about time you did. One thing about Mrs. Hax,” she declared in a piping falsetto that betrayed her anger, “is that when someone pushes her, she pushes back twice as hard. I am ruthless.” She assumed a stance that she imagined to be an illustration of ruthlessness, her flaccid arms akimbo. A burlesque of violence. “So let me make this perfectly, crystal clear. That rubber sheet is staying on that bed until you forget your lazy, dirty habits and stop them accidents. A grown man,” she said disparagingly, shaking her head. “I just got sick and tired of hauling one mattress off the bed to dry and hauling another one on. Just remember I’m not getting any younger either. I’m not up to heavy work like that. So if you want that rubber thing off, you try and remember not to pee the bed.”
The old man turned on his side and hid his face.
“No sulking allowed,” she said sternly. “Breakfast is ready and I have plenty to do today. I can’t keep it waiting forever.”
Dieter turned on to his back and fixed his eyes on the ceiling. Mrs. Hax shook her head in exasperation. It was going to be one of those days. What went on in the old bastard’s head, if anything? What made him so peculiar, so difficult at times like these?
She walked over to the bed and took him firmly by the wrist. “Upsy-daisy!” she cried brightly, planting her feet solidly apart and jerking him upright. She skidded him to the edge of the bed, the rubber sheet whining a muffled complaint, and his hands, in startled protest and ineffectual rebellion, pawing at the front of her dress. Mrs. Hax propped him upright while his head wobbled feebly from side to side and his tongue flickered angrily, darting and questing like a snake’s.
“There,” she said, patting his hand, “that’s better. Now let’s let bygones be bygones. A fresh start. I’ll say, ‘Good morning, Mr. Bethge!’ and you answer, ‘Good morning, Mrs. Hax!’ ”
He gave no sign of agreement. Mrs. Hax hopefully cocked her head to one side and, like some huge, querulous bird, chirped, “Good morning, Mr. Bethge!” The old man stubbornly disregarded her, smiling sweetly and vacantly into space.
“Well,” she said, patting her dress down around her wide hips and heavy haunches, “it’s no skin off my teeth, mister.”
She stumped to the door, stopped, and looked back. The old man sat perched precariously on the edge of the bed, his white hair ruffled, tufted and crested like some angry heron. A pale shadow fell across the lower half of his face and threw his eyes into relief, so that they shone with the dull, glazed intensity of the most devout of worshippers.
Mrs. Hax often saw him like this, mute and still, lost in reverie; and she liked to suppose that, somehow, he was moved by a dim apprehension of mortality and loss. Perhaps he was even overcome with memories of his wife, and felt the same vast yearning she felt for her own dead Albert.
She mustered a smile and offered it. “Five minutes, dear,” she said, and then closed the door softly behind her.
Bethge made no response. He was thinking – trying to pry those memories out of the soft beds into which they had so comfortably settled, sinking deeper and deeper under the weight of all the years, growing more somnolent and lazy, less easily stirred from sleep. He could no longer make his head crackle with the sudden, decisive leap of quick thought hurtling from synapse to synapse. Instead, memories had now to be pricked and prodded, and sometimes, if he was lucky, they came in revelatory flashes. Yet it was only old, old thoughts and things that came to him. Only they had any real clarity – and the sharpness to wound.
And now it was something about a bear. What?
Bethge, with a jerky, tremulous movement, swiped at the spittle on his chin with the back of his hand. In his agitation he crossed and recrossed his thin legs, the marbly, polished legs of a very old man.
Bear? He rubbed the bridge of his nose; somehow, it was important. He began to rock himself gently, his long, curving nose slicing like a scythe, back and forth, reaping the dim air of his stale little room. And as he swayed, it all began to come to him, and he began to run, swiftly, surely, silently back into time.
In the dark barn that smells of brittle straw, and sharply of horse dung, the knife is making little greedy, tearing noises. It is not sharp enough. Then he hears the hoarse, dragging whisper of steel on whetstone. Although he is afraid that the bear his father is skinning may suddenly rear to life, he climbs over the wall of the box stall and steps into the manger and crouches down. He is only five, so the manger is a nice, tight, comforting fit.
What a bear! A killer, a marauder who had left two sows tangled in their guts with single blows from his needle-sharp claws.
The smell of the bear makes him think of gun metal – oily, smoky. Each hair bristles like polished black wire, and when the sun catches the pelt it shines vividly, electrically blue.
The curved blade of the knife, now sharpened, slices through the bear’s fat like butter, relentlessly peeling back the coat and exposing long, flat, pink muscles. As his father’s busy, bloody hands work, Dieter feels a growing uneasiness. The strong hands tug and tear, wrestling with the heavy, inert body as if they are frantically searching for something. Like clay under a sculptor’s hand, the bear begins to change. Each stroke of the knife renders him less bear-like and more like something else. Dieter senses this and crouches lower in the manger in anticipation.
His father begins to raise the skin off the back, his forearms hidden as the knife molds upward toward the neck. At last he grunts and stands. Reaches for the axe. In two sharp, snapping blows the head is severed from the trunk and the grinning mask flung into a corner. He gathers up the skin and carries it out to salt it and peg it down in the yard. Dieter hears the chickens clamouring to pick it clean.
He stares down into the pit of the shadowy stall. This is no bear. Stripped of its rich, glossy fur, naked, it is no bear. Two arms, two legs, a raw pink skin. A man. Under all that lank, black hair a man was hiding, lurking in disguise.
He feels the spiralling terror of an unwilling accomplice to murder. He begins to cry and call for his father, who suddenly appears in the doorway covered in grease and blood, a murderer.
From far away, he heard someone call him. “Mr. Bethge! Mr. Bethge!” The last syllable of his name was drawn out and held like a note, so that it quivered in the air and urged him on with its stridency.
He realized he had been crying, that his eyes were filled with those unexpected tears that came so suddenly they constantly surprised and embarrassed him.
For a bear? But this wasn’t all of it. There had been another bear; he was sure of it. A bear who had lived in shame and impotence.
He edged himself off the bed and painfully on to his knobbed, arthritic feet. Breakfast.
At breakfast they quarrel in the dreary, passionless manner of master and charge. He wants what she has, bacon and eggs. He tells her he hates porridge.
“Look,” Mrs. Hax said, “I can’t give you bacon and eggs. Doctor’s orders.”
“What doctor?”
“The doctor we saw last month. You remember.”
“No.” It was true. He couldn’t remember any doctor.
“Yes you do. Come on now. We took a ride downtown in a cab. Remember now?”
“No.”
“And we stopped by Woolworth’s and bought a big bag of that sticky candy you like so much. Remember?”
“No.”
“That’s fine,” she said irritably. “You don’t want to remember, there’s nothing I can do. It doesn’t matter, because you’re not getting bacon and eggs.”
“I don’t want porridge,” he said tiredly.
“Eat it.”
“Give me some corn flakes.”
“Look at my plate,” she said, pointing with her knife. “I’m getting cold grease scum all over everything. Fight. fight. When do I get a moment’s peace to eat?”
“I want corn flakes,” he said with a little self-satisfied tuck to the corners of his mouth.
“You can’t have corn flakes,” she said. “Corn flakes bung you up. That’s why you eat hot cereal – to keep you regular. Just like stewed prunes. Now, which do you want,” she asked slyly, “Sunny Boy or stewed prunes?”
“I want corn flakes.” He smiled up happily at the ceiling.
“Like a stuck record.” She folded her hands on the table and leaned conspiratorially toward him. “You don’t
