The Second History

by Rebecca Silver Slayter

  “What on earth would that be?”

  “How happy we were.”

  * * *

  —

  The next night, it’s already dark when Sladja arrives to collect the pages. She enters the house carrying a lantern like the ones Judy remembers from her fathers’ house. Made in the old style, with an ornamental glass chamber, it casts a splintered yellow light around the room.

  On other nights, Sladja has taken the finished pages from Judy without so much as looking at them, and then immediately unlocked the drawer and begun work marking up the new pages. But this time, for some reason of her own, she sits down at the desk and begins to read what Judy has copied, word by word.

  Judy watches her, trying to guess from her face what she is looking for or confirming as she reads. She seems to linger over certain lines, her gaze arrested, her thoughts a mystery as she stares into the page. Once she turns a page over to read again what she has already read.

  At last, she lays the papers on the table and sits for a moment looking over her shoulder into the shadows that dart and shudder along the wall.

  Standing at the window, her hands at rest on her rounded belly, Judy feels strangely moved by the older woman. She imagines for her there is something stinging in the past, some sharp hook of regret that has caught her thoughts.

  But the mood, whatever the source of it, drops away abruptly and completely. With an air of impatience, Sladja jams the key into the locked drawer and tosses the history onto the table. She seems to cross out more lines than ever before, with only a few brief, scribbled words to replace them. When she has finished, the pages she pushes across the table to Judy are scarcely legible.

  As Judy bends to take up the pages, she feels a sudden, violent tightening in her womb. With a gasp, she drops the papers, which waft and drift across the floor. And the pain comes again.

  She finds herself on her hands and knees and doesn’t know how she reached the position. Whatever is happening to her won’t stop happening. All that had held together—one thought to another, one moment to the next—cleaves. Between pains she looks up to Sladja, who stands at the table, white-faced. She looks much tinier and older than she did when she came into the room. Judy can see every thought in her head. She is afraid.

  For a moment, the two women regard each other from either end of this event. As Sladja’s lips part and Judy imagines she might speak, Judy slides a hand into her pants. When she pulls her hand out, it is red.

  There’s a crash as Sladja shoves aside the stool, which falls to the floor. She stumbles across the room and throws open the door. Catching hold of a rope Judy has never noticed before, she strikes a bell that must be hidden in the eaves. The bell clangs and clangs, but does nothing else. Summons no one.

  Sladja drops the bell pull and turns back to Judy, who thinks now she’ll come to help her. But instead she opens her mouth and howls.

  The sound seems to repeat in Judy’s head, ring in her bones. The long wail repeats, repeats, and ends.

  When it does, a third person is in the room. She slips inside the door and stands with her fists at her sides, looking from Sladja to Judy. As Golda slowly edges towards Judy, Sladja pushes past and vanishes out the door. The lantern winks out just as Judy realizes that the pains have stopped.

  In the dark, she hears Golda crouch to the ground beside her. And then the girl’s arms wrap around her. Her embrace is too tight to be comforting or comfortable. But Judy finds herself clinging to the arms that have encircled her.

  Sladja returns with a pot of hot water and a small sack of herbs, which she mixes into the water and forces Judy to drink. It burns her tongue but she drinks it all. She feels Golda’s eyes on her as she lowers the cup to the floor.

  Together, as though they share an understanding, Golda and Sladja guide Judy to her bedding. In the light of the candles Sladja brought back with her to the black house, Judy watches the two women. When they think she sleeps, they blow out the candles and leave.

  In the dark, Judy shakes with exhaustion. There is no more pain, and no more bleeding. She doesn’t know what has happened to her. She waits and waits to know.

  In her fist is the key Golda pressed into her hand when she helped her to her bed. And in the table behind her is the drawer it will unlock.

  XIV

  Four, five, sometimes six times a day now, Sladja comes to check on Judy. If she finds Judy out of bed, she guides her back to it with a firm hand and a frown. Judy learns that if she waits until Sladja is gone, she can safely take an hour out of bed before she appears again. And so every time the other woman leaves, she listens for the scrape of the bolt and then unlocks the drawer, and sits at the table and reads. She notes the line of sunlight on the floorboards if the day is bright, and makes herself stop reading when it has shifted by more than the span of her hand. If the day is dark, she just guesses at the time, but sometimes she becomes lost in what she’s reading, and knows she’s in danger of staying out of bed too long and being caught. She doesn’t know what Sladja would do if she found her at the table with the open drawer and the history in her hands.

  Now and again, Judy once more feels the clench of her womb, and occasionally it is sharp enough to take her breath from her. But in time, it passes, and there is no more blood. Whatever has happened or almost happened remains at bay, for now.

  When she has locked the history back in the drawer, Judy slides the key halfway under the table leg. She hopes that when Sladja at last notices it missing, she’ll think she only dropped it.

  Each time she pushes the key into the lock she wonders how it came to be in Golda’s hand, and then slipped into her own. She tries to imagine when Golda might have noticed the key, abandoned on the table where Sladja left it. The two women seemed to have been by her side until they left. But what is strangest of all is that Golda guessed it might be useful to Judy.

  When she first saw the girl, she was frightened of her. The terrible violence of whatever had been done to her tongue seemed to cling to her, an endlessly echoing threat. But Judy sees now that the girl is a victim. Like Judy, she is trapped here in some inscrutable way. Though she’s permitted a measure of freedom—more, it seems, than Judy—within its confines, she is captive. She is kept, thinks Judy, and then, I am kept.

  * * *

  —

  Judy wonders if Eban knows what happened to her, and then tries and fails to imagine how it could possibly have been conveyed without words. In the long quiet hours of rest and worry, she has found herself missing him. When she lost the other babies, he would make her stay in bed for days, as Sladja does now. And he would struggle by turn to entertain or comfort her. To guess which was what she wanted. At the time she wished only that he would leave her alone, but now she thinks that she would like him to be here.

  She feels as though she is creeping towards an understanding, if she could only get a little closer. She no longer recalls what she’s searching for, but she retains the conviction that whatever it is, she might find it in the pages of the history.

  Two days into her reading, Judy’s eye catches Josefine’s name on the page. The history has recounted six years of life in the colony since she was last mentioned.

  * * *

  —

  We’ve met four times to discuss what to do about Josefine. But no one has any ideas. None that we can live with, none worthy of the kind of men and women we came to these hills to be. She can’t be sent away, not after so many years. But she can’t be kept. She shows great interest in the children, but she frightens them. She carries the youngest boy, James, around in her arms like a baby, even though it makes him scream and fight her, and his parents say she takes him with her deep into the woods when they are at work. Things have gone missing that can’t be accounted for except by her presence at the time they disappeared. She eats as she pleases, from the fields, from our stocks, and wastes as much as she eats, leav
ing picked potatoes to rot in the mud where she dropped them, or forgetting to re-tie the sacks of dried fruit she plunders, so that they become infested with grain beetles. At night she doesn’t seem to sleep but just wanders from house to house, and several people have reported waking to find her standing just inside or just outside their door. She hardly answers us when asked what she is doing or why. And none of us seem to be able to reason with her.

  Last night I told Ren she was unhinged, and I could tell from his expression that he was annoyed. It has been a long time since he gave up speaking to her, but he never pretended to understand why I asked it of him. Or to think well of me for asking. Since then, he has been true to his word. I don’t know how he explained it to her, but I haven’t seen a look or word pass between them ever again.

  And so when I said her name he flinched like I’d slapped him, but didn’t answer.

  “Something will have to be done,” I told him. And still he just studied the staff he was carving—since winter he’s had a persistent pain in his left knee, and he thought a cane might make his long climbs in the hills a little easier—and said nothing.

  “Everyone has said their piece, but still no one does anything. They’re in need of leadership. A decision. A sure hand.”

  “Maybe,” he said.

  “I used to think you were that kind of person.” I looked at him as I spoke the words so he’d know I meant the sting of them. But he didn’t look stung in the least. He looked sorry. And I saw right then how old he’d grown.

  “I thought it too,” he said only. “I thought it too, Sladjana.”

  I wished he called me “my ljubavi” as he used to. For the first time, I realized it had been years since he had spoken those words. But the thought didn’t make me sad as all of our conversation seemed to be making him sad. It made me angry. “And what has changed?” I demanded. “You’re no less needed now. And so what’s the change? Where is the man we followed here, the one we listened to, whose every word we hung on? The one I listened to. The one I followed here. Aren’t you that man?”

  I wanted to make him angry too. I thought my anger would break the strange calm that had settled over him, the look of hardly caring about anything at all.

  “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “Not that man. Not anymore.”

  When I grew up, it was unusual to marry young. It was rare and considered unwise to know only one lover. I can’t remember why. Was it because you were meant to wait until you had grown old enough to know yourself, as if the person you are was a fixed destination, an address to roll into like a driveway and never leave? When we met, we were nineteen years old, both of us, born just three days apart. Which seemed meaningful to us, in those young years when everything was meaningful, everything important. We won the disapproval of our parents, which was as good as a blessing. We were alike in everything, except in the ways we were different, which were perfect too.

  Or was it because you were meant to try out those feelings, before you owned them permanently? Was it so you could learn the ways of other bodies, and then know what was him and what was sex itself, so it wouldn’t feel as if you had invented it all, together, something as alive and wondrous as that, belonging all to you. Or was it because if you loved only once, you would love too hard?

  “I was pompous,” he said. “A blowhard. It makes me sick to think about it. I spend all day forgetting it, and then I come home and I remember. When we came here, I was certain about everything. I thought we were going off to live in an idea. But it’s not an idea. It’s this shitty cough I can’t get rid of and no drugs for it but those expired ones you hock like snake oil in a pillbox. We’ll all die of things we could have cured at the counter of a pharmacy. It’s the awful food that tastes so good it’s depressing, because we’re all half-starved. It’s all these people, who have come here with us and gone half-crazy with us or maybe always were. It’s how hard we work. It’s how much we care. It’s how the woods smell, every single day. It’s how the weather changes everything. It’s the way you look now, with your hair grown long and turned white like it has. You are relentlessly beautiful.”

  He didn’t say even those last words with tenderness. But I didn’t want any. “Pompous?” I repeated.

  He nodded. “I used to talk and talk and talk. And I believed everything I said.”

  “You believed?” I knocked the staff out of his hand, and the knife too, without meaning to. He watched them clatter to the floor, and kept his head lowered. “I believed. Was it pompous?” I asked.

  “We didn’t know anything,” he said, which wasn’t an answer.

  “I thought we were going to do something magnificent, something so unlike anything our parents ever did. All those people from before. They watched everything they had known fall apart, and let their lives happen to them. But what we planned? Before we came here, I could see everything, I knew exactly how it would be. We would begin together. No one else got to begin again.” He had dropped one hand to his side, like it was thinking about picking up the staff or the knife, but hadn’t made up its mind. He was still looking at the floor. “But we didn’t, did we? That’s what you’re telling me now. We just got old in a worse world like everyone else.”

  Years and years ago, when we still lived in the city, which was still the original city, Ren signed us up for dance lessons. It was a kind of a joke, but we went every week, faithfully. In an old church that had been remade for weddings and parties instead of religion. We did the steps better than anyone there. We were always first to get them right, and I knew it reflected well on us. I knew the other dancers thought we were a better couple than they were because of it. It was spring after a long winter, and at the lesson’s end, while the other dancers lingered to practise or make shy conversation, we would burst through the church doors into the pink evening. I would hang on his arm, matching my steps to his as we hurried down the sidewalk, because we were that eager. We were young and beautiful and other people envied us. I don’t know if I knew it then, but we cared for no one but ourselves. And we were as happy as we would ever be.

  I don’t know what made me think of that.

  “I’ve let you down,” Ren said at last.

  “It’s her,” I told him. “It hasn’t been right since she came.”

  “Who? What are you talking about?”

  I spat her name. “Josefine. She has ruined everything.”

  He stared at me and I thought of things my mother used to say. I loved to hear her talk. I loved her strange Serbian idioms. Merak nema cenu. Your heart’s desire has no price. Progledati nekome kroz prste meant to look at someone through your fingers, as I looked at her. I couldn’t rightly see her until she was dead. As a child, I thought she was remarkable. I thought her life was original and interesting. Later I saw it was all waste. But I miss her language. I feel tired of talking in English. I want to speak and know there’s no chance he’ll understand and no hope he’ll even try.

  “I didn’t know that was what you thought,” he said quietly. “You’re wrong, Sladja. It never had anything to do with her. It wasn’t her who did this.”

  “Then who was it? Tell me that. Who did it?”

  He didn’t say the words, but I heard them. He didn’t say anything. He just picked up his staff from the floor and slid his knife into his pocket. Then he touched my hair and left the room.

  We did.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, the full moon casts down enough light for Judy to read on into the early hours of the night. She reads until her eyes ache, huddled by the broken window, squinting in the blue near-dark. She reads of how the colony finally sends Josefine away, of how she walks into the wood, willing and sullen, and Sladja watches till she’s gone. And then page follows page of crop reports, weather chronicles, the routines of finding and preparing food, repeated over and over. The pomp of the first years has drained from the
recounting of these tasks. They began as pioneers, devoted believers. They left their jobs and talents to toil in the woods as clumsy farmers and terrible hunters, for love of an idea. And now, what was left of that novel society was a joyless and increasingly fractious body of people. A tattered family, who knew each other only by habit, and were bound together by resentment more than care.

  Sladja writes more and more frequently of Oona. The two women seem to have drawn closer over the years, and they are often alone together. Oona sometimes hunts with Sladja, while Sladja takes to helping Oona skin and cure the meat. There is no indication of what the two women talk of, or if they talk at all, but they seem to seek out each other’s company, and Sladja writes of the other woman with respect, and even warmth.

  Judy looks up, startled, and finds the twin at the door. Somehow she didn’t hear him pull the lock or even push open the door. She heard nothing until he stepped inside. Now he stands staring at her, a torch in one hand and something else in the other.

  Judy’s thudding heart sounds in her ears. She’s dizzy, her fingers clawing the edge of the page, and her eyes dart to the still-open drawer. Does he understand what she has? Does he stand there frozen because he is about to run, to bring someone to show what she has done? She has closed her hand around the page edge. She could slide it in the drawer and hope he has never seen the history before, or has forgotten it. Or knows no better than she does why it matters.

  The light of the torch scatters over his face, and falls against the walls of the room, which swim into view as he steps closer. No one but Sladja has ever come here after dark. And he carries no food or drink with him, no pail. She can’t guess what he means by standing there.

  Still watching her with his strangely steady gaze, he reaches out his hand and reveals its contents. With a frown she peers at a soiled cloth wrapped in a ball and then, answering his encouraging nod, she opens the cloth. Inside is a knitted object she can’t identify, made of the same greasy grey wool as all of the colony’s hats and sweaters. He reaches his hand closer, and she takes the bundle of wool from him, holding it up to the moonlight.