Miriam Toews - Irma Voth

What do you think? said Noehmi. Do you think it’ll work?

Definitely, I said.

Dupont is making the duct right now at his mother’s apartment.

I’d like to see it, I said.

Actually, said Noehmi, I was wondering if you would provide one of the voices. It would just be a recording. But obviously the voices are really important because there’s nothing else. I have to get them right.

I’d be one of the man’s memories? I said.

Yeah, said Noehmi. I think your voice would be good for his second grade teacher. When he remembers her telling him that he can accomplish anything in life if he works hard and wants it badly enough.

I don’t speak Spanish very well, I said.

Yeah you do, said Noehmi. You have an interesting accent and that’s why your voice will be cool in the play. It’ll stand out a bit from the others so that when your voice is heard the audience will be able to differentiate it more easily from the other female voices. You know what I mean?

I guess, I said.

He really likes her sandals and wants to marry her, said Noehmi. They’re white and red and have three straps on them that cross the foot and a wedge heel. He starts putting on a bolo tie when he goes to school and slicking his hair over to one side to impress her.

The teacher?

Yeah, said Noehmi. And once, in the hallway after recess, he asks her to dance and that makes her laugh.

Does she dance with him? I asked. I thought about Jorge trying to teach me that dance, how I had failed him so spectacularly.

Well, I’m not sure if that will be explained, said Noehmi. I’d say no, she doesn’t, so he dances alone in the hallway. But he doesn’t mind because he knows that he’s impressed her and made her laugh.

Ah, I said. I smiled. For some reason, I don’t know which one, I remembered my missionary aunt explaining to me in great detail how the jungle tribes of Ecuador used hot rocks to shrink heads. The features of the shrunken face remained exactly the same as they had been normally, except they were much smaller.

So? said Noehmi. Will you do it?

Of course, I said.

The next day I went for a walk, late in the day, before dinner. I took X. with me because Aggie was busy being taught skateboard tricks by Israel and I didn’t want to go through fathoms of grief asking her to babysit. I had an uneasy feeling in my gut. I was a little nervous. There’s a word in Low German for the way I felt but translated it means on top of and below a runaway horse which … well, I don’t really know how to describe what I was feeling. It was too complicated and I was too stupid to unravel it all.

I walked past the bookseller in the park. Then I walked past him again. And one more time until I worked up the nerve to stop and say hello. The bookseller asked me if we had met once before and I said yes and that he had given me a book which I hadn’t paid for. I handed him some money and he said thank you and asked me if I wanted another book and I said yes, but now I had no more money.

Again! Credit, he said, to keep you coming back. He smiled at me and I looked at the trees. He asked me if Spanish was my mother tongue and I said no. He said then what is? English?

No, I said. German. He rummaged around in his pile of books and gave me a copy of a book called Jakob von Gunten . It was written by Robert Walser, in German, a long time ago, around the turn of the last century. The bookseller told me that he kept books in different languages for tourists who happened to wander past looking for something to read. Robert Walser liked to walk around a lot, he said. He lived in a mental asylum for twenty years and somebody asked him if he was there to write and he said no, I’m here to be mad, and then one day he went for a long walk and lay down under a tree and died, said the bookseller. That’s all I know about him. I hope you like the book. I thanked him and said goodbye. Then he asked me what my name was and I said Irma Voth.

What’s yours? And he said it was Pushkin. But that I could call him Asher.

I stared at my new book. I flipped it over and flipped it over. What’s it about? he said. I think it’s about a boy who goes to servant school, I said. And then at the end he and the principal walk off into the desert.

All right, said Asher. Is that your baby? he said. Yes and no, I said. She’s my sister actually. Asher waved at Ximena who stared at him soulfully. Natalie had bought a stroller for her and sometimes when she was in it she became curiously reflective. Asher handed X. a cardboard baby book and she took it and put it in her mouth and gnawed at it with a terrible hunger. Then she flung it so that it barely missed Asher’s head and it fell onto the ground. He picked it up and gave it back to her.

Ximena and I kept walking. I pushed the stroller down the sidewalk towards the house of refuge for exiled writers. There were posters on the windows advertising different types of classes available to the general public.

The Bubbling Phenomena and Non-Compactness.

The “Almost Nothing” Precariousness in Art Since the 60s.

Taming Complexity.

Did Homer Describe an Eclipse in the Odyssey ?

I read these posters and said the words out loud to Ximena. What do you think? I asked her. Did he or didn’t he? She craned her head around and up to glare at me while I read. She had black rings of dirt around her neck. She wanted to keep moving.

When we got back home Aggie was alone and lying on the bed on her back. She told me she had something to show me and then she lifted her sweatshirt and showed me her belly button. There was jewellery stuck to it. I had it pierced, she said. Israel paid for it with his allowance. There was a tiny blue heart on a silver ring.

Does it hurt? I asked her.

Of course! she said. But I’ve got stuff to keep it clean.

Ximena had fallen asleep in her stroller so I left her there and lay down on the bed next to Aggie and closed my eyes. She asked me what was wrong and I said I didn’t know. I was tired. I told her that I had used expensive perfume to kill some ants in a guest’s room instead of going to the supply bin in the cellar to get the real bug killer because I didn’t feel like going all that way. Then I panicked because the room smelled like perfume and I was sure that the guest would tell Hubertus or Natalie that I had used some of it for myself. So I lit a match to get rid of the perfume smell and then the room smelled like sulphur. I tried to turn the overhead fan on but the guest had hung wet clothing on it to dry and it was so heavy that the fan didn’t spin very well and then stopped altogether and started to smell a bit like smoke. So then I opened the window to get rid of the sulphur smell and the smoke smell and the perfume smell but the screen was missing so a zillion flies flew into the room. Then I had to spend the next twenty minutes killing them and cleaning their bodies off the various surfaces and the whole time I was sweating like a horse because I was so afraid that the guest would come back to her room.

Did she? said Aggie.

No, I said.

What kind of perfume was it? she said. Poison?

Is that a kind? I said.

Yeah, said Aggie. Christian Dior.

What do you mean? I said.

Christian Dior is the name of the designer who makes the perfume, said Aggie.

How do you know that? I said.

Me and Israel get samples for his mom, she said.

I told Aggie that all the noise and confusion on the streets was overwhelming me a little bit. I told her that I missed the stars in Chihuahua and the sound of the wind rustling the corn.

Me encanta este lugar, said Aggie.

I know, I said. She was speaking mostly Spanish these days. She had told me that she liked it here.

I asked Aggie to tell me about her day in Plattdeutsch.