The Wall (F)

For the first time in his 26 years, Erik Hess invited a girl—a young woman—to his home. His two rooms on the third floor overlooked the 16-foot wall that ran along the river on the west side of the city. The view out the window behind his bed allowed him to watch the barges working up and down the river, and the tiny window in the bathroom in the front gave him a clear view of the former capitol.

His grandfather George lived in the room behind the kitchen on the ground floor and his window had been plastered over right after the city was divided and the wall went up. His grandfather did not complain about the windowless room. “Even if my eyes were any good, any good at all,” he would say, “what would I want to look at in this miserable city.” He spent much of the day in bed reading old newspapers, his legs bent to relieve the pressure on his knees hurt during the last war.

Erik’s older brother William lived with his family of four on the second floor. William’s wife stayed at home with their children, both boys, one 6 and one 11. William worked as a clerk for a municipal judge and refused to talk in any detail about court proceedings other than to characterize them as charades masking rampant injustice and cruelty.

However, his wife Catherine would dutifully ask daily at supper how William’s day had gone. “Lousy thieves were at it again. Always the same, they make money, others pay and pay and pay.” Catherine would look down at her plate, and William would hastily compliment her cooking, or the fresh flowers on the table, or her hair. “This chicken is perfectly cooked, my sweet one.” Then Catherine would look up and smile and chide the boys for their table manners.

Erik often took his supper up to his room, and after checking out the back window to see if anything interesting was moving on the river, he would sit at his tiny desk and bless his meal and eat slowly, chewing each bite as if it might never be served again. When he at last finished, he brushed his teeth and gargled some soda water, and then most evenings he would pull out his students’ work for evaluation.

Because he did not gain admission to the university’s school for architecture, he taught mechanical drawing classes at the poly-tech. Some of the drawings were in such disarray that Erik crumpled them and then sort of smoothed them out again after writing in large red letters one word. No! But a few of them were so clean and so perfect they seemed to have come from a machine. The heads of the arrows were perfectly balanced, the marks designating measurements consistently the same size. Nena’s work had shown such quality.

Now 22, Nena worked for a modular construction company in the former mill district. Her primary task was to create basic drawings for potential customers after they met with the sales engineers. Her exactness and the tidiness of her hand won her honors at the poly-tech, and her skills earned her enough money to live alone in a three-room flat in the market district.

Erik invited Nena to coffee the day she finished her second course with him. Of course, that was two years ago, but Erik still liked thinking about watching her yellow hair she fixed to the top of her head with two Morado pencils slowly bobbing up and down as she leaned into her work. Sometimes, she would glance up and catch him looking at her. She never smiled or frowned, but Erik believed her dark brown eyes betrayed some interest.

Between the wall and the river ran a two-lane road, but no traffic—vehicles or cyclists or pedestrians—were allowed. Across the river there was no wall, and so Erik could see people on the bank fishing and buses and trucks going by and children playing near the water’s edge. He could also see to the right Victory Bridge that now had a barricade across the middle.

Erik moved into the top floor rooms when he was 16, when his parents were killed in the October Blast. William and his wife and a baby boy moved in and took over the second floor. The first thing Erik did was to take down the curtains in both the bedroom and bathroom. Some days he talked about getting rid of the bed and finding an old sofa to sleep on so he could put his desk at the window and look out over the river.

One Saturday morning during breakfast, Catherine was the first to speak to his plans for the bed. “You will need a bed. You will want a bed for your special guests.” Erik blushed and for the next week could hardly meet her eyes or even mutter a hello. William shrugged. “Don’t do something so stupid. It’s a good bed.”

Nena’s flat was on the second floor and her living room had two 8-foot windows that opened up onto a small porch just deep enough for small chairs. The first time Erik went with her back to her place, she fixed coffee for them and they sat outside in the cool late afternoon air and shared a cigarette. Across the four lanes of the boulevard was a small park with ancient sycamores, leafless in the December light.

“You were my best student.”

“Thank you.” She held out the cigarette to him.

“By far.”

“Thank you. You are a good teacher.”

“You should apply to the architectural school.”

“No, no—that work, no I don’t want the work to be like that—to be so important.”

“You are happy, then?”

She giggled. “Oh, happy. What is happy?”

“I don’t know.” Erik realized he sounded too serious, so he stood up and stretched and gestured across the street. “You have a great view of the park.”

“Yes. What do you see when you look out your windows?”

“I see the river and can watch the sun rise.”

Nena stood up next to him. “I would like to see the river.”

The river never quite froze over during the winter. Always there was a ribbon of moving water that looked black during the short days. In the early spring the river would rise rapidly along the banks as the mountain snow melted, and by May the mid-morning sun would strike the river and seem to set the surface on fire.

“When will we meet this Nena?” Catherine asked him this question as she stirred a deep pot of corn chowder and Erik, sipping hot tea, slouched against the refrigerator. “You see her nearly every day now.”

“It’s quiet at her place. And there is more to do on her side of the city.”

“Quiet.” Catherine laughed. “Always, men and their quiet.”

“Perhaps soon. Perhaps.”

Often, when Erik sat outside the classroom building as he waited for his next class to begin, he would think of Nena and how they would kick off the sheets in her bed and pass a cigarette back and forth without a word. Then she would stub it out in a coffee cup on her bedside table and roll over on top of him and murmur into his ear how good she was feeling. Sometimes she would shiver and he would fumble for the sheet and tuck it tightly around them as if wrapping a present.

“Well,” said Catherine, “you should have flowers on your desk when she visits you.”

Yes, Erik thought, flowers. And she would like Moroccan mint tea, too. He would scrub the bathroom, making sure to clean the floor behind the toilet and the bottom of the shower curtain and put out fresh towels and perhaps a flower in the bathroom would be a right thing to do as well. Of course the white bed linen would be clean, and he would put away the old blanket that he kept on his sitting chair. He would take down his drawings. Or, no, they would remain. She might admire some of them and they would have something to talk about as they drank their tea.

The thing about the wall was that it made the city feel second-rate, somehow inferior being cut off from the whole. The acting mayor—a state appointee—the postponed elections, the censorship of the newspapers because of the ongoing emergency, all left the city less than what it had been. And to what end.

Erik’s grandfather’s verdict was simple. An inglorious failure. Complete and utterly hopeless, a never-ending, abject failure.

“Tomorrow, Catherine.”

“Tomorrow? Your Nena comes tomorrow?”

“Yes, tomorrow.” Ladson 2013