A Stolen Season

by Rodney Hall

  Let me go, let me go. I’m forty-nine already.

  An elderly waiter materializes at her elbow, murmuring, ‘In this ceiba tree our gods live.’ His stilted English gives him authority as, with a tiny tinkle of clashing ice cubes, he places her drink in reach and points among the dusk-shadowed branches. She looks up in time to see the setting sun caught in a vast basket of boughs. Lurid radiance spills into the rift of sky between the horizon and a floating cloudbank big as a continent. Belatedly she realizes the entire tree is covered in broad-based thorns thick as barnacles, at one and the same time dangerous and comical. Never in her life has she seen such a ridiculously foreign-looking tree.

  Already the charm of surprise is too fleeting. Well, Marianna can fix that. She can stop time itself. By way of proof she pops off a few photos on her mobile. Then, remembering her vulnerability, deletes the files before some multinational can track her down and sweep every last image into its infinite archive of stolen privacies. Fortuitously, there’s no reception here. A close call, even so. Given the choice, she prefers to have tree gods spying on her. And not being her gods, they might take such a dim view of tourists they won’t be interested anyhow.

  She intends thanking the old chap but he has vanished. The tension in her chest begins to unknot.

  And now, tramping along the lane between the hotel and the city wall, a procession approaches. Spindly wooden crucifixes are carried by men with broadbrimmed hats and shadowed terracotta faces. Some brandish branches of bronze-green leaves. Marianna watches, fascinated. As a lapsed Lutheran she knows very little about decadence (let alone the hair-raising ritual of drinking Christ’s blood). She knows very little about architecture. And she knows even less about the legacy of the conquistadors. She knows something about poverty but nothing about symbolism. She knows all too much about men, however.

  Men she does . . . though not these. Their raw religious passion strikes a dangerous note. Falsetto voices wail. The crosses, taller than the rooftops, bend and wobble as they make wavering progress, even after those holding them up have disappeared from sight behind the hutches and stables lining the road. She listens to the ululating cries as they enter an echoey alleyway.

  This, she instructs herself, is a treat. Yet fear seizes her. What if they come back? What if they come back for me? What if I have been observed? What if I’m not alone, here on this ottoman among the flowers? What if I have been recognized? She darts a look in all directions in case someone has crept up behind her. But there’s only the peaceful garden and a long low line of hotel windows mirroring the golden afternoon.

  Until . . .

  Fear rushes at her because the same crowd comes careering back in panic, fleeing as if chased by demons, shouting something that sounds like Arrest her! Arrest her! But no—it’s only words in their own language. Nonsense. Bursting out between the wall and the hotel fence, many of them now hatless, they jostle one another. All are barefoot. Baggy clothing the colour of wheat flaps around their knees. Intent, frequently in collision, uttering strange cries and no longer carrying the crosses, they charge from anywhere to anywhere.

  She waits anxiously to see what they are escaping from and whether she needs to lock herself in her room. But nothing (and no one) follows. As swiftly as they have appeared they are gone. She is left with the emptiness of an event not understood. She knows less than she thought. A single penetrating voice lingers, intoning some kind of lament. The melody unravels, bare as Gregorian chant yet native to the jungle, till what’s so very strange is that it lodges in the pit of her groin.

  Marriage to Manfred was a fiasco.

  The curtain billows her way again, soft, big-hipped and stealthy. For years she promised herself she would travel—well, here she is, in a place where everything is authentically foreign. She watches the skyline lift till the sun slips from the tree’s thorny grasp to plunge behind a tide of forested hills.

  The waiter is back, expectant, standing too close and refolding a napkin over the crook of his arm. She wants to be rid of him. She needs space. He proceeds to claim the special splendour of the sunset for his country: ‘This sky is nowhere else!’ The silly boast baffles her. To prevent him making more demands on her admiration she interrupts. ‘I wish to order the best dinner Belize can offer,’ she tells him. This does the trick and he sets off to arrange it. Swallowed by the garden. Gone. The enclosing foliage promptly creeps closer around her. Folded red flames of heliconia emerge above the fence. She sips her drink and settles once more to tackling the task of being at peace. The ottoman mutters and crepitates.

  Little does she suspect she might have let loose a furore in the hotel. But she has. A hubbub spreads through the maze of corridors because nobody on the staff knows what ‘the best meal Belize can offer’ is . . . nor even that there might be any such thing. Panicked restaurant staff gather behind the windows to watch the problem guest fanning herself under her dim sag-bellied canopy. The difficulty being that, while everyone admits the crisis, no one can suggest a way through. On the lookout for enlightenment the manager stations himself between two display cabinets of Mayan jade carvings. Thus flanked by memorials to the nation’s dignity he dispatches his most handsome and least scrupulous employee to offer her a dish of complimentary ice as the pretext for insisting she choose for herself from the printed menu.

  As this languid Adonis crosses the lawn the tropical dusk advances simultaneously from the opposite direction to meet him. For Marianna—marooned between—her golden terrace remains bathed in warmth. Evening lilies open fleshy lips to deliver secreted anaesthetics. She is preoccupied with ghosts. She can face the fact that Manfred ruined everything. Though, to be fair (and she prides herself on being fair), he was not altogether to blame. Way before Manfred she’d had to endure childhood . . . and her father in particular. The past is the past. This she insists on. And the present the present. Till recently she has never done anything to contradict the ordinariness of life. Though look at her now . . . queening it at the ends of the earth! The charm of the unfamiliar. She entertains the idea of staying for a whole week.

  Glancing at the intruder she checks his dark eyes and emergent moustache. His ruthless golden hand. Supple wrist. And a fresh supply of ice crackling in the dish, which he has placed on her little table with its unequal legs. Without the need of a second look at him she scoops a couple of cubes into her glass. The young man adjusts his pelvis hopefully and places a menu where she cannot avoid seeing it. But then, losing courage, retreats to the bar without uttering a word.

  Now the head cook emerges from the kitchen, a corpulent woman, crowding the restaurant with her fit of panic. Two-way doors flap and bat at her back. She is arrested by the manager’s firm hand on her arm and the manager’s imperious finger raised to gain time. Stalemate.

  All unaware, Marianna adjusts the cushions and settles her head. From some far corner of the establishment a few tentative notes plucked on a guitar conjure up the human world. And indeed this must signal a fresh chapter because lights come on in the room behind her to spill through the angled slats. Gently luminous. She consults her wristwatch, although the more she stares at it the less the hands make sense. One overwhelming question demands an answer: ‘Did I commit suicide?’ And she asks it. Aware that she’s within earshot of unknown gods she relies on English to baffle them, murmuring, ‘Were my troubles ever that bad?’ Well, yes, they were. And worse by the day, right up to the final humiliation. ‘Forget it,’ she apologizes to placate the gods—just in case they might be linguists—before politely adding, ‘Please.’

  And, of course, the suicide isn’t her secret of secrets. Her secret of secrets lies deeper, embedded and unreachable, defying her to find adequate words.

  The unseen musician builds the rhythm with repeated pungent chords. She pictures him perched on a stool in some corner of the foyer, one foot on a box, too absorbed by the sweep of fingernails to notice that the hotel around him is empty
and there’s nobody listening. His dancing syncopations build mesmerizing repetitions. The dream of music. Tuned sky.

  Manfred had simply burst into her studio as a total stranger, with the explanation that he was being followed. Yes, ‘followed’. What had attracted him was the slogan over the door: You walk in—you dance out. That slogan, he said when he got to know her, clinched it. And once in, he stayed in. Day after day. But who was he? How did he come to have so much time on his hands? Well, it was none of her business. Confident of her skill and independence, she did what she did. As a ballroom dancing instructor. And he signed up to be taught.

  She prided herself on earning a liveable income despite the times being against her. Nightclubs were the chosen hub. Dances devoted to tribal jigging and bouncing and ballrooms everywhere had long since closed their doors. Young people could not be bothered learning the proper steps. Musicians took to the streets as buskers. She rescued a studio and bought the lease for a snip. The professionals who owned the original franchise had gone broke. The only customers left were either actors or cranks.

  Well, of course, one of the cranks was Manfred.

  As soon as he enrolled he began practising his moves, hour upon hour in a time warp of mostly forgotten courtesies, gyrating around the huge buckled floor, his existence confirmed by dusty mirrors and the brief disturbance of long-faded drapes. He became really quite good at it, and, true to his word, paid cash down for the lessons.

  Oh, she should have seen what was coming: a young bully like that being too humble by half, hair oiled like a black marketeer, coltish smile and ice-blue eyes, his Windsor knot and twinkling shoes. The trace of cologne was not the only unpleasant impression. She picked his German accent too. So, he and she had Germany in common. His consonants transported her back to her childhood in Kiel.

  He was busy as busy—Manfred—busy keeping out of sight of the authorities by disappearing into her life. She gave him permission without realizing he meant to stay. It never crossed her mind he might take her over from the inside. Already, after a fortnight at most, he murmured increments of the possible, ‘This . . . our happiness . . . could be by us . . . made permanent.’ Apparently he had come to a decision and all he needed was her consent. In return for marriage he would assume responsibility for the business and fix up the accounts to current standards, ‘Because we will share a joint bank account already and then we can also be prosperous truly, liebchen.’

  Next thing, she became the new Mrs Regel. Body and soul. And they strolled arm in arm around the Saturday market, choosing vegetables and fish and soon to be greeted by the stallholders as regulars because, to give him credit, Manfred had a gift for companionship. But something about his full moist lips gave dreadful hints when she and he, disguised as a couple, exchanged counterfeit kisses. On top of this he began growing a beard for purposes undisclosed. Once safe in this obscure marriage he trashed his laptop (first securing a few treasured files on USB) and tossed away his mobile phone.

  Incredibly, she still didn’t pick it. In bed his body lay heavy on hers. He sizzled with curly black hairs. She was his meal. And soon enough something else claimed her attention anyhow. Books on natural childbirth spoke to her from shop windows. She became absorbed in the organic adjustments of pregnancy. She gave up smoking and alcohol. She sought guidance on diet and controlled breathing. The baby flourished by the month to become so very contented and quiet it only occasionally shifted to seek a more comfortable position in there.

  Now, under the ceiba tree, she deletes huge hunks of the pregnancy story to save herself from fruitless regrets. Enough to say that, in time, the baby’s stillness grew heavy with doubts, ending in a rush to hospital—Manfred on the front step of their apartment waved her goodbye and good luck—the double doors to Emergency clashing behind her as a doctor swept in on flying white coat-tails and set to work with his stethoscope. Listening. Immediately he adopted the sombre attentiveness of cocked head and close scrutiny. His diagnosis reduced the future to ash and struck her half-dead with grief.

  She will never forget.

  The rickety ottoman creaks. Bats fly overhead. Grief bloats her eyes. With sudden force the tropical night swoops up from the strange land, fully armed, bristling with bludgeons and lances, gorgeously indigo, releasing a million luminous moths to spangle the sky. From its murmurous depths the wilderness utters a crescendo of cries, the chaos of damned souls yelping and moaning with unbearable intensity. God knows what this noisy disturbance is. But she cannot breathe till it’s over. In terror she covers her ears—lock down—till the crisis passes. And it does.

  Eventually deep night envelops Marianna and cloaks her thoughts with bloodwarm velvet. She is puzzled by the dish of water standing beside her empty glass. Why water? A tiny surviving sliver of ice escapes notice. Light through the angled slats reaches past her and out into the restless dark. The call of a bell tinkles from some remote cavity of the hotel. Darkness swallows the last of the land and it’s the turn of a million cicadas to grind into action, redefining the void as the airy spaces of their own crystal palace.

  A delicious cooking aroma beckons—but Marianna isn’t finished with her mood.

  Of course, in that maternity ward, they had sedated her. Foggily she struggled to make sense of the nurse’s repeated encouragement, ‘Doctor has taken care of your trouble, so you’ll soon be yourself again as good as new!’ and later the same nurse’s admonishment, ‘You lost too much blood and your type’s that hard to come by.’ She’d known she had to get out. In her weakened state this required stupendous effort. Nevertheless, she’d stood up. She’d dressed. She’d retrieved her shoes from a closet and blundered across the shiny floor, from exit sign to exit sign. Gasping for oxygen, she’d lurched into the reception hall, confronting her clinical reflection in the supervisor’s glass hub. Finally, the duty staff agreed she could sign herself out. They even called a taxi.

  Though she’d dreaded facing poor Manfred with the news there was no way to soften it. So, as soon as he opened the door to let her in, she mustered enough courage. She did her best not to babble. At the brink of incoherence she fought to suppress her hysterics. ‘The baby was dead already!’ she screamed. He listened. He shrugged his shoulders. He put on a regretful voice, though apparently unable to take it in. He shrank from her grasping hands. Worse, he warded her off, taking the opportunity to confess that he had never been wholly open with her . . . not altogether open . . . not even when it came to basic things, ‘My name isn’t Regel, by the way,’ he shouted in her face because she wasn’t listening.

  What? What was that again? Her body heard and somehow knew it was being wounded to the core. Disfigured by a strange quirky smirk of pride he repeated himself, owning up to his distinguished family in a quiet voice, ‘I am Konstantin von Clausewitz.’ Her wild eyes finally got him in focus. If this was so, then who was she? No longer Marianna Regel nor even Marianna Gluck.

  Fainting with desperation, she’d pushed past him. She needed to lie down. But—there in the bedroom—she was brought up short by a half-packed travel bag, open on the bed. He could explain, he apologized hastily, and launched into a tale with international ramifications, going back to the Global Financial Crisis, no less. The important part being that his interim crimes could now be put behind him, buried and forgotten. National economies having plunged at the whim of the Alan Greenspans and Larry Summerses of the moral elite, a recovery offered smaller players such as Konstantin von Clausewitz the chance to cash in on the mess, too, until universal faith in the self-regulating financial market could be restored. Such was his explanation.

  He paused for the irrefutability of logic to take effect.

  She felt herself weak and wavering and white as a waif. Believe it or not, Manfred (as he would always be to her) appeared to be inviting approval. She heard him add that he had insured their future, this being how things are done these days at the top of the profession (where betting on
the failure of one’s own investments is a commonplace money-making tactic). So, really, nobody had suffered except his clients (mostly old people in nursing homes with not much longer to live anyhow). Looked at in this way the crash could be seen as a catalyst for prosperity. Misinterpreting her distress, he assured her again that he had made money. The problem began because there turned out to be rather too much. It was only when less fortunate associates started investigating that he’d taken the name Manfred Regel, sought a place to hide and found her. Surely she could understand? He had needed the refuge of a complete backwater where those smart city speculators would never find him. He smiled then, glad to have the truth out in the open at last, combing his oiled hair and meeting her eyes in the bedroom mirror.

  ‘How much?’ she asked. ‘A million?’ she hazarded.

  ‘Millions,’ he said and smiled confidentially. ‘The rest you know.’

  The usual problem is that no matter how hard we try to hold on to a moment—any moment—it’s gone already. All the more remarkable that this horrible confrontation defies the rule by never leaving Marianna. Here on the terrace of her Belize hotel, even at the verge of the jungle, the hurt wounds her as sharply as ever.

  What followed followed with the force and confusion of a landslide . . . events tumbling in a rush . . . relief at finding her passport still valid . . . one last glimpse of Manfred . . . a ticket desk at Melbourne airport . . . the effort of dragging her exhausted bones from Boeing to Airbus to Boeing as she made spontaneous decisions . . . taking flight north, then west, then north again . . . till she felt like a disembodied witness condemned to watch the shell of herself deposited on one of the tango islands (her phrase) at a holiday resort, the last-minute recommendation of a travel agent she consulted online.

  Was he out of his mind, that travel agent!