Read Online Olympia by Dennis Bock - Free Book Online

before. None of us has except my mother. He wants to keep driving. But I’m thinking maybe he realizes we’ve been on the road too much lately, that he’s been pushing his luck. When he sees a tear run down my mother’s cheek he knows this rolling vacation’s got to come to a screeching halt. I see him shoring up his resolve. Ruby stands in the open wing of the car door, twirling her hair in her fingers, something she does when she’s sleepy. The country air is heavy with the shade of cattle. I look up the sides of the valley. There’s nothing here but this house, alpine-looking, like a Bavarian postcard. Milking cows pause on the shadowing afternoon hills to gaze at us on the path below.

    â€œHere is my favourite son,” my mother says brightly in German, brushing her cheek with a sleeve. Willy’s face is narrow. A thin man, not much of a farmer, I think. I imagine his mind reach out before his arm moves to shake my extended hand. The delay is still there. It’s more than just a shyness. I remember the story we learned in class of the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. By all accounts, the unnecessary war. The war Willy fought. I wait. His shoes point outwards, like a clown’s. They’re on the wrong feet. I want to withdraw my hand, to step back from him. I want to get back in the car and keep driving. I want to look for storms. His hand drifts up between us like an afterthought, a smile drifts slowly across his face. I’m shaking hands with a war wound.

    His voice has an old man’s timbre. He’s saying something tome.

    â€œGrüss Gott,”
I answer.

    â€œHe says you look just like me,” my mother says, translating. I release his grip and step aside. Ruby shakes his hand like a young adult, unfazed.

    â€œWe saw deer from the road,” she says, grinning. It doesn’t matter that he can’t understand her. Awkwardly he reaches to her small head and tousles her hair.

    From a distance I study Willy’s tic while the grown-ups sit around the kitchen table drinking coffee and eating poppy-seed cake. Ulla, his housekeeper, sits with us. The whole conversation’s in German. Ruby and I sit politely. We clean our plates and wait for our mother to pour out more fresh milk into our glasses. With my rough understanding of German I gather Ulla lives on the farm, a live-in nursemaid in this one-man sanatorium. No one says anything about her husband. Or maybe I’ve missed something. I sip at my milk and wonder if Willy has been married, if anybody ever consented to him. Ulla cuts the corner of the cake with her fork, takes a mouthful, and rises from her chair. Still chewing broadly, she returns from the refrigerator with three white containers and counts out a handful of colourful pills. The table falls silent. When she finishes she pushes them over to Willy and he swallows each, one by one, his milky eyes turned to the ceiling. His hands like claws. He rolls each pill into the small scoop of an unclipped fingernail and lifts it to his mouth like a crane, his wrist pointing outwards. Ruby’s feet paddle under the table nervously until our mother releases us from the kitchen.

    We run outside, filling our lungs with air. In the barn I climb up into the rafters while Ruby waits down below. Sparrows dart in and out through spaces between the boards. Dust pauses in the shafts of light entering through cracks in the old walls. Harnesses and wooden crates and dusty skis piled on the thick pine beams above our heads.

    â€œWatch this,” I say, affecting a horrible body spasm. “It’s Uncle Spaz.” I leap into the air and fall twisting, my tongue sticking out the side of my mouth. I come up from the haystack, covered in straw and dust. “Uncle Super Spaz is going to get you.” I lurch towards my sister like a hungry Frankenstein, lead-footed. “I’m going to give you the Mustard Brain disease if you