The Ice Cream Man (16 page)

Suddenly, my mother says, “Let’s go.”

She sniffles and sobs throughout the return journey. Otherwise everything is as usual. We stop along the way to get something to eat. The waitress brings us the menu, we order, spoon up our soup. Tears roll down my mother’s cheeks. The men next to us sip their beers, perplexed and wary of clattering their glasses against the rustic table. The men try to figure me out, and my mother gives them no hints, not even accidentally. The tears flow appealingly; her nose is not dripping or red at all. She lets her head droop and leans against the back of her chair. The men feel it in their own backs, softening them enough emotionally that they grow hard.

When we get home, I step a little too hard on the gas as I park the car in the street and graze the bumper of the Štěpáneks’ Škoda, but my mother does not seem to notice. She gives me a kiss and says, “Thank you, Jan. You drive like you’ve been driving your whole life. I’m sure the girls notice how smoothly you drive. Why don’t you take someone out for a spin?”

I remember one night when I awoke to a commotion in the hall. My father and mother had returned home from an event where the missing limbs of my father and some other disabled war veterans played an important role. There had been dancing as well, in a grand ballroom, with a ceiling hung with Bohemian crystal chandeliers and dusty draperies in the windows. The music had been like an echo from the past, the ceiling too high, the women’s hairdos and behinds too big; the men had gulped down bottle after bottle, because at least they had their mouths left. My mother always returned from these galas disappointed and dripping with venom: a ballroom full of men with parts missing, poorly fitting artificial limbs, and a couple of intact Party bigwigs who, while they did dance lecherously with my mother, left it at that, in deference to the man who had made sacrifices for the fatherland. I heard my mother’s frustrated venting, kicking her high heels against the freezer in the kitchen, and my father’s silence as my mother wriggled and grunted out of her tight-fitting dress.

A conversation that consisted mostly of my mother’s voice, because my father spoke softly or not at all:

“The night is young, the night is still bloody young, and I’m not so old that life should be over . . .”

“Oh, for God’s sake, I’ve had it up to here with those speeches, harping on about the same thing year in, year out, word for word. They don’t see that everything’s changing . . . even the Alps are crumbling to the ground . . . it’s just that people’s lives are too short.”

“Why weren’t the Štěpáneks there? Have they been run over?”

My mother starts to giggle.

“Didn’t you think it was awfully strange that no one’s wondered where they are?”

“Why do you think I’m talking to you? Why do you even hear me saying anything?”

To that my father does reply, but even that is a rare occurrence. “Of course, you told me right at the start, nothing has changed, no one can call you a liar. But you phrased it as a question then. Do you remember?”

“I don’t remember. And I’m not going to reminisce, either!”

“Did I think you were talking to me just because I happened to end up in the same house? Did I think that badly of you?”

“What do you remember about that?”

“Don’t shout. You’ll wake the boy.”

“He’s not your son. I was already pregnant before you turned up.”

“No, you weren’t. Do you think I don’t know how to count?”

“He came back!”

“No, he didn’t.”

“We went into the woods. He was carrying a gun, but he put it down on the ground. We were lying fifty meters from the house, the spruce branches hung low, and the ground was full of needles. He was stinking and dirty, but I licked him clean.”

The whole house seems to fall silent; maybe my mother is sobbing. Then my father talks for some time in a voice so low I can’t make out what he is saying. Finally, my mother screams at the top of her lungs,
“Why not? Because of that leg!”

“It was your leg that won the whole World War, wasn’t it! And all the women of Europe were running after that leg! They went mad if they didn’t get a chance to touch your leg! How is it possible that the surgeons managed to save you, but not that leg? Where is it now? Lying on a shit pile somewhere? It should have been immortalized in the National Museum!”

“Do you know how I’ve envied you because of that leg? Since you lost it, you’ve never been able to imagine you ever had two legs. And do you know what, nobody else has, either! Nobody has two legs!”

At home, after the car journey, Jan’s mother scratches her leg on the sofa and Jan cannot suppress that image, which is sharp and swift, like a long built-up electrical discharge. Finally it is released and lights up the whole area, without mercy, leaving nothing untouched, passing through walls and closed doors. That is how she is with all those men, as if she had a terrible itch she could not reach, then she would guide them, order them across her back: over, over, no, lower, yes, yes, do it harder, and they are not allowed to stop until she is satisfied; that is what they are to her, just something sufficiently rough, durable, an extra hand, a bit of friction in the world that she slips through too easily, and she feels that she is in control of her body and herself; with every step, she can feel how her womb sways in her lower abdomen after them, quaking in its ligaments like a cradle suspended in pain, a pain chosen by her, demanded by her of men who could never hurt her, because she always gets there first, she chooses the pain before it can choose her.

Jan’s father has put on weight. He has a harder time walking: his remaining leg has become bowed at the knee, while his artificial leg is thin and straight like a young man’s.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if Dad slept downstairs?” Jan asks.

“Easier for whom?” his mother laughs.

Jan’s father does not have many questions left. On weekends, only one of them sounds like a question; his voice is a bit more energetic, more hopeful, because their son is at home and for the first time in a long time, the oven is on and spreading a burned smell upstairs. The freezer is full of berries, mashed potatoes, fish, and meat. But Jan’s mother has not cooked real food at home in a long time. She rinses some potatoes and casts them, skins and all, into a ten-liter pot. Jan’s father will gulp them down all week long. With smoked fish on the first day, and mixed with fried onions and pieces of sausage on other days. She slaps a pot holder on the table in front of him and puts the frying pan down on top of it. She doesn’t bother to use plates anymore. Sometimes she holds the lid of the freezer open and breathes in the white vapor, looking into its chilly depths as if she wanted to get in herself and not get out for a hundred years.

“What’s for dinner?”

During the meal, grease runs down from the corners of Jan’s father’s mouth. Jan’s mother does not look in his father’s direction even once, but it does not seem to help. She presses a napkin to her mouth, as if the grease were emerging from there instead of from between his chomping teeth.

“Well, son, how are your studies going?”

“They’re going all right.”

Jan’s father nods, suppresses an acrid belch, grasps the edge of the table for support, and struggles to get up.

“I’m going out for a smoke.”

“Isn’t it slippery in the yard?”

“They’ve put some sand down,” Jan’s mother says as she empties his father’s gnawed-down chops into the dog’s bowl.

Jan watches from the window as his father goes down the concrete stairs one at a time, holding onto the iron railing. Someone had sprinkled some sand across the remaining slush in the courtyard. The sand forms two trails: one leads to the gate and the other to the rusty lounge chair under the maple tree. Jan’s father cautiously backs up to the lounge chair, bends down, and searches for the armrests with the palms of his hands, then slumps onto the frozen-stiff blanket.

The dog trots between Jan’s feet and the front door. He takes the dog for a long walk to the riverside, where the snow has bent and snapped the branches of the bushes. When he returns, his father is still sitting in the lounge chair. Some carefully smoked cigarette ends have been thrown into the snow. Water melts from the dog’s paws onto the kitchen floor, and the dog goes straight into the living room to sniff Jan’s mother’s feet and legs. Jan sees its nose lightly appraising her ankles, calves, and the backs of her knees: nothing new on offer.

“Jan, darling, do you think you could squirt some oil on the gate hinges this evening?” Jan’s mother asks him when his father has come in and poked his head into the living room. Jan’s father seems to be considering whether he should go and sit on the sofa, then says he is going to lie down. Jan listens to his stifled groans on the stairs.

“Wouldn’t it be easier if Dad slept downstairs?” Jan asks.

“Easier for whom?” his mother laughs as if she were throwing a plate at the wall.

The gate has been creaking for the past six months. The Štěpáneks’ dog starts to yap every time someone comes through the gate, and people have complained about it.

Jan’s mother hasn’t gone out to squirt any oil on it herself, and no man had been found in the house to do it. Jan can see in his father’s expression that his mother has not even mentioned the gate, but he cannot blame his mother for that. A man should notice certain things himself and do something about them. In the early hours of Monday morning, Jan’s mother hears a car starting up in her sleep, but she hears neither the gate squeak nor the Štěpáneks’ dog, and she sleeps peacefully until her alarm clock goes off. She wakes to an ordinary Monday morning, washes up, brushes her hair, examines the wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, gets dressed and goes downstairs to the kitchen to make coffee, sees Jan’s empty milk glass and bread crumbs on the tablecloth. As carefully as he had always tidied up after himself, he has left more traces of himself behind now that he has moved to Prague, and his mother leaves the milk glass and the crumbs where they are so they will still be there to greet her in the evening after a long day at work.

The clock ticks on the wall; the tree branches waver outside the window like whips tied full of knots, and only when she is outside, across the slippery courtyard to the gate, which does not make the tiniest squeak, does she look over to the right, to the street where she can see a dark rectangle of asphalt in one of the parking spaces where no snow has fallen. If only her life had been so ordinary that something might have been stolen from her, or if only she had had such a shameless or badly brought-up son that he had taken off in the family car for the umpteenth time. Jan’s mother can only carry on, walking past as if nothing has happened, as if she has no sense that her son was right there by the black rectangle, and that now he has vanished beyond its boundaries, the tire tracks blending in with the tracks from other tires, the blue car blending in with other blue cars, their paths endlessly diverging, while the mother’s life divides into only two: a fear that has finally turned to sorrow.

Maminka. If you hear from me again, that means something bad has happened, so you can hope
never
to hear from me again. Jan.

V

MERMAIDS

The wind is blowing a gale on
the deck of the car ferry, and a young man is standing there in the wind. The first thing we notice is how pale he is. Just like Snow White. His skin white as snow, his hair black as ebony.

He’s not from around here. You can tell from the way he’s looking over the rail. Sleet is falling into the Kattegat, and the sky is irrevocably mixed up with the clouds. It’s clear he has never seen the sea before, and of all the boys we have ever seen, he is the
saddest-looking
one of them all. He would surely leap over the rail if he had seen the sea before, and the mere act of seeing it no longer held any fascination for him.

We immediately hit on the idea to take him to Kerstin. Would Kerstin like him? Snow White from the story isn’t a man, of course, but that doesn’t matter. We know what Kerstin would say: the only reason she’s a girl is because the prince is a boy.

The boy looks at the sea, and the sea calls to him with its foamy mouth, sleet running down the back of his neck. It must be cold for such a slender fellow. His coat is thin and dark blue; the wind wants his coat, and we want his hair and skin. But they belong to Kerstin, just like everything else.

We have woolly hats knitted of white angora, with tassels and pom-poms, a touch of turquoise on our eyelids. Just a hint, the right amount. Gosh, how easy it is to capture him! The troubles only start with Kerstin, because nothing is ever quite good enough for her.

We take the boy inside and buy him a beer, leaving the wind and sleet to lick their fingers outside the panoramic windows. The saltwater has splashed up from the sea into his mouth, so he probably thinks Swedes put salt in their beer. Along one wall in the bar, there is a long leatherette-upholstered banquette that makes your crotch sweat. We let the boy sit on the banquette between us, and more of us position ourselves in front of him so he cannot flee.

On the car deck is the blue rust bucket he drove aboard the ferry on the Danish side. We do not yet know where he set off from on his way to Denmark, but from here we are going to Kerstin’s place in Gothenburg.

We make an attempt in English: “
Do you need a place to stay? Can we drive your car?”

He doesn’t understand anything. We speak Swedish, English, German, and French, but he speaks only his own language.

“We drive Jan’s car, OK?”

We make
vroom
,
vroom
noises and turn invisible steering wheels in the air. He repeats, enough times that in the end even our ears can make it out,
“Ano, ano.”

“No? Did you say no?”

We let him visit the toilet. There is a long line, because we will be reaching land soon. When he returns, we are leaning against the walls in the passageway and trying to figure it out.

“Which one, Jan? Yes or no?”

We sleep in Kerstin’s living room, all side by side as usual, and put Jan in Kerstin’s room. Kerstin won’t be here until Sunday, but Jan has no idea that Kerstin exists. On Saturday evening, we wash Jan’s clothes, and we would wash Jan as well if he’d let us. He takes off his sweater, socks, and trousers, flings them out through the chink in the door and onto the floor in the hall. We get a whiff of their strange smell. He crawls under the covers of Kerstin’s bed in only his pants, but we demand to have them as well. In the morning, Kerstin discovers a bare-torsoed boy sound asleep in her bed and thinks we are offering her something on a plate. Nothing could enrage her more. She raises her foot and thrusts the heel of her white patent-leather boot between Jan’s shoulder blades. Jan falls to the floor like a stuffed cabbage roll, instantly wakes up, and starts yanking at the bedclothes to cover his groin. Kerstin’s rage is glacial and crackly after that kick. “Who the hell are you? And what the hell are you doing in my bed?”

Jan struggles on the floor like a beetle on its back, trying to scuttle under the desk, but he ends up knocking over a chair with a crash. He keeps a grip on the quilt, but Kerstin notices that he has nothing on and shrieks. “Give me that quilt! Don’t rub your filthy cock on my quilt!”

We come running and cry out in unison, “Kerstin, calm down! Kerstin, wait, we can explain!”

Kerstin stops tugging at the quilt and turns to look at us. While the force of her gaze is such that there is never any real need for her to raise her voice, she shouts and roars surprisingly often.

“You’d better have a damned good explanation.”

“We do, Kerstin, we do!”

“Out with it!” she roars, but she is unable to conceal the frenzy that has crept into her voice. She knows as well as we do that we would never in the world have dared to stick anyone straight into her bed. Jan holds his breath, there on the floor between the chair legs and Kerstin’s patent-leather boots. We count to three and exclaim at once, “He’s from Prague!”

At that, even Kerstin falls silent. We have never known Kerstin to go this quiet. She has been frothing at the mouth about Prague since last August, and she’s been going on about Vietnam for even longer—and suddenly Prague is right here, in her bed. We’ve organized it for her! Nothing less would do for Kerstin. Kerstin has never accepted the status of an onlooker, which the twentieth century has forced on us in our country. She must be in all places at all times, anywhere but Sweden. Everyone is crying out to be rescued like baby birds in an abandoned nest, but Kerstin has only two hands. Kerstin is twenty-three years old and studies a bit of this and that at the University of Gothenburg. Nature has granted her so many gifts that to dedicate herself to just one subject would be to neglect ten others. Kerstin cannot really bear to concentrate on anything, when everything is so transparent and everyone else just lags behind helplessly. Sometimes other people don’t even seem to be of the same species; they are rather less advanced creatures. Some are such small, immobile beings that one becomes aware of their existence only if they happen to bite or swarm. Then there are livestock animals, cattle and poultry, for which one can feel disdain as well as slight pity. The third category are the wild beasts, whose elite ranks may possess highly advanced, specialized skills such as the bat’s sonar or the shark’s electroreception, which even Kerstin can appreciate and admire—and fear a little.

Now Kerstin looks as if she has stopped in front of a cage and spotted a rare hue, a different climate, an erotically acrobatic limb. Later, much later, Kerstin finds out what it was she really saw: that jerry can under Jan’s desk when it was still full of potential.

Once Kerstin has gone into the kitchen, we whisper to Jan from the doorway,
“Don’t worry. She likes you.
”

Any of us could have married Jan, but he has no trouble getting a residential permit without having to get married. Sweden doesn’t ask if anybody knows what color his toothbrush is or what size shoes he wears, and nobody needs to feign a two-week whirlwind romance, which officials never believe anyway. Sweden marries Jan. When his papers are in order and Kerstin has not yet tired of him, we sign Jan up for a Swedish language course. Even though spring is approaching and the weather is starting to warm up and the grass is turning green, he always has the same sorrowful expression. We start to run out of ideas. Why in the world did he head north? Why didn’t he go south, to the Mediterranean coast? We try to come up with all sorts of nice things, cook tasty food. We get it into our heads to have his car painted—the one that looks as if it were welded together from blue eggshells. Maybe it’s the car that’s making him sad: the car remembers what a long journey it took to get here. We will try to blot out the car’s Eastern Bloc style and paint it full of flowers, hearts, clouds, and birds; we busy ourselves with the car when he comes and stands on the other side of the street.

“Look, Jan, doesn’t it look nice? This is, like, the sky, and there on the trunk is the earth, but d’you see what’s all around? The hearts. In the sky and on the earth.”

“Mammas bil,”
he stammers.

“Huh?”

“What’d he say?”

“He said, ‘
Mom
’
s car.
’”

“His mom’s?”

“Oh, it’s Jan’s mom’s?”

“Is his mom going to be upset?” We try not to giggle. Kerstin puts her brush into her pot of paint. “Come on; don’t just stand there in the middle of the street.”

Kerstin says that, though Jan is standing on the opposite side of the street. And as Jan crosses the street, he looks as if he’s wading through water up to his waist.

“We couldn’t find the key,” Kerstin says, pointing to the car door. “Do you have it? How come you always take your car key with you, even when you don’t even need it? What if one of the girls cracked her head open or we needed to drive somewhere really fast, and the key was in your pocket somewhere on Kungsgatan? Or are you trying to say you’ve been buying too much gas?”

Kerstin waits for a moment, but when Jan gives no sign of putting his hand in his pocket, Kerstin glances at us. We need no further encouragement. We have a lot of hands between us, and we position ourselves in front of Jan, on either side and behind him, so he cannot get away. Though the first hand finds the key right away and snatches it up to safety, we carry on for a while as if the key were nowhere to be found, not in his front or back pockets or under his shirt.

“Well, then,” says Kerstin.

Kerstin opens the car door and pushes Jan into the passenger seat. Kerstin sits in the driver’s seat and barks an order to Jan, though it is in a different tone than the one she uses to bark at us.

“Turn your head this way and keep your eyes shut. All right, girls . . . give me that . . .”

“What?”

“That thing!”

“Kerstin, what are you planning to do?”

A coarse, wet brush starts to wiggle across Jan’s face. If it weren’t so cold and stiff, Jan might have thought it was the tip of Kerstin’s tongue turning long and earnestly at his cheek.

“There, now you can have a look. But don’t move—just open your eyes.”

We lean in closer to see Jan’s expression as he looks at himself in the rearview mirror: two large black teardrops rolling down his cheeks.

“How come Jan’s always so sad?” Kerstin leans her head against his so they are both reflected in the mirror. “The car’s not sad anymore. Is there anything that will cheer Jan up? Shall we go to the beach?” Then she adds in English, “
Do you want see some mermaids?
”

“Hey, Kerstin, that’s car paint. You can only get it off with sandpaper.”

“Now you’ve ruined his face.”

“Don’t shout; you’ll make him lose it. We’ll sort this out somehow.”

“A plastic surgeon will sort it out.”

“Let’s ring Göran. His old man sells cars.”

We bought Jan a pair of swimming trunks with orange fish on them. We lounge on beach towels, roasted and caked with sand, and watch Jan as he tries to wade in deeper. The sea is still cold, but Jan chose to flee into its chilliness when we took off our bikini tops.

“Gosh, he’s pale.”

“Just like Snow White.”

“Except Snow White’s a girl.”

Kerstin bursts out, “Oh, that’s such a sham. The only reason she’s a girl is because the prince is a boy.”

“How come you didn’t give him a kiss when you found him in your bed?”

“Kicking is so cruel.”

“And he got a nasty bruise between his shoulder blades.”

“It wasn’t a kiss that brought Snow White around,” Kerstin declares. “That’s the watered-down American version. Americans are a schizophrenic lot. They need a lot of watering down to counteract all that napalm. The real Snow White woke up when the piece of poisoned apple was dislodged from her throat, and it was only dislodged because the dwarves stumbled when they were carrying the glass coffin. It was sheer coincidence. The prince wouldn’t have minded as long as she was pretty enough, even if she was in a coma.”

“But she did wake up.”

“Must have been a disappointment.”

“And yet knowing so much.”

“And studying at the university before the coffin.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, he pointed to the ceiling light and the toaster oven and said
student
.”

“Oh, no.”

“Electrical engineer or something.”

“Kerstin’s not interested in engineer types.”

“Fortunately, though, he’s a political refugee.”

“What could be political about electricity?”

“Under Communism, all electrical charges are positive, so they can’t get any current out of them.”

“So let’s say he’s a dissident. Those are the only thinkers Kerstin has any time for.”

“What if it turns out he’s been disagreeing with Kerstin all along?”

“Then we’d better hope he doesn’t learn Swedish too well.”

“That’s a matter of principle with Kerstin, always disagreeing with people.”

“Hey, Kerstin, how d’you know he’s so clever and wise when he doesn’t know how to say anything?”

Kerstin is lying in the middle of our group with her eyes closed, going over Jan in her mind, the time he almost revealed everything there on the floor of her room.

“From his eyes, of course,” Kerstin replies, pretending to need no time to think it over.

“And his ass?”

“Ugh, you! Really, it’s lovely that I can talk to him about everything and he doesn’t understand a word. I just blurt out the first thing that comes into my head or things I’ve never told anyone about. It’s like talking to Bulten when I was little.”

“Who on Earth is Bulten?”

“Bulten was our dog.”

We laugh so much our nipples bounce up and down.

“Kerstin has a new lapdog!”

“Hey, he’s looking over here.”

“He thinks we’re laughing at him.”

“Isn’t that what we’re doing?”

“We’re laughing at both of them. Kerstin and Jan. Woof, woof, woof!”

“Hey, Jan! Is it cold?”

“Be brave!”

“Go for it!” Followed by, in English,
“Go, Czechoslovakia, go!”