“You ever been to Calcutta?”
I thought maybe he had misspoken and meant the Indian restaurant that had just opened up on the grounds of the old Russian barracks. Luckily I just said no.
“That’s a city you’ve got to see!” he exclaimed. “You don’t understand one thing about this world if you haven’t experienced Calcutta.”
He started in and there seemed to be no end to his tale. The whole thing sounded a little odd to me, but I listened all the same. At first I was still thinking about Martina — about me and Martina — but then I just listened to what the head of the Becker household had to say.
“You planning to go back?” I asked when he paused to blow his nose.
“Wait just a sec,” he said, turned around, and went back into the house. He returned with a heavy necklace, corals alternating with silver balls.
“Here, have a look. Stuff like this goes for a song there.”
I raised my dirty hands. He misunderstood and hung the necklace over my right forearm.
It was really heavy. I examined it while he went on talking. After ten minutes he took the necklace back and wrapped it around his wrist. It was already dark when he stuck out his hand to say good-bye.
I called my mother that same evening. Sometime I’d like to actually ask her why she hadn’t let me enroll in the high school that focuses on music. Have you ever heard of a musician getting fired? I haven’t.
Lately my mother always wants to know if I’m sleeping okay. That’s become her criterion for general well-being. I told her I’d be sleeping well enough if weren’t for the damned mosquitoes.
“That’s funny!” she exclaimed. “I’ve got bites every morning, regular mosquito bites.” Now that was eerie, I thought, right out of Hitchcock. If those little beasts were suddenly going crazy at the end of the millennium, that meant something. On the other hand that might get things moving, there might be a lot of new jobs, cram courses for trained exterminators.
Last night I left the window wide open — that way it wouldn’t be so cozy for mosquitoes.
I assume it was the Beckers’ garage door that woke me up. I heard their car start and back out onto the driveway. I recognized Becker’s voice. He was talking to his wife. Then the girls came trotting out. He told them both to go back to bed. All I heard from her was a kind of a clucking and that sound her leather pants make when she walks. Both car doors slammed shut almost simultaneously. I didn’t get up. The girls stayed outside for a while. I could only make out individual words.
I was surprised that they left the garage door open. Maybe they thought they’d be back soon. It was a foolish thing to do, though — an open garage with bikes, tires, and all sorts of tools.
Farther off in town I could hear a few cars and a freight train approaching. We’ve lived here long enough to recognize all the sounds. But they travel this well only on November nights.
Gradually I could make out the stems of the leafless grapevines framing the window. They looked like the feelers of giant snails or like Vs for victory, or like the feet of animals you might assemble out of matchsticks. As it grew lighter and the Findeisens’ car drove off, the stems seemed to turn reddish. Where they thicken at the end they look like Q-tips. For a moment I thought I smelled alcohol, and thought of the street people and their bottles. I had no idea what Martina had done with those.
She slept until the alarm went off, threw me a quick glance, and sat up on the edge of the bed. Before getting up she stretched her arms above her head. I used to pull her back into bed sometimes.
I could sense that it wouldn’t even take her asking me a question — just one single word, something totally trivial — and I’d lose it. I’ve slowly learned to live with the feeling. It hardly scares me anymore. It comes over me with almost soothing regularity. And I give in to it — but of course only when I’m alone. Other people, especially those who think they know me, would find it upsetting. Basically it’s nothing more than bleeding radiators. That has to be done every now and then.
Of course it was clear to me that I had to get up. The timing was tight, and if nothing had been done when Martina emerged from the bathroom, she’d have to leave without breakfast. Pulling the car out and sitting there waiting at the front gate wouldn’t help either.
I thought I heard the Beckers’ car. I raised my head from the pillow and listened. From that position I could see the mousetrap. It was still wide open.
And then I heard the bathroom door and Martina going downstairs. Step by step, stair by stair, finally her heels striking the kitchen tiles and the squeak — or more like the whinny — of the refrigerator door.
Suddenly it was clear to me that the mouse — presuming it was still alive — had been listening to these same sounds and noises, although maybe somewhat muted by the cabinet. And that it probably could tell whether somebody was going up or down the stairs, and that it felt frightened when steps approached, and maybe even joy or at least relief when they moved away again, though that didn’t change its situation. And I understood that all I needed to do was close the trap, carry it out into the yard, and come evening tell Martina that the mouse had shot away like an arrow. I was sorry I hadn’t thought of that earlier, and how this was a great moment to give the trap back, to be rid of it at last — right now, when I could hear the Beckers laughing. I only had to go to the window and I’d see the Beckers, all five of them, coming up the hill and waving at us over and over. Although they were still a good distance off, I spotted the huge sponge cake they were carrying, a gift for their hosts. I still remember wanting to compare their three kids, scampering ahead in their bright outfits, to butterflies in a flowery meadow. “Like butterflies, like butterflies,” I wanted to call out to them.
I can still recall the kids, them and how the sound of their footsteps came closer and closer. Have you ever actually been to Calcutta?
II
Mr. Neitherkorn and Fate
“I needed a haircut,” I began. “But either the hairdressers were busy giving manicures or were fully booked, or I ended up in a beauty salon.” Mr. Neitherkorn looked up from his cup as if about to say something, but then just extracted a sugar cube from the bowl, dunked it in his coffee, and shoved it into his mouth to suck on. “Suddenly,” I went on, “there was a shopwindow, and inside what looked like a swarm of barbers. Their customers, all people of color, were sitting in regal but well-worn barber chairs. The white men working around them didn’t seem too happy, looked lost in smocks a couple sizes too large. They ran shavers across black and brown skulls and finished off by massaging the now bald heads with perfume. When a chair opened up for me, I demonstrated for a short lithe man, probably in his early forties, how much he should take off. He nodded, dampened my hair with squirts from a spray bottle, and picked up a comb. It wasn’t very pleasant for either of us. I can’t get a comb through my hair myself unless it’s soaking wet. But I didn’t complain. After a while my barber asked his neighbor something in Russian. But the man was so busy trimming a beard narrow as a helmet strap along the chin line of a shaved head that he failed to respond. I made some remark. The barber looked at me in the mirror as if enjoying watching me grimace under the tug of his comb. Where was I from? And him? From Bukhara. I said that I’d been to Bukhara once, and had enjoyed both the city and the desert. His comb halted midstroke, and we smiled at each other in the mirror. He described for me exactly where his apartment had been — across from the monument of a Hero of the People, did I remember it perhaps? Pumping cloud upon cloud of vapor from his spray bottle, he tried to prompt my memory with more details, but without success. He had trained as an engineer but had been living in the U.S. for a year now, along with his whole family. ‘Better a barber in New York than an engineer in Bukhara?’ I asked — purely rhetorically. And then he replied: ‘Nu, chto delat? Eto sudba.’”