“I even once told him to curse me again, or to bless me—his choice—but by then he was a very different kind of man.”
He hummed lightly. The mourners on either side huddled back to their cars in the dimming light and drove away.
“And, you know,” he said, sighing, “it’s not true that nothing stuck to him. In a way, my curses came true too. In a metaphorical way. That moment of speechlessness happened to him over and over, where he could not talk when it was of tantamount importance. He rarely talked at all. He never married or truly fell in love. He never did anything with his life. Just wandered from country to country. We lost touch many years ago.”
The man closed his mouth, and the two looked at the headstone together, reading and rereading the few words there: Hans Hoefler, and the quote they had decided upon as a group at the court: We need more Hans Hoeflers in this world.
The words looked wrong, like a carving of incorrect dates. The secretary pulled her coat tighter around herself. She thought of how she had never sat and had a long conversation with her father because he, too, refused to talk about himself. “Someone else should speak instead,” he said. “If I don’t speak, it means someone else will,” which did not always turn out to be true. She spent many, many hours with him in an expectant silence. “Tell me,” she whispered, softly, sometimes, but he would just look at her mildly, a flat blankness in his eyes. He did not even shake his head; it was like words had returned to abstraction to him, just interesting sounds exiting the mouth of the young woman whose nose and hands reminded him of something.
At the cemetery, she stepped closer and touched the shoulder of the man in the wheelchair, and he reached up to her hand with his own. He was much older, and hairless, but the bones in his face were still handsome. Compared with Hans—worried, dark-eyed Hans—this chair-bound brother still received more appreciative looks from women. There was something broad and fine in the way his cheekbones paralleled his jaw. The secretary walked next to him, and helped him home without seeming like she was helping, and stood with him in the elevator, and accompanied him into his apartment, into rooms that were clean and spare. Without words, as if they had been married for years, the two commenced cooking dinner together, chopping carrots and onions, warming the bread. He showed her a photo album of his childhood, and she could see the hair he had described and the strong legs of the former athlete. They ate facing the window, though it was night, and watched the lights in the building across the street switch on one by one. “Delicious,” he said once, and she nodded.
Before she left, after stacking the dishes and snapping off squares of dark chocolate from the cupboard, she pulled her chair in closer to him and, placing a hand on each of his shoulders, kissed his cheeks, his head, the heavy flat bones of his eyebrows where no hair grew. She kissed near his lips, but not on them. His eyelids closed, and she kissed their round, soft orbs. Each fingertip. Each palm. The corner where his jaw hinged, and the light lobe of his ear.
“I am too old—” he began, and she shushed him. She took his weathered, hairless hand, and placed it gently inside her shirt, on her breast, and she just let him hold her there, listening to her heart beat. In some quiet basic way, it was the opposite of the scarf given to her by the old woman the previous month. Here was a tasselless moment, without instruction or order or guilt or implication.
“Thank you for calling me,” she said, and she loosened the bowl of his palm, and said good night. His eyes were closed then. Not asleep, just cupping the tears that had gathered under the lids. She let herself out. The night was windy but clear, and since she had already eaten dinner, earlier than expected, the time felt unusually spacious. She stepped into a music club and listened to a violinist play Bach while a piano player waited his turn, and she sipped a glass of wine so acidic it seized her throat lightly, and she thought of the man who was sleeping now, and although she still dreamed of both of them often, she never investigated into Hans again.
The story would be over about Hans Hoefler except for one piece.
The week after the secretary’s visit, the brother decided to return to the grave; something about her visit made him want to go back.
It was a gray-skied October morning, and the brother wheeled over the knots of grass to the headstone, where he stared at Hans’s name for at least half an hour.
It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It’s so obvious at that point. And yet the brother wheeled as close as he could, and, leaning down from his chair, he grasped the cold sides of the headstone with his hands.
“You weren’t that powerful, kid,” he cried. “You died, didn’t you?”
And yet, even as he said it, he realized, with new clarity, that Hans had killed himself. And that it did not seem like an act of fear or great despair. It seemed almost like some sort of trick. The vampire’s child, from that horror film, had been a creature thousands of years old. Perhaps Hans had thought he would live forever, would curse and be cursed forever, would rule the world with his mind, forever. No one could ever prove to Hans now that he was as mortal and helpless as the rest. He had circumvented the question.
It altered the taste of the brother’s spit, thinking this. He took his hands off the headstone and wheeled away. It was beginning to rain anyway, and a heady mossy smell overtook the grassy hills of the cemetery. He wheeled as quickly as he could, past the chapel, through the iron gates, to the steadying relief of slick wheels on hard concrete. He popped open his umbrella and fixed it to the arm of his wheelchair. The rain was loud and pointed.
Had we left him here, the bitterness would be where we saw him last and maybe where he died, for wherever we see him last is where we assume he will stay forever. But we will not leave him there. Soon after the visit, his mouth relaxed, and within a week, there were tears, and the tears changed the muscles of his face, because they were not bitter tears but tears of sadness—sadness at the parents who had died long before, tears for Hans and his desperate delusions, tears for his country’s impossible recovery, tears for the fact that life happened once and choices were exactly what they were. Hans was still dead. The world went on perfectly fine without him, just as the war had started, happened, and ended without his playing a role as either hero or villain. One could not spend one’s life in the imaginings of another life; if the brother spent too much time with that, the wheelchair would crowd out all other thoughts. So he poured himself a glass of cold coffee from the coffee jug which he had put, unlidded, into the refrigerator, and the caffeine relaxed him, clarified his sight, as he looked out the window into the rainy afternoon. He would not call the auburn-haired woman who had been so kind, because what they had shared had been completed. But he could keep his eyes open now for the next point of meaning. He could watch the sky all day long. He could return to the restaurant with the fine herb omelettes where he had deliberately left his umbrella because he hadn’t wanted to leave. There was love to be felt, and discovered, still. There was a powerlessness that was kind.