Love and Hydrogen Read online

  He turned to me. “What about it, Vasovic?” he asked.

  The reporter, bushy-haired with thick black glasses, turned with him, pen poised. “Should they have put LSD in the water supply?”

  “No speak,” I told him, and dropped my shorts to change.

  The protests went on for much of the summer. You could watch on the television the Provos and student demonstrators, all in white, carrying their banners. And the police, all in black, waiting to beat them up.

  Help me, my brother wrote. Your brother’s in need of help, my father wrote. My brother had developed a romantic rivalry with a lawyer named Tasa who’d turned out to be UDBA. That’s your brother, my father wrote. Cuckolding the Civil Secret Police. In a bar, drunk, he had railed against Yugoslavia’s silence in the face of the invasion of Hungary. It had been ten years ago, his nervous friends had counseled. He should let it rest. But my brother had mounted a table and balanced with his bad knee. The immortal Hungarians! Puskas in prison!

  I was able to arrange a return trip only at the end of the season. I spent the night in Belgrade and walked to the train station during the following dawn. Mist hovered above the woods and in the golden treetops. I needed clean air. I snorted like a horse and felt the freshness.

  I found my brother in hiding in a town not far from our own. He was staying in a room with a metalworker from Bosnia, a poverty-stricken Moslem who’d moved in the hope of survival. The room was clean, with two beds, a wood stove, a small fir table, and a wash-stand. An alder shadowed the tiny back window.

  The metalworker set out tea for us and then disappeared. We embraced. Everyone liked my brother. He was an open, emotional man, so handsome that women turned to look at him on the street.

  He told me he’d read about the Liverpool match. We smiled and talked about the old days and the cowshed.

  He asked me to get him out. I wanted to know his financial picture. He had no financial picture. Our parents were in a terrible state, he confided. He was testing their faith in the Party’s infallibility. It caused him pain to be doing this. Could I get him out?

  I told him I would try. Of course, I would try. We were silent, the fir table between us. He looked into my expression. It was as if I had said, What can I do?

  I’d brought money, hidden, as well as other gifts. He accepted them all with a combination of apathy and good-natured fear. He’d never refused financial assistance.

  At the airport check-through, a commissioner asked why I was not playing in my homeland. I told him I was spreading the glory of Yugoslav football to the West. While he looked over my paperwork, he said, “And your father’s an honest man.”

  “What makes you think I’m not?” I asked. Everyone around us looked up.

  He was unembarrassed. “I was talking about your father,” he said mildly, holding out my passport. “I don’t even know you.”

  I wrote my brother upon my return to tell him how my attempts were proceeding. I heard nothing back. My father wrote a week or so later and mentioned nothing about it. He described instead how he’d felt during the Liberation: the muddle inside. The enormous happiness all around him—everyone on the street dancing and jumping—and he himself just walking through it all, feeling only a sort of heaviness.

  THE DUTCH MEANWHILE, as always, went ahead drawing their straight lines into the future. They were unsatisfied to simply win; they were determined, as well, to proselytize their beauty and goodness to the world. Their football was to be like their foreign policy: a light unto all nations. The Provos unveiled a poster with Cruyff at its center and the motto Better Long-haired Than Shortsighted.

  I felt accused by it. I avoided it. I avoided Cruyff. Then, before an exhibition, the trainer ran out of tape with the two of us still barefoot. He disappeared into the bowels of the stadium to search for more. Cruyff and I sat on facing tables, bobbing our feet at one another.

  His hair was longer than ever. He picked at an ear. He studied me like someone else’s chess problem. He asked, “What’s happening to your country, Vasovic?”

  “I don’t know,” I finally said, when able to speak.

  “You just went back,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “To see your brother,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “He was in some sort of trouble,” he said.

  “Michels told you this?” I asked.

  “He didn’t return with you,” he said.

  “Is he here?” I asked. “Do you see him?”

  He looked around. He resumed with his ear.

  “He was a great player,” he eventually remarked.

  “What’s wrong with you?” the trainer asked me, when he finally returned.

  “He’s been like that the whole time,” Cruyff informed him.

  I played the worst match of my life. Afterward I just lay on the pitch. Someone asked for my jersey.

  Everything became less pleasurable for me. I had football intelligence, which had nothing to do with normal intelligence. The most difficult things in life were choices, as our trainer used to say. I tore a muscle in my thigh which would not heal. Running was now an application of fire. As the Saint said, Pain was a holy angel, who showed treasures to men which otherwise remained forever hidden.

  My parents had stopped writing. My brother had stopped writing. It happened to be the case that certain things remained unsaid in their country, while they were expressed in this one. There was no point in discussing which was the “right” way. Each involved different people who acted as they had been inwardly conditioned to act.

  One sunny Sunday, soon after Queen’s Day, which had been marked by mobs selling things on the street and drinking to excess, I took a throw-in in an exhibition against Glasgow and caught the eye of a blonde girl with an overbite and tears in her eyes, and I stepped away from the ball and never kicked one again.

  What had she conjured for me? The young woman with the rug. My father. My brother. The overbite of a boy who’d played with us in the cowshed. Who is it that goes free when those he loves are not?

  Michels tried to work with me and reason with me for a week or so and then gave up.

  “Let him go,” Cruyff said, witness to his final attempt.

  I got a job sweeping the new Café Het Station, which seemed chilly and fantastical. The huge bleak spaces of the adjacent bus station rose out of the mist beyond every morning as I pushed my broom.

  On one occasion I even stepped away from a ball that rolled toward me from a nearby boys’ game.

  Wasn’t it so that even when we were laughing, we were sad. In the last letter I received from my brother, he wrote that he was writing from the saddest of all prisons: his heart.

  Good thoughts, bad thoughts, perfect headers, crooked, dipping volleys from impossible angles, and envisioned geometries. Placid-faced neighbors and beer: all these become part of a great invisible sphere in which one lived and about whose reality there was no doubt. Those spheres keep us cosseted from pain. We used to sing in one of our children’s songs about the angels, “Two to cover me, two to wake me,” and guardianship by the invisible powers was something grown-ups needed no less than children.

  Therefore, I wrote my parents, one last time, you must not think me unhappy. What is happiness and unhappiness? It depends on what happens inside. I am grateful every day for those spheres inside—that I have them—that I have you—and that, all of that, makes me happy.

  EUSTACE

  Against the glass, Sister Emelia’s face looked surprising, Biddy realized. Like the blowfish in the encyclopedia. She was yelling something, her eyes wide and her face red, but he couldn’t make it out through the double doors. He was scared at first, because she looked like the Flahertys’ dog, who always had to be chained up and when he jumped at you was all pink gums and yellow teeth, but that passed. After a while she wasn’t funny anymore. She yelled something again, shaking the handles on the doors, and he examined her teeth.

  Biddy wasn’t his
real name; it was Eustace Lee, named for some uncle his father always remembered as sharp, as in “Old Eustace Lee was sharp, boy.” He didn’t like the name Biddy and he didn’t like the way strangers would screw up their faces and repeat it when they heard it, but then, he always thought it fit him for some reason, and Eustace Lee was no bargain, either. He never knew where the name came from. His mother claimed it came from his being a little “biddy” baby, but he didn’t think even she believed that. It was his from as far back as he could remember. Even Sister Emelia called him Biddy, except when she got mad.

  Although later the doctor kept telling everyone how well planned it was, Biddy hadn’t decided to do anything until right before recess, and after Sister Emelia had come in for Question Time. He’d interrupted Janie Hilgenberg (everybody did), who’d been asking something stupid about when the new bathrooms would be finished and had asked the same question for the third day in a row about the old drunk and Father Hogan, and the whole class had swallowed together, and it had gotten quiet. Sister Emelia had put her chalk down and had looked over at him and had gotten red (though not as red as later, against the glass) and then had stood up just as the recess bell rang. Biddy had managed to get outside with the pack. She hadn’t followed him out onto the playground. He wasn’t fooled. He knew where he was headed after recess and he knew that while yelling had been enough the first two times, it wouldn’t be anymore.

  —ALL RIGHT NOW, Biddy, let’s try it again. Why’d you lock everybody out?

  —Answer the doctor, Biddy.

  —Please, Mr. Siebert. It’s a little more helpful if you’re less of a . . . presence. Biddy?

  —C’mon, Biddy. We talked about this. The doctor can’t help unless you want to help yourself. Right?

  —Biddy?

  —I didn’t want to get hit.

  —Who was going to hit you?

  —Sister Emelia.

  —Why was Sister Emelia going to hit you?

  —You must’ve done something, Biddy. Tell the man.

  —Mr. Siebert, this really isn’t working out. Would you please take your wife and leave us now? We’ll see what we can do on our own.

  —Look—you said we could stay the first time.

  —I know, but I think we need to be one-on-one here. Please. Walk around. Do some shopping. Come back around three. We’ll still be here. Biddy doesn’t mind if you go, do you Biddy?

  —No.

  —Biddy, you’re gonna be all right?

  —Yeah.

  —You gonna remember what we talked about and not waste everybody’s time?

  —Yeah, you guys go do something.

  —We’ll be back in a little while. Okay?

  —Okay.

  —Shut the door all the way. Thanks. Thanks. Okay. Now. Do you want to sit somewhere else? Is that good?

  —This is good.

  —You ready to talk some more?

  —If you want.

  —Okay. So. Why was she going to hit you?

  —Because I asked about the old drunk again.

  —What?

  —I asked her about this old drunk, and Father Hogan. It’s a long story. It was a stupid question.

  —I don’t understand.

  —It’s okay. Nobody does.

  —She was going to hit you for asking a question?

  —I asked it before. She’d told me to stop asking it. It was like I knew it was going to start trouble.

  —How’d you know she was going to hit you?

  —She gets this look.

  —Has she hit you before?

  —Sure. Otherwise why would I be worried?

  —And that’s when the recess bell rang? What’d you do then?

  —I went back in. Everybody was out except the two old secretaries in the office and Mrs. Krenning—

  —Mrs. Krenning?

  —The fifth-grade teacher, so I told the secretaries that Sister Emelia wanted them, and Mrs. Krenning that Greg—that’s her kid—got hurt on the monkey bars. When they left I locked the doors.

  —But . . . let me get this . . . how did you lock the doors?

  —I had time enough. Sister Emelia left her keys on the desk and I went around and locked them.

  —It was that easy? All the doors?

  —There’re only three, not counting the main ones.

  —Amazing. And the other sisters didn’t have keys?

  —Only to the main doors, I think. I remember being early one morning and Sister Theresa saying we had to go around to the front because her keys didn’t open the other doors.

  —So what about the main doors, then?

  —I got Chuck’s push broom—the janitor’s—and slid it through the things on the doors. I just jammed it in there.

  SISTER EMELIA hadn’t figured out what was going on; nobody had, until they noticed the push broom through the glass and Biddy on the stairs.

  He thought, while they pounded and stared in at him, The door’s a force field. The planet outside has no air.

  He went up to the second floor to follow the nuns’ progress around the building. He could hear the far-off rattle when they tried each door. He stayed near a window with a good view of the street, and some of his classmates found him and stood around below, looking up and pointing. After about twenty minutes his parents came. They were led to the main doors. He stayed where he was. A little bit after that Chuck came and started fooling with the office door in the back, so Biddy went down and stuffed a doorstop under it and then slid the heavy office desks over in front of it end to end until three together just about reached the opposite wall.

  He walked up and down the halls before settling into a ground-floor classroom. He hadn’t planned on this. However much time he had left was his.

  He jumped about three feet when Michael Graham tapped at the window and asked if he could come in, too. There were unlocked windows on both sides of the one Michael was tapping on, and Biddy hurried over, trying to look like nothing was wrong, and locked them, and then ran from the room to check the other windows. Across the hall a seventh grader was trying to get in with a boost from Sister Veronica, and Biddy ran over and tried to pry him loose but he wouldn’t let go so Biddy bit his hand and he yelled and fell back onto Sister’s head and Biddy shut the window. There were more noises, in the fifth- and first-grade rooms, and he got rid of one quick but the other kept him away by slapping at him with his free hand until he got some erasers from the chalkboard and clapped at the kid’s face until his hair was all white and he was choking and gagging and he let go, too.

  He was coughing himself from the dust, still holding the erasers. He could see the kid he bit outside with the nuns, showing off the hand to the other kids.

  There was a crash down the hall and he took off, and in the boys’ bathroom there was Sister Theresa, trying to wiggle through the frosted window. She said to him, “Biddy—don’t you make it worse, Biddy, don’t you move,” and he took a stack of tiles from the corner from under the new toilet seats and, just out of her reach, slid the frame down tight on her, wedged the tiles in, and left her hanging there yelling his name.

  —WHAT DO YOU THINK of me asking all these questions?

  —I ask questions, too.

  —Uh—that other sister—how’d you trap her in the window like that?

  —I don’t know how she got up that high. Someone must’ve given her a boost. I got a stack of tiles and stuck them in the top, you know, like this, so she couldn’t move either way.

  —Why do you think she tried to climb in, instead of the janitor?

  —Chuck’s kind of old for things like that.

  —But why her, do you think?

  —She probably figured she was the skinniest.

  —You don’t think it was because she was especially worried about you?

  —No.

  —Is she pretty much your favorite sister?

  —I don’t know.

  —Do you have a favorite sister?

  —I guess so.


  —Who’s your favorite sister?

  —She is.

  —You know how long she hung there?

  —No. I heard her yelling. Then I didn’t. I guess they got her when they got me.

  —Didn’t you worry about her hanging there?

  —No. She couldn’t move.

  —No, I meant . . . why didn’t you push her back out, instead of trapping her?

  —I didn’t think she’d let go.

  —Did you try?

  —No.

  —Why didn’t you bite her hand, too?

  —I didn’t want to. I couldn’t.

  —Ah. Why not?

  —Her fingers are like . . . cold. Like worms. I couldn’t.

  HE SAT ON THE STEPS of the second-floor landing, watching everyone running around below. His parents were talking to Sister Emelia. The teachers were trying to keep the kids together and quiet on the playground and weren’t doing too good a job. Sister Veronica was chasing a kid who’d crossed the street. It was windy and her habit was slowing her up.

  He wondered if he’d stay all night. He wondered if he’d find something to eat. He wondered if they’d break something to get at him. Then the nuns all ran down to the street and a big black Oldsmobile pulled up—Father Hogan’s car—and he knew he wouldn’t be staying all night.

  —YOU NEVER THOUGHT that all they’d have to do is get ahold of Father Hogan?

  —No. I forgot about him.

  —You didn’t think all along that he’d come and let them in?

  —No. That’s a dumb question.

  —Why?

  —Because. It’s dumb.

  —Why is it dumb?

  —Because! If I knew they’d get back in, why would I lock them out?

  —What did you think when he drove up?

  —I don’t know.

  —What did you do?

  —I ran down and tried to jam up the last doors.

  —And you couldn’t.

  —There was nothing around, and I heard them coming.

  —So what did you do?

  —I ran. I ran up to the top. I ran into a room but it was stupid to try and hide and I knew it, so I came back out to the stairs.

  —Who was the first person you saw?

  —Sister Emelia.