The Greenhouse

Seventeen

With both hands on the wheel, I watch the pilgrim’s way unwind, bend after bend, as I drive through the forest with trees on all sides. I’m facing the sun until noon, but then it shifts between mirrors as the day passes.

It suits me fine to be on my own, although it might have been easier if I’d had a copilot with me to read the map and avoid wrong turns. Instead every now and then I turn on the turn signal and pull to the side of the road in this dark green forest, turn off the engine, peer over the map, and then water the plants in the trunk while I’m at it. Of course, you have to keep your eyes peeled for wild deer or boar and other small creatures on this road. I try to remember what kind of animals I might expect to find. I can almost hear Dad’s voice beside me:

— Woods can be dodgy places, they’ve got bears and wolves in them and wicked people, too. Some crime is probably being committed right now in the thick of the woods just a few yards away, and it’ll probably be reported in the local press tomorrow. And young girls posing as hitchhikers could easily be the bait used by criminal gangs. Once they’ve stopped a car the gang pops up from the behind the bushes.

Dad’s worries can be smothering; unlike him, I trust people. I suddenly look to my side; no, Mom isn’t there.

I feel Mom is beginning to fade; I’m so scared that soon I won’t be able to conjure it all up again. I therefore replay our final conversation in my mind when she called me from the car wreckage, and I dwell on every conceivable detail. Mom had intended to phone Dad but I answered. He’d given her the mobile phone shortly before it happened, but I didn’t realize she actually used it or carried it around with her. In order for her to continue to exist I constantly have to discover new things about her; with each flashback I collect new information about things I didn’t know before.

Dad hadn’t said bye to her any differently that morning, but he found it difficult to forgive me for having answered the phone and even more difficult to forgive himself for not being at home. He wanted to be the one to own Mom’s last words, for her not to leave without delivering her last words to him.

— She needed me and I was out in a store buying an extension, he said.

He was so terribly disappointed that Mom died before he did, sixteen years younger, she was, as he constantly repeated, only fifty-nine. He’d imagined things so differently.

She says she’s had a little mishap and that the “road crew” have come to help her, strong fellows — and that I needn’t worry, she was in good hands, they were working fast, the boys, and on top of things.

— Did you burst a tire, Mom?

— I must have, she says in a calm and collected voice. I could well believe I burst a tire. The car seemed to go a bit wobbly.

There might have been a slight tremor in her voice, but she told me not to worry about her twice, she’d just had a slight mishap — that was exactly how she put it — a slight mishap, and out of sheer clumsiness. She’d call me again once they’d got the car back up on the road again, the road crew, as she called them, as if she were some rally driver and they were four assistants.

— Did you go off the road?

— You better take care of the dinner for yourself and your father if I’m not back on time; you can heat up the fish balls from yesterday, it’ll be a while yet.

Then she takes a brief pause before starting on her description of the autumn color paradise she’s in. I’m totally puzzled by the sunlight she talked about. It was raining all over the country, and according to the police’s report, it was precisely the wetness of the road that had caused the accident. It was all wet, the asphalt was wet, the fields were wet, the lava field was wet, and yet she described the stunning shades of the landscape, how the sun gilded the moss out in the middle of the black lava field. She spoke about this beautiful light, she spoke about the light, yeah, about the light.

— Are you out in the lava field, Mom? Are you hurt at all, Mom?

— I probably need to get new frames for my glasses.

I know the phone call is coming to an end now, but to prolong the duration of the memory, to postpone Mom’s farewell in my mind, to keep her with me for longer, I embellish the script of the flashback with elements that I didn’t get to say on the spur of the moment.

— But, Mom, but, Mom, I was just wondering if we should maybe try to move your eight-petaled roses out of the greenhouse into the garden, out into the flower bed, and see if they survive the winter.

Or I could ask something that would take her longer to explain:

— How do you make your curry sauce, Mom? And cocoa soup, Mom, and halibut soup?

Then I thought I heard her say, but I’m not sure about this, that I should be tolerant of Dad even though he was a bit old-fashioned and eccentric in his ways. And continue to be good to my brother Jósef.

— Be good to your dad. And don’t forget your brother Jósef. You held his hand when you were still in the carriage — might she have said that?

Then I hear a faint shuddering breath, like the beginning of pneumonia; Mom has stopped talking.

The conversation is over, but I hear a background murmur of male voices.

— Is the phone still on? someone asks.

— She’s gone, it’s over, another voice can be heard saying.

Then someone picks up the phone.

— Hello, is there anyone there? they ask.

I say nothing.

— He’s hung up, the voice says at the end of the line.

— The tow truck is here, another voice can be heard saying.

— We couldn’t reach her properly with the shears while she was still alive and really couldn’t do much for her, says one of the ambulance men who fully understands that I want to ask questions. But we saw that she was talking on the phone, which was incredible, considering how badly hurt the woman was; she must have been steadily swallowing blood. There was never any hope, no hope of her ever surviving this while she waited to be cut out of the wreckage.

Her clothes and glasses were returned to us in a bag, along with her berry-picking rake and various other objects that she had with her in the car. Her glasses were covered in blood with both lenses cracked, one arm twisted back ninety degrees.

Dad and I took care of the flowers on the coffin. I wanted to have wildflowers, meadowsweet, chervil, wood cranesbill, buttercups, and lady’s mantle, but Dad wanted something more solemn, bought in a shop, imported roses. In the end, though, he gave in and left the floral arrangements to his son.