The Ice Cream Man (22 page)

Ten minutes later, they are walking down the street. It is late; hardly anyone else is around. A car splutters past, its exhaust pipe making a ridiculous noise. The boy kisses Gunilla up against the side of the church. The stone apostles stare down disapprovingly, but they are as brittle as the teeth in an old man’s mouth. There is a stagnant, musty smell coming from the river. The coolness of the park comes to meet them. He pushes Gunilla away from the gravel path in amongst the trees, onto the grass; the branches hang low, sticky dark green leaves flutter like birds in the dark. The wind caresses her skin, but the boy’s touch is rougher. Gunilla squeezes his hand, and he stops. They walk through the streets, to the bridge and over it. On the other side of the river stands the landlady’s house, its windows dark. Gunilla pulls the heavy door open, walks past the mailboxes on the wall and up the stairs. The boy follows her up to the top floor and they reach the door to her room. Gunilla is unable to go inside, loosens herself from the boy’s grip and runs to the end of the hall, under the staircase that leads up to the attic, but the boy finds Gunilla in the dark, lifts her up by her thighs, bearing her weight and pressing her against the wall, starts spreading his saliva in Gunilla’s mouth, and his tongue asks permission for another projecting part, hinting at its possibilities. The wall and the boy are equally hard and unyielding; disgust rises in Gunilla’s throat, and when the boy feels the stirring of revulsion on the tip of his tongue, his tongue retracts like a dog that has been given a thrashing, and her revulsion is replaced by pity. The two begin to alternate, and neither takes a firm hold on her. When the boy pulls Gunilla’s hand to his bare penis, the revulsion returns, but the boy will be happy with anything at all; he begs, implores, his torment made flesh against her stomach so she can pity him again and let the boy squeeze, gouge, and rub against the fabric of her dress until a wet star spreads out across it.

The boy stops there, in the heat of the star and her belly, his thighs trembling, full of adrenaline. Foreign, tobacco-brown saliva is drying on the roof of Gunilla’s mouth. The boy stirs, gives another push, slowly, with a turning motion, as if he were carefully scraping out a jam jar though he couldn’t even open the lid.
“Děkuji,”
the boy says in a low voice, very different than how he stammered in English, then staggers away, stuffing himself back into his trousers.

Gunilla leans back against the wall under the stairs for as long as she can hear his boots, goes into her room, switches the lights on and off, would rather sit in the dark, but she cannot switch off the street lamp. She goes back out and down the stairs to the second floor, where she rings the landlady’s doorbell. The landlady seems put out, but she is still awake. She doesn’t believe for a second that Gunilla’s father is ill, and didn’t she make it clear to Gunilla from the start that she has to go to the post office to make phone calls, just like the other tenants. Particularly international calls. The landlady is accustomed to her cataract-blurred eyes reshaping and distorting her surroundings, and she looks at the dark star on Gunilla’s dress with equanimity . . . only in an extreme
emergency . . .
but it has dripped down so far, that star, that the landlady stops talking and digs out a pen and a small pad of unbleached paper from the drawer in the telephone table on which she is to note down the times and call units. Gunilla dials the number slowly and holds her breath as she listens to the line whose silence gives no indication whether the phone is working at all. Finally she hears ring tones, but no one picks up. Gunilla lets the phone ring for a long time. Perhaps her father is fast asleep and thinks the phone is ringing in his dream.

“Jan Vorszda.”

“Hello?”

“Who’s that?”

“It’s me, Dad.”

“Gunilla?”

Her father sounds angry. “Yes, I know where you are.”

“Where else could I be? This is exactly where I should be.”

“What are you babbling about? Are you drunk?”

“So you’re not going to listen to me at all if I drink a little beer? Dad, do you remember what Czech beer tastes like? Do you remember how good it is?”

“It can stay there.”

“How can you say that?”

“That’s something you can’t understand.”

“It’s your fault. It’s because of you I don’t understand anything. I don’t even know how to buy food in a shop. What does
děkuji
mean? One guy said
děkuji
to me just now.”

“What did he say that for?”

“What do you mean, what for?”

“What did he say that to you for at this time of night?”

“Tell me what it means first.”

“Is Monika there?”

“Annika is not here.”

“Well, where is she?”

“I guess she’s in Italy.”

“Shouldn’t you two be traveling together?”

“Maybe, I dunno.”

“Did you two have an argument?”

“No.”

“If I knew you’d be gallivanting around on your own, I wouldn’t have let you go in the first place.”

“How would you have stopped me?”

Then Gunilla hears her mother’s voice, “Let me talk to her.”

“Is Mom there?”

“Yes.”

“What’s Mom doing there in the middle of the night?”

“Why are you calling at this hour? Do you know what time it is?”

She goes silent.

“Do you know?”

“It’s a bit difficult to call from here.”

“Where are you?”

Gunilla’s mother’s voice booms into her ear: “Gunilla, you are where you are. Listen to me. You’re a big girl.”

“Mom?”

“If you don’t want to tell us where you are or who you’re with, that’s perfectly OK.”

“No, it’s not!” her father roars.

“Don’t mind your father; he knows all too well what the boys are like over there.”

“Mom, pass the phone back to Dad.”

“Why haven’t you phoned me—even once? When has your father ever understood you?”

“Kerstin, give me the phone now.”

“Dad?”

“Is there anything else you want to say?”

Gunilla does not know what to say to this either, so her father continues.

“Do you have any money?”

“Yeah.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Just fantastic, Dad.”

Gunilla tries to put the receiver down, but her fingers stiffen around it like a lever that still has some important movement to perform. A finger on her other hand comes down and finds the little switch that leads inside the device and makes the line beep. The landlady bends down.

“How many units?”

Gunilla is hunched on the footstool next to the telephone table. The landlady takes the receiver and replaces it.

“Well, how is your father doing?”

“Not very well. But no worse than before.”

Milena,

Do you remember what you told me about your room, what it was like when you moved in there before we met? In the evenings, you would always switch off the lights before you started to get undressed, because you felt that someone was watching you. Then when we were in the room together for the first time, you sensed that I had been there all along. I had always been everywhere: in front of the cooker, sitting on the chair, by the window, and in the bed, and whenever you were about to get undressed, I would turn toward you, wanting to see all of you. You were only shy because we hadn’t met yet.

When I had to leave, you wanted to have a photo of me. You said it would be easier with a photo. You can put it in one place and turn it around as the need arises. What did you mean? Now that we have met, there is only one reason in the world why I shouldn’t see you. Last night I woke up unable to breathe. I was lying on my front with my face against the pillow, exactly as if you had turned my photo facedown. Is that why you don’t write? Because you have someone else?

Petr

Gunilla rings the translator’s doorbell. The door opens, but only a crack.

“What do you want?” the woman asks.

“I have some more letters.”

“What about the envelopes? No envelopes again?”

Gunilla starts to stammer, “Are they really necessary . . . ?”

The door slams shut. Gunilla’s head starts to throb. She rings the doorbell again. The woman whips the door wide open as if to shove Gunilla away.

“Don’t you understand? This is going to stop here.”

“Why do you need the envelopes?”

“Because they have the boy’s address and the address of the girl he’s writing to.”

“It’s my address.”

“That may well be, but nothing else adds up.”

“What doesn’t add up?”

“How stupid do you think I am?”

“I’ll bring you the envelopes.”

“You do that, and I’ll tell the boy exactly what you’re playing at.”

“I paid you for five letters.”

“I won’t translate another line.”

“Then please give me my money back.”

“What money?”

“The money for the two you haven’t translated yet.”

“Ha! Listen to me . . .” The woman switches to Czech and starts to mutter and snort as if to an invisible audience that is unanimously on her side.

“What did you say?” Gunilla asks. Her face is pink, and her eyes are watering.

The woman says something in Czech again, and all her neighbors in their garden chairs, in their beds, and on their sofas, in the midst of their salt-laden meals, their fishy-smelling lays, and their two-decades-behind-the-times TV programs, nod in unison.

“Děkuji,”
says Gunilla.

Gunilla stands on the tram between two men. The men are wearing blue cement-crusted dungarees, but their large bellies prevent their cocks from reaching Gunilla. At night Gunilla dreams about an old man, but he is not too old to be a real man. The man doffs his hat and points at Gunilla’s knee.
“Young lady, do you know how we used to clean wounds during the war when we had no liquor or clean water?”
The man takes out his cock and urinates on Gunilla’s knee, though she is not wounded and the war ended a long time ago.

“Milena called,” the landlady says, following Gunilla up the stairs as if to nag her about unpaid rent. Gunilla strides up the stairs; the landlady has trouble keeping up with her. Gunilla goes into her room and shuts the door behind her. The landlady knocks on the door, then speaks through it.

“Have you used the gas cooker?”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t dared to.”

The landlady shrugs and repeats, “Milena called.” As if Milena and the cooker were somehow linked in a way Gunilla has not yet grasped. Milena wanted to know if there were any letters for her, wanted someone to read them to her over the phone. The landlady refused: “I’d be standing here until next week. It’d be easier if you wrote a single sentence yourself.” Milena did not give in. “What’s Petr writing? How does he sound?” “Mixed-up,” the landlady told her. “Stark raving mad.” Milena didn’t understand that one bit. People in love are supposed to understand poetry and imagery, but the harsh truth is that they revert to the level of concrete thought in which their beloved is the pinnacle of all that is concrete. They become completely useless to society. Lovely children are born without the need for people to be in love. The landlady had to spell the address of the garrison again and again. Milena had no pen or paper. Country girls never learn; they cut bread against their bellies and call about important things without a pen or paper. Milena said, “What if he’s not there anymore?” As if he could just escape from there. Let her wait a year, when she’s washed enough socks, starts to bark at the boy like he’s an idiot, once a week at first, then once a day. And better to do that, because even lunatics can’t bear being in love for long.

Finally Milena apologized to the landlady: “The key is in the space between the top of the door frame and the wall. It was there for Petr before I decided to leave him. But the key is the only thing I left, because I forgot all about it.”

Gunilla is sitting on the bed and asks, “Why have you told me all this? Why all the detail?”

“You know,” the landlady replies. “Oh, yes, you know.”

VIII

THE FOREIGN GIRL

“I hav
e to go.”

“I’ll come and see you.”

“Don’t. Everybody will recognize you there.”

“When can you come again?”

“Not for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Come in the morning. When the others are still asleep. I’ll be on guard duty.”

“I’ll just walk past. I won’t say anything.”

“And I won’t look at you.”

“You should look to see who’s coming. What sort of guard duty is it otherwise?”

“Just so I don’t watch you. I have to keep watch.”

“So what do you watch for?”

“If anyone else comes. Besides you.”

The next morning, the boy says without moving his lips, “You didn’t come yesterday.”

The girl replies without turning her head, “I was asleep.”

The next morning, the boy adds, “I’m awake because of you.”

The girl snaps, “You’re awake because you’re on guard duty.”

The girl’s blue dress appears at the end of the road.

“I’m on guard duty so I can see you.”

The girl walks away.

“Where are you going?”

“To work.”

“Where?”

“The hospital.”

“The hospital’s in the other direction.”

“What’s in this direction?”

“The train station.”

“Then that’s where I’m going.”

“I thought you’d taken the train.”

“That’s how I will be going.”

Three mornings in a row, the boy asks the girl what her name is, but she keeps on walking past without moving her mouth, looking straight ahead.

“What’s your name?”

His back is stiff from standing; his eyes sting as if someone had hurled salt at them. The boy draws the girl’s air into his nostrils, and his nose clogs up with his ardor.

Shoes clomp on the cobblestones, coming nearer.

“What’s your name?”

Clomp, clomp, clomp.

The boy thinks of the tongue in the girl’s mouth. Her mouth is closed, her tongue crouching inside her mouth like a little mole in its den. It is pitch dark in her mouth, plum skin between her teeth.

The wind is blowing, blowing hard. Scraps of paper whirl above the cobblestones, and farther away, where the street is not paved, dust, hair, and dried seeds swirl and rise up to her armpits. More of the girl is visible, too: the fabric of her dress is pressed against her legs, folding into a little triangle under the bulge of her belly.

“What’s your name?”

The girl tugs the fabric out from between her legs, hearing and seeing nothing.

“You do have a name, don’t you?”

It is pouring rain. Warm drops, large, splashing. The water flows down over the cobblestones in the direction from which the girl is approaching through the rain, translucent, then in blue. The boy gulps: a fucking Siren.

“Don’t you have an umbrella?”

Even if I had one, the boy thinks to himself, I wouldn’t give it to you. When you’re this lovely in the rain. And even though you only walk past, you are with me as long as it rains, because the rain drenches the blue and green fabrics, drips from your eyelashes, from the peak of a cap, from sleeve cuffs and a skirt hem, and the water doesn’t care which is which, we are one and the same to the water, the two halves of Europe are one and the same to the water now tipping down over the atlas.

“Well, what is it? Your name?”

The girl walks toward the train station, goes up the steps, through the station hall, and through the door to the platform, then sits down under the canopy and the departures board. The train stands on the rails—dark, massive, and in its place. People are swarming around and loading suitcases filled with gifts and food onto the train. The girl does not see the people because she ought to remember them first, and the girl remembers only two kinds of cars: blue ones and green ones. Blue cars travel in various directions, while green cars go in and out through the gates of the garrison. Trains are announced in the languages of other countries, as if all foreigners are out and about at five in the morning but at all other times they are abroad. People say you can’t see the air, but you can. It weighs down on the earth’s crust like pity and appears like the blue in photographs where the blue has faded into the shadow of other colors.

People bustle around the station, on the move early. Early birds peck among the rails and pick up all the seeds. People wait for their trains, swaying as they stand, still half-asleep, dreaming about themselves, others, and abilities they do not have. They fly, pass through walls, and do not die, even from bullets. The happy ones dream like that, and now they are happy. The unhappy ones dream about things that shouldn’t be impossible.

The boy can barely keep his balance because the paving stones have come loose. There is simply the air, stirred up by the girl as she walked past, and the thinner-than-thin fabric swaying around her calves.

“Halt!”

Her shoes drum in his ears. The drumming in his ears identifies the direction the shoes are heading. But blood rushes from his head to his feet, leaving darkness in his eyes that he should be using to see.

“Stop!” The girl is deaf, stone-deaf.

“Halt! Or I’ll shoot!”

The girl freezes on the spot. So there is some order in the world after all. The gun is pointing toward the street at a 45-degree angle. It could point in other directions, too, but every direction is fateful because they could all lead to death.

“I haven’t slept for seven nights.”

“Well, at least you could get some sleep during the daytime.”

“I can’t get to sleep.”

“You need to sleep. You look really ill.”

“And you look pretty at five in the morning, you look pretty when it rains, you’re always pretty.”

“That was a nasty thing to say.”

“It can’t be.”

“As nasty as if you’d said: you look ugly at five in the morning, you look ugly when it rains, you’re always ugly.”

“No, it’s not.”

“You don’t pay attention to an ugly girl because she’s ugly, but the only reason you pay attention to a pretty girl is because she’s pretty.”

“Sure, but I bet you’re pretty on the inside as well.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Do you know yourself?”

“Your head’s mixed up. You shouldn’t be handling a weapon. You could kill someone.”

“Don’t tell anyone, but there are no bullets in these. So we club people over the head with them if there’s any trouble.”

“How much longer do you have to stand there?”

“Two hours.”

“Sit down for a while.”

“Not allowed to sit. Have to stand.”

“Sit down. I’ll watch to make sure nobody’s coming.”

“If I even bend my knees a tiny bit, I’ll never get up again.”

“Fine, stand then.”

“Standing on two legs sets us apart from other animals. It’s not a trivial matter.”

“I’m going now.”

“For goodness’ sake, don’t go yet.”

“I’m late.”

“Stay and talk to me for a while. The old woman in the house opposite is watching us through the curtains, but I don’t give a damn. Now she’s watching me swaying and chatting with a female civilian in the middle of my watch. For all she knows, you might be one of the decoys. She thinks there are still Nazis here. There are still a few red stars, but they can make themselves scarce as well.

“Who was that one yesterday?”

“Which one yesterday?”

“And don’t say he was your older brother.”

“I don’t have an older brother.”

“No, because if he was your older brother, that would make you a real afterthought. He was at least ten years older than you.”

“Who?”

“He was an orthopedic surgeon from the hospital.”

“So who was it?”

“And what were you doing going in that direction, when the hospital is on the other side of town?”

“From your point of view.”

“What do you mean, from my point of view? It’s the same way however you look at it.”

“Except for people who squint like you.”

“Every morning, you walk in the wrong direction.”

“No, I don’t. Not if I’ve been on night shift.”

“Yes, but you walk away from the hospital even when that’s where you’re going.”

“Your head’s mixed up.”

“So go and walk somewhere else.”

“I’m walking to work.”

“Is that so? To your love work, I bet.”

“You’ve been standing guard too much. Saying I was walking with someone yesterday.”

“Was I dreaming or what?”

“Hopefully.”

“Is that what you hope?”

“Otherwise you were seeing one of your own.”

“Oh, so I’ve taken leave of my senses?”

“Hasn’t anyone else noticed the state you’re in?”

“Voluntary troops are completely unprotected by the law. If you lose your life, or your mind, you have only yourself to blame.”

“So blame yourself.”

“No, I blame you. It’s because of you I’m a volunteer.”

“I’m leaving now.”

“I have to stick around here. You can go wherever you like.”

“As if people can go wherever they want.”

“Don’t give me that. You’d go exactly where you’re going, wherever your orthopedic surgeon is.”

“What orthopedic surgeon? I’m a cleaner on the internal diseases ward.”

“I see. Those are the softer, more contemplative types. Do you prefer them?”

“You’re really pathetic.”

“Rather that than being made of thin air.”

“Idiot.”

“Say that again.”

The girl clamps her mouth shut and goes on her way. The soldier shouts after her, “Just don’t smile. I can see it from here if I squint a little.”

That summer, people in the city started talking about a foreign girl who wouldn’t say no to anyone who claimed his name was Petr and was wearing a uniform. That summer, many boys were called Petr. In the bar in the evenings, one soldier would sit next to another and say, “What
’
s up, Petr?”

Well, what’s up with you? Everything’s all right. Because none of them loved the foreign girl, but the foreign girl loved them all.

If anyone ever tried another name, the girl would go completely cold; and in those cases, even the uniform was no help. And if the same guy came back without his uniform but said his name was Petr, that wouldn’t work either. But if the same guy came back again with his uniform and said his name was Petr, the foreign girl would lie right down on the bed in that room she’d rented from the woman with poor-enough eyesight.

The woman’s eyes were so bad that she could only see one and the same blurry soldier, the only one the foreign girl truly loved, who kept running in and out, up and down the stairs.

There was only one thing the woman wondered about. That the boy was always on leave.

In July 1990, there were still Russian soldiers in town. They came to try it on at the girl’s place as well, but the girl was choosy: a red star alone wouldn’t do. The landlady’s eyes were so poor that she couldn’t distinguish the local boys from the Russian ones, but the latter left a different smell in the stairway.

One evening, there were three soldiers behind the girl’s door. One of them was Petr, the second was Jan, and the third, Martin. The girl made some tea for Martin and Jan and went to bed with Petr. Martin and Jan slurped their tea and burned their tongues as they watched how much the girl loved Petr. When Petr felt the girl had passed the point of no return, he informed her right in the middle of everything that he was not Petr but Jan, and Petr was sitting at the table with Martin slurping tea that the girl had made. The girl’s face filled with purple blotches, and she got so tight Jan could not get away from her. Something happened to Jan that had remained just hot air until then: how much longer it lasts when you’re being strangled, when your tissues don’t get enough oxygen.

The girl began crying uncontrollably. The boys weren’t so nasty that they could watch a girl cry, though they were generally nastier in a group than they would have been on their own. First the one who claimed he really was Petr and who had only been drinking tea went over to the girl and tried to comfort her as best he could, but the girl was curled up and sobbing on the bed with her face to the wall, her heels drawn up under her buttocks. Then Jan came and said he was Petr after all, that it was just a game. And Martin, who was still sitting at the table with his empty teacup, decided not to say anything, so at least one of them didn’t need to lie to the girl. But her sobbing continued, and the boys had to go back to their barracks before it showed any sign of subsiding.

No one ever asked the foreign girl what her name was.

If they had asked, she would have replied:
Milena
. And though it made no difference, they would have wondered a little.

That’s a Czech name.

We don’t know who you are. But we all know that you’re definitely not Milena.