We're Flying (6 page)

HEIDI HAD NO CLEAR RECOLLECTION
of time after her return home. She withdrew to her room and didn’t speak to anyone. She heard her father standing at the foot of her bed, and announcing in a loud voice, You can go back to the office now. He went away, he came back, stood there in silence and looked down at her. Her mother brought her meals, sat down on the side of the bed, talked to her or stroked her hair. Sometimes she cried. You can’t lie here always, she said, you have to eat something, say something. At night Heidi stood in front of the window for hours, gazing out at the moonlit mountains, the stony sisters, that simultaneously drew her and frightened her. She got sick. The doctor was clueless, he performed all sorts of tests on her, and Heidi let it happen. She sat on the treatment table in her underwear. The doctor wrote
something in her file, and then swiveled around on his much too low chair. Everything’s fine, he said, making a face as though nothing was, except you’re pregnant.

She asked him not to tell her parents, but after a while it was impossible to conceal the fact. Her mother was first to notice, and told her father. Her parents reacted with astonishing calm. They asked Heidi who the father was, and whether he knew. Oddly, it had never occurred to Heidi to let Rainer know. What did the child have to do with him? But on her parents’ insistence, she called him. He came that weekend, and Heidi met him at the station. He was wearing good clothes, and she sensed that he had thought about everything and had a plan. They drank coffee in a place near the station, and Rainer cautiously tried to establish Heidi’s view of everything, and whether she could imagine a life with him. By the time they moved on, to lunch at home with her parents, everything was decided.

Rainer got on well with Heidi’s parents. He had a way of submitting to others immediately, and Heidi’s father liked that. He helped Rainer get a job, and found them a little three-room apartment. From the balcony, Heidi could see the Three Sisters, and when the wind was in the right angle she could hear the trains, and even the platform announcements. On Sundays, Rainer and Heidi
went to her parents’, and they all acted as though the baby was already born and belonged to them. Heidi didn’t say much, she sensed that it would pass, and that something different was in store for her, something she couldn’t begin to predict. At the wedding, Heidi’s father made a speech, poking fun at his daughter who had left home to become an artist, and had come back with a bun in the oven. Rainer looked sheepish, but Heidi smiled and raised the baby aloft, like a prize.

HEIDI WENT TO INNSBRUCK
many times in the intervening years, but never once to Vienna. Rainer didn’t care for Vienna, much less the Viennese. Anyway, he didn’t want Heidi to get any stupid ideas, he said, otherwise she might start applying to the Academy again.

A train came in, and Heidi quickly stood up. She didn’t want people to see her sitting there as though she had nothing better to do. She went to the supermarket, and then home. She stopped by the neighbor’s. Cyril wasn’t ready to go home yet, he wanted to go on playing with Leah. He can have supper with us, that’s fine, said the neighbor. Not today, said Heidi. Cyril, she called out shrilly, and she stuck her head in at the door, past the neighbor. Cyril!

While she was making supper, she saw the teenagers hanging around the recycling containers. She knew one of the girls, who was a trainee at the bakery. At work she wore a shapeless apron, but on the street you only ever saw her in a miniskirt, with exposed navel and a pushup bra that made her breasts look even bigger than they were. She’s just a kid, Rainer had said once, in a tone that made Heidi suspicious. He often made remarks like that about other women, he seemed to think of little else. In their years together Heidi had lost all respect for him. She refused to participate in his games, and kept to herself whenever she could. He suggested a course of therapy for her, came home with pamphlets for couples workshops. Never, said Heidi, I’ll never do that, and I’ll never talk about those things in front of other people either. She wouldn’t even touch the pamphlets, that was how disgusted she was.

After some time Heidi had begun to draw again, in the mornings, when Rainer was out of the house and Cyril was in his kindergarten. Every evening she watched the trainee baker from her kitchen window, saw her parading back and forth in front of the boys, with her chest out and her bottom wiggling. Heidi wanted to ask her to model for her, but she didn’t dare go down and talk to the girl. Instead, she drew her from memory, she imagined her in
all sorts of poses, naked and clothed, from the back, from the front, squatting or kneeling, standing, face averted, with a hand in her hair.

Heidi stood naked in front of the mirror, and then drew the girl, based on her own body, a childlike figure resembling both parents without it being clear which features came from which parent. She hid the drawings in a cardboard box at the top of the closet in the bedroom. There must be hundreds of them by now.

Sometimes she wondered what would have happened if she’d stayed on the train and gone to Vienna, and submitted her portfolio. Most likely she wouldn’t have been asked to take the exam. Or she would have failed the exam. Or she would have passed the exam and taken the course, and she would be an art teacher now in some little town or other. The only thing you could say for certain was that there would have been no Cyril, and she couldn’t imagine a life without him, even if she did sometimes wish he had never been born, and she had remained free and independent and able to do whatever she wanted.

She would have liked to talk about all that with Renate, would have liked to show her the new drawings, but since her return she had avoided her former teacher. She thought of that night, the smell of Renate, and her bare feet and her hands, her tanned skin, her pale skin. She
felt ashamed in front of her, and secretly she probably gave her some of the blame for what had happened. She never thanked Renate for the card and the soft toy that Renate had sent when Cyril was born. She had the feeling she was making fun of her in some way.

HEIDI WAS MAKING SUPPER
. The news was on the radio. Cyril was in the living room, listening to a kids’ tape. He had the volume on much too high, and his story was mixed in with items on the news, making an absurd collage. Outside, Carmen was showing off in front of her pals. In her mind, Heidi changed to the girl, parading up and down, confidently showing off her body, dolled up for no one except herself. Heidi knew by now that Carmen wasn’t interested in the boys, she was just playing with them. She had talked to her, they had had coffee together, she had gone to buy clothes with her and underwear, which she only wore when Rainer wasn’t at home. She had let Carmen put makeup on her and do her hair. And then they had taken pictures of themselves and each other, made little videos using Carmen’s mobile phone camera, masquerades, games, whatever they felt like. Heidi had shown herself to the girl, she imagined her showing the little films to her friends with her cheeky
laugh. Heidi was waiting for Carmen to look up at her, but she never did, probably she was just toying with her too.

Heidi imagined what would happen if Rainer found the drawings when she was no longer there. Sometime, looking for a reason, he would go through all her things, and open the box and find the sketches and the photographs. She’s just a kid, he would say, and shake his head, and not get it.

The Hurt

A
T THE AGE
of forty, Lucia’s mother had gone mad. I think that was the thing Lucia was most afraid of for herself. I asked her what had precipitated it. Just life, Lucia said, shrugging her shoulders. She married this man who loved her more than she loved him. I came along, she raised me, and eventually she couldn’t take it anymore and she cut her wrists. When I found her she was unconscious. I was thirteen.

Lucia was two years younger than me. I met her one summer, when I was staying with my grandparents in the mountains. I’d finished school in the spring, and I was going to start college in the fall. I had been hoping to go walking with my grandfather, but he had fallen ill and
was slow to recover, so I had a lot of time to myself. When it rained, I read to try and prepare for college, but when the sun shone I was outside all day, wandering around, swimming in the icy lake, and coming home late.

It was at the lake that I first met Lucia. We hit it off right away, and spent all our time together. We went walking in the mountains, lay in the grass for hours, and when the weather was bad we put on slickers and went out anyway. The meadows were springy underfoot, and when the sun came out the sky was blue like you wouldn’t believe.

Often Lucia asked me to tell her stories. I’d hardly experienced anything in real life, but I always came up with something to tell her about. I can’t remember what, I just remember we used to laugh a lot. Lucia told me about her dreams, places she wanted to visit, things she wanted to buy. A car and clothes and a house. She had it all planned. She wanted to work in one of the hotel bars and make a lot of money in no time at all, and then she wanted a husband and two kids and a house on the edge of the village, near the lake. Then I can sit at home, she said, and look out the window and wait for the kids to come home from school.

Once Lucia got sick. She was alone at home, her mother was away in the clinic, and her father was in the shop downstairs. He sold radios and TVs, and he was a nice,
rather shy man. She’s just got a bit of a cold, he said, and he sent me upstairs to her.

Lucia answered the door in pajamas, and I followed her up to her room. It was my first time in the house, and I had a mildly alarming sense I was doing something forbidden. It was that afternoon Lucia told me about her mother. It’s only in summer, she said, she sits upstairs in her room all day long, doesn’t speak, doesn’t do anything, and my father keeps having to go up and check how she is. He’s worried she might try to do it again, said Lucia. Will you make me some tea?

She wasn’t really sick, but I made her some tea anyway, it was like a game of house. Lucia told me where to find everything. When I opened the cabinets, I had a feeling I was under observation. Then Lucia walked into the kitchen and watched me and smiled when I looked at her. When she coughed, it sounded like she was pretending.

Lucia showed me photographs. We lay on the bed together, she was under the covers, I was on top. Eventually she asked me to kiss her, and I kissed her. About a week later, we slept together, it was the first time for both of us.

We thought we would go on a circular walk over two mountain passes. We would spend the night in a youth hostel in the next valley. We had been walking all day,
had climbed up a long way, crossed stony landscapes, and only late in the afternoon reached our destination, which was a tiny village way up a barren valley. The youth hostel was a small stone house at the edge of the village. On the door was a sign telling you where to pick up the key.

The house was cold and empty. On the ground floor was a kitchen and a little dining room. There was a guest book on the table. The last entry was a couple of days ago. Two Australians had written something about the end of the world. The dormitory was up in the attic. It was dark, because there were only two dormer windows and a single weak lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I dropped my backpack on one of the narrow mattresses along the wall on the floor, and Lucia took the one beside it. At the foot end of the mattresses were piles of brown woolen blankets. We went down to the kitchen, made coffee, and ate provisions we’d brought with us, bread and cheese and fruit and chocolate.

The sun dipped over the mountain early and it quickly got cold, but the sky was still blue. In a little general store we bought a liter of red wine. Then we strolled up the valley out of the village. We could hear marmots whistle, but we couldn’t see them. After a bit, Lucia said she was getting cold. I offered her my jacket, but she declined and we turned back.

The youth hostel was situated next to a stream we could hear even with the windows closed. It was barely warmer inside than out. I opened the wine and we got into our sleeping bags, not undressing, and drank wine out of the bottle and talked. Tell me a story, Lucia said, and I told her about things I wanted to do and films I’d seen and books I’d read.

Lucia slipped out of her sleeping bag to go to the bathroom. When she came back, she sat on my sleeping bag for a minute, then she stripped to her underwear and scooted in beside me.

Autumn came, and Lucia got a job at a hotel bar. I went home and enrolled at university. I had a good record at high school, but I had trouble making the adjustment to college. I found it hard to meet people, and spent most of my evenings alone in the little attic room my parents had found me.

I wrote regularly to Lucia, who rarely wrote back. If she did, it was a postcard that barely said anything, just that she was doing fine, that there was nothing happening in the village, the weather was good or bad or whatever. Sometimes she filled in the space with little drawings, a flower or an Alpine hut, and one time a heart with a drop of blood squeezed from it. The drawings looked like tattoos to me.

The summer after, my grandfather died. I drove out to the funeral in the village with my father. I hoped to see Lucia. She wasn’t there. I left messages for her but she didn’t get in touch. When we returned to the flatland, we took Grandmother with us.

A couple of times I tried to phone Lucia. Usually her father picked up and said she had just gone out. Once it was her. I said I wanted to visit her, but she didn’t seem interested. When I insisted, she said I was free to do what I liked, she couldn’t tell me never to come to the village. After that I wrote to her less often, but I didn’t forget her either. I had promised her that summer that I would be back, and when I’d finished at college, I applied for the job of teacher at the village school. The headmaster told me it was only on account of my grandparents that I got the job.

YOU WON’T COME BACK
, Lucia had said four years ago. Now she said, I never thought you’d be back. I had come up by train at the beginning of the week. My father promised to bring my stuff up to the valley by car that weekend, my books and the stereo and the little TV. But on Friday it snowed and the pass was shut. My father called and said did it matter if he came the following week? I was sitting
in my grandparents’ little house. I was sleeping in the bed my grandfather had died in, and presumably my great-grandfather before him. I lay under the heavy comforter, my arms pinned to my sides like a dead person’s, and I tried to imagine what it would be like if I really couldn’t move them, just to lie there and wait for death.