The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf Read online

  III

  IF A STORY has a beginning and a middle and an end, at what point do we say, Here, right here—this was the beginning of the end? And do we intend this to sound ominous, as of course it does, or merely to state a fact? If I were to say that the precise moment when Helle Ten Brix got the eye tattooed on her neck was the beginning of the end, it seems to me that this might be taken for a statement of fact; whereas to say that the moment when she claimed to have watched me with that eye—to have stared impossibly through the taut layer of paper-white skin molecules covering the nape of her neck, through the layer of silver-black moon-glow molecules simmering above my yard, through the leafless apple-tree molecules, the unclean-picture-window molecules, the furnace-heat molecules, the millions of dust molecules, and into my dark living room, where Sam and I stood kissing each other—would be more ominous. But whose end? Mine? Helle’s? Sam’s? The end of everything?

  Sam said he had to run inside for a minute to get William’s baseball cap. Or at least that’s what Helle told me. William and the twins were dragging Lily on an improvised rope leash up and down the road in front of the house; I was frozen like the statue of poor vain Inger, halfway between the sofa and the door. “Frannie?” Sam said. “I didn’t …” As long as the door remained open, what I saw was a black man-shaped hole in a bluish, moonlit rectangle, a hole into which I was careful not to fall as I made my way past it to shut the door. For he seemed to have forgotten that in the north, in the autumn, the nights are cold, and that a woman who works as a waitress in a diner can’t afford to let so much as the smallest whiff of precious heated air escape her house. Once I’d closed the door, however, he was forced to turn around to face me, so that now the round lenses of his glasses, their pinkish plastic frames, caught the moonlight coming in through the picture window, making it look as if he had enormous pink-rimmed, opaque eyes; his large teeth, likewise catching the moonlight when he opened his mouth again to speak, gleamed disturbingly. “Is that a new dress?” he asked, and when I didn’t answer he stuck out a hand, which landed on the dress’s flowered shoulder, causing me to jump. I didn’t have any idea, did I, he said, how happy I made him. But he didn’t look happy; he looked severe and judgmental. “What are you doing here?” I finally asked. Helle and William were waiting outside. “Hey, Frannie,” he said. “Hey.”

  I don’t intend to describe the kiss. You might say I’ve already done so, having given it to Helle and Dancer, although their kiss was chaste and tentative by comparison, and although my own ambivalence certainly wasn’t due to any basic hostility toward men. The truth is, my feelings for Sam were breath-stoppingly, heart-achingly strong, even if chiefly physical, at least during the early stages of our affair. He would come into the diner and I would see his wrist as it lifted the ginger ale glass to his lips—the light brown hairs and the scattering of freckles on the upper, invulnerable side of his wrist; the forking blue vein and the bracelet of creases on its soft underside—and I would have to hold onto the back of the booth to catch my breath. The bubbles would rise to the top of his glass in long, segmented chains, then burst invisibly under his nose, and he’d sneeze. When we were making love he would sometimes stop and reach out blindly for his glasses, which he always removed beforehand; he’d put them on and stare intently for several seconds off to the left or the right of me at whatever happened to be there—a framed reproduction of Monet’s waterlilies on a motel room wall; a fly walking across the dusty dashboard of his car; a styrofoam coffee cup blowing across a field of flattened, brown grass toward a far-off set of goalposts—and then he’d look back at me, partly relieved, partly resigned. Only much later, when we were lying next to each other in those separate humming spheres that our bodies become after sex, would he say that he loved me. His voice was funny, not unlike an adolescent boy’s, cracking at the ends of his sentences. The smell of his skin was faintly peppery. One of his knee joints clicked when he bent it.

  Meanwhile, Helle’s conduct in my presence underwent a subtle change. Nothing so obvious as the face jerked away as if slapped, the sarcastic remark—expressions of wounded dignity you might expect from a disappointed suitor. Mainly she seemed to be keeping a close eye on me (irony fully intended). Several weeks elapsed in this fashion: Helle regarding me sharply with her dark gray eyes as I tried to get out of the wind in the glass-paneled drugstore entry to light my cigarette, bending over and cupping my hand around the match, poised between a gigantic cobalt-blue apothecary jar filled with vitamin pills and a naked beige dummy wearing a truss; Helle sneaking quick glances at me as I stood on the railroad bridge, paging through the Peterson’s Guide she’d handed me so I could have the pleasure of identifying for myself the black-masked bird we’d both just witnessed impaling a lizard; Helle studying me through her binoculars as I walked away from her up my driveway. Otherwise she kept up her end of any conversation, sounding for the most part like her usual cheerful and imperious self.

  It wasn’t until the day before Thanksgiving that I found out what was bothering her. Kosta had let me leave work early, and as we were walking past the quarries—Helle now fixing me with a cool and speculative stare, going on and on about how men just had to keep tunneling around under the world’s surface, didn’t they, taking good things out, putting bad things in—I was trying to figure out what I’d make for tomorrow’s dinner. I was also troubled by the fact that my mother’s annual letter had been surprisingly short this year, uncharacteristically disjointed and emotional, as if there might be some genuine problem at home. None of the expected references to “your father,” for example. Was he dead? It was like my mother, I thought, to suppress such a piece of information, and then hold it against me that I never went to the funeral.

  A gray day, the clouds mixed together, moving rapidly in one gray seething mass, and across the quarry’s unnaturally yellow-green water the whole gray sky appeared to be sailing past the outstretched fingerbones of five birch trees, as if the world’s rotation were suddenly made visible. In a similar quarry, I told Helle, not far from where I grew up, a girl with whom I went to Sunday school drowned. A mean girl named Bettina Archer, who cut tiny breasts and penises from felt and then stuck them to the felt-board Bible figures, blaming me. An immoral person generally suffers for his immoral behavior, Helle pointed out, taking her binoculars from the pocket of her army surplus parka and squinting through them at a top-heavy bird roosting in one of the birches. A kingfisher, she said—want to look? It was windy and cold; from the narrow strip of dead grass growing around the base of the dented guardrail the wind jarred loose a stinging cloud of grit and sand left behind by last winter’s road crews. No! I said, to which Helle replied that there was no need to get angry; it wasn’t as if kingfishers weren’t a dime a dozen.

  Although she was obviously being perverse, for soon enough it became perfectly clear that she knew what I was talking about. “Do you need an example, Frances?” she asked. “Suppose there’s a man who thinks he’s getting away with something. Maybe he’s married to a placid, unimaginative woman, to a woman who’s so interested in living her own peaceful life that she never notices what’s going on around her. ‘Judgment is mine, sayeth the Lord,’ except you know as well as I do that even if there is a God, after the lesson of the flood fell on deaf ears He more or less gave up on the idea that men could learn anything from a deity. So this man thinks he’s safe, thinks he isn’t being watched, but what he doesn’t realize is that the minute God turned His back on us, something else took over. Something that had been there all along, biding its time. You can see a kingfisher any day of the week. A dime a dozen, as I said. But this, I promise you, this is worth looking at.”

  Then—as we stood there in the dead grass at the side of the road, cars whizzing by, grit and sand blowing into our faces, the wind wrinkling the quarry’s yellow-green surface into a regular pattern of ridged whorls like a giant thumb-print—Helle turned her back to me, extending her elbows so she could cup the knob of dark hair at the nape of
her neck in both hands, lifting it to reveal, for the first time, her tattoo. I remembered a beach hat my mother used to wear, a white sailor-type cap with grommets set into it, the two back ones of which I thought she was referring to when she warned me that she had eyes in the back of her head.

  “Like it?” Helle asked, and when I didn’t say anything she released the knob of hair and turned around again, her mouth set in a tight, fierce little smile. She was eighteen, she said. She’d had it done not long after her birthday, and though she’d had it now for almost half a century, very few people knew it was there: Dancer, of course, because he’d encouraged her to get it; Kayo’s spookish sister Maja; probably Inger Fog, née Nissen; the traitor Maeve Merrow; now me. Oh, and the tattooist. Otherwise she kept it covered, either with her hair or with some kind of high collar, the occasional scarf. Hadn’t I ever wondered why she always kept her neck covered? Granted, lots of old women tried to hide their poor old creased, pathetic necks, like tupelo trunks growing out of the dismal swamps of their bodies, but she, Helle, didn’t need to do such a thing. For wasn’t her neck as smooth and unlined as a young girl’s?

  She went on to explain how every morning as she brushed her hair it made her happy just to think of it, that single tattooed eye staring out from the nape of her smooth, unlined neck. At first glance you might mistake it for a Masonic symbol. Only the Masonic eye which regards us from the glowing, disconnected tip of a pyramid on the backside of the dollar bill is frank and direct in its gaze: an eye you’d expect to find in the face of a man who has a firm handshake, an outward-looking eye, reflective in the literal sense of a mirror, within which you confront your own image. A male eye. Whereas the eye on the nape of Helle’s neck, she confided, was nothing less than an aperture into a world defined by an increasingly smaller series of apertures; it was a female eye, one that invited entry without offering any possibility of discovery.

  The tattooist, whom she’d been instructed to call Mandrill, was an artist of the form. Helle never found out his real name, perhaps because, as Dancer had suggested, most men who lived their lives in close contact with the sea understood the protective power of artifice. All she knew was that Mandrill had chosen his name in honor of the monkeys that swung through the forests of his native Nigeria, illuminating with their bright faces and buttocks the shadowy green places into which the sun never penetrated—she knew this because Mandrill’s face had been tattooed to emphasize the accuracy of the name. Thus a red band had been made to extend from Mandrill’s chin to the bridge of his nose; a network of blue and purple lines radiated out across his cheeks; black ovals encircled his golden eyes; thousands of tiny yellow dots covered his perfectly bald skull, snaking down across his temples and around his ears to replicate a mane. Nor, as Mandrill suggested, patting the seat of his pants, did the resemblance end there. He was a tall, thin man who had to stoop in order not to bump his head against the rafters of his shop. Indeed, what the shop reminded Helle of more than anything else was the root cellar at Krageslund; it was located on a side street off the Nyhavn, below street level down a crumbling set of steps, at the bottom of which stood two trash cans filled with stained gauze, wads of surgical cotton, and ambiguous brown bottles. Even Dancer, who was relatively short, was forced to bend over as he went through the front door.

  A little snow had been falling, on and off, but the flakes were too large to stick; as they entered the shop Helle could feel them melting on her lips, mixing there with the familiar dockside taste of brine. The winter of 1915 was unusually cold; the Limfjord froze solid, and there were rumors of wolves in Göteborg. In Horns, Inger had written, the snow was so deep that you couldn’t see through the first-floor windows of the stores and houses; the children had created an intricate series of snow tunnels through which they traveled, silent and invisible, materializing suddenly where you least expected them. There had been an influenza epidemic; many people had died, including Torben Toksvig. But inside Mandrill’s shop it was warm, even hot; like a hot black stone dropped into a pond, the stove in the center of the room sent forth ripples of overheated air, causing the needles lying out on an adjacent table to appear undulant, wavery, longer than they actually were.

  The walls of the shop were covered with charts of sample designs, numbered and arranged according to category. There were the predictable nautical motifs (ships in full sail, anchors resting on their three points, fish, spears, flags, mermaids, constellations); the amorous (hearts, twined hands, naked women, embellished initials); and the religious (crosses, admonitory passages from Scripture, pietistic symbols, chalices, and lambs). There were primitive geometric configurations, repeating concentric circles, tiny checkerboards, relentless cross-hatchings, straight lines and wavy ones, diamonds and stars. An entire wall was devoted to trompe l’oeil designs, many of which were calculated to excite a sexual response and which were, according to Dancer, enjoying great popularity in the local bordellos. A whore could have her breasts tattooed to resemble sunflowers, petals radiating out from the nipples, the stems trailing languidly down the torso, disappearing into the grass of the pubic hair; she could wear a tattooed chemise of the finest Chantilly lace, with a tattooed hand disappearing up under the tattooed lace hem of her tattooed knickers.

  A small man such as yourself, Mandrill told Helle, could get his whole body covered for the same price it would cost a big man to do a single arm. The tree of life, perhaps? Its roots extending along the toes, its branches spreading out across the shoulders, a snake twined around the torso, an apple in the palm of the right hand?

  No, Helle said; she wanted something small enough to fit on the nape of her neck. Something she could display when she wanted to but that she herself wouldn’t be able to see—a quality as apparently discrete from herself and yet hard to overlook as, for instance, Daisy’s shoulderblades, those small wings she customarily kept folded in place beneath a white dimity blouse. “Ah,” Mandrill said, his golden eyes narrowing. And did the young man realize that the nape of the neck was one of the most vulnerable parts of the human body? If you wanted to kill someone, all you had to do was stick a sharp object into that part of the neck where the tip of the spine meets the base of the skull, where the medulla oblongata nestles unprotected by bone. Hadn’t everyone heard about the milliner who was said to have murdered her wealthiest customer with a hatpin? One small slip of the needle and you could end up paralyzed forever. This had never happened to Mandrill, but he knew of a young sailor from Liverpool who’d wanted the image of his sweetheart’s lips to press an eternal kiss into the soft skin just below his hairline. Now that same sailor, no longer young, could be seen any day of the week sitting propped up in a chair outside the Norwegian Gate, selling worthless spectacles, their lenses made of window glass.

  Some tattooists trace the design onto the skin, a practice for which Mandrill had nothing but scorn: you might begin with an overarching concept, but for the specific details you had to rely on the skin’s hidden messages. In this way the human soul could be given visible form. You had to coax the details out; you had to learn how to overlook the body’s attempts at trickery. The people of the Punjab, Helle said, believed that at death the soul, the little man or woman inside the mortal frame, would go to heaven imprinted with the same patterns which adorned the body in life. Naturally such a process was painful. The design could be applied by a variety of methods: pricking, incising, burning, and, more rarely, incrustation, in which precious stones or pearls would be set into the skin, a method favored mainly by the very rich, such as Indian maharajahs. Mandrill recommended pricking, since incision was too painful, and since burning had connected to it the stigma of slavery—a burned-in design was, after all, nothing more than a brand. Generally he used needles, sometimes one at a time, sometimes several, stuck into the head of a cork.

  The eye on Helle’s neck, to all outward appearances, was an ordinary eye, an ellipse about two and a half inches long and an inch wide at the minor axis, the outer canthus narrowing into a point
, the inner canthus a small, rounded extension separated from the eyeball by a delicate line to indicate the presence of the tear gland; long, outward-curving lashes thickly fringed the crescent-shaped upper lid, while the lower lashes were shorter, more finely distributed, and the lid itself slightly less pronounced. On closer inspection, however, you could see that instead of an iris Mandrill had drawn a woman’s face, the same small, severe face over and over—Helle’s face, in fact—viewed from slightly different angles, the faces subtly overlapping, indicative of motion or changing phase; and that the pupil, the point of intersection of all of those overlapping eyes, had been made to contain another, smaller eye. You could hardly make it out, Helle said, but if you held a magnifying glass up to that second eye you would see that its iris was in fact an oceanscape, where an impossibly tiny clipper ship sailed under an even more impossibly tiny moon. In the creation of any work of art, Mandrill explained, there was a moment when the senses no longer proved useful and faith took over, in this case that moment having occurred when he came to the place where those multiple eye sockets intersected, the very place where his needle could have slipped through the skin and killed her.