by Mike Allen
They clapped for him and hugged him, and after a few minutes of that nonsense he wrenched the smile from his face and ordered them back outside.
Only once they were gone from the room did he notice his wife wasn’t smiling. She asked, “What will you tell him, Danilo?”
He frowned. “You need to ask? I will tell him, with emphasis, not to waver. I will tell him not to listen to these new liberals in the media who speak of anyone who opposes communism as if they are raving reactionaries. They are no better than the revolutionaries who hated the Czar more than they loved their own country. I will tell him that while he fights to contain the spread of communism, he must remember he is in the right, whatever the outcry.”
Galina’s own frown deepened. “Have you forgotten that a government is not its people? Yes, the Soviet Union is not Russia, but our Russia is still there. Our families are still there, what’s left of them.” She fixed his gaze with hers, then looked away. “Have you forgotten even that now? There is so much you have forgotten.”
An awkward silence followed. “Of course I haven’t forgotten,” Daniel said. “Why would you think that?”
But as he asked the question, she left.
He didn’t try to follow her, nor did he let anger crease his brow for long. Galina had her moods. After all the terrors they’d endured together, a difference of opinion seemed too insignificant a thing to fret over.
He ventured out to check on his pupils’ progress, acting on the well-tested principle that his hulking presence would make them work twice as fast. He found Jackie again beside the snapdragons and lavender, with reasonably competent facsimiles of those blooms taking shape on her too-tiny canvas. He jabbed a thick finger at her painting. “Those shadows should be umber, not black.”
“Oh!” She started and turned around. But when he saw her face, something startled him: her eyes had flashed green, he thought, or for an instant reflected that shade.
The surprised look didn’t leave her face, but she wasn’t looking at her teacher. “Who’s that girl? I haven’t seen her before.”
Indeed, a girl Daniel had never before seen on the grounds regarded them from the gazebo. A slight breeze stirred her pale hair, made it flow like soft snowfall. She was younger than most of his students, perhaps eleven, in a dress of simple gray, face a graceful oval. He could not make out the color of her eyes.
Something about her caused a stir in the pit of his stomach, a fluttering anxiety the likes of which he had not felt in decades. He started to tell Jackie he did not recognize the girl either, but his throat and teeth and tongue couldn’t form the sounds.
When he looked back, the gazebo was empty. He forgot all about it soon after.
Virginia, 1987
Galina and her grandson Sam sat side by side on the loveseat in the den, their backs to a wall of river stone and a circular window framed with yellowed masonry, arranged by Daniel in a pattern like a sunburst or a daisy bloom.
Sam seemed to enjoy these moments much more than his older, more surly siblings ever had. Rather than fidgeting through the folktales she shared, he sat unabashedly spellbound. In the kitchen at the other end of the house, Irene—Sam’s mother, Galina’s youngest daughter—sang as she sliced carrots and cucumbers for dinner, a chore she’d taken upon herself during this afternoon’s visit.
Sam listened, and Galina told: “Everyone in the village believed the boy had run away, but she knew where he had gone. Because the Queen of the Copper Mountain loved him too. She loved to hear him play the pipes, and wanted him to only play for her.
“She lured him to her lair with promises that she would make him the greatest maker of beautiful things that the village had ever seen. And because of his master’s lies, he believed he needed the Queen’s help, and he went to her, and she named her price, that he would spend the rest of his days with her under the mountain, and never come back.”
“Did he come back?” The boy asked.
Galina answered with a thin smile and kept speaking. “But the girl he had vowed to marry did not believe he had run from their wedding. She knew where he had gone, and who he must be with. She wrapped herself in every warm thing she could find, she tied layers of old wool rags tight around her feet, and she marched to the mountain through a day darker than night.”
“Did she find him?” her grandson asked.
“Not at first. But she found the cave of flowers, beautiful flowers made from stone, made by men who the Queen took. And she shouted, and shouted, and shouted that she wanted the boy she loved back.”
Almost, almost, she felt no pang of regret. She ached so much to tell, to unburden, and this was the only way she knew to safely vent that terrible pressure. And so she went on.
“And finally the Queen appeared. She was like a woman and a dragon both, tall with eyes bright as fire and robes that gleamed. She was fiery too, like a dragon, because she was angry, because the boy wanted to be set free, wanted to break his promise.
“The Queen told the girl that she could have her betrothed back, but he would forget all he had learned from her. The girl begged her not to do this, because she feared he would be so unhappy at losing his skills that he would seek the Queen again. And the Queen told her for this to be so she must have something else in exchange. She knew the girl was with child, and she said she had always wanted a child of her very own.
“The girl cried and cried, but agreed to the bargain, and this made the Queen angrier, because she wanted the girl to refuse. She taunted the girl mercilessly. She told the girl her daughter’s name and said that some day, when it was too late, she would give her daughter back—”
“Mom!” Irene stood in the hall, arms akimbo. “How awful! You know that’s not how the story goes.”
Galina regarded her daughter coolly. “Must I bind myself to those ridiculous translations you read him?”
Irene rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to make it so dismal. I just don’t want you scaring Sam.”
“I’m not scared!” her son protested.
Then Daniel opened the patio door and stumbled into the room. His dark eyes scanned the walls, never settling, never finding a focal point.
He clutched a small painting in both hands—an impressionistic rendition of a pale-haired girl standing before a trellis of hyacinth bean. The paint was still wet. Some of it had smeared across the front of his sweatshirt.
“Mr. Brodsky?” called a voice. A worried-looking mouse of a girl came in behind him, a bewildered student no older than fourteen.
Danilo held the portrait toward Galina, mouth working, sound fighting to come out.
“What’s going on?” blurted Irene. She had to shout again before the girl spoke.
“My assignment. That girl out in the garden. She posed for me and I painted her. When I brought it to him .…” There were tears on her cheeks. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“What girl?” demanded Irene, as Galina regarded the oval face, the dun dress, the hair like snow. Her own face turned pale before her eyes narrowed.
“He’ll be all right,” she snapped. Then, to her daughter, “Take her to the kitchen phone so she can call her parents to pick her up. Lessons are over.”
The student started to protest, but Irene had already moved to intercept. She shot Galina a troubled glance as she pushed the sputtering girl ahead of her through the hallway. Sam began to cry, no doubt from seeing his beloved grandfather in such a state, but tending to him had to wait. Galina closed the distance to her husband, took the painting away from him without a word. She followed her daughter down the hall, turned to descend the basement stairs.
Daniel shook and rubbed at his arms as if he had just come in from a blizzard. Then noticed his grandson sitting alone, sobbing.
He didn’t understand how he’d gotten from the garden to the den, but what good would it do to let Sam see his fear? A graying giant, he lumbered to the boy, patted his shoulder with a huge but gentle hand. “There now,” he said. “No need for w
orries. There’s nothing to cry about. Nothing at all.”
Virginia, 2003
On a night when clouds hung low enough to shroud the mountaintop, Daniel stumbled naked and wet down the central hallway of the home built by his own hands.
He moved at a speed unsafe for his sagging weight and softened bones. He skidded and caromed against a river stone wall—every stone in it arranged to suit his will—and barked his elbow. He took no notice, didn’t stop until he reached the basement door, his hand gripping the knob as if it were an extension of the power that gripped him.
Behind him a snail trail of water led backward to the bathroom, where the overhead light still shone, the hot tub jets still bubbled. In the condensation on the mirror, the frantic streaks made by his fingers still remained, not yet filled in by the steam, the space he’d wiped clear to stare goggle-eyed at a figure with hair like snow.
He opened the door to the stairwell and groped for the light switch. Right as he found it, his wet feet slipped and he fell. His shadow thrashed before him, crazy partner in a dance of pain. The cement floor that broke his fall offered no other mercy.
He lay for some time on that surface that he had troweled smooth so many years ago. What he at first took to be the rattle of his own breath sharpened into a different sound, a creature scuttling toward him across the hard floor. He looked up, did a double take to see a young girl standing at the top of the stairs, peering down at him through a snow-white cascade of hair.
The apparition distracted him from the creature’s approach, until it flicked its tongue against his ear.
He cried out and turned his head, raised a pain-wracked arm to ward off whatever attack was coming, but the creature had scurried away. He caught a glint off shiny green scales as it sidewound into the darkness.
His eyes stayed fixed on the point where the creature had vanished. He didn’t move, his body an archipelago of pains small and large.
The thing had gone into the storage room, that tomb for hundreds of cast-off children born of pastels and pigment and clays and canvas and stone. His unfinished, imperfect offspring.
If he shouted, if he could manage even a scream, perhaps Galina would hear him, even in this house he’d built on the mountaintop with its sturdy stone walls.
Instead, after a long silence broken only by the voices that clamored in his head, he started to pull himself in the direction the creature had gone, dragging his broken body into the dark.
no place, no year
Dreaming, Galina shivers feverish on a metal floor, in the filthy cargo hold of a ship bound for South America, while her young husband holds her wrapped in blankets. He cries quietly, leaving only once to beg the hard-faced crewmen for a damp cloth.
She shivers naked on the stone in a freezing cold cave, hearing her sweet love call her name from a place she cannot see, the warmth of his arms denied her.
The abyss gapes hungry above her and the Queen slithers across it in her finery, scales of glittering emerald, eyes like lakes set afire. Talons flex, the curving gold weapons of a monster that listened to a boy’s piping in a mosquito-swarmed field, and longed.
Would that Galina had gone to him when he played, would that she had taken a rock and crushed the entranced lizard when it was small and distracted—when she was vulnerable, far away from her kingdom, green scales speckled by the sun.
Dreaming, Galina shouts, “Leave me alone!”
I give back what I took. I take back what I gave.
Then she’s no longer dreaming. Beside her the bedside clock flashes the witching hour. She knows immediately that Daniel’s not in the room, has never gotten into bed with her.
She pads from the bedroom, heart laboring faster as she calls his name and hears no reply. She peers down the lighted basement stairs, sees the blood at the bottom, and where that leads, hurries to the storage room as panic thrashes in her chest.
With long rows of metal-framed wooden storage bins to either side of her, she gropes in the center of the room for the pull chain that will throw on the light. She calls Daniel’s name again, hears nothing.
She finds the chain, pulls, and the first blinding arc of light reveals a girl with head haloed in white, standing just inches away.
Galina screams.
But the girl is gone—and her husband lies sprawled in an aisle between two of the bins, bone jutting from a torn and bleeding knee, naked flesh blackened with bruises. He raises his head, face frozen in an agonized scowl.
He found them: the paintings made by the students who saw the white-haired girl in the garden, who painted her portrait—always the same age, the same dress, the same oval face and snow-blond hair, no matter what the year. Twenty-one in all that Galina took from his confused hands. They’re strewn around him, some smeared with his blood.
She’d always known who it was who smiled shyly from the canvases, wanting so badly to be seen, to know she wasn’t forgotten. At first Galina had thought it cruel, how the Queen used their daughter’s ghost to taunt them. But she determined to never show rage, never weep. Why should she ever give her tormentor such gifts?
She had kept every portrait, stacked them on their sides on a bottom shelf It never mattered that they were in plain view. Daniel couldn’t see them, or if he did, he would forget they were there the moment his gaze wandered
How did he find them in the dark?
Running is beyond her at her age, but at the children’s insistence they had a phone installed downstairs, and that’s what she steps toward when the sudden pain in her belly doubles her over, forces her to her knees.
A flicker in the corner of her vision, a sinuous strand of green.
A superheated stone burns inside her. The pain surges, brings her to the floor.
The ceiling fades. Above it space shines black. She looks up at the figure unfolding its limbs in that space, and even in her agony she snarls defiance. She addresses the Queen in Russian, her voice that of a woman pierced by a spear. “I cannot fight your power. I never could. Whatever it is that your heart demands you do to me—do it. Then, please, trouble us no more.”
Like a flag the vision furls and slides away.
Despite the pebble burning white hot in her abdomen, she makes the journey to the phone, an ordeal of just a few feet that feels like hours, days, the remainder of a lifetime.
Epilogue
He lies in his bed, kept alive by tubes and tenderly held spoonfuls. Other hands move him, keep him free of bedsores. When he speaks, he hears the words in his head, but the sounds that come from his mouth are the unsculpted squawks of a baby.
He remembers now—he remembers Tamara, the stone baby, the girl with hair of snow. When Galina sits beside him, keeping him company, reading to him from the paper or from a long Russian novel, the girl is there too, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder, listening.
He wants to tell his wife that the long-delayed birth did not banish their first child, it freed her, and now wherever Galina goes she follows. She is waiting for the end, when her mother will see her, and at last they will embrace.
But he cannot tell her. There is a wall between them, a barrier of stone and cold silence. There is a wall between his mind and his useless tongue, between his anger and his limp hands. He cannot carve the wall, cannot shape it in any way.
He remembers now—he remembers that he played the reeds. He could play again, if his body would move. He is frozen as he was in the cave, unable to speak as his beautiful and beloved Galina lowered her hood to reveal her wind-burned face and made her impossible demands of his pitiless, envious jailor.
But now, in his fugue of memory and delusion, her eyes find his in the cave wall, and she says without speaking, It was a terrible sacrifice I made for you, my Danilo, but in the end it was just one of many, so, so many.
GUTTER
Without letting up on the gas, Kyle held the box of business cards out the window and shook it open, dumping his name in the gutter a thousand times over.
He
circled the entire block, drawing a line around the abandoned office buildings, a regiment of eyesores built in the 1930s and left to decay as industry shifted to the suburbs. Cornices grinned ragged, the bricks of their teeth fallen away. Crumbling gargoyles made for sad guardians, jutting lumps long divested of wings and heads. Below columns of broken windows, along the fissured sidewalks, the gaping doors whispered darkness, the plywood that once hushed them rotted to tatters.
Circuit completed, box emptied, Kyle parked in the middle of the street. He left the engine idling as he stepped out of the pickup. Its headlights provided the sole illumination—clouds smothered the stars, and city hall had allowed the corner streetlamps to die.
