Steven Millhauser - We Others - New and Selected Stories

He decided to return to Mühlenberg; perhaps he could take up his old trade. But first he wanted to pay a visit to Berlin. He arrived at night and went with wildly beating heart to the Zaubertheater, but the Zaubertheater was no longer there. A small, flourishing restaurant stood in its place, but so transformed in look that he had to stare very hard to be certain. The doorway had been widened and replaced with glass, a glass window had been built into the outer wall, the corridor wall had been torn down, and the stage itself had vanished into thin air. Only the old florid decorations high up on the ceiling remained to tell their tale. August was not unhappy. He would have liked to order a light dinner with a glass of wine — the hake looked first-rate — but the menu in the window was forbidding. A woman inside looked up at him with a frown; he stepped away from the glass. His coat was shabby, his hair long and unclean. On an impulse he decided to seek out the Black Boot, but that too was gone: in its place was a nightclub of a somewhat shady kind. Hausenstein was right: they were deader than a doornail. He thought of paying a visit to the Preisendanz Emporium but was suddenly afraid it might not be there; he wanted something to remain. He took the last train that night.

The train for Mühlenberg does not go as far as Mühlenberg itself, but stops at Ulmbach before continuing to the southwest. At Ulmbach August learned that the coach would leave in forty-six minutes. It was a sunny afternoon. Leaving his battered traveling bag at the coach house, but carrying his rope-tied suitcase of automatons, August took a walk to the back of the coach house and down to the small and nearly dry river, spanned by a wooden bridge. On the other side of the river was a small wood, beyond which he saw factory smokestacks. He crossed the bridge into the wood, spotted with sunlight. He looked for a shady place where he might sit down and eat the pear in his pocket. The wood was deserted; it appeared to be dying. He found a shady spot under a broad, decaying tree. He recognized it as a linden and thought, Hausenstein would have said something witty about that: Unter den Linden. He kicked away a mulch of old leaves covering its half-exposed roots. Sitting down wearily between two roots and half-closing his eyes, he felt shut away peacefully from the river and the factory. He noticed that his suitcase was half-sunk in the leaves and shifted it slightly. There were many leaves lying about, brown leaves and green leaves, and leaves that were green and brown together. August had a sudden idea. Laying the suitcase on its side, he began covering it with leaves. It was done quickly: the leaves had been lying in a depression, and the suitcase was well buried.

For it often happens that way: Fate blunders into a blind alley, and even an entire life can be a mistake. Perhaps one day a child, playing in the leaves, would discover a funny old suitcase. August leaned back against the linden and tried to understand. Was it really his fault that the world no longer cared about clockwork? He supposed it was: Hausenstein had explained it all to him a dozen times. But was beauty subject to fashion? He did not understand. What was a life? One day his father had opened the back of a watch and shown him the wheels inside. Was that his life? A bird inside a funny paper man, the boats in the picture that suddenly began to move, a perspiring magician in a drab green tent — were these the secret signs of a destiny, as intimate and precise as the watermark on a postage stamp? Or were they merely accidents, chosen by memory among the many accidents that constitute a life? He tried desperately to understand. Had it all been a mistake? His art was outmoded: the world had no need for him. And so it had all come to nothing. He had given his life away to a childish passion. And now it was over. He was terribly tired. Sitting under the warm shade of the linden, August grieved for his lost youth. Slowly his eyes closed, and his head fell forward.

August woke with a start. The sun shone brightly through the leaves of the wood. He had dreamed of his rooms in the boarding house near the Preisendanz Emporium. He took out his watch: he hadn’t missed the coach. It was warm in the shade. A thrush landed on a branch of the linden, paused as if looking for something, and flew away. Suddenly August looked about in alarm. Where was his suitcase? Where? Stolen while he slept? Thieves in the wood? How? Where? He remembered.

He replaced the watch in his pocket and leaned back against the linden. His heart was beating quickly, and he noticed that a hand was trembling. It was warm in the shade. Two factory smokestacks showed bright white through the trees. August felt that he needed to rest for a long time. But his little nap had refreshed him.

A short while later, he picked up his suitcase and started back to the coach house.

One sunny morning I woke and pushed aside a corner of the blinds. Above the frosted, sun-dazzled bottom of the glass I saw a brilliant blue sky, divided into luminous rectangles by the orderly white strips of wood in my window. Down below, the backyard had vanished. In its place was a dazzling white sea, whose lifted and immobile waves would surely have toppled if I had not looked at them just then. It had happened secretly, in the night. It had snowed with such abandon, such fervor, such furious delight, that I could not understand how that wildness of snowing had failed to wake me with its white roar. The topmost twigs of the tall backyard hedge poked through the whiteness, but here and there a great drift covered them. The silver chains of the bright yellow swing-frame plunged into snow. Snow rose high above the floor of the old chicken coop at the back of the garage, and snow on the chicken-coop roof swept up to the top of the garage gable. In the corner of the white yard the tilted clothespole rose out of the snow like the mast of a sinking ship. A reckless snow-wave, having dashed against the side of the pole, flung up a line of frozen spray, as if straining to pull it all under. From the flat roof of the chicken coop hung a row of thick icicles, some in sun and some in shade. They reminded me of glossy and matte prints in my father’s albums. Under the sunny icicles were dark holes in the snow where the water dripped. Suddenly I remembered a rusty rake-head lying teeth down in the dirt of the vegetable garden. It seemed more completely buried than ships under the sea, or the quartz and flint arrowheads that were said to lie under the dark loam of the garden, too far down for me to ever find them, forever out of reach.

I hurried downstairs, shocked to discover that I was expected to eat breakfast on such a morning. In the sunny yellow kitchen I dreamed of dark tunnels in the snow. There was no exit from the house that day except by way of the front door. A thin, dark, wetly gleaming trail led between high snowbanks to the two cement steps before the buried sidewalk, where it stopped abruptly, as if in sudden discouragement. Jagged hills of snow thrown up by the snowplow rose higher than my head. I climbed over the broken slabs and reached the freedom of the street. Joey Czukowski and Mario Salvio were already there. They seemed struck with wonder. Earmuffs up and cap peaks pulled low, they both held snowballs in their hands, as if they did not know what to do with them. Together we roamed the neighborhood in search of Jimmy Shaw. Here and there great gaps appeared in the snow ranges, revealing a plowed driveway and a vista of snowy yard. At the side of Mario’s house a sparkling drift swept up to the windowsill. A patch of bright green grass, in a valley between drifts, startled us as if waves had parted and we were looking at the bottom of the sea. High above, white and black against the summer-blue sky, the telephone wires were heaped with snow. Heavy snow-lumps fell thudding. We found Jimmy Shaw banging a stick against a snow-covered stop sign on Collins Street. Pagliaro’s lot disturbed us: in summer we fought there with ash-can covers, sticks, and rusty cans, and now its dips and rises, its ripples and contours, which we knew as intimately as we knew our cellar floors, had been transformed into a mysterious new pattern of humps and hollows, an unknown realm reminding us of the vanished lot only by the distorted swelling of its central hill.