The Girl of the Lake

by Bill Roorbach

  So Bobby told the whole story of his desertion, his defection, his despair. Mr. D’Arcy didn’t seem mad, more like amused, and listened carefully. “Well, never mind. Later we’ll ask Hilyard to make a couple of phone calls on your behalf.”

  Bobby’s heart sank. “Um, who’s he gonna call?”

  “On your behalf, my boy. No more to say. Not to worry, either. Hilyard has a very delicate touch. But you and I, we have a game to attend to.”

  In the map room Mr. D’Arcy flicked on the lights one by one, Bobby glum till he saw that the dead were still in Sweden, lots of dead. The living were arranged in their sleigh—a matchbox Bobby had rigged with paper clips for runners—rode upon the ice of the Ota. Mr. D’Arcy named all the figures in the sleigh: Monique, Petra, the other girls. The young German gardener last. Bobby picked this figurine up and looked at him long: peasant garb, greenish trousers, yellow shirt showing a tear, rake and hoe over its shoulder, a figure larger than any of the others, especially its huge little hands. Bobby said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “You may, yes, ask anything, as you wish.”

  “Is Dort the same Dort?”

  “And I may answer or not, as I wish!” Mr. D’Arcy said. He was more cheerful today, for certain. “For now let us just say that he is a young, silent, rather irritating gardener’s assistant, and German to boot, with the one noble trait of loyalty. He is strong, he’s nearly a horse himself, which the Young Count is by no means. The Ota has overflowed its own jumbled ice after a thaw, has frozen anew, slick and hard and black, I should say. Can you see it?”

  Bobby could see it.

  The sleigh sang along on the most modern polished-steel runners—the problem was in controlling its speed, the two man-horses slipping and sliding, holding the trace bars. The Young Count skidded in his riding boots, slithered at Dort’s steadier side, had to keep shushing the girls behind them, who whimpered. They passed below the Petrokov Summer Palace, where flames silhouetted brigands passing furniture out the windows. A shout—they’d been seen!—and dozens of men came crashing down the great lawn through the crusted snow after the sleigh. But Dort was a horse and pulled the whole band along the ice at a sensational clip. The Young Count gave up trying to help, finally hoisted himself onto the broadboard, then into the sleigh and among the panicked girls, looked back to see a phalanx of scruffy, slipping soldiers and peasant men giving chase, losing ground. No comfort there: the milldam was ahead.

  The Young Count hugged and kissed each girl and told each he loved her, kissed his daughters passionately as if he would never see them again, then took up arms. Petra loaded and handed him hunting rifles one by one. The Count picked off three soldiers and four peasants of a growing number, while all along Dort pulled and the sleigh skittered. At the dam the desperate family tumbled out, all but Monique, who was frozen with fear. The Young Count, the girls, Dort, thus forced to leave her, stomped in the crusty snow to the mill buildings, where they raced through the miller’s abandoned house, down two flights of wooden stairs and back outside, out onto the ice below the dam, all of them falling and sprawling, the Young Count thinking to reach the far bank and the old sawmill, where they could take cover and fight. Just then over the dam came the sleigh, pushed by the brigands no doubt, Monique riding it down silently, thrown out on the impact, landing grotesquely twisted on the current-weakened ice, which broke too, dumping the sleigh and then the woman into the water, farewell.

  The girls, the gardener, the Young Count, all held hands in a line, Dort first, then the Count, pulling all behind to cross a frozen mass of floes and logs and treacherous puddles on slickest ice. Petra held the one rifle they had salvaged. Of course, by now the soldier-brigands would have the weapons from the sleigh. Near the sawmill shore, near what might have been safety, the ice simply ended in a deep flow of river water from the millrace. And here came the soldiers, followed by the peasants. Twenty or more men and boys, firing the dacha’s hunting rifles. Marta, the Count’s younger daughter, shrieked and fell on the ice, dead. Petra, the older, fired back, hitting no one. The soldiers came forward, slipping in their tall boots on the ice in a crowd. Then suddenly the ice beneath them gave way. One head bobbing, then under the ice, many arms flailing, many men simply sinking under the weight of their stolen clothes and full pockets, two or three climbing out on Miller Gurevitch’s garden banks where, as Mr. D’Arcy said, “We can only hope they froze.”

  All this left the family and gardener on a huge pan of ice that turned slowly as if it would reach the shore and save those still alive, but instead abruptly stopped, heaving itself up on something submerged, rising then on the slow current, and cleaving, dumping everyone. Petra and Dort managed to swim out, helped the Young Count to shore and safety, but all the others were lost. The survivor’s garments grew stiff with ice. The Count was nearly out of his head with grief, ready to leap into the Ota and join the dead.

  Dort had the inspiration to burn the sawmill building, easily ignited with the sawyer’s tidily stored flint and steel, sparks in dry sawdust. Twenty minutes and the fire was famous, as Mr. D’Arcy put it. Half an hour and the survivors’ clothes were dry.

  Bobby studied the figures of the little girls. He flew Monique to Sweden first, laid her in line, squashed the matchbox sleigh with a slow fist. He thought hard in the silence, then flew the sleigh to Sweden, too. He could do that much. Then he flew Marta, shot. Then one little drowned girl at a time, till the five girls but Petra were in Sweden. Mr. D’Arcy watched solemnly. He said, “Saved from rape by death.”

  Silence in the map room, just the sound of a fan whirring somewhere in the walls. Abruptly, Mr. D’Arcy continued: The remaining threesome walked southwards into spring, avoiding towns, raiding abandoned farms for food, finding fresh scraps of clothing, always marching, growing wild, filthy, starved, thin as rats. The Young Count’s plan was to cross the German lines—the kaiser more an ally than not, he thought—and perhaps as refugees or even as prisoners of war make their way to Germany, and later, God willing, la France.

  At that, there was a very soft knocking, and the hidden door rolled silently open on its secret ball bearings. “You will take luncheon here?” said Hilyard.

  “Yes, quite, why not?” said Mr. D’Arcy, an entirely different voice.

  And the butler set up a card table, chairs, tablecloth. Soon he was back with a tureen of bright red soup, a small loaf of coarse bread, then strips of liver on fine plates. Next a salad of dark greens. Next a plate of cheeses. Finally chocolates. Bobby ate with best manners, Mr. D’Arcy delicately. No talk until Hilyard was back to collect the plates.

  To him, Mr. D’Arcy said, “You’ve made some phone calls?”

  The butler said, “Indeed, sir. I found everyone most agreeable once a certain level of astonishment wore off.” And here crept the first smile Bobby had seen on that face.

  An alarming smile spread on Mr. D’Arcy’s face as well. He said, “And we will have Saturdays?”

  “Saturdays, sir, quite so, though it took some persuasion.” Those smiles. Both men looked at Bobby.

  “What?” the boy said. He knew the calls were about him, all right.

  Mr. D’Arcy said, “You mustn’t shirk school, my boy. And from here forward, you shan’t. I believe Mr. Hilyard has interceded on your behalf—you won’t be punished, we believe, except by having to come here Saturdays through the school year for tutoring, to, um, rather make up, I should say, to make up for lost school.” And that was that.

  After lunch the little band—the Young Count, Petra, and Dort—made the German lines. Mr. D’Arcy leaned into his story in the golden lamplight, a hand on the map as Bobby moved the last three figures southward to the banks of a great painted river. Dort crossed first, shouting German so as to be welcomed. The soldiers he met shoved him and cuffed his ears but in the end allowed him to swim back to his friends. Dort, though, had read their intentions and thought the Young Count and he would be shot for the girl. So the little band hurried several l
eagues along the river until they found a crossing on rocks under the remains of a bridge. A Russian peasant came to them, begged for food. This was the river Dnepr, the peasant said. He took them to a ditched dredging barge he’d found, and the four of them launched that poor vessel and floated three weeks south, unchallenged. At Kiev they traded the dredging equipment to a docksman for bags of beans and grain, and the band floated on. Kiev was in German hands; Dort barked greetings to soldiers, sailors. And so the grieving band continued, all the way to Zaporozhye.

  There, life seemed as it had always, high summer. The band found an estate the Young Count knew—that of a friend of his father’s—untouched, its master gone, a very old man in charge, a blind great uncle. That old man welcomed them, shared the estate’s abundant stores, comfortable beds, bathing rooms. This, Mr. D’Arcy said, was the worst period the Young Count had ever or would ever encounter in his life: the succor and the solace made him comfortable and in comfort every horror welled up: his wife, dead, his younger daughter, dead, his whole extended family, too, each a sorrow too much to bear. He’d sleep hard, wake happy, then remember—spend the waking day in tears. Dort, the same. Petra, however, was young and healed more quickly, spun on tiptoes among the flowers of the great, untended gardens, the sole ray of joy on the old estate. The Count did what he could to restore her to her studies, to be brave in her presence.

  “You said ‘we,’ ” said Bobby. “You keep saying ‘we.’ ”

  “Do I?” said Mr. D’Arcy. He thought a moment, trying to hear himself, said, “If so, I apologize. It is not I but a younger man I speak of, the Young Count Darlotsoff.”

  The old blind man of the manor came to the Young Count in front of the fire one midnight, walking in his sleep (“A true Tiresias,” as Mr. D’Arcy said), and chanted: “Listen noble friend, listen to me: You will be well. You will find freedom via water. You will prosper in your new home. You will never forget, but you will come to accept. You will be wealthy again, in a new palace. You will never again marry. You will have no more children. Until one day a boy will come. You will tell him what you have suffered, and even in his innocence he will understand, and what you tell him will change him forever, and you will have an heir in him. You will live long, very, very long. You who have lost so much, will gain more back. And the boy you befriend will change the world in his turn.” The Young Count found surcease in the old man’s words, found the will to live on.

  The Germans couldn’t hold Kiev and in retreat took the manor, bunking there, preparing for what they did not realize would be their doom. The intrepid threesome was once again cast loose, headed once again southward. They reached the Crimea, spent what seemed a kind of mourning vacation in Sebastopol, then Yalta, a resort city where White Army thugs handed out random death. Dort found work on the docks, was accosted constantly, beaten twice for his silence, accused of being Red, or German, or criminal. The Young Count could get no work, was jeered and slapped for his aristocratic accent by anyone who felt the urge, but made rounds of the meanest back streets for scraps of food, for useful tins. Petra dressed as a smaller child, an urchin, used her fine manners to collect day-old bread, vegetables gone by, the odd soup bone. In fact, the band ate relatively well. They lived under a bridge briefly, then on the littered beach. Dort kept them in vodka, which was the coin of his realm.

  One chilly afternoon as autumn approached, the Young Count discovered a day sailboat from one of the empty resorts, small open cockpit, hull perhaps five meters in length, sails partially rotted—it had been pulled into the reeds by vandals and forgotten. If one stayed out of sight of the piers (where White Army hooligans lined up young men and shot them just to watch the sea turn red), if one slipped into town at night, one might supply such a boat with food and water, might steal it unseen. Terror prevented immediate fulfillment of the plan, however; even a hobo’s beach was more comfort than that little boat. Still, over the course of the subsequent weeks, they hid a fourth of their scavenged food under the boat’s small foredeck among moldy life vests. On the penultimate night Dort took ill—vomiting, shitting, coughing.

  “Surely I can say shitting, yes? You grin! American boy!”

  The next morning, the Young Count fell ill, too. That evening, Petra. Dort came around healthy enough to look after her, then the Young Count came around, too. But brave Petra grew worse and worse, and there on the beach under the salvaged awning of a pleasure yacht she died.

  Mr. D’Arcy cried silently for a long while. Bobby felt he could cry, too, but would not. He flew Petra to Sweden, felt that the others greeted her there—felt at least that she had company there, had family: her sisters, her mother, her grandparents. Who did the Young Count have? No one but Dort, the irritating gardener.

  At length, Mr. D’Arcy continued:

  The Young Count grew determined. Death at sea seemed a blessing. Even to be shot, heaven sent. The night after burying Petra in Black Sea sand, “so for the tides to find,” he and Dort dragged the abandoned boat from the reeds, climbed in, and hand-paddled in a calm sea, no moon, paddled till they were pure exhaustion, then paddled more. Dawn and a breeze came up, good fortune, since they had not made the horizon, could still see shore. Then the breeze turned to wind and then to storm—more good fortune mixed with more bad: the boat was tossed and flung, but no other vessels were about, no one to spot them, and they made way. The Young Count had some aristocrat’s sailing lessons behind him and kept the little boat before the cold north wind a full day, cruising ever south. In the night, Dort asleep, the Young Count held the tiller, groaned and wept, let his tears mingle with the heavy rain, the relentless spray. At daybreak, landfall.

  “This was Turkiye, Robert, the country of Turkey, and freedom. And the Young Count did live on, as his Tiresias said he would.”

  In Berlin, some months later, posing as French, the Young Count took a new name. Protected by Dort’s knowledge of the city, he worked briefly as a waiter till he could make it to Paris, well after the war. There, his money waited, so very much money that he found no obstacles to a voyage to New York, where he worked to became thoroughly American in a matter of months, hoping to shed his horror. But horror ever returned, returned unbidden at every sweet moment, even to this king of the banking world. And in time, the Young Count—not so young anymore—found his new-world palace, as had been predicted. And in a moment of weakness, of nostalgia, of irrational love and longing for the past, he sent for Dort, who willingly came and became his master gardener, as stupid and irritating as always, as loyal as always, the only one who knew Mr. D’Arcy’s story, first to last.

  BOBBY TORE UP DOGWOOD lane, pulling his sleigh full of doomed daughters, skittered on the ice that was Wahackme Road, raced onto his own road, all but skated along the tar and breathlessly home. Mr. D’Arcy wouldn’t say a word more about the phone calls Hilyard had made, only invited him back for Saturdays, which invitation Bobby would honor nearly every Saturday of his coming youth and young manhood: lessons on the maps; lessons on a polished-brass microscope; lessons in a dozen languages; lessons in business, ethics, economics; lessons in math and mythology; lessons in what the old man called charm. Robert grew intellectually far past his peers but loved them and was loved by them and attended school in any case, daily attendance through college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where with Mr. D’Arcy’s help he was welcomed at Harvard with every blandishment the admissions team could muster. With the move to college, the Saturdays with the ancient man ended but never the game. Christmas break and summers, too, and many a road trip with friends to meet the master, sometimes particular girlfriends. Mr. D’Arcy approved only of a certain redhead called Marilyn, whom much later Bobby would marry. And though Mr. D’Arcy passed away on a winter’s day, expiring quietly alone at his desk, the Young Count was always with Bobby, gave him his many powers, gave him Dort, too, and Hilyard, also the Connecticut estate and a fortune in stocks and bonds and real estate and numbered accounts across the great blue globe. Robert B. Mullendore would ch
ange the world, all right, becoming a figure in government, then diplomacy, finally international business, a paragon of ethical development, champion of peace.

  HE WAS LATE, AND RAN, only slowing when he saw his parents—both of them, Dad home early from work, tall and concerned, Mom in her apron, head cocked somber—saw his folks standing at the end of the driveway waiting for him, Mrs. Applegate just behind them, arms crossed over her chest.

  Kiva

  MY FATHER, A GENETICIST nearly seventy, was raising me alone. My young mother, a formerly kind woman suffering from thoroughgoing mental illness, we’d left behind in the hasty move from Kabul, Afghanistan, some eight years before. Much younger than my father (whose name is Hammad Aravin Hammad, a sandwich of Arab and Sanskrit), she’d been returned to her extended family in their bombed and beleaguered border village of Khwost, and the marriage annulled. Which sounds cruel, but the woman we’d all known no longer existed. There’d been a political disaster, something I was too young to understand. Father was being helped by the Americans. He’d made terrible missteps under their guidance, and so he was owed.

  Mother’s illness and our move (to Punta de Fleche, New Mexico, a laboratory town invented along with the atomic bomb) had put Baba and me frequently in the way of counselors and therapists of all kinds, and the two of us had a really communicative relationship that we were at constant pains to keep fresh and loving around the hole in our lives. I really mean this and really mean everything I say; I’m not an ironic person, never speak in opposites. We were both a little obsessed by the idea of romance. If Baba dated, he respectfully told me of his plans, then told me logistical details only: where he and the woman had gone and what time, certain stretches of conversation, the plot of a given movie. If he had sex, I had no idea of it and would have found it highly gross to know in any case. If I dated, it was entirely because of his encouragement. I did not have sex, except for masturbation, which he liked to say without even slightly flinching was part of life, even provided me with the tamest possible men’s magazines (breasts and bottoms and here and there some fuzz, no inner workings, to use his phrase), even while forbidding me porn on the web. On that basis in fact, knowing what boys are made of, he did not allow me my own Internet account but gave me nearly free rein with his own. You did not try to hide computer keystrokes of any kind from Baba; Baba was very nearly a computer himself. With a heavy accent, some might say, but I never noticed. His work at the lab was classified, and he never said the first word about it. At home we only spoke English, and I, having arrived in the USA at the impressionable age of eight, had become thoroughly American, with an American’s sense of individuality that often troubled the old man.