She started when a drop of saliva fell on her hand. Her insides were hollowed out by hunger. She rubbed her stomach and stared again into the crystal, and it darkened. She saw her teacher telling the class that her friend Ruth had been expelled because she was a dirty Jew. Esme didn’t understand. Ruth wasn’t a bit dirty. She always had a pretty dress on and freshly curled hair, and she smelled like rosewater.
Esme ran to Ruth’s apartment after school. Ruth’s mother, Mrs. Cohn, told her that she couldn’t play with Ruth anymore. Mrs. Cohn looked frightened, and Esme could see Ruth crying behind her.
Esme asked her mother why, and her mother had shaken her head.
“It is not for us to ask why. This is part of the Fuhrer’s plan. Don’t ask about this again.”
She saw her father. He swung Esme up in the air, looking so fine in his uniform, and said he’d be back in the fall. Esme’s mother sat in a chair, screaming hysterically at the piece of paper in her hand. Bombs began to drop on her city. And then there was a pile of rubble with her mother’s hand protruding, smeared with white dust and blood.
Esme passed her hand over her eyes. “Why do you show me only past things?” she whispered to the crystal. “I want to see the future. I want to see what will happen to me.” She blew out the candle and cuddled the crystal ball close to her as if it were a beloved pet. It felt warm and solid against her chest.
***
When the Russians came into Berlin, Esme hid in her apartment all day. She could hear shouts and gunfire, yelling and screaming. People further down Metzger Strasse hung white sheets from their window sills. Esme decided not to because she didn’t want anyone to know she was living there. She lay on her bed, peeking out the window occasionally, until it was dark and hunger forced her out. She picked her way through the chunks of stone on the front steps and ventured outside.
She saw bodies in the street. One of them was Herr Gruber’s. Blood pooled around him, running in dark rivulets until it disappeared in the dust. Esme shrugged and moved past him.
The little shop on the corner, where Esme had bought penny candy so long ago, had been looted. Flour and sugar were scattered in the gutter. Coffee too, and tins of vegetables stomped on until they had exploded. Esme’s empty belly churned at the sight. Noiselessly, she slipped through the shop door and hoped something had been spared.
The shop was dimly lit by a fire burning half a block away. Cases were smashed, shelves broken, and the floor was sticky with juices from broken jars and crushed cans. She found a can of beans that had rolled under a collapsed shelf and pocketed it. She smelled meat and worked her way to the back, hoping to find a sausage or maybe some bacon.
An electric torch pierced the darkness. “Kto tam?” barked a male voice.
Esme cowered in the shadows, making herself small. The soldier advanced into the shop, sweeping his light back and forth. The beam fell on a dirty chunk of liverwurst. Esme’s mouth watered. She could not help herself and made a quick grab for it. As she pocketed her prize, a hand closed on her shoulder.
“Who are you?” said the soldier. He dragged her to her feet and blinded her with the torch. Esme struggled fiercely. She tried to bite the hand that clutched a handful of her coat.
“Wait, wait,” the voice said, a bit softer now. The torch scanned her face and body. She considered slipping out of her coat and running, but the food was in her coat pocket. She pulled away again and aimed a kick at the soldier. The hand pushed her to arm’s length but did not release her.
“What’s your name, boy?”
“Karl,” spat Esme. It was her father’s name. “Let me go!”
“Not before you have this,” the voice replied. His hand closed on hers for a moment, and she realized she had a handful of dried figs. She crammed them all into her mouth. The rich sweetness was overpowering, and she almost choked. She chewed hastily and swallowed them.
“You look like my brother Yermak,” he said, then turned the light on himself, showing a weathered, high-cheeked face covered with a stubble of blond beard. “My name is Mitya.”
Esme eyed him warily. He let go of her coat, and she spun on her heel to run.
“Aren’t you still hungry?” he called.
Esme stopped and turned.
“I have more figs here.”
“Give me the torch,” she replied.
He gave it to her and she played it over him. His face was guileless.
“All right,” she replied, and handed back the torch. “Give me the food.”
***
Esme ate while Mitya talked. Mitya was twenty-two, a lieutenant in the Eighth Guards under General Chukov, and he missed his younger brother a great deal.
“He is all I have left. My parents are gone. When the German Army invaded, my parents sent us off to live with my grandmother in Moscow. I was to take care of him. We got letters from my mother every week, and then nothing. So I left Yermak in Moscow and went back home to Kiev. “
“Mmmm?” said Esme, her mouth full.
“The house was burned. My parent’s rotten corpses lay in the front yard. They left no one alive in our town.” Mitya made a feral noise in his throat.
Esme swallowed. “My parents are dead, too,” she said.
“So Karl, you live with your auntie or uncle?”
“No,” she replied.
“Where do you live, then?” Mitya sounded concerned.
“Here.” She shrugged.
“Well, Karl, if you need anything, you come find me. Ask my men for Lieutenant Wolodny. I’ll look out for you.”
“I will, sir.”
When she left, she disappeared into a different building and waited until she was sure Mitya was gone.
He was, after all, still a Russian.
***
Mitya and his men apparently had been assigned to patrol Metzger Strasse. They set up camp in front of the corner store. The soldiers would laugh and yell rude things at women who passed, but to her they were boisterously friendly. When Mitya saw her, he would wink at her and she would smile.
But she was still on her guard. The Russians opened up the storehouses that held the food for the German armies, and Berliners swarmed in, pushing and shoving and grabbing blindly. Esme squirmed through the mob and got some coffee and tinned meat and a sack of rice. The persistent sound of screaming caught her attention, and she looked for the source. In a corner, she saw a young mother on the ground, her baby howling beside her, surrounded by ten or twelve soldiers. One man was on top of her, as the others waited their turn, laughing and joking while she sobbed and pleaded vainly for them to stop only long enough to nurse her hungry child. Nobody was paying any attention, much less trying to intervene. Esme fled back to Metzger Strasse.
Over the next few days, her hunger receded, and she found time to bathe and comb her hair. Even though it was a betrayal to the Reich, she liked being cleaner and better fed.
She stared hard into her crystal ball each night and thought about Mitya, but saw nothing except her own face. She wished that the library still existed so that she could find a book to tell her how to use a crystal ball to see the future.
“You are a useless thing!” she said in disgust, and picked it up. It warmed quickly in her hand, and the reflected candlelight flickered like golden fireflies inside it. She held it to her cheek and sighed.
***
On occasion, Mitya would seek her out, to make sure she was all right. Esme would sit with him on the carved stone steps of her building and talk. Mostly Mitya talked about the beautiful farmland in the Ukraine, and Yermak.
“How would you like to come with me when I leave?” he asked her one day. “Your family is gone. You could live with us—three brothers together. You like this idea, Karl?”
Esme cringed inwardly and pulled her cap down more firmly on her head.
“Yes, sir, that might be fine,” she said, and forced a grin.
Mitya grinned back and handed her a small canvas sack. She peered into it and saw h
ard candies and a tin of evaporated milk.
“Here, have the milk now. Let me open for you.” Mitya used his knife to punch two holes in the top and handed it to her. It tasted heavenly. Mitya smiled as she gulped it down, ignoring the droplets flowing down her chin and neck.
“Yes, Karl. You and me and Yermak. We will work our family’s farm.” Mitya slapped her on the back in mid-gulp and laughed when she choked and coughed.
***
The Russians had occupied Berlin for almost a week. During the day, they brought in food to the starving citizens, cleared rubble from the street, and offered medical treatment. At night, however, Esme was often awakened by screams. Women screaming. And soldiers singing drunken songs and cursing as they prowled the street. She burrowed under her blankets to shut out the noise.
A food center was set up in what was left of the corner shop. One afternoon, Esme took Mitya’s sack and went in. A man as big as a bear gave her flour and potatoes. He grinned at her, a little drunkenly, and reached into a burlap sack.
“For the lieutenant’s friend, Karl, we have something special.” He pulled out a red apple and put it in the sack. Esme’s face lit up with delight.
“Danke schoen,” she whispered. She could not wait to bite into the crisp skin and taste the sweet juice.
The bear-man exchanged a glance with another soldier in the shop. “Say it properly, boy. Say spessiba.” She stared at him, eyes suddenly wide with apprehension.
The second soldier laughed. “Stupid German. He needs some vodka to loosen his tongue!”
Esme backed away, clutching her sack of food. The bear-man reached out and knocked her cap off. Her blonde braids tumbled to her waist.
She shrieked and turned to run—and ran right into Mitya.
“Karl?” he said, looking into her terrified face. Suddenly his face darkened, and Esme panicked. Before he could grab her, she ran blindly down Mezger Strasse and hid in an alley. Hours later, she crept out and slipped into her apartment.
She pressed her back against the door and found the rosy, shiny apple in the sack. She bit deeply into it. Her face contorted, and she threw it across the room in frustration.
It was mealy and dry, like dust in her mouth.
***
Too frightened to light the candle, Esme huddled in her mother’s closet. The closet still smelled faintly of her mother’s scent, and Esme found that comforting. There was a great celebration going on down at the corner, much yelling and singing and gunfire in the air. Esme gathered it had something to do with Hitler.
“I hope you are dead and in a million pieces, mein Fuhrer,” she whispered bitterly. “Then maybe you will know how I feel.”
The closet door hung askew on its hinges, so the door wouldn’t close tightly. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her crystal ball. A shaft of light penetrated the closet, and Esme held the ball up.
“Please, please, show me what will become of me. Especially now. I am so scared.”
She looked into the shadowy depths and saw, much to her amazement, something new. It was Mitya, coming into her apartment. He had a bottle of vodka in his hand. He took a swig and looked around, seeking something.
“Oh!” cried Esme in her excitement. Then she heard a crack as Mitya turned, and realized that what she was seeing was a reflection, not a vision. She leaped from the closet at a run, but Mitya was faster. He grabbed her and spun her around, pulling her close to him. His breath was rancid with vodka fumes.
“Who are you, really?” he breathed.
“Esme,” she squeaked.
“Well, Esme, you made a fool of me.” He clutched her shoulder and grabbed her face with the other, squeezing it painfully. Esme had to stand on tiptoe to keep him from wrenching her neck from her shoulders.
“I looked out for you, protected you. You were a sad little orphan boy alone in Berlin. My men wanted to shoot you, but I stopped them.”
Esme whimpered softly. Mitya softened his grip on her face and began stroking her cheekbone with his thumb.
“I had plans for us,” he said in a faraway tone. “For days now, I have dreamed of nothing but going home with you, back to Kiev and Yermak. I was going to adopt you, make you my brother, teach you to farm our fine land. I would have a family again. You were a good thing in this hell of a war. ”
Tears rose in Mitya’s eyes, already red from vodka. He was silent for a few moments. Then he sighed.
“Now it’s all gone. And the men, they laugh at me because I have been fooled by a girl—a very stupid girl.”
“I’m sorry,” Esme whispered.
Mitya looked down at her. His face hardened and his eyes narrowed. He licked his lips. Esme began shaking with pure terror.
“We’ll see how sorry you are,” Mitya said in a rough voice. He released her face and ripped at her shirt, sending the buttons flying. Esme felt his big hands on her body and struggled madly, pounding on him with her fists. He bent her back, pushed his face into hers and kissed her, openmouthed and smothering. His breath and his slobber made her retch.
I’m going to die, she thought. Or worse.
She felt something shift in her pocket. She reached in and pulled out her crystal ball. With all the force of fear and desperation, she swung it into the side of his head.
He groaned and collapsed to the floor, pulling Esme with him. She wrenched herself free and rolled away. Mitya was bleeding where she had hit him, and his face was slack. She knelt over him. A blind fury for all she had lost and suffered overcame her, and she smashed his face with the crystal, over and over, until the crystal broke in half. One edge sliced her palm.
The pain brought her back to her senses. Mitya’s face was pulped, the eyes crushed, the forehead caved in. Esme put her head on his chest and listened for a heartbeat. She heard nothing.
Terror rushed back in. If the soldiers found out she had killed their lieutenant, she would die horribly. She went to the kitchen and washed her bloody face and hands with rusty water, and rinsed the crystal halves, slipping them back into her pocket. She changed her ruined shirt and took Mitya’s cap to hide her hair.
Then she took a last look around the ravaged apartment.
“Auf wiedersen,” she whispered. Her eyes filled with tears.
She slipped out into the street and worked her way west, toward the Americans.
***
After hours of creeping through the ruins of Berlin, hiding from Russian patrols she was sure were looking for her, scrambling over piles of rubble, Esme saw two Americans in a Jeep coming up a street. She tossed away Mitya’s cap, stepped into the roadway, and put her hands up, trembling for fear they would shoot her, or worse. But they smiled with compassion and put her in the Jeep, and brought her to their camp on the western edge of the city. A man who wore a white armband with a red cross on it brought her to the hospital tent. A sympathetic woman, who must have been a nurse, found Esme a hot meal, a clean cot, and even a dress. Eventually she made her way through the refugee camps and the bureaucracy to the United States, where she was adopted by a family in Texas.
She learned to speak English with only a trace of an accent. She married and they bought a home in the suburbs. She had three children, and believed wholeheartedly in the American Dream, never speaking of the horrors of the war. But she kept the broken crystal, wrapped in tissue paper, in her bedside table.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Esme suddenly felt an urgent pull in her heart. Her children were aghast when she announced she was traveling to Germany—alone. Brushing aside their objections, she went, and the first thing she did when she got there was to find the house at 27, Metzger Strasse.
It was still there, repaired in an ugly way by the East German government. A steel door replaced the old glass-and-wood that she remembered. Heavy curtains hung in the windows of her old apartment, and the outer stonework still bore scars from the shellings. But the stone steps leading up to the entry were exactly as they had always been.
Esme reached
into her purse and pulled out the crystal ball. She placed the two halves on the bottom step. The broken edges glittered in the sun. She stared at them, and a refracted sunbeam caught one edge, sending a beam of white light into her eyes. In the light, she saw Ruth and her mother, naked and clawing at the walls as gas filled a chamber. She saw Mitya’s body being carried down these very steps. She saw a graveyard, a hero’s funeral and a young boy weeping. She saw Mrs. Schmidt, shot dead as she tried to scale the Wall to the West. She saw Erik, living comfortably as an apparatchik of the Stasi. Finally she saw a young girl with long blonde braids, standing alone in the middle of a blasted apartment.
“You always showed me the past, not the future,” she whispered. “But you saved my life, even so.”
She picked up one half of the crystal. Then she walked away, leaving the other half behind, shining on the step.
Calling Jon Michael Kelley’s work literary is like calling the Pope Catholic. A redundancy, yes, but sometimes, when words fail, one is only left with the obvious. To try in any way to, particularly by way of synopsis, set the tone for this work is futile. To restate his bold ideas is unfair.
Let me just say: to read Jon Michael Kelley is to love him or hate him. There is no middle ground. The same, I think, can be said for Bret Easton Ellis and Kurt Vonnegut and James Ellroy. Big shoes to fill, I know, but no genre writer at Kelley’s emerging level, at least to my knowledge, fills them better.
“The Tardy Hand of Miss Tangerine,” which I listened to the author read an excerpt from at AnthoCon 2011, is my favorite of Jon’s works. It’s what drew me in, made me want to devour more of his words, and it reminded me, as only great works can do, how small and magical and terrifying our world really is.
The Tardy Hand of Miss Tangerine
Jon Michael Kelley
Her departing gift to me—a beneficence, let’s call it—was a tattoo of letters and numbers across my chest, taut as clothesline between the areolas, drawn in her own hand; a font so gracefully balanced and femininely stylized that it seems to flow upon gentle currents: willowy beginnings rolling into tighter lowercase, slanting a bit left, with the last letter’s descender, or stroke, plunging down and finishing in a tight, grasping coil, much like the prehensile tail of a seahorse.
Evil Jester Digest, Vol.2 Page 11
