Lanceheim (2 page)

The paw that was pointing at the desk was now aimed right at the doctor's face.

“Do you think,” roared Father, “that you have the right to reduce a punishment that our almighty Magnus has pronounced? Do you think perhaps…that you are the equal of Magnus?”

The doctor finally realized what he was up against. Reuben looked down at the floor and put his fins over his ears. He did not want to hear. It could hurt as much as it wanted.

“Drexler's syndrome,” said Margot Swan to the old composer, who again refused to lift his gaze from the floor, “is a disease around which I have devoted the greater part of my life to doing research. Drexler's syndrome means that the hair cells in the ear die without apparent reason. The course of the disease is often very…aggressive. Sometimes it only affects hair cells, sometimes the hair cells are only the beginning.”

I prefer pain, thought Reuben, I prefer pain to this. And he got up and left Father and the doctor in the examining room. He sat down on one of the chairs in the waiting
room, where he could still hear Father telling off the blasphemous doctor, and there and then he decided never to return to a hospital again. Fifteen minutes later Father came out of the consultation room. His cheeks were red, his eyes were large, and he was breathing heavily.

“Now we're leaving,” he said triumphantly.

Reuben did not recall how they managed to find their way out.

“You have Drexler's syndrome,” said Margot Swan. “As I said earlier, there is of course a slight possibility that I am mistaken, which is why we are continuing to take samples, but…I advise you to read as much as you can about the disease before the next time we meet, then I will try to answer any questions you have. Judging by what I see today—and once again, more is required to determine this beyond all doubt, but from what I know at this point—it's a matter of about three weeks. Then your hearing is going to…be extremely limited, if not…”

Reuben Walrus did not know what Margot Swan was talking about. He could not for the life of him recall the name of the syndrome. And he would not recall how he managed to find his way out of the hospital this time either.

S
traight out I will confess, at the risk of making myself more ridiculous than I ought to, that the tip of my pen does not even quiver when I describe my cubhood as an idyll. That is how I recall it, as a long series of uneventful days in the secure community that was Das Vorschutz, a few kilometers outside Lanceheim's eastern city limits. Before I begin tiring the reader with recollections from those days of happiness, I will only assure you that I am familiar with many of the well-trodden paths on which I now embark. Humility—hindsight's faithful squire—taps me on the shoulder and reminds me of the hundreds of capably authored depictions of cubbish delight, of the joy and excitement of discovery. I do not wish to promote myself at anyone else's expense, but because the surroundings of my cubhood happen to coincide with his, I am of the opinion that this will nonetheless be of some general interest. So, I beg you, put up with the following pages; they will later prove to be significant.

 

My family and I
lived in a forest glade that had been cleared many generations ago just for us, for our profession, and for our kind. On soil that was soft as moss, fertile from humus, and carefully tended by expert and sensitive paws, five timbered two-story houses had been built in a perfect circle: large buildings that seemed to be growing up under their straw roofs. These were dwellings of dark, hewn lumber, just as broad as they were tall. The houses surrounded a round lawn where I played ball for the first time, where I split a seam for the first time, and where I fell in love for the first time.

Every beaver that is delivered to Mollisan Town is invited, when he or she reaches that age, to become one of the forest guards in Das Vorschutz. Many are thereby called, but few are chosen. At the time when I was growing up, the tamers of the great forest were named Hans Beaver, Jonas Beaver, Anders Beaver, Sven Beaver, and Karl Beaver. Each one of them had taken a bird as a wife, and to this day I do not know whether that was only by chance.

My father, Karl, was responsible for the trees. He was a hard gnawer who would rather punish than woo and who sought companionship with his colleagues rather than with his family. My mother was a dreamer, a nightingale, the charming Carolyn. She lived in a world of her own; I think it became more wonderful with each passing year. When she was not at the school or in the kitchen, she spent most of her time in a small room on the upper floor where she sewed curtains and coverings for the couch and armchair from the same rough, white cotton cloth where pink hollyhocks grew and blossomed. She sat at her desk and looked out the window at the massive trees that, ancient and wise, rose up around the glade and protected us from the sun and rain. During the Evening Storm their dense crowns sang to
us, and in the breeze during the day the leaves whispered a song whose melody Mother knew.

When Father showed up down in the glade, Mother quickly got up and hurried down to the kitchen to prepare dinner. I kept to the lower floor, in the living room or at the kitchen table, where I sat reading my books. In passing, Mother mumbled the same thing every day.

“Today I know that Papa is going to like the food.”

But not one single time did I hear Father comment on Mother's cooking.

I loved Mother's fragile smile and her beautiful voice, and there was nothing I wanted more than to protect and take care of her. She might look at me with a questioning expression, as if she wondered for a moment who I was, before her gaze was veiled again and she withdrew back into her own, inner life. She taught me not to exaggerate the significance of the gestures, words, and expressions that a female shows the world; it is what goes on in her soul that is decisive.

And what did I really think of my father?

I realize that in the above description observant readers may detect a certain antipathy between the lines. The reply to the question just posed is that there were occasions when Father's impulsiveness and aggression coincided in the perfect, cross-ruled system of coordinates that was his spiritual life, and then he was a stuffed animal that you were compelled to fear. Nonetheless I loved him and admired him as if he were the wisest, most remarkable stuffed animal in all of Mollisan Town. For to get an appreciative glance from Father, I was prepared to climb up in the beech tree at Heimat without a ladder or run naked through the thistle field east of Pal's Ravine. Naturally Father would have punished me severely if I had done either of these foolish pranks. He was an animal who set scientific reason and religious veneration above all; he viewed everything else with skepticism.

 

That the trees fell
to my father Karl Beaver's lot was completely natural to all who knew him. His character was easy to compare to a tree's: tough and ancient, but strong and confident of victory. The few times when I was growing up that Father showed a sensitive, verging on raw, side were when he was forced to fell any of his stately friends, for he knew them all as individuals. If he had shown me or Mother the same consideration, he would have—according to Father's way of seeing things—betrayed himself and revealed a weakness that a model father ought not to show an impressionable son.

He would leave us early in the morning, along with the other beavers, and did not come home until dinnertime. He participated in all the ceremonies and activities that were part of our isolated miniature society in Das Vorschutz, and he defended us all. I am certain that he would have sacrificed his life to save me or Mother if it had been needed. But at the same time—if a paradox may be permitted—he would have saved us for his own sake.

Does this make him a better or a worse stuffed animal?

I would prefer to leave that unsaid.

My father, the daring Karl Beaver, if he had had the opportunity to consider and judge my life, would have brooded a great deal. Now it will soon be five years since the red pickup fetched him, and in many respects he remains a mystery to me, just as I would grow up to be a mystery to him.

Oh well, genuine love allows mysteries to remain unsolved. This I have learned from Maximilian, and this I have learned from love itself.

 

The first six years
of my life I spent in Das Vorschutz. I never left our securely staked-out part of the massive forest; there was no reason to. Hans Beaver and his Olga Woodpecker
and Anders Beaver and Bluebird Niklasson had each had a cub of their own delivered the same year I myself arrived with the green pickup. Together with my same-age companions Weasel Tukovsky and Buzzard Jones, I kept myself occupied from early in the morning until late in the evening.

This self-imposed isolation, encouraged and upheld by the grown-ups in Das Vorschutz, may seem strange to an outsider. Early in the morning or in the middle of the afternoon, it took less than an hour to get to the Star, the roundabout where the four avenues—rectilinear parade streets in each direction—meet in the middle of Mollisan Town, but we pretended not to notice. Without wanting to, we were part of a city that in every detail made claims to be more complete than our beloved forest. What was called civilization was, according to our way of seeing it, a single, gigantic life lie. How could stuffed animals close their eyes to the most fundamental of truths: that their ability to develop creation—I mean all the technical, medical, and psychological advances made during the last hundred years—could not be considered more than a youthful attempt in relation to Magnus's own creation?

The authorities left us alone.

The forest guards were managed by a division of the Environmental Ministry that was also responsible for roads and road maintenance. The ministry officials encouraged, even stirred up, our rebellious isolation. Perhaps this was simpler than the opposite? However it was, we were allowed to provide our own schooling as long as we adhered to the prevailing curriculum; a doctor came out to the forest glade once a month and attended to our physical health; and over and above grocery shopping and more infrequent clothes shopping, there was no real reason to set our claws and paws on the colorful asphalt of Mollisan Town.

When I was little, of course I didn't think about this. I lived the only life I knew, and I loved every second and
minute of it. How could it be anything other than an idyll? Buzzard, Weasel, and I took care to develop our personalities in different directions: We were laying the groundwork for our adult lives. Buzzard, aggressive and demanding, a challenger and a leader. Weasel, an admirer who accepted Buzzard's challenges and survived them, thanks to his unpredictable imagination. And finally me, the silent wolf, the observer whom the other two needed to be able to perform and accomplish, show off and go further.

 

The year we turned
seven, our days of play and voyages of discovery were almost imperceptibly transformed into school days. It was my mother, Carolyn Nightingale, who in her evasive, cautious manner shifted our youthful curiosity from Weasel's imaginary worlds to the subjects she chose. Our schoolhouse was at our home, in a room next to the first-floor dining room that I had hardly noticed until then. This room, we now discovered, had served through the decades as the Forest Cubs' classroom. A corresponding room in the home of Hans Beaver and Olga Woodpecker was used as the doctor's consultation room, while in the house where Jonas Beaver lived with his family, the same room was used for the weekly meetings of the forest guards.

My mother lured us to the classroom in the morning with apple tartlets she had made famous far up in north Lanceheim. The slightly salty dough in combination with the sweetness of the cinnamon and the acid fructose of the apples was a perfect taste experience, impossible to resist. In that way I always came to associate learning with the most obvious sort of physical satisfaction.

During the following three years, Mother began every school day by reading selected passages from the great classics to us. My memory is distinct. The odor of tar that came
in through the open window—it always smelled of tar from the wooden houses—and the aromas from my classmates' cotton bodies where they sat on the inherited benches. The taste of the tartlet on my tongue, Mother up at the lectern, and the massive blackboard behind her, which made her look smaller than she was. And the words that came out of her mouth. Some were too difficult for us, the plots of the books might fly high over our heads, but even then I enjoyed the sounds and the rhythm of Mother's voice.

Mother was in charge of the lessons in language, social studies, and mathematics. We did not devote ourselves to any other subjects those first years.

 

In third grade we
got two new teachers. Mother remained our main teacher and spent most of her time with us, but in addition Weasel's mother, Bluebird Niklasson, started teaching chemistry, physics, and biology. Eva Whippoorwill came to the classroom once a week to give us lessons in something that was called Physical Improvement. I was unexpectedly on the verge of a decisive awakening.

It happened during Eva Whippoorwill's first minutes in the classroom. She had told us to stand up, and with inquisitive looks she complained about our poor posture and substandard stuffing. In my whole body, along my back and down through my hind legs, along my upper arms in toward the armpits and above all in my chest, in my heart, a form of shaking began to take shape.

Of course I got scared. What was happening to me?

I looked down at my body and confirmed that, despite the fact that it felt as if all of me was a jackhammer in use, I stood steady and unmoving by my bench. How was this possible? The sweat broke out on my forehead at the same time as I felt dry in the mouth. I observed, without daring to turn my head, Eva Whippoorwill's slender, beautiful legs,
heard her admonitions, and blushed when I admired her ample chest area.

For the first time in my young life I was on the way to falling in love.

That the object of this storm of emotions—whose symptoms were mostly reminiscent of a serious case of stomach flu—was my almost thirty-years-older teacher meant that I was following in the footsteps of many young students. But this I knew nothing about, because I had not made it that far in the luxuriant flora of epic literature.

When Miss Whippoorwill was through with her inspection, we sat down again, and she then spent the hour expounding at the blackboard on the various groups of muscles that she promised to develop in us during the coming year. I read scarcely a word of what she wrote. All I saw was her graceful neck and the shimmering red nuances of her beautiful, slender beak.

The lump in my stomach sank deeper down in my body in a way that made me both nervous and jubilantly happy. The feeling was inexplicable, but when the lesson was over and Miss Whippoorwill left, I knew that I wanted to experience it again. I glanced furtively at Buzzard and Weasel to see if they realized what had happened—had they too been afflicted by this strange influenza? But they were on their way out the door as if this day was only another little cog in the perpetual motion machine that we still imagined life to be.

I took my time. My friends were not unaccustomed to Mother keeping me behind in the classroom a few hours after the end of school. She had no natural aptitude for doing dishes or cleaning, and I gladly helped out.

But not this day. I waited until I no longer heard my classmates, and then headed directly to the second floor. I knew exactly where I should go. From the windows in Mother and Father's bedroom you could see right into the upper
floor of Sven Beaver and Eva Whippoorwill's house; I had known that for a long time. Sven Beaver liked watching TV in the evening; Father despised the bluish glow from the neighbor's house. It disturbed him even when he closed the curtains.

I was breathing heavily and dry in the mouth when I came into the bedroom. I had a single thought in my head: Eva Whippoorwill. Despite the fact that I had seen Miss Whippoorwill almost every day since I was little, despite the fact that she and her husband ate dinner at our house once a month, she had been transformed during a few magic moments into someone else. I too was changed beyond recognition. It was only when Mother amiably asked what I wanted that I realized I was not alone in the room. Blushing with shame, I fled. The marvelous, painful fever of being in love had taken possession of me, and—it was wonderful.