The Fisherman (17 page)

With a shock, Lottie realizes that the girl she’s been listening to is herself. That’s her mouth saying those horrible things. That’s Gretchen and Christina whose lives are being threatened. That’s Italo playing lead in that x-rated fantasy. Glancing about, she sees that she—the other one, I mean—is surrounded by her family, Clara, Rainer, and her sisters forming a tight circle around her, her aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents encircling them. Everyone’s face is frozen in the same, blank stare, and everyone is carrying on their own monologue. None is any nicer than what Lottie hears her other-self saying. Quite a few are worse. Here’s Clara, regretting that she never brought that tinker who came around the house every other week up to her bedroom. He was tall, and his hands and feet were big, not to mention that nose. Maybe he’d have been able to satisfy her. Here’s Rainer, bemoaning the idiots who surround him, the buffoons he’s forced to spend his days beside and who wouldn’t understand the least of his thoughts, who understand only the satisfaction of their animal urges. Although, to be honest, none of his wretched family is as smart as even the dumbest of his co-workers, but what can you expect, with a house full of women? Here’s Gretchen, wishing she were strong enough to hold the pillow over Christina’s face until she could be the youngest again. Here’s Christina, wondering what it would be like to set fire to that dog that scares her with its barking every time she walks past it—and while she’s at it, why not set fire to the old woman who owns the dog and laughs at her fright? And so and so on out from there, everyone uttering their most secret depravities.

Lottie feels her skin crawling, as if the words she’s heard are ants scrambling across it. Her head spins. She claps her hands over her ears, but it’s too late. Those ants have already found their way into her head and are running madly round and round her brain. She pulls away from the scene, lowers the telescope, so to speak, until she’s back above the highest waves. The roar of the ocean, she understands, is the accumulated voices of this multitude, of who knows how many monologues of rage, pain, and frustration. She hangs in space, still listening to Helen speaking in the darkness, and the sea begins to churn beneath her. When the Schmidts crossed the Atlantic, Lottie had stood at the railing on the front deck watching the sea froth as the ship sliced through it. Now the water below bubbles and foams in much the same way, as if it’s a giant pot under which the gas has been turned to high. The people floating there are tossed in all directions; despite which, as far as Lottie can tell, they continue talking. Something is coming. Lottie can feel it rising beneath her, shouldering the ocean aside as it ascends from unimaginable depths. Something is coming. Lottie hears Helen’s voice rising, feels the bag of slivered almonds pressed against her breast. Something is coming. Lottie can see its outline forming in the water, a rounded shape larger than any object she’s ever seen, larger than the ship that brought her to America, larger than Brooklyn Bridge, larger than the dam her father is helping to build. It’s drawing closer, increasing in size as it comes, until it breaks the ocean’s surface and Lottie sees that it’s a mouth, a titanic maw ringed with jagged teeth the size of houses. It continues to rise toward her, waterfalls streaming down its sides, waves crashing against it, hundreds of people sliding down into its cavernous gullet. It’s like the mouth of an inconceivably huge snake, one of those monsters you read about in ancient myths, so big it wraps around the earth and holds its own tail in its mouth. Lottie sees that it’s closing, that its edges are rising to meet one another, and that when they do she’ll be caught within them, dragged down to wherever it is this thing calls home. Lottie tries to withdraw further, to raise herself to a safer distance, but it’s no use. She’s as high as she can go. Helen is shouting, the enormous jaws climbing with each guttural cough and grunt. Lottie feels herself overwhelmed. The sheer size of this thing—it’s as if the immensity alone threatens to extinguish her, blow her out the way a strong wind would a candle. Faced with that mouth, that throat leading down to endless depths, Lottie feels herself flicker. She tenses, pushing the bag of almonds into herself so fiercely it actually hurts, and in that momentary flare of pain she’s saved. Without really thinking about it, she clutches the bag, wheels back her arm, and throws the bag as hard as she can at the sound of Helen’s voice. The jaws are scaling the sky to either side of her, each one taller than any building, when the bag of slivered almonds strikes Helen full in the face.

With a squawk, she breaks off her speech. Instantly, the enormous jaws, the black ocean, the crowds of people, vanish, and Lottie’s in the darkened closet. All strength gone from her legs, she slumps against the wall. It’s as if she can breathe again. She sucks in lungfuls of air, not caring that it’s rich with Helen’s stench, while her heart throbs so hard it makes her nauseated. The closet spins around her, which squeezing her eyes closed helps only a little. She hears Helen shuffling toward her and does what she should have in the first place: she screams, as long and loud as she can. When Helen grabs her mouth with one cold, damp hand, Lottie lashes out, punching and kicking. The dead woman responds in kind, slamming Lottie’s head with her other hand. Fireworks flash behind Lottie’s eyes, and she swings out into unconsciousness and back. Someone is pounding on the closet door, shouting for whoever’s inside to open up. That voice rapidly becomes a chorus. Helen hisses, no word in her death-tongue, just a sign of frustration. She heaves Lottie into the air and pivots around. Frantic, Lottie tears at Helen’s fingers, trying to pry them loose. She can hear her mother’s voice among those at the door. She kicks furiously, connecting with her captor’s legs. Helen staggers, but maintains her grip. “He waits, girl,” she says. “He will always be waiting for you.”

Then Lottie’s flying through the air. One instant, she’s hanging suspended in space. The next, she’s colliding with the closet door. She falls to the floor, and the door springs open, spilling the crowd outside it in. Lottie’s co-workers pour into the closet so fast they don’t notice her lying in front of them, and they trip and fall over her. All at once, she’s at the bottom of a pile of men and women swearing furiously at one another as they try to regain their footing. Lottie’s voice, knocked out of her by the crash into the door, returns, and she screams for help, screams for her mother to help her. Clara hears her above the din and starts hauling bodies off her, yelling at them to get up, that’s her daughter they’re crushing under their fat asses. A pair of hands catches Lottie beneath the arms, and she scrambles to her feet and into Clara’s embrace. Lottie wraps herself around her mother, hugs her in that self-abandoned way she had as a child. “What?” Clara says, “All this over a bag of almonds?”

That’s it. At her mother’s joke, Lottie bursts into tears, sobbing as if her heart had broken. She continues to cry as Clara leads her out of the closet and out of the bakery. She cries all the way home, and after Clara has undressed her and put her to bed. She cries herself to uneasy sleep, and later, Clara will tell her that, even then, she continued crying.

As for Helen, she’s gone, disappeared from the closet as if she opened a door in the darkness and stepped through it. Traces of her remain. Her smell, which sickens half a dozen people to the point of vomiting, lingers in the air, while her muddy trail dirties its floor. Seeing the dirty footprints, Clara knew what had happened, which is why she removes Lottie to the safety of their home. Why Helen threatened her daughter Clara isn’t sure, but she guesses it’s connected to whatever it is that kept Rainer at his books for most of last night.

XII

Rainer runs in the door. As he’s drawn closer to home, the conviction has been growing in him that whatever has happened to Lottie is the direct result of his experiments the previous night, what he had hinted at to Italo. The look on Clara’s face as he stops, panting, in the kitchen, is confirmation that his recent activity has not gone unnoticed. On hearing that Helen has visited his daughter, Rainer is distraught. Despite Clara’s assertion that the girl has been through enough excitement for one day, and she needs her rest, Rainer insists on seeing her. He swears he’ll be quiet, but when he sees her lying in her bed, still faintly sobbing, a kind of strangled noise forces its way out of his mouth. Clara whispering, “Come back!” he crosses to the bed Lottie usually shares with her sisters and sits down on the edge of it. His daughter does not waken. Rainer places his hand on Lottie’s forehead, and snatches it back, as if he’s been burned. He looks down at the floor, his shoulders sagging, and mutters something Clara can’t hear from her position at the door. Lottie inhales sharply, sniffles, sobs once, twice, and falls quiet. Rainer stands and walks quickly out of the room.

“What is it?” Clara asks when they’ve closed the door. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s sick,” Rainer answers. “That woman—that thing has done something to her.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Rainer says, “but she has been poisoned.”

“Poisoned?” Clara says.

“Yes,” Rainer says. “Her soul is sick, very sick.”

Clara glares at him, trying to control her frustration. “Her soul,” she says. “So has she really been poisoned, or are you speaking in metaphors?”

“Both,” Rainer says. “That woman has done violence to a part of Lottie we cannot see or touch. But it is a crucial part of her all the same, and the wound to it has sickened the Lottie we can see and touch.”

“Can she be cured?” Clara asks.

“I have given her a blessing,” Rainer says, “which will help a little.”

“Should we send for Reverend Gross?”

“The minister?” Rainer snorts the word. “What does a minister know about any of this? They spend all their days worrying about who might be thinking impure thoughts—who might be thinking at all. You might as well ask Gretchen or Christina for help.”

“Who, then?” Clara asks, “Who is going to help our daughter?” Before Rainer can answer, she adds, “Surely the books say something about this kind of thing? It’s all connected, isn’t it? This maybe-
Schwarzkunstler
, the dead woman, Lottie’s sickness, they’re like links in the same chain. Understand the one and you will understand the others.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?” Clara says.

“Because it isn’t like links on a chain,” Rainer says. “The relations among these things are more subtle, more complex. It’s like the relations of the sun and the planets, the planets and their moons—it’s like the relations of those moons to the sun.”

“You’re saying it’s beyond you,” Clara says.

Rainer stiffens. “I didn’t say that. I’m among the few men alive who understands even a fraction of it.”

“But not enough,” Clara snaps. “Not enough to put that woman back where she belongs, and not enough to help your daughter.”

“It’s complex,” Rainer says. “Half of what the books tell makes no sense, and the other half is close to madness.”

“Mad as a woman who should be dead poisoning your child?”

“Worse,” Rainer says, “far worse.”

“I don’t care,” Clara says. “If the books can help Lottie, you will find out how and do what has to be done. No excuses. I don’t want you wasting time worrying if this word means ‘a’ or ‘one.’ You should have done this by now, and then none of this would have happened. No more waiting. You act now.”

Although ten years will elapse before Clara relates this conversation to Lottie, she’ll still remember the fury she sees raging in her husband’s eyes. There isn’t much Rainer is proud about any more. In coming to America, he’s had to eat a tableful of humble pie, and he’s learned it goes down best with a smile. He’s accepted his sister-in-law’s snide reproofs in her bakery. He’s accepted his co-workers criticisms of his masonry. He’s even accepted his children’s corrections of his English. Throughout it all, he’s treasured his scholarship as the one place no one dares intrude, the kingdom in which he still reigns. Prior to the start of this mad affair, he managed to steal a few minutes every night with one book or another. Clara pretended not to see his lips moving soundlessly, his finger leaping from word to word, as he delivered an imaginary lecture. Though he’s never voiced any such hope to her, Clara knows that he secretly dreams of finding a position at an American university, re-establishing the career he was forced to abandon. For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable. It’s thin ice to be skating onto, and Clara is aware of her danger. As Rainer struggles to find a reply, she says, “I have sent Gretchen and Christina to stay with the Oliveris. I’m going over to help them. That poor woman already has all she can do with her own children and those others. Help your daughter,” she says, and leaves.

XIII

Since Clara isn’t there to see what Rainer does, and since Lottie is unconscious, I can only speculate as to what happens next. No doubt Rainer thought of the perfect reply to Clara’s accusations the second the door closed behind her. You know how that is. Maybe he walked around the kitchen, trying to bring his anger under control. Eventually, though, he fetched his books from wherever he concealed them and spread them out onto the kitchen table. Years ago, when they were in Germany, just before the storm broke over Rainer, Lottie saw one of the books. At the time, she didn’t know what she was looking at. It was only in talking to Reverend Mapple that she stumbled across the memory and finally understood its significance. She was spying on her father, peering through the keyhole in his study door for no other reason than that he’d strictly forbidden her and her sisters to disturb him while he was in it with the door shut. Lottie observed him unlock one of his glass-doored bookcases with a key strung on his watch chain. From the bookcase’s highest shelf, he reached down a tall, narrow volume. Bound between plain gray covers, it was secured with a lock, which Rainer opened with a second key on his watch chain. He sat down at his desk, turning back the book’s cover. Lottie swore the room darkened, as if the air in her father’s study had filled with particles of minute blackness, making it difficult for her to distinguish Rainer. Because of this, she couldn’t say for sure if what she saw next was accurate, but the pages of the book appeared to be giving off a black light, dimming her father’s face. Lottie bolted, ran from what she seemed to be seeing, heedless of Rainer hearing her. For the better part of the week that followed, she kept as much distance between herself and Rainer as reasonably possible. When there was no escape, when she had to embrace him, she had all she could do keeping herself from shuddering at the tiny flakes of blackness she could see clinging to his cheek, like the flecks of shaving foam he missed. For years after, she woke gasping from nightmares in which her father looked up from his desk to show her no face, only a black emptiness.