The Search for Joyful (15 page)

I was horrified that such an interpretation had been put on our talks, and I searched my mind. Had I been guilty of indiscretion? I felt confused. At the same time, angry. I was not doing my country any harm. Who did I hurt by absorbing the life of an Austria that didn't exist anymore? I had only been listening to an outdated chapter of history.

As for Mandy's fear that I was becoming interested in him—of course that was nonsense.

 
I WENT AGAIN after chapel Sunday to visit Erich, but I didn't offer to write letters and I didn't stay long. Just long enough to let whoever was concerned know I wasn't intimidated by gossip.

And long enough to settle the question of his appearance for myself. His features were finely drawn, yet there was strength in them. His light brown hair fell forward over his forehead in a boyish manner. But his mouth was set in too hard a line as though he was watchful and on guard. I suppose he was. After all, he was a prisoner and an enemy. And yes . . . he was good-looking.

Why hadn't I noticed that immediately? Or had I, and not wanted to complicate things by thinking it? It took a world war for my kind and his to meet and talk. And I mustn't forget it.

I began to doubt that it had all been as innocent as I pretended. Had I been attracted to him from the beginning, in spite of professional ethics? In spite of a chasm of differences between us?

Mandy had been a friend after all, and quite right to point out the danger I'd been headed for. I would keep this and every other visit short and impersonal and never speak of submarines again, even if they were thirteenth-century glass bottles.

He watched as I straightened the things on his night table, gave him medication, and turned to go. “Must you leave so soon?” He hurried on, I think to prevent my leaving. “I received a Red Cross package today. Amazing when you think of all the frontiers on both sides it had to pass through.”

“Was it from home?”

“My parents received the customary letter from submarine command: ‘missing in action.'”

“What a shock that must have been. I'm so sorry.”

He regarded me levelly; his gray eyes held a question, but he didn't ask it. Instead he said, “I've been awarded the Iron Cross.”

“Oh.” I could hardly congratulate him. The pause was awkward. “It must be a relief to your family to know you're alive.”

He nodded. “I wonder if they'll get the letter you wrote for me before the war ends?”

“I'm sure they will.”

“I don't know. I haven't seen a newspaper or heard the radio since I've been here. We were supposed to be winning the war. It was supposed to be over by now. Is it possible that we will lose? I never considered that might happen. What would it mean for Austria? Would my father's party, the old Social Democrats, regain its position, I wonder?”

His talk of war and politics made me nervous. “Is there anything I can do for you before I go?”

He pulled himself from revery to the present.

“Are you meeting someone? A young man? Is that why you're dressed up and look so pretty?”

“Goodbye, Erich.”

“Kathy, I'm sorry. Please forgive me. I haven't much to do except lie here and think. I think about you a lot. I wonder what it's like to be an Indian in Canada.”

“Not now, Erich.”

“Is your young man white or Indian?”

“I don't have a young man. He's Indian,” I said over my shoulder as I left the room. I was so flustered that I ran into Sister Magdalena. “Sorry,” I muttered.

 
IT WAS UNSETTLING to have claimed Crazy Dancer as my young man.

Was that how I thought of him? But I hardly knew him. In fact I very much doubted that anyone could know him. And my mind rocketed between two worlds. The only thing they had in common was that both were insubstantial. The pictures in my mind were of an idealized courtly life on the shores of the Bodensee, where Erich played American jazz records till morning. Which didn't stop him clicking his heels and bowing over the hands of ladies. These fragments broke and distorted as pounding moccasined feet trampled them into shards.

But it isn't possible to have a meaningful relationship with someone you see only intermittently. And it had been almost four months. Spring was trying to burst out of its frozen straightjacket, buds were thrusting tentatively but the coldness of the air nipped them back.

It was grand walking weather, and I returned to my room for a sweater. A walk would help clear my mind. I had to sort out my feelings, put things in order. But when I returned to my room it was to find a crisis. Mandy didn't know it was a crisis, but looking at her I knew instantly.

Mandy was dabbing hydrogen peroxide on her hair.

“What are you doing?” I asked, taking the bottle from her and checking the label.

“I thought I'd put some blond highlights in my hair.”

“Mandy, this isn't that kind of peroxide. It's medicinal.”

“I guess you're right. It hasn't made any difference.”

“Just wait,” I said.

In half an hour bleached white streaks appeared. Mandy flew about the room tearing at it as if she could tear it out.

“What will I do?” she wept.

“Sit down,” I said, and began to brush her hair from underneath where the peroxide hadn't penetrated. The strands blended and, to finish the job, I set her nurse's cap on her head.

“Oh, Kathy,” she exclaimed, surveying herself in the mirror, “you saved my life.”

I smiled at her extravagance.

“At least you saved me from a tongue-lashing by Sister Ursula.”

I agreed that was quite likely.

I took my sweater from the hook on the back of the door and went for the walk I'd decided on earlier. I got as far as the parking lot, when there was a cacophony of sound as a car horn was depressed again and again. I looked over at the distraction and saw it was aimed at me. I stood still, my mind not registering what I saw.

Crazy Dancer leaped from a decrepit car, leaving the door ajar.

“Is it you? I can't believe it.”

“I came for our date.”

“What date?”

“The one we made last June, the Moon When the Ponies Shed—” He burst out laughing. “I put in for a transfer, and it finally came through.”

He looked so jaunty standing there that I joined in the laugh. “I was just thinking about you, and you turn up.”

“Were you thinking that Christmas was a long time ago?”

“Something like that.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

I walked over to the car. “What happened to the motorcycle?”

“You said you wanted four wheels. So I made a trade.”

I surveyed his acquisition somewhat dubiously.

“It's in good running condition,” he assured me.

“What about gas?”

His face lit up—he'd been waiting for me to ask. “It doesn't run on gas. Well, just to get it started. Look at this.”

I walked around to the driver's side with him. He opened the hood and pointed out a nest of metal tubing and what looked like a second carburetor. “It runs on a mixture of kerosine and gasoline. Mostly kerosine. There's a separate throttle that feeds the kerosine into the engine.”

“It won't explode, will it?”

His smile was teasing. “Do you still have the gray and white feather?”

I nodded. “Well, as you say,” I conceded, “it has four wheels.”

He came around with me while I got in, then walked back to the driver's side. He fiddled with the controls and the engine started up. It sounded just as an engine should and I hoped it would behave like one.

Crazy Dancer shifted his feet. “Here we go!”

As we pulled out of the parking lot I asked, “And it's running on kerosine?”

“You bet.”

“Why doesn't everyone use such a device?”

“It's not legal.”

I absorbed this a moment, then said, “You're very good at adapting the white man's inventions.”

“Pretty good,” he admitted.

“You should meet Georges. He likes to fool around with motors, but he isn't as good as you are.”

“Georges is your brother?”

“Yes, he's Connie's twin.”

“You didn't tell me they were twins.”

“I didn't?”

“Twins. Did you know that everything of importance in the world is a twin? Rain is the twin of sun. Mountains the twin of valleys. Hot is the twin of cold. Good the twin of bad. Which is he?”

“What do you mean, which is he?”

“The good or the bad, the left-handed or the right-handed?”

“They're both right-handed.”

“That can't be. The right-handed bring berries, fruit, and flowers to the world. The left-handed, nettles and briars. The right hand made all the animals except the grizzly. The left hand made the grizzly to kill the rest of them.”

“A fairy tale!”

He shook his head. “Twins balance the world.”

“The world doesn't seem very balanced to me.”

He looked troubled. “The Grandfathers never dreamed this world. Perhaps it is as you say, fairy tales.”

He seemed so dejected at this possibility that I said, “I didn't mean
everything,
only that my twins are both right-handed.”

“Perhaps,” he probed the question, “it is different with white twins.” This explanation restored his spirits.

We were driving past some of the ugliest scenery I had ever seen, acres of nothing but railroad tracks, freight cars, and switch engines.

“Where are we?” I demanded.

“These railway yards are what keeps Montreal in business, and fed also.”

We were bound, he told me, for Ile Perrot at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and the Ottawa, with only primitive and deserted dirt roads.

“You picked a rough place to drive.”

“No,” he said, “it's for you to drive.” He stopped the car and insisted I change places with him. “It's your turn,” he encouraged.

“I don't drive.”

“I thought so. I was testing you out on some of those curves back there.”

“What do you mean?”

“I purposely came up to them too fast. If you drove, you'd automatically press your foot to the floorboard like it was a brake. And that's your first lesson. You don't speed up approaching a curve. You speed up
in
the curve. That way centrifugal force gives you more traction, especially if the curve is banked.”

I thanked him for the lesson and wondered what was next. It turned out the second lesson was to get the feel of the car, know where it was on the road.

“Most drivers haven't the faintest idea where their wheels are, how close to the shoulder, how close to the dividing line. They make left turns too flat, and they can't back into a parking space unless it's the size of an eighteen-wheeler because they don't know where their wheels are.”

I began to protest. “This is supposed to be a fun date.” He replied there was nothing more fun in the world than driving, if you knew what you were doing. He said it was like dancing, only with wheels instead of feet.

I made a last attempt to get out of it. “If I'm going to learn, it ought to be on a regular car, not one with two gas pedals.”

He brushed this aside. “Start the engine on gas, and all you have to worry about is the kerosine pedal. The trick is to go slow, stay in first, and know exactly where your wheels are.” To practice this he fished out of the trunk some beat-up highway cones swiped from a construction job, and laid out a mille miglia on that country road.

Crazy Dancer was right. It was fun doing a slow-motion ballet with an automobile, knocking over cones in the beginning but finally squeezing through them. Until I got the hang of the clutch, I achieved some nasty jerks and stalls. However, I braced myself against the wheel and had the satisfaction of seeing Crazy Dancer get the bumps. He took it gamely, encouraging me with a soft patter of praise, and only when we were headed for a boulder did he grab the wheel.

“A little practice in the city, and you can get your license.”

He came by the following day to give me a short course in engine maintenance and how to hot-wire the ignition in case I forgot my keys. We disassembled and reassembled the two carburetors half a dozen times and checked the tubing before he was satisfied. The fuel pump was the next order of business, then how to jump-start a dead battery. Belts and hoses were Crazy Dancer's particular joys, mainly because on this jalopy they were always slipping, wearing out, or leaking.

At the end of the session, with dusk settling in, he sent me back to take notes and draw diagrams. I'd become pretty good at this in my anatomy course and mentally substituted engine parts for body organs. The fuel pump was a heart. Air intake and carburetor were bronchi and lungs. Transmission was muscle, and electrical system, nerves.

Our next date I showed Crazy Dancer my sketches. He was delighted and gave me a crash course in sectioning and dimensioning. I got covered with oil and the muck under the hood, but that wasn't much different from an operating table.

To crown my success Crazy Dancer announced I was ready for the last and final test. It turned out this was to drive an army truck, which a buddy of his had parked up a side street. Other than the fact that everything was outsized, I had no trouble. My reward was a big hug and an old grease-stained race driver's cap which he set on my head.

Back at the wheel of his own car, he drove us out to the Ile Perrot.

“You know,” he told me, “I think you are three things: a spider, a turtle, and a lark.”