Grey Moon
Chapter three
Instructions
Notebook. Day 99.
They send the alert at seven now. This was the second night of it, and by half past the street had put itself to bed. I watched it from the kitchen: the Krauses’ blinds, then the third floor, then the whole facade across the courtyard going dark in patches, like a switchboard losing its operators. We are a careful species. Tell us to pull the curtains and we pull them — even the ones who don’t believe it.
I pulled ours. Lena was on the couch, where she’d been since morning. Not asleep. That’s the part I can’t get used to. She used to wake at four; now she doesn’t sleep and doesn’t rise, just lies with her eyes open and lets the day happen to the ceiling. I bring her things; she takes them when I put them in her hands. If I don’t say get up, she doesn’t, and I’ve stopped saying it — because the third time you say it and watch it land on nothing.
That’s the entry. I can’t remember when she stopped starting things, and now she’s stopped finishing them too. She just stays, in the exact middle of the day, like someone waiting in a corridor for a name that isn’t going to be called.
[School worksheet, “My News.” A child’s careful hand. Undated — around day 106.]
My news is we are going to London on a aeroplane to Granny Pearl. Granny Pearl has a garden with a apple tree and a cat called Mr Biscuit. Mama says the moon there is the proper moon and I will sleep better. I am bringing my beetle but Mama says the aeroplane might not allow him so I have made him a box with holes and not told her. My news is also Mama is very tired. When I am big I am going to be a vet, or the person who finds out what is wrong with the moon. By Ana, age 8 and three quarters.
Notebook. Day 110.
Ana knocked at half seven, while it was still more night than morning, and handed me the jar with both hands — the way you hand over something alive. The aeroplane wouldn’t take him. “His name is Borko,” she said. “He likes the soft part of the apple, not the skin. He doesn’t like the sun. I wrote it all down.” There was a folded paper rubber-banded to the lid: instructions in the careful hand, and a drawing of Borko looking, I think, optimistic.
She explained the trip in case I worried: London, the long one, Mama’s work, and Granny Pearl’s garden where she’ll stay so Mama won’t be alone in a strange flat at night. The going-along was her own idea; she told me so with some pride. I did not say that a child volunteering to mind her mother is a thing that should not yet have a name.
Her mother waited by the lift with the cases, dressed, ready, and somehow not quite arrived. I said I’d keep Borko until they were back. Ana weighed this with the gravity of a customs officer and decided to allow it. Then the doors closed on the two of them.
From the window I watched the taxi pull away, Ana waving from the rear glass long after the car had turned, waving at the building, at me, at the whole grey street, as if she were the one staying behind and we were the ones being carried off.
I have a beetle now. I put him on the kitchen sill, out of the sun, and read his instructions twice. It is the most anyone has asked of me in weeks, and I find I don’t want to get it wrong.
Notebook. Day 117.
Found Stefan at the allotment. That’s where he is now the flat’s gone quiet, wife and daughter in London and a whole autumn of evenings to fill. I’d half expected a man rattling around missing them, already pricing a flight to follow, working out how to get them home before whatever this is closes the airports. He was netting the winter cabbages against the pigeons. Methodical and unhurried.
This is a man who once drove back through the night from a contract abroad because Ana had a non-speaking part — a tree — in the school play, and would not be the empty seat in the third row. I waited for that man. He talked about the netting, the pigeons, the merits of a particular knot. He stepped around the daughter-sized hole in the conversation without appearing to notice it was there.
I almost said it: get her back, Stefan, while there are still planes. I didn’t. What would I be doing but frightening a steady man on a hunch? I said the cabbages looked good.
When I left he called after me, with no hill in sight, „Wir sind nicht aus Zucker.“ He laughed, and it was entirely him. I keep turning it over. Everyone I know who’s gone has gone strange first; Stefan’s only gone quiet around one subject, and is otherwise so completely himself that I’ve decided it’s an ordinary kind of missing them, not the other thing. I’ve decided. I note that I’ve decided, which is what I do when I’m not sure.
[Postcard — London to Freiburg. A child’s hand, posted around day 117.]
Dear Marko,
Mama said the English moon would be the proper moon, but I checked on the first night and it is the same moon. I think Mama got it wrong, which she does not usually do.
Granny Pearl says I worry like an old woman and gave me cocoa for it. Mama is tired from the journey and sleeps in the day now. Mr Biscuit sleeps on her feet.
Is Borko eating? The soft part, not the skin, and keep him out of the sun. Tell him I am coming back.
— Ana
Notebook. Day 125.
The Tuesday integration review used to fill the room. Today it was me, Wallner, and a wall of black rectangles. Istanbul sent apologies. Their flight was cancelled, the first of ours to go, which makes a grim kind of sense: the far edges fray first.
But it wasn’t only the flight. Hamburg cancelled half its people, and Hamburg comes by train. I don’t know whether the trains were a mess or whether they ran fine and the people didn’t. Deutsche Bahn often is a mess; you can hang almost anything on it and nobody checks. I didn’t find out. That’s the part that stays with me afterwards: I could have asked, and I chose the version that let me get on with the agenda. So did Wallner. We both reached for the railways, both a little relieved to have something to blame that comes with a timetable.
He moved the rest to remote “until travel settles,” and I didn’t correct him, though I know what a schedule looks like when it’s eaten from the inside — not cancelled so much as quietly unattended. Saying so out loud felt like bad manners. Travel settling is a comfortable thing to be waiting for; it puts the trouble out on the rails, somewhere other than the empty chairs.
Then I did the arithmetic I shouldn’t. I checked it on my phone, under the table, like a score I was ashamed to care about: Basel to London. Still flying. Twice a day, still flying. No reason to look. Ana’s there and safe and her mother’s with her. I looked anyway, and noted the times, and noted that I’d noted them.
Notebook. Day 130.
Borko is thriving. I want that on the record, because it’s the one thing in this flat I can say cleanly. The apple, the soft part, no skin, out of the sun: I follow Ana’s paper to the letter, and the result is a beetle in robust health, doing his slow circuits of the jar with the air of a man with places to be. Eight years old and she wrote clearer instructions than most of the manuals I’ve shipped. You do this, then this, and the living thing stays living.
Lena came with no paper. That’s the difference I keep arriving at, the two of them across the room from each other in the evening: the jar on the sill, Lena on the couch, both very still, only one of them mendable. I can keep a beetle alive because a child told me how. I have shared rooms with this woman for nine years and I don’t have her instructions, and there’s no one left to write them, and if there were I’m not certain my hands would do what they said.
I changed the apple tonight and found I’d cut a second piece without thinking, for her, out of the habit of laying two places. She wasn’t hungry. She’s never hungry. I ate it myself at the window so it wouldn’t be something I’d thrown away, and watched the moon come up, and did the only maintenance the evening would allow. The beetle. I can manage the beetle.