Fiction flashquake |
|
Emil studied his wife as he delivered the news. Earlier he had watched her draw the heavy damask drapes in the dining room, cover her head with a kerchief, and light the Sabbath candles, uttering the familiar prayer in a tone of rote and reverence. Their son Max had knelt on a chair beside her in order to see and hear better. Now Max was asleep and Magda sat across from him, the dark waves of her hair pulled into a knot at the back of her head, looking past him to the pair of silver candlesticks where the last of the Sabbath flame flickered. "Everyday a new surprise, no?" he said, trying to sound optimistic. "All of it?" she asked. Whenever she was nervous or upset, she played with the crumbs left behind from the breaking of bread. She did that now, drawing lines through the golden bits of Challah crust on the linen tablecloth. 
"I'm afraid, yes, all of it." She connected the lines, forming a triangle through the crumbs. Deliberately or unconsciously, Emil couldn't be sure, she drew an upside down triangle on top of the first, completing a six-pointed star like the one on their newly issued identification cards. "Everything you work so hard for," she said. She picked up her fork, forged of fine silver, stared at it as she held it close to her face. It couldn't have appeared more than a blur in her vision. He drank the last of the wine from one of the crystal goblets on the table, felt the weight of it in his hand. There was much he hadn't told her. She knew he no longer had a job, of course, but she didn't know about the closed bank account nor the stocks he'd been forced to turn over. He would have liked to believe in his own resourcefulness, born of insight or foresight, but in reality it had been Werner at the bank who had advised him to pull out from his savings what he could before it was too late. "It is only a temporary measure, I am sure, until the new government is more firmly established," Emil said to his wife. He smelled something burning, and turned to see that one of the Sabbath candles had died out, a thin stream of smoke rising toward the ceiling. "When?" she asked, as if she had not heard him. "The beginning of next week." She moved her hand and the glow from the remaining candle hit the cut of the diamond on her finger, bouncing faint facets of light off the wall. "No, it can't be so soon." "I will ask Werner to hide your ring until this passes. At least you will have that." She put down the fork. Whatever its attraction had been was lost to her now. "Max's birthday isn't until Thursday." The last time her voice had shook with such quiet urgency was almost six years ago when she had told him in that same pressing manner to go for the midwife. "He will still have his birthday." "But what about the bicycle? Will we have to turn that over too?" A few weeks before Magda had gotten it into her mind that Max should have something special this year to make up for all the usual privileges accorded a school-age boy which were being steadily taken from him. So while a faction of Vienna was discussing whether or not to buy their way out of Austria, Emil was working his way through the black market in search of a bicycle for Max. He'd scrubbed the tires clean before bringing it home so Magda wouldn't know he hadn't bought it new. "Yes, we will have to turn over the bicycle too." "Is it not enough that he cannot go to school, that I can no longer take him to the park to play?" "There will be many more birthdays. We will buy Max plenty of bicycles." "I want to see him, at six, ride a bicycle for the first time. I want him to know while he is young how it is to feel steady and yet fly free through the streets." She waved her hand in a semicircle, and his gaze followed the field of her motion, from the paintings on the walls to the silver and crystal on the ivory tablecloth to the Oriental rug on the floor. "Please, I can bear to lose all of it-but I cannot bear that." Emil felt himself fall into the same helpless hole he'd fallen into the morning the midwife told him there'd been some complications, leaving him in stunned silence. It was Max who had called out first, a lusty cry, giving him the strength to pray for Magda's recovery. Only he wasn't Max yet. They'd agreed on Aaron, after Emil's deceased grandfather, but when Magda's father passed on last year, she began to call him Max. There could be no more children to carry on the name, she explained. She wanted to preserve his memory. Emil glanced around the room again. His eyes follow the remembered arc of Magda's arm. He feels himself rise from the table and make his way toward his son's room where Max is curled up, a crescent moon beneath the feather comforter which will also be gone by the beginning of next week. His hair is flattened from sleep, his prominent ears projecting like wings from the sides of his head. He leads Max to the hall closet where the bicycle is safely hidden away. He hears the squeals of delight as he lets go of the back of the seat in the early morning hours, sending his only son sailing into the wind. The thought of turning over the bicycle in a few days threatens to shatter the moment with the suddenness of breaking glass. He puts his arm around Magda and watches Max take off down the street, the morning breeze ruffling his hair, his ears sticking out boldly. |
© 2002 by Peggy Duffy HOME | Archives | Submission Guidelines | Contributors | Links | Contact the Author |