my father-in-law flipped the picture back around. My mother-in-law unhooked the sock from the chandelier, opened the windows and doors onto the street and garden. The snowy cold night blew inside. The chandelier swayed in the draft, my father-in-law’s tie fluttered, as did his son’s hair. Then the white horse stepped toward me from the wall, coming to fetch all these people who were so exhausted from partying on the first day of January. I retreated into the hall. My father-in-law yawned and yanked his tie over his head. His wife was bending over the carpet, picking up bread and cake crumbs and cherry stones.
The dishes have to be cleared before we can turn in, she said.
I had no intention of helping. Her husband laid his tie on the table, widening the knotted loop into a perfect circle like you see in display windows.
I said a hasty good night.
Whatever you dream about tonight will come true, he said.
That new year began with the whole paraputch talking about the missing cuff link. It isn’t here in the house, it probably fell in the toilet, after all, things like that do happen. I knew better and told my husband that the gold cuff link was lying on the bedside table in his parents’ jewelry box.
What are you snooping around for, he asked.
Because a cuff link can’t walk, I said. The next time I peeked in the jewelry box, it had disappeared. At Easter my father-in-law was swaggering about with a gold tie pin:
From my dear wife.
She wasn’t that dear a wife to him, she knew that. He had a mistress my age in the garden shop, a specialist in mites and aphids. Since no one could say her official title of Comrade Engineer for Combating Parasites in Cultivated Plants without laughing, everyone called her Comrade Louse Inspector. On Sundays my mother-in-law was happy that her husband couldn’t go to the nursery. But at Easter her face was soft and mellow as dough. She couldn’t get enough of looking at him, to see him so moved by his tie pin that on Sunday he didn’t sneak off to the bathroom to phone his lover. My mother-in-law took a deep breath and said:
I took my old ring to the goldsmith, it was too small for me.
I felt a lump in my throat. My husband gave me a fixed stare through his keyhole eyes, the way he always did to silence me. Then I whispered in his ear:
That’s half-true what your mother is saying, the cuff link alone wouldn’t have been enough for your father’s tie pin, her ring is gone as well.
A fat fly is buzzing in circles just above the driver’s head. It settles on his arm, he tries to swat it. Then it lands on the back of his neck, he swats again. He swats himself just below his ear with a loud clap. The fly escapes and perches on the window frame. The driver tries to shoo it out the open window into the street. It drifts away, its buzzing drowned out by the rattle of the tracks. What’s the matter, asks the old woman, you seem desperate. A fly, says the driver. Oh, without my glasses I can’t see anything as small as that. He’ll be heading your way in a minute, the driver says. Why didn’t you kill it, she asks. He tried to but missed, says the man with the briefcase, he has a tram to drive, he can’t go chasing flies. That would be something, a whole tram derailed because of a fly. Well, it won’t be bothering me, laughs the old lady, since I shake so much. Count your blessings, says the driver. You’re wrong there, she says, it’s not a blessing, you’ll find out soon enough when you get old. But the mosquitoes don’t mind the shaking, they sure don’t, and neither do the fleas. My blood is type A, that’s the best one for fleas, the doctor told me. I’m AB, says the man with the briefcase. And the young lady, asks the old woman, sealing her lips in a crooked smile while she waits for the answer. O, I say. O, that’s gypsy blood, says the old woman. People with type O can give blood to anybody, but they can only take from other O’s. The driver slaps himself on the temple. You son of a whore, he shouts, go bother somebody else, I’m not dead yet, and I’m not a pile of shit, either. He shoos the fly in our direction. I’m not dead yet, either. I’m the youngest in the car, so when it comes to dying, I should be last in line. I’m type O too, says the driver. The fly flits around the windowpane like a floater in your eye. Its abdomen is shiny and green and large as the trembling stones dangling from the old lady’s ears.
I liked to visit the workshop to see the old shoemaker because he liked to talk.
Music is my life, he would say, but I also need it here to drown out the noise the rats make. I listen to music at home too, until I fall asleep. In the old days my Vera used to sing along, day in, day out. By night she’d often be so hoarse she’d have to drink a cup of hot tea with honey.
Every summer his wife would plant dahlias along the wire fence that caught the morning sun.
She sure had a green thumb, my Vera, he said, she got everything to bloom. But the last summer she was home, her dahlias started sprouting strange leaves—leaves that really belonged on fritillarias, zinnias, delphiniums, and phlox. The same thing happened when the dahlias began to flower, each single stem seemed to have everything imaginable. The dahlias looked absolutely amazing, but they were a little crazy too. People would stop at the fence to look. Before the flowers started to fade, my daughter dug them all up so the wind wouldn’t scatter the crazy seeds around. Vera had always been a pretty quiet person, but after those dahlias bloomed she scarcely said a word. Physically she was fit as a fiddle but she wasn’t much use around the house, so my daughter sent her out shopping every day. Vera’d come back with beans instead of potatoes, vinegar instead of fizzy water, matches instead of toilet paper. When Vera didn’t get any better, my daughter wrote out a shopping list for her. My poor forgetful Vera showed the list to the people in the shop, but she still came home with shoelaces instead of toothpaste, or thumbtacks instead of cigarettes. So my daughter went straight down to the shop. The shop assistant and the cashier remembered the lady with the list perfectly. No, they said, she hadn’t bought any shoelaces or thumbtacks, just toothpaste and cigarettes, exactly as it said on the list. Besides, we don’t even have any shoelaces, they’ve been on order for weeks but haven’t been delivered yet. And we don’t carry thumbtacks at all. From that point on, Vera was only allowed out for an hour’s walk every morning. But she started coming back with a handbag that belonged to someone else. Usually there was an I.D. card inside, so my daughter could return the bag to its proper owner and recover her mother’s. Then one day we weren’t able to track down Vera’s own purse, and meanwhile she was bringing home more and more handbags belonging to other women, so after that she could go out only if she left the house with nothing in her hands and came back with nothing. But then she’d come back wearing a hat instead of her headscarf. During the winter we couldn’t let her out because of the cold, but the following spring Vera went out three times wearing a dress and showed up all out of breath dressed in a skirt and blouse. At that point I agreed to put her in a mental home. There’s not a clothing store anywhere in the neighborhood, said the old shoemaker, so she definitely wasn’t stealing. One thing’s for sure, Vera would never have stolen anything. Even the people in the neighborhood said that much. Out on the street she always looked fairly normal. Almost too self-effacing, people said. She never returned their greetings, though; she’d just pass by and say:
I left the rice on, so I’ve got to run.
The old shoemaker pinched the corners of his mouth with his thumb and index finger. But now it doesn’t matter anymore. It’s neither here nor there, like so much in life.
For my part, I told the old shoemaker about my dead grandmother, and that after my father died my grandfather had said that life was just the farty sputter of a lantern, not even worth the bother of putting your shoes on.
He’s right about that, the old man said, your grandfather must be a bit of a philosopher, you can’t be dumb and come up with something like that.
Then he pointed to the boards where shoes were hanging on every nail:
But look there. When it comes to shoes, I have to see things a little differently, else I wouldn’
t have any bread to eat.
Stretched out under his lips, the skin between the old man’s thumb and index finger, yellowed from the leather wax, looked like webbing from a duck’s foot.
My Vera, at least she wound up that way by herself. But there are two young women in the mental home with her who lost their wits after what the police did to them. These women hadn’t done anything, either—one swiped a little candle wax from the factory, the other took a sack of corncobs that was lying in a field. Now, you tell me, what kind of crime is that.
The young shoemaker said: I don’t have any rubber or any leather for the soles. He slid his hands into Paul’s sandals as if they were mittens, turned them upside down, and stared at the blackberry that was crushed into the sole. His teeth stuck out as his mouth opened and closed; in my thoughts I was somewhere else. The boy who made the dust snakes was dead because I didn’t stay to play with him. My father died because he didn’t want to go on hiding from me. My grandfather, because I had lied about his death. And Lilli, because I had said that her officer’s stomach was round as a ball, like the setting sun. Now the old shoemaker had died because I had danced my fill of the world. The young man with the crooked mouth wrapped the sandals back inside the newspaper.
Check in ten days and we’ll see what’s what. I could already see what was what. I nodded and left.
Outside the wind was flying through the street, clusters of little green peas were dropping from the lindens. Each cluster had a small leathery wing—that had nothing to do with the sawtoothed, heart-shaped leaves on the boughs. A sofa of white clouds was floating high in the evening summer sky. A woman slipped out of the pharmacy carrying a small vial. The contents, the rubber stopper, and the woman’s thumb were the color of indigo. I asked her for the time. The woman said:
It’s about half past eight.
I had wanted to do something for Paul, not in ten days’ time, as the young shoemaker suggested, but that very day, between seven and just about half past eight. I had failed. The pharmacist was sitting in the window next to a stack of tiny boxes with Chinese writing on them, barefoot, her back to the street. Each box was filled so tight you couldn’t have squeezed a coat button inside. They looked like those condom wrappers that had the word Butterfly printed next to all the Chinese characters. Lilli had once said: