Read Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & Online
Authors: Anna Tambour
Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Literary Collections, #General
Monterra's Deliciosa & Other Tales & (2 page)
Werner turned his back for a few seconds, then turned around and motioned Gretina forward. It was her birthday today. Had been for four hours already, and every year Werner gave her lilac soap, or violet perfume, or rose talcum, or lily of the valley cologne, or a box of lace handkerchiefs. Always at the table, after dinner. So his behaviour now? She couldn't guess but thought it must be something that some saleslady said was especially nice. Werner's gifts were those of a man who had been a bachelor for a long time, a saleslady's dream.
Gretina smiled with both exasperation at his helplessness and lack of imagination in present-giving, and love for her excited husband who must have believed every word of the saleswoman's spiel as to the wonderfulness of this year's bar of soap or box of embroidered hankies.
"Close your eyes," he commanded softly.
She closed her eyes. Oh, he was a child at heart.
"Put out your hands."
She put out her hands.
He put something in one, and then put her other hand on top.
"Open now!" he commanded in a squeak.
She took her covering hand away and there on her palm was—what?
As big as her neatly filed thumbnail. Totally symmetrical. Thick as one of her homemade sugar cookies. And looking as if it had also been cut by a sharp tin form. Patterned with a tiny tiny sprinkle of pinprick holes. Grey as stone. Five-pointed. A perfect star.
Werner pushed the hair away from her left ear to whisper into it: "It's a starfish from the seas near us."
"But there aren't any seas near us."
"There were five hundred million years ago," he whispered again, and his eyes shone with hope, fear, anxiety. But she didn't see them, gazing as she was at this minute creature, so alive to her, even though it had last moved longer ago than she could fathom.
She turned it over with a fingertip, and there was its mouth. Perfectly preserved, just as the top carried its distinct markings, just like the pattern of pricks in the round loaf of rye at Burgstrom's Bakery. The texture of holes and bumps looked like living skin, though the colour was just dead stone.
Her eyes lifted to Werner's and then froze. "You took it. You did. I can see!" She only whispered, but they both looked to the front door in panic till Werner smiled and took her by the shoulders. He guided her and then pushed her gently into her chair by the big table, then sat at her feet. He held both of her hands in her lap.
"Gretina. I've worked there for twenty years, have I not?"
"Yes. That is so."
"And hasn't everyone always said how good my work is?"
"Yes, Werner, but—"
"And laughed at me for it?"
Gretina's lips flapped closed in a tight line, but her finger flutter gave the answer straight into Werner's hands.
"Hmm?" he asked, smiling wryly.
She smiled back, and pulled one of her hands away to stroke his head. "Yes, Werner, they made a bit of fun of you when I was there, and I suppose they still do."
"And you and the other ladies who cleaned never had to worry about me pinching your bottoms, did you, or leaving a mess in the guards' room like the others?"
"No, Werner darling. You've never done any of those things."
"And has the director praised my work?"
"No, Werner. Not that you've told me."
They didn't mention that the director also laughed at Werner's legendary perfection and dullness, calling him their "only exhibit that never needs to be cared for." In fact, they had both heard this joke; it was this that had made Gretina notice Werner in the first place, and decide that he did, indeed, need care.
"And so, Gretina, this is the thank-you I have never received. They didn't give me the thank-you, so I took it, and now I am giving you my thank-you. And they will never miss it because it is so small, and because in the case there are over fifty of them in a heap. Nothing looks disturbed, and now, instead of being hidden in the bottom of the heap, unnoticed and unloved, this star is now chosen, alone, for you, my star of the heavens."
This was more words than he had ever spoken. And so close together, without interruption.
He didn't know what else to do. He felt suddenly as still and silly as a lopsided footstool. His feet were tingling now, his kneecaps screaming sore as he remained stuck in position at Gretina's feet.
But Gretina couldn't speak at all. The star, she placed in the exact centre of the table.
Then, with hasty fingers, she pulled Werner upright, sat him in her warmed seat, and undressed first him, and then herself. Then she took them both off to bed, where they spoke to each other in a way that needed no words.
After an uncharacteristically messy bath (together), they sat down to a hardly tasted, horribly overcooked birthday dinner, in which even the cream-filled strudel slipped down their throats faster than bitter tonic, and the dishes flew through the suds and tea towel to be clattered onto the sideboard; sweep, sweep, and like two sloppy housekeepers, they tore off their kitchen aprons in glee, to finally meet at the table under the glow of its lamp.
Gretina reached for the star and then scooted her chair next to Werner. She put on her spectacles to see it closer. He listened as she remarked on every feature. "So perfect. So perfect."
She had never been anywhere but this beautiful but land-locked city. Water was a river. She had never seen the sea. She associated only with some knitting ladies from her work days, meeting occasionally to find a new goal for a project, and to deliver her work. She could never find a project for herself. Not me, she thought.
She could never imagine anything on her own. Just stars, her little trademark. She had always trusted Werner to have the imagination, and she had thrilled to his mechanical creatures, as he called them. As each little machine came to life under his fingers, she felt his excitement. Why did he make them? She had never wondered why. Just accepted. That was his wont. And when she had worked at the museum, she had accepted everything there, too, including the smell in the stuffed specimen halls. She had never looked at any of the exhibits. Her job every night had been to manage the angry beast of a floor polisher. Until the jokes about Werner made her look at him, she had never had eyes for anything in the museum except the polisher, as it took all her concentration for it not to bang against the walls and exhibition cases, let alone bite her toes with a propensity that seemed positively vicious.
"Look at its mouth. So small and alive-looking. Look at this pattern of holes." Her voice was a mumble of wonder, without asking for response. She didn't get her knitting, and he didn't make up the table to receive his tools. All of his mechanical creatures remained caged in their dark drawers, forgotten in the shared thrill over this once-living but now stone star, warmed by Gretina's palm.
"The first time in your life anyone's noticed you. Now you'll see, I'll take care of you," Gretina murmured, bent over the small object, her glasses slipping to the end of her nose.
Werner grinned to himself. He had thought she would think the little star pretty, and hoped it would be special. But her feeling for it was unexpected. It was, after all, stone dead, and had been beyond the limits of Gretina's imagination. Those machines he made to amuse her with their life suddenly lost their purpose if she so easily attached herself to a stone, just because it once crawled and tasted.
For a moment he felt panic. What if she would never enjoy his machines again because they never breathed? What would he do to amuse her, to make her feel the burst of life in their apartment inhabited by only them—failures at making a family?
Gretina looked up at his face, inviting him to share this—baby? She almost looked that way. But how, with this fingernail-sized bauble?
"You have tomorrow off?"
"Yes, my dear ... but you know that." Werner's voice was a bit sharp; he was rattled by something almost feverish in her tone, and those twin spots of raspberry colour high on Gretina's normally sallow cheeks.
"Show me all of them!" Still hunched over the star, she twisted her neck to peer up at him, her glittering eyes split by the tops of her spectacle frames.
"What?" He pretended not to understand, but his back suddenly straightened against the chair's hard wood, and his chest hurt with the urgency of shock.
"The other starfish in the case. I want to look at them."
"Of course not. They'll recognise us." His feet found his chair's legs and curved themselves around the wood.
Her bisected eyes were disconcerting—hugely dilated, and unwaveringly staring at him. "Werner. You must. No one will know us in our street clothes. And besides, you said yourself: no one will ever miss it."
- 2 -
They entered the museum, after very little sleep, in a noisy press of weekend families, and kept their heads down (to humour Werner) as staid husband led stolid wife up the stairs and down the long hallways towards the corner room.
They first had to go through the hangar-high hall with the crouching pterodactyl and its massive, hulking neighbour. Even without the afternoon shadows, the pterodactyl leered, and Gretina felt Werner's fear as he hurried them through, head down, push/pulling her with him so fast that she didn't look at anything except the state of the shiny floor.
Finally they exited that echoing space and entered a small dark room crowded with old glass cases. In the far corner case lay the pile of tiny
Pentacrinus scalaris
starfish.
He pulled her over so abruptly that she had no time to see anything else, then hovered impatiently while she gazed at the little anonymous shapes that looked like nothing so much as a pile of pretty grey buttons in the counter at the knitting shop. She gazed but felt nothing.
Werner's nerves were fraying at the edges while he politely waited about thirty seconds. Then he said, "Yes? Now let's go to Schüssel's for some birthday cake, eh Greti?"
As she straightened her back to go, with a sense of a let-down that she didn't understand, her eyes stumbled upon his face: impatient, pleading—and that frightened smile—and something inside her forbade her to coddle him now.
"Silly noodle." Her smile was impish. "No one is here. Even the children. Werner, I will look at everything in this room." And—on an unfamiliar impulse to tease, perhaps cruelly: "Maybe I ask you to take something else for me, yes?"
Werner's fingers were suddenly slippery, and she relented. "No, I just look, big noodle," she giggled, as she reached up to Werner's head and pulled it down against his startled resistance, biting him ever so gently on the ear.
She let go of him abruptly and walked to the nearest cabinet. Werner could think of nothing to do but to humour her. He stood where he could see both entrance and exit to the room, desperate to leave, and desperate to please also, as Gretina had become extraordinarily attractive in this new dangerous wilfulness.
She shuffled to the next case. It said "Sea lily," with a fossil sea lily, and a pickled, bottled modern-day sea lily next to the stone one so that people could see that they really were the same. They looked rather like a cross between a squid and an exotic orchid, pretty but not fascinating. Then she shuffled to the next case, housing giant periwinkles; then clams, frankly boring. Then case after case of things that looked like big versions of everyday creatures such as snails and even, ugh, cockroaches. She was only looking now because of the comical display of fear on Werner's face. How she would soothe her little boy when they got home! She held up her hand, motioning "just a moment and I'll be finished," when she saw it, in the case at the end of the middle row.
The sign said "Confuciusornis sanctus," whatever that meant. But the thing in the slab leaning up against the back of the case wrenched her heart. A bird, rising with every ounce of its strength from the trap of the stone that grasped it. Its beak pointed towards the sky, wide open in an arrested scream—for help? Its wings were held out from its body like a cloak. Its bent arms, and hands—yes, they were hands, with fingers—spoke just as Gretina's mother used to when she was dying: a drink of water, Greti dear, please—
I am so thirsty
.
Its legs were stretched completely straight, toes down, half as if it were taking off, to soar over mountains, half as if it were, as its taut hands and arms and mouth expressed, being pulled down to death.
"120 million years" the sign said. For that long, this creature had suffered. Gretina fumbled in her handbag for a hanky and her sudden choking noise brought an alarmed Werner to her side.
"Take that," she said, and then noticed its companion, lying flat in the same display case. Being horizontal, its similar body shape frozen in time, this one seemed just dead. It looked like what its vertically propped neighbour actually was, a bird caught in the dregs of a lake, struggling to emerge while being held by gripping mud until death. Its body contortions and curved cloak of wings were the same as those of a lark drowned in a birdbath, outstretched in weak futility forever.
"That, Werner." Gretina pointed to the upright stone.
It was the size of a welcome mat. Werner's heart pounded hard against the cage of his shirt, the shirt of a typical middle-aged man on a family outing, embroidered with Alpine flowers. Blood whooshed in his ears, big waves of it, smothering his name at the end of Gretina's harsh whisper.
He cradled her right elbow with a guiding arm. "Yes, Greti, dear," he murmured, just to get her out of this nightmare of a birthday present his special and just a bit naughty gift had turned out to be.
~
The nutcake was sawdust in his mouth as he watched his wife take a mouthful, crumple her face in a fit of choking, and blow her nose again in that sopping mess of a napkin.
"You'll save him, won't you?" she asked.
"So it's him now?"
"Yes, the long tail feathers."
"You read that much?"
"As we left. He's here all the way from China. I want him to be happy."
"Urrrh," Werner shivered. What have I brought upon myself? Violet water, nice smelling soap. She always said she liked them. Why did I want more? "Greti, my lamb ..."
"No, no, Werner!"
"I can't, Gretina. They will miss it."
"They won't if you put up one of those 'exhibit closed' signs there."
Werner's breath escaped like pressure cooker puff. She was right. Half the museum, it sometimes seemed, had cases that displayed EXHIBIT CLOSED cards where some item should have been. Even Gretina had noticed this. But what...
"Do you think he's a night bird?"
"Psh!" The sudden spray from Werner's lips startled both of them, as he had never been known to lose his temper, even if he had lost his composure last night in his anticipation over his gift to her: the pretty little star of stone, a tribute to her whimsical personal stamp on her own simple creations.
Now Gretina's intensity unnerved him, and made him aware of who was master. He had better find a way of salvaging this disaster. With what he hoped was a reassuring smile, he began to plan. Another machine, this time more lively than any of his previous moving creatures. Maybe it could cut dough into stars? Form and spit out little marzipan shapes? Or should it be animal-like? He had never tried that. They all lived for him, with their own bodies, voices, joints. It never had occurred to him before that she might want them to look like something that lived in the real world. Besides, he was no sculptor. Aach, what a mess! The thought of making a fake animal made him sick. Just a toymaker he would be.
Gretina watched his "thinking face" and smiled.
~
That week was busy at work. Monday night, a bat broke in through a skylight, and Jules and Dietmar took an hour to catch it, which they did only after Dietmar sprained his foot against a plinth supporting a stuffed owl with a mouse in its claws, mounted on a gnarled branch. Dietmar grabbed the owl in his fall, and its sharp beak pierced his hand quick as an opener bites into a can of juice.
Tuesday was quiet, but at the Wednesday 2 a.m. break, the entire staff heard Olag curse, foully and for long minutes. A rat had found his lunch on the counter, and not only eaten it, but left a pool of urine in the crumbs. Nothing was open at this time, and peace was only restored after Werner cleaned up the mess and donated his own meal, which Olag resented for having been ignored by the rat, but didn't thank Werner for, seeming to think that it was his, Olag's, due, for the gross insult given by the rat.
Then there were the pigeons that had snuck in during open hours, which the day shift must not have noticed. They absolutely refused to be tempted down from their perches on the tops of the mineral cases, so they had to be poisoned, a tricky procedure when the birds only fed in the day, when people were wandering the halls. Poison grain, birds falling from the tops of cases—impossible. Complicated procedures had to be followed, and they were entrusted to Werner as the most exact of procedure followers.
At 3:30 a.m. Friday, Werner trudged home, disheartened by his inability to think of anything he could make that would be as enjoyable as the little star that Gretina treasured and—worse—talked to. And he despaired of coming up with anything as exciting, in the mood Gretina had gotten into, as that bird fossil that she hadn't mentioned once, in what he knew was a deliberate act of silent command.
He comforted himself by his hunched-over stance as he walked, holding his right hand on his left breast pocket. He looked like a man with a bad heart, angina pains. But for Klokwerk, his curved-in huddle, his fingers spread, enabled him all the better to feel and hear the reassuring beat of one of his little creatures, alive in his pocket.
He'd taken to carrying them with him to work—for company and inspiration. At a touch, they could be turned on or off. And he loved feeling the little life, so regular, next to his heart.
The streetlights threw a sickly light on the lone hunched man walking home, trailing a faint ticktock sound. A tomcat snarled somewhere on a roof, an old woman wearing a strange assortment of clothes slept on a pile of filled garbage bags, and otherwise the streets were as dead as the huge stone men and women posted beside so many doorways, as dead as the stone eagle perched higher than anyone up on that globe, unnoticed by Werner that night as he made his way home, his mind caught in his problem, twisting to be released.
Gretina had been patient, but each homecoming brought a new disappointment. Now it had been long enough. "Where is he?" she asked Werner as she took off his coat.
His shoulderblades suddenly pushed against the back of his shirt. He had hoped this wouldn't come.
"Gretina, I can't. It's too risky. You know that." In an attempt to look enthusiastic, he smiled, but only managed to accentuate his lined face with its moonscape of pockmarks. "You should see the new creature I'm planning for you. It makes sugar stars all by itself!"
She didn't smile. Dinner was noisy that dawn, with spoons clunked against plates. And some mashed potato ended up with a splat on the light above the bare wood table.
~
Werner was so preoccupied that he didn't hear the footsteps. He was Klokwerk to the minute, as usual; he was in the starfish fossil room, brooding over his mistake, when Gretina touched him on the arm.
He jumped in place without meaning to.
"How did you get in?" he hissed.
"Just banged at the entrance and Olag let me in."
Fat sloppy Olag. But they were all like that.
"What did you tell him?"
"Didn't have to. He said, 'Klokwerk's upstairs, beautiful.'" Her eyebrows wrinkled at her own memories of the guards.
"Well?" Werner was impatient. "What?"
"I must see him."
"Him?"
"You know."
"Now? Are you mad? You must forget this thing. The stone was just a trinket. You are being silly."
"No, Werner. I must see if he wants to come home with me."
She turned her back on her husband, and took the few paces to the
Confuciusornis sanctus
case. He was still there, still screaming, still striving to break free.
"Greti, my lo—" Werner's wheedling "love" shrivelled in his throat. His hands, which he'd put lightly on his wife's shoulders to persuade her to go home, felt something very irregular underneath that sensible, dowdy dress.
"Now, Werner!" Gretina twirled around to face him, with her dress wide open to the waist. "Every tool's here."
The vest bristled with metal shapes as it gaped over her pink canvas brassiere, since she couldn't fasten more than the two bottom buttons.
Werner's heart hit hard against his pocket-bound creature. Bam bam BAM BAM ...
"Werner!" Gretina whispered. "Do it now!"
The pain caught his breath. He needed to sit.
She grabbed his arm and pulled it to her. "Now, Werner. There is no time to delay."
"But—"
"No. Stand up!"
"But where? I can't walk out with it, Gretina. I need to sit down. Ooh ..."
As he turned his head away, she lifted up her skirt, and between her legs, suspended by pink canvas straps, hung her knitting bag. And he had never suspected.
"I've practiced, you big noodle. Now get on with it. You can get a sign later to put in the case. Ach, but you are useless. Werner!"
Gretina grabbed his hands and planted them in two vest pockets.
There was no arguing with her.
In three minutes, she was walking, casual as a stroll in the park, through the terrifying hall with the master and his dog; walking as normally as if she'd just delivered Werner's blood pressure pills that she'd forgotten to put into his lunch, and delayed him a bit for some inane wifely chat —just what she'd told Werner to say if Olag or someone asked.
The glass case was missing an occupant, but Werner could easily get an "exhibit closed" sign from another display in some out-of-the-way room tonight, and it would be an unnoticed skitter of a detour to pop it in place, all done probably in the next hour or so, and no one the wiser.
By the time the door closed downstairs, he was smiling at the ingenuity of his little Greti ... and her wilful allure.
It was in the Butterfly Hall five minutes later that he realised: Gretina had left with the tools.
Without them, it is impossible for me to put a sign in that case tonight.
~
A drizzle fell on Werner's bare head as he shuffled home. In his breast pocket, his little companion kicked mechanical feet. Stamp STAMP Stamp STAMP...
It was in front of the parliament building that Werner suddenly grabbed his chest and collapsed. The streetlight tinged his face a pallid green, but it was, in actuality, the grey from a blood-starved heart.
In the steady rain now, not even a cat to be heard. A taxi approached, slowed, then sped away, the driver having learnt to his disgust not to take pity on drunks.