Revenge

THE LITTLE DUSTMAN

The train was full. Every seat was taken and people were standing between cars. The heater seemed to be broken and my legs were cold.

A dozen or so children in navy blue blazers and berets were sitting in the front of the car. The girls had ribbons around their necks and the boys wore bow ties. The man who seemed to be in charge of the children was absorbed in a thick book, but from time to time he would look up to check on them.

For nearly an hour, we had been waiting there, but the conductor just kept repeating the same announcement over the public address system, that there were mechanical difficulties and it would be some time still before we were moving again.

Although it was spring and the cherry trees along the track were just beginning to bloom, it had suddenly started to snow. Just a flurry at first, but after a while it showed no sign of letting up, and grew heavier as I watched. In no time at all, everything was blanketed in white.

“I’ll be late for Mama’s funeral,” I murmured to myself. Glancing at my watch, I rubbed the fog from the window. My fingers were cold and wet.

I had learned of Mama’s death from my girlfriend, who worked as an editor for an arts-and-crafts magazine.

“That writer, the one you said was your stepmother for a while … she died,” she told me. “From a heart attack, the day before yesterday. I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have told you.” I could tell she wanted to avoid hurting me.

I had called the woman my mother only from the time I was ten until I turned twelve. Just about the same age as the kids in the front of the train car—and almost thirty years ago now. But it had been the only time in my life that I’d had anything like a real mother.

My biological mother had died shortly after giving birth to me. She had scratched a pimple inside her nose and it had become infected.

“The nose is close to the brain.” This had been my father’s way of explaining what had happened. “You have to be careful. Germs can get right into the brain through the nose.”

Which is why I have always been terrified of going to the ear-nose-and-throat doctor. When they insert that crooked tube in my nose, I can’t escape the thought that it will go right through and stick into my brain.

I had no memory of my real mother, no idea what a mother was. Until that woman came to live with us, a mother to me was no more than a metallic sensation in the back of my nose.

My father’s new wife was a young woman, just fourteen years older than me, who worked in an art supply shop. He was a middle school art teacher, and it seemed he did a lot of business with the shop.

Mama, as I came to call her, was quiet and petite. Even to the eyes of a child, every feature of her body—neck, fingernails, knees, feet—seemed almost miniature. The first impression I had of her was a pair of tiny shoes I found one day in the entrance hall. They were elegant black high heels, the kind a grown woman wears, but they seemed small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.

Our life as a family got off to an awkward start. We did our best to play the assigned roles—father, mother, son—knowing, though, that if we tried too hard it would never work. It’s strange to think about it now, but even a ten-year-old has a certain kind of common sense.

My father gave Mama a cloisonné pendant he had made in his “studio”—a storeroom next to the art class. It was a hexagon hung on a gold chain with flecks of green, violet, deep red, and yellow, the colors changing with the light. It was small, like her, and she almost never took it off.

She was happy when I called her Mama; it made her feel like a grown-up, she said. So I always called her Mama. Even after they divorced just two years later, she continued to be Mama in my mind.

I was upset, then, a few years later, to discover that I could no longer remember her real name, but I was reluctant to ask my father, who had left no trace of her in his world. So I searched the house, afraid I’d lose all connection to her if I did nothing to conjure her memory. Finally, deep in a drawer, I found the pendant. The colors were as brilliant as ever, and her name was engraved on the back. Relieved, I returned it to the drawer.

Mama had talked very little when we were together during those two years. I could tell she didn’t want to bother me. She never cross-examined me or forced a topic of conversation, and when I spoke, she smiled and listened carefully. The rest of the time we were content to keep quiet.

In general, Mama had little to say when other people were present, but when she was alone she talked to herself all the time. I would sneak in to spy on her when she was making dinner or washing dishes, and I would often catch her muttering something under her breath. It sounded a little like singing, or lines from a play, or perhaps she was praying. I never managed to catch what she was saying, and as soon as she realized I was there, she would stop and cover her embarrassment by chopping something or rattling a pan.

When Mama had free time, she would sit at the dining room table and write. She would open a notebook and then fuss with her hair or scrape together a pile of eraser dust for a minute or two. But then her pencil would suddenly start racing across the paper.

“What are you writing?” I would ask. Even when I interrupted her, she never got angry.

“A novel,” she always answered. She seemed to actually prefer having me around. She would watch me intently, as though the next word in her story might be hidden somewhere inside me.

“Why are you writing that?”

“Because I want to. That’s all. But we aren’t going to tell Papa, okay?”

“Why not?”

“Because your father is a real artist.”

In fact, I have no idea whether my father was a real artist or not. It’s true that he made things in his studio, but it was usually nothing more than a pipe for himself, a pencil box for me, a nameplate for the front door, or a collar for the dog. Mama must have been very impressed by the pendant.

On nights when my father was going to be out late or when he was away on a school trip, Mama would come to my room. After I had changed into my pajamas, she would sit me down on a chair and read to me from her novel.

To tell the truth, I don’t remember the story at all. I suppose it must have been much too difficult for a ten-year-old to understand, but that never seemed to bother Mama. She seemed to like her audience of one.

What I do remember is her low, powerful voice, which sounded odd coming from such a tiny body. The pages rustled when she turned them, the pendant swayed gently at her breast.

Even long after my bedtime, she would still be reading, staring at the notebook without looking up. I sat, hands on my knees, trying to look interested. Mama’s lips would get dry and cracked, and her voice would go hoarse. Eventually, she started to slur her words, and her voice quivered so much I worried she was about to cry. I would pray for her to stop; I didn’t like to see Mama suffering like that.

The woman sitting next to me had taken all sorts of things out of her bag to help pass the time while we waited for the train to start moving again. Postcards, her knitting, some mandarin oranges—objects emerged as if by magic. Now she was busy with a crossword puzzle, and when she came up with an answer, she would excitedly tap the pen on the magazine and scribble in the blanks.

Across from us were two girls who looked like university students. They were simply dressed and wore little makeup; their conversation sounded very serious. In fact, it sounded like an argument of some sort, the kind that goes in circles. One of them would say something and they’d talk about that for a while, and then the other one would say something else and they’d go back to the beginning. They took little notice of the train delay, or of my fidgeting anxiety that I might miss Mama’s funeral.

The children in the front of the car were well behaved, sitting quietly and amusing themselves as best they could. When their teacher began handing out candy, they waited patiently and ate it in silence.

The wind blustered again and the snow swirled outside, covering the woods and grass, the roofs of the farms, the earthen bank along the track.

It was snowing like this the day Mama and I went to the zoo. Mama proposed the outing. I’m writing about a zoo in my next novel and I need to go see one, she’d said. So we went, despite the weather.

The zoo was empty—just Mama and me, and the sour lady at the ticket window. I was wearing a brown coat with artificial fur at the collar and cuffs, earmuffs, gloves, and two pairs of socks. We held hands as we walked, and when a gust of wind came we would huddle close together.

“What animals do you want to see?” I asked.

“Let’s see all of them,” she said. She looked even tinier and more fragile bundled up against the snow. Her boots were barely big enough for a doll, and her body seemed to vanish into her coat. We walked around the whole zoo, stopping to peer into each cage, but perhaps because of the cold, they were nearly all empty.

Cheetah, Bengal tiger, puma, camel, antelope, lion … I read the nameplates as we stood for a moment in front of each cage. Dry leaves floating in a water dish, traces of blood clinging to a bone, droppings scattered about—and the snow piling up on everything.

My only concern was Mama. Was she seeing enough? Had she found what she needed for her story?

Rhinoceros, llama, flamingo, ostrich …

Only the penguins and the polar bears were out enjoying themselves. The snow suited them fine. The penguins were busy diving in their pond, while the polar bears paced their cage, thick necks swaying from side to side. The snow glazed their fur with a sparkling crust.

Anteater, sloth, gibbon, cobra, hedgehog, crocodile …

Eventually we found we could imagine the animals even without seeing them. The tiger yawning, the llama twitching its ears, the sloth shifting its grip on a branch.

“Why do you suppose giraffes have such long necks?” Mama said, brushing the snow from the railing in front of the cage.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It seems absurd, doesn’t it?” I nodded vaguely, not quite sure what “absurd” meant. “Long necks that serve no purpose. An elephant uses its trunk to take a shower, an anteater eats with its nose, but a giraffe’s neck is useless.”

“That’s true,” I agreed.

“I suppose they learn to live with them somehow, but if I were a giraffe, I’d want a normal neck.” She sounded terribly sad.

When we had been around to see every cage, Mama bought us soft-serve ice-cream cones at the snack stand. She took off her gloves in order to dig the coin purse out from the bottom of her bag. Her fingers looked numb as she counted out the change. We sat down to eat them on a bench. It seems ridiculous now that we wanted ice cream on such a cold day, but at the time it felt perfectly natural.

The snow fell on our cones, and we ate it along with the ice cream, but it didn’t have much flavor. Mama looked at me from time to time, and not wanting to disappoint her, I tried to appear as though I were enjoying myself. We could hear the animals howling over the wind.

I wonder whether Mama ever wrote her story about the zoo? In any case, she never read it aloud to me.

“We apologize for the delay. Thank you for your patience.” The announcement played over and over, and was greeted by sighs up and down the car.

“‘A shooting star with a long tail.’ What could that be?” said the woman next to me, tapping her pen against her temple.

“Comet?” I suggested.

“It’s six letters,” she said, counting “c … o … m … e … t” under her breath.

“Meteor,” said one of the college students across from us.

“M … e … t … e … o … r. That’s it. It fits perfectly. Thank you.” She eagerly filled in the blanks.

“Not at all,” said the girl, turning back to her conversation.

It was difficult for me to believe that Mama had grown old. In my memory she was unchanged from that day at the zoo, and younger than I am now. When I finally arrive at the funeral and see her picture on the altar, will I feel that I am looking at a total stranger?

“It says her body was discovered by the paper boy,” my girlfriend had said. “He thought it was strange that no one answered the door even though he could hear the TV. She was found with her head resting on her desk, as though she’d been writing something.”

“Did she have a heart condition?” I asked.

“It doesn’t say. But she hadn’t published much in almost ten years, so none of our editors had ever met her. But…” She hesitated.

“Tell me what it says,” I prompted. “I want to know.”

“She apparently had psychological problems brought on by writer’s block. She thought her work was being plagiarized, or that someone was coming in and taking things when she was away from home. She made quite a fuss about it, and she apparently started carrying her manuscripts around tied up in a scarf.”

Mama was not a particularly successful writer. About five or six years after the divorce, I happened to see a short piece in the newspaper saying that she had won a new writer’s prize. I bought the book and read it. It was a strange story about an old lady who owns an apartment building and grows carrots in the courtyard. She digs up one in the shape of a human hand, with five perfect fingers. In the end, they discover her husband’s body buried in the garden, minus the hands. That was the general idea.

She had several books published after she won the prize, but no one took much notice. I would find them in the remainders bin; when I brought them home, I had to hide them from my father.

“Well then…” said the man, clearing his throat. The children stood up and formed two lines in the aisle, their legs apart and their hands behind their backs. The passengers sat watching them; the woman next to me closed her magazine and the college girls fell silent.

“‘The Little Dustman’ by Johannes Brahms,” the man announced, holding up a pen for a conductor’s baton.

The voices of the children reverberated above our heads, voices almost too beautiful to be human, rippling the surface of memory. I prayed for Mama as the snow continued to fall.

Later, someone sent me a small box of things she had left behind. A few trinkets, some clothing, fragments of manuscripts—and a faded picture clipped from a newspaper that had been tucked into the box. In the picture, an emaciated old woman in a headscarf stood smiling in the courtyard of an apartment building. She was holding a carrot in the shape of a hand. Mama was standing next to her, holding a carrot, too, and looking terribly uncomfortable. It had been a beautiful day and Mama was squinting in the sunlight.

I have no idea why Mama left us. Toward the end, she talked to herself more and more, and she no longer bothered to stop even when she realized I was in the room. She muttered almost constantly, like a broken record. At some point I realized the pendant had disappeared from around her neck.

On her last day with us, she held my cheeks in her hands. “You’ve been a good boy,” she said. “I wish that I was so good.” Her hands were as cold as they had been on that snowy day at the zoo.