Marek Huberath - Nest of Worlds

Leo was taken to the neurology department of a hospital. As if that wasn’t enough, little Duarte fell into a stupor. He would stare at the ceiling, drool trickling from his mouth. Sometimes he would twitch and go in his diaper. They took him to the same neurology department. Edda, stricken, abstracted, wandered about and repeated that it was outside circling the house, that this wasn’t the end of it.

Laila was released from the hospital, although her burns still oozed. Whites had to pay for medical care, and her parents couldn’t afford for her to stay any longer in the ward. She would have to go back for the skin grafts.

Her face was all bandaged, and her arms and stomach too. Sometimes her mother would put a blouse on her, but usually not, because so much fluid came through the dressings. They said she had no skin under her bandages, but Gavein didn’t believe that. Without skin on her head and half her body, she would have died some time ago.

The Hougassians became more talkative and sociable. They were being treated better than they expected.

Max brought Gavein and his wife a small TV set in a white plastic case. “I found it in our attic,” he said. “Helga cleaned it up. It’s only black and white, but we thought you could use it until you got one of your own. Your wife is weak, Dave?”

“She’s better but still can’t come down for meals.”

“I understand she’s young and beautiful.”

“She’s my age. You’re right about the other.”

“A goddess of the north. A snowflake,” Max went on.

Gavein didn’t reply to that. The cliché was unpleasant.

Max explained, at wearisome length, how to turn on and tune the set. Then he asked Edda about her younger son. She burst into tears. Duarte had a brain tumor. The operation was scheduled for next Wednesday. Leo, the doctors said, only had a cyst under his skull. His operation was not dangerous, they assured her.

Ra Mahleiné grew stronger. Her wounds were healing. But the television bored her. Usually she read or made sewing repairs. When she watched the programs, she often knitted. Sometimes she just sat and reminisced.

“In the spring of last year, I kept out of trouble for a long time and worked on deck. Pulling ropes, scrubbing planks. It was hard on the hands. There were electric winches for the rigging, but they broke down all the time. The guards thought my hands were too delicate, so they didn’t let me up on deck for the rest of the voyage. At least after that my skin became softer again.”

Gavein listened, stretched out, his hands behind his head.

“I loved to look at the sea,” she continued. “At the waves like soup, like tar. The water was so dark, it was black. The sky was dark too, a black-blue during the day and pitch at night. Some of the passengers had good eyes and claimed they could see motionless airplanes in the sky. I imagined that you were sitting in one of them. In one that was frozen in the same place all those years.”

“But planes don’t fly that high during the day, and anyway time goes normally for them.”

“They were motionless,” she said. “Everyone who could see them said that. Even when a seaplane approached our boat, it speeded up only at the surface of the water, all at once. In the air, the farther away it was, the slower it went, until, though it was still big, it melted into the black-blue sky as into mist. Before it landed or immediately after it took off, it always hung in the sky for a couple of days.”

“Odd,” Gavein said. “At the surface of the water, you’d think it would brake, not speed up.”

“It braked only in the water. It hit the water very fast.”

“I’ll have to discuss this with Zef.”

Then his thoughts turned to a familiar theme. “The landing and the exchange of passengers,” he prompted, “must have been a big event.”

“Not for the whites. The procedure was always the same; there was never an exception. When the plane came up to the boat, the guards drove us all belowdecks. Some liked to use clubs. I’ll always associate seaplanes with clubs. Then they counted heads, to make sure someone hadn’t hid herself in the rigging. Only when everyone was accounted for did they let the new passengers on board and release from the cells those whose time was up. Oh, Gavein, how I wished they would miscount and release me.”

He helped her downstairs, his arm around her waist, her arm around his shoulders. She wore his faded jeans and flannel shirt. Gaunt as she was, she was the most beautiful woman at the table. He sat her down among the others and glanced at her constantly, afraid she might grow faint.

Edda brought in a blackened iron. “You two don’t have your own,” she said. “This is the one Hilgret burned, but it’s been fixed. You can check it yourself, Dave. Please take it, you’ll need it.” She set the iron in front of them.

For a moment Gavein didn’t know what to do. Ra Mahleiné used to be superstitious; perhaps she still was.

“A good omen,” he said. “The rope from a hanging brings good luck, they say. This iron will too.”

“I can test it for you, Dave,” said Massmoudieh. He wasn’t sitting with them; he was pacing back and forth. Everyone accepted his presence. He spoke to everyone, and used people’s first names too.

Ra Mahleiné was tolerated. Evidently the events of recent days had dulled the Davabel need for hierarchy.

The phone clattered.

“It’s the hospital.” Zef handed the phone to his mother.

After a moment Edda turned a white face to the diners. “Zef, we have to go. Duarte’s in a coma.” Then her tears began to flow.

She returned two days later. Duarte hadn’t even made it to the operation; he died without regaining consciousness. The funeral was to be next week. Leo’s operation was next week also.

Gavein got a job as manager of a used-book store, with a salary of nine hundred packets a month. While he was at work, Laila helped Ra Mahleiné with the housework. For this they paid the girl thirty packets a month. Ra Mahleiné repeatedly reminded her to put something over her bandages when she cleaned, so the burns wouldn’t get infected from the dirt, but Laila always forgot.

Leo lived only three days after his operation. It wasn’t a cyst after all but a tumor and malignant. The operation caused extensive damage to the core of his brain. He died without regaining consciousness.

“It’s a mercy,” the doctor told Edda. “Had he lived, he would have been a vegetable.”

Something snapped in Edda after Leo’s death.

“It’s you, Dave, it’s your doing! Something entered our house with you. It circled, circled, and finally pounced on my family. Death itself walks in your footsteps. Tell it to go. Before, nothing happened. We lived in peace… You came and brought misery,” she said, sobbing and screaming in turn.

He answered, “If you wish, we’ll find another place. I’ll start looking at the ads in the paper.”

That evening, Ra Mahleiné began to hemorrhage. It wasn’t her period, she said. The loss of blood weakened her considerably. For two days she lay in bed. He had to carry her to the toilet. She wouldn’t allow him to call a doctor, fearing doctors as much as she feared officials.

Edda apologized for her outburst, and things seemed to return to normal. But everyone remembered her words.

Gavein’s job filled his day. He had an hour break around noon but couldn’t use it; driving home took too much time.

He had three subordinates. Two, Agatha and Greta, were young women about the same age as each other, one a gray, the other a red. Both were sleepy and slow. The third was Wilcox, a retired policeman, dried up and gray before his time, who apparently had chosen to work at the bookstore so he could read for free. He claimed he was making up for what hadn’t been paid him on the force. Wilcox was a black, but unfortunately for him he had turned gray and the writing in his passport had been rendered illegible by a coffee spill. Therefore he was often treated as a red or barely even a gray. He didn’t seem to care.