There was a sunroom in our house, a kind of conservatory with a glass outer wall and slanted ceiling of green glass framed in steel. It was a very luxurious appointment in that region, and it was my mother’s favorite place to be. She had filled it with plants and books, and she liked to lie on a chaise in this room and read and smoke cigarettes. I found her there, as I knew I would, and I gazed at her with wonder and fascination because I knew her fate. She was incredibly beautiful, with her dark hair parted in the center and tied behind her in a bun, and her small hands, and the lovely fullness of her chin, the indications under her chin of some fattening, like a quality of indolence in her character. But a man would not dwell on this as on her neck, so lovely and slim, or the high modestly dressed bosom. A man would not want to see signs of the future. Since she was my mother it had never occurred to me how many years younger she was than my father. He had married her out of the gymnasium; she was the eldest of four daughters and her parents had been eager to settle her in prosperous welfare, which is what a mature man offers. It is not that the parents are unaware of the erotic component for the man in this sort of marriage. They are fully aware of it. Rectitude, propriety, are always very practical. I gazed at her in wonder and awe. I blushed. What? she said. She put her book down and smiled and held out her arms. What, Willi, what is it? I fell into her arms and began to sob and she held me and my tears wet the dark dress she wore. She held my head and whispered, What, Willi, what did you do to yourself, poor Willi? Then, aware that my sobs had become breathless and hysterical, she held me at arm’s length — tears and snot were dribbling from me — and her eyes widened in genuine alarm.
That night I heard from the bedroom the shocking exciting sounds of her undoing. I have heard such terrible sounds of blows upon a body in Berlin after the war, Freikorps hoodlums in the streets attacking whores they had dragged from the brothel and tearing the clothes from their bodies and beating them to the cobblestones. I sat up in bed, hardly able to breathe, terrified, but feeling undeniable arousal. Give it to her, I muttered, banging my fist in my palm. Give it to her. But then I could bear it no longer and ran into their room and stood between them, lifting my screaming mother from the bed, holding her in my arms, shouting at my father to stop, to stop. But he reached around me and grabbed her hair with one hand and punched her face with the other. I was enraged, I pushed her back and jumped at him, pummeling him, shouting that I would kill him. This was in Galicia in the year 1910. All of it was to be destroyed anyway, even without me.
The Hunter
THE TOWN IS TERRACED IN THE HILL, ALONG THE RIVER, A FACTORY town of clapboard houses and public buildings faced in red stone. There is a one-room library called the Lyceum. There are several taverns made from porched homes, Miller and Bud signs hanging in neon in the front windows. Down at water’s edge sits the old brassworks, a long two-story brick building with a tower at one end and it is behind locked fences and many of its windows are broken. The river is frozen. The town is dusted in new snow. Along the sides of the streets the winter’s accumulated snow is banked high as a man’s shoulder. Smoke drifts from the chimneys of the houses and is quickly sucked into the sky. The wind comes up off the river and sweeps up the hill through the houses.
A school bus makes its way through the narrow hill streets. The mothers and fathers stand on the porches above to watch the bus accept their children. It’s the only thing moving in the town. The fathers fill their arms with firewood stacked by the front doors and go back inside. Trees are black in the woods behind the homes; they are black against the snow. Sparrow and finch dart from branch to branch and puff their feathers to keep warm. They flutter to the ground and hop on the snow crust under the trees.
The children enter the school through the big oak doors with the push bars. It is not a large school but its proportions, square and high, create hollow rooms and echoing stairwells. The children sit in their rows with their hands folded and watch their teacher. She is cheery and kind. She has been here just long enough for her immodest wish to transform these children to have turned to awe at what they are. Their small faces have been rubbed raw by the cold; the weakness of their fair skin is brought out in blotches on their cheeks and in the blue pallor of their eyelids. Their eyelids are translucent membranes, so thin and so delicate that she wonders how they sleep, how they keep from seeing through their closed eyes.
She tells them she is happy to see them here in such cold weather, with a hard wind blowing up the valley and another storm coming. She begins the day’s work with their exercise, making them squat and bend and jump and swing their arms and somersault so that they can see what the world looks like upside down. How does it look? she cries, trying it herself, somersaulting on the gym mat until she’s dizzy.
They are not animated but the exercise alerts them to the mood she’s in. They watch her with interest to see what is next. She leads them out of the small, dimly lit gymnasium through the empty halls, up and down the stairs, telling them they are a lost patrol in the caves of a planet somewhere far out in space. They are looking for signs of life. They wander through the unused schoolrooms, where crayon drawings hang from one thumbtack and corkboards have curled away from their frames. Look, she calls, holding up a child’s red rubber boot, fished from the depths of a classroom closet. You never can tell!
When they descend to the basement, the janitor dozing in his cubicle is startled awake by a group of children staring at him. He is a large bearish man and wears fatigue pants and a red plaid woolen shirt. The teacher has never seen him wear anything different. His face has a gray stubble. We’re a lost patrol, she says to him, have you seen any living creatures hereabouts? The janitor frowns. What? he says. What?
It is warm in the basement. The furnace emits its basso roar. She has him open the furnace door so the children can see the source of heat, the fire in its pit. They are each invited to cast a handful of coal through the door. They do this as a sacrament.
Then she insists that the janitor open the storage rooms and the old lunchroom kitchen, and here she notes unused cases of dried soup mix and canned goods, and then large pots and thick aluminum cauldrons and a stack of metal trays with food compartments. Here, you can’t take those, the janitor says. And why not, she answers, this is their school, isn’t it? She gives each child a tray or pot, and they march upstairs, banging them with their fists to scare away the creatures of wet flesh and rotating eyes and pulpy horns who may be lying in wait around the corners.
In the afternoon it is already dark, and the school bus receives the children in the parking lot behind the building. The new streetlamps installed by the county radiate an amber light. The yellow school bus in the amber light is the color of a dark egg yolk. As it leaves, the children, their faces indistinct behind the windows, turn to stare out at the young teacher. She waves, her fingers opening and closing like a fluttering wing. The bus windows slide past, breaking her image and re-forming it, and giving her the illusion of the stone building behind her sliding along its foundations in the opposite direction.
The bus has turned into the road. It goes slowly past the school. The children’s heads lurch in unison as the driver shifts gears. The bus plunges out of sight in the dip of the hill. At this moment the teacher realizes that she did not recognize the driver. He was not the small, burly man with eyeglasses without rims. He was a young man with long light hair and white eyebrows, and he looked at her in the instant he hunched over the steering wheel, with his arms about to make the effort of putting the bus into a turn.