I never thought I'd hear the day my mother, Ingrid Magnussen, would admit to regret. Now that she stood in front of me, shaking with it, I couldn't think of anything to say. It was like watching a river run backwards.
We stood there staring out at the empty road.
"What are you going to do when you get out?" I asked her. "Where are you going to go?"
She wiped the sweat off her face with the collar of her dress. Secretaries and office workers and COs were coming out of the brick administration building. They leaned into the hot wind, holding their skirts down, heading for lunch, a nice air-conditioned Coco's or Denny's. When they saw me with my mother, they drew closer together, talking among themselves. She was already a celebrity, I could see it. We watched them start up their cars. I knew she imagined herself with those keys in her hand, accelerator, gas tank marked Full.
She sighed. "By the time Susan is done, I'll be a household icon, like Aunt Jemima, the Pillsbury Doughboy. I'll have my choice of teaching positions. Where would you like to go, Astrid?" She glanced at me, smiled, my carrot. Reminding me which end of the plank and so on.
"That's years away," I said.
"You can't make it alone," she said. "You need an environment, a context. People invested in your success. God knows, look at me. I had to go to prison to get noticed."
The cars started up, crunched over the gravel. Camille came out of the shelter, pointed at her watch. It was over. I felt empty and used. Whatever I thought knowing the truth would do for me, it hadn't. It was my last hope. I wanted her to hurt the way I did. I wanted it very much.
"So, how does it feel, knowing I don't give a damn anymore?" I said. "That I'll do anything to get what I want. Even lie for you, I won't blink an eye. I'm like you now, aren't I? I look at the world and ask what's in it for me."
She shook her head, gazed down at her bare tanned feet. "If I could take it all back, I would, Astrid." She lifted her eyes to mine. "You've got to believe me." Her eyes, glinting in the sun, were exactly the color of the pool we swam in together the summer she was arrested. I wanted to swim there again, to submerge myself in them.
"Then tell me you don't want me to testify," I said. "Tell me you don't want me like this. Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was."
She turned her blue gaze toward the road, that road, the beautiful road, the road women in prison dreamed about. The road she had already left me for once. Her hair like smoke in the wind. Overhead, the foliage blew back and forth like a fighter working a small bag in air that smelled of brushfire and dairy cattle. She pressed her hands over her eyes, then slid them down her face to her mouth. I watched her staring out at the road. She seemed lost there, sealed in longing, searching for an exit, a hidden door.
And suddenly I felt panic. I'd made a mistake, like when I'd played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I'd made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn't afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn't want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn't need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath. "Listen, forget it. A deal's a deal. Let's leave it at that."
The wind crackled its dangerous whip in the air, I imagined I could see the shower of sparks, smell the ashes. I was afraid she hadn't heard me. She was still as a daguerreotype, arms crossed across her denim dress. "I'll tell Susan," she said quietly. "To leave you alone."
I knew I had heard her but I didn't believe it. I waited for something, to make me believe it was true.
My mother came back to me then, put her arms around me, rested her cheek against my hair. Although I knew it was impossible, I could smell her violets. "If you could go back, even partway, I would give anything," she said into my ear.
Her large hands gently stroked my hair. It was all I ever really wanted, that revelation. The possibility of fixed stars.
32
THE YEAR my mother's new trial was held, February was bitter cold. I was living in Berlin with Paul Trout, in a fourth-story flat in the old Eastern sector, a sublet of a sublet some friends found for us. It was crumbling and coal-heated, but we could afford it most of the time. Ever since Paul's graphic novels had become the codebook of a new secret society among European art students, we'd made friends in every city. They passed us along from squat to sublet to spare couch like torches in a relay race.
I liked Berlin. The city and I understood each other. I liked that they had left the bombed-out hulk of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church as a monument to loss. Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn't learned yet, that there was no such thing as an empty canvas.
I had begun turning to sculpture, an outgrowth of my time with Rena Grushenka. I'd developed an obsessive fondness for scavenged materials, for flea markets and curbside treasures and haggling in six different languages. Over time, this flotsam worked its way into my art, along with bits of German and worship of the Real and twenty-four kinds of animal scat. At the Hochschule der Kiinste, our art student friends had a professor, Oskar Schein, who liked my work. He smuggled me into classes there as sort of a shadow student, and was lobbying for my acceptance as a bona fide scholar working toward a degree, but in a perverse way, my current status suited me. I was still a foster child. The Hochschule der Kiinste was Cal Arts in German, students with funny haircuts making ugly art, but I was developing a context, as my mother would have said. My classmates knew about Paul and me, we were the wild children with all the talent, living on my waitress tips and sidewalk sales of our handmade rearview-mirror ornaments. They wished they could be us. We are the free birds, I could still hear Rena say.
That year, I craved suitcases. I haunted the flea market near the Tiergarten, bargaining and trading for old-fashioned suitcases — there were thousands for sale now, since unification. Leather with yellow celluloid handles. Train cases and hatboxes. In the old Eastern sector, no one had ever thrown them out, because there had been nothing to replace them with. Now they sold cheap, the Easterners were buying the latest carry-ons, uprights with wheels. Along the flea market booths of the Strasse des 17 Juni, the dealers all knew me. Handkofferfrdulein, they called me. Suitcase girl.
I was making altars inside them. Secret, portable museums. Displacement being the modern condition, as Oskar Schein liked to say. He kept wanting to buy one, but I couldn't sell, though Paul and I were quite obviously broke. I needed them. Instead, I made Oskar one of his own for his birthday, with Louise Brooks as Lulu, and inflation marks in denominations of hundreds of thousands, toy train tracks like veins, and a black plastic clay swamp in the bottom printed with a giant bootprint that I'd filled with clear, green-tinted gel. Through the Lucite you could see the submerged likenesses of Goethe, Schiller, and Rilke.