Theft

by N. S. Köenings

  In the garden, Flora pointed to the plum tree. “That’s where it happened, where George fell.” Eva noted the dark fruits on the ground, some rotting already, gutted by the birds. Higher in the foliage, unripe plums still dangled, sunlit, yellow, bluish in the air. Flora waited for her by the round stone well, leaned lightly on the edge. “We do have one, you see.” A well! Eva hadn’t known. Stepping forward, she felt something, a kind of quiet awe. She leaned against the well’s high edge and looked into the water. Far off, low, Eva saw the sky, reflected in a cameo, a cloud. The distance made her dizzy. “Come, let’s sit,” said Flora. Around them, the cobbles gave at their periphery to flower beds: echinacea, chamomile, creeping blue petunias, violet clematis. Old man’s beard, thought Eva. Flora motioned to the bench.

  Eva began softly. “Was it awful for you yesterday?” She touched Flora’s arm, then pulled her hand away as lightly as she’d placed it. “I don’t plan these things, you know.” Flora didn’t look at her. She fiddled with the housecoat’s hem. “I know how it works, Miss Bright. I’m a regular, you know,” she said. Eva smiled at her. “Of course you are, Flora. I know that. It’s only that I’m sorry it all happened so fast. I wish I could have stopped it, slowed it down somehow.” Eva pursed her lips, wished again that she were more experienced, and said slowly, “Fontanella said you were terribly upset.”

  Flora didn’t answer. She was remembering herself, how still, how heavy she had felt. “I was, I suppose. Yes. Who wouldn’t be?” She nudged a fallen plum with the tip of her brown shoe and looked beyond the flower beds at the untidy expanse. How did all the others feel, the members of the Thursday Club who did get messages, some even once a week, who had relationships with shades? They would know, thought Flora, how one should proceed. They made a habit of these things. But no, perhaps they wouldn’t have any wisdom for her. Flora’s message was the first to come from such a stranger, from a force that was not human, from a person—if one spoke that way of spirits of the sea—one had never known. “It’s a . . .” she searched a moment, mouthing the word once before she spoke it. “Djinn, is it?”

  Eva looked up into the plum tree and farther out into the sky, which was pale and close, a powdery, brisk blue. “Yes,” she said. She felt wistful suddenly. “From Africa. But I haven’t any news. He hasn’t,” Eva said, “come back.” An inky fruit snapped from its twig, landing perfectly in the far lake of the well with a tiny distant pop. Down the lane, a door slammed. “Flora, look, I have to tell you this,” said Eva. “Fontanella. And Blackie—Maxwell Black, I mean—they think that you should wait another week. Fontanella thinks I made the whole thing up.” (That I’ve got something against her, Eva almost said, but she thought better of it. Flora didn’t need to hear it. And this wasn’t about Eva, or about the others. This was about George.) She went on. “And Blackie isn’t sure, really, what that spirit was, and he thinks we should know first. He’d like to do some research. Then he wants to try to speak to it again, himself, have an explanation. Would you like to wait?”

  Flora’s hair, in perfect, heavy, yellowed waves of wax, shimmered in the light. Her mouth fell slightly open. She was listening to something in herself. Her heart hurt. She wished to save her husband, and she’d do anything at all, get that tea from China and do headstands if she must. “Miss Bright, George is doing badly. The doctors aren’t a help. I don’t want to wait. Whatever the thing wants. Whatever the thing says. Goats or diamonds, I don’t care.” She stopped. She caught herself, as if surprised by her own certainty and ready to disown it. “That is—if you think it’s all right.”

  Eva took Flora’s hand in hers. “I do think it’s all right, Flora. Yes, I really do.” She stroked Flora’s crooked fingers. “Listen to me, Flora.” Flora’s pale eyes widened. She planted both feet firmly on the ground as if to brace herself, for anything. Eva spoke then evenly and gently. “Flora, I believe in this. I am going to help you get what Sheikh Abdul has asked for. We’ll do it together. We’ll try it, as you say. We’re going to see it through.”

  Hearing Eva Bright’s commitment, that Eva didn’t think her mad, Flora told her everything. What she’d seen while it happened, how a transparent panel showing George had hovered in her eyes. That George had been to Africa, had been there in the War. That it wasn’t as far out as everyone had said. What if he had been touched by something there and it had come to help him? People were touched by all kinds of things, surely Eva could feel ghosts when she entered clients’ homes, surely Eva sensed that the ordinary world everybody saw wasn’t all there was. How different could Sheikh Abdul be from a shade? Did it really matter? “I don’t know,” said Eva. “Maybe not at all.” Flora rubbed her feet against the flagstones, a busy, rushing sound.

  “My George,” Flora said. Her eyes were dry, her tired face was clear. Eva asked, “He makes you happy, then?” Flora looked at Eva in surprise, as if all husbands made their wives so. Then she nodded slowly. “Oh,” she said. “You haven’t ever had one. You don’t know what it’s like, do you?” Eva shook her head. A leaf from the high plum tree wafted down and onto Flora’s shoulder. Flora plucked it up, examined it a moment, then let it drop on to the ground. “I do so want him back.

  “I do wish, sometimes, or I used to,” Flora said, “that he’d say more things to me, that he’d ask how I was feeling, you know, those kinds of things that women like and men find hard to do. As if they were just looking at the outside parts of you, not really looking in.” Flora looked down at herself as though there were a window at her ribs; she laughed at herself then, as if at a child. “But he’s been good to me, you know. A rudder. A strong man can be that for you, a good presence.” Eva cocked her head, as if the very word “presence” might call a being up. Releasing her companion’s hand, she said, “You’d be lonesome without him, wouldn’t you?” Flora shook her fingers out into the air, as if casting bad things off. Her words were like a warning. “Yes, I would, indeed.”

  Susan Stakes a Claim

  Susan Darling was Fontanella’s newest protégée, the favorite. Shy and awkward but remarkably determined, Susan had, just three months before, gone to Fontanella’s cottage and asked for an audition. She’d begun her demonstration by touching Fontanella’s mantel photographs and telling her, without any clues, who the people were, and what they meant in Fontanella’s life. Other adepts could do that, of course, it was not extraordinary. That someone could learn. But she had also located, without Fontanella telling her that she’d been seeking it for months, the purple powder puff that belonged in Fontanella’s dressing room but which, oblivious, she had kept in hand when she went out into the parlor to the telephone; the puff had fallen from her fingers down behind the bookshelf. “Purple,” Susan Darling had intoned, fingers at the books. “I sense lost purple here.” Fontanella was amazed. “What?” she said, and then, delighted, smitten, “I’ve never seen the like.” Susan Darling only smiled.

  She was further talented in ways that none of them had ever come across: she did not simply locate wayward things, but engaged in the discovery of unsuspected objects that wanted, she would quietly insist, to be with so-and-so, that needed to be owned by someone who had, until Susan Darling told them so, never thought of owning such a thing, or (this happened often too) exclaimed that they had always thought they did want just that thing, but they had never seen it in real life, only in their dreams, how did Susan know?

  In art school, Susan specialized in wood-block prints and etchings, which Eva thought was apt—all that digging in the corners, scraping, poking with thin tools; how different was that from biting one’s own fingernails, or scraping wax from tabletops, which Susan, twitching, always seemed to do? She was reputed to be talented. “Quite the artist,” Fontanella often said, too proudly, as if Susan’s skills were hers. When she said it, Susan blushed and fluttered, smiled a low, sweet smile.

  It made Eva uncomfortable, to witness that odd friendship, and it made her, though she hadn’t really spelled it out, think less of Susan Darling
, who appeared to take Fontanella’s views so seriously, and next make them her own. She was so pretty and so young—there was also that. If Eva did see her in town—at the boardwalk or the market, coming from the library, Susan was usually accompanied by other students in their twenties, a gleeful, agitated bunch, among whom Susan stood out like an alien fairy. So admired and artistic, Susan would surely not have time, thought Eva, for plain and solid serious women like herself, in walking shoes and combs. And so when Susan rang the bell, Eva—who had just finished the dishes, was thinking of her overcoat, which would likely be too hot, and of Hassan’s Take-Aways—was surprised.

  Before Eva could speak, Susan asked, in a low voice, “You’re not going out, are you?” Eva thought at first that Susan had been sent to check on her. “And what if I am?” she said. She was not a person who spoke harshly. But there was something afoot, a new anxiety that had risen too close to her skin. “Blackie sent you, I suppose? I expect you’ll give Nella a report.” She saw Susan cringe, but she would not take it back. She let her words hang in the air—Susan standing on the walk, one ankle curled around the other, one knee bent, her head lolling to the side, hand reaching blindly for the lintel as if she might be blown off by the wind, and Eva, dish towel at her hip, sleeves rolled up above her sturdy elbows, angry. Susan tried again. “No, Eva. You mustn’t think so. No.” Eva leaned against the doorjamb, watching her, trying to get a fix on why the girl had come.

  Susan closed her eyes. Her hair—so blond that it was nearly white, the sort of color children have but are intended, aren’t they, to grow out of—fell forward in two screens on either side of a violent, perfect, middle part. She was breathing through her nose. Was humming, nearly, then whispering to herself. “No, no.” Eva watched her. “Susan,” she said. “Susan!” Susan didn’t answer. What on earth does this girl want? Eva had nearly lost all patience with her when the tortured buzzing stopped and Susan raised her head. And when she did so, Eva saw the girl in a new light. There was such an openness in Susan’s face, a shine to it, such clean tears in her eyes, that Eva was quite taken aback. “Susan!” Eva said, more softly, and moved towards her. “What’s happening to you? Hey, are you all right?”

  Susan set both feet on the floor and let her hands drop slowly to her sides, no longer weird and wobbling, rather, very straight and ready, like an arrow or a flute. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I am.” She looked Eva in the face and, unhesitatingly at last, loosed her fine bell voice. She said: “I don’t believe that you have played a trick. I don’t think you are ill. I don’t agree with Nella. I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but I’m not on her side with this. I was right there, too. I saw you. I heard Sheikh Abdul Aziz. And I would like to help.”

  With a look around them to both sides of the street, a scan for Fontanella, Eva pulled the girl deftly inside and took her up the stairs. She gave Susan a drink of water and asked that she explain. “I don’t quite know,” said Susan. Here she smiled a bit at Eva over the thick rim of the glass, and with the sea behind her, the way the light shone on all that ashen hair, Eva thought, as everybody did upon looking again, and close, that Susan Darling was astonishing and beautifully fragile. She was very young. She did not warrant Eva’s harshness. And her words, in a strange way Eva recognized, made a lot of sense.

  She didn’t know exactly what she meant, she said. She only had a feeling. “And I know that I’m not given to, you know, feelings in the same way you and Nella are—” Eva wished the girl would stop shortening Fontanella’s name, it made her think of Blackie and The Medium (Maxanella!), pasted in a kiss. Susan sensed it in her: “Fontanella, I mean, Eva. Anyway, I don’t have access to the future, not in terms of what somebody should do, or what is going to happen. And I generally don’t have feelings that are to do with people. Or with people’s stories—as Fontanella does, you know, when she senses that not everything is right, or that some man has cheated on his wife, or is so attached to her and frightened that he can’t let her move on.” Eva hadn’t ever heard Susan talk so much, or so plainly, except behind the mediums’ table, when she was at work. Outside of the Thursday Club, she’d thought of Susan, it was true, as Fontanella’s rabbit. And yet here she was, voluble and eloquent, speaking clearly in her kitchen. She went on. “All my feelings have to do with things. So I’m not sure why I’m having this one, except that maybe I’m about to find something, or some thing will find me. But I am. It’s been coming on since Thursday. Since—” Susan did pause then. “Since you—since Sheikh Abdul—asked Flora for rose water.”

  Eva refilled Susan’s glass. For a slight girl who didn’t seem to exercise, Susan drank a lot. Perhaps she’s like a plant, Eva thought, and the idea made her smile. She also thought, Rose water. Susan had much more to say. “I know rose water isn’t hard to find, so of course that isn’t it. But there was something there. And what happens to me when I’m about to find something for someone is that I get a sort of headache, here.” She lifted a wan hand to the center of her forehead, where her straight nose began. “It got better here, this morning, and at first I didn’t think much of it. But it came back when I left, and it got worse at home, and later on at Nella’s—Fontanella’s—the pain kept getting stronger, horrid, which it only does if I’m in the wrong place.”

  Susan looked at Eva as though surely she’d already understood. “And so, I had to leave, you see. I knew I shouldn’t be there. So I left. And I walked and walked around, and I went down to the water because that can clear my mind sometimes, and the pain got softer then, more like a dull throb, which is just as it should be—the water’s quite near you—and then it led me here. I’m here now. That ache is altogether gone now. And I wanted you to know.”

  Eva was aware of thinking that Susan had some courage. Was admirable, even. What did they have but feelings, after all? What else did mediums go on? Their work did have rules, of course, and guidelines, ways of being done. But in the end they couldn’t ever prove that they were working with the truth, the kind of fact that can be captured with a ruler or a gauge, or trapped inside a jar. Her own feelings about Sheikh Abdul Aziz—that he had torn into her body, made her mouth taste strange, and that she had no choice but to do his will—well, these were hard to justify, unless a person simply trusted in herself. And this—what she had thought was not possible for Susan, who seemed simply to follow Fontanella and do whatever Blackie said—was precisely what the girl had done. Followed, so to speak, her nose. And shown up on her doorstep. “George Hewett has spent time in Africa,” said Eva quietly. Susan smiled. “Well then. That makes it even better, doesn’t it. Like it’s really meant.”

  Eva asked, “You’re not worried about this Sheikh Abdul being a djinn? Two thousand years old, I think he said. That isn’t troublesome to you?” Susan shook her head. “It isn’t. Who are we to say what’s out there? Spirits, forces, goblin? Phantoms? We don’t know anything at all.” Eva was almost convinced. But she did have to check. “You really haven’t come to spy?” This hurt Susan’s feelings, Eva saw it—the recoil, the biting at her lip. “I haven’t come to spy,” the girl said very quietly. “George has been to Africa. And there’s a swelling in my head. I’m here because of this.” She gestured to her brow. Eva liked the firmness in her voice. “Yes. All right,” she said, and Susan looked so pleased that Eva touched her arm and left her hand there, on the thin girl’s cool, soft skin.

  George Hewett in Africa

  Hitler’s war, they called it in those parts, as if no one else were in it. But if by war was meant the crush and broil of battle, heat and flies and blood, then George had not exactly been to war. If asked, which he was less and less these days, since men his age tended to stay home and the young people didn’t really care, George agreed that he had “fought in Africa.” He would then make a face that told inquirers that he had said enough. Ah, he saw great battles, they would think. He shot men dead cold. And they could easily imagine that the kinds of stories he might have would be too hard to hear. El Alamein, they though
t, confused. The Rufiji Delta. Perhaps even Gallipoli. Pleased—for that was what he wanted—George would say no more. But the real truth of it was that he had not fought even once. War, for George, had been a lot like a vacation. He did have a rifle, yes, which he carried with him sometimes on his rounds, and which he cleaned and loaded at the drills, and yes, he’d had a uniform. Which suited him. But that uniform had not once been drenched in blood or guts, he’d not fired his rifle even in the air, or at any living thing, and he’d seen no wound caused by a cannon or a bomb. What had George Hewett done?

  Garrisoned on the coast, right beside the sea (that Indian Ocean, yes, where Sheikh Abdul was from!), George Alexander Hewett had had the calmest and most pleasant, the most free, time of his life. His duties principally consisted of keeping track of Greek and Polish prisoners, making sure they left, or stayed, ration cards in order. He did not travel far or wide at all. He did not take hard rides in a tank, did not see a grenade. He spent three fat, wonderful, phantasmagoric years in what, when he allowed himself to think of it, had been something like heaven. How wonderful it was. He was young, handsome, and more far away from home than he had ever thought he could be. And this place! These places! Unbelievable, to him, how different from his own. The ocean was a lighter blue than any he had swum in as a boy, clean and clear and filled with colored fish. The fish! He’d always liked his seafood—and out there, well, there were fish he’d never had before, and squid, and octopi, tiny orange shrimp the length of a boy’s eyelash.

  He had not been interested in local lore, not either in the language, which (even taking pride in his refusal) he had stubbornly not learned. Seeking out, instead, the broadsheets from the army, the dear BBC, he’d barely thought about the local news. Of the natives, George did not ask any questions. He was not the sort to truck with them, the narrow men who plied the others with hot weed or offered boys and girls and women in the narrow streets and alleys. He’d never either gone into a local home to sample homemade foods, nor spent any time inside a smoky, street-side shack. He’d not formed any friendships. And he had not really wished to. That whole world had been far beyond his ken. But it had surely dazzled him. George Hewett, from a well-fed, comfortable distance, had principally observed.