The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

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  CHAPTER 28 Kate

  Robert consented, stonily, to see the campus doctor, but he would not let me go with him. The health center was in walking distance of our house, like everything else, and in spite of myself I stood on the porch, watching him go. He walked with his shoulders bowed, putting one foot in front of the other as if every movement pained him. I prayed to whatever I could think of that he would be communicative enough or desperate enough to tell the doctor all his symptoms. They might have to do tests. He might be exhausted from some blood disease: mononucleosis or--God forbid--leukemia. But that wouldn't explain the dark woman. If Robert didn't report much from this visit, I would have to meet with the doctor myself and explain things, and I might have to do it in secret, so as not to anger Robert.

  He had apparently gone on to his classes after the appointment, or to paint at the campus studio, because I didn't see him until dinnertime. He didn't tell me anything until after I'd put Ingrid down to sleep, and even then I had to ask him what the doctor had said. He was sitting in the living room--not sitting, actually, but sprawled on the sofa with an unopened book. He raised his head when I spoke to him. "What?" He seemed to be looking at me across a great distance, and one side of his face drooped a little, as I'd noticed before. "Oh. I didn't go."

  Rage and grief rose in me, but I took a deep breath. "Why not?"

  "Lay off me, will you?" he said in a thin voice. "I didn't feel like it. I had work to do, and I haven't had time to paint in three days."

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  "Did you go paint instead?" That, at least, would be a sign of life.

  "Are you checking up on me?" His eyes narrowed. He put the book in front of him like a breastplate. I wondered if he might even decide to throw it at me. It was a photographic essay on wolves he'd bought on impulse earlier in the year. That was a change, too, his frequently buying new books he later didn't read. He'd always been too thrifty to buy anything that wasn't secondhand, or much of anything at all, apart from the big well-made shoes he loved.

  "I'm not checking up on you," I said carefully. "I'm just concerned about your health, and I'd like you to go to the doctor and look into it. I think just doing that will help you feel better."

  "Do you?" he said almost nastily. "You think it will help me feel better. Do you have any idea how I feel? Do you know what it's like not to be able to paint, for example?"

  "Certainly," I said, trying not to fire up. "There are very few days when I get to do that myself. Almost none, in fact. I know that feeling."

  "And do you know what it's like to think about something over and over until you wonder... never mind," he finished.

  "Until you wonder what?" I tried to speak very calmly, to show only that I was a good listener.

  "Until you can't think about or see anything else?" His voice was low and his eyes flickered to the doorway. "So many terrible things have happened in history, including to artists, even artists like me, who tried to have normal lives. Can you imagine what it would be like to think about that all the time?"

  "I think about terrible things sometimes, too," I said staunchly, although this sounded to me like a rather strange digression. "We all have those thoughts. History is full of awful things. People's lives are full of awful things. Every thinking person reflects on them--especially when you have children. But that doesn't mean you have to make yourself ill over them."

  "Or what if you started thinking about one person? All the time?"

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  My skin began to crawl, whether from fear or from anticipated jealousy or both, I couldn't have said. Here was the moment when he would wreck our lives. "What do you mean?" I got the words out with some difficulty.

  "Someone you could have cared about," he said, and his eyes traveled the room again. "But she didn't exist."

  "What?" I felt a long blankness in my own mind--I couldn't find the end of it.

  "I'll go to the doctor tomorrow," he said angrily, like a little boy resigned to punishment. I knew he'd agreed so that I wouldn't ask him anything more.

  The next day he went out and came back, slept, and then got up to eat some lunch. I stood silently beside the table. I didn't have to ask. "He can't find anything wrong physically--well, he took a blood test for anemia and some other things, but he wants me to get a psychiatric evaluation." He put the words deliberately out into the room, so that something in them rang just short of contempt, but I knew that his telling me at all meant he was afraid, and willing to go. I went to him and put my arms around him and caressed his head, the heavy curls, the massive forehead, feeling that surprising mind inside, the vast gifts I had always admired and wondered about. I touched his face. I loved that head, his crisp uncontrollable hair.

  "I'm sure everything will be all right," I said.

  "I'll go for you." His voice was so quiet I could hardly hear it, and then he put his arms tightly around my waist and leaned over to bury his face against me.

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  CHAPTER 29 1878

  The snow has deepened overnight. In the morning she gives orders for dinner, sends a note to her dressmaker, and leaves the house for the garden. She would like to know how the hedge looks, the bench. When she shuts the back door of the house behind her and steps into the first drift, she forgets everything else, even the letter tucked inside her dress. The tree planted ten years ago by the house's original occupants is festooned with snow; a tiny bird sits on a wall, ruffled up to twice its size. Her laced boots let in a rim of snow at the tops as she makes her way among the dormant flower beds, the shriveled arbor. Everything is transformed. She remembers her brothers as children, lying in the drifts while she watched from an upstairs window, waving their arms, flailing their legs, pummeling one another, floundering, their woolen coats and long knitted stockings engulfed in white. Or was it white?

  She scoops a generous helping--a dessert, Mont Blanc --with her gloved hand and puts it into her mouth, swallows a little of the tasteless cold. The flower beds will be yellow in the spring, this one pink and cream, and under the tree will bloom the small blue flowers she has loved all her life, brought here most recently from her mother's grave. If she had a daughter, she would take her out in the garden on the day they bloomed and tell her where they came from. No--she would take her daughter out every single day, twice a day, into the sunshine and the bower, or the snow, sit with her on the bench, have a swing built for her. Or for him, her little son. She holds back the sting of tears and turns angrily to the sweep of snow along the back wall, tracing a long shape in it with

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  her hand. Beyond the wall are trees, then the brownish haze of the Bois de Boulogne. If she finishes the maid's dress in her painting with more white, in the quick flecking she favors these days, it will lighten the whole picture.

  The letter inside her clothes touches her, a sharply folded edge. She brushes the snow off her gloves and opens her cloak, her collar, draws it out, conscious of the back of the house behind her, the eyes of the servants. But they will be especially busy at this hour, in the kitchen or airing her father-in-law's parlor and bedroom while he sits at his dressing-room window, too blind to see even her dark figure in the white garden.

  The letter does not use her name but an endearment. The writer tells her about his day, his new painting, the books by his fireplace, but beneath these lines she hears him saying something quite different. She keeps her wet, gloved fingers away from the ink. She has memorized every word of it already, but she wants to see the curving black proof again, his handwriting with its consistent carelessness, his economy of line. It is the same casual directness she has seen in his sketches, a confidence different from her own intensity--riveting, even puzzling. His words are also confident, except that their meaning is more than it seems to be. The accent aigu, a mere brush with the pen's tip, a caress, the accent grave strong, leaning away, a warning. He writes of himself, assured yet apologetic: Je, the "j" in capital form at the beginning of his precious sentences a muscular d
eep breath, the "e" quick and restrained. He writes of her and the renewal of life she has given to him--accidentally? he asks--and as in his last few letters, with her permission, he calls her tu, the "t" respectful at the beginnings of sentences, the "u" tender, a hand cupped around a tiny flame.

  Holding the edges of the page, she ignores the sound of each line for a moment, for the pleasure of understanding it afresh a moment later. He intends no disruption of her life; he knows that at his age he can offer her few attractions; he wants only to be allowed to breathe in her presence and encourage her noblest

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  thoughts. He dares to hope that, although they may never even speak of it, she sees him at the very least as her devoted friend. He apologizes for disturbing her with unworthy feelings. It frightens her that underneath the long flourish of his pardonne-moi and its delicate hyphen, he guesses that she is already his.

  Her feet grow cold; the snow is beginning to soak through her boots. She folds the letter, tucks it away in a secret place, and puts her face against the bark of the tree. She can't afford to stand there long, in case anyone with sufficient sight should come to the windows behind her, but she needs a sustaining pause. The trembling at her core comes not from his words, with their graceful half retreat, but from his certainty. She has decided already not to reply to this one. But she has not decided never to reread it.

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  CHAPTER 30 Kate

  Robert insisted on visiting the psychiatrist alone, and when he returned he told me matter-of-factly that he had some medication to try and the name and number of a therapist. He didn't say whether or not he would call the therapist, or whether he would take the medication. I couldn't figure out where he'd even put it, and I decided not to pry for a week or two. I would just wait to see what he did and encourage him in any way I could. Eventually, the bottle appeared in our medicine cabinet in the bathroom-- lithium. I heard it rattle morning and night when he took a dose.

  Within a week, Robert seemed calmer and began to paint again, although he slept at least twelve hours out of every twenty-four and ate in a daze. I was thankful that he was holding his studio classes without further interruptions and that I hadn't perceived any unease on the part of the college, although how such unease would have reached me I wasn't sure. One day Robert told me that the psychiatrist wanted to see me and that he, Robert, thought it was a good idea. He had an appointment that afternoon--I wondered why he hadn't mentioned it sooner--and when the time came, I packed Ingrid into her car seat because it was short notice to find a babysitter. The mountains flowed by, and I realized as I watched them pass that I hadn't even been to town in a while. My life revolved around the house, the sandbox and swings when it was warm enough outside, the supermarket up the road. I watched Robert's grave profile as he drove and finally asked him why he thought the psychiatrist wanted to see me. "He likes to get a family member's perspective," he said, and added,

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  "He thinks I'm doing well so far. On lithium." It was the first time he'd mentioned the drug by name.

  "Do you think so, too?" I put my hand on his thigh, feeling the muscles shift when he braked.

  "I feel pretty good," he said. "I doubt I'll need it for long. I wish I weren't so tired, though--I need the energy to paint."

  To paint, I thought, hut to be with us, too? He fell asleep after dinner without playing with Ingrid, and was often still asleep when I left on my walks with her in the morning. I said nothing more.

  The clinic was a long, low building made of expensive-looking wood and planted around with raw little trees in paper tubes. Robert went in matter-of-factly, holding the door for me as I passed through with Ingrid in my arms. The waiting room inside, which seemed to serve a number of doctors, was spacious, with a large patch of sunlight at one end. Eventually a man came out, smiled and nodded at Robert, and called me by name. He didn't wear a white coat or carry a chart--he was dressed in a jacket and tie, ironed khaki trousers.

  I glanced at Robert, who shook his head. "This is for you," he said. "He wants to talk with you. He'll call me in, too, if he needs me."

  So I left Ingrid with Robert and followed Dr. --well, what does his name matter? He was kind and middle-aged and doing his job. His office was lined with framed diplomas and certificates, his desk very neat, a large bronze paperweight sitting on the only loose piece of paper. I sat down facing the desk, my arms empty without Ingrid. I wished now I'd brought her in, and it worried me that Robert might put his face back in his hands instead of watching her cruise past electrical outlets and floral arrangements. But when I studied Dr. Q a little, I found I liked him. His face was gentle and reminded me of my Michigan grandfather's. When he spoke, his voice was deep, a little guttural, as if he had come from somewhere else as a teenager and whatever his accent was had become untraceable, just a slight rasping on the consonants.

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  "Thank you for coming to see me today, Mrs. Oliver," he said. "It's helpful to me to talk with a close family member, especially with any new patient."

  "I'm glad to," I answered honestly. "I've been really worried about Robert."

  "Of course you have." He rearranged the paperweight, leaned back in his seat, looked at me. "I know this must have been hard for you. Please be sure that I am paying very close attention to Robert and I'm satisfied that our first trial of medication is having a good effect."

  "He certainly seems calmer," I admitted.

  "Can you tell me a little about what you first noticed in his behavior that seemed different or that concerned you? Robert has told me that you were the one who got him to see a doctor originally."

  I folded my hands and recited our problems, Robert's problems, the dizzying ups and downs of the last year.

  Dr. Q listened silently, without changing expression, and his expression was kind. "And he seems to you more stable on the lithium?"

  "Yes," I said. "He sleeps a lot still, and he complains about that, but he does seem able to get up and go to teach almost all the time. He complains about not being able to paint."

  "It takes time to adjust to new medication, and it takes time to find out what medication works and what dosage works." Dr. Q arranged the paperweight thoughtfully again, this time in the top left corner of the one paper. "I do think in your husband's case it's important for him to take lithium for a while, and he will probably need it permanently, or some other medication if this one doesn't turn out to be just what we want. The process will require quite a bit of patience on his part--and on yours."

  I began to feel new alarm. "Do you mean you think he will always have these problems? Won't he be able to stop the medicine when he's better?"

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  The doctor recentered the bronze lump on the document. It reminded me suddenly of that childhood game--rock, paper, scissors--where one element could win out over the other, but something else could always win out over the winner, a fascinating cycle. "It takes some time to develop any accurate diagnosis. But I believe Robert is probably experiencing--"

  And then he told me the name of an illness, one I knew only vaguely and associated with nameless things, things that had nothing to do with me, things that people were given electric shock therapy for, or that caused them to kill themselves. I sat there for a few seconds, trying to fit these words to Robert, my husband. My whole body was bathed in cold. "Are you telling me that my husband is mentally ill?"

  "We don't really know what part of any condition is mental illness and what is environmental or a function of personality," Dr. Q demurred, and I hated him for the first time--he was hedging. "Robert may stabilize on this medication, or we may have to try some other things. I think given his intelligence and his dedication to his art and his family, you can be hopeful that he'll achieve quite a bit."

  But it was too late. Robert was no longer only Robert for me. He was someone with a diagnosis. I knew already that nothing would be the same, ever, no matter how much I tried to feel about Robert as I had before. My heart ach
ed for him, but it ached even more for myself. Dr. Q had taken away the dearest thing I had, and he clearly didn't know what that felt like. He had nothing to give me in return, just the view of his hand arranging his empty desk. I wished he'd had the grace to apologize.

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  CHAPTER 31 Kate

  Robert was sleepy on lithium. One day he ran into another car on his way to the museum in town--at low speed, fortunately. After that, Dr. Q put him on a different drug, combining it with something for anxiety. Robert explained these things to me when I asked for details, which I did as often as I could without irritating him.

  By mid-December the new drug seemed to work well enough to allow him to paint and to get to his classes on time, and he seemed more like the old energetic Robert. He worked in the campus studio during that period, staying there late at night several times a week. When I visited once with Ingrid, I found him deep in a portrait--the lady of my nightmares. She sat in an armchair, her hands crossed in her lap. It was one of the brilliant paintings that later got him his big show in Chicago -- a reasonably cheerful image this time--she was dressed in yellow, smiling as if to herself, as if remembering something pleasant and private, her eyes soft, a spray of flowers on the table beside her. I was so relieved to see him working, and in happy colors, that I almost stopped wondering who she was.

  That made the shock greater when I went by a couple of days later to bring Robert some cookies that Ingrid and I had managed to make together, and found him working on the same picture but from a live model. She looked like a student, and she sat in a folding chair, not in the midst of overstuffed damask. For a moment my heart froze. She was young and pretty, and Robert was chatting with her, as if to keep her still while he repainted the angle