The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  But she feels herself lifted from herself, in a heady, weightless, animal joy. At last, she thinks, at last something has happened.

  Sladja approaches and Judy doesn’t shrink from her touch this time. She lets Sladja lay one hand over her belly and then withdraw it, without looking at her.

  The woman beckons to Eban, and he looks from her to Judy and then follows. Judy takes a step toward them, but Sladja stops at the door and turns, shaking her head, and Judy understands she is to stay. Their eyes lowered, Romeo, Bobby-Rae and Golda follow after, as if they’ve been silently summoned away.

  Only Oona remains, standing in the corner, one hand at her throat. Judy wonders if she was wrong to think her eyes were sorrowful. They might only be tired. Or, she thinks suddenly, angry.

  From a cupboard in the far wall, Oona takes out a roll of blankets and a pillow like the one Judy slept on in the strange, beautiful bed of the fourth house. She spreads them out on the floor and makes a bed, while Judy watches. Then she offers it to her, with a gesture of her hand, and leaves. Judy hears the bolt turn in the lock.

  The thin light that leaks in through the window dwindles and soon disappears.

  XI

  In the days that follow, Judy remains in the black house. Twice a day, food and water are delivered to her. Three times, the sheets are stripped from the bed where she sleeps, and taken away, along with her soiled clothing. When they’re returned, they smell of soap and are rough to the touch.

  At first, because she’s exhausted and half-starved, she’s grateful to be cared for in this way. She imagines that Eban is being similarly cared for, wherever they’ve taken him. She feels sure, almost sure, that if they had wished to harm her and Eban, they would have done it by now. Instead, she and Eban have entered their names in the record, just as the others did themselves when they arrived. She and Eban are part of this place now.

  The hours recover their meaning again. By counting the meals delivered to her, and watching light swell and fade through the broken window, Judy is able to count the passing days. She sleeps until the light outside is bright and even, and sometimes lies awake, drawn out across her bed, long after dark has fallen. She sleeps with a hand cupped to her belly and wakes sometimes to feel her baby turning inside her.

  Not since she was a child has she been cared for like this. Food and water arrive without her fetching it. Her waste is carried away in a white pot each morning, and another set down in the corner to replace it. As she grows strong again, she begins to feel a twitch in the muscles of her limbs, which long to be put to use. She circles the floor of the black house to exercise her arms and legs, but a physical restlessness has taken hold of her that soon spreads to her mind.

  She begins speaking to herself, and occasionally to her child. She can’t bear the unending silence, and imagines measures she might take to force the people who deliver her meals to talk. But she doesn’t know if they even possess the tongues to form words, and fearing for her own tongue, she doesn’t dare open her mouth when they appear at the door, and only nods at them in wordless thanks.

  I was never alone, she thinks one morning, sitting on the wooden floor of the house with her legs spread out before her. And then she says it to her child: “I’ve never been alone.”

  As a girl she was always in the company of her fathers. None of them ever left their home, except to walk or meet a peddler on the road. And it wasn’t safe to do either alone. She can recall playing by herself in the dust yard just outside the door, but she always knew that Dan or Alphonse would be watching from a window, and sometimes she’d refuse to raise her eyes from the dirt only so as not to see their eager waving. So she could, for those few minutes, relieve the burden of their steady gaze.

  Now, unseen, unheard, she wanders the vast liberty of aloneness, which stretches out around her as widely as the walls contain her tightly. “Your father never let me be,” she tells her daughter. “Since we came into his hide, he kept his eyes on me, same as when I was a child bound to that house. When it was my turn to hunt or get water, I’d pretend I got lost or struggled. He thinks, even now, I’m no good as a hunter. But it was lies, so I could steal an hour or two to myself in the wood, where I didn’t feel his eyes forever watching me.”

  She performs the physical listening she has learned to do, feeling for a movement from her baby, some signal of allegiance or argument. But there is nothing. “You think I’m unkind. You’re wondering what sort of mother you have. Being watched like that isn’t the same as being loved, you know.”

  Still nothing. “And I never told him. I never said it to him. I only went into the wood and came back when I was ready.”

  The third time she searches the black house, emptying the contents of the wall cabinets and upper desk drawer, she finds something she had previously overlooked. A stump of pencil like the ones Eban would sometimes sketch with—a stick of charcoal wrapped in waxed string. It’s soft and dull, and so little of the string remains that her hand soon turns black when she uses it. But it’s a treasure. The most precious thing she has.

  She begins to keep records of her own, writing on the backs of the test pages from the desk drawer. She rotates the pencil carefully as she writes, a quarter turn every few letters, so it sharpens with use, and not a mark is wasted. She would write all day if she could, but the three inches of pencil are a measure of all the words she can have, and so she chooses them with caution, the way she would mete out food from winter stock.

  5 days. Her heels at my ribs. Kicks all night. Rain.

  The parsimony frustrates her. Words run feral in her mind all night. She whispers them aloud. “Why am I thinking so much of Daniel? Of his moods. I didn’t understand them when I was a child; I thought they must make sense in some adult way that would become comprehensible one day. They would drift in like systems of weather, and you’d watch the dark spread out across the sky. He’d go for longer and longer walks, and Alphonse would plead with him to come back, trying to make a joke of it, for my sake, I think now, and sometimes he’d lose his temper and shout at him. He’d lead Dan home like a child. And then he’d tell me not to worry, that my father had a wandering heart and it was in his nature to want to travel too far, farther than was safe.

  “And then Dan would stop going for walks altogether and be in his study at all hours, and we’d hear his footsteps pacing overhead. ‘You’ll wear a hole in the floor,’ Alphonse would say when he appeared, wan and silent, at meals, and this was also a joke, but I could see he was worried, and I thought it was because of the floor that he looked that way, so I was always fearfully watching overhead, sure one day I’d see my father come tumbling down with the ceiling.

  “When it got very bad, he would sit in the chair in his study and not answer me when I called to him from the door. He wouldn’t be working or reading or doing anything at all. It was just unhappiness, but I didn’t know then what it was; I knew only enough to be frightened by it. Later, Alphonse told me that when Daniel was young it had been all right to walk as far as he wanted. He had loved to walk in forests and rivers, and would go away for days and days with just his knapsack and specimen kit, studying life in the water and fields and trees. All the tiny alive things that no one else saw. And so although he loved us, it was horrible for him to live in our house—to not be able to ever really leave.

  “And if he were here in this place instead of me, he would risk everything to escape it. And then I think of you, how I carry you inside me, and I feel you thump at the walls, and I wonder if you are just as desperate.”

  And then in the morning, she writes, 6 days. Hoar frost. Steady kicks. Daniel, again.

  * * *

  —

  On the eleventh day in the black house, the door opens at first light to reveal Eban, uncertain, holding the food tray out before him like he mistrusts it.

  “You!” she says, pushing herself up from the bed with the extra effort it now
takes. In the last week, her belly has begun to press more insistently against her clothes, and she sees him notice it.

  He shakes his head sharply, and doesn’t come inside like the others do. Instead he bends over the doorstep to set the tray on the ground, moving so slowly she finds herself irritated with him, when seconds earlier she was as glad to see him as anyone she’d ever seen before.

  And then two whispered words, so faint she can scarcely hear them or be sure that they have issued from his bent form: “Take it.”

  “Eban?”

  He doesn’t answer but remains doubled over, making slight, enigmatic gestures over the tray, pretending, she understands suddenly, to be fixing something there.

  Only when she has knelt to the ground before him and accepted the tray does he speak, a hurried murmur in her ear, their eyes never meeting: “We can’t say anything. They may be watching. If they send me again tonight. Then. When it’s dark. Promise me, Judy. Don’t speak.”

  He rises to his feet and stares for several seconds at her body, the roundness of her belly, with an intensity she doesn’t recognize—worry? anger? hunger? Then he looks her in the eye and she hears the words he means her to understand as though he’s spoken them again. Don’t speak.

  And then he gently closes the door, and all she has is the hard bread and salt-cured rabbit he left, and the hours till he comes again.

  * * *

  —

  It’s some time before she notices that Eban didn’t bring a fresh chamber pot, and yesterday’s is near full. So she holds her bladder and waits for the evening visit, feeling the pressure swell as though she might burst.

  That afternoon, the baby kicks more than ever before, so sharply that Judy holds her breath to keep from crying out. She becomes desperate enough to try to raise the door in the floor, thinking to creep down into the dark below and squat there in the dirt. But the door has been locked with a key, and she pounds her hand against it in frustration.

  She would never admit it, but she has begun to fear her daughter’s arrival. She knows nothing of childbirth beyond the simplest facts, and that many women die in their labours. In the books she has read, no birth has ever been described—the cleaving of mother and fetus happens between pages, insinuated screams within the silence.

  Now, drawing short breaths to bring her mind away from the pain of her bladder, she tries to guess how it will feel to deliver a living thing into the world.

  Eban returns at dark, tapping at the door and then, after a moment’s hesitation, pushing it open.

  This time, he comes inside, setting the tray of food on the desk and gathering up the dirtied dishes, watching her anxiously all the while. She says nothing, sitting on the bed roll with her legs outstretched, determined to hide the soiled cloth beneath her. She won’t move until he leaves.

  He notices the filled pot as he sets a new one beside it, and looks at her sharply. Glancing quickly to the door, he whispers, “I’m sorry. I forgot it. I didn’t know.”

  “Don’t speak.”

  He looks startled. “Don’t…?” Again, he looks to the door.

  “Don’t speak.” She waits for him to react and then says, “Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “I didn’t mean to…I only wanted to keep you safe. I don’t know what they will do to us.”

  She knows it to be true. She knows he’s right to be cautious. And yet, she feels angry. Not at the people who keep them here, but at him. “I’m here, day and night. Who could I speak to?”

  “I only meant…”

  She looks away from his earnest face. “Is it really okay now?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “Are they watching you? Watching us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why do you bring the food now?”

  He shakes his head again. “She gave it to me. Oona. She makes the food and she just put the dishes in my hands. There’s no way to know more. There’s no way to ask any questions.”

  She draws the blanket up more tightly as he steps towards her, and he stops.

  “I shouldn’t stay long. I suppose…I suppose they might be testing me.”

  She feels a stirring in her stomach that isn’t the baby. She thinks she might be sick. It’s only now that it occurs to her how long her time here might go on.

  “Judy, it’s not a bad place. There’s a job for everyone. There’s food twice a day, and always enough. Better food than we ever had. Oona cooks it for us. But I said that already. I don’t know what to tell you. We all sleep under the houses. But we can come and go as we want. They let me work, and they’re…” He pauses, and then says shyly, “They’re pleased with me. I can tell it. Every day I’m allowed to do more. Today I fixed the roof of the house where Romeo and Bobby-Rae sleep. They have tools like you’ve never seen before. Everything needed to do it right, to make a good job of it. No one speaks, but they’re kind to one another. It doesn’t feel like there’s any danger at all. I know we must be careful. I’m very careful. I follow the rule and do what they show me they want me to do. But I feel welcome here. I can tell that—”

  “Eban, are we prisoners?”

  He stares at her. Then he turns his back and crosses to the filled chamber pot, carrying it carefully to the door and setting it down outside. He leaves the door open, swinging gently in the evening wind. “I like it here. That’s what I’m telling you. That’s what I mean. I like living with these people, in these houses. It’s a good place.”

  She waits until he looks her in the eye as she repeats her question. “Are we?”

  He hesitates and then answers softly, “Weren’t we always?”

  She watches without moving as he balances the pot over the dishes in his arms and leaves.

  For a moment she thinks he forgot to lock the door behind him, but then, after a time, she hears the drawing of the bolt into its place.

  She forgot to ask how many there are.

  * * *

  —

  The idea took hold in her mind the day she found a dumping ground she hadn’t seen before. Years earlier they had searched out and buried all the dumping grounds for miles around their hide. But that day she had wandered farther than the usual path and found a place where people, years ago, had gone to cast away what they couldn’t use.

  She found the usual things in the new dumping ground. Pieces of machinery made for unfathomable purposes. Rotten shreds of clothing. The plastics. And then she saw something else, lying beneath a sheet of rusted steel roofing.

  It was, she realized, after dragging the sheet away, a chair. A chair that looked like a machine.

  The chair sat on four wheels, two large ones at the back and two small ones at the front. There were metal plates for the feet of the person who sat in it, and two tattered straps that must have bound the feet that rested there. Two plastic-covered shanks projected from the chair back. She rested her hand on one, and her fingers settled into purpose-made grooves. Handles, she thought, but not for the person who sat in the chair.

  She looked at it for a long time. She thought of the person who made the chair. Of the person who sat in it. And of the person who held the handles and pushed.

  And then she went back to the hide, where Eban sat sewing patches on her winter coat. He raised his face to see her.

  “I want to go to the cities,” she said.

  They argued till it was dark, and then argued until it was light again. She argued. Eban only received her argument and shook his head, staring at her helplessly. “But why?” he asked and asked again, until she wanted to take the words in her hands and heave them into the woods. “We are safe here, we have all we need…”

  She took his hands in hers and said, “There were good people once who made good things, did good things. It can’t all be gone. Whatever is there now, there might be good left too. Buried t
here among the rest.”

  He refused her. Patiently, gently, kindly, he refused her. And she knew he believed she couldn’t leave without him, and she thought she might believe it herself, and despised them both for her cowardice. And the patience and gentleness and kindness she had loved in him became something different. Complacence. Weakness. A trap.

  And then she was pregnant a second time. And then a third. And the argument went on.

  * * *

  —

  The next day, Oona brings the food. Judy studies her face as she lowers the tray onto the table with a steadiness she admires. That evening Oona returns, slipping into her house with the same soft step and laying out the new dishes and sweeping up the old with a single motion, surprising in its grace.

  Oona delivers the food each day after that, until the first morning of Judy’s fourth week in the black house, when the door opens to reveal the white-haired woman. Sladja.

  The woman shuts the door behind her and leans against it, seeming to consider something. She presses a finger to her mouth, her eyes fixed on Judy. When she at last steps away from the door, her lips are white, drained of blood by the pressure of her finger.

  Hastily setting the food on the floor like she just remembered she carried it, Sladja crosses towards Judy so quickly that she instinctively draws back.

  The older woman holds her steady with one hand and pushes the other into Judy’s belly, as though feeling for something there.

  Judy fights to free herself, but Sladja holds her tightly, one hand pressed against her back as the other digs deeper, palpating the flesh of her belly and then slowly sliding up, coming to rest at last above her navel.