Schroder: A Novel (32 page)
Authors: Amity Gaige
Tags: #Fiction / Family Life, #Fiction / Literary
She nodded, left the room, and went back out to see her husband in the waiting area.
“What did the doctor say?” the man asked anxiously.
She looked at him sadly.
(Pause.)
“He said you’re going to die.”
13
. The son in me likes to think:
a sacrifice
. She did what she had to. She played a role. She was a decoy. A mother would do that. Wouldn’t a mother do that, in extraordinary circumstances?
14
. My aunt was funny. She was nothing like her fastidious brother. She disliked cooking and cleaning. The only things she enjoyed were smoking, talking, and games of chance. When it was discovered that it was my eighth birthday, my aunt rose from her card table and declared she was going to bake me a cake. I followed her into the kitchen in a state of hope and disbelief. She pushed a tower of dirty dishes into the concrete sink basin and rubbed her hands together.
An egg?
I suggested, trying to jog her memory.
An egg
, she said, bending toward the icebox.
Flour?
I climbed the cupboards to look for flour. She had no butter, but she did possess a bottle of vegetable oil, as well as a packet of colored sugar that we planned to sprinkle on top. There was the matter of the cake tin. Clattering aluminum followed. She stood, beaming. Here was something that would work.
Eureka
, she said.
First we’ve just got to clean the mouse shit out of it
.
Sometimes, she and I would go to Kreuzberg to walk among the Turks. It was said that if West Berlin was the insane asylum of the Federal Republic, then Kreuzberg was the lockdown room. Where had all these people come from, in their headscarves and wide-legged pants, and why were they grazing their goats in Viktoriapark? On weekends, the Turks turned stretches of the Landwehr Canal into a giant souk. My aunt and I loved it there, and we spent afternoons rubbing the fabrics and wooden carvings and murmuring to one another. I did whatever she did, which meant that we both looked crazy, or at least starved for sense impression, which was true, since when you went into Kreuzberg you realized how strange the rest of West Berlin was, not just leached of color and scent, but wrongheaded, mishmoshed, half-resurrected by attempts to switch out the old, bombed-out cathedrals with modern boxes of concrete and metal, a project that would never succeed, because there was too much dust and history in that island of a city, too much backward-leaning ballast. It took a particular kind of mind-set to appreciate the architectural disharmony of West Berlin. My aunt possessed that mind-set. She shared it with the punks and skinheads and radicals that populated Kreuzberg along with the Turks. She’d take me down to the abandoned U-Bahn station at Bülowstrasse, where we’d buy kebabs and stare at the inert turnstiles, strains of the Clash reverberating through the corridors. This was my life. My island life.
15
. Even the wind couldn’t pass through the Wall, but instead blew back at us in a tunnel, picking up bits of dirt and paper, contributing to the eerie impression that the graffiti-filled structure resembled a very long subway. Kids bounced balls against it. People grew shade plants beside it. But whatever the Wall was or wasn’t, whatever it resembled, however impassable or foreboding it was, it was also, for me, an outrageously small margin that separated me from my mother, a margin that probably drove me a little bit crazy, which is an admission I do not intend to seem exculpatory, i.e., a burgeoning insanity defense. After all, it’s easy to avoid going crazy. All you have to do is pretend that whatever is making you crazy is impotent. After a year or two, I played there near the Wall paying it no attention, as I would have ignored a disapproving grown-up who stood there blocking the sun with his shoulders, until day by day I literally forgot that it was a Wall in the sense of a thing that separates; that is to say, I forgot there was anything on the other side. I forgot that I had ever been on the other side. Being there would have been impossible; there was nothing there. There was a wall, and beyond the wall was the end of reality, as in the dream wherein the door of your sweet house opens onto a desert.
16
. I love you and I will always love you. Thank you. Thank you. This was the best part of my life.
17
. Monks, Quakers, Buddhists, Apaches, George Harrison, aboriginal widows, my dad, Abbot Rancé of La Trappe, Isaac Luria, Abraham Lincoln, Capricorns, the late Platonists, to name a few. You could count yourself as silent, Reader, but according to Milroy-Dudek (1993),
listenership
is not a form of silence, sorry.
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Contents
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Amity Gaige
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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ISBN 978-1-4555-1214-0