Cafe Babanussa (14 page)

“Ruby, I'll do no such thing. I'm taking you away for a while.”

The next thing she knew they were racing through the night in a taxi. Ruby thought they had crossed over to the East and that Werner was going to trade her for some spy on the Glienicke Bridge. Then came the glare of an office and a man in a white coat pulling down her pants to put a syringe in her ass. Within an hour her brain was on lockdown. They took a taxi home and she stared morosely out the window, her hand in Werner's. At home she could still feel the lockdown closing in on her like a vise as she sat trembling quietly at the kitchen table.

R
UBY SLIPPED OFF HER CLOTHES AND WATCHED AS
they fell to the floor. She let the cloud-coloured hospital gown unfold its worn cotton threads slowly over the tan curves of her breasts, her belly, then her hips. She sat down on the edge of the bed, bending over to feel if there were any straps hiding underneath. Curling up into a ball on the crisp sheets, she frowned at her ashen kneecaps. She thought of how her grandmother would have disapproved of their greyness and would have scolded her father for not teaching her how to lighten them up with the juice and rind of a lemon. In her mind she cradled this vision of her grandmother and her father, letting their comfortable sepia images rock her back and forth in sleep's lullaby.

Ruby woke with a start. She heard words hurtling out into the night, then a rush of feet stampeding off in the direction of the distressed voice. Then silence. The vastness of it engulfed her. She had dreamed about the faceless man again, but this time he actually raped her. There was something about
his voice that seemed vaguely familiar. She tried to sit up, to escape it, but her body kept shaking violently. She began plummeting down a tunnel of darkness. She tried to still her frantic hands long enough to grab on to the rails of her bed. If she held on, maybe she could stop this sudden, mad descent. But she felt her spirit seeping away, leaving her bones and flesh wide open for the demons. In they came, piercing and penetrating what was left of her. A thousand different faces from her past erupted into her brain and just as quickly as they appeared, eyes that had laughed with her, lips that had kissed her, arms that had held her became disfigured. Ruby watched in horror as the flurry of faces flashing before her transformed into one massive heap of rotting flesh on the floor by her bed.

Then she saw his feet. Brown shoes, perfectly shined. Clad in a pale doctor's gown, Werner approached steadily. Ruby stared at his feet, transfixed.

Werner began to whisper. He swung an iron swastika tauntingly in his hand, its points sharpened like daggers. Ruby began screaming silently into her pillow, her arms pummelling the sides of the mattress. Her chest was heaving furiously; the air was being choked out of her lungs. In a low, halting groan she begged, “Go away, go away and leave me alone. Please,” but his cold breath closed around her.

Rat a tat tat tat tat tat tat!
Ruby thrashed free of Werner's hold. Hanging on to the bed rails as tightly as she could, she listened for this sound that played insistently on the edge of her mind.
Rat a tat, rat a tat, tat tat tat!
Her right hand loosened its grip and slammed against the wall in response.
Rat a
tat tat, rat tat tat, ta ta ta tat!
She heard the door to her room fling open and a shaft of angry light bathed the wall where her hand was drumming ferociously.

“Frau Edwards!
Was machen Sie bloss?
What on earth are you doing?”

Footsteps neared the bed. Ruby felt a hand on her back, cold breath on her shoulder. Whirling to push the white blur away from her with all her might, she screamed, “Go awaaaaaay!” It went crashing to the floor. More footsteps thundered down the hall. Voices hissed like vipers. Ruby felt herself being shoved back down on the bed. She listened desperately for the sound of the drums. Instead all she heard was a voice yelling, “Give her the goddamn needle!”

Ruby wound her body up into a tight ball, and the doctor twisted her arm flat against the mattress. She waited for the steel to bite her flesh; she waited for blackness to come.

When she woke, she could feel the rays of morning sun streaking down her back. Rolling over to look out the window, she felt as if lead weights were attached to every muscle, every bone. With a slow, sickening realization, Ruby recalled the scenes from the previous night. She tugged hold of her pillow and crushed it against her body. Tears spilled over her face; anguish surged with every breath she expelled. When no more tears came, the cool silence of the room lapped over her.

It was not the first time Werner had tormented her in her visions. But she didn't want to think about him. She couldn't
dig down below the surface. So she thought about the drums. She remembered how days before her hospitalization she had spent a whole day hallucinating that she was travelling across other continents. As soon as she had stepped out of bed that morning, she found herself thinking,
If it's six a.m. here, it'll be around midnight in Brazil
. She mumbled the words repeatedly to herself, until she had willed herself into the heart of Bahia. Her feet shuffled around the apartment to a samba beat. All day long she hummed what Portuguese words she remembered from all the bossa nova songs her mom had played when they were children. Werner tried to shut her up, pleaded with her to lie down and rest. He finally gave up, conceding that her antics were harmless, even if they irritated him to no end.

In the evening, she had looked out her fifth-storey window to find the air blackened with the buzz of insects. Bees, scorpions, flies, giant moths clamoured against the screen, wings flapping in a wild symphony. The buzz droned louder and louder in her head. Words fluttered in her ear.
Africa. The whole world will return here
. The flapping transformed into a steady drumbeat. Dark bodies swayed around orange firelight. Propelled by the rhythms, Ruby whirled around the room. Flinging her head from side to side, thrusting her arms out in front of her, she stamped her feet on the floor.

Someone coughed. Ruby realized she was no longer alone in the room. A woman with greying hair and a wrinkled forehead lay on the bed next to the wall, staring sullenly at the ceiling. Ruby wondered if she had been there during the night.
The woman glared back. Words percolated out of her thin mouth, hot and angry.

“Was guckst du denn so an?” What are you staring at?

The word
du
hit Ruby like a slap in the face. It was unusual for an older woman, a total stranger, to speak to her in this informal, familiar way. She got up to use the washroom.

She sat on the toilet, her legs spread wide, and watched the stream of warm, yellow liquid form a puddle on the platform inside the white bowl. She giggled at this Germanic need to inspect every aspect of their lives, inventing thrones for their shit and piss to rest on. All in order to check out its size, colour, texture. Werner bemoaned the toilets he had seen elsewhere. Of course the German toilets were superior!

Thinking of him, she dipped her fingers into her steaming excrement and brought the brown filth to her lips.

Someone pounded on the door. “
Beeilen Sie sich, bitte
. Hurry up! You're not the only one in here.”

Ruby jumped off the seat with a start. Shaking, she slashed an arm across her mouth, wiping the shit from her lips onto her wrist. She turned on the taps, spat into the sink and let hot water stream over her hands.

The pounding started again.

“Okay, okay, I'm coming out!” she hollered.

When she opened the door, the woman brushed by her without a word and slammed the door shut. Ruby looked at her shaking hands, hands that no longer belonged to her. She flattened herself down on the mattress and pressed her hands under her body to still them.

She convinced herself that she almost felt safe. At least here her movements could be confined. At least here she couldn't step out into a street, oblivious to the screeching cars around her. Only one thought continued to stalk her. The words to frame it slipped backwards off her tongue, tumbling down her throat to toss in her stomach until they were carried out of her body again.
Home
.

Would she ever go home again?

Metal carts rattled down the hall. An aide came in and handed her a tray of breakfast. As Ruby balanced it carefully on her lap, she heard the aide call her roommate's name gently.

“Frau Elke Jungblut,
Ihr Frühstück ist da
.”
Your breakfast is here
.

“Ich will es nicht”
came the voice from the bathroom.
I don't want it!

The aide persisted. “You have to eat something.”

“I said I don't want it!”

The aide shrugged and left the tray on the night table before leaving the room. Elke opened the bathroom door and peeked out. Seeing only Ruby in the room, she slumped down on her bed, ignoring the tray.

Ruby slapped the cheese and wurst on a piece of bread and chewed noisily on the rubbery bits. When she was finished, she sucked at the seeds from the grainy bread that had stuck between her teeth.

Frau Jungblut snapped: “Didn't anyone ever teach you any manners? Cover your mouth with your napkin when you do that!”

A jet of anger shot up out of the white nothingness that enveloped Ruby like a blanket. “This isn't exactly Café Kranzler.” The hunched old women that filled the Ku'damm
Kaffeehaus
on Sunday afternoons flashed before her. Carefully slipping forkfuls of Herrentorte into their mouths, taking tiny sips of coffee, blotting their lips with folded cotton napkins, they reminisced about the good old days before the Wall, before Willy Brandt, before the Turks.

Frau Jungblut's voice burst through the flow of images: “Why, you rude thing, you. Just who do you think you are? You're not German. What are you doing here anyway? All you people, stealing from us, using up our money, our resources. Why don't you go home!”

Ruby looked at the woman lying in the bed next to hers and wondered where she had been during the war. She snarled. “Ach. You're so right. This place should really be reserved for Germans only.”

The ferocity of Ruby's words stunned the old woman. She sputtered, “Well, well . . . I didn't ask to be here, my husband put me here. I didn't ask to come here.”

Storm clouds closed in on Ruby again. She shoved the tray and sent it crashing to the floor. When someone came to clean up the mess, Ruby laughed at their tsk-tsking. A nurse came with more pills.

People floated in and out of the room, holding clipboards, jotting notes, whispering secrets to each other. Ruby closed her eyes and let the waves of darkness roll over her. Night came early.

Werner had taken her away to Corsica after Dom's death. But she hadn't gotten better. Every day they trudged for an hour up the dusty road. The yellow and orange flashes of the fruit trees interrupted the monotony of the dirty brown September hills, the craggy bushes that marked their way. She was careful to watch out for the scorpions that seemed to dart out from under every rock. At the village market, she picked over grapes and oranges. Her fingers finally rested on fresh figs, bursting with juice and seeds, to bring home. She smiled at Werner and thought he knew. They filled their baskets with lemons still graced with their dark shiny leaves, artichokes, olives, bread and cheese. And figs. She hummed an early Ella tune on the way back down the mountain. It was part of a collection of her father's old jazz 78s. Werner knew the song: it wasn't too highbrow for him. As he chirped along with her, she smiled and held his hand tightly.

That night the owner of the house they rented brought them wild boar. On his way up the path, Ruby saw him stop to pull fresh bay leaves from the laurel tree that shaded the courtyard. He showed them how to cook it the Corsican way. Wine, garlic and bay leaves, braised slowly in the oven. A celebratory feast. Ruby smiled at him and lifted her glass of wine to her lips.

She left the men and wandered out into the dusk, staring at the stars blinking in the early night sky. The pungent smell of eucalyptus filled her nostrils. It all smelled so new, so clean. She pressed a hand into her belly and thought, “Daughter of the southern stars.”

Those late-September days were filled with dark clouds that burst across the skies, crowding out the sun momentarily. She missed their drama when they returned to Berlin ten days later. The city was a blanket of grey. Werner called her sister and asked her to come. She heard him whisper, “It didn't help. She's not getting any better.”

Ruby spent days staring out the window, waiting for her sister to arrive, waiting to be admitted to hospital. Four flights up, on the other side of the courtyard, she watched her neighbour knotting the muslin curtains that hung in her windows. Two knots hanging in the window. Ruby pressed her hand into her tummy, feeling around for life. “Twins,” she whispered to herself.

That afternoon, she lay on the bed, fighting to keep the voices out of her head. They were getting louder and louder and she couldn't hide from them anymore. Werner turned on the vacuum. He pushed the machine all around her, zigzagging over the floor by her feet. Suddenly she felt the air-sucking nozzle buzz up between her legs. Then it was inside her, shoving, sucking, shoving, sucking. One fetus after another being ripped right out of her.

“No!” she screamed. “No!”

She ran over to yank the cord from the outlet. But it was too late. She saw the blood streaming down her legs. She grabbed a T-shirt from the dresser to wipe off the blood and plug up her vagina so that nothing more would come out. But when she wiped the inside of her thighs, there was nothing. Nothing. Werner stood shaking in the middle of the room,
still holding on to the nozzle. He let it drop with a thud on the floor and came over to where she stood. She screamed at him to get away. He stomped out of the room. She could hear him picking up the phone in the hallway, dialing. He had betrayed her. Yes, he had told her that he wouldn't bring children into this godawful world, but she thought all that had changed. After all, he had sung the song with her. He knew. She crumpled up on the bed and wailed. Half an hour later they were in a cab, racing through the city. Another needle.

Ruby opened her eyes. Cold sweat dripped off her body onto the sheets. She was shivering. She looked at the clock. Seven a.m. A young woman, dark hair flying about her face, burst into the room. She surveyed the cold, rectangular space with a disdainful eye. It was as if she knew the place well and wanted to be sure she had the best room possible. She stepped back out into the hall, talking loudly in a language Ruby had never heard before. Every so often a turn of phrase caught her ears, lilting with the sounds of something vaguely French, vaguely Spanish. When she returned to the room, the woman was dragging an enormous suitcase, ragged and bulging at the sides. Two other women lingered in the doorway, saying goodbye to her. Ruby looked in amazement at the suitcase, its tan leather streaked with wear, and somehow felt naked. She had brought so little with her.