The Wooden King. Thomas Maxwell McConnell

      “Do you ask your mother these questions, or only me?”

      “Only you.”

      “Why? What is going to happen in 2050?”

      “I don’t know what will happen. Will I be alive?”

      “You will live a long time.”

      “Like Grandfather?”

      “Like Grandfather. Yes.”

      “How old will I be?”

      “In 2050? One hundred and sixteen.”

      What current ran through this boy that his little hands should always feel so fevered?

      “Time for sleep now.”

      As Trn rose for the lamp the boy huddled into the back of the couch, tugged the covers over his head. As he did every night now, this metamorphosis, nature inverted, a chrysalis of bedclothes. You could have said anything else. You could have said that was a problem of subtraction you couldn’t do in your head.

      “I hope you’re not chewing your nails there.”

      “No.”

      “What’s that squelching sound I hear?”

      “My tongue’s feeling for my spit makers.”

      Trn stayed his hand, prolonged the light for them both a few moments more. No map in the world had a place for their country now. Vague beneath the blanket he felt the knots tight in the rope of the little spine, the unfledged blade of the shoulder. In the dark he sat a while longer, a hand at rest over this spare cradle of bones. How could anything I might ever do possibly be enough?

      He whispered, “Good dreams, I love you,” and rose to leave in the dark.

      They were the same flight of seventeen he’d trudged up all winter but he counted them nevertheless, a hollow series in the dark of the well, as if each scuff of his soles were over empty stone. He pulled his fingers one by one out of the gloves, on the landing unlaced his boots, came in quietly shutting the door.

      From the kitchen Alena leaned into the hall, her eyes bearing on his.

      “He went in good order,” Trn said.

      She pursed her lips and was gone. He hooked his coat, scarf over the collar, hat last, coupled gloves in the coat pocket. At the counter she was rolling dough.

      “Is your father up? “

      “I don’t know,” she said.

      “We talked on the way again about Adam,” Trn said. “I believe he’ll be fine.”

      “And what makes you believe that?”

      “I told him Adam was upset about his father.”

      Her shoulders worked her elbows like pistons, the red embroidered hem of the apron leaping.

      “And when we are upset, I told him, angry at the world because we can’t be angry with the person who’s upset us, we often launch our anger anywhere because we hurt everywhere, so we think it doesn’t matter.”

      “And what did Aleks say to this?”

      “He listened,” Trn said. “He didn’t say much but I think he understood.”

      She glanced over her shoulder to roll her eyes.

      “And the next time Adam pushes him to the ground and kicks him,” she said, “all will be well.”

      “I told him to keep away from Adam.”

      “But who’s going to tell Adam to keep away from Aleks? Tell Adam that he’s only angry with the world?”

      “If it happens again I will speak to the teacher.”

      She slapped the dough against the counter, arched her weight to flatten it with the heels of both hands.

      “‘I will speak with the teacher,’” she said. “Just like you did about those German hoodlums last year. And if that doesn’t work you will speak to the director again, I suppose.”

      “Yes.”

      Her eyes came round to bore on his again.

      “And this will make Adam Svoboda conduct himself in a more civilized fashion. This will make Aleks grow ten centimeters over one night so he’ll be bigger than Adam and Adam will suddenly leave him alone. Swing his kicks at another boy who will turn the other cheek.”

      “Aleks must learn to exhaust all the possibilities before pummeling back. I know that’s what you want, for him to return every blow, but he must learn.”

      “And why? Because it’s the honorable thing? Because it’s what you wish him to do, to learn? Adam Svoboda’s father went to Poland so he could go on fighting Germans. That’s the lesson Adam Svoboda learned.”

      “And now he’s probably dead and his son draws the blood from smaller boys because his father is not here to teach Adam the difference.”

      “The difference between what?”

      “The simple difference between what we do and what we ought to do. Perhaps the difference isn’t so simple but it must be learned.”

      She turned to the counter again, fingers clenching so the dough escaped them. She gripped at it again and never looked back.

      “If you won’t teach him to fight,” she said, “I will. I’ll find someone.”

      The muscle stood from her jaw, the tendons taut inside her neck.

      “Thank you for making dumplings. We all like them so much.”

      She pounded the dough, set pale clumps aside on waxed paper.

      “We have dumplings twice a week,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

      He closed the lavatory door, rolled his cuffs. The water purled in the stoppered sink and a vapor fumed over it. He undid two shirt buttons, folded in his collar. Be glad for hot water. The brush grew the lather in the cup and he spread it along his jaw, under his chin, toward the cheekbones. He put a new blade into the razor, glanced up at the face with its white beard in the mirror. An ersatz Saint Mikulas. The rasp of the blade took the soap and left behind the familiar stare puzzled in the cloudy glass, the eyes always set too close together. The razor dripped, her wedding gift all those years before. No one uses a straight razor anymore, she said. The scrape up the neck, the jawline. Not so many years before. Through the fog of the mirror a small rain coursed, blurred the lather, blurred the face. I could grow a beard for winter, a winter beard for warmth. Save time mornings. He lengthened his lip and razed the lather there. Save water. Save the gas to heat it. He stirred the suds in the basin, lifted the blade and blinked the fog away before cutting at the little that remained.

      Winding west and south instead of east to the nearest tram stop he took in the houses on this long avenue of the quarter, ornamented with towers and oriel windows, pinnacles with weathervanes shaped like pennants that bore the year of their construction. 1906. MCMII 1918. The last throes of a realm that couldn’t hear its own death rattle, when the best fancied they were a suburb of old Vienna. Chandeliers hung behind the leaded panes, the street lined with weeping cherries naked to the weather. Hands in pockets he walked on, his breath scouting before him, the old leather case slung from his shoulder beating at his hip the time of his strides. Between the houses painted yellow or gray, pale green and white plaster, he glimpsed the bare trees on the hills that shaped the valley, snow powdered on the forest floors. To the west, just piercing the haze, the twin spires of the cathedral rose over the city.

      At the bottom of the hill he waited to cross, an old man stooped in his heavy clothes beside him, looking right for the traffic.

      “Sir? Sir? Now you should look the other way first.”

      “Why did they have to change everything?” the man said under his visible breath, under the