intersection at the light, Emma followed a group of students ahead of her and headed for the meadow near the top of the train station. When she passed the church near her house, she turned her head away.
A year ago, her friend, Irene, had asked her why she did it. “I don’t do that,” she said.
“But you do. You and I have been walking around town forever, and any time you get near a church you turn your head away. What’s with that?”
“I have a visceral aversion to church. It makes me get sick and I throw up.”
“Oh, come on. Sure, it’s boring; it might smell bad, be hard on your sitz-bones—but throwing up? I mean, I know the stories about crucifixion are hard for tender ears but really …”
“You don’t understand,” Emma said. “My father’s idea of religion was, well, let’s say hands on and punitive. We went to church every Sunday and prayed before every meal and before bed. I haven’t been inside one since before the kids were born.”
They hadn’t talked about it further, but the conversation had triggered something and her nightmares had gotten so bad that Manfred had insisted she visit a psychiatrist for sleeping meds. The treatment didn’t help much, but Emma decided that the peace, resulting from Manfred’s satisfaction at her following his request, was worth it.
Now she passed the black plastic coffins for recycling. They were big enough to be loaded onto the back of 18-wheelers. There was one for paper, one for cardboard, and one for plastic. Her favorite was the glass one. On the side it sported round portholes with directions for what was to be deposited: green glass in one, colorless glass in another, brown glass in the third. Emma indulged herself in fantasizing about odd glass that could not be recycled: What about blue medicine bottles? Or white milk bottles? Or the sand-colored earthenware flasks that held Matteus vinho verde?
Before she could come up with more non-categorizable oddball types of glass, she had reached the Schanze, the meadow with its view of the alps. The alps were hazy, gray shapes in the distance, more like stage props than mountains, keeping the horizon in check. In summer, when the weather was clear, the meadow was jam-packed with students lounging on the grass, eating, studying, and playing music. Now it was bare and empty. She took the elevator down into the underground train-transit area.
The din, as always, was a physical assault. Trains ran overhead, sounding like thunder. There was the sharp clatter of wheeled bags being rattled over the anti-skid metal crossbars on the ramps. People were talking on cell phones, shouting to be heard over all the noise. The cleaning machines, like giant boxes on wheels, zoomed in and out between the pillars that supported the ceiling. The harsh neon light hurt Emma’s eyes, and she walked with her head down, following the white raised lines for the blind.
She had once talked about these lines with a friend and asked him, “Where do blind people go? The lines go straight through the station and up to the tram stop. No detours for them.”
He’d said, “I’ve never thought about it, but it’s true. No bar stop, no snack, no nothing. How do they find …? Well, I suppose, they’d track a beer or a snack kiosk with their noses, but the toilets in this country aren’t allowed to smell. So, I guess blind people are meant to go directly to the bus stop. What if we invented a system where the lines included information on the kind of store you’re passing?”
Emma remembered they’d gotten quite giddy making up ways to inform persons with canes what place they were passing. “Bumps,” she had suggested. “One for a café, two for a restaurant, three for a clothing store.”
“Canes that pick up a radio frequency running through the white stripes. Like a guided audio tour in a museum.”
“Satellite beams that give you a verbal map …”
She smiled remembering that conversation. Then she frowned. That friend had committed suicide a few years later. He had hung himself in his closet at home, and, whenever she thought of him, she wondered if she could’ve done something to save him. With a frisson of fear and excitement, sometimes she thought that, instead of saving him, she might have joined him had he only asked.
The rat-a-tat-tat of carry-on bags brought her back to the present. Between the trains and the rattling wheels of luggage and official carts, one might think an earthquake was happening. If this were the country of her dreams, California, most likely it would be time to run or duck. But here the earth did not shiver. Here all was solid.
A couple of nights earlier, she had watched a show on Rome where people whistled, laughed, and talked to each other along the old cobblestone alleys and in the cafes on the plaza. Now, she was looking into grim faces and hearing determined marching steps that paused for no one. Eyes front, her fellow citizens seemed to be on a mission. This was no country for idlers.
Her nostrils filled with the scent of paper, cardboard, and the dusty smell of electric space heaters as she walked by a news kiosk. The two middle-aged ladies behind the counter stared sourly out from behind their mountains of papers, chewing gum, candies, and cigarettes. Even the people buying snacks looked sour, and the men drinking beer looked aggrieved. They stood at the tall metal tables not looking at anybody, downing their beer as if it was medicine.
She figured she probably looked just as grim. It was hard to smile when your face felt frozen, and everything was gray. Maybe the men looked as though they were ingesting medicine because it was not yet nine o’clock on a Monday morning, and one should most certainly not look like one drank beer for fun at such an early hour.
When she was still a student, Emma had worked in a kiosk for a month. The kiosk had been so depressing and boring she had spent most of the day thinking about pain-free ways to commit suicide. It was the only job she had been able to get. Her typing was two-fingered; she was not qualified to be a waitress or work in a store; and it seemed there was nothing she was good at. She’d gotten As in Latin and history, but that was useless for all practical purposes. So, she had signed up to work in a kiosk. Her shift started at six, when it was still dark. Within minutes of opening the shutters, a truck delivered newspapers and magazines, which had to be unpacked and stacked for the early morning customers. Then the old magazines were taken off the rack and tied for the next morning’s pickup. Mostly her work consisted of unpacking and stacking chewing gum, chocolates, and cigarettes so there would never be an empty slot.
Emma often wondered why she hadn’t, at least, enjoyed the free chocolates or reading the trashy novels. Maybe she had. Yet, mostly she remembered how she dreaded the long empty hours when all she could think about was death. She could still feel that emptiness. People had purchased their papers, cigarettes, or chocolates without looking at her, as though she were nothing more than a dispensing machine.
She double-backed to the kiosk and picked up a candy bar. She smiled at the gray-haired woman as she held it out.
“How are you this morning?” Emma asked.
“Hmmph,” the woman grumbled with a frown and added, “one franc fifty.”
Emma paid and left. She hardly ever passed a kiosk without flashing back to those memories—empty days with nothing but hopelessness and a dank, dark future of unpacking cigarette cartons, unemployable for anything more meaningful. Some days she stopped, trying to make a connection with the people behind the counters.
And when they rejected her validation, as this woman had done, it gave Emma a shiver of satisfaction: She had been right. She was nothing but a cipher, and, if she weren’t such a coward, she would have ended up in the closet along with her friend. It was like picking a scab. The ache was a delicious and shameful reminder that she was still alive.
2
She met Ron at the cafe near the S-Bahn entrance. They met once a month for coffee. Years ago at school, Ron had been in love with her and repeatedly professed he’d wait for her forever. Some days, she understood she was his bulwark against the world. Sometimes she felt guilty for allowing the relationship to go on, but he was one of her best and oldest friends. He even became godfather to her younger son, who was named after him.
He