I Remember You

by Elisabeth de Mariaffi

  True memories felt chromatic—a vivid flash—and at the same time, suspect. Hard to trust: she wanted them so much. The first time she’d kissed Harry, a secret, in a passage between houses. She’d pulled him along to show him where a stork was nesting on a chimney pot. The shine of daylight, and high above them a voice calling out: Kuckuck! Kuckuck!

  A little girl leaning out her window, red ribbons in her hair. Spying there.

  Arden spun the bottle cap on the table. The chime as it pinballed from bottle to glass. Heike pulled her glass over and poured again for both of them.

  — Well. What do you think? Are we going to drink this whole thing?

  Arden stayed where she was, watching. Her fingers wound together in her lap.

  — It’s inadvisable.

  — And yet.

  There were two large windows on either side of the door, and Heike turned her head as if to look out onto the street. Where there were no shutters, the sheers hung down in front of the glass, grey with age and tawdry along the edges. On the other side there were only silhouettes moving in turns along the sidewalk, as though someone had rigged a slow-moving fan to cast shadows.

  — The hospital will keep it quiet, she said.

  * * *

  The nurse at the inquest—Marjorie Halloway—had started her testimony by saying she’d been called to Dr. Lerner’s office, but he seemed zonked, out of sorts: she’d been afraid to come in, and then afraid he might hit the young lady, his lady friend, who was with him.

  Heike had also thought Eric meant to hit her. He was weeping in fear—Get her away! I don’t want to see her!—and suddenly raised the broken pen high in his fist, his whole arm shaking with the force of his grip. She was trapped between him and the window and threw an arm over her head to shield herself, the other hand grabbing at the cord from the blinds, trying to wrap it around her wrist like a tether. She was afraid he might push her out the window, the nurse only standing there, stupidly, frightened of him herself.

  But he did not hit her. Instead, he brought his hand down to his own eye—the hand still holding the fountain pen—and the action of driving the nib’s point and then the barrel of the pen itself into the eye socket was not impulsive or easy. It was a fervid gesture, determined, and the bursting of the eye seemed meant for Heike alone. A kind of final punishment.

  This could not be true. Eric was by that time lost to his delusion, she told herself, and Heike’s own face hidden away under her arm, bracing for the blow. She did not look up until she heard him screaming, his face already running with ink and blood. Heike felt the room weave around her. Eric’s other hand still held tight to her dress, pulling her closer.

  He threw himself forward, his face coming down hard against the desk and driving the pen farther into the eye. There was a crumpling sound, eggshells crushed in a fist, and she told herself it was only his nose against the oak desktop. A sound like gristle in the teeth.

  The nurse was screaming too, from her place in the doorway, and she did not, as she told the inquest, run into the room directly, but waited for Eric to fall to the ground, dragging Heike with him. Her arm caught in the cord and wrenched back, her shoulder twisting in its socket. Eric’s other eye rolling, just the white of it gleaming beneath her, his hand tight in her skirt and her body suspended somehow between the two, the skirt and the window cord, as though she were strung on a line.

  The nurse called out for help, and her cries to the younger girl, Harriet Woods—Harry! Harry!—jerked at Heike’s memory: Harry, her husband, Heike calling to him the day he died. She heard herself screaming the name now. Her vision faltered, the room darkening in little fits. Harry. She was lightheaded. As though the room were a jigsaw puzzle, falling away piece by piece.

  Eric convulsed beneath her, blood draining from his nose and ear. She thought for a moment she would vomit and turned her face to the window to breathe.

  It was true, as Miss Halloway told the court, that she’d had to tear Heike’s skirt to free her, and that Heike herself sat on Eric’s ankles to hold him down, but he was mostly still by then. The other girl arrived, breathless up the stairs, and she ran around the room twice before leaving to fetch the doctor. No one thought of the telephone. They waited and did not speak, but the nurse wept and Heike fumbled to unwind the cord where she’d wrapped it around her wrist, the skin coming up in welts where it had cut against her and the whole thing a tight web, pulling tighter. Her hands shaking as she worked to untangle herself. It was only when the new doctor arrived that she realized she’d also been crying. Her fingernails tearing at the cord.

  At first he thought the stains on her skirt were blood, but it was only the black of the ink where Eric had grasped at her. This was the doctor, Tate, up from the village in his suit pants and slippers, unprepared for the scene he walked into. The blood was there, too, but in a fine, even spray, across Heike’s face and neck and collarbones, as though someone had brushed her with powder. There was blood on the floor, and more of it, as you’d expect, near to where Eric had fallen. A head will bleed, Miss Halloway told the inquest, like none other.

  It was Tate who dismissed her. He asked her which village she was from, or if Eric had found her on the road. If she worked on the road, or at a roadside bar, or if she’d come from a house with other girls in it. She froze, understanding suddenly what he thought of her. When she did not answer, he assumed she was in shock, and he told her to run away before the newspapers got hold of her, or the police. Heike was out of the room before she realized she’d forgotten the flashlight, her purse, everything she’d brought in with her, and had to go back in and watch them covering Eric’s body with a white sheet. His features appearing slowly, grotesque and exaggerated, staining dark through the cloth.

  She left the building, shoes slipping off her heels as she ran down the marble stairs and along the hall, the woman in her cast-iron bed sedated now, her leg calm under a heavy blanket, the bell of bone on metal ringing out for no one anymore.

  * * *

  Out on the lawn it had been cooler and quiet, and she half-expected to find Marek there, waiting for her. Instead, she was alone. The silence was expansive around her, and the grounds seemed wider and more vacant than they had before, the space between building and tree, or tree and tree, opening out long and deep green. She did not bother to turn on the flashlight. Before she reached the car, she noticed the little storage house, its door still open, and she went in and this time flipped on the light, for the moment unworried about being seen. It flickered and then buzzed to life, a fluorescent trough running down the centre of the structure.

  She could see now the disorder she’d left behind, the bags and boxes upended and torn through. The brightness made the place lonelier than ever, an abandoned museum of belongings. With the light burning, the birds in the rafters made daytime noises, and she noticed for the first time a ladder at the back of the room, fixed to an open hatch in the ceiling: the attic access. She left her bag at the bottom of it and climbed up, just high enough to poke her head through the hatch. Here there were no racks, no labels, the bags just jumbled together. It was hard to know if these were the oldest remnants or the newest additions. The light from the main room was present but blocked by her body on the ladder. Heike went all the way up until she was on her knees on the floor, then flicked on the flashlight.

  To one side there were crates without lids, as though a rash of people had been stripped down and their things tossed into the nearest container and the container tossed aside. To the other, just more suitcases, mostly well-worn, the leather cracked. She had not asked herself why she was here or what she was doing, but the knowledge sat at the back of her throat. The thing old Marek had wanted to show her: if she’d been a patient here, there was a chance that her own bag was in this storage house, and in it, some clue to what had come before. The life she’d had before Eric, before Daniel.

  She drew up high on her knees and began to poke through the open crates, but the contents were dusty and
unremarkable. If there was a past Heike in here, how would she ever know? It was the by-now-usual collection of shoes and belts, work pants and embroidered blouses. A tartan shawl. A blanket.

  Heike turned to the other side and let the flashlight graze the floor and the pile of leather bags. The sole of her foot pushed an empty tin crate, and it fell, lopsided, off its perch over an old duffel bag and hit the ground with a shudder. The lid broke off, dangling there by a single hinge. It was a dump, a garbage house. She should go down the ladder and switch the light off and get back in the car and be gone, before Tate changed his mind, or the police changed it for him.

  She turned back to the crates instead and shone her light toward the wall. It caught on the pearled inlay of a handle, creamy white. Well protected back there. She climbed in and drew the case out. A last whim. She used to ask Eric for a white suitcase, didn’t she? Hadn’t she been sure, once, that she had lost such a thing? The curve of the handle was cool against her hand, and she crawled backward, watching behind her for the hatch and hitting the tin lid with her foot. The case was heavy enough to make it awkward to lift, and she dragged it along, drawing a furrow through the other bags. Pure white with a white handle. She kicked the empty crate out of the way and drew up onto her knees.

  Schneiders it said on the closure. She lit up the brand name with the flashlight. There was no standard keyhole or latch. Heike ran her thumb over the ornament at the top of the case, a copper dragon’s head. No, not a dragon: a bird, a swallow; the fork-split of a tail, not a tongue. She flipped the case over. The copper swallow the only possible latch she could see. Her thumb on the swallow’s tail, she pushed up, lifting the notch. She did this without thinking, as though she’d opened it a hundred times before. Her index finger flexed; the tiny hammer swung out. The case fell open at her feet. Heike flinched without meaning to, as though there might be a body in the bag.

  But there was nothing macabre inside, only the leftovers of some long-ago picnic: three glass bottles, rinsed and wrapped in cloth napkins to protect them; the waxed paper wrappers off a few sandwiches, the paper blue with mould at the edges; a bathing suit. Bundled in a blue cloth she found a folding camera, still clean and, like the case itself, Germanmade: a Zeiss Contessa with a little hinged door to protect the lens. Its owner just returning from a trip to the beach, something pleasing and sunny, the day the bottom fell out of the world.

  The case was lined with gingham. On closer examination, Heike saw that this was just a groundcover, its edges stuck to the true lining, years of being pressed up against each other creating a seal. She ran a fingernail underneath and stripped the cloth out. Between cloth and lining there was a newspaper, folded in half, part of the crossword filled in and smeared with ink. The date on it mid-June, 1950. No pen, but a bit of dry grass, as though the cloth had not been shaken out thoroughly enough, and a sketchbook, the size and shape of the one she’d found at the cabin. Heike opened it, the flashlight shining straight down. Some of the pages were blank, some dense with charcoal drawings. A few simple watercolours, gestural, unfinished. She combed through, letting the edges flutter past her thumb and watching a weird filmstrip of moving images, from the back of the book to the front. Near the centre of the book, a page stuck and she stopped.

  Ravens on a wire and diving, the swoop and fall of their wings.

  She could see now why the flutter of pages paused here: wedged into the binding was a small photograph, cut with a crimped edge. The style of the time. In the picture were two girls, one light and one dark, hands clasped. Barefoot. Out in the countryside somewhere, posed on the grassy banks of a river. The smaller of the two so familiar: Lena.

  Heike traced the dark hair with a finger. Her sister, Lena, about three in the photo. Her thighs still baby soft. And next to her, blond hair in braids upon her head, Tessa. The girl from the raft.

  Heike flipped the picture over. Her mother’s fine, spidery handwriting: Lena u. Heike, Meissen an der Elbe, 1941.

  On the inside cover of the book, there was a little sketch of the swallow closure from the suitcase, curlicued, and in the same black ink her own name, her name for only a short while, her long-ago name: Heike Foster, Dresden Pond, Cayuga County.

  * * *

  — Do you think he knew? Arden asked.

  She had gone next door to the bakery, and they were eating hot rolls from a paper bag out in the sunshine. They’d left the pickles and hocks back at the tavern, sweating on their plates, but Heike had brought the fifth of bourbon along with them, and she slipped it into the bag next to the remaining rolls. The bottle could now be called at best an eighth rather than a fifth, and this only if the caller had a magnanimous eye.

  — He was so sure of himself, Heike said. It was a kind of bragging, to bring me back so close to the asylum. And every time we went, he let me get just a bit closer: now in the restaurant down the road, now close by the building, now right on the grounds. I must have walked there before, through the garden. Every time he was only proving to himself how clever, how divine he was.

  — I don’t mean the asylum. I mean the cabin, Cayuga, the whole landscape. It’s amazing that he ever agreed to come here. It’s like bringing you back to the scene of the crime.

  — Oh, no. I’m sure he had no idea I’d ever lived here. It’s only a fishing cabin; a summer place. The accident must have happened in the city—Eric said I was transferred from a city hospital. He told me how patients come in, on the train, all the way from California sometimes. No way out once you’re in—he used to say that. Because you arrive and the connection is immediately lost. Your history, everything. So there is no proof the cabin is mine.

  — A person could look up the deed.

  Heike swallowed the bit of bread in her mouth. She’d thought of it: the dresser drawer with its ream of papers. The possibility of something official in there, a passport, a marriage certificate that linked her to Harry Foster and so to the house on the pond. She’d kept the white case, carrying it away with her the night Eric died. The photo and sketchbook were in her handbag now, the Contessa camera still loaded with a roll of half-spent film.

  They were standing in the middle of the sidewalk. Arden reached into her purse, and then Heike felt the nudge of something against her hand. For a moment she was worried it was Eric’s ring, Arden giving it back, but in fact it was a billfold.

  — Just to help you get settled. Or get started, however you want to phrase it.

  Heike fingered the thin leather, opening it and closing it again. The money inside held in place with a silvery bobby pin. Arden snapped her purse closed.

  — You’ll take it, won’t you? It’s just a boost. I didn’t even have to lie about the groceries: it’s my own money.

  — It’s more than a boost.

  — Well. Take it. I mean to help you, at least to get yourself settled. Like I said, I never had a sister. Then, catching herself: Oh, please don’t . . . I didn’t mean it that way. I don’t want to make you sad.

  Heike clutched the money in one hand.

  — No. You haven’t. Of course not. It’s lovely, you know. It’s very sweet of you. She looked down at the billfold again. I haven’t had a sister for a long time, she said. She reached out for Arden, squeezing her arm. At least Lena is someone I can remember.

  Long weeks hiking through the countryside, hiding in ditches and stealing bread, or begging for it. Lena repeating a little song she’d learned in school, “Goldvogel, flieg aus, Flieg auf die Stangen, Käsebrode langen . . .”

  Heike’s face lightened.

  — It means: “Golden bird, grab us some cheese sandwiches!” Her grip on Arden’s wrist, another quick squeeze before she pulled away again. We were so alone, she said. And then one morning, she was gone.

  As though she’d been plucked away by some invisible hand, the junipers and late-spring snow around their little camp crisp and untouched. The coat she’d tucked around Lena had still been there on the ground when Heike woke, with a trace of frost along the lin
ing of the hood where Lena’s breath had dampened it. A few feet away, the sun had already warmed the earth, and there was no snow.

  No snow, no footprints.

  She was lost; she’d wandered off. She’d woken in the night, disoriented, and gone to look for some familiar thing, her doll, her blanket. What Heike feared most was what she’d already known was most likely: that the cold had been too much for Lena, the cold or else a steep fall, a wrong turn in the dark.

  They walked on in silence for a moment, Arden’s paper bag crackling around the weight of the bread and bottle inside.

  — There was a dog, Heike said finally. Did I ever tell you that? A dog, loose in the woods. A giant.

  Arden stopped, hedging a little.

  — And you think . . . Lena? The dog, I mean . . .

  — Did it eat her, or attack her somehow? Heike looked up at the sun, her eyes almost shut. No, she said. I don’t think so. It stayed with me for a day and a night, that dog. Not too close, but never far away. It wasn’t vicious. Or else it wasn’t hungry—but everything was hungry, everyone, so . . . She looked back to Arden again, sunspots clouding her vision for a moment. I almost wondered if it would lead me to her, to Lena.

  — But it didn’t.

  — It was killed, Heike said. In the night. The soldiers killed it.

  The dog lying there stiff against the snow in the morning, curled into itself, and the girl, also killed by soldiers, lying stiff in the barn where Heike had hidden away all night, and Lena seven days gone. A wisp of smoke in the sky from the forest on the other side of the village, the camp where the men had come from in the night. She’d turned and run the other way.

  Now she caught herself:

  — I don’t really know how long she was missing. Lena. I couldn’t remember, later on, how long I spent trying to find her. So I made it up. I decided it must have been seven days.