The Painted Drum - Louise Erdrich [109]
As I walk through the door of the house, brushing sticks from my hair, the telephone rings. I hesitate, but then rush to pick it up. It is Kurt. Someone has broken into his studio, the renovated barn behind his house. That person has used all of the power equipment that Krahe keeps in the barn to demolish Number Twenty-one and all else that he has worked on or produced in the past year, certainly since Kendra’s death. Many things that were stored alongside the new projects are also damaged. I have no idea why this particular act of vandalism frees the two of us, but hearing Krahe’s agitation and reading his call as a sort of plea, I drive up to the barn to examine the disaster with him. By then, the police have left and there is nothing but splintered wood, shattered rock. All of the broken stuff and the pieces so massive they could only be nicked are scrawled with loops of spray paint. The paint is an intense blue, that blue my mother loves, and in its twizzling energy it is like an obscure but brilliant form of writing. Some new language is at work. The blue is everywhere.
“Who do you think did it?”
He touches my shoulder. Although it has been over a year since Davan’s mother and I met on the road, I see her right away. Mrs. Eyke’s eyes are pressed like coal into the soft whiteness of her face, and she smiles, but I say nothing.
Kurt is walking around with his hands on his head, groaning, but here’s the peculiar thing. He seems more excited than horrified by the trashed scene. He seems more thrilled than bereft. His face is glowing with intensity and his hands fly off his head in big gestures as he talks of the destruction. Frohlockendzerstorung. The word invents itself. A nameless wildness bubbles up inside of me and I want to shout. Kurt and I walk across a short piece of field to his house to have some coffee, and as we walk we link arms eagerly, naturally, as if no time had passed, as if there had been no other accidents or grief in the world, but only this one retribution from an unseen hand, which seemed to wreck with more joy than malice, the way a child does, wondering at the breakage and startled to laughter by the noise.
That night I stay with Kurt at his house, and I actually call Elsie to tell her that I won’t be coming back until morning. Her voice is careful, perhaps a little sad, but mostly she sounds relieved.
“Good night, dear,” she says.
There are other things that she could say to me, things I will never hear. I doubt that many mothers say these things to their daughters. Maybe it would be like telling your daughter the truth about the pain of childbirth. They try to protect us, even when we’re middle-aged. So I must supply the words for myself:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
I work part of the next afternoon