There were always certain things I saw that you didn’t see, and I realize now it is why you kept me close. That and you liked my coding. That and you liked me in bed. But if you kept me close, I’d help to keep you safe, because I saw things you didn’t see. Like so many leaders, it was hard for you to find people who didn’t need to put you on a pedestal. Many leaders of course, wish for this, for adulation. But you had been saved once or twice or three times by women and men who didn’t worship you particularly but saw things coming you didn’t see. And so you kept us close. None of us were trained bodyguards or agents. We were just people with a good eye for things, with good minds that noticed.
At the Ear Inn Karina said, “Of course I listened, why would I not? I could not help you erase your steps if I didn’t know what you were doing.”
“And where we were doing it.”
“They buried him in the jacket.”
I hadn’t known and wondered if she had a photo, one in any case I wouldn’t have wanted to look at. “There were two,” I said, “on the same hanger, one on top of the other, the same size, it was so odd.”
“Yes, I remember. In KaDeWe in Berlin im Winter,” she said in the Deutschlich we both affected. “The year after die Wende.”
After the wall came down we migrated to the east, young people from all over the world, and rented acres of loft in Prenzlauer Berg without amenities or heating for pennies and pretended we were making art.
I remember I didn’t try the jacket on. I was tired and wanted to go home. (I was living in your flat at that time.) If it didn’t fit you, or you didn’t like it, you could bring it back. But Karina tried one on. “Is it for your husband?” I asked, for I noticed she wore a ring.
“No,” she beamed. “Nür für mich allein.” A beautiful present for herself. Blue angel, she looked good in a man’s jacket, so good. “If the second one doesn’t fit him, you can wear it and then we can be twins.”
“I was just thinking that.” As if I could touch the mirror and merge with her.
They buried you in the second one. In East Berlin. I wasn’t there because no one could find me in Paris. I’d wanted complete quiet, radio silence while I finished the work. But because of it I can’t be sure. And I don’t ask for a photograph.
Now I can never go back to Germany, although why should it matter? The day I met you, that is the tattoo that unlike the others I can never have removed.
Karina.
What side is she on?
But she may too forever wonder the same thing about me, and in the end we can never know the truth of one another, but perhaps the only truth is this—maybe we both just want to be with someone who knew you, who had touched you, who had let you in.
We will go to Mexico together, to Oaxaca. Taking turns wearing the remaining jacket until it is worn through in many places. And then I will find somewhere else to go. Zusammen, oder vielleicht allein.
As If Leaves Could Hide Invisible Beings
ANGELIQUE DOES IT ALONE once a week, winter and summer. In summer she takes off all her clothes, wades through the mud, shoots off into the middle where she can no longer stand, treads water for a few moments, then turns around and swims back. She looks for a grassy spot on which to dry off, one not shaded by cedars, relatively free of rocks and deadfall. She smokes one cigarette before she gets dressed. She likes being naked in nature too much to give it up. Still, the thought always niggles: what if a strange man comes across her lying naked on the grass beside the Ouse, far from shouting distance? Not likely; deer season is in November.
Once when she arrived at the river there was a black bear on the other side, investigating something in the shallows. Angelique knew the bear probably wouldn’t cross to attack her, but all the same she ran all the way back. The trail was knotted with deadfall, rocks, and roots. She only slowed for breath when she’d reached the back pasture, out in the open again. Her heart hammering, she listened for the dog, didn’t hear him. The bear could eat her dog instead of her. That would be okay.
Angelique used to think the bear chased her all the way to the village. It was time to leave the farm, the bear was telling her.
Or maybe it was the fairies.
They were not a thing you saw, but a thing you felt. Angelique acknowledged their presence with an organ she’d never known she had, as if a gigantic eye had just been blasted open by their presence. Part mockery, part dare, there they were, hiding under the cabbage leaves. Full of shame, stooped and bent and dirty and poor and tiny and magic and otherworldly, they shaded their eyes with their hands, staring up at this giantess who had so rudely interrupted them.
“Go away,” they said.
But how could she, for it was her garden after all and needed weeding?
They tried to hide under the leaves. It was pathetic really, as if leaves could hide invisible beings, which of course they can’t.
“We don’t want to be seen,” they said. “Not yet, and not by you.”
“Too bad,” Angelique said.
What she meant was: I couldn’t stop seeing you if I wanted. Now that I can, it’s not like I can put the ability back in its lock box for you must understand that’s quite impossible. Shutting her new enormous eye, her ear, for she couldn’t really see them and they spoke not in words but in meanings and feelings sent from one to another and now to Angelique as well by some kind of faerie short wave radio. Angelique stared and stared, felt and felt with whatever the new organ was. Went inside and put on a soup to simmer. Set out dinner for the family. Read the children Tolkien before bed.
Pretending things were normal didn’t really work, because as almost everyone knows, you can’t go back if there is no back to go to. It had been erased, back had. Permanently. Or so it felt, for they were still there the next day and the day after and the day after that. At times Angelique even admitted she liked it, because at least this feeling of strange and fertile newness was, well, new, if quite impossible and a little creepy, but things had after all been boring for longer than she could remember.
In the dream she came to a village where a ring of beautiful old houses shared a huge common garden. The garden was wild and overgrown and better because of it, at its heart a deep still enchantment. Angelique approached a house and knocked with a brass knocker and the door opened and she went in and then it swung shut behind her. The door swung shut and then they were there as they’d always been; she’d felt them a moment before they’d made themselves known: a door opening, an eye beginning to open, another eye closing to make way for the first. They advanced from all sides, imprisoning Angelique in a sleep so deep and old she knew the door would never open again; she’d never ever be able to leave. This was a spell as binding as being born: once invoked it could never be broken except by dying. It was over now. Everything she’d ever thought life was for was over, irrevocably and forever. A spell as deep as dream, as sleep, no, deeper, a sleep perhaps which had two doors: first, the door into ordinary waking life, now slammed irrevocably shut, and then the other. The one they’d taken her through, locking the first.
And so Angelique and Mort picked up and moved. Angelique built a new garden and planted it and then they came, and there were more of them than there had ever been at the farm. Eventually she got used to them and didn’t worry about being crazy anymore and even got to like them and as she did they seemed to change, but it was Angelique who was changing.