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laws of return [Cameron Stracher] New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1996 reprinted by permission of the author a jew among the norse Flight attendants bustle down the aisles, feigning good cheer and distributing towelettes. Your face is the window on your soul, they say, wipe, wipe. Dirk snorts on my shoulder. I roll his head to one side and clean the drool from my shirt. He struggles awake, an encephalitic child on a field trip. "Coffee," he manages. Oxygen masks mist caffeine into our mucous membranes. Plastic arrives microwaved in aluminum: Slowly our cells recover from the stunted night. "Isn't it illegal to pack us in here like aliens?" asks Dirk as he unlocks the tray table from his sternum. I explain that if I didn't pass the bar, my counsel would consti- tute the unauthorized practice of law and subject me to disciplinary action. "Ce nest pas important," says Dirk. "On y va a Paris." The vast expanse of blue below has given way to crabby lumps of brown that we guess are Great Britain. "Could be Norway, though," says Dirk. "Depends on our flight plan." He looks at me like a dentist who has just yanked his patient's tooth. I run my tongue over the gaping hole; the salty taste of my own blood is not unpleasant. Dirk turns back to the window. "No," he says. "It's Great Britain. If it were Norway, we'd see the smoke signals." I settle into the cab and let Dirk's pidgin French guide us to our hotel. "Trust me," he says, and I do. The sunlight is sharp as needles. The air thick with the promise of heat. Dirk keeps up a steady patois with the cabdriver while I watch for familiar signs of Paris. I've never been, but when I see the Eiffel Tower, I know we've arrived in the correct city. We careen through cobbled streets, narrowly avoiding unruffled pedestrians, who step aside like toreadors. The cab screeches to a halt at a red light, then bursts forward when it changes to green. A young woman, a foreigner, scrambles for safety on the sidewalk. Her blond hair ripples like a cloak about her features. I look back, blood jumping, until her face is unmasked. At the hotel Dirk pays the driver. We lug our suitcases into the lobby and up to the registration desk. Slick-faced and grimy-eyed, we plead with the concierge for a bed. "No thing, messieurs," she assures us. "The rooms are not avail- able until the noon." In the street scraps of food and paper stream down the gutters. Headless chickens and eviscerated pigs hang from hooks in a butch- er's window. A woman carries a baguette in one arm, a screaming child in the other. She steps over a man asleep in a doorway. "Isn't Paris beautiful?" says Dirk. I am too tired to respond. If Paris has opened its heart, my eyes are closed. We sip espresso at a sidewalk cafe. Slowly we sputter and lurch back to life. "I could live here," says Dirk. "What about your friends?" I ask. "They could too." "Your family?" "Who needs them?" Across the street a man and a woman embrace. She kisses him on both cheeks, then lingers over his mouth. His hands on the back of her shirt pulse like folded wings. "It's twenty hours by train to Oslo," I say. Dirk is silent for a long time. Then he says, carefully, "She might not want to see you." I digest this bit of information as if it were an unknown delicacy rather than the usual cassoulet. "What if she does?" A sleepless night. Dirk snoring like Napoleon's army. Shouts from the alley piercing our windows. When night finally falls, it is day- break in Paris. "Les croissants avec confiture," announces Dirk. "Du pain, du fromage, le cafe au lait." He props the tray against my chest, hov- erring above me like a nurse in intensive care. He's been awake for hours, taken a stroll along the Seine, read the newspapers, called the Coast. All is quiet on the western front. While I slather my bread with jam, Dirk regales me with tales of battles with rogue viruses, plagues, and pestilence. A permanent skin graft to a beeper seems a small price to pay for true passion. "I love San Francisco," he declares. "It feels like home." I remind him that college was a warm and fuzzy experience. "The worst four years of my life. It was like living in a box." "The rooms weren't that bad." "You, at least, fit in. I was the square peg." I don't remember my shape. It seemed elastic and shifting. "Forced into the round hole," I offer. "So to speak." I feel a fever rise in my neck and spread across my cheeks. That Dirk is gay I've known since the night I found him in bed with another man. But that he might have his own passions and desires separate from my own I never considered for more than an instant. Has he loved, lost, promised, wanted? What cadavers has he buried in the woods? Without sound, loss is forgotten. The yellow heat of summer yawns across our beds. The gray facade of shuttered windows on the building opposite stares blankly back at us. "I'm going to call Elisabet," I announce. "Was it something I said?" asks Dirk. The foreign pulse of a European telephone like an alarm clock swathed in bandages. "Hallo? Familie Andenasen." A woman's voice. Elisabet's mother? Aunt? Neighbor? She's never mentioned a sister. Could I have the right family, wrong num- ber? Wrong family, right number? I gush through my story, tumbling over the words, not stopping to consider whether we speak the same language, share a vocabulary. If I halt, I may never regain my footing. I'll slide back down the hill and collapse in the ruined fields and mud. "The train?" she asks in perfect English. "Do you think that is a good idea? Elisabet is not well. Perhaps you should write first." Stunned by the intrusion of this assembled woman, a mother/ aunt/neighbor whom I've never met, whose voice I've never heard, I babble responses in fourteen languages, none of which I speak. "Good, then," she says. "I will tell her you called and that you will write." She wishes me good health and happiness. She has en- joyed conversing with me. I sink to the floor of the telephone booth. Gum wrappers, cig- arette butts, and bottle caps welcome me. I stare into the eye of a used condom. Someone pounds on the door. I wave him off. But monsieur, he insists, if I don't get up, then I am gravely ill, or I am a vagrant, or he has to make a phone call. If only I could understand la langue d'amonr. I will lie here all day with my copy of Paris from the Floor of a Phone Booth. Small animals will sniff me, decide I am not their type, and leave me in peace. I am not unhappy. I have my square yard of corrugated metal and a large debt to a pawnbroker. Dirk's face appears in the gloom. "Do you need a doctor?" he asks. I explain that Elisabet's mother is Cerberus at the gate. She has shredded my trousers, chased me off the bill. Dick helps me to my feet, wipes off my knees. "The only solution to Scandinavian pragmatism," he decides, "is Jewish irrationality." The night train sways like a drunken Swede while the Swedes them- selves are surprisingly steady as they navigate drunkenly down the aisles. The two motions cancel each other like sine and cosine. There is no hope for sleep. The train passes through postcard villages, sweeping up vacationing Swedes in its passage. Come home, Lars, come home, Bjorn, calls the train. Come home to a winter of darkness and alcohol, work at Volvo and Saab, tennis heroes and pornography stars. Ah, but one last taste, proposes the six-foot blond, one sip before we pass into night. It's still summer, man, drink. Drink! The duty-free shop is eight deep with Swedes, fishing for their last krona. Even the Danes cannot keep up with their northern cous- ins. They bid fond farewells as the ferry docks in their island country. What a night we had, coughs one, spitting on his shoes. My seatmate, short and dark, a mutation in the species, offers me a bottle of vodka. When I take a sip, he says something in German. "Ich bin ein American," I say in my best imitation of John F. Kennedy. He repeats his question in English. "Oslo," I tell him. "Ach, the most terrible city," he warns. "Why do you think they are so unhappy?" He points behind him, where a group of four men sit drinking sullenly. "You could be German," he says. "We are friends now." He hands me the bottle. I match his massive gulps with birdlike swallows. Soon he is telling me a rambling story of unrequited love in a linguistic babble comprised of Swedish, English, and German. I feign comprehension through the heartache. "Do not love a Norwegian woman," he concludes. "She is like winter." I sit up, startled, but his eyes are glazed and focused above my head. White foam has gathered on the corners of his mouth like a beach stained by roiling waters. He drains the bottle, sighs, belches, and begins to sing. The train whistles mournfully, calling all Nordic dwellers back to their frozen lands, distinguished only in their bleakness. I press my face against the swift, rushing blackness and fall asleep to a soul- ful and tuneless rendition of the Swedish national anthem. I awake stiff-necked and thick-tongued on the Norwegian border. The seat next to me is empty except for a small package of lozenges and a scribbled note: "Headache cure." Two frontier guards, their faces smooth and hairless, guns bulg- ing from girlish hips, search the car for contraband, aliens, undesir- able elements. They examine my passport with unflinching sobriety, intent on discovering the drug smuggler beneath my placid exterior. "How long will you stay in Oslo?" one asks. I hesitate, unsure of the answer, and my hesitation becomes evasion. I see myself sweating nervously in the guard's mirror glasses. I imagine prison, torture, my cause taken up by Helsinki Watch. "Seven days?" I squeak. The guard stares at me impassively, his bug eyes unblinking. "Business or pleasure?" he asks. "Pleasure?" I say as sweat gushes from my forehead like a lawn sprinkler. He hands my passport to his brother-in-arms, then turns back to me and says, "Elisabet can't love you." I nod dumbly, convinced that in this country of cousins everyone knows my plight. "Then you must declare it," he says, handing me a form. DECLARATION OF IMPOSSIBLE LOVE I scribble my name across the bottom. The guard nods, clicks his heels smartly, and moves on to the next passenger. Poor man, I can hear him screaming as he cracks under interrogation. He loves her; he'll do anything for her; why did she leave him? A name, an address, but no warning. I wander the streets of Oslo like a man on a newly frozen lake. One wrong step; she could be anywhere. A group of students emerge from a cafe. A woman reads on a bench. Blond faces pack a streetcar. I rush through the mathematical possibilities: in a small city, the chance encounter. If I sat in one place, unmoving, for how long? The stolid stone buildings. The square corners. The unadorned facades. Streetlights blink in regular intervals; pedestrians wait for the green. Cabs slow, their dark-skinned drivers asking first in German, then English if I need a ride to the hotel. No hotel, radio, I say, as if I made perfect sense. They nod; they know that eighteen percent of all foreign visitors will suffer depression, anxiety, schizo- phrenia. Five o'clock. The stores close. She walks briskly from the library to the tram station. She doesn't see the thin American, his face in a crumpled letter, a duffel bag at his feet. She's promised Mama to help with supper tonight. Her brother has summer holiday. Her father can't be bothered. Poor Mama, she's all alone. I climb aboard the streetcar. The neat blue line leads straight to the suburbs. Her town, the last stop. Boxy apartment complexes, each with flower arrangement and balcony, line the tracks. Small children on bicycles wave at the train. The passengers stare glumly back. A drunk man snarls and mutters at a young woman. She sits stoically, and no one intervenes. The conductor, a Sikh, sings each station in a Punjabi-accented Norwegian. He hasn't heard from his wife for nearly a year, yet each month, confident that he will have good news soon, he sends deutsche marks wrapped in old newspaper. The ranks are thinned. Her stop is called. Everyone but the drunk and me scrambles for the exit. I watch him pick his nose, his fat fingers halfway up his head. He sees me and growls, rising un- steadily from his seat before he flops back down. I skip off the train. She could be anywhere. I walk one hundred meters in one di- rection, then walk back. Commuters bustle past, heads down, eyes averted, loaves of bread in their arms. Finally I stop a man, mouth Norwegian sounds. He stares at me impassively. I pull her letter from my jeans, point to her address. Ja, ja, he knows where that is and gestures in the direction. A neat white house. A gravel path. Small hemlocks, recently planted, form a barrier from the street. In Norway, she told me, no one is wealthy, but my parents are well off. I zip my jacket. Though the sky betrays no hint of dusk, the greedy landscape absorbs all warmth. Winter and Not Winter are the only seasons. Parsimony the national pastime. A figure floats in a first-floor window. Not as tall, not as blond. I move to the door, my feet scraping gravel. A knock. The echoing silence. A pot banging or a gunshot. Footfalls on creaking floor. A lock clicks. "Yes?" I have seen photos. But is it possible she doesn't recognize me? For a moment I could be anyone, do anything. It's not too late. Run away. Wrong address. Encyclopedia salesman. "Colin," I say, pointing to myself like a missionary among the natives. She blinks, the same catlike quickness, her features impervious. Then: "But you said you would write." "I was in town." Translation neurons, long withered from disuse, struggle to fire coherent messages across decayed synapses. Irony and pathos take a backseat to comprehension. "But Elisabet is not home." "Will she be back soon?" "A fortnight." I do not speak the Queen's English. If I did, I would understand that Elisabet will not return for fourteen days and nights. But I am an American -- ignorant, savage, illiterate. ' She tried to tell me when I telephoned, she says. Elisabet is north, visiting her grandmother. I grasp the doorjamb; the house wobbles. Mrs. Andenas, former nurse and psychiatric social worker, clutches my wrist and eases me into the entryway. "Sitte du har," she commands as she propels me into a chair. She returns a moment later with a cup of tea and a buttered sweet roll. "Spise," she says. "You have had a long passage." I do not cry. I am oddly content sitting in the paneled entryway of the Andenas house eating a Berlinerbolle. It would have been too sim- ple to take a train from one European capital to another. I am con- vinced my journey requires additional hardship, adversity, mishaps, and drunks. My father's father walked one thousand frozen miles, slept in graveyards, dodged bullets, to reach his promised land. "You should not be sad," says Elisabet's mother. "This is what I told Elisabet. Let the teenagers have their love. For you there is the university." She offers me another Berlinerbolle. While I eat, she scribbles Elisabet's address on a piece of paper. There is no telephone, she tells me; otherwise I could call. I do not ask what she does in an emergency: a neighbor's phone or the corner store? I have already made my decision. I thank her for the tea and rolls and decline her offer to stay the night. I have friends in the city, I lie. She doesn't try to per- suade me. "It is better," she says at the door. "You will be happier with your own." As I walk down the driveway, a man in an expensive German import drives up. He nods tentatively; hasn't he seen me before? I lower my eyes and duck into a neighbor's yard, leaving Elisabet's father to ponder my existence in his rearview mirror. The town is so small that the ticket agent takes fifteen minutes to find it on his map. There is no train service that far north, he tells me. I will have to ride the night train to Tromso and then a bus. Bus service is sporadic; he can issue a ticket but cannot guarantee passage. I am poised between Paris and the unknown. Twenty-four hours from a NATO outpost or a sidewalk cafe. To return is to abandon all hope; to venture forward, sheer madness. Old men are crammed into freight cars. Cannibals and Pygmies sell children to Gypsies. Unspeakable atrocities are committed at night. I buy a ticket. We leave the city and climb into the mountains, sluicing through jagged peaks, swooping above dizzying drops to fjords below. The water, still and clear as a teardrop on a granite slab, hums with sunlight. In a landscape of vertiginous beauty the inhabitants have no choice but to seek balance in a solemn gravity; otherwise, land and people would be as untethered as kites. My fellow passengers are a joyless lot. With no alcohol and no border crossings they stare glumly out the windows or down the aisles. When night falls, they smoke rancid cigarettes between cars, laughing in staccato bursts and spitting tobacco onto the floor. Their teeth, fingers, and hair are the color of dirty bathwater. Their speech is filled with hiccups and sighs. They have just emerged from forty years in the forest, blinking into town, carting provisions back to mud huts and lean-tos. I roll my thin coat into a pillow and fall asleep on the vinyl couchette. She flees down the stairs and out the door, her feet skip- ping manically over pavement and ascending into the starless night. I tell my parents I'm having a wonderful time in Paris. I give them Dirk's room number and hope they won't call back. The barren terrain. The idling buses. If I died now, who would claim my body? "Colin?" asks my mother. "Has something happened?" I reassure her that we have a bad connection. That lachrymal sound she hears is merely a thousand pulses of light competing for space along a microscopic fiber optic cable. That huge bill on their calling card from a town they cannot pronounce is my penultimate resting place. I promise to call again when I am safely entombed. A light rain falls. Two seasons: mud and ice. To freeze in the depths of summer. I board a bus. "North Pole," I say to the driver, showing him my ticket. He nods. All roads lead to the Arctic. We rumble onto a two-lane highway. Scrawny vegetation dots the roadside. The landscape looks newly formed, as if recently heaved from the earth. Everything is rock and water. We pass a sign in English and Nomvegian: Farthest Northern Point You Would Ever Want to Attain. Beyond, all is wilderness and frontier. I scratch my name and the date into the seat with a key, a record of my passage. I will not be forgotten. We board a ferry. We disembark. We board another ferry. I fall asleep. When I awake, the faces around me have changed, but the bus lumbers northward. I am traveling to the edge of the world; the driver will wake me when we fall off. The highway becomes a dirt path. The bus humps one rutted shoulder. At any moment we will overturn into a ditch and sink in a cloudberry bog. Sheep crowd the road, pulling at weeds in the cracked earth. The bus bumps them politely aside. They shake their cloven hooves and bray. They know who I am. The driver shakes me from my reverie. The bus is silent and empty. "Tilsa," he declares. I stagger from my seat, dragging my duffel bag and jacket. The street is mud; the sky gray. A knot of buildings huddle for warmth. Children peer at me from the windows of a shop. I am a notorious gunslinger returning for vengeance. I walk toward the saloon. The doors swing open, and two women carrying potato sacks emerge. I step aside as they brush past, then slip inside. "Andenas," I say to the man at the cash register, pointing to the slip of paper with Elisabet's address. "You are her American," he says in faultless English. He directs me to the last house at the end of a small peninsula. I thank him. "No problem," he says. Curtains flutter in the houses I pass. Faces glimpsed in the shad- ows. It is high noon, but it could be evening; the light through the clouds is pale and thin. From her window she sees a familiar figure walking down the road: the angular tilt of one shoulder, the high forehead. She would run if there were an exit. She vvould hide in the attic if they had one. I unlock the gate. Two dogs bark. The ground is uneven and clumped. I stumble several times. The front door opens. A smile, not joyful but polite, as if she has received a book she's already read. A smile on which I can read the true foolishness of my journey, the impossibility of any reconciliation. I would run if I could, if I hadn't traveled so far and bus service weren't so erratic. Instead I trudge forward through the mud. "Mother said you had come," she says. The telephone, appar- ently, has been invented overnight. She grants me a perfunctory kiss, a quick brush of the lips, and invites me inside. White surfaces glare. Windows shine like bur- nished aluminum. Even the wood.floors are bleached. I leave my shoes at the door. An old woman drinks tea in the living room. Elisabet introduces her grandmother. She says something in Norwegian that I assume is a greeting but could just as easily be a curse. I tell her that I am happy to meet her too. "Are you hungry?" Elisabet asks. "You must have had a long trip. All the way from Paris." We sit in the kitchen. She feeds me bread and cheese. I ramble nervously about the bar exam, my pending job, Dirk, my family, the taxis in Paris, the weather, the Swede who insisted I was German. Elisabet says little. Her grandmother pours another cup of tea and joins us at the table. Her chair scrapes against the wooden floor. Elisabet leans toward me. "What are you doing here?" she asks. I look to her grandmother as if waiting for an answer, hoping to deflect the question mentally. "She doesn't understand English," Elisabet says. I realize that the answer she expects and the one I am about to give are a mere approximation of what I can't name. The truth is something concealed, mysterious, ineffable. Three words to repre- sent the unrepresentahle. "I love you," I say anyway. Elisabet is silent. "Don't you love me?" She breathes. "No," she says finally. Her chair creaks. "Like a brother, yes. Not like a lover." "Te?" asks Grandma, holding up her cup. "Nei takk, Bestemor," says Elisabet. My shirt is a damp towel. My toes throb in wet socks. In the kitchen an ancient doctor sharpens a wood saw. Water boils on the stove. He can't amputate a frozen heart. "I didn't come all the way up here to argue you into going out with me," I lie. "No?" says Elisabet. "I missed you." "I missed you too." "Then why aren't we together?" Elisabet hesitates. For a moment I allow a drop of hope like ink to squirt into my blood. Black ink. "I'm Norwegian," she says softly, sadly. "You're American." "Ja, ja," says Grandma. "Akkurat." - I have traveled five thousand miles, abandoned friends, braved drunken bores, borne miserable weather, suffered inedible food, lied to my family, and swallowed all pride. Nothing can stop me. I swivel to Elisabet's grandmother, her expression as solemn as a sacrament. "Shut up," I say. The day will not end. A grainy light seeps through the windows. I flop about on the hard bed like a herring in a basket. Elisabet sleeps an arm's length away. Her breathing is steady and deep. Her mouth tilts open. She has one hand flung into the space between us as if to ward off unwanted crossings. "You saw me," I said. "Yes." "But you ran away." "Yes." "That's how it happens? You just decide?" "Go to sleep, Colin. You'll wake up Bestemor." The old woman has my watch and schoolbooks. They do her no good. She can't read a word. Fortunately her hearing's not great either. "How can you sleep?" "Close your eyes." The midnight sun is a yellow star stitched to my breast. Night will not fall. Dawn breaks and breaks. I bury my head in the feather pillow. I do not dream. In the morning, snow. The mountains capped in white. The fjord an angry gray. Every- thing between is just a degree. Elisabet is gone. It may have been days. My watch is missing. I am snow-blind, afraid to move. I need food, water, my daily dose. I will die of exposure, starvation, malnutrition, the usual dep- rivations. Downstairs I hear voices, my name. The demands of nature drive me to the bathroom. The voices halt, hesitate, then resume. I release my bladder. I pad down the stairs, cough loudly at the bottom, make my entrance. "Morgen," says Grandma, who apparently has turned the other cheek. "Har de?" "Fine, thank you; I think I'm leaving today," I say to Elisabet. Elisabet translates, ignoring my announcement. "Bestemor says you should stay the week," she says. "You only just arrived." "What do you think?" "It's up to Bestemor." "Ask Bestemor if you'll sleep with me." "I won't." "Why not?" "Because it's none of Bestemor's business." In southern parts of the Northern Hemisphere, I tell myself, children play beneath open hydrants. Couples stroll in parks. Dirk sits at an outdoor cafe. The days are hot; the nights breezy and warm. "It snowed," I say. "Just a little," says Elisabet. "I'm leaving." "I know." There is no teary good-bye on a runway. Years from now we won't meet in an exotic locale and remember how we always had Tilsa. A piano won't play our song because we don't have one. I stuff my underwear into my duffel bag. Brush my teeth. Elis- abet gives me a loaf of bread and a wedge of cheese for the journey. "There's an afternoon bus," she says. I search for a heartbreaking response, a howl to rend the soul. The earth will split and crack to the core. "I should use the bathroom," I say finally. My face in the mirror looks tired, creased with age. I suck in my cheeks until they are hollow and gaunt. I run my palms over the unfulfilled promise of a beard. I sit on the edge of the tub. I believe I will cry. Tears well in my eyes. I sneeze. "Hurry, 'Colin," Elisabet says through the door. "We don't have much time." I blow my nose and rinse my face in cold water, hoping it will sound as if I've emerged from the depths of a prolonged weep. I open the door. Elisabet's lovely face: the intersecting circles and arched vertices, the moon forehead, the gray stillness of her eyes. She takes my hand and leads me down the stairs. I follow, my feet scuffing wood. At the front door she fishes through a pile of umbrellas and gives me one. "Take it," she says. "I'll mail it back." "Don't be silly. We have plenty." "I won't keep it." "But we don't need it." "You may." We both hold the umbrella for a moment, staring at the curve of the black plastic handle. "Fine. Do as you like." I shrug on my coat, mash my feet into my soggy shoes. Elisabet's grandmother watches me from the vestibule. When I am ready, she hugs me farewell. "Thanks for letting me stay," I say. She hugs me again. "Have a good trip," she says. I am halfway down the road when I realize she speaks English. And all that day it rained. The windows were sprayed with mud. A brown light came through. She walked home in the mud. She was neither happy nor sad. Years later, when she remembered him, she would see him through the smudged windows, his hand in a half wave, dirt or memory obscuring his face. No statues were smashed. No one was banished from his father's house. Dirk asks me to wait on the ticket line while he finds a newspaper. I gather our bags and corral them toward the counter. All around me the familiar twang of nasal voices. I toe-push the bags across the dirty floor. A young woman and her mother discuss the wonderful weather, the beautiful city, the charming gardens. They both are tall and fit, the young woman's face unmistakably American: upturned nose, clear blue eyes, straight teeth. She smiles when she notices that I am looking at her, props her hair behind one ear. "I hate lines," she says. "Pardon?" I say. She hesitates; something is wrong with my accent. "Allemand?" she asks. I shake my head sadly. She shrugs and gives up. "I can't speak French," she apologizes. I kick our bags forward another inch. Dirk appears, newspaper in hand. "Last copy," he says. "I snagged it right before some New Yorker. He offered me five bucks." The woman's face slides from surprise to suspicion, narrow eyes slitting to blue scratches. "Great," I say, turning from her. "What's news at home?" Dirk, observing our silent exchange, drapes his arm across my shoulders, crooking my neck in his elbow. His lips brush my ear. I can hear his blood. "It's an epidemic," he says. "They think you can get it from kissing. There's no cure, no recovery." I don't laugh. He is not funny. "Tomorrow," he prophesies, "everyone you've loved will be dead." |
