Those Who Knew

by Idra Novey

  Now that the toilet was fixed, she could sip tea until she’d skimmed all the disasters and scandals she could bear. Victor the Invincible was in the national news again with that grim, confident stare of his. She was just about to scroll down past his likeness when a name in the caption pricked her vision like a needle.

  She lifted her fingers to the screen, bewildered. She was imagining it. The name wasn’t there. In the photo, half-concealed behind Victor, there was no sliver of a young woman with S’s thick hair. S’s dark eyes. No thin plastic mattress. No soldier forcing her into the corner while the rest of them were led out.

  * * *

  Not long after dawn, Victor stepped onto the balcony off the master bedroom with his son. The mist had not yet lifted from the manicured lawn around their new oceanfront apartment. Beyond the lawn, fog obscured the water. Victor heard his wife calling from the bedroom that it was too cold for Edgar to be outside in pajamas, but Victor just slid the balcony door shut. Every morning Cristina yelled at him about something. Tired of it, he’d been coming home later in the evening, which meant the morning was his only time with Edgar. What did it matter if the boy wore his pajamas outside?

  We’re street dogs, aren’t we? He grinned at his boy. A little chill isn’t going to kill a street dog. You don’t want to grow up into a little pampered poodle, do you?

  Edgar shook his head and said he did not, though the boy had wrapped his scrawny arms over his chest. He had curled his bare toes against the cold concrete of the balcony and then Victor heard the click begin of his son’s little milk teeth chattering against each other, his whole scrawny body quaking with shivers. Victor had no recollection of being that weak and prone to girlish trembling when he and Freddy snuck out together in the morning and peed on the trees.

  At the thought, Victor grabbed his son’s skinny, quivering arm. If you wanted to, he warned his son, I bet you could stop making that noise with your teeth.

  But beneath his father’s grip, Edgar went on chattering and trembling, as dramatic as his mother. Before Victor even realized what he was doing, he shoved the boy backward. The sliding glass door of the balcony rattled as Edgar fell against it. A stiff terror took over the boy’s small face, and Victor looked away from him. Go on, he said, yanking the door open, get in there.

  Without a word Edgar slipped inside and Victor found himself alone again, the only street dog in his household. Oh how he abhorred his wife’s family and their fussy bourgeois obsession with appearances. He abhorred them more every minute. He hadn’t told his father-in-law or Cristina before his drive yesterday out to the pig farm. Somebody had to grab that lying bastard who had caused all the problems and tell him to drain that shit pond or he was going to find himself floating in it facedown. Trying to pay more people off was just postponing a solution. They needed to slaughter the pigs. There wasn’t time to separate the ones healthy enough to sell for meat. The odor had been viler than Victor had expected. He’d been able to smell it, the reek of feces emanating from his clothes, the whole drive home.

  Wrapping his palms over the chilly metal of the balcony railing, he leaned out over the misted lawn. The fog had begun to lift from the ocean, revealing some debris in the water swirling toward the shoreline. It looked like a large slab of cardboard, or the broken-off panel of a boat. Nobody was even trying to control the trash problem around the island. Every morning tide now carried debris toward his building, some unsightly object drifting closer, determined to wreck his view.

  * * *

  Lena opened the link in Olga’s email. The sight of Victor’s stiff, deliberate smile caused a swift, cold numbness down her spine, as total as an epidural. The longer Lena had been gone from the island, the easier it had become to resist opening articles about Victor. It had been months since she had opened even one.

  She had never heard Olga speak of anyone she’d been detained with, let alone a Sara who had been the love of her life. As for the young press secretary beside Victor in the photograph, Olga was right. She was beaming at him as admiringly as Maria P.

  I had no idea my Sara had a niece with her name, Olga had written amid her repeated adamant requests for Lena to write to this young Sara immediately at the email Olga had found for her. But what if Olga’s concern for this young woman was misplaced?

  Olga explained that she had already written to Sara herself. But it will be more powerful for her to hear it from you directly, Olga went on in her email, adding that she had a plan in mind already, both to get Sara out of his office and to get that bastard. Tell her about Maria P., Olga ordered; tell her about him nearly killing you.

  Lena closed the link to get rid of Victor’s face. It had taken her so long to stop returning constantly to the thought of him. But in the decade she and Olga had now been friends, she could not recall a single request Olga had ever made of her. And what risk was Olga really asking her to take? If Sara found the email inappropriate, even hysterical, if she read it with scorn, if she forwarded it to Victor and asked if he knew this unhinged woman emailing with such outlandish accusations, what did it matter? What could Victor do to her with a whole ocean between them?

  And it was such a small risk, next to the possibility that she might prevent some other young woman from becoming the next Maria P. dead on a road—or, like herself, having to remember, for years, the sound of her own gasping until the world dimmed inward, the terror of waking up limp on the floor, still alone with Victor, his tense body hovering over her.

  For Olga, for Maria P., Lena drew closer to the keyboard at the hallway computer stand outside her seminar room and forced herself to tap out the words. She purged everything that happened in the basement—including the minutes she had yet to confide even to Olga, the ones after she regained consciousness, when she had numbly stayed on in the basement. Victor had asked if she was all right, but made no other acknowledgment of what he had done beyond speaking in a lower, more hesitant tone about the next march. Sitting slightly farther away from him than usual, she had gone right on listening.

  It was not until she boarded a bus home that she had touched the painful spots on her throat where he’d dug in his fingers the hardest. She still felt stunned at the number of minutes she had remained there, listening to him, before making her way up the basement stairs and on through his family’s kitchen to the front door, still disturbed at the full day it had taken her to recognize that she would never place herself in a room with Victor again.

  Without rereading the email to Sara, she pressed send. She held in her breath. Then let it go. She had not just stewed and cringed this time, scolding herself with the punishing thought that no other young woman could be nearly as naïve and shame-ridden as she had been.

  All through her 9:45 a.m. seminar, as her classmates debated the possible pedagogical merit of video games for reluctant readers, she stared out at the leaves churning in the wind outside before allowing herself to glance back at the clock on the wall, recalculating the minutes until she could check her email again.

  But after her seminar there was no response from Sara. And nothing more from Olga either.

  On her train home, pressed against too many strangers barreling together underground, Lena remained standing, watching the darkness flickering by outside the windows. She thought about Olga never mentioning a beloved even once, at least not to her. Lena could not recall Olga confiding about anyone detained with her or any details of that time at all. Lena had assumed that limit to their friendship had to do with her family and had never pried. With sorrow, she realized Olga had probably confided now solely out of necessity.

  Coming up from the train, Lena checked her mail again. Nothing from Sara. Nothing from Olga.

  She picked her son up from day care, boiled chicken drumsticks for their dinner, and thought about the mistrust that is the legacy of a divide, how much safer it felt to withhold anything close to trust in a country as bitterly divided as her own.


  She warmed the water for her son’s bath, steaming up their tiny bathroom until she could no longer see her face in the mirror.

  At last, after getting her son in bed and sweeping his bits of chicken off the floor, after multiple waves of deepening doubt and self-pity and bitterly concluding that women did not want random strangers reaching out with emotional warnings, unloading some fraught history they had no reason to believe or care about, Sara’s reply arrived not from the Senate but from a personal email.

  Lena skimmed through the thank-you and statements of commiseration: . . . had to invent a boyfriend for him to stop . . . but again at lunch . . . his arm . . . started to question . . . yet stayed on . . . his fight for the amnesty laws . . . having been named for an aunt who . . . about to meet Olga . . . emboldened after hearing from you both . . . want to do something . . . perhaps you have heard on the news here . . . the vile smell . . .

  * * *

  Two hours before they’d agreed to meet, Olga took a bus down to Independence Square. She had not told Sara why she had chosen such an old, run-down sandwich shop. For forty years, Olga had mourned her way past it without entering, waiting for it to shut down and be replaced with something she’d never enter. But all through the abysmal years and the decade since then, the sandwich shop had inexplicably endured, same as she had. It was just past four, but already the end-of-day honking and traffic had begun, the ever-larger number of drivers sitting alone in their cars, pressing their horns in vain.

  Stepping through the front door, Olga felt a pressure mounting in her ears, a trembling in her eyelids. She saw that the metal-rimmed counter had been replaced. The counter edge was tiled now, and behind it someone was tapping in an order on a computer screen. Two juice machines beeped and roared and Olga wondered if she had made a mistake in choosing this place.

  Can I help you? a waitress behind the counter asked, and Olga shook her head, motioned for the waitress to give her a minute to sit down. Pulling herself onto the shiny new stool at the counter, she thought of all the straws Sara had chewed on here. All the flaws in Trotsky’s thinking they had dissected, the Akhmatova lines they’d debated, the resentful jokes they’d made about the sexy girl who had become the lone female student with a speaking role at the Campus Commie meetings and the male leaders who’d treated her like an intermission.

  And had it also been at this counter—and Olga knew it had been—that she had insisted they both go to the CC meeting the night the roundup had occurred? Sara had wanted to skip it. To sit again on one of these stools, at this same counter, and recall her insistence that afternoon caused a prickling pain in her knees. Olga readjusted her weight on the small seat but the pain needled deeper.

  There’s too much shouting at the meetings, Sara had said, which Olga had agreed was true but insisted they had to show up and support the movement anyway, as no one else was talking about how to address a handful of families possessing more wealth than all the rest of the island’s inhabitants combined.

  No one but the CC, Olga had argued, is even attempting to reimagine this country.

  But reimagining it how? Sara had asked, and brought up the CC leader at the last meeting who’d joked about admiring Hitler’s ability to keep a crowd listening.

  Which is why we need to show up, Olga had insisted, as if they were equally vulnerable. But it was only Sara’s surname the soldiers had pronounced in a different tone at the roundup, freighting it with something more determined.

  Then came the room with the boarded-over window, the soldier who kept coming in and saying Where’s the Jew girl, ordering Sara to the mattress, spitting out her last name as if it were the bone of a fish he had to spit out before it choked him. When they ordered Olga and the other women from the room, Olga had pressed herself against the wall and refused to leave. But the butt of one gun and then another made it clear the choice was not hers. All she could choose was to will her mind back to the room, to the sound of Sara’s hands sticking to the plastic mattress.

  On the other side of the counter now, two juice machines roared monstrously to life, one sluicing apples, the other roaring up an orange pulpy blur that looked like mango. Hunched over the counter, watching the liquid splash against the sides, Olga decided she would have to hold back with this niece. At least during this first encounter, or her grief would overwhelm her as suddenly as Simon had described his stutter returning despite all his years of tactics. Olga feared even her humor would fail her if she said Sara’s name here too many times.

  And then, impossibly, gloriously, walking into this invincible sandwich shop was her beloved again. Unaged. Unbroken. Her hair longer and slightly darker. But with the same thick, untamable curls. The same deep-set black eyes just as sharp, just as quick to spot Olga waving and trembling, half crumbling off the stool like the ruin she was.

  You’re the reason, she said to the young woman before her. You’re why I couldn’t die.

  * * *

  Victor was in the bathroom when his wife intruded. He despised intrusions while he was in the bathroom and was about to remind Cristina of this, along with several other things he particularly despised about her this morning, when she shoved the just-arrived newspaper onto his bent legs.

  What the hell is this? she said, her overdyed hair hanging flat around her face. What did you write this email for? How could you let something like this get leaked to the paper?

  Victor spread the front page over his legs. “Leaked Email Exposes Senatorial Ties to Fecal Fiasco,” the headline said, and it was by that relentless, annoying reporter with the stutter, Simon something. All the senators warned each other to avoid him.

  It had to be your cousin who leaked this, Cristina said, her voice reaching its most nasal, intolerable pitch, and Victor asked her to just let him finish reading. The email quoted was one he’d sent to his cousin several years ago, assuring him that a little consultant income from a pig farm wouldn’t set off any alarms, government salaries on the island being as dismal as they were. On its own, unassociated with the unprecedented lake full of shit his father-in-law’s incompetent friend had produced, the message wasn’t fatal. It was the context that was ruinous and he couldn’t see his cousin knowing this was the quote to send. His cousin’s mind wasn’t attuned to what a single sentence from an old email would provoke in the media, and it occurred to Victor exactly who had to be behind this.

  He flushed the toilet and moved away from it before the drops could splash the backs of his legs. He drew right up into the face of the stranger he had married, scavenging it for the truth.

  It was you who went through my emails, wasn’t it? he asked, his face twisting with viciousness. It was your father’s idea, and you did his bidding. As you always do.

  What are you talking about? Cristina drew in her bird-thin neck and he saw that she was frightened. And decided her fear was proof. He was right. She had done it.

  He drew even closer and had a fleeting, furious thought of Lena’s arrogance, of Maria’s, as if he’d needed her sophomoric ideas when the same obvious premise for eliminating tuition had occurred to him and every sentient being in the TJP. The first time, at his place, when Maria threatened to expose him for campaigning on her ideas without giving her any credit, he’d controlled himself. He’d shouted about the Senate having no need for the juvenile calculations of some college girl. He hadn’t touched her, not even once. But on the road above the Minnow, Maria had been drunker than he’d ever seen her, and angrier, accusing him of manipulating and stalking her, threatening that she had a friend who knew a reporter she was going to call if he didn’t give her the credit she deserved.

  In the bathroom now, he took hold of his wife’s bony shoulders, his panic tearing up his stomach. You and your father forced me into this! he shouted. You made me prey on my cousin’s trust and now you think you can just hurl our reputations into the garbage to save your father’s?

  What
are you talking about? Cristina said, backing away from him.

  You know what I’m talking about. He sank his thumbs into her shoulders, his capacity for restraint draining from him as swiftly as the color from his wife’s face.

  But then a child’s high-pitched voice came from the hallway outside the master bathroom. The milk smells funny, their son called, and stillness fell over them, a grim stillness containing an honesty unlike any they’d yet allowed into their marriage.

  Pack your things, his wife said, extracting herself from his grip and backing toward the door. All I have ever done is defend you, Victor. Every time you slammed the table at a meeting and shouted like a monster, it got back to me. I’ve defended you to every wife in the Senate, to my father, to everyone. You need to get out of this apartment. Now.

  Transaction Log for Olga’s

  SEEK THE SUBLIME OR DIE

  Ecstasy, S, that’s what it was to behold your namesake.

  She is brazen. In all the ways that matter, she is your spirit daughter—fierce but kind. Wary but courageous. When I asked if she was willing to collaborate with Simon, she said yes without hesitation. She bravely reported to her job today as usual. Simon and I both thought that was the safest plan for her, and she agreed. I hate thinking of her still sitting a wall away from that vengeful psychopath, but to quit right away would be too suspect, and dangerous.