Perfectly Clear Workbench

[Othon Sdcd]

HereI sit, said my father, not going anywhere else. At the time I thought he was referring to the greenhouse and his cubbyhole there, but it later occurred to me he might have meant his physical form.

After a rainy day in the apple orchard, the scent hung heavy over the greenhouse. The apples were spread out to dry on the tables and shelves, drying out before being put into storage in the place where my father slept at night. Sometimes I would lie awake in my room at night, down in the house, wondering if he was cold. I wondered if he would call me when the pipe burst.

He held the flask out to me, and I took it, feeling the warmth from his hand on it, and I held it like an object that was capable of transmitting strength and courage, then gave it back. My father drained the last from it, then placed it back in his coat pocket, nodded, and started walking. I hesitated, but then followed.

A door opened, and then Hiller stood there. He looked first at my father and then at me, sizing us up, as if he were measuring us up for our future coffins. Rumor had it that Hiller had an eye for that: he handled dead bodies and laid them in coffins and then buried them in the cemetery north of town. I thought he looked like a rat, his nose long and his whiskers bushy, his eyes tight-set in his skull. His suit was brown and he walked on two legs, scenting deals: he could sense death approaching. His customers were out and about all over town.

The piece of paper my father was holding fell to the floor, and no one noticed it, not my father, not Hiller. I snatched up the paper and put it inside my jacket. Hiller had signaled to some of the men who now crossed the floor toward where we were standing. The men grinned, walking slowly but heavily; the floor groaned and creaked, and my father put up his hands: he was finished.

He picked up the decanter, poured some into a cup without a handle. I observed his hands: he had soil under his fingernails, and I thought he had also used his hands in the battles in the East: those noble, arduous battles that had stayed inside him, which he would keep there, encapsulated, hardening.

Long since then, I have often thought my father was a poet, but a poet who did not write. The poems that took form inside him remained there, inchoate, and built up, layer upon layer, around his soul, forming tissues and scars, sentences that intertwined into vegetation so dense that the content could no longer be discerned.

I remember his words, and it was dark when I woke up. Spring was out in full force outside. I could hear the river rushing down by the power-plant dam. I had to get out of bed, and the floor was cold, but I went out into the kitchen, looked up toward the hill. The greenhouse gleamed like a ship that had glided up across the sky, a spaceship that had just landed. I raised my hand and waved. I saw the shadow of him moving around in there. He walked with a slight stoop, as if he were full of thoughts; when he stood still he was a silhouette, a dark shadow in the silver-infused light inside, a captain who had landed his craft on a planet chosen at random.

I suspected he was lying low in the boiler room; he would often go in there in the early-morning hours, when his bunk in the old onion storeroom turned hard and cold. Yoo-hoo, I said, but got no reply.

I went along the concrete aisle, and underneath the tables the pipes hissed, like just-awoken monsters: small teeth, rough fur. Flowerpots lay overturned on the tables, as if a person who had passed through here wanted to point the way. This way, in here!

He collapsed, fell heavily onto me, and I thought that was how I was going to die, underneath my father, squashed like a fly. He was warm and heavy; his arms lay along the floor, and I edged my way out, leaving him lying in the doorway to the coal storeroom.

I knew your father, said the pastor who came to discuss things with me. Your father was a kind man. And what do you mean by that, I thought, but I said nothing. How could you do a thing like this, the pastor asked. I sat still and looked straight out at the trees and the river behind them. The water shimmered; the sky was high up.

Talking was hard for me, but I was used to handling words, at least as long as I could think them out, write them down on paper. Everything was perfectly clear to me when I sat down and wrote things down on paper. But I avoided answering questions orally.

It may be that he did not suffer from silence, that he was not compelled to banish it. I myself managed to exile it to a lower level within me, a consciousness that could be accessed only via byways, and it sometimes happened that I would wake up with the passageway leading in there wide open, would wake up terrified at the compressed silence in there.

With my heart pounding, I was in the greenhouse once again, but it was a place without a soul, with only the cleared tables inside. The pipes were cold; the furnace lay on its side in front of the door to the boiler room. I thought he was in a good place now, and those of us who were still alive had left this place back in the summer, left everything and headed over to the other side of the river, an apartment with square rooms and electric heating, nobody who boozed anymore.

He could have still been lying in his hideout, unnoticed by all that was running or trickling or rushing outside. He could have carried on being a listener, someone who takes in what comes without being touched or hardened. He could have had the radio on. He could have heard that the Soviet Union broke up, the European Union expanded, the old money disappeared and was replaced by a new currency. Maybe he would have looked up from what he was doing, wondering at how time had passed so quickly. Maybe he would have thought that the old world, his own, would soon no longer be there. Then he would have returned to his rounds: moistening the soil, dividing root from root, plant from plant.

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