‘The boy is safe,’ Johnny said thickly. ‘Uh-huh. Uh-huh.’
‘We have to put a stop to this,’ Brown repeated.
‘How do you suggest we do that?’ Weizak asked, his voice brittle. ‘It has gone too far to…
Voices fading. The voices are under the clouds. Everything is under the clouds. Europe is under the clouds of war. Everything is under the clouds but the peaks, the mountain peaks of
(switzerland. switzerland and now her name is BORENTZ. her name is JOHANNA BORENTZ and her husband is an engineer or an architect, whichever it is that builds the bridges. he builds in switzerland and there is goat’s milk, goat’s cheese. a baby. ooooh the labor! the labor is terrible and she needs drugs, morphine, this JOHANNA
BORENTZ, because of the hip. the broken hip. it has mended, it has gone to sleep, but now it awakes and begins to scream as her pelvis spreads to let the baby out, one baby.
two. and three. and four. they don’t come all at once, no – they are a harvest of years, they are)
‘The babies,’ Johnny lilted, and now he spoke in a woman’s voice, not his own voice at all. It was the voice of a woman. Then gibberish in song came from his mouth.
‘What in the name of God…’ Brown began.
‘Polish, it is Polish!’ Weizak cried. His eyes were bulging, his face pale. ‘It is a cradle song and it is in Polish, my God, my Christ, what is it we have here?’
Weizak leaned forward as if to cross the years with Johnny, as if to leap them, as if to (bridge, a bridge, it’s in turkey. then a bridge somewhere hot in the far east, is it Laos?
can’t tell, lost a man there, we lost HANS there, then a bridge in virginia, a bridge over the RAPPAHANNOCK RIVER and another bridge in california. we are applying for citizenship now and we go to classes in a hot little room in the back of a post-office where it always smells of glue. it is 1963, november, and when we hear kennedy has been killed in dallas we weep and when the little boy salutes his dead father’s coffin she thinks ‘THE
BOY IS SAFE’ and it brings back memories of some burning, some great burning and sorrow, what boy? she dreams about the boy, it makes her head hurt. and the man dies, HELMUT BORENTZ dies and she and the children live in carmel california. in a house on. on. on. can’t see the street sign, it’s in the dead zone, like the rowboat, like the picnic table on the lawn. it’s in the dead zone. like warsaw. the children go away, she goes to their graduation ceremonies one by one, and her hip hurts. one dies in vietnam. the rest of them are fine. one of them is building bridges. her name is JOHANNA BORENTZ and late at night alone now she sometimes thinks in the ticking darkness: ‘THE BOY IS
SAFE.’)
Johnny looked up at them. His head felt strange. That peculiar light around Weizak had gone. He felt like himself again, but weak and a little pukey. He looked at the picture in his hands for a moment and then handed it back.
‘Johnny?’ Brown said. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Tired,’ he muttered.
‘Can you tell us what happened to you?’
He looked at Weizak. ‘Your mother is alive,’ he said.
‘No, Johnny. She died many years ago. In the war.’
‘A German trooptruck knocked her through a plate-glass show window and into a dock shop,’ Johnny said. ‘She woke up in a hospital with amnesia. She had no identification, no papers. She took the name Johanna somebody. I didn’t get that, but when the war was over she went to Switzerland and married a Swiss… engineer, I think. His specialty was building bridges, and his name was Helmut Borentz. So her married name was – is –
Johanna Borentz.’
The nurse’s eyes were getting bigger and bigger. Dr. Brown’s face was tight, either because he had decided Johnny was having them all on or perhaps just because he didn’t like to see his neat schedule of ‘tests disrupted.