Beyond Volcanoes E-Book

Alexander Mores

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 194

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

In an apartment block on the edge of a working-class settlement in Rhineland, an 8-year-old has been suffering for years from his parents' intensifying marital crisis, reacting with withdrawal and a variety of behavioral anomalies. During an escalation of the crisis with short-term separation, a fun-loving aunt begins to take increased care of the little one. She invites him to visit her in Hamburg and takes him to the volcanic island of Lanzarote. An adventurous time for the boy, while the smoldering marital crisis of his parents is escalating further. Alexander Mores tells an intense but also humorous story of a child who is at the mercy of changeful family dynamics, who tries to live on between the extremes, and who must find his own individual happiness in the end.

Leseprobe

Beyond Volcanoes

EpigraphAt the abyssChangesIkarusCopyright

Epigraph

"We want to be loved; failing that, admired; failing that, feared; failing that, hated and despised. At all costs we want to stir up some sort of feeling in others. Our soul abhors a vacuum. At all costs it longs for contact."

Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas

At the abyss

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

It was just after noon. His parents wanted to "settle up", at least that's what they called it. Settle up. As always on Sundays, usually after lunch without dessert. Outside life pulsed on a cloudless late summer day, while his mother fetched her spiral calendar from the bedroom. In it were entered the sums of money she received from his father, which he had to sign week by week.

On her way back she glanced uneasily through the door peephole for seconds. She entered the kitchen, closed the door, and made sure the door to the living room was also closed. Now they were undisturbed. No neighbor bordered this room, except for the hard-of-hearing pensioner in her one-room apartment one floor below.

At the angular table next to the window overlooking the gray apartment block across the street, his father was already sitting, digging a well-filled envelope out of his working bag, the cognac-brown leather riddled with cracks and breaks.

His mother's gaze was directed on his father, at times rigid, at times wandering and lingering. His father's gaze sank into the envelope, his lips moving imperceptibly, a thumb stroked over many bills. On the white, bare wall a pocketbook-sized bronze cross watched over everything, faded at the edges.

At the far end of the room, at the sink in the corner, stood an eight-year-old boy. Nearsighted and without glasses, not lost in thought as usual but attentive. He knew the ritual and was afraid. Usually he was sent out but for some reason not this time. Maybe he had just been forgotten, overlooked at the sink where the dishes from lunch were piled up. They had eaten blood and liver sausages with jacket potatoes and Brussels sprouts, a favorite dish of his father. The little one had been persistently urged to eat up but had not done so, not quite.

His father held out the envelope with a bundle of large and small bills to his mother. Hastily she took the envelope with one hand to take out the money with the other and put it on the table in front of her. Nimbly she moistened her right thumb with the tip of her tongue and began to count. One bill at a time. Her gaze clung to it with concentration as if she were boning a fish. Finished counting, all over again: Bill after bill after bill. A deep breath. A sigh. She mumbled a sum looking at her husband in disbelief.

"Is that all?" she muttered distrustful.

Silence.

Now again, each word of hers drawn out, "I ask you, is that all?"

"Yes, that's all. That's all it was this time," his father answered steadfastly, slightly annoyed, without avoiding her gaze. She calculated in detail how much money he should have received based on the miles he had driven and on the last expense report.

"What can I say? I have to eat and drink, I don't live on air alone. It's not possible yet."

His mother's eyes narrowed, searching in those of his father, knowing but not finding. Something didn't seem right for her. Again that silence in this room. After a blink she abruptly smiled - like the corners of her mouth pulled up on strings, while her eyes continued to stare, unaffected. Suddenly she seemed amused, almost relaxed.

"You don't need to grin like that," he grumbled. That didn't seem to distract her in any way. His parents glared at each other.

"You know exactly what I'm talking about. Tell me where all the money went, please, right now. Right now!"

Her expression had darkened again, branched wrinkles on her forehead, the corners of her mouth dropped low.

"You're dreaming, woman. That's all there is to it. I can't do magic," his father insisted. I. Can't. Do. Magic.

The mood between them was charged like puffy dark cluster clouds before a summer thunderstorm.

Silence.

"You whoremonger!" she screamed all at once.

A fine spray shot out of her mouth, illuminated by the sunlight in the background, and drifted over to her husband.

The boy in the corner winced, his heart seemed to stop for never-ending seconds.

"What am I?" his father countered slowly, more threatening than questioning. "What do you call me? Keep it up, woman."

"I know exactly what you're up to. You can't fool me! What whore are you feeding with all that money?" she added hysterically.

"Which whore am I supposed to feed? What is it with you and whores all the time? There are no whores."

"There were whores and there are whores! Many! There must be many."

"Then prove it to me. Where is the proof?" Demandingly his father raised his hands, palms up, asserting his innocence.

"I have proof and I'm going to get you. You'll be surprised. I'm going to hire a detective. Soon."

"You just watch it. I'm not your slave after all! Someday I'll be gone. I won't be watching this for long."

"What won't you be watching for long? How I sit here day in and day out in this apartment while you're out in the wide world doing God knows what?"

"Nobody made you do it, woman."

Then her fist thundered on the table. In a reflex the boy banged against the sink, making the dishes clink. She looked there briefly and spotted him, pressed against the sink, his hands instinctively held in front of his head. Quickly she was with him, pushing him out the kitchen door and sending him into his small room, while she cast searching glances out the peephole, one eye squinted shut, the other wide open, staring out as if she had just caught someone in the act.

The boy couldn't help but open his nursery door as soon as he heard the kitchen door close again. What happened next? Even if he suspected it, he was still feverish every time anew. Because it was about his parents. Because it was about his life. Because everything was at stake. The danger of separation increased with the volume of their arguments, with the shrillness or depth of their voices, with the spitefulness and determination of their tone. Sometimes he was afraid that one of them might kill the other, that a spark might detonate something that had been built-up long and deep, that was capable of destroying everything around it in a flash. If only it would be ignited.

Sometimes when they became quieter again in between, he went to the kitchen door and listened right in front of it, only to immediately turn back to the nursery when the voices rose again. The intensity of their conflicts had increased lately, his mother's hysterical screaming countered by his father's deep rumbling.

The little one closed the door and sat down on his bed. And cried sobbing bitterly, as frequently before, his face buried in his hands. And prayed that this time once more everything would be all right, just this once. Please. The fear of what might happen otherwise choked him, almost strangled him, so that he had to struggle for breath. Eventually his crying turned into whimpering. At some point the whimpering quieted and he tipped over onto the bed. And no one came to comfort him.

He fell asleep out of exhaustion, and because there was nothing else that seemed to make any sense.

It was autumn and the days were noticeably shorter. One Sunday his parents decided to do something unusual: Go out to eat together. This gave the little one hope as did the increasing silence in the apartment. Silence and quarrel. Ebb and flow. Silence now spread between his parents again. Fortunately. Silence was better than shouting and rumbling. And outside a warming sea of brightly colored treetops beckoned.

The preparations for departure went smoothly, his parents were in a trance. Their soundless paths through the rooms seemed to be guided as if by an invisible hand so that they did not get in each other's way.

For the obligatory shave his forty-nine-year-old father lined up martially in front of the mirror cabinet in the bathroom, one foot placed confidently on the edge of the bathtub, toes clinging to it like a hawk to a branch. Swiftly he soaped his face beyond recognition with a shaggy brush, pressing his lips tightly together almost in disgust. His green eyes kept looking skeptically scrutinizing away from his beard to his thick black hair, his head nodding and turning, a jeweler over a high carat could hardly have been more focused. In the end he smacked slap-like aftershave into his stubble-free face as he surveyed the result benevolently but not free of doubt, swaying his head around with an unsteady look. The smacking of the aftershave on his father's skin served as a wake-up call for the little one in the flow of preparations for departure.

Most of the time, however, his father spent waiting for his wife. While the television mumbled or the newspaper rustled, he repeatedly sounded from the living room, "How much longer will it take?" or "Can you please take it up a notch?" He usually did not receive an answer to such inquiries. Every now and then he became aware of this and anger rose in him. When he then asked impatiently "Don't I deserve an answer?", an annoyed, appeasing "No" always came back, drawn out, just like you would turn away a dog that was wagging its tail and setting its sights on a piece of cake.

His fifty-three-year-old mother had her own rhythm, unexcited but not really relaxed. Her session in front of the tilting magnifying mirror in the kitchen was not concluded until all pores were clean enough. Single strands of her red hair, shoulder-length and slightly wavy, could always dangle disturbingly into her field of vision and were pushed behind the ear with a sigh. Immediately her large, brown eyes popped back out searching for skin blemishes or eyebrow hairs that dared to dance out of the narrow lines. The tension his mother showed was a mystery to the little one from the start, as he already couldn't understand the purpose of the activity. Still he preferred it to the hairspray orgies that were held in the bathroom just before they left. Firing off one spray after another she fiddled around on her head until a frizzy red helmet manifested itself at the end, able to withstand any wind just as promised in the advertisement. Nauseating spicy smell permeated throughout the apartment, cough-inducing, as if an airplane had accidentally dropped a load of pesticide over the building instead of a cornfield as intended. The little one regularly got dizzy from the smell, which is why the persistent hissing of the spray had become a warning signal for him early in his life. When it sounded, the nursery door had to be closed immediately and conscientiously.

At some point his parents stood at the apartment door taciturnly side by side. She, of average height and figure, was dressed in a dark blue suit with a white blouse. He, not much taller than she was, but strikingly broad-shouldered and muscular beneath the silken surface of his burgundy shirt. The beige cotton pants fell loosely over his favorite beige shoes with the thick heels that his wife, in absent-minded moments, referred to as "high heels". This could leave him grumpy for several minutes. He then expressed his concern that this term might slip out of her mouth in the company of others and it might make the rounds that he would like to wear high heels. When his wife's soothing words failed to convince him, as they often did, he strode over to the bar in the living room closet and cooled his nerves with a shot of brandy.

During final touches at the front door his mother paused briefly. Was anything else missing? Did they have everything with them? Money, keys, handbag? Then an impulse ran through her. She opened the door to the nursery and pulled the little one out of his daydreams into which he had slipped while waiting. He winced as the door snapped open, inhaling deeply, and took a few moments to regain full consciousness.

The trip could begin.

As usual the drive to the restaurant took them into the surrounding countryside, out of the working-class district, from the outskirts of the city into the green of the Rhenish hills and forests. They liked the anonymity among the day-trippers far from apartment blocks and familiar neighbors.

For this trip they took their car of a noble brand, which his father had bought second-hand in a night-and-fog action. This vehicle, felt three to seven yards large, stood angular and sky-blue lined up next to all the other cars in the neighborhood, the Volkswagens and Fords, the Fiats and Renaults. None of them had any quality, his father said. On the day of the purchase there was a heated argument between his parents, but the car, of which his father was rock-solidly convinced, was finally kept and soon received the nickname "Rocky". With this purchase he had "asserted" himself as his father emphasized from time to time with a lot of self-confidence.

His mother, who didn't get her driver's license until she was in her mid-thirties, seemed to hate the car from the minute she saw it. It was she who had to do most of the shopping alone, while her husband, as she liked to smugly put it, "just sits on his butt and drives around in the beautiful, wide world".

During their drives around town his mother sat behind the steering wheel leaning slightly forward in high concentration, clinging to it, her hands textbook "ten to two". With eyes wide open she steered the cumbersome hulk around the curves. Parking could become a matter of inches, only to discover time and again that a parking space was too small or that a car door couldn’t be opened far enough to get out without hindrance or damage. If she had to get on the highway, she would drive on the far right, barely over sixty miles per hour, and steadfastly avoided overtaking, especially trucks. And because of the quickly soiling sky blue she became a regular customer at the car wash on the way to the supermarket. The little one did not have a problem with it, on the contrary, he liked to stay alone in the car and watch the powerful, automated scrubbing and wiping in amazement from the inside.

Soon not only his father but also other residents of the settlement took a liking to the car. One day something was missing from it: The star that had crowned the hood at the front. Simply broken off. Stolen! That can happen, his father believed, and bought a new one. A few weeks later: Gone again! His father bought another star, but began to spend more time than usual on the bedroom balcony, especially in the evening. This overlooked that side of the parking lot where his car stood. The only problem was: Because his father was not at home most of the time on weekdays and often had to sleep off-site, he missed the thief on his third coup.

As little as his father had let show until then, he escalated when he came home one Saturday and heard the news exhausted from the work week: "If I catch him, I'll kill him! I'll kill him! He won't know left from right anymore! What a pig! What a cursed pig!" His mother tried to calm him down, which though as usual increased his rage even more. Puffing heavily he hurried into the living room to the bar in the cupboard, grabbed a bottle by the neck and choked down cognac greedily gulping and bubbling, unlike usual. His father had stylish, bellied cognac glasses in which he used to swivel and admire the alcohol before downing it like a heron downing a tadpole, followed by a long, contented sigh. When his mother turned away from this unfamiliar sight, she only smirked and shook her head almost imperceptibly as if to say, "That's what you get for your posh car."

No sooner had the anger faded, than his father had already devised an insidious plan. He bought a fourth, a "very last" star, before his vacation. As bait. He placed a chair on the balcony, put binoculars next to it, and laid in wait for three weeks night after night. He wanted to catch the perpetrator in the act, preferably seize him immediately and "take care of him". He had everything he needed for that. In his occasional almost instantaneous flare-up of anger, he could be as quick as lightning and as strong as a bear at the same time, so intimidating and breaking down resistance that, having reached his target, he could quickly let go of the underdog, saving his strength and turning away without so much as a glance. On special occasions in cheerful company he could recount in a nostalgic mood the situations in which he had already successfully made use of this skill. A skill he had acquired in his childhood in the countryside by observing animals sometimes even for hours.

Physical skills also played a role in his father's career. Before he started working for a specialty chemicals company in the Rhineland, transporting dangerous goods across Western Europe by delivery truck, he had worked in construction for a long time, during which he had "constructed" a respectable body - anyone who would underestimate him in a fight because of his height could make the biggest mistake of his life.

The surveillance action was immediately noticed by the boy. His nursery window looked directly onto the balcony where his father sat in the dark. If he pulled the curtain aside a bit, he could see him and follow the almost rhythmic proceedings. A sip of the beer, which was placed back on the wine-red floor tiles with a brief clink. A grab for the binoculars and a careful peek down from the third floor at the unmistakable "Rocky". Glances over to the neighboring apartment block, sometimes shorter, sometimes a little longer, depending on whose not-hidden-by-a-curtain life had something worth seeing going on at the moment. His father seemed to have a better evening's entertainment on the balcony than his mother in the living room watching the latest episode of "The Black Forest Clinic".

At the latest when the hustle and bustle in the apartment block opposite slowly came to a standstill or the questioning, admonishing singsong of his wife from the bedroom gnawed too much on his nerves ("Don't be so stupid!", "Come on in!" or "What's the matter with you?"), he gave up torn back and forth and reluctantly went to sleep.

Eventually the fourth star disappeared overnight.

His father gave up and placed a nice white fur on the rear shelf to compensate for it. He said in swiftly regained self-assurance that no one would notice the absence of the star anyway, which was probably true. In the end perhaps only those directly involved, the family and the thief, knew that four stars had gone missing from this street named after a commander.

This did not shake the general interest in the car anyway. When a hubcap was suddenly absent on the front left, his father didn't say a word about it. Not a single word. He pressed his lips together, pushed his lower jaw stubbornly forward while at the same time lowering the corners of his mouth, and blushed. Taciturnly and breathing heavily he stood for a while at the open cupboard bar in the living room. Between gulps he muttered the words "spare parts store" only once, shaking his head.

The fuss around the car went into the next round. The missing hubcap was replaced, all four were secured as inconspicuously as possible by an ingenious construction of transparent cable ties, and furthermore it was meticulously thought through whether anything else on this car might run the risk of involuntarily changing hands in the future. His father could no longer be carefree about this anyway.

On the way to the restaurant there was silence in the car. The little one hated car riding when it took a long time. He got dizzy, nauseous, and in the worst case vomiting. On the way to his father's family, who owned a vineyard near the Luxembourg border, a regular stop had to be made for him.

Even worse was bus travel, not local transport but large buses on which his school class went on excursions.

Incautiously on the first of these excursions he thought he could sit carefree in the back of the bus with his classmates, farthest away from the teachers, where it swayed and shook the most during the ride. In all the joyful distraction and excitement of eating and drinking, the nausea came over him so quickly and unopposed that he could only register his vomiting in a half-dazed yet utterly shocked state, as well as the acrid stench that spread around the room from the seatback in front of him, or the disgusted reactions of the other kids. And as if it wasn't bad enough, the class teacher spiced up this stew of impressions with a good pinch of hustle and bustle.

The horrific incident taught him a lesson and fear became a constant companion. From now on he sat in the very front on school trips and was busy reacting to any sign of dizziness or nausea in his fight against vomiting. Inhaling deeply, exhaling deeply, the horror of the profoundly disgusting - that could cause a stir and humiliate him in not just one way - breathing down his neck.

While others talked or laughed, he counted the minutes until arrival, trying to stay focused in the wrestling match raging in his head and guts, distracting himself with the scenery despite his nearsightedness.

Winding country roads could seem particularly treacherous. However, when switchbacks came into view winding up a slope, a kind of mortal fear began to squeeze his throat sweat-inducing. Suddenly what had been laboriously achieved unnoticed by the others, seemed to be on the brink again, about to give way to the unbearable again. And already were his shaky fingers groping in the backpack for the freezer bag with the sandwiches, to bring them to safety and to remain in reassuring contact with the empty freezer bag. For whatever was to come.

At the destination of a class day trip many pupils got happily and curiously outside, looking downright rested. The little one, pale, almost greenish in the face, felt as if he had been put through a meat grinder, happy and a little proud when he had once again made it through the trip without vomiting. As he took his steps down the stairs to get outside, he was as wobbly on his feet as a newborn calf. But unfortunately all his relief soon gave way to the awareness that he had to get back. On the bus. And so "after the nausea" was, as it were, "before the nausea". Beautiful views.

The restaurant his parents were heading for this Sunday was fortunately barely fifteen minutes away by car. That was just enough for mild dizziness to set in, not worth mentioning. It was one of those typical country inns with a large gravel parking lot and an attraction or two for guests. In this case it was a bowling alley in the basement. At least that's what was advertised. The boy, accompanied by his parents, had not yet seen it.

He sat in the back seat behind his mother as always, watching his father steer with the nonchalance of a professional driver. Their eyes never met in the rearview mirror. The only sound during the drive was the gentle humming of the engine. No voices. No radio. No music. Only three times speechlessness. Lifelessness. And at the finish the crackling and pattering of gravel under the tires, rubber on stone, which the little one particularly liked.

For Sunday walks, which usually lasted not much longer than an hour, his parents preferred three to four well acquainted routes on paved, well frequented paths. That day was different.

They trotted side by side along an idyllic forest path chatting excitedly. When someone approached them from time to time, the irritable back and forth briefly fell silent. The little one sometimes left the path when nature caught his attention. Mostly he walked behind them, sometimes farther, then again closer, repelled by the coldness and hostility in their voices and sentences, then again attracted because of anxious curiosity aroused by the quarrel of the two most important people in his life. He could not escape their alternately threatening and grief-stricken voices.

It was about Aunt Natasha, his mother's younger and prettier sister.

"Are you having an affair with her or not?"

His father denied and added, "How long do I have to listen to that? What do you want me to tell you? Do you want me to say that there's something there? All right, then I have something with her! Are you happy now? This can't go on, woman."