Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

The man shifted in his chair. His eyes flicked over to the woman, but not long enough to register an expression.

“Well,” he said, “something inside the combination of my contempt and that slap did alter Hans a bit, did snap him into a new place. He had always been obedient, and he continued to stare with that wet Hans gaze, but when he finally spoke, he said, in a quieter voice, that he might wish I had no legs. I was by then already a very fine and fast runner in school. He said Mother would not like me so well without legs, which, I must add as a side note, turned out, unfortunately, to be true. ‘Good one, Hans!’ I told him, encouragingly. ‘More!’ He leaned closer and in a whisper said that he wished that all my hair would fall out, as we’d just seen a horror film in which the vampire’s eldest child, the preferred child, loses all its hair and becomes a human snake and eats its father. Also, I had the better hair, the hair all the relatives commented upon. Such lustrous hair, too good for a boy, they all said, about my eyelashes too.”

The man in the wheelchair blinked, reptilian.

“I was—to be frank—delighted,” he said, leaning in. “Now, this was the sort of conversation I felt rivalrous brothers should have, and I suppose I felt guilty for all the preferential treatment I’d received, so it seemed better to get it all out in the open. I couldn’t tell if Hans had cursed me because he really felt it or just to please me, but I didn’t care. Of course, I was not to be outdone, and told him that he would turn scaly and dry up like a desert, that he would lose his hearing on the day of his piano recital, and forget how to speak at a crucial moment in his life, whenever that was. I said to him, ‘One day you will open your mouth when it is imperative that you use it, and nothing will come out.’ We were sitting in the room off of the kitchen; it was a small, dark hallway that was always warm from the heating vent, and smelled of nuts, though no one ate nuts in our home. We always loved sitting there. I was fidgety with pleasure. Hans nodded, digesting my curses. I asked for one more. His eyes began to glaze over, and he told me, as if in a trance, that Germany would collapse with me inside it, and I would be legless, dragging my body through the burning streets of a formerly beautiful city, and I would call and call and no one would come, and how I would find my darling wife dead in the flames.

“He and I sat silent then, until he shook himself alert.

“ ‘Will that do?’ Hans asked, smiling a little shyly at me.”

The man raised his forehead where his eyebrows would be.

“Well, he was quite a bit happier for a while after that,” the man said. “It was probably the longest I’d spoken with him in a number of months. It’s good for brothers to do a little cursing every now and then. Good to have some room to vent. All was well until, of course, the curses started to come true. The final ones didn’t. I was married for ten years, later, yes, but she left me because she fell in love with a younger man. I had no darling wife, dead. I was not present at any bombing.

“But the rest did,” he said. “We said so many curses that day, and the world was in such tumult that the odds were high that something would stick. None stuck to him; most did to me. Now, I knew an incident with a train took my legs, not Hans. I tended to put myself in dangerous situations. A fire took the hair off my head and eyebrows, a fire I could have avoided. But either way, though it was years later, Hans thought he had ordered it all, straight off a menu from the devil himself, and although I told him it was not his fault, he surely thought otherwise. That there was both greatness and a terrible danger in his mind.”

A light wind blew through the cemetery. The secretary kept her weight on both feet. She felt a bit too tall, taller than she liked to feel, but she did not want to sit on the grass, as it was wet.

“Never once did I think it was the power of his mind,” Hans’s brother said. “He had a fine human mind, sure, but he was no soothsayer. Please. I told him that, too—‘You’re just a regular kid, Hans!’—but I’m sure he thought I was trying to placate him. He read the news daily, every single word. It was a terrible time, a terrifying time. We could hardly understand any of it. And I felt terrible that I had encouraged him so. I was older; I should’ve known better. He hadn’t wanted to say anything, and I had made him, and then things came true, and imagination met reality. We all knew someone who had done something. News kept pouring in. Poor Hans. He listened to it all with terror. He stopped seeing his friends. It wasn’t just him; many young men I knew who had frightening thoughts or dreams were extremely vigilant in those days. One neighbor went on serious drugs to sleep so he’d stop having some kind of dream; he never said what it was. We did not know what we were capable of. The lid was off.

“I even once told him to curse me again, or to bless me—his choice—but by then he was a very different kind of man.”

He hummed lightly. The mourners on either side huddled back to their cars in the dimming light and drove away.

“And, you know,” he said, sighing, “it’s not true that nothing stuck to him. In a way, my curses came true too. In a metaphorical way. That moment of speechlessness happened to him over and over, where he could not talk when it was of tantamount importance. He rarely talked at all. He never married or truly fell in love. He never did anything with his life. Just wandered from country to country. We lost touch many years ago.”

The man closed his mouth, and the two looked at the headstone together, reading and rereading the few words there: Hans Hoefler , and the quote they had decided upon as a group at the court: We need more Hans Hoeflers in this world .

The words looked wrong, like a carving of incorrect dates. The secretary pulled her coat tighter around herself. She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. “Someone else should speak instead,” he said. “If I don’t speak, it means someone else will,” which did not always turn out to be true. She spent many, many hours with him in an expectant silence. “Tell me,” she whispered, softly, sometimes, but he would just look at her mildly, a flat blankness in his eyes. He did not even shake his head; it was like words had returned to abstraction to him, just interesting sounds exiting the mouth of the young woman whose nose and hands reminded him of something.

At the cemetery, she stepped closer and touched the shoulder of the man in the wheelchair, and he reached up to her hand with his own. He was much older, and hairless, but the bones in his face were still handsome. Compared with Hans—worried, dark-eyed Hans—this chair-bound brother still received more appreciative looks from women. There was something broad and fine in the way his cheekbones paralleled his jaw. The secretary walked next to him, and helped him home without seeming like she was helping, and stood with him in the elevator, and accompanied him into his apartment, into rooms that were clean and spare. Without words, as if they had been married for years, the two commenced cooking dinner together, chopping carrots and onions, warming the bread. He showed her a photo album of his childhood, and she could see the hair he had described and the strong legs of the former athlete. They ate facing the window, though it was night, and watched the lights in the building across the street switch on one by one. “Delicious,” he said once, and she nodded.

Before she left, after stacking the dishes and snapping off squares of dark chocolate from the cupboard, she pulled her chair in closer to him and, placing a hand on each of his shoulders, kissed his cheeks, his head, the heavy flat bones of his eyebrows where no hair grew. She kissed near his lips, but not on them. His eyelids closed, and she kissed their round, soft orbs. Each fingertip. Each palm. The corner where his jaw hinged, and the light lobe of his ear.