Read Online Olympia by Dennis Bock - Free Book Online Page B

wants to get in the Opel. He wants to see castles and shipyards. His people no longer live here. His father’s back in Kingston, himself now an immigrant like my parents in the only place I know. He can still visit friends here. He likes seeing his old buddies from school. He hasn’t seen them for years. But it’s not the same. He’s got new friends, a new life somewhere else.

    Willy leans on his cane. I’m waiting a short distance up the trail. When Ruby and my mother finally come out from the trees, Ruby runs over to Willy and gives him a flower. He blushes and spins in a slow clumsy circle, smiling, and says,
“Danke schön, Kanada.”
As we ascend we turn our heads to watch the valley deepen below. It takes us two hours to get to the top. I keep running ahead, thinking I’ll have a better chance at discovering a deer posing among the pine trees if I forge on alone, without the chatter of a clumsy hiking party and the click of an old man’s walking stick. I double back, panting. Ruby’s holding Willy’s elbow as they walk, prattling on to him in English. He smiles, understanding nothing.

    When we reach the top Willy leans over and says into my ear: “Say something. Yell something.” My German’s just good enough. He wants an echo. He wants to show me how his brain works, how the gas feels inside. The farm’s a brown dot at the far end of the valley. The laneway we drove over yesterday snakes its way over the green valley floor and disappears behind a hill where it meets up with the road that leads eventually to Munich. He leans back on his cane and waits, Ruby’s flower wilting in his fine skeletal hand. For a moment there’s only our breathing and the snapping eye of my father’s camera.

    â€œWhich way’s the Berlin Wall?” I ask my father.

    â€œEast,” he says, without removing his eye from the viewfinder.

    Willy gestures to our right, beyond the farm, makes a small pointing circle with his cane. He’s heard the word “Berlin.”

    â€œWunderbar,”
my mother says under her breath. She’s looking in the direction of France. Ruby’s holding the bouquet of deep-blue flowers they’ve taken from the woods. Willy leans into my ear again.

    â€œWhat will you say?” he asks. I taste his old man’s breath, notice white stubble on his chin. I wonder at the depth of his illness. Will he die while we’re still guests in his house? A grunt of expectation comes from his throat.

    With all my might.

    â€œHelp!”

    The echo draws back over us from the other side. My lungs burn. My father, at first startled, looks pleased. My mother turns around quickly and looks at me. My voice returns to me weakly from the other side, changed somehow, a bridge of voices crisscrossing over the valley floor. Willy’s smiling, his demonstration complete.

    At night we sit outside on folding wooden chairs and watch the shadows lengthen over the hills. The evening consumes the new black hair on the shins of my outstretched legs. Ruby’s at the foot of the picnic table, warming up. When she’s ready, she stands before us and begins a simplified version of the floor routine she’s been working on since last winter. A series of front and back handsprings, cartwheels, and somersaults. Even now, after supper and in the fading evening light, she moves like a dancer does, as soundlessly and quick as the bats feeding low in the air over our heads.

    My mother holds Willy’s hand as they watch the routine. I wonder if he knows what’s going on. He’s filled up on those pills again. I imagine they’ve brought him back to where he wants to be, thinned the yellow cloud in his lungs. As Ruby spins through the air I slip around to the back of the house and down into the basement where my mattress comes from. It’s dark down here, but I find the light switch and begin looking around. There’s