The Ice Cream Man (14 page)

“Once you have your license, you’ll take me for a drive. Promise me.”

“I think that’s the least . . .”

“It’s important. There’s a place I want you to take me.”

In the throes of my earlier irritation, I’m sure I would have wondered out loud if there wasn’t anyone among my mother’s teacher colleagues, with whom she has coffee, who would be happy to arrange as many rides as far and as often as she could wish, but now I keep silent.

“You’re the only one who can take me there,” she adds, as if reading my thoughts.

“Can’t you get there on public transportation?”

“I haven’t been there in more than twenty years.”

“Where?”

“You mustn’t tell your father about that money.”

After the next corner, we can see the train station. My mother hops across the street as if from one ice floe to another; the floes wobble under her high heels, and she nearly topples headlong into the middle of the road. I grab ahold of her sleeve and guide her into the station building.

“You won’t get there until around two in the morning, Mom. Are you absolutely certain you don’t want to wait until morning? Maybe you could stay the night at Aunt Elke’s.”

“No, no, no. Aunt Elke has a border now. Your father will come get me from the station.”

“But it’s so hard for Dad to drive. And in the middle of the night.”

My mother brushes herself off and straightens her clothing, fishes a small mirror out of her handbag and grimaces in it, then suddenly looks exhausted and decides not to bother touching up her lipstick.

“This has been a long day. But it was nice to see you, Jan.” She steps closer and squeezes the sleeves of my coat. “You’d never leave without telling me, would you?”

“Where would I go?”

“I know. But people leave all the same.”

As I open the door to our place and the light from the corridor falls on Milan’s bed, Pavlina’s legs fly off it and she sits bolt upright, staring at me in terror, as if I were gripping a bread knife.

“Milan let me in.”

Of course, she hasn’t been lying in my bunk. Maybe that’s just because it smells pretty bad: the sheets haven’t been washed for a couple of months at least.

“Did your mom make her train?” she ventures.

“Everything always works out for my mom.”

I pull the door shut but don’t feel like switching the light on. A pale violet gleam from the courtyard comes in through the dirty window; the volleyball net flaps in the wind, and the wall looks the same as ever.

“Where have you been, Jan?”

“I guess I’ve been somewhere.”

“You haven’t gone to any classes all week, without saying anything. People were asking me about you. I felt really silly.”

“Why did they ask you?”

She looks down, then continues bravely, “I took notes and did the assignments, so you can copy them.”

“You’re not going to drive me away, are you?” Pavlina suddenly breaks down.

“That’s Milan’s bed. What can I do about it if he’s letting you spend the night there?”

For a while, I think I might take my trousers off right in front of Pavlina so she’ll get a good, long look at how it just dangles there, and how there’s nothing for its bare head to creep into for protection, just as my mother explained, but instead I throw my coat over the back of the chair, kick off my shoes, and crawl under the blanket and quilt. Pavlina sits there in the dark, drawing her knees up under her winter coat. It smells of wet dog, and she is shivering, waiting and fearing that I will say something, but I just want to go to sleep.

“Are you angry with me, Jan?”

“Angry, why?”

“Are you?”

“You don’t arouse feelings anywhere near that strong in me.”

She sits there motionless for a while, then starts searching for her shoes under Milan’s bed. When she finds them, she doesn’t put them on but snatches them up, stuffs her coat under her arm in an awkward bundle, and hurries out of the room. The door closes quickly but without any unnecessary noise, and I can hear her running down the corridor in her stocking feet all the way to the stairs. Only when she reaches the stairway does she stop, put on her coat and shoes, and wrap her wool scarf around her neck. Downstairs, the old woman at the reception desk glowers at her and taps her wristwatch. I think of the wind and the sleet outside, the dim orange of the streetlights; I know how late it is and how long a trek she has to the other side of the city. She could hop on a tram, but she walks the whole way in the cold and wind. It does not affect me. I do not believe anyone could suffer on account of me.

When I was a child, my mother used to take me to the movies on the weekends. They were always films for adults. After the war, she no longer believed in children’s culture. She always paid full price for me and managed to get good seats. I remember the disjointed explanations directed at the usher concerning problems with childcare and assurances of manual censorship: yes, she would cover the boy’s eyes and ears during any unsuitable scenes. And that’s what she did, wrapping me tightly under her arm and pulling down the peak of my cap whenever necessary, but the way she would blurt out things meant it wasn’t difficult to imagine what was happening on the screen. “But he’s married!” “Look out for the train!” “That’s poison!”

There was one film we went to see as many times as there were screenings, though there were few outward signs of any effects it had on my mother. She never once had to resort to censorship, and she sat stock-still in her seat, silently—or at most her breathing became oddly tentative. The first time, I was sure she was just as bored as I was, but we went back to see the film again the very next day. Then a third time, then a fourth, and maybe even a fifth. I wondered what was so special about that film, but no matter how closely I watched, nothing really happened in it. The usual grown-up stuff: people walking, sitting, and talking; sometimes outdoors, sometimes indoors; dramatic diagonal light flickering across the faces of the men and women.

There are only three scenes I can still remember. The first time I saw the film, my attention was still focused during the first couple of scenes: a man and a woman are carrying suitcases along a sun-drenched dirt road. Where are they heading? What are they
carrying
in their cases? They glance around, looking worried. They glance at each other, looking worried. I don’t understand why. They walk, go into a house, unpack their clothes and toiletries. And now: my mother’s arm tenses up, and she pushes my cap down as the oil lamp on the bedside table is lit and the man and woman stand in the room on their own. My pulse quickens, and my
mother’s
reaction tattoos the scene onto my memory; though the very next day, she allows me to see how excessive her emergency measure was. Yes, the woman undresses and puts on a sheetlike nightgown, but the man has already left the room by that point, and the viewers do not get to see much more than he does: any bare skin remains out of view as the white fabric descends. The third scene takes place outdoors, at the end of the film: the expansive scenery features fields and railroad tracks. The woman is standing between two men: the one she was with at the beginning, when they were carrying their suitcases, and a stranger who is looking at her in astonishment through old-fashioned round spectacles. The man’s puzzlement does not affect me in the slightest.

This scene imprinted itself in my mind simply because in subsequent screenings I knew it meant that my pain would soon cease. There was something that relaxed in my mother as well: she had been sitting rigidly in exactly the same position, as if in a dentist’s chair, certain that the drill was going to strike a nerve at any moment. As the end credits began to roll and the other cinema-goers squeezed past us with their carrier bags and their stinking overcoats, my mother sprang to her feet and, with sharp words and downright rude shoving, shooed people’s shoulders and heads from her line of sight. She would go crazy if anyone stood in the projector beam, casting an idiotic shadow over the names of those who had taken part in the making of the film. My mother’s agitation was such that you would have thought it was linked to some genuine family crisis or a cruel twist of fate that was suddenly legible on the screen, now transformed into a notice board.

Did my mother’s past conceal such unprecedented material as arriving, departing, and two men? The drama remained unresolved; the dentist’s drill never reached the nerve. The men’s roles remained unclear to me. There was some coincidence and overlap there. The first one carries suitcases with my mother, leaves the room when she puts her nightgown on, and stands there in the background in the final scene, when the second man appears in the frame and seems to be standing on the train tracks. The second man has a suitcase, but he also has round spectacles through which he observes my mother. In astonishment. That’s the only emotion I remember from the film. Astonishment at a sudden event, willful violence, or harrowing loss that registers in someone’s eyes prior to terror, hopelessness, accusation. I wait for the train to come; I wait for my mother’s hands to cover my eyes and the shout of “Look out for the train!”; I wait for someone to die or be injured or rescued in the nick of time. But they just stand there without moving a muscle, all three of them. There is no resolution.

My mother is right. This place is reminiscent of a prison. The only difference is that you can get in and out using your own key. But what if it makes no difference at all whether you go in or out? Anyone at all could live in this room. The same books are lying on this desk as on others; they make the rounds from one year to the next. Electricity hasn’t changed into anything else since its invention. No one has been able to explain it fully, but it exists, and it is enough for us that we are able to make use of it. Then there are the notes: I admit that everyone scribbles them in his own style and his own handwriting. But soon enough, copies of them start to circulate for the course as well; some students are simply more skilled at taking notes than others, and for a small fee, everyone can benefit. In our class, the person who does it is Pavlina. Using a system of abbreviations and symbols, she has come up with an unbeatable shorthand technique that enables her to keep up with even the most ruthless lecturers. When Pavlina writes, smoke comes out of her pen, while the others just carve things into their desks, chew on their pens, and plan what they are going to do on the weekend. Pavlina is a gray, insignificant element of the class, but she has staked out her place with her diligence and helpfulness.

Sometimes it seems as though I might feel something stronger for her if she had some visible physical defect, if some serious childhood illness had left her crippled, making her walk with a limp or empty her bodily waste into a pouch attached to her abdomen. I had a dream in which we were playing together as children, building an entire community out of sand. Everything was going smoothly: we wasted no time on idle chat, and she handed me a bucket full of sand, which I tipped up to make a watchtower by the moat. When I woke up, I felt great relief that it was just a dream and we had never been anything as far-reaching and binding as childhood friends, that we were born and grew up in different parts of the country and lived our lives unaware of each other until last year, because otherwise I would have had no option but to marry her right after our final exams, then get a job, a flat, and a car, and have two children. She, on the other hand, was made for that later stage of life; she knows she will be good at it and indispensable, and her insignificance in these student circles, these cruel elimination rounds of youth, are just a temporary phase. Maybe she thinks quiet people are nice—could that be why she has chosen me? Or maybe because she has no chance with Milan or the rest of them, who talk over each other and brim with sociability, potency, and plans for the future.

Pavlina always sat at the front of the lecture hall, attentive and focused, with the chatterers and half-asleep students behind her. I always came in at the last minute or even a bit late, but the lecturers never once complained, never even batted an eyelid, because I did it so unobtrusively, subserviently, without a peep, as if we were attending a statesman’s funeral. I didn’t make a racket, didn’t cough, and I always opened my briefcase in the corridor and took out my notebook and pen, which I placed silently on the desk.

Perhaps Pavlina had been observing me for a while, in the corridors or at the canteen; perhaps she had occasionally been on the same tram, but I had never seen any more of her than the back of a wool sweater and a blunt haircut that ended at her neck and bobbed briskly above the desk between the notes she was churning out and the circuit diagrams appearing on the blackboard. Even I realized that something was wrong when her place in the second row was empty one morning at the last lecture before the winter vacation, if only because of the commotion it caused when people tried to decide who was going to take notes on behalf of the students.

She arrived so late that it would have been more dignified not to show up at all, but she slipped into the upper section of the lecture hall through the rear door, like a thief, and flopped down into the seat next to me without removing her hat or coat, panting quietly. Perhaps she had been running too hard just to make it to a lecture. She didn’t even look at me, but I became embarrassingly aware of her presence and couldn’t help noticing how slowly and disconsolately she removed her tweed cap, as if she wanted to use it to stroke herself. She sat there until the end of the lecture, slouched down, looking like she was freezing even though she was still wearing her coat. As people began to leave the hall, I thrust my notebook under her nose. She turned her head stiffly and looked at me with dark circles under her eyes.