The Blackberry Bush (4 page)

I thanked her in German. “
Danke.
” An older man I couldn’t see, who was behind the wall, called her back after her task was complete.

As I looked down into my hands, I realized that the image was made of iron. A heavy disk with the design on it…

Then the vision disappeared, and I was back at first base, just in time to catch the throw from third.

I’m drawing from memory, even though I’ve never “seen” this before. My mom says that writers like Thea Beckman do that—they remember a story that hasn’t happened and write it down.

Now the drawing is done, and I’m staring at it.

Sometimes when I stare at things my vision goes fuzzy, and I can think really deeply. I’m not sure where I learned to do this, but it feels the same as when I’m snowboarding on the half-pipe at Gold Mine.

Mom often wakes me up from these visions and asks me what I’m thinking about. I never know how to answer. It’s a third world. There’s also a normal first world we all live in and also the second world of our sleeping dreams. I like world number three best of all—dreaming while you are awake. It’s kind of like reading.

I’m always having to hide my designs. If my parents knew how much time I’ve wasted drawing, they would freak. They think I’m doing homework.

Mom works at the Zarzamora Winery outside of town. She hosts wine tastings in the summer and winter. No one comes through town much in spring and fall, so she’s always at home during those seasons. Mom gets a lot of free wine sample bottles, and I especially like the designs on the labels. I soak them off of the glass and attach them to my drawings. Someday I’m going to design those labels. Even better artwork than the ones I collect now. Ideas come to me while I’m sitting in school.

The ThornHeart design keeps coming back into focus as I sit here at the drafting table.

Picking up a Sharpie, I start to draw a perfect copy of it on my right wrist (I forgot to tell you I’m left-handed and I ride board sports goofy-foot). Dad says they always have use in the majors for left-hand pitchers.

But I don’t like sports where we throw, kick, and shoot things. I like to throw and shoot my own body around. Why send something into motion when you can go into motion yourself and enjoy the feeling instead of watching it? I especially like cartwheels. They say boys can’t do them, but they are so wrong. I never go a day without cartwheeling. I can even cartwheel along the top of the old stone wall. Mom would wig if she saw that. For an instant in the middle, you feel weightless. There has to be a way to make that moment last longer.

The sounds of the local marching band wake me from my visions. Interesting how the wind direction makes it louder or softer.

Dad watches sports on TV all the time. I like to be with him, so I try it almost every day, but I often fall asleep. TV is like a fourth world. I like the other three worlds better. We’re not really a part of the TV world. If we disappeared, it wouldn’t even matter to the TV. I’ve watched my dad while he’s watching sports, trying to figure out what’s happening in his mind. But I don’t get it.

Mom hates it when I draw on myself, I remember, as I look at the ThornHeart on my wrist. But I decide to color it in with red anyway.

Reminds me of the hearts that the statues of Jesus and Mary show us at St. Catherine’s Roman Catholic here in Zarzamora. The church is almost never locked, and I sometimes go in there and draw with a clipboard. Jesus and Mary appear to be holding their rib cages open for us to see their hearts.

Mmm, if you took that crown of thorns from the other statue and put it around my heart image, then…

I enjoy the smell of the Catholic church. Nothing else in town has the same scent. A mix of perfume, campfire smoke, wood, and mold. The light coming through the colored windows is amazing as it moves across the wood grains on the pews.

I draw on everything. I draw all over the insides of my schoolbooks. I draw inside the Bible I take to church. I doodle in the margins of my worksheets. I like to erase the eyes of people in magazine pictures and draw in new pinpoint eyes. My mom thinks that’s creepy, but I laugh my head off when I look at it.

Church sometimes feels the same as all the team practices. It also feels a little like school. There are rules, groups, and patterns. Every game has rules.

It’s like we and the Catholics at St. Catherine’s are on different teams. But we don’t have enough pictures and stuff to look at as they have. On the other hand, we have great music with a band. Sometimes when we sing, I go to that same place as when I stare at pictures or do cartwheels. I wonder if that happens with the Catholics too. My mom raises her hands in the air and almost dances. Her closed eyelids start to twitch. I love watching that, but I’m not sure why. I think she sees Holland, her home, and her family when that happens.

She misses them and talks about them all the time. Many nights, she pours a glass of local red Cabernet Sauvignon (with a cool label) and writes them a crinkly blue aerogramme in Dutch. I think it’s old-fashioned to write letters, but she looks relaxed and happy doing it.

She and Dad would like to have had more kids, but they don’t seem to be able to. It would be easier for me if there were more kids in the house. My parents spend too much time thinking about me, and I spend too much time trying to avoid that focus.

I hear them talking about me at night when they think I’m sleeping. The more they say, the more I can tell they don’t “get” me at all. They are so stressed, and I’m really not afraid of anything. I’ve even skateboarded down the crazy-steep Edwards Street hill. No one else has ever made it to the bottom on a board, even to this very day. I started to get that cool “cartwheel” feel when I knew I was going too fast to bail. Like right after you yell “droppin’ next!” at the half-pipe at Gold Mine.

I shred. I rip. Whatever you want to call it. I rocketed past a cheering Sam that day on the way down Edwards. Guys were watching from the top and bottom. When I flattened out into a cruise at the bottom, my hands shot up, like Mom’s do in church. I was going too fast to hear my own victory shout.

The older kids have called me J-Bro since that day and give me fist-bumps and props when they see me. My parents both call me “Yosh” for short, and it’s embarrassing when my friends are around. Their accent can be so cheesy, but I suppose they can’t help it.

I really like this ThornHeart design. I’m going to have the guy down at the Asian restaurant make me a Chinese ink stamp of it so I can stamp this design all over the place whenever I use paper for anything. I can also stamp it in the books I read. It would look cool in the Thea Beckman books on the inside covers.

If I leave my room now, I can get out of here before my parents get home. I feel like I get points every time I succeed at fooling them. Who’s keeping score, though?

Back on my bike, I look down at the lock chain that holds the paper ThornHeart design down in my bike basket and keeps it from blowing away. I’m the only one of my friends who can ride with no hands. But I do wear a helmet all the time; it just makes sense. Besides, a helmet is another surface on which to draw things. I’m going to spray-paint over the old designs so I can put this new one, the ThornHeart, in the front.

Mr. Park is Korean, and his accent is hard to understand. The restaurant has Chinese and other Asian food. He watches a little TV with Korean shows at the cash register during the day. Like the Catholic church, it smells cool there.

He greets me with a big smile and calls me “Mr. Josh-wa.” We work out a deal for twelve bucks for an ink stamp, and he says he’ll have it ready for me in a few days. He keeps the picture. It’s okay. I memorized it before I ever saw it. He’ll include a red ink pad.

Now I’m back on the bike and heading home for supper. It’s been a great couple of hours. I can’t help but wonder if I’ll dream about the pale girl tonight. Hope I can find some more time to draw and dream before I go to bed.

I’ll have to steal it from my parents, though, because they would rather I lived in their world.

Angelo

I
t’s dark out, and I’m sitting in another blackberry bush, this one outside of an ancient church in Rotterdam.

Sometimes it’s the chance encounters that make all the difference. I’m about to witness one of them. Imagine all of the seemingly random events that lead to your very existence. Change one detail, and you’d never even be here. Do you know your backstory? If not, why not dig a little…discover and experience the mystery for yourself?

Right now the warm summer rain is drenching me, but it feels good.

I’ve been strolling around a cemetery in Hillegersberg—an upscale suburb of Rotterdam, Holland—killing time, waiting for the big encounter.

I’m on top of a hill, if you can call it that. More of a mound, here in the middle of the cemetery. Holland is pretty flat, so it stands out. And the old, imposing, dirty-brick Protestant town church, with this suburb grown up around it, commands the view from all directions. I have a hunch that people have been meeting on this hill for centuries—perhaps millennia. Maybe it’s an ancient burial mound of some kind. The church itself has its own mythic-sounding name: Hillegonda.

To the right is the side entrance to the church through the ornate, open black-iron gate. Bright light from the chandeliers is streaming through the clear church windows into the soggy night.

The Meere organ is leading the congregation in singing the Psalms of Zion. Dutch people are psalm singers by nature. Many of them learn the psalms by heart without even trying, and Psalm 42 is their favorite: “As the hart panteth for the water....”

Over to the left, emerging out of the dark into a streetlamp-lit halo, is Walter, a German. It is the heart of World War II, and Germany is occupying Holland. Rotterdam has been especially hard-hit, and much of the city lies in shambled ruins after the iron fist of the German Luftwaffe bombed Amsterdam’s twin town back into the Stone Age.

The summer of 1943
World War II
Hillegersberg, outside Rotterdam
German-occupied Holland

W
ALTER WALKS TOWARD THE GATE
, checking his elite Ziffer à Grande Complication 1924 Swiss watch. It is his special treasure, given to him by his proud father right before Walter left for his military assignment in Rotterdam. His particularly emotionless face seems drawn in by the music and the light from the nearby church.

An officer in the German army, Walter is from an aristocratic Rheinland family that used to do business here at the downstream North Sea port of Rotterdam. Tonight he is off duty and going for a walk in civilian clothing to clear his head. He misses his wife and young son, Harald, back in Germany, and it seems strange for him to be the “enemy” in this city so familiar to him. His father’s company has had an office for years, on and off, in this vital seaport.

Walter’s father is an elder in the little Protestant church back home in Oberwinter. Deeply patriotic, the Dornbusch family has supplied high-end officers to army after army, war after war. His great-great-grandfather led the premier Prussian division into the pivotal Battle of Sedan. Walter’s father was decorated with the Iron Cross. But it isn’t likely that Walter will follow in those heroic footsteps. He’s stuck here in occupation duty in Holland, in charge of the rebuilding of the Rotterdam infrastructure that his own nation’s air force destroyed. Nothing like pouring concrete in the middle of rubble.

The foolishness, futility, and irony of it all have led him out to get some fresh air. His current project, the pedestrian/bicycle/auto tunnel under the river not far from the elegant port terminus of the Holland-Amerika steamship line, is meant to be an Autobahn link in the network of Greater Germany, into which Holland will eventually be absorbed.

His colleagues are readying plans to move half the Dutch population out of Holland to the steppes of partially conquered Russia to homestead new farms side by side with Germans, after the final victory.

Walter is the first in a long line of officers who will have no thrilling battle stories to tell his son. He’s authorized to carry a sidearm but doubts he’ll ever fire it. He’s a bureaucrat in a military uniform.

But Walter’s life is about to take a turn he’d never expect.

How pathetic
, he thinks as he walks through the gate toward the side door of the church.
Any glory is gone from my life
.

He pauses at the door of the church.
I can pass for civilian Dutch in these clothes
, he thinks,
as long as I don’t have to say a lot
.

It has been a long time since Walter has been in church. But the sound of the organ reminds him of his home congregation, and all that home means to him. Homesick and a little depressed, he opens the door and walks in.

Placing his wet umbrella in the stand with the dripping others, he realizes, awkwardly, that he’s late for the Sunday evening service and that this door opens near the pulpit. Every eye in the place turns to him briefly as he moves quickly to the left…and out of the line of sight.

There’s an empty place on a bench next to an elegant young woman with wavy, shoulder-length dark hair that peeks out from under a brimmed hat. He can’t see her face from this angle.

Walter sits down, not sure if he is wet mostly from perspiration (it’s a humid summer night) or the rain. But he feels wetter than everyone else in the room. Grief and disappointment well up inside him. Both seem out of place in this ancient holy place that overflows with goodness and promise.

As the sermon winds down, the congregation rises to sing another psalm from their little black books, and Walter shares a book with the young woman he noticed earlier.

As the organ prelude pauses for the congregation to begin singing, something otherworldly happens.

Her voice, clear and potent, resonates with Walter’s very body. They say the precise pitch/note that gets produced when you “ping” a crystal glass, when amplified, will shatter the glass.