Bridge of Clay Read online

  Absolutely dormant.

  A concert in Vienna?

  No.

  Often, I wonder what it must have been like for him—to buy the mandatory return ticket, knowing she was only going one-way. I wonder how it was to lie and make her reapply for her passport, as had to be done, every time you left, even if briefly. So Penelope did it, like always.

  As mentioned earlier, she’d been in concerts before.

  She’d gone to Kraków. Gdańsk. East Germany.

  There was also the time she’d traveled to a small city by the name of Nebenstadt, west of the Curtain, but even that was spitting distance from the East. The concerts were always high but not-too-high affairs, because she was a beautiful pianist, and a brilliant one, but not a brilliant one. She usually made the trips alone, and never failed to return at the allotted hour.

  Until now.

  * * *

  —

  This time her father encouraged her to take a bigger suitcase, and another jacket. In the night he added some extra underwear and socks. He also fed an envelope inside the pages of a book—a black hardcover, which was one of a pair. The envelope held words and money:

  A letter and American dollars.

  The books were then wrapped in brown paper.

  On top, in weighty handwriting, it said, FOR THE MISTAKE MAKER, WHO PLAYS CHOPIN BEST OF ALL, THEN MOZART, AND BACH.

  When she picked up her luggage in the morning, it was immediately, obviously heavier. She’d started to unzip it and check, when he said, “I added a small gift, for the road—and you’re in a rush.” He hurried her out the door. “You can open it on the train.”

  And she believed him.

  She was in a blue woolen dress with fat, flat buttons.

  Her blond hair reached the middle of her back.

  Her face was certain and soft.

  Lastly, her hands were crisp and cool, and perfectly clean.

  She looked nothing like a refugee.

  * * *

  —

  At the station it was odd, for the man who’d never shown a spark of emotion was suddenly shaky and wet in the eyes. His mustache was vulnerable for the first time in its steadfast life.

  “Tato?”

  “This damn cold air.”

  “But it’s not so cold today.”

  She was right, it wasn’t, it was mild, and sunny. The light was high, silvering the city in all its glorious grey.

  “Are you arguing with me? We should not argue when someone is leaving.”

  “Yes, Tato.”

  When the train pulled in, her father pulled away. Looking back, it’s so clear he was barely holding himself together, tearing out his pockets from within. He was working away at them to distract himself, to keep the emotion at bay.

  “Tato, it’s here.”

  “I can see that. I’m old, not blind.”

  “I thought we weren’t supposed to argue.”

  “Now you’re arguing with me again!” Never would he raise his voice like that, not at home, let alone in public, and he wasn’t making sense.

  “Sorry, Tato.”

  From there, they kissed, both cheeks, a third time on the right.

  “Do widzenia.”

  “Na razie. See you later.”

  No you won’t. “Tak, tak. Na razie.”

  For the rest of her life, she was relieved beyond measure that when she boarded the train, she turned and said, “I don’t know how I’ll play without you hitting me with that branch.” She’d said the same thing every time.

  The old man nodded, barely allowing her to see his face chop and change, as watery as the Baltic Sea.

  The Baltic.

  That was how she always explained it. She claimed her father’s face had turned to a body of water. The deep wrinkles, the eyes. Even the mustache. All of it drowned in sunshine, and cold, cold water.

  * * *

  —

  For a good hour, she looked out the window of the carriage, at Eastern Europe passing her by. She thought of her father many times, but it wasn’t till she saw another man—something like a Lenin—that she remembered the gift. The suitcase.

  The train trotted on.

  Her eyes met the underwear first, and the socks, and then the brown package, and still she hadn’t pieced it together. The extra clothing was possibly explained by the eccentricities of an older man; a happiness came over her when she read the note about Chopin, Mozart and Bach.

  But then she opened the package.

  She saw the two black books.

  The print on their covers was in English.

  Both had Homer written at the top, and then respectively, The Iliad, The Odyssey.

  When she thumbed through the first one and found the envelope, the realization was sudden, and severe. She rose to her feet and whispered “Nie” to the half-crowded train.

  Dear Penelope,

  I imagine you reading this letter on your journey to Vienna, and I say from the outset—do not turn around. Do not come back. I will not receive you with open arms, but rather push you away. I think you can see that there is another life for you now, there’s another way to be.

  Inside this envelope are all the documents you need. When you get to Vienna, do not take a taxi to the camp. It is overpriced and you will arrive far too early. There is a bus, and that will get you there. Also, don’t say you are seeking to leave for economic reasons. Say only this: you are afraid of reprisals from the government.

  I expect it will not be easy, but you will make it. You will survive and live, and one day I hope we will see each other again, and you will read these books to me in English—for I expect that to be the language you will speak. If it turns out that you never come back, I ask you to read it to your own children, if that is to be what happens out there, on the wine-dark sea.

  The last thing I will say is that I taught only one person in this world to play the piano, and although you were a great mistake maker, it was my pleasure and privilege. It is what I’ve loved best, and most.

  Yours sincerely, with much love,

  Waldek Lesciuszko

  Well, what would you do?

  What would you say?

  Penelope, the Mistake Maker, stayed standing a few seconds longer, then sagged slowly back to her seat. She kept quiet and shivery, with the letter in her hands, and the two black books in her lap. Without a sound, she started to cry.

  Into the passing face of Europe outside, Penelope Lesciuszko cried her stray, silent tears. She cried all the way to Vienna.

  He’d never been drunk, and therefore never hungover, but Clay imagined this was probably what it was like.

  His head was next to him, he gathered it up.

  He sat awhile, then crawled from the mattress and found the heavy plastic sheet next to him, in the grass. With tired bones and shaking hands, he made his bed with it, he tucked it in, then walked toward the fence line—an obligatory white sports field divider, all rail and no palings—and rested his face on the wood. He breathed the burning rooves.

  For a long time, he tried to forget:

  The man at the table.

  The quiet background noise of brothers and felt betrayal.

  It came from many moments, that bridge of his, but there, at The Surrounds that morning, it came from last night most of all.

  * * *

  —

  Eight hours earlier, when the Murderer left, there were ten minutes of uncomfortable silence. To break it, Tommy said, “Jesus, he looked like death warmed up.” He held Hector over his heart. The cat purred, a lump of stripes.

  “He deserved to look a lot worse,” I told him.

  “What a shocker of a suit” and “Who gives a shit, I’m going down the pub,” said Henry and Rory, in sequence. They stood like melded
elements, like sand and rust combined.

  Clay, of course, famous for saying all but nothing, said nothing. He’d probably spoken enough for one night. For a moment he wondered, why now? Why had he come home now? But then he realized the date. It was February 17.

  He put his injured hand in a small bucket of ice, and kept the other from the graze on his face, tempting as it was to touch it. At the table it was he and I, at silent loggerheads. For me, this much was clear: there was only one brother to worry about, and that was the one in front of me.

  Hi, Dad, for Christ’s sake.

  I looked at the ice, bobbing around his wrist.

  You’ll need a bucket big as your body, boy.

  I didn’t say it, but I was sure Clay read it on my face, as he lost the battle and placed two trigger-like fingers on the wound below his eye. The mostly mute little bastard even nodded a bit, just before the clean pile of dishes, in all its outlandish altitude, collapsed into the sink.

  It didn’t stop the standoff, though, oh no.

  Me, I went right on staring.

  Clay carried on with his fingers.

  Tommy placed Hector down, cleaned up the crockery, and soon returned with the pigeon (T looking on from his shoulder), and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. He would check on Achilles and Rosy—both exiled, out back, to the porch. He made a point of closing the door.

  * * *

  —

  Of course, earlier, when Clay had said those two fateful words, the rest of us stood behind him, like witnesses at the scene of a crime. A grisly one. Caught and swollen, there were many things to be thought, but I only remember one:

  We’ve lost him now for good.

  But I was ready to fight it out.

  “You’ve got two minutes,” I said, and the Murderer slowly nodded. He slipped against his chair; it ground into the floor. “Well, go on then. Two minutes aren’t long, old man.”

  Old man?

  The Murderer queried and resigned himself to it in the same breath. He was an old man, an old memory, a forgotten idea—and middle-aged though he might have been, to us he was all but dead.

  He put his hands down on the table.

  He resurrected his voice.

  It came out in installments, as he awkwardly addressed the room.

  “I need, or, actually, I was wondering…” He didn’t sound like him anymore, not to any of us. We’d remembered him slightly left, or right. “I’m here to ask—”

  And thank God for Rory, because in a broiled voice that sounded just like it always had, he unloaded a full-blooded reply, to our father’s timorous stutterings. “For Christ’s sake, spit the fucking thing out!”

  We stopped.

  All of us, temporarily.

  But then Rosy barked again and there was me and a bit of shut-that-bloody-dog-up, and somewhere, in the middle, the words:

  “Okay, look.” The murderer found a way through. “I won’t waste any more time, and I know I’ve got no right, but I came because I live far from here now, in the country. It’s a lot of land, and there’s a river, and I’m building a bridge. I’ve learned the hard way that the river floods. You can be locked either side, and…” The voice was full of splinters, a fence post in his throat. “I’ll need help to build it, and I’m asking if any of you might—”

  “No.” I was first.

  Again, the Murderer nodded.

  “You’ve got some fucking neck, haven’t you?”—Rory, in case you didn’t guess.

  “Henry?”

  Henry took my cue and remained his affable self, in the face of all the outrage. “No thanks, mate.”

  “He’s not your mate—Clay?”

  Clay shook his head.

  “Tommy?”

  “No.”

  One of us was lying.

  * * *

  —

  From there, there was a sort of bashed-up quiet.

  The table was arid between father and sons, and a hell of a lot of toast crumbs. A pair of mismatched salt and pepper shakers stood in the middle, like some comedy duo. One portly. One tall.

  The Murderer nodded and left.

  As he did so, he took out a small piece of paper and gave it to that company of crumbs. “My address. In case you change your mind.”

  “Go now.” I folded my arms. “And leave the cigarettes.”

  * * *

  —

  The address was torn up straightaway.

  I threw it into the wooden crate next to the fridge that held assorted bottles and old newspapers.

  We sat, we stood and leaned.

  The kitchen quiet.

  What was there to say?

  Did we have a meaningful chat about uniting even stronger at times like these?

  Of course not.

  We spoke our few sentences, and Rory, pub-bound, was first to leave. The Naked Arms. On his way out he put a warm and humid hand, just briefly, on Clay’s head. At the pub, he’d likely sit where we’d all sat once—even the Murderer—on a night we’d never forget.

  Next, Henry went out back, probably to arrange some old books, or LPs, which he’d amassed from weekend garage sales.

  Tommy followed soon after.

  Once Clay and I had sat for a while, he’d quietly walked to the bathroom. He showered, then stood at the basin. It was cluttered with hair and toothpaste; held together by grit. Maybe it was all he needed to prove that great things could come from anything.

  But he still avoided the mirror.

  * * *

  —

  Later, he went to where it all began.

  His hoarding of sacred sites.

  Sure, there was Bernborough Park.

  There was the mattress at The Surrounds.

  The cemetery on the hill.

  Years earlier, though, for good reason, it all started here.

  He made his way up to the roof.

  * * *

  —

  Tonight he walked out front, then around to near Mrs. Chilman’s house—fence, to meter box, to tiles. As was his habit, he sat about halfway, blending in, which was what he did more as he got older. In the early days he went up mostly in daylight, but now he preferred not to be seen by passersby. Only when someone climbed up with him did he sit on the ridge or the edge.

  Across the road, diagonally, he watched the house of Carey Novac.

  Number 11.

  Brown brick. Yellow-windowed.

  He knew she’d be reading The Quarryman.

  For a while he watched the varied silhouettes, but soon he turned away. Much as he loved seeing just the slightest sight of her, he didn’t come to the roof for Carey. He’d sat up here well before she’d even arrived on Archer Street.

  Now he moved over, a dozen tiles to the left, and watched the length of the city. It had clambered from its previous abyss, big, broad and street-lit. He took it all steadily in.

  “Hi, city.”

  At times he liked to talk to it—to feel both less and more alone.

  * * *

  —

  It might have been half an hour later when Carey came out, fleetingly. She put one hand on the railing, and held the other, slowly, aloft.

  Hi, Clay.

  Hi, Carey.

  Then back in.

  Tomorrow, for her, was a brutal start like always. She’d wheel her bike across the lawn at quarter to four, for trackwork at the McAndrew Stables, down at Royal Hennessey.

  Toward the end, Henry came up, straight from the garage, with a beer and a bag of peanuts. He sat at the edge, near a Playboy in the gutter; a dead and dying Miss January. He gestured for Clay to follow, and when he arrived, he made his offerings; the nuts and the sweating beer.

  “No thanks.”

  “He speaks!” Henry slappe
d his back. “That’s twice in three hours; this really is a night for the books. I’d better get down to the newsagent’s tomorrow and do another lotto ticket.”

  Clay looked silently out:

  The dark compost of skyscrapers and suburbia.

  Then he looked at his brother, and the surety of his beer sips. He enjoyed the thought of that lotto ticket.

  Henry’s numbers were one to six.

  * * *

  —

  Later, Henry gestured to the street, where Rory came laboring upwards, a letterbox over his shoulder. Behind him, the timber pole dragged along the ground; he swung it to our lawn, triumphant. “Oi, Henry, throw us a nut, y’ weak lanky prick!” He thought for a moment but forgot what he was saying. It must have been funny, though, it must have been sidesplitting, because he laughed on his way to the porch. He angled up the steps and lay noisily down on the deck.

  Henry sighed. “Here, we better get him,” and Clay followed, to the other side, where Henry had propped a ladder. He didn’t look at The Surrounds, or the immense backdrop of slanted rooves. No, all he saw was the yard, and Rosy running laps of the clothesline. Achilles stood chewing in the moonlight.

  * * *

  —

  As for Rory, he weighed a drunken ton, but they somehow slung him to bed.

  “Dirty bastard,” said Henry. “Must have twenty schooners in ’im.”

  They’d never seen Hector move so quickly, either. His look of alarm was priceless, as he leapt, mattress to mattress, and out the door. On the other bed, Tommy slept against the wall.

  * * *

  —

  In their bedroom, later, much later, it said 1:39 on Henry’s old clock radio (also bargained for at a garage sale), and Clay was standing, his back to the open window. Earlier, Henry had sat on the floor, writing a quick-fire essay for school, but now he hadn’t moved for minutes; he lay on top of the sheets, and Clay was safe to think it: