Grass And Weeds

by Serika Iwakura


My assessment of our operations in the new Canadian branch of the company was concluded, and so I was to return to Germany. This necessitated ending a personal relationship I had established with a local woman. It was regrettable.

I explained the new situation late in the evening after our last meeting. I explained to her as we drove by the shore of the lake in the Ontario town where I had been assigned. Bartok on the automotive tape player. Mikrokosmos. Through the windshield, the rolling, magnificent water. Upon the rearview mirror, a fly.

She was sobbing. How curious.

"Remember Chinatown?" I said, to lend substance to our talk. "The street market there in Toronto that day? The row of plates with the faces of Mao and Stalin -- ." I laughed.

"You -- piece of garbage," she whispered, passionately, again sobbing. I was genuinely sorry for her, genuinely.

And yet, curiously, I had to suppress a smile.

"The ancient fellow, with the red silk shirt, the ancient dragon? Most striking -- ."

"You're incapable of emotion," she said.

I turned the knob of the musical system, moderating the treble, adding, "Would that it were so."

"How can anyone say something like that?"

I felt to answer would be superfluous. I therefore shrugged.

"Bastard! Egotist!"

I smiled.

"It is my experience one is called an egotist by others when one does not do that which pleases their ego. A paradox? If I happen to differ from your conception of me, is that not rather a failure of perception on your part, than a failing of -- ."

She raised her hand to strike me.

"Mein Kinder," I said, surely reasonably. "Do not do this while we are driving, please."

She stuck me nonetheless. Then she wept again. Thin, pale, a salad of red hair in short disputatious locks. Eyes the color of green apples. A formal white stiff secretarial shirt. Sockless and shoeless. She was passive in bed, and had two very young daughters. We entered a remarkable pretzel of an underpass, and emerged. The rear view mirror framed a möbius strip of cement, the fly upon its reduced image gigantic in juxtaposition. Papal, it rubbed its forelegs together. Again the woman sobbed.

She was opaque to me. Extraterrestials had claimed her features, her gestures, her brains. My attention floated inevitably from her, like a balloon. I wished she were a prostitute. Creatures that ask little of you. Simply marks and pfennigs.

The woman's hips shifted, and her hand rummaged in her purse. She removed a Kleenex. Daubed the soft square into her eyes. Ran arterial-hued fingernails through her violent hair. My thoughts wandered. I thought of Tolstoy. Of muscular black women being violated by Alsatian dogs. Of Toyota Corollas. Of primal lizards, trilobites. Huge glowing UFOs.

"Surely the future belongs to another species," I remarked.

"Nothing you say ever makes sense," she said.

"No?" I said.

We passed a ridge and I saw the long blueness of the lake glimmer in the moonlight. Exquisite loveliness. I could not resist, I pulled the vehicle over for a moment, simply to look. The lapping of the waves, the sea. How like Eternity.

"My father was not a soldier during the War," I told her. "He was a boy with a crippled leg, in Munich. As a boy it was his wish to be an architect. Yet it was not to be. He was weakened. For after the war, the entire city of Munich was rubble, you see. Stones and dust. And he said to me that some weeks after the war, as he was walking on the outskirts of the city, looking for rats to catch and eat, he saw grass and weeds peering through the broken fragments, and he thought, how simple it would be for the grass and the weeds merely to grow, merely to continue to grow, to overtake the stones and cover them up, to cover up all the city, and all the other cities, till there was nothing left of the world but the grass and the weeds."

"You're insane. Germans. Men. Insane."

Was she correct? I paused to wonder. Yet as I returned to my thoughts of the grass and the weeds, and was comforted.

 

The End