The Best Thing for You (23 page)

Yet for all their wilful squalor and childish melodramatics, Ulrike began to like herself in this new life, to like her own toughness and leanness (she lost the last of her baby fat away
from her cozily stocked little apartment), to like the narrow focus of their ideals, that rendered the usual student occupations – studying, drinking, music, fashion, falling in love – irrelevant. She began to write articles of her own for the newspaper, cold, tight, reasoned pieces that earned letters to the editor in the major papers. Attention of any sort bewitched her comrades, and soon they were looking to her as a leader. As silliness became notoriety, the group began to look for ways to leave a larger mark on the world.

At Easter, Ulrike went home to visit her parents.

They met her at the train station. In the eight months of her absence (she had not gone home for Christmas) her parents seemed to have aged years, and stood both frail and lumpish, peering nearsightedly down the platform. When they caught sight of Ulrike her mother’s face contorted in a spasm of emotion, while her father offered, then cautiously withdrew, a half-dozen red and yellow carnations in a paper cone. She was aware of having left in jeans and a black turtleneck, with a manicure and an icy determination to succeed, and of the picture she now presented: a chop-haired beanpole dressed in army fatigues liberally defaced with ballpoint pen.

Is it you? her father said, the flowers hanging slack at his side.

She wanted to show him the book in her knee pocket, as a link between now and then – a paperback edition of Aristotle’s
Nicomachean Ethics
– but turned instead to walk between them, silently, back to the apartment.

After a lovingly starchy meal, her father enquired about her grades. She admitted she had no idea.

Ulrike? her mother said. She noticed they both used her name frequently, as though to reassure themselves she was still their own child and not some changeling.

There followed a predictable acceleration of hostilities, during which Ulrike refused to account for her allowance (though “feeding anarchists” seemed a suitably anarchic response). Her mother wept, while her father said she must be under the influence of some dangerous cult, and threatened to take her down to the local hospital and have her committed for psychiatric evaluation, frogmarch her if necessary; at which last suggestion Ulrike, unpardonably, laughed. It was the knowledge – joyous, blasphemous, tragic and comic too – that she was too big and strong, finally, to be contained, and if it came to a physical struggle her white-haired father would inevitably come off the worse. She had wanted to cry, and had therefore laughed. Still, had she not laughed, her mother would probably not have slapped her, and her father would probably not, in the same instant, have ordered her out of the house “forever” (the word must be hobbled this way, in quotes, as anger usually hobbles forgiveness, that is, harshly but temporarily). In the scuffle, as the two of them together plucked at her arms, in a last desperate exertion of parental authority – to chastise, but also to touch – she would probably not have shaken them off to collect her knapsack, and in so doing spotted the metronome, still poised on the piano lid, and – seeing several problems align like monoliths on a midsummer’s eve, allowing a single solution, like a single shaft of light, to penetrate them all – slipped it into her knapsack and left her parents’ smug, narrow, comfortable, corrupt home forever.

On the train, on the way back north, she got the metronome’s back plate off with a penknife, and compared the guts of the thing with a diagram in one of her books, a thorough, thoughtful work on the construction of elementary explosives. Like a clockwork: good enough. As for a target, that would not be difficult: every family had a skeleton in the closet, everyone knew of this or that
official who had somehow stayed on in the very job he held during the war, like those bell-bottomed wooden dolls that rocked and rocked and didn’t fall over. Someone would know a city counsellor or administrator or doctor or perhaps even a judge who had signed a paper or looked away, it would not (to stoke Ulrike’s heartbreak and rage) need very much.

When her comrades weakly protested that the metronome was unreliable for a timer, a self-indulgent choice, she stood firm. The raised arm, the swastika, the yellow star: had it not also, she argued, been a war of symbols?

You take it personally, said Lucas, the gentle loudmouth, watching her pack her knapsack with clothes and books. As well as an anarchist he pretended to be an aficionado of Eastern religions, and was always espousing transcendence and the dissolution of the self. He was also sick with love for Ulrike, and hid it rather badly.

Six weeks at least, we agreed, she said. Don’t come looking for me and then say you forgot.

No, he said.

She slung the knapsack over one shoulder and put the package containing the metronome rather more gingerly in her coat pocket.

Walk me to the courthouse.

He nodded and swallowed and reached to embrace her but she pushed him away, saying, Stupid. The metronome.

He nodded again, and they went out.

They took the subway to the courthouse, an imposing stone building with lions on either side of the stairs. They stopped in the shadow of a paw and made a huddling business of lighting cigarettes.

There, Ulrike murmured, nodding at a line of sleek black sedans parked out front. That one. See the licence plate.

Kiss me, Lucas Loudmouth said huskily. She refused.

I’ll make a distraction, he said.

Lucas, no.

Watch, he said, and pulled from his own pocket a contraption she immediately recognized as a cruder version of her own.

Idiot! she said, but he had already pulled away and was running out into the square, whooping and waving the wiry tangle over his head. Heads turned, cars slowed. Ulrike shrank back into the lion’s shadow. She saw him stop, seventy or eighty yards away, and raise the contraption to his lips as though to kiss it. Afterwards she realized he must have been lighting some part of it with his cigarette.

The explosion was not loud, from that distance, nor were the screams of passersby, nor even the impact of two cars whose drivers both veered away at the same moment. The flash did not seem big and the smoke dissipated quickly, but foolish Lucas Loudmouth did not get up from the ground. The doors of the courthouse opened and people began to emerge, tentatively, to see what had happened. Many more leaned out of the windows. Shouting she heard, and sirens, but distantly, as though on the other side of a huge glass wall. A man rushed down the steps, brushing against her, and ran over to where the body lay; when he got close she saw him turn away to retch. She began to walk back to the subway station. On the way she stopped in a café to use the washroom. Locked in a cubicle, she disabled the device in her pocket, flushed some parts, deposited others in a sanitary napkin disposal box, and walked away clutching the maimed metronome in her hand. She already had her passport and a couple of thousand marks tucked inside her Aristotle. She had planned to go to Switzerland until the police lost interest, or perhaps Italy.

At the airport she set the metronome on the ticket counter while she counted out the cash. Her hearing was slowly returning,
but the scarfed, blond-beehived ticket seller still had to speak twice before Ulrike understood her.

You are a musician? she repeated, smiling curiously, nodding at the metronome.

Ulrike nodded.

The ticket seller booked her on a flight to Frankfurt almost immediately, but cautioned her there would be a four-hour wait for the next flight to New York.

Luggage? she asked brightly.

It was sent on ahead, Ulrike said. Then added: To Juilliard.

Ah! the ticket seller said.

In Frankfurt Ulrike bought juice and a pretzel and a postcard showing the Staatsoper. Fortunately she had dressed well for her first terrorist act, in heels, a dark wool suit, and a beige trench coat, and drew little attention. Her plan had been to walk briskly down the street past the line of cars, stopping beside her target to remove an imaginary stone from her shoe, while slipping the package from her pocket and sticking it to the inside rim of the front wheel.

She tried to write a note to her parents on the postcard.

Years later she would imagine she had been spotted outside the courthouse moments before the blast, by a security guard who thought the loitering conjunction of the well-dressed young woman and the scruffy, animated young man suspicious. After the explosion his eyes would have returned to the young woman, who, after a moment’s hesitation, walked briskly away from the chaotic scene without once looking back. He noted carefully what she was wearing and notified the police, who traced her as far as the airport, even found the unwritten postcard abandoned on a plastic seat in one of the lounges, but never located the woman herself.

He
died?
David interrupted.

It was probably a fuse, the woman said. He probably thought he’d have time to run away, and while everyone was looking at the explosion I would have time to get the bomb under the car. You don’t want to hear the rest? she added, because David had stood up.

You’re sick, he said unhappily. You’re making this up.

There isn’t much more, she said. In New York I got a job with an import-export company, because of my German. Then with an auction house, where I learned the antiques trade. I never married, out of respect for Lucas. I started my own business fifteen years ago, and here I am. Would you still like the metronome?

Something curious happened in David’s brain. For a brief, swirling, neurochemical moment he believed everything she had told him; and in the next moment he found himself smiling at the fabulous story he had found, this souvenir from New York, about an old German lady in a music shop, mad as a hatter, who thought she’d been a terrorist the way other women thought they’d been beauties, and both flattered and tormented themselves with the memory.

Very much, he said.

Are you a Jew?

And because he felt tender towards her now, because her mind had clearly gone lacy over the years, he told her he was.

I tried to find the son in London, she said. To give it back. I wrote letters to several Goldbergs, but either they didn’t respond or they responded too eagerly. I didn’t trust them. I just put it here on the shelf, finally, with the others.

You’ll miss it, David said, while she busied herself behind the counter with tissue and tape and wrapping paper. To crown her
dementia, she had insisted he accept the metronome as a gift. No other transaction, she said, was ethically possible.

She shook her head.

It ticks like a bomb, she said, and for a moment he saw everything it had come to mean to her, over the years, all the horror – whether real, suspected, or purely fantastic – in the starkness of her teeth, the taut deadness of her skin, and the frail outstanding bones of her skull.

James, back home in Vancouver, had trouble accepting the story as part of the gift, and told David that the woman had lied to him, that the metronome was worth only a fraction of what it would have sold for had it still worked.

You had it appraised? David repeated, incredulous.

The relationship limped on for a few more months, but by the end there was no point even pretending they might have a future together. James insisted, quite formally, on returning David’s gifts, including the metronome, whereas David refused to give up the cherished half-dozen books and the silver cufflinks he had received in return. They parted on the worst possible terms. When David received the promotion that would take him away from Vancouver, possibly forever, he gave his notice and packed his belongings and spent an inordinate amount of time pretending to himself he wasn’t sitting by the phone waiting for James (who would surely have heard by now) to call. On his last night in the apartment he retrieved the metronome from his briefcase and wrapped it elaborately in some cotton batting and leftover kraft paper. A gift it had been, and a gift it would remain.

David had kept the apartment well, the white walls unscarred, the wood floors shiny and smooth. By the time he had finished cleaning the existing cleanness the next occupants would not be able to guess who had lived here before, though they would find
the metronome and they would try. They would try, he thought; and, if it amused them, would it matter if they got it wrong?

Wait, Anika said. That can’t be right.

What?

Maelzel, she said. The metronome. I’m sure it’s older than – what did we say? Eighteen thirty-six?

I didn’t say anything, Thom said. You’re the one who had all those piano lessons.

Eleven years! she said, making her eyes big and staggering a little in the elevator to express the burden of it. He laughed.

They had moved in on the first of December. Now it was the eighteenth, dusk. The elevator drifted slowly upwards. Their arms were full of shopping, gifts and groceries, and some library books. They had continued to elaborate the story of the metronome, begun their first night in the new apartment, as a kind of entertainment to get them through their first days in a strange place. But already the strangeness had worn away, and they felt as though they had never really lived anywhere else. Already they had their favourite shops and haunts – a particular deli, the gay coffee shop, the library on Denman. Still the story of the metronome stayed with them, curling and flowering around each of these bricks that was finally falling into place in their new life. Thom had got a couple of leads on jobs from a man he met in the elevator and was working almost full-time. Anika got a job interview with a newspaper the day after they moved in, and was set to start in January. She spent her last days of unemployment taking black and white photos in the park and cooking elaborate meals. When Thom got home they would pick up the story wherever they had left it off the day before. The distance between them was shrinking and Anika thought they were slowly
being restored to their old selves, laughing, affectionate, pleased with each other. They touched more.