Claudia Grinnell reads 

Between Lives



in RealAudio format.
     

Past

"In spite of its show of life on the surface, the Sargasso Sea is in reality the most barren of waters." John Ryther, Scientific American, 1956.

       I read some time ago that the ascent of a deep sea diver is similar to the ascent of a sleeping person into waking consciousness. As the diver approaches the water's surface, his environment once again becomes familiar: sun rays greet him; sounds become audible; colors extend across the usual spectrum. If the diver, in happy anticipation of re-greeting his natural environment, rises too quickly, he will become ill, may even die; therefore, the critical problem in diving is to determine what rate of ascent constitutes adequate decompression, since the rate of ascent should allow gases to diffuse out of tissues and be exhaled from the lungs, thus preventing bubble formation in tissues or blood. 
       This is not the case for the sleeping person, for if someone should jolt a sleeper from sleep, he will merely be disoriented for a little while. I can attest to this fact because the sounds of shots that morning registered on my sleeping mind as annoying noise, and jerked me awake. Only after processing the sensory input and evaluating its nature against similar noises I had heard in the past did my brain send the necessary commands to the rest of my body to go to the window and look.
       The man lay face down in no-man's land. His arms stretched above his head. He was very still. A light fog rose off the grass, obscuring the barbed wire just inches away from his head. Two guards in the tower held their rifles steady at the man in the grass. On this side of the border, the guards' house buzzed with activity: one guard telephoned, another one scanned the grass with glasses, and a third kept pointing his index finger at the east Berlin guard tower, like a child firing a make-believe gun. 
       The man in the grass twitched toward the barbed fence and another bullet found its way into his right leg. The dark blue jogging suit burst open around the upper quadrant of the leg, and the leg itself angled upward and came to rest in an awkward forty-five degree angle away from the trunk. The man stopped all movements. Thirty minutes later, two east Berlin guards carried him back to east German territory and out of sight. 
       Where he had lain, the grass was flattened, and I thought I saw red spots on the fence post, and I remembered once, when I was a small child, maybe four or five years old, a man at a carnival. He was quite old, and he stooped over to hand me a balloon. I remembered his lips; he had drawn them red, in some clownish imitation of a smile. The balloon was red too. I recoiled from his hand and the string that fastened the balloon into my field of vision, and kept saying over and over, No, no, no, I don't want it. My mother, with an embarrassed smile, dragged me to a corner stand, away from the cotton candy and the caramel apples to scold me. Why couldn't I be grateful like other children? Why couldn't a balloon make me happy? And all I could do was to repeat, I don't want it. Later that evening, I heard my mother and father speak in low, indistinguishable tones about what I assumed to be my insolence. I lay in bed and caught fragments of sentences and voices here and there: difficult . . . failure . . . live like this . . . abnormal. When my father shot himself three weeks later, the sound of the hammer hitting the bullet was the exclamation mark on my mother's long list of laments, a manly gesture similar to a fist hitting the table at the end of an argument. 
       I stood at the window and willed the blood specks to float off the post, to rise against gravity, to fasten themselves onto the gray sky. But instead, the entire post seemed to rise, pulling with it other posts and barbed wire, which curled like ribbon towards the ground. I had a bona fide vision! Then I felt my cold feet, and I put first one foot and then the other between the ribs of the heater under the window, and hopped crane-like for about five minutes while toasting the soles of my feet. People gathered on this side of the border; they looked at the grass and the gray men in the guard tower and themselves and then walked away. This had been the third border incident that year, and there wasn't much to say. The first two had been drownings, which began as attempts to swim across the river separating our part of the city from theirs and ended in soggy human flesh being scooped from the river's bottom and dragged to shore. 
       I placed my hands against the window's glass and felt a shock of coldness. I put my forehead between my hands and leaned against the pane. And thus I stood for a good while until the contrasting temperatures—heat to about waist high and cold from there on up—confused my body and it began to itch. I did not want to give in to the impulse, because it struck me as inappropriate, so I focused on a woman, a dark-haired, middle-aged woman wearing a white overcoat against the cold, opening her car door. The door swung wide and obscured the woman for a second, and the next picture I saw was of her behind the steering wheel of her car. The intervening frames were missing. She had taken a quantum leap from this world into that without me. She drove off without a backward glance.
       And in my mind I called after her, come back! We will have a beautiful life together. 
       She turned around. She still wore that white trenchcoat, and she opened the coat to reveal a black bra and black panties. She stood before me in ankle deep grass, and there was a three-legged wooden footstool beside her.
       "I caught you looking at me. You are bad. I will have to punish you."
       She undressed me and commanded me to put my cock on the wooden footstool. I began to cry, and she comforted me, told me it would be all right, that I would have to have this lesson to learn to obey.
       "I am sorry," she said, "but there is no other way." I believed her. And I put my cock on the footstool, and she ground it under her high heels, as if putting out a cigarette, only she was putting out my lust, and when I came, it was like the sizzle of a cigarette being ground out in a wet dish.
       "I am a surgeon," she said. "I take you apart and put you back together differently." I laid at her feet and took refuge in her. She must have felt merciful because she ended the punishment and held me and kissed me, and I felt the warmth of a strong flowing love and trust binding me to her.
       That same afternoon I told the Dekan of the Sciences Department about my resignation. His office was located at the end of the hall from mine, and while walking there, I considered what explanation would sound most plausible. When I stood in his office, the afternoon sun shone directly into my eyes, and the Dekan blurred into a vision of black, barely visible in his reclining leather chair, and I forgot my prepared speech. I stumbled through a few sentences about breaking points and death, and then was mercifully interrupted.
       "Why don't you join the Red Brigades," he asked. "Just imagine, the power, the intrigue, the women."
I admitted that I had not thought about that at all.
       "What do you want to do with the rest of your life then? You are a good biologist, a fair teacher. There isn't much else you can do, is there?" He raked both hands through his hair, leaving tracks. Then he stood up and walked towards me and for a moment I thought he would pounce on me, tackle me like one of those American football players, with his shoulder hunched and low and his arms reaching toward me.
       "You'll be back. Wait a couple of years. You'll be back." It turned out he was right, for I did ask for my job back three years later, and when I did, he asked me if I had joined the Red Brigades, and I told him, no, I had learned how to dive.

       I crossed into the East German sector two hours later, after changing the required amount of money from Westmark to Eastmark at a ratio of one to one, which meant that I had lost about two hundred percent of my purchasing power.
       The sun began to set above the TV tower receiving antenna, and briefly it appeared as if a needle were pushing through a giant orange; then the sun slid further down and I lost interest in the spectacle. I did not know what to do in East Berlin; twice before had I crossed over: once to visit the Deutsche Museum, and once to view the horse drawn carriage, the Victoria, at the Brandenburg Gate from the front. I had become tired of seeing the horses' asses in the West. Now, though, I did not have a purpose for my visit. I thought that perhaps a stroll Unter den Linden would cheer me up. But the jewel of European avenues was littered with cheesy cafes and tired looking waiters, so that I took a side street to escape. Soon, I was lost.
       All of a sudden, I realized that East Berlin was a city of papier maché, a Hollywood production of sorts, giving only the appearance of prosperous reality, while on the back lot dogs, and cats, and the occasional human would fight over scraps. It was dark now, and few people were about, and those who were, scurried from house to house as if seeking refuge from a bombing attack. Paint was peeling from most houses, revealing splotchy gray brick. Windows were missing; cars were few. I could not find my way back to the main street, to that medium of civilization, light. I was not afraid, though, merely tired, and so I sat down on the sidewalk over a ribbed gutter guard and watched and listened to sewage waters gurgle below me. I dropped a few coins down the gutter, imagining that this was the Trevi fountain, but why the hell would I want to return to this place?
       "You are late," a male voice hissed in my ear. I turned to see a man in a dark coat, which was too big for his shoulders.
       I nodded. Yes, of course.
       "Give me the film."
       I would have loved to play, but I did not have anything resembling a film on me, and I related that to the man, and he looked confused for a second, and then angry. He said something in a language I could not understand, but assumed was Russian because of the guttural pronunciation. He punched down on my shoulder and kicked at my back. Seconds later, we rolled around the street, in a comic wrestling embrace. A gun fell from his pocket. I scooped it up, and the tumbling came to an end. I held the gun to his face and told him to move, scram, make tracks, and then I was alone again.

       I tried hard to resist any Harry Lime fantasies, but they came unbidden, although this was Berlin and not Vienna, and there was not a giant ferries' wheel anywhere in sight. I held the gun; it was warm, although cold steel would have fit better into my script. I could not get it to open, so I had no idea how much, if any, ammunition it held. I held my arm up and squeezed the trigger and a bullet was released, perhaps killing God or mortally wounding one of His angels. No one responded.
       A Trabi coughed up the road, driven by a young woman with short blonde hair. She stopped and motioned for me to get in, and I did, and she wore a short skirt and no panty hose, and I thought that maybe I did not kill God. At any rate, I thanked Him, but remembered my lesson and tried not to look. She asked me what a gentleman like me was doing in a place like this, and I told her that I was lost and trying to find my way back to Friedrichstrasse, to the border crossing there.
       "You're a Wessie? Oh, I should have known. Get out of my car. Out. Out." I begged her to drive me at least as far as Unter den Linden, so that I could get my bearings.
       "Listen you capitalist pig, you. You are the enemy. I don't want to breathe your stench for a minute longer." I did not have a choice but to show her the gun. Drive, I told her, drive to Friedrichstrasse, and tell me why you are so angry at me. She did not say another word. At the Friedrichstrasses checkpoint I dumped the gun into a trashcan; it was like parting with a dear friend.
       I was jobless now and aimless. I thought about going to America to wash dishes and work hard and become a millionaire. I considered raising sheep in New Zealand. I called my mother and told her that I had quit my job and will be leaving the country but could not answer her why question. I told her that a why question is mostly irrelevant, that the most important questions in life are the how and the what questions.
       "How will you live then," she asked. 
       You see, I told her, there's the rub. I didn't know. Nobody does.
       "And what will you do with the apartment?"
       I told her that she could move into it while I was gone, something I knew she would like to hear.
       "And when you come back, can I stay?"
       I said yes then, and that's how, in 1988, this forty year old man begun to live with his mother, again. I say again, because, I, after all, like most people, lived with my mother at the beginning of my life. Maybe it is fair then, to have my mother return near the end of her own life.
       I wish I could tell you that I went to America in 1985 and became rich, or that I joined the Red Brigades and made the establishment shake in their boots, or that I did anything at all worth telling. It did not turn out like that.
       What happened was this: I exchanged twenty thousand Deutsche Marks into Spanish Pesetas, becoming an instant millionaire, and boarded a Marbella bound Air Condor jet. In Marbella, I rented a cottage, a hut really, on the beach. I stayed three years, eating oranges and bananas and dried fish. After three years, I had a tan and a diving license and still no idea how to answer the how question. Maybe one cannot look for answers; maybe they have to come on their own. And maybe the entire notion of question and answer is wrong.

       "I saved a bit of the wall for you," mother said as we climbed the stairs to my—our—apartment. "You missed all the excitement." 

Present

" . . . there can be no doubt that volume for volume the Sargasso Sea is the clearest, purest and biologically poorest ocean ever studied." John Ryther, ibid.


       Mother is in a state of decline. No amount of denial can get me past that fact. She forgets little things, things like turning on the coffee machine or turning off the water faucet, things that I, in turn, chide her about. Her downcast eyes are no source of pleasure to me, although, at times, I do feel a twinge of superiority.
       On that particular Friday afternoon, I walked up Kreuzstrasse and turned the corner to Frankenstrasse with its lindentrees and pre-World War Two houses (the only ones in all of Berlin) when I saw my mother standing naked before our house, looking exasperated (I was about an hour late due to a conference with a student) and holding a piece of paper that even from a distance looked suspiciously like red and white lottery tickets.
       "I want you to take this to the store right away. I have the winning numbers. I do. I do."
       "The lottery isn't till tomorrow night. I will do it first thing in the morning. Let's go inside." I avoided her eyes, her pleading eyes. And most of all, I avoided looking at her breasts and that black triangle of hair between her legs. But the repression of the gaze caused a thought to surface. So there was the delta, the alpha and the omega of my existence? And other thoughts came. Why are we joyous at births and sad at deaths? Should it not be the other way around? Was not every birth a death already? I looked at the lottery ticket. Six numbers in five rows had been crossed with wobbly marks. I recognized one of the rows as last week's numbers. I wondered how long my mother had been standing in front of our house, holding a lottery ticket. She took a step towards the lindentree and wrapped one arm around it.
       "I shall chain myself to the tree until you register this ticket." Mother, I thought, I can tear you from limb to limb and the tree as well.
       "We have a new neighbor," she said. "He moved in an hour ago. He is above us now."
       The apartment on the third floor had been empty for over a month, and I had grown accustomed to the absence of noise over my head. The previous renter, a heavy man prone to falls, had kept me awake with his frequent late night stumblings to and from the refrigerator. The man had died of a massive fat embolism in his lung as a result of one of his falls during which he had broken, unbeknownst to him, a bone in his wrist. This was the surmise of the doctor conducting the autopsy. He had poked into the man's fat, twisting limbs, opening jaws, stretching back eyelids to reveal white bulges while I stood in the doorway, leaning first this way and that against the dark-grained wood. I was on a ship, I thought, a ship on the high seas, while a hurricane tore through the water and the sails. Then I thought that sails were impracticable. Then I thought how unpredictably thoughts weave in and out of traffic. It is almost as if the brain were a giant map with infinite roads turning here and there, and thoughts were the cars on these roads, except that the cars were creating the roads as they were traveling down the synaptic highways and maybe vice versa, and maybe whoever was steering those cars jumped from speeding car to speeding car so that driving conditions were hazardous and destinations unreachable.
       The doctor motioned me toward the dead man on the floor. 
       "Give me a hand here. We need to put him on a stretcher and get him out of here before he stinks up the place too badly."
       Two assistants carried the man downstairs, bumping the stretcher against the walls and leaving indentions, while the man on the stretcher wobbled without a discernable rhythm or style. On the first floor platform, they encountered an obstacle, Mrs. Enkhaus' son's bicycle leaning against the wall. So my services were required again. I pushed myself around the stretcher, careful not to touch the man's arm, which dangled into the space between me and the wall, and lifted the bicycle by its seat and carried it into the cellar where it should have been parked in the first place.
       The man was loaded into the coroner's van, and the doors shut, while the coroner thanked me.
       "You know, you won't have an upstairs neighbor for a while now. Rental law dictates that there is at least a two week period of non-occupancy when something like this happens. Or would you move in, right behind a dead man?" 
       I told him that I did not know, had not thought about this at all, but that at first impulse it really did not make any difference to me, as long as there were no visible reminders, say, blood or twisted intestines, laying about. This led to a discussion on life and death and what constitutes both, and I finally deferred to his professional opinion that death meant cessation of brain activity, although I thought, and still do, that it would mean that most people could safely be considered dead. The coroner sped off in the van, and I settled into almost four weeks of quiet.
       The new neighbor, it turned out, was a professional diver. Robert dove caves off the coast of Mexico and for a while held the world record for deep sea diving. His apartment was littered with oxygen bottles, fins, and diving suits. We met as he carried the last of his gear upstairs and mother and I were debating the lottery ticket. He handled the situation with impeccable grace, suggesting that he would help mother upstairs while I registered the ticket.
       "If you win, you can give me ten thou, and we'll go diving together. Deal?"
       After that, we talked about diving, deep sea diving mostly, something I had never tried because it was a fringe sport and not popular. He told me that diving in the Sargasso Sea was next on his list. I had written my dissertation on the Sargasso Sea. And so we talked about flying to Bermuda, renting a boat, diving the Sargasso Sea. 
       But this does not happen because Robert falls in love with a woman who makes him give up diving and because Mother is in a state of decline.

Future

"Measurements of in vivo fluorescence among phyoplankton populations in the Sargasso Sea found that it varied according to depth. The peak value was recorded at the surface and decreased gradually until the depth of ninety meters and would then rise after the depth reached ninety meters." C. Guo and W.M. Dunstan, Marine Biology, 1995.

       I will take three days to set up the dive, getting acclimated to the water and the inevitable nitrogen narcosis, which sets in below one hundred thirty feet, and is caused by the narcotic effects of the air's nitrogen at high pressure. At midnight, I enter the water, wearing seven cylinders that weigh more than I do: two of eighteen liters, two of fourteen liters, two of ten liters and one of four liters. I sink swiftly towards the bottom of this sea, plummeting really, feet first for fifteen minutes. I have no idea how deep I have gone or how much further I have to go. Silence and darkness wrap around me. Tons of water bear down on me. Surely, I am deeper than the one hundred thirty foot redline, the danger zone because I think how wonderful it would be to toss off the cylinders and float unencumbered. Robert warned me that nitrogen narcosis would involve a loss of judgment and often causes divers to discard parts of equipment. Suddenly, the floor of sea looms toward me, darker than the water, inevitable. Silt, as fine as talcum powder, flies up and hangs suspended in the water, as my feet crash into the bottom. I can not see and shiver from the effects of the gases. I drop my weightbelts and start on the return route, decompressing as I go, and break the water's surface just as the sun becomes visible in our half of the world.