Amberville (14 page)

Across from me at the kitchen table sat my beloved fox. I had become accustomed to seeing a fire burning in her eyes. It had burned there since the day we met, and the injustices of the last few weeks had caused it to flame up. The letter from the Cub List extinguished that fire for all time.

“My love,” I said. “It…it’s going to work out.”

I had nothing else to say. She didn’t answer. She remained mute for several days. Our roles were reversed: she went into a kind of coma and I did my best to entice her back to life. For me this was perfect; I could finally put away my own pain and concentrate on someone else. Practical tasks kept me occupied. I bought and prepared food, I did dishes and laundry. And I consoled and consoled. Nicole did as I asked, she got up and got dressed, she ate the food I prepared, and she listened to me talk. But she was in a world of her own where I couldn’t get to her, and I didn’t know what was going on in her mind.

After a lunch that we ate in our kitchen in Tourquai a week or so after the letter from the Cub List, she got up, went directly into the bedroom, pulled out the suitcase from under the bed, and started packing her clothes. I’d followed her into the bedroom because I felt that something
was going on, and when she started packing I asked what she was doing. She didn’t answer, simply continued calmly folding her clothes and setting them in small heaps in the suitcase. I asked again. She didn’t seem to hear me. I became furious; it must have been the result of the entire drawn-out process I’d gone through. I rushed over to the bed, throwing the suitcase and the neatly folded clothes onto the floor and screaming at her with the full force of my lungs. She looked me straight in the eyes and said with studied clarity, “I’m leaving you now.”

And I realized that there was nothing I could do about it.

The rest of the story is uninteresting. I became what I am. I took a swing at someone when I was drunk, I kicked someone else—I don’t know who they were, and that has no significance. I again became what I’d been before those weeks in the cellar and my first poetry collection. I fought because I wanted to, because it felt good, and then: because there was always someone who paid me. Much later I wound up in jail; during the first time at the correctional facility I was forced to remain sober and I learned to close myself off. I realized that it was a matter of concentration. I focused, wiping out everything that had happened between the cellar in Yok and the first drunken fistfight. In time I understood that prison was exactly like the city outside. I started fighting again, I got paid just like before, and thanks to the payment I could flee from my memories with the help of drugs. They were needed those days when I didn’t have the energy to concentrate. I can forget everything, except this: Snake Marek is the animal who for no reason froze my third grant and crushed my life. This I will never forget.

E
ric was fiddling with the key he had in his pants pocket.

He was standing, along with the crow, the gazelle, and Snake Marek, in the men’s restroom kitty-corner from the Order Room on the ninth floor of the Environmental Ministry’s imposing headquarters between Avenue Gabriel and Place de la Libération in the heart of Tourquai. Eric had pushed open the door just enough that he could peek out through the narrow doorway. The half-moon was in place; there couldn’t be more than a half hour left of the Evening Weather. The Environmental Ministry was a deserted building except for the guards who were expected to patrol the floors each night. But the guards were apathetic. Eric had heard Edda complain countless times about how the security company was eager to send invoices, but hardly even managed to leave the reception area at night. Despite the fact that two inspection rounds were part of the contract.

The corridor along the meeting rooms was in darkness except for the bluish glow here and there from the plant lights. They were hanging from the ceiling like personal suns for the rubber trees, palms, and ferns, which otherwise
would have folded up and died in the windowless dark. The dark-blue wall-to-wall carpeting created a subdued, sober impression.

“Is there usually some particular time that—” Sam whispered impatiently, but was immediately hushed by Eric.

“Someone’s coming,” hissed the bear.

As though on command, they all stopped breathing for a few long moments. They heard a door being slammed shut with a kind of metallic clang, a lock being turned, and then the sound of footsteps. Against the sound-muffling carpets it was impossible to determine if the steps were heading in their direction or not.

Tom-Tom was the first to start breathing again, like a fish on land gasping for air, and Eric became irritated.

Too many sounds were coming from the crow.

At the same time Eric didn’t want to close the door completely. Not knowing what was going on was, he decided, a greater risk than staying completely hidden.

Then all four of them heard it. The crackling sound of a walkie-talkie far away, and a voice that said, “On nine now, read?”

“On nine, yes.”

Eric turned around in surprise and encountered Snake’s piercing gaze.

“Never leaves reception, huh?” Snake hissed.

Eric hushed him with a hand gesture. “Into the stall,” he hissed, gently shoving the crow so that he would understand.

Snake was the quickest to move, but instead of wriggling over toward the toilets he slithered lightning-fast across the floor and glided down into a small wastebasket by the wash basin, where he hid himself under a crumpled paper towel. There were two stalls in the men’s restroom, and it was by chance that the crow took the innermost one while Sam and Eric had to share the stall closest to the door.

“You and me in a restroom stall. A fantasy fulfilled,” sighed Sam without even trying to speak especially softly, “and then the circumstances are so…rotten.”

The gazelle giggled, closing the door and sitting down on the lowered toilet seat while Eric positioned himself to peer through the gap in the door.

“Shh,” hissed Eric.

“Honestly speaking,” said Sam without whispering, “what can happen? Is the guard going to throw us out?”

The gazelle was not afraid of being discovered. Of all the violations of the law he had committed over the years, a break-in at the Environmental Ministry men’s room was hardly anything to write home about. Snake had surely come up with an excuse for himself that would make the situation worse for the others, and Tom-Tom was too stupid to even think of lying. In addition, the crow would neither allow himself to be arrested or questioned; in tight situations he lost control and it’s the guard you’d be feeling sorry for. The only one who really couldn’t be discovered was Eric.

The restroom door opened and the guard came in.

Eric shut his eyes. When he’d played hide-and-seek with Teddy when he was really little, he’d thought he became invisible if he closed his eyes. He waited. Without a single idea of how he might handle the situation. Here I stand, hiding, he thought, inside a stall in a men’s restroom along with a drug-intoxicated homosexual prostitute gazelle who is particularly popular with the masochists of the city.

And Eric Bear smiled a weak smile, for the condition of things could hardly get much worse.

The guard’s few footsteps across the floor over to the stall were determined. And Eric was imagining the paw on the handle on the other side when there was an unexpected crackling from the walkie-talkie. The sound echoed inside the half-tiled room.

“Yes? Over,” answered the guard.

His paw was still on the door handle.

“Food’s ready now,” said his colleague from down in reception.

“Already? Read.”

“I’m not waiting, you can come when you want.”

Then the crackling ceased, and for a few, endless seconds the guard hesitated before he made his decision. With rapid steps he left the restroom. The door slammed shut.

Eric didn’t open his eyes. He didn’t know how long he held his breath, but he felt quite ready to faint. His shoulders sank, he opened the door and stepped out of the stall.

“Damn, I’d almost started hoping for a little action,” said Tom-Tom Crow, who was coming out of the neighboring stall.

They felt strangely exhilarated, even Snake, who came winding out of the wastebasket. Eric crossly muttered a reply to the crow that no one heard, and retook his position by the door out to the corridor and the Order Room.

The full moon was old when the courier finally arrived.

Tom-Tom had fallen asleep inside one of the restroom stalls, Sam and Snake were carrying on a low-voiced conversation about nothing in particular over by the wash basin. When the elevator announced its arrival in the south corridor with a mournful ping, Eric was standing at his post by the door, but all three of them heard the sound.

The gazelle and Snake fell silent.

It was certainly not the guard taking the elevator, and it wasn’t more than a few moments later that they saw him; it was some kind of feline creature. A well-pressed gray suit and the steel-rimmed eyeglasses concealed his particular features, making him anonymous. He took the direct route to the Order Room, setting his briefcase down on the floor while he dug in his pocket for a key. He unlocked the door, took the briefcase, and went into the room, from which he came out again after scarcely half a minute. He’d vanished before the moment had even become exciting.

Eric remained standing in the doorway and peeked.

“Why are we still standing here?” asked Sam impatiently. “He’s definitely gone.”

“That was the Cub List,” whispered Eric.

And he’d scarcely uttered the word before the elevator announced the next visitor. This one, however, had a quite different appearance.

To begin with, it took a while before he showed himself in the north corridor. And when he finally arrived, it was as though he’d gotten lost. With lingering steps he looked around time after time. He was a threadbare camel with shoes so worn the right heel was missing. His pants looked as though he’d slept in them for several weeks, and the shirt that hung down over his thighs was spotted black by soot or oil. When he proved to have the key to the Order Room on a chain around his neck, they all understood that this was the only possibility: this animal was born with pockets with holes in them.

The camel went into the Order Room and came out again. The whole thing went very quickly, but in contrast to the earlier, correct civil servant with his briefcase, it was impossible to see if the camel had taken a list along.

“Now?” whispered Sam.

“We’ll wait until we hear the elevator,” Eric whispered back.

He involuntarily put his paw in his pocket and squeezed the key. It was the key that he’d had made when he was young, the key that he’d copied in modeling clay from Mother’s key ring. And what if it didn’t work? If it was the wrong key, and had been the wrong key for all these years? Or if the ministry had quite simply changed the locks since then? Stranger things had happened.

“Now, then?”

Sam’s impatience demanded no explanation. All four of them had calculated what risk they were taking as of now.
If the camel had actually set a Death List…a real Death List in the locked Order Room, ChauffeurTiger could arrive at any moment to fetch it. And no one, not even Tom-Tom, had any desire to run into the tiger.

“Now,” said Eric.

He opened the door to the restroom and quickly crossed the dark corridor. Without hesitating, without thinking, he put the key in the Order Room lock and turned it.

It worked.

When he stepped into the small room, where, just as his mother had always said, there was only a table and a desk blotter, he immediately saw the two envelopes. The one neat with typewritten letters on the front, the other looking like it had been crumpled up, thrown into a puddle, hung up to dry, and then ended up here. Eric felt Snake’s presence right behind him, and intuitively he realized that there was no time to waste. Without appearing any too urgent, he ran over to the table and snatched the battered envelope at the same moment as the snake was making his way up the legs of the table with the intention of doing the same thing. Eric took a few steps to the side and opened the envelope. There was no risk that anyone would notice that the envelope had been opened and closed again; the shabby camel had seen to that.

A piece of paper, and there was a list with names, eighteen of them, typewritten in a column. Eric read.

What was there was impossible.

It was not only Nicholas Dove’s name that Eric recognized on the Death List. There was another name that he knew more than well. Terror and shock caused Eric Bear to become dizzy, feel nauseous. He took a deep breath, pulled himself together, and looked up from the paper.

“It’s true,” Eric Bear said without moving. “There is a Death List.”

T
he bedroom was bathed in the gentle daylight coming in through the drawn, white curtains. On a massive double bed, thick down comforters and a dozen shapeless pillows created a white lunar landscape with high mountains and deep ravines. Resting in this realm of softness was the delicate, unclothed body that was Emma Rabbit. She was lying on her stomach, with her legs scissored around a thick bedspread and her face turned to the right, toward the windows.

The walls of the bedroom were white, the oiled oak boards of the parquet floor had become darker since they moved in, and the bed was the only piece of furniture in the room, besides the round, white rug and the overstuffed armchair where Eric Bear was sitting, observing his sleeping wife. In the bedroom on Uxbridge Street there was an aroma of sleep and well-being, but it had been several years since Eric had noticed that. Today, after having been squeezed in with the males at Yiala’s Arch for two weeks, the aroma was more than tangible; it broke over him, filling him with melancholy.

He couldn’t see his wife’s face from the armchair where he was sitting, but he saw her thin body, and that caused tenderness to bubble up from his heart.

Was Eric Bear sitting there, secretly looking at his sleeping wife?

It couldn’t be denied.

Thoughts were moving through his head, slowly but evasively. Memories and associations, scenes and words, all in a single incomprehensible jumble. He let it happen. His yoga teacher had taught him to let thoughts come and go like clouds passing over an early Forenoon Sky. He had never understood what she meant, but finally he did just what she’d said. And slowly but surely he fell through the years down toward his childhood, which is often the case if you simply let your thoughts be in peace. Morning and the bedroom faded away and disappeared, until the scent of a familiar breathing was all that remained.

A sweet-smelling breath, closed-in the way a stuffed animal’s breath always is. The warm exhalations that come from the belly, that gather fragments from cotton that has never seen the light of day. From Teddy’s mouth came a breath that, to be sure, was lukewarm and stale, with a touch of honey and grass, but which made Eric secure. After the nightmares, he might take the few steps across the room and jump down into Teddy’s bed where his breath was waiting on the pillow, and the ghosts and demons that were haunting him disappeared. Or in the classroom, when Teddy turned around and whispered something in his ear, and Eric felt his breath sweeping past a few millimeters away; then it was those two against the world.

Alone was strong.

But two was one stronger.

During Eric Bear’s entire upbringing he’d wanted to get closer to his twin brother. It was being close to Teddy that meant something, that gave him power to free himself from
Mother and dare to revolt against Father. And with every year that passed, Teddy became more and more distant.

Perhaps that was why the moments of physical proximity with his twin had survived through all these years. His breath of course, but also how in the evenings they’d used each other’s bellies as pillows, and how the feeling of being a part of someone else had been a shield against the reality lying in wait outside the house on Hillville Road. They used to massage each other before they fell asleep in the evening, hard with a solid grip, or loosely with the fingertips. Even the wrestling matches, which Teddy always won as he was the stronger of the two, left behind a feeling of healing nearness despite the bruises and worn fur.

Eric had loved his twin brother. He had needed him. More than he’d loved and needed anyone else in the whole world. It was in the light of Teddy’s betrayal that Eric’s complicated teenage years should be seen; this betrayal which neither of them could truly say when it occurred. It was not a matter of open conflict. Teddy disappeared by degrees into his own world of peculiar ideas that he refused to account for. It hurt to be shut out. And in his attempts to compensate for the loneliness to which he was inescapably consigned—and which he feared more than anything else—he sought community in circles where community was offered only in exchange for something else.

Eric loved Teddy. Eric did everything Teddy asked for. The only problem was that Teddy asked too seldom. But when it happened…when it happened…it was such a joy. However peculiar Teddy’s requests were, Eric went along. It was as though he stood, freezing, outside a shuttered-up house week after week, and then suddenly someone opened the door and asked him to come up and sit down in front of the warm fire. Coming home. Feeling secure. Not having to wonder and worry.

When did Eric discover
for the first time that everything wasn’t as it should be with Teddy?

This question might be answered in two ways.

The first answer is: never.

The second answer is: at the same moment that they started school and Eric had the chance to compare his twin brother with others who were the same age. But by avoiding judging his brother’s singular manner in terms of right or wrong, life went on.

Sometimes it was absurd. In his teenage years it was not uncommon for Teddy to do and say things that appeared patently peculiar. Eric defended his brother by refusing to react to these peculiarities, and together the brothers seemed like certifiable lunatics. Even if Eric didn’t know what would happen if it was openly acknowledged that something was wrong, the thought frightened him.

Boxer Bloom was a fundamentalist, a conservative on the border of being a reactionary animal in all questions except political ones, where he gladly appeared to be liberal. Teddy Bear’s eccentricities became more extensive the older Teddy got. The boxer became more and more irritated. Rhinoceros Edda’s understanding for Teddy was exceeded only by her desire to smooth things over.

“I can’t eat this,” said Teddy suddenly one evening when all four of them were sitting in the kitchen on Hillville Road, having dinner.

The twins had recently turned fourteen and they were in the eighth grade. Teddy and Eric had spent the last weeks of summer vacation at Hillevie’s sailing camp. Since they’d come home from camp and the family had moved into Amberville again, Boxer Bloom had done his best to pretend as though everything were fine. He imagined to himself that Teddy had undergone a magic metamorphosis over the
summer, and that everything would finally be…normal. Now he was getting desperate. It had nothing to do with food. The reminder that they would be forced to live with Teddy’s lack of accountability and compulsive thoughts for yet another year was more than Boxer could bear. When Teddy pushed aside his plate and awkwardly looked down at the table, something burst inside Boxer Bloom. With suppressed rage he muttered, “You can’t eat?”

“Papa,” said Teddy, who, like Eric, heard how angry his father was, “that’s not the idea. I…I just can’t.”

“It’s a tomato salsa, potato casserole, and veal cutlet,” Boxer informed, “that your mother has devoted hours to preparing. And which you have eaten a hundred times before.”

“Well,” objected Mother, “perhaps not
that
many times…”

“Why doesn’t it suit you just now?”

Boxer stared fiercely at the cub.

“If he doesn’t want to, he doesn’t have to, does he?” said Eric. “He’s eaten the salsa and the casserole. Maybe he’s full?”

“It’s got nothing to do with that,” said Teddy.

“Well, now,” thundered Bloom. “So what does it have to do with?”

“It can’t be right to kill a calf,” Teddy almost whispered.

And Boxer struck his paw on the table and got up. He appeared massive where he stood looking down at them. He held one paw pointed right at the cub.

“And what in the hell do you mean?!” shouted Bloom.

But in the moment following, before Teddy had time to reply, despite the fact that the tears were already rolling down his cheeks, Eric unexpectedly flew at his father.

Mother screamed, Father cried out and staggered backwards out toward the living room. Eric was hanging around his belly in something that resembled a convulsive hug.

“No more!” shouted Eric. “No more now.”

Eric didn’t care about the veal cutlet and his crazy brother. Feelings of impotence had built up for several weeks, just as long as Bloom had tried to imagine that everything would be fine, and finally here was the violent, physical release.

It should be said in Boxer Bloom’s defense that he did not forcibly attempt to free himself from his cub. When he regained his balance he simply stood completely still until Eric released his hold. And they remained standing like that, staring at each other, the cub openly aggressive, the father more surprised. Before they recovered enough to say anything to each other, Teddy got up from the table out in the kitchen. The sound caused Eric to turn around, and he saw his twin brother running up the stairs.

“There are limits,” said Bloom flatly. “A limit for when it’s gone too far and we can’t take care of it ourselves any longer.”

Eric turned around again and stared into the dog’s eyes.

“Your love ought to be boundless,” Eric whispered scarcely audibly, “but it never has been.”

Whereupon he turned and ran up the stairs after Teddy.

Emma Rabbit turned around
in the bed.

Eric Bear gave a start, restored in an instant to the present. He looked at her and how in her sleep she was searching for the blanket because she was cold lying there on her back. She pulled one of the large, white comforters over her, again disappearing out of his field of vision. The tears were running from Eric’s eyes without his realizing it. Soundlessly he got up. It was a little more than two weeks since he’d seen her last. But tonight, after he’d put the Death List back in its crumpled envelope, he was compelled to come here instead of to Yiala’s Arch. Compelled to see her, to carefully stroke her forehead in her sleep.

He had intended to sneak out of the bedroom and let it be fine like that, but he wasn’t able to. Not just now. He stood up, taking a few steps over toward the bed. She turned her head, and her whiskers twitched from the dream she was having. It was strange, he thought, that he dared to love someone like this. Again. To make yourself so defenseless, to risk being wounded so terribly. Again. After everything that had happened with Teddy.

Eric looked at his sleeping wife and smiled. But she wouldn’t hurt him. And it was this certainty, this self-assured thought that meant that he’d dared. He loved her because she was worthy of being loved, and he, more clearly than anyone else, could see that.

Carefully he sneaked out of the bedroom, avoiding the plank in the floor right next to the threshold, the one that always creaked. He walked quickly through the living room and out into the hall, succeeded in opening and closing the door without the least sound, and only a few moments later he was en route in his gray Volga Combi.

A Death List existed.

It was not drawn up by the Chauffeurs.

And Nicholas Dove was there on the list.

The list consisted of names and dates, that was all. On certain days no one would be picked up, other days there was more than one. Such was the case the twenty-first of May.

That was the day the Chauffeurs would pick Nicholas Dove up.

That was in four days.

But on the twenty-first of May there had been one more name. Yet another stuffed animal would be taken away from this life in four days.

Teddy Bear.