Deep Cuts

by Angel Leigh McCoy

  Jonas shook his head and waited while the server, a sexless teenager with short, pallid hair and sallow skin, poured Carles a glass of the house sangría, then drifted away.

  “No.” His voice was raspy, and he cleared his throat and took a sip of wine, quickly concocting a half-truth. “A woman I saw dancing on the street tonight. Outside the Monasterio de la Encarnación.” He didn’t say anything else as he watched the couple finish their dance then go together to a table on the other side of the room. After it closed to the public, the café’s dimmed lighting always showed a haze of cigarette smoke floating just beyond the stage, and before she faded into it, the woman turned and inexplicably gazed in his direction a final time. The summers in Madrid had never bothered Jonas, but her penetrating look was enough to make him sweat beneath his simple cotton shirt.

  He turned back to Carles, then started. His friend’s face was drained of color, and he was staring at Jonas in dismay.

  “What is it?” Jonas demanded. Dear God, had he said something, given Carles some unintentional clue about the things he had done?

  “You have seen her,” Carles said. He was whispering, but with the music ended, Jonas could hear him clearly. There was no mistaking his next words. “Santa Alma.”

  Jonas frowned, confused and relieved at the same time. “‘Saint Soul’? What are you talking about?”

  He waited, but Carles didn’t answer. Instead, the other man glanced around the café, a faraway expression on his face; at last he turned back to Jonas, and his eyes were full of pity.

  “Jonas, you are my friend,” he said. “But we are not close, so I know nothing about whatever it is that you have done—” He held up a hand to stop Jonas when he would have spoken. “And I don’t want to. I would prefer to remember our conversations—you—as they have always been.”

  “What are you talking about?” Jonas asked again. The skin at the back of his scalp was crawling. “Who is this woman?”

  “Not who, what.” Carles looked at his hands. “Do you know what night it is?”

  “Wednesday,” he said. “July 27th.”

  Carles nodded. “Sí. It is the anniversary of the death of St. Panteleon.”

  Jonas frowned, unable to make the connection. “But what does a Grecian saint have to do with the woman I saw? She was a flamenco dancer.”

  “St. Panteleon was a physician—”

  “I know that.” Stress had made Jonas snappish, and he lifted the wine glass, hiding behind a long swallow.

  “In the Monasterio de la Encarnación, there is supposed to be a vial of his dried blood,” Carles continued calmly. “Legend has it that on this night every year the contents liquefy, and while the church won’t officially acknowledge this, the local priests will talk about it if you ask. What they won’t talk about is Santa Alma, the woman in white who appears the same night.”

  Jonas sat back on his chair, involuntarily searching the shadowed corners of the café for the dark-haired Gypsy dancer. She was gone, but the dread she had stirred inside him remained, and Carles’s next words only deepened his uneasiness. “The locals believe that she comes to claim the souls of men who have done evil. Those who report seeing her…” He shook his head instead of finishing.

  “What?” Jonas demanded.

  “They disappear,” Carles answered.

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. Still, a pulse had begun a sickening beat in his temple. “If they disappear, then how would anyone know about her?”

  His friend’s mouth turned down. “Because they always see her once beforehand, and they always stop somewhere before she takes them. Just like…you. It’s as if she intends that others should know of her presence.”

  “No one’s taking me—or my soul—anywhere,” Jonas said, but his tone held no conviction.

  Carles leaned forward. “Jonas, I will stay with you,” he offered. “Until it passes and it is mañana. We will not leave the café, and so you will be all right, sí?”

  Jonas squeezed his eyes shut and drew his hands across his rough face, feeling a two-day growth of beard. How ironic that his fingertips remained sensitive, still the hands of a fine surgeon after all these decades. Age had mapped its lines upon his face and skin, but even the drink had not unsteadied that touch, that skill. How much good could he have brought about with his natural feel for a scalpel, the instinctive ability to carve with a minimum of movement and destruction? Yet, instead of saving life or continuing it, he had chosen alcohol and, in his own dark way, stolen the very thing he was supposed to preserve.

  “No,” Jonas said, opening his eyes. “Though it is kind of you to offer.” He started to say something else, then blinked as everything in the café somehow…sharpened, as if God had dialed up the contrast in this minuscule part of His Kingdom so that Jonas could appreciate it. It was late, well beyond the two a.m. closing time to which the tourists were held; only the locals knew that if you went around to the back of the eighteenth century building in which the Café de Chinitas was located, you could get in after hours when it was darker and more…earthy. The performers went from the well-rehearsed professionals of earlier to those who danced because their spirits demanded it, like the Gypsy woman of a few minutes ago and her younger partner. The stage lights were shut off, and the others were dimmed, draining away the commercialism the café maintained during regular business hours—the red plates and painted chairs now looked sensual and warm, the bright tablecloths mellowed out, the flamboyantly decorated wall behind the stage turned dark and exotic beneath the stucco arches on either side of it. Jonas found it suddenly beautiful, and it wasn’t difficult to understand why. The Café de Chinitas had been the focal point in his dismal existence for the last two years, the only place where he had, except for Sundays when it was closed, the barest of social contact with other human beings. In a way it had been his life, and he supposed that what he was experiencing now wasn’t much different from the way a drowning man was said to see his life flash before his eyes before he finally died.

  “No,” he said again to Carles. He felt drunk with the loveliness of the café, awed that it felt like an hour had passed when he knew it had only been seconds. Jonas stood and offered his hand to Carles across the table, seeing the sorrow in the old man’s eyes. “You are a good friend,” he said quietly. “But it is time for us to say good-bye.”

  “Good-bye,” Carles repeated. “Not just…good night?”

  Jonas shrugged, unwilling to admit what they both knew. They shook hands, and although he had touched thousands of people—patients—the delicate, papery feel of Carles’s ancient skin was, in that moment, unique and wonderful, something alive and like nothing else in the world. If only Jonas had had this same admiration for humanity in his youth. He let go of Carles with reluctance, nodded a final farewell, and strode out of the café, wishing he could go with his head held high. Unfortunately, he was fresh out of false courage.

  Such a beautiful Spanish night. The full moon floated overhead like a huge heavenly spotlight, effectively washing out man’s weaker electrical ones as it shone on the old buildings and beautiful flowerbeds lining the streets. Perhaps he could take a final walk and stop by his rented room—then he could return to the Monasterio de la Encarnación and await the appearance of Santa Alma. Jonas had no doubt that’s where he would find her, and he knew also that he would seek her out. The thought of fleeing was simply…not there, as if the concept of escape had been utterly erased from his brain. There were, however, papers in his room that would condemn him if he did not return, and others found them…but then, why would he care? He had no family upon which to bring shame, and Jonas had long ago eradicated anything that would incriminate anyone else—the others would have to bear their own burdens of penance. Would it not be fitting, and perhaps enlightening, for the world to learn of the unspeakable crimes he had committed?

  Let them know…let them learn.

  Jonas’s feet had a will of their own, and this time, they carried him not to the ba
ck of the Monasterio de la Encarnación, but around to the high, wrought-iron gates guarding the convent’s front. How strange to think that nuns slept in one section of this seventeenth century building, while elsewhere, in its reliquary chamber, were stored the bones of saints…and the infamous vial of St. Panteleon’s blood. Had the blood, as Carles had claimed, returned to its liquified form tonight?

  “Yes,” said a female voice from behind him. “It has.”

  Jonas turned slowly and faced the woman he’d seen earlier in the evening. Close up, she was lovely beyond description, and there was no mistaking the resemblance. His heart, already shattered in so many places, crumbled a little more. This was what had so crushed him earlier in the café, what Jonas had refused to admit to Carles, and to himself, until now: the middled-aged woman in the café had looked and danced like Nadia—the only woman he had ever loved and who had died because of what he had done. How fitting that his destroyer could have been her twin.

  “You’ve come to kill me,” Jonas rasped.

  She shook her head and turned, slipping in a graceful circle around him, her every movement clearly in time to a score of music he could not hear. Layer after layer of pure white ruffles shimmered in the moonlight, and it was impossible to tell where the glowing fabric ended and her skin began. Pearlized castanets flashed on her fingers but made not the slightest sound. Her hair was silver, her lips as pale as her skin—even her eyes were colorless but still, somehow, filled with compassion. She was like a deadly albino angel and he had never seen anything so beautiful.

  Eerily graceful, she circled him twice, then stopped. “I have not come to punish you, Jonas Scharffen. I have come to save you.”

  Jonas was terrified, but still he frowned. “But the legends—”

  “Are just that,” she interrupted. “Tales built of things about which man has no true knowledge.” Her smile still held that strange hint of kindness. “Like so much of what mankind insists, the beliefs are only partially correct.”

  “Then what…?”

  “Forgiveness requires remorse,” she said. “Regret and sensitivity for those you have wronged. You have all this.” Her unblinking gaze was fixed upon his. “But it also requires admission of guilt, and acceptance.”

  “I know what I’ve done,” he said in a low voice. “And I know what I am.”

  “But you have admitted it to no one.” Now her voice had an edge of ice. “And you have not accepted your own actions. You have not accepted that you are to blame for the things you have done.”

  Jonas shook his head vehemently and felt himself stumble with the movement. He grasped one of the iron fence bars to steady himself, then released it in horror—it felt too much like the bars of a prison. “No. I was only following orders from the govern-ment—”

  “Did someone cover your hand with theirs and guide your blade?” she demanded. The moonlight in her eyes reminded him of gleaming metal. “I think not. No one wielded the knife but you, Jonas.” Her voice was barely loud enough to be heard, yet something in the tone stopped him from arguing. He was lying—to her, to himself. Jonas knew it, but he had the passage of years to give him the strength to maintain that deception. Or so he thought.

  “What are you?” he asked. “An angel or a demon?”

  “Neither.” She tilted her head to one side. “If you must label me, I suppose you would call me a guide. I am sent to lead you to salvation, in whatever way I must. But for redemption, perhaps you need to remember.”

  Before he could reply her hands flashed forward and crossed, then her arms lifted in the classic start of flamenco. At the apex of the movement, the pearl-colored castanets clacked smartly, the first sound Jonas had heard them make. She spun and her dress left a blur of white fire across his vision that made him recoil and rub his face. Music suddenly filled his ears, the fiery sounds of a gifted flamenco guitarist, and when he scowled and opened his eyes—

  It is twenty-five years ago and Nadia’s laughter fills his soul and makes him cry inside.

  Another café, this one in Czechoslovakia and nameless, a tiny back-street place deep in Central Prague that the Roma keep carefully hidden from the secret police. No one here would sneer and insult another by calling them “Gypsy” or “thief”—in this place, the people could laugh and dance and drink without fear.

  The aromas of strong coffee and pilsner beer beat at Jonas’s senses along with the smells of pork sausage and cabbage, plus the sweeter scent of Roski from platters scattered throughout the room. Nadia whirls in front of him, outrageously patterned skirt spreading like a huge, colorful bird as she tries to convince him to join her, she will teach him flamenco, the traditional dance of her forbidden heritage. But he is uncoordinated at best, at worst paralyzed from the terror building inside his chest like a wild thing because he knows what is coming—

  As the door shatters and a dozen uniformed men with weapons storm into the café, he grabs Nadia’s hand and pulls her aside. “She’s with me,” he tells the captain of the militia. “I am Dr. Jonas Scharffen.” The young military man hesitates then passes Nadia by, his brutal grip snagging the wrist of a much younger Romani girl, easily half the age of Jonas’s beloved.

  “Jonas, what have you done?” Nadia cries. “I trusted you—we all did!”

  “Keep your voice down,” he hisses. “I did it for you, so that we could be together and not have to hide.”

  “But Jonas, these are my people!”

  “They won’t be harmed,” he tells her, believing this. “The government will have them sterilized and released. They won’t be hurt—”

  Nadia’s mouth twists while, around them, the women scream and the men hurl curses as the militia forces them to line up, then begins herding them out of the café like goats. Her arm is warm beneath Jonas’s fingers and even amid the chaos it brings memories of the previous night, when her soft body had moved against his and her mouth murmured endearments.

  “How could you?” She looks around wildly. “You are just like the Gadjo—you think of the Roma as breeding machines to be eliminated.” She pulls away from Jonas, the touch that had been so warm now rough and hateful. “I will stay with my people and share their fate. You have destroyed what we had, Jonas. I could never love you now.”

  “But they knew about this place already!” Jonas reaches for her. “You think I had more to do with it than that?”

  “Then you should have warned us.” Nadia’s gaze is full of loathing. “You are an evil man, Jonas Scharffen. God forgive me for ever sharing myself with you.”

  “Do you remember now?”

  A different voice, a different time. Jonas squinted at the warm darkness, and the woman Carles had told him was Santa Alma stood patiently a few feet away. He said the first thing that came to mind. “It wasn’t my fault. The secret police already knew they were there. If I hadn’t cooperated when they came to my office that morning, they would have accused me of consorting with the Gypsies.”

  “And weren’t you?” she asked softly.

  “What does that matter?” Jonas balled his fists at his sides, an old man’s pathetic gesture of defiance. “I wanted to save Nadia, not condemn her.”

  The look that Santa Alma gave him was full of false surprise. “And did you, Jonas Scharffen? Did you save the woman you loved?” Before he could reply, her castanets flashed over her head again, another blur of pure white, and—

  The room is white and silver, painted walls and sanitized metal, filled with tubes and wires and equipment, cold and flooded with unforgiving fluorescent light. He has been at this for what feels like years, but in reality it has only been slightly more than a week, eight days of cutting and tying, of changing—limiting—the lives of the Gypsy women the militia bring to him from the holding quarters in the main hospital. One is finished, and her arm is marked, and they roll her away; another cart is pushed inside, and someone else takes her place within his queue. Jonas works like a machine and nothing is wasted, not his movements or the sterilized sc
alpels or the minimal sutures he so deftly works into their bodies. To him, they are faceless beings, not human and certainly not women—they are nothing, no more than animals to be controlled. Jonas glances at the anesthesiologist and sees him look down at the latest patient; his gaze automatically follows the other man’s, and he gasps for air behind his surgical mask as the sound of his breathing becomes huge, more than enough to drown out the hiss of the nearby respirator—

  On the table before him, the unconscious woman is Nadia.

  “Did you save her, Jonas?”

  “I did what I had to do,” he said hoarsely. He couldn’t meet her eyes, couldn’t bear to see what he knew would be disappointment rather than accusation.

  “That’s not what I asked,” she said gently.

  “No.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  For a long time, he said nothing. Then, “I…killed her.”

  “But you didn’t mean to.”

  Jonas opened my mouth to agree, the denial rising automatically. After all, wasn’t that what he had been telling himself for years?

  “Yes, I did,” he said suddenly. “I knew exactly what I was doing. Nadia hated me for what I’d done, wouldn’t have anything to do with me. So I took revenge.” How strange to hear this most brutal of truths after a quarter century of poisonous self-denial, but suddenly Jonas couldn’t stop. “I had her opened up, and she would have been fine…but I cut both of her ovarian arteries. She bled to death on the table, and I watched her die.”

  Santa Alma said nothing, and Jonas couldn’t bear to meet her colorless gaze. He stared at the ground instead and realized that his feet were swallowed in darkness, as though he were standing over an abyss. Perhaps he was, and wouldn’t oblivion—even damnation—be better than what he had endured for the last third of his life?

  The woman’s voice, like plaintive music that could not be ignored, made Jonas lift his head. “And the others, Jonas Scharffen…what of them?”

  “I always told myself that they were better off,” he admitted shakily. “That although what I did might be wrong, the Czech government would have taken more drastic steps, perhaps even exterminated them if I hadn’t done my part. It was bad, but not as bad as it could have been.”