Side by Side but Never Face to Face: A Novella and Stories

Side by Side but Never Face to Face

A Novella and Stories

Maggie Kast

Side by Side but Never Face to Face

Copyright © 2020 by Maggie Kast

All rights reserved.

Print ISBN: 978-1-949039-08-5

E-book ISBN: 978-1-949039-09-2

Orison Books

PO Box 8385

Asheville, NC 28814

www.orisonbooks.com

Table of Contents

The Cry of the Patoo

The Way it Never Was

To March With

So You Won’t Have To

Maria in the Heart of Empire

Joyful Noise

No Pity

Side by Side but Never Face to Face

Pronunciations of Hmong Names and Words

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About Orison Books

To E.C.K. and all once forced to flee.

The Cry of the Patoo

Hot, blue sky wheeled around, and the crashing sound of metal on stone faded into silence. Where was he—and who? He seemed to be lying on his side. Drops of moisture crawled across his forehead, and the sun beat hard on his shoulder and back. He raised his head to see it if would hurt.

Are you on top of me? A voice from below him, then running footsteps and excited, shouting voices with Caribbean accents. The world rocked back and forth, then heaved around, and his two hundred pounds fell back behind that goddamned steering wheel on the wrong side of the car.

Manfred had been driving, on spring vacation in Jamaica, 1977. He always drove the car. But why would a whole island want to drive on the left side of the road? He saw what had been under him, now beside him: Greta, his beloved American wife, her white hair turning crimson. Everything else was green grasses and ferns and vines, tangling and twining in the steamy air of a ditch, with a gravel-filled creek at the bottom.

Surely, some slippage in the mesh of events had landed him in this alien place, and he seized on wisps of memory to repair the break. Had he not been little Fredi, the adored child who Mutti loved to dress up long before the war? She made him stand still and endure her fussy hands while she tugged at his long curls and fastened the suspenders on his Lederhosen, then froze his image with her camera. Had he not been the boy she read to in the thin, afternoon light, her big chest pushed against his cheek? Nubby fabrics enveloped her warm body as she told stories of mountain gnomes, and she smelled of rose oil and sour milk. His charm had been irresistible—how could he have thudded down so far from home?

Tears streaked Greta’s undamaged face and she seemed dazed, bloody but apparently unhurt. Why was she crying? She never gasped or clutched the picnic table when the kids climbed a tree. She let them wriggle on their stomachs to the edge of a canyon and peer down into the lonesome chasms. Mutti screamed and fainted and took offense her whole life, but Greta managed incipient crises with generosity and competence. So what was eating her now?

He looked at her. She held the baby girl, Katrina, in her arms. The blood streaming from Katrina’s neck would need to be stopped. Her broken teeth would need fixing, but they were baby teeth, anyway. Someone poked a head in the window and spoke in a clipped voice.

We’ve turned him over, and he’s all right. Who was that, and where were the boys?

Manfred’s gaze followed the voice to the lush green growth beyond the window. The ditch had begun to glow with the slanted light of late afternoon, and time slowed as he watched the world tilt off kilter. The vegetation turned an artificial green before his eyes, oblivious to the car in its midst, while the heat rotted anything that had lost the struggle to survive. Nameless tropical plants germinated profusely, bent on procreation, then toppled into the fertile, decaying mud at the ditch bottom. Wood slapped muck, a slow, hollow clapping. It was the sound of Pappi in his head, yes.

Bravo, Pappi had said, unsmiling as always. Bravo! The little man ate a piece of chicken. He laid his fork and knife down to clap hands. Clap, clap, echoing in the drafty, high-ceilinged room. Mutti had gathered her shawl and risen from the table when the maid brought in the platter of chicken, potato puree and creamed spinach. She knew Fredi could not bear chicken skin and would only eat his special piece, the breast. From her standing position, Mutti speared it and cut the meat from the bone onto Fredi’s plate. Pappi breathed heavily, stuck his fork forcefully into a thigh, and transferred it to his plate. He ate rapidly, fork in his left hand and knife in his right. Fredi ate a piece of the breast.

There, Mutti beamed. Isn’t that good? Just the way you like it.

A small, high voice cut into the memory of Pappi’s clapping. Where’s Gabriel? Ben’s face sprang into view through the car window, eyes scared. Strong, able bodies and Jamaican voices hustled them out of the car and up the embankment. They climbed over the torn stone wall onto the muddy road. Small creatures were discovering new continents and scaling newly vertical faces. One of the men carried Gabriel’s wet and muddy twelve-year-old form, pulled from the ditch, and Greta carried the three-year-old Katrina. Manfred and Ben climbed unassisted into the open jeep, where the men sat Gabriel on the seat next to Ben. The engine roared, and the jeep took off for the tiny hospital in Santa Maria.

Manfred held on to the roof of the jeep and watched the baby in Greta’s arms. Greta kept asking Ben to push her back into her seat as the jeep bumped over the rutted roads. Something was wrong with Gabriel’s eye. He was sitting up on his own, but Manfred could only guess what might be happening inside that thin body.

Maybe Pappi had been right. He should have gone to work in a factory. Only Mutti kept on believing in him, even when he failed the Matura and had to go to Maturaschule, where they drilled indispensable items of information into your head before you took the exam the second and final time. If he hadn’t gone to medical school, he wouldn’t be surmising ruptured spleen as he looked at Gabriel, who wept as he bounced with the lurching of the jeep. He wouldn’t be seeing a fiery, black pit as his baby’s eyes rolled back in her head. He wouldn’t have acquired that sharp diagnostic acumen which told him unfailingly who would live and who would die—telling him right now that there was absolutely nothing he could do. A deep, guttural roar rose above the unmuffled engine sound. Greta’s frightened eyes told him the roar had come from his own throat.

What no one could take away: Manfred was a man who had tested his mettle in the streets of Vienna where he had looked straight ahead and walked fast while Nazis in brown shirts marauded, hunting for Jews. He heard their boots clicking on the cobblestones right behind him and then beside him and then, thank God, they passed on and nabbed some other poor bastard to scrub the street,—then vanish. Manfred imposed martial law on his own rising panic, maintaining his composure as indifferent border guards took their time examining a flimsy piece of paper. Then he crossed the ocean on the last boat allowed to land, before Cuba started sending them back to Europe.

Yes, his two marriages had fallen apart and the two sons from these unions, aged three and twelve, each lived with his own remarried mother. Distance from his kids pained Manfred, but Greta, he hoped, would lend his life calm and control, would protect him from disaster. Perhaps he’d been wrong.

He looked from Katrina to Greta, who’d never known war or borders or boots. She hadn’t even been born forty years ago when Manfred ran for his life. Raised in harmonious comfort, she barely understood why Mutti had refused to have her Fredi circumcised, why she had painted over the dates in his baby book to make it look like he had been baptized Lutheran at birth. Now, without warning, calamity had shoved its way into Greta’s presence, decimating the rich and varied pleasures of their life together. Greta’s face clenched with concern and seemed to age instantly, catching up with her bloodied white hair.

She craned her head toward the driver and pleaded over the motor’s racket. Please hurry.

We’re going—we’re driving as fast as we can. The words of the driver came stuttering back to Manfred on a hot wind. Brute facts were accumulating, like bricks in a wall. He had to do something. There was nothing he could do.

Look what you have done, Pappi said, for God’s sake! as fourteen-year-old Manfred stood, tall and gawky, over Mutti’s crumpled form.

A minute before, she had gasped and clutched her chest, crying, Ach, ach, and slipped to the floor. There she lay, eyes fluttering, saliva bubbling onto her red lips. No matter how often Mutti fainted, it always made Manfred’s stomach contract, though his lip curled. He adjusted the sneer to a tentative smile and looked at Pappi as if to say Don’t worry, she’ll be up in a minute. Pappi always blamed Manfred. But what if this time were serious? Doubt spurted like bile inside him.

He had refused to put on his white gloves and go to dancing school, where each week he was required to line up with other boys and face a phalanx of skittish, knobby-kneed girls. Some were taller than he and some still so little that their heads barely reached his belt. The two ranks would approach each other until their eyes locked. Ill-matched pairs would raise stiff arms and begin a jerky waltz.

But Manfred had a different kind of social life in mind. The kitchen maid was a country girl with thick, blond braids. Two days before, when he got home from school, she had cornered him on the back stairway and wrapped her arms around him. She pressed her breasts against him and cocked her head with a questioning smile as he absorbed the rich smell of her hairy armpits. He was about to raise his hands to her waist and dare a kiss, when she laughed and ran away. Tonight he wanted to dress up like a count with a monocle or paint the heels of his shoes a scandalous red, then go out with his friends to watch the whores on the street and speculate on if, and when.

To the devil with white gloves and waltzes, Manfred had said to Mutti, prompting her collapse.

Now Pappi shouted, Every day it’s something else!

Mutti sat up and began to pat her hair. Pappi’s face went red, and he choked with fury, then coughed. The jeep’s engine echoed the sound as it careened to a standstill in front of the hospital.

Attendants rushed the baby into one treatment room and Gabriel into another, while Ben remained among the local families in the small, crowded waiting room. Manfred and Greta stayed with Katrina. Indigo darkness invaded the room with the speed of tropical night, and weak, incandescent bulbs made pools of yellow light. The nurse listened to the baby’s heartbeat. She passed the stethoscope to Manfred and began rhythmic compression of Katrina’s chest. After listening again, she took the stethoscope from her ears and pulled the sheet over Katrina’s face. Greta pulled it down to kiss Katrina’s stomach, her lips, and her forehead. Katrina had lived for three years, two months, and fourteen days. Greta raised her hands and grabbed the neck of her blouse to tear it, but interrupted the gesture in mid-air. Manfred swore to himself that he would never be a survivor again. Greta pulled the sheet back over Katrina and went out to tell Ben.

Night fell, thick and velvet as they waited for an ambulance to take them over the mountains to Kingston, where Gabriel would be X-rayed and his eyelid repaired. Two orderlies carried him on a stretcher, one of his legs now black, blue, and swollen. Greta’s face was stone and her eyes flat and empty. A nurse took her elbow and a high, ghostly sound twined like a ribbon out of the darkness. The nurse raised her head and listened, frowning. The patoo, she said, that’s our bad luck bird.

Manfred thought of the broken-hearted cry of Rübizahl, the mountain gnome of storybooks, abandoned by his princess. A keening sound burst from his throat, but again it seemed to come from outside himself. The patoo’s wail turned halting and insistent, and the heavy scent of night-blooming jasmine made Manfred yearn for cool, fresh air. Cockroaches big as fists and six inch-long centipedes crawled from the grass into the light shining from the hospital door. A yellow, nocturnal snake undulated across the road in front of them, but Greta didn’t draw back as she would have before.

Everything grows here, said the nurse’s lilting voice. You could spit a tomato seed onto the ground. Tomorrow you’d see more tomatoes.

Manfred placed one foot in front of the other, trying to squeeze by the bad omens. He still had much to lose: two fine sons here, two more with their own mothers and a fifth, Allen, safely with Greta’s parents. At five, Allen was learning to walk and beginning to get out of diapers, and this was the first time the family had traveled without him. Was this punishment for leaving him behind?

Plants put out leaf and bloom under cover of darkness, sowing their seeds silently on the wind. Cells divided and replicated with greedy abandon. Manfred plodded on, willing the curve in the road to have straightened, the wheel to have been on the left side of the car, someone else to have been driving. But events had accumulated without mercy, and now would not budge one iota, no matter how hard he strained against them.

Fredi had tried to be good, but there was always something wrong with him that Mutti was determined to fix. His ears were dirty or his clothes were messy or wet, or his nose runny. She wanted him cleaner or dryer or neater. Especially his nose. She cocked her head to one side and put a finger to his nose, smoothing it, and he wondered what she saw. Mutti wiped and washed, pulled and straightened, and he wished she would leave him alone. He hated when she washed his uncircumcised penis, which she did with great care every day, bending close and peering through her glasses, squeezing too hard.

She made him go to a doctor, a specialist, every time he got a cold or a cough. He promised to be good, to use his handkerchief and wear his sweater, but she made him go anyway. Fräulein could take him to the park, but Mutti always made time to take him to the doctor herself, even if she was supposed to work at her new job, taking pictures for Uncle Siegfried’s weekly, Der Kuckuck.

He didn’t know which was worse, the trip to the doctor’s office or the visit itself. She bundled him up in his coat, hat, and muffler and held his hand as they rode the clanking streetcar while his stomach bounced inside him and he feared he would mess his pants. They climbed the curved, marble staircase to the doctor’s second-floor office and Fredi wanted to turn and run down, but Mutti held his hand firmly and kept on climbing. Weren’t his nose and ears and penis all right the way they were? She should stop worrying.

She led him into the doctor’s office with its brown leather chair that moved up and down, its cabinet of shiny instruments. He pressed his lips together, determined not to cry as Mutti sat him in the chair. She leaned over him as the doctor opened the door, then stood up straight, one hand on Fredi’s shoulder. He’s got another cold. I’m afraid it’s still the same problem with his nose.

That’s the third time this winter, said the doctor, and then something about a septum which Fredi didn’t understand. Mutti and the doctor went on talking, and Fredi thought of Rübizahl, the gnome who knew just what to do with doctors. Rübizahl met a doctor one day in the forest, disguised himself as a harmless woodcutter, and offered to help hunt for herbs. The doctor told the woodcutter that gnomes were nonsensical, made-up creatures. Rübizahl changed himself into a fearsome giant with fire-flashing eyes and savage beard, grabbed the doctor by the collar and said I am Rübizahl, and I’ll crack your ribs with two fingers. Back and forth flew the doctor, tossed between the huge Rübizahl’s hands like a toy, until Rübizahl kicked him up in the air and left him for dead.

Why don’t you stand over there and hold his hands? said the real doctor. We’ll see if it’s closed off. Mutti disappeared from view and held Fredi’s hands too tight above his head as a nurse tilted the chair back. The doctor approached with something shiny in his hand, and the nurse shone a light on his face. Fredi felt something cold and hard in one nostril, and then  on the other side, pushing harder. The hardness turned sharp and stung him like a bee, as he pressed into the chair and arched his back, straining against Mutti’s hands. What had he done to bring this about? He wasn’t crying, but tears ran down his cheeks.

He had not been good enough. He’d settled in Chicago and become a much-loved doctor who healed the sick and fought for the powerless. Together with the Black Panther Party, and later at St. Basil’s Church, he founded a Free People’s Clinic that challenged the system of payment for care. A sign on the door of his private practice said, "Your bill represents your share of my upkeep. If you are unable to pay I will take care of you