Midfield Dynamo, page 7
This, and, what I’d perceived as the high point of my career are just two shades of the same ugly daub, and I realize my very worst crime was what I thought was my very greatest moment, the one those supporters in that small club near Berlin will remember me for forever. I would do well to go back and apologize to Nowak and to everyone who witnessed it, and to disown everything in my life that led to it, and beyond it, to now; but, there is nothing I can do, and no way for me to repent. I am a spent age-thickened footballer mooching around a large circle with a line through it, in the middle of a city I care little for.
Wilson is shaping to boot the goal-kick up the pitch, but he spies The Child dropping deep to take it off him. He rolls the ball out to him, and because Arterberry didn’t try this during the game our opposition is out of shape to receive our attack. The Child turns out with the ball, raises his head, and with a morphinic excitement I spy a gap opening towards the right side of their box. I take off, and The Child floats a cultured back-spinning pass up the channel and as I sprint I can see Nat come across to meet it. His shoulders arch, his neck muscles slacken and he glances the pass off the top of his head. The ball loops into my bending path and skims out in front of me, and I sense my opponent behind as I chase towards where the ball will bounce again, and skid and roll, and I feel like I am clear and free. A silence comes over me as I take a touch, but the touch is terrible, and has put me too wide and the ball is gone too long and my right leg has been clipped and I should really go to ground, and I can hear the crowd scream for me to do so, as if nothing would make them happier. But to my left I glimpse our striker powering alone into the box, and if I can dink the ball across to him he will surely score. I know too, that if I fall I will be reconnected with my past, so I straighten, and my legs out of dumb momentum begin to gather and re-coordinate beneath me and I realize that if I propel myself and stretch for this disappearing ball and dink it back across the box, that somehow I will have done enough. I lunge, feet first, and scissor my right foot desperately at the base of the ball. As I connect and slide over the line, I can see the ball spinning handsomely back up and away from me, towards a space in front of our striker, whose eyes and mouth have widened, his arms have spread, his feet have skipped, his knees are bent and he lifts himself diagonally up to where my cross is going. The ball slows into its languid arc, and as his body coils and his eyes wince shut, bringing him into the great pre-impact dark that every footballer knows, I gasp deeply, once more, at the impotent, incidental and unforgiveable beauty of it all.
11. Half Bird Half Bear
One day, when I was fifteen or so, my grand-uncle-in-law, Wojciech, and I were sitting outside the main train station in Dresden waiting for a bus to take me back to the airport in Berlin. From there I would fly on home to Dublin. The week before, we had buried his wife, my grand-aunt, Bernadette, in a cemetery in the suburbs of Wrocław. It was the Easter holidays and my parents thought it would be a good idea for me to stay on for a few days after the funeral and keep Wojciech company.
The afternoon was bright and breezy. People were crossing over and back in front of us as we sat on the bench. The footpath was narrow, so there was much tutting and fussing as people negotiated the station’s entrance. Wojciech and I were lost again in saying nothing to each other and we didn’t notice that my bags were causing the obstruction. A frail bespectacled old man in a white button-up shirt – dotted with prints of hot-air balloons, conifer trees, rucksacks, wolves, bi-planes – sidled over and he, assuming that I was not from here, said, in accented English, ‘Your bags are causing disruption, sirs. May I move them?’
Then, without waiting for our reply, he lifted my shoulder bag and rucksack to one side. Then, he trotted off.
Wojciech and I sat uncomfortably for almost a minute, until he turned to me and said, ‘You know, this busybody has implied that we are inconsiderate.’
I did not reply. I could not grasp Wojciech’s sense of grievance, nor could I ignore it. It was not for the first time that week I fell short of the pitch of his world. I looked at my watch. The bus would be along in five minutes. Wojciech and I prepared to bid farewell to each other.
I had grown fond of him. During the day he was kind, patient and at times lively company; but it was our night-time encounters in the hallway of his small apartment that I will never forget. He sleepwalked each night, quietly raving to himself, then calling out scarily into the dark, until I led him back to bed.
The sun slid behind a cloud, then reappeared, warming our faces. A bus accelerated away leaving a grey cloud of exhaust that uncoupled from itself, in spirals, before being carried away by the breeze.
‘You know, I once had two uncles, fine tall men – twins!’ Wojciech said. ‘They were from Ukraine. Sergei was a geologist and Eugene an actuarist. They were both clever and were well-respected men too. Before the War they worked as advisors at a quarry near my hometown on the Polish side of the border and they often visited us. I was a young boy then, but I remember my mother, who was their older sister, at first remarked on how graceful she thought my two uncles were, bringing their education and refinement in among us parochial people. After they’d leave though, and this made me laugh, she always said she preferred dark-haired Sergei. He was the younger brother by almost three days. My mother would say that he had an easy grace – whereas she called Eugene ‘conspicuously graceful’ – and that he was often a fraction over-thankful and over-attentive in our house, and these small performances of his, over the course of his visit, eventually got right up her nose.’
I looked at Wojciech’s creased hands opening and folding and turning in among themselves as he spoke. Then he rested them in his lap – like two small animals in love.
‘Apparently Sergei was a great shot with the rifle,’ he continued, ‘and when he was younger he hunted squirrels. He would go to the markets in his village and the villages nearby, each Saturday, and sell squirrel fur. He told me once that the only way to shoot a squirrel was through the eye, otherwise the pelt would be singed and ripped and ruined. Then, Eugene and Sergei were called up to the army and during the War Eugene was killed when the Germans advanced east, and, as they were thrust back west, Sergei fronted up one column of this counter-attack. He received a Red Star medal for blowing up a lone Panzer not far from here. But he did not ever recover from losing his brother and he didn’t visit us again.’
I wondered at the time where Wojciech’s memory was going. I looked to him, his hands trembling.
‘Sergei died of hypothermia two winters later. He was found one morning curled up in the snow, in the middle of a field outside of his village, after drinking for a week. He’d pawned his medal for vodka. Many months after the funeral, my mother learned of what happened, so she travelled to his village to buy the medal back, but the broker had already sold it to a local timber merchant whose asking price, when my mother tracked him down, was far too much. She returned home empty-handed.’
Later that evening, on my flight back to Ireland – as the plane arced over a white disintegrating trail below – I pictured this Sergei as a boy of my age, crouching through the edge of a great forest full of gigantic autumnal trees, slowly turning his rifle over in his hands, hunting his squirrels. I thought for the first time in the aeroplane, and still do think, what a strange word squirrel is, with that ‘ir’ pushing up through the middle of it, and how strangely Wojciech, who passed on less than a year later, pronounced the word too, almost as if he ignored that ‘ir’.
‘Screwil,’ he said.
And when he first uttered this word I’d no idea what he was talking about until he acted out the movements of a squirrel sitting on a branch eating a nut. I looked out the window of the plane as the land passed peacefully below me and I rolled the word around in my mouth; then I wrote it down on the back of my ticket. I tried to imagine all of the squirrels Sergei must have killed and skinned and whose fur he sold. And it’s only now I think about the ones he missed, with a distant clatter and whizz. And I can see at last a squirrel fleeing from the end of a bobbing branch. And in the sylvan quiet of this moment, I imagine this squirrel as a mere kernel of panic imploding, then opening, imploding, then opening … it heaving and floating forever there, in the damp forest air – half bird, half bear.
UP FRONT
10. Forty-eight Pots of Honey
Three things wake me each morning. First is an alarm clock belonging to my upstairs neighbour who works as a bin collector for the local council; the second is the swarms of airplanes that thrust east out over the city, one after another, like giant untethered circular saws splitting the sky over and over, until it is, I imagine, a smithereened tectonic of swirling blue rhombuses; the third thing that wakes me is Christian, my third child out of four. His name is pronounced Kris-tee-ann, or so my wife, Bettina, insisted the day he was birthed in the back seat of a friend’s car I’d borrowed, because I cannot afford my own. Bettina and I were on a motorway lay-by on the way to the hospital after her waters broke; ‘Kris-tee-ann!’ she bellowed as I called an ambulance, but before it arrived Christian had already appeared and was beginning his first gentle mewlings. Bettina, though, was cold, exhausted, her thighs bloody, and she was thirsty and anxious. I was beside myself with worry. After the ambulance doors closed and it calmly drove off with her and Christian inside, I went home, made a hot chocolate and rang our neighbour to say I would be over presently for the two older kids, Horst and David. I then lit our gas fire and lay on the couch, and as the heat began touching my face and my arms I bolted to the kitchen of our tiny apartment and threw up in the sink and thought, with my stomach spasming horribly, how Christian and I already had a particular connection, seeing as I delivered him, or at least helped to, or at least I saw him in his entirety first – the godless gestalt of that moment. In any case, the third thing that wakes me in the morning is small red-headed Christian, now almost six years old, quietly climbing into bed beside my beautiful Bettina and I.
Our youngest, Karl, has started kindergarten so Bettina has once more returned to her work as a legal aide. She was a lawyer when I first met her, but once we had our eldest, Horst, she began working part-time as a legal aide for a firm of lawyers on the third floor of a terraced building three cobbled streets away from our apartment. I work odd jobs. My last was in a market selling bread for my local bakery. I’d stand for hours among the large-boned folk from the hinterlands of the city and sell dark-seeded breads wrapped in newspaper. Over the course of the winter, I’d become increasingly miserable and resolve to get a job indoors. Every winter it snows here for months until the whole place ought to come to a standstill, but the city struggles on inventively through its yard-upon-yard-thick fields of snow, its citizens like long-distance swimmers near a coastline with its waters covered in lard and felt and hare hides. The weather in spring, however, is astonishing; but the summer I find too hot, and in the park people lie around naked in the long grass all day, shining limbs bent skyward like small animals swaying drunkenly in the arid shimmer; the autumn then is colourful and astonishing too; and the winter, et cetera …
When I am between jobs I try to write. I get a week or two every now and then and I go to a café near my house. The café is inexpensive, pleasant and quiet; lacquered-steel-and-unstained-timber furniture, and little ornamentation – no cushions, no music. No children are admitted, no parents with buggies, no fathers with infants swaddled, no women with toddlers; no people that might harass the quiet. The café owner, Sebastian, is forthcoming and firm when he explains to people with children why they cannot enter; and they hate him. He speaks in a pedantic way but with a wobbly syntax and sometimes looking on at him speaking I realize that his words are things that suppress a rampant if unwieldy death drive. He tells these people that he has three children of his own, but there need to be some places for quiet in this city, some places where the expectation of quiet is possible, and his café is one. During my visits the café is often empty for hours, me at a table under the window of the front section, scribbling or typing, and he in the back cooking or rolling a cigarette. He smokes these cigarettes every twenty minutes or so. I think he does this to break the frustration of knowing, because he has made his café so quiet, that he will have to throw most and sometimes all of this food out. And because I am not intrusive company he often appears beside me and wordlessly leaves a saucer of food on the table with a fish fork wrapped in a small pastel-green serviette. As he walks away I utter a subtle, ‘Thank you, Sebastian.’
Today is tremendously peaceful. It is snowing outside. The massive window of the café frames the descending flakes, each one the still centre of innumerable falling universes. I am writing about a man listening with growing disinterest to his brother who is describing a dream he had that morning where he saw his feet over the edge of his bed but realized that he could not put on his socks, and not because he was paralyzed, but because he had left his body and was entering his first reverse-moments of death. But because he had been happy in his life and wanted to go through with it, and to begin that day by putting on his socks, this brother felt an unspeakable disappointment at being dead, which amassed into a feeling of unendurable neutrality that almost as soon as it appeared, it sluiced itself, from its core, into a stark feeling of motherlessness. This brother then realized he could not weep, and this motherlessness, the aloneness of being aware, for a moment, of his endless death began to gather and mound and surge into the sorts of feelings he had no words for, even in his dreams, and with that he woke and was incrementally swathed in three types of relief … But I am unable to write these brothers out of this scene, or imagine what these species of relief might feel like or how they might best be described, and anyway, Sebastian has come from the kitchen and has taken a seat on the bench in front of me and asks, as he rolls a cigarette, ‘Peter. Sorry to intrude on your writing, but are you able to drive?’
I smile, angle my notebook and write across the page, ‘I can drive, Sebastian; I don’t like to, but I can.’
‘I have a favour,’ he replies. ‘Could you collect some honey for me, from my producer, Mrs Berg? She is old and lives forty miles north of here. I forgot that she leaves tomorrow morning for two months in Trieste, and I need the honey because I am all out. I’m uncomfortable asking because you seem to be working, but could you drive out and collect it?’ he continues, licking the glue of his cigarette paper. ‘I will pay you fifty euros for just two hours driving. You can use my camper van; it is full of diesel and is sturdy.’
I look out the window silently.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘I have customers expecting … I will throw you in a pot for nothing. Now what do you think?!’
I am in the van easing out of the city limits. The motorway has narrowed to a single-lane carriageway and the snow has not stopped. There was a small orange gritter speeding ahead of me earlier, but it now passes me on the way back, having turned, I presume, at the state border. The sides of the road are heaped in black-and-white snow and it is getting dark. I despair at this van; it is cold, sluggish and rear-wheel-drive, and whenever I meet an incline of any sort the front wheels veer around the place and at times I have no control at all. Sebastian told me that Mrs Berg lives two miles off exit 16 of this road that goes north to a small riverless city from where Sebastian’s first wife, Karin, hails. He once told me that Karin’s family, the Poteckis, were royalty, until the forties when the Soviets came and dismantled their country and crushed anything that was royal in it. So the Poteckis went west and settled in this city in this new country and made their money from selling furs and knock-off courtly furniture to local aristocrats. When Karin married Sebastian they felt she had married down, he, far too slovenly and decent a man, far too perfectly unambitious for them to consider worthy of their Karin, and Karin apparently said to her family, fine, that’s okay, if I never see you all again I don’t care, Sebastian is a good man and I love him and I will spend my life with him. I try to imagine this ardent woman, but she merely morphs into Bettina from a decade ago, on the night I first met her in a pub during a summer music festival in my hometown. I saw her near the back of a bar, late on a warm raucous night. She had bobbed light-brown hair, large blue eyes and fine lightly muscled and tanned arms. She was sipping from a glass of beer and I knew she was only passing through and that I would most likely never see her again, so I talked to her. Later, as we drunkenly stumbled down a laneway, she led me into a front garden and pushed me under a tree, pulled my trousers down, lifted her denim skirt and lowered herself onto me, and said, ‘Please, please don’t come.’ Having not had sex in over three years, I came long and thoroughly. After I stopped panting, she bent down and kissed my mouth, deeply and softly, and said she was not getting off until I really fucked her. She need not have worried – I was young – and within minutes we screwed again under that tree, and as she whispered and groaned and her shoulders shook under the canopy of the willow, I came once more, in threads, hundreds of them. Thus, I believe, Horst.
