I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  KAROLINA

  I first saw Karolina outside the Sumesa on the corner of Avenidas Oaxaca and Álvaro Obregón. She was smoking a stubby cigarette, a sled-like backpack hitched to her shoulders. I stopped short, felt my heart lurch. Could it be? Karolina was my brother’s ex-wife; they’d divorced five years ago, in Seattle, and I’d not seen her since. Right before their divorce, she had gone missing for fifteen days, an event still marked by dread and shame. The second time I saw her was by the bus stop on Avenida Michoacán. The third sighting was in Parque México, late at night. I had decided to walk back to the hotel from a work dinner in Roma Sur because I was having trouble sleeping and a long walk before bed—tracing the park’s serpentine paths, imagining the alertness being drained from my body one step at a time—seemed like a preemptive strike against insomnia. The dog run was empty except for a young man throwing a tennis ball for a German shepherd. The owner was wearing sunglasses, despite the hour. I was just past the run, in the thick green center of the park, when I came upon Karolina asleep on a bench, squeezing her giant backpack like a lover.

  The city was four months past the earthquake. The moment I had heard news of the disaster, I called my friend in the conservation department of the National Museum of Anthropology. He and his family were safe, he said, though a building in their neighborhood had collapsed and thirty-two people had lost their lives. At home in Miami, as I watched the death toll tick up on my laptop, it had never occurred to me that Karolina had been in danger here too.

  The man in sunglasses leashed the German shepherd and left the run. He whistled. The dog carried the tennis ball in his mouth. I have always been a little uneasy around dogs. I wondered where the man and his dog had been when the earth started to thrash under their feet, whether they had been afraid. I knelt by the bench. I touched Karolina’s cheek. Her skin was sticky and cool. I grasped her shoulder. I willed her to open her eyes, but she seemed fast asleep.

  “Karolina,” I said.

  My voice jolted her into the waking world. She stared, and then her mouth yawned open, exposing the sheen of molars, and she screamed. I fell backward, as though shoved. “Karolina,” I said again, but she leaped to her feet and ran away, knees high, her giant backpack upright in her arms. I watched as she disappeared into the night.

  A moment later, the man with the German shepherd burst through the darkness and rushed to my side. He took me by the arm and helped me up.

  “Are you all right?” he asked in Spanish. “I heard a scream. Were you attacked?”

  Had I been attacked? It nearly felt that way.

  I was conversational in the Romance languages, as this was important for my work, so I lied and told the man that I had fallen, tripped over something in the dark.

  He nodded and released my arm. I noticed him looking around, searching for whatever it was I had tripped over. His sunglasses were crooked on his face. The German shepherd paced around me—full of suspicion, I couldn’t help but think—and then dropped the tennis ball at my feet.

  * * *

  In the wake of a natural disaster an art restorer—I worked for a museum in Miami; my specialty was mosaics—mourned not only the loss of life but the damage done to the history of human culture. I could not see an image of a collapsed building without worrying what had been destroyed inside. In the Great Earthquake of Lisbon, in 1755, the Ribeira Palace, which once sat on the Tagus River, was obliterated—sculptures and tapestries and paintings, by Rubens and Correggio, vanished. In 2010, the earthquake that devastated Haiti brought down the Cathédrale Sainte-Trinité and its famed religious murals; a painting by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière was believed to have been destroyed when the presidential palace collapsed. Years and years of artistic history—which is to say human history—gone.

  Or nearly.

  In some cases, people gathered the fragments and with these fragments made a new shape.

  My husband (soon to be my ex-husband) was a psychologist who specialized in trauma; in this way, both our vocations placed us in close proximity to disaster and its aftermath.

  * * *

  The morning after I found Karolina in the park, I delivered a talk at a conference, on the restoration of Roman mosaics in the ancient city of Stobi. The conference had been on my calendar for many months, and the talk was one I had given before, and yet the subject matter felt freshly urgent. My throat was dry and I kept pausing for sips of water.

  My friend at the National Museum of Anthropology attended my talk and though he was complimentary afterward he said that he couldn’t help but notice that I had seemed nervous. Are you sleeping? Are you feeling all right?

  Not really, I wanted to tell him, but it felt wrong to raise my own grievances after everything his city had been through. The major museums in Mexico City had weathered the earthquake relatively unscathed, though through conference chatter I had learned several smaller museums and galleries had suffered serious damage—a collapsed roof, a facade turned to rubble, shows suspended. The Permanencia Voluntaria film archive had been marred, perhaps beyond repair. A venerable gallery owner had died when her building collapsed in Roma Norte. My friend was involved with plans to help several badly damaged museums in Puebla.

  After we finished talking I took a long walk, back toward my hotel. I walked through Jardín Pushkin, where children on Rollerblades were careening around an obstacle course of pink and purple cones; past tall apartment buildings with graffiti looping the ground floors and old women in bathrobes smoking on small balconies; past a man in an expensive-looking sweat suit grooming his black standard poodle on the edge of a grand fountain.

  * * *

  By the time I came to Mexico City, my brother was remarried and expecting his first child, and I was the one mired in separation. A few weeks after my husband left, I woke one morning forcefully in love with my friend from the National Museum. I started phoning him late at night, at a loss for what else to do. This caused difficulties with his wife, who my friend said could not be subjected to undue stress, and he told me that if we were to remain friends I had to stop, so I did, though the cessation of my calls only made my feelings for him firm into an unmovable stone, lodged somewhere between my ribs.

  At the conference, I felt the ache of it each time I took a deep breath or stretched.

  For as long as I’d known my husband, he had been proud of the fact that he’d remained friendly with all his ex-girlfriends; this was, to him, the ultimate mark of sophisticated manners. When he told me he was leaving me, he said he hoped we could remain friends. (In that same conversation he’d also said I was a dishonest person and incapable of change.) That day I’d remembered a couple in our circle who had divorced a few years prior and had somehow managed to remain companionable and the way my husband had spoken of them, admiringly, as though the transition they had undergone was the most desirable outcome for a marriage. Perhaps, with my friend, I was trying to reverse my husband’s equation.

  * * *

  On the final day of the conference, I attended my friend’s lecture on posthumous artist casts. It was an excellent talk, but when I stepped out of the hall the convention center was flooded with people, overwhelming. Plus, my friend had, over text, already declined my invitation to dinner, citing a need to return home as quickly as possible. A stab of disappointment, as I had hoped we could have a chance to speak alone. I left quickly and found an outdoor café in Condesa. I was sitting outside, under a cream umbrella, when I noticed Karolina crossing the street.

  She stopped on a narrow concrete island near where several different streets intersected, a constellation of traffic, motorbikes whipping past. For a moment, I was frightened for her, but the longer I stared at Karolina the more the worry was replaced by a hot, churning anger. The fifteen days that Karolina had spent missing were the worst of my life. I now identified that period of time as the beginning of the end of my marriage.

  Let me explain.

  One evening, Karolina did not come home from her job at the hea
lth food store in Fremont. All her clothes still hung in her closet. Her alpaca scarf was on the coat hook, her necklace with the wooden beads was on the bedroom dresser, her striped socks were slung over the side of the laundry bin. I can be certain of these details because when I flew out to Seattle to be with my brother, he took me by the arm and led me around their house, pointing out her things. My brother did everything right: called her cell phone, which went straight to voicemail and was later found in a dumpster in the Central District; called her friends; filed a missing person report; organized a neighborhood search. Despite all this, within a few days he had been identified as a person of interest. It seemed the detectives assigned to the case had turned up a troubling call Karolina had placed to 911 a month before she vanished. Also, there had been complaints from the neighbors, fights so stormy they could be heard from across the street.

  Before long, the detectives wanted to talk to me. As they asked their questions, I remembered my brother as a child, in our cramped apartment in DeLand. I saw him kneeling on the living room floor, clutching a tall glass of ice. I was splayed out with a fever and longed for sleep, but my brother had heard on TV that if a person was very sick, they must be kept awake. He pinched a cube and rubbed cold circles on my cheeks. He did this until our mother, who worked the graveyard shift as a campus security guard, came home. By then I had lost all feeling in my face.

  The detectives played the tape for me. I listened to Karolina pant and cry, listened to her say that she had locked herself in the bathroom and was afraid. I listened to my brother bang and shout in the background. I told the detectives that never in my life had my brother shown such aggression, even though there were times when I gave him plenty of reason. I said his behavior on the 911 call was an aberration, that it did not fit into a larger pattern, though it occurred to me later that perhaps his behavior did fit a larger pattern, just not one I was privy to.

  “She must have done something,” I said to the detectives. “Something awful.”

  They didn’t play the second call Karolina placed to 911 that night, when she phoned a few minutes later to say the situation was under control and no one needed to come out to the house after all.

  My husband flew to Seattle to attempt to talk sense into me (his words). He refused to stay at my brother’s house; instead he checked into a hotel and insisted I pack my bags and join him.

  “He is not a child,” my husband said during those days of terror and unknowing, in response to my attempts to offer up evidence of my brother’s goodness (most of which, I will admit, lived in the distant past). “He is an adult and he has serious problems. You’ve never been honest about him and look what’s happened. Now you need to think very carefully about what you’re willing to sacrifice for justice.”

  My husband was raised in a two-parent home, both his parents university professors, the kind of people whose offices my mother had been paid to guard, and still he felt he had the right to say this to me.

  After that conversation, I, too, locked myself in the bathroom and wept, not because I was afraid of my husband but because I was afraid of what I might be called upon to do, the ways in which I might find myself unable.

  The whole ordeal ended when Karolina surfaced on a friend’s farm outside Vancouver, just long enough to file for divorce. She did not wind up in legal trouble, despite everything she had put us through and the resources that had been spent on the search; she claimed she’d had no choice but to flee in secret, that she had been scared for her life.

  When Karolina turned up in Canada—I tell you, I have never felt such relief.

  My husband was less reassured. The revelation that my brother did not disappear Karolina failed to satisfy him. The fact that he could have was damning enough. My husband had spent his career counseling trauma survivors—many of whom were women traumatized at the hands of violent men—and I told myself his work accounted for where his sympathies lay. Nevertheless, I knew my husband was disappointed in where my sympathies lay during those fifteen days in Seattle and beyond. All this disappointment was, I felt, intensified by the terrible movements in our world. There has never been a worse time to be a bystander, to be the person who says, That was taken out of context, or, There are always two sides, or, We don’t yet know the whole story.

  On the street, a white van swooshed past, and when I had a clear view of the intersection again, Karolina was gone from the concrete island. She had crossed over to my side of the street and was standing on the corner, staring at me. She started in my direction and before I knew it she was right in front of me, her tall body casting a long shadow on the sidewalk. Her hair was a thick blond rope, her eyes the same feline green. I flashed back to meeting her parents at the wedding—a small, reticent Nordic couple with whom, I understood, she was not close.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “Of all the people.”

  She began unsnapping a mess of nylon straps, unshackling herself from her mammoth backpack and then propping it up against the café’s concrete wall. The mesh pockets bulged with all manner of things: balled-up paper towels, a half-empty water bottle, a paperback, a garbage bag, a plastic comb. She pulled out the empty chair across from me, sat down, and stuck her arms into the umbrella shade.

  Soon it became clear to me, in a way that it had not been in the park, that Karolina had not bathed in days—weeks, perhaps. She wore a long-sleeved cotton T-shirt and a denim jacket, the cuffs and elbows soiled. The skin on her cheeks looked pitted. Her nails were capped with black lines, her knuckles chapped, her eyebrows overgrown.

  “Back in the park,” Karolina said, “I thought I had finally fallen into a deep enough sleep to dream and wouldn’t you know that I dreamed of that bitch who always hated me. But you weren’t a dream at all, I’m sorry to say. You’re sitting right here.” She reached out and tapped my arm, as though to make sure.

  “I’m no dream.” I tried to picture where Karolina had been during the earthquake, in some trembling building or outside. “But I won’t be staying long.”

  The server who had delivered my glass of white wine came by and stopped short, taken aback by Karolina’s appearance, by her smell.

  “Everything is fine,” I told him. “We’re old friends.”

  “Is that what we are?” Karolina said after he left.

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going on, but why don’t you come back to my hotel. You could take a shower, get something to eat.”

  “I could get something to eat right here.” Karolina eyed my wine. “You could buy me whatever I wanted.”

  “I could,” I said, without enthusiasm.

  I was eager to hustle us out of public view. We weren’t terribly far from the convention center, so perhaps I feared running into a colleague, more specifically my friend, and having to explain, even as I knew people were more likely to congregate at the bar in the Stanza Hotel or at the Gin Gin. Perhaps I had questions for Karolina that I felt should be asked only out of sight, behind a closed door.

  “Is it nice?” she asked.

  “Is what nice?”

  “Your hotel.”

  I hadn’t thought of how it would feel to escort Karolina through the glossed lobby, past the boisterous groups of young women in ankle boots and fedoras and black lipstick, and into the gleaming elevators. I considered the stories the hotel staff might invent for themselves as they watched: an idiot American taken in by a scam artist, a white savior hell-bent on tending to Mexico City’s homeless, a feckless visitor enjoying the services of a prostitute. Or some other explanation entirely, though I didn’t imagine they would include my having discovered my ex-sister-in-law in a state of homelessness or near-homelessness, unwashed and sleeping in parks.

  “Of course it’s nice,” Karolina said. “You always liked nice things.”

  She gestured for my glass. I slid it across the table.

  “My brother is well.” I felt a prickling under my skin. “I thought you might want to know.”

&
nbsp; Like a sommelier, Karolina raised the glass toward the sky and squinted at the wine pooled in the bottom. She swirled it around and then killed the glass in one swallow.

  “Does he still work for Alaska Air?”

  I nodded. He had recently gotten a promotion, though I kept that to myself. I could tell her all about his life—his second marriage, the coming child—or I could say nothing, and my ability to grant or withhold information made me feel powerful.

  * * *

  I’m not sure what I want to say about my brother’s relationship with Karolina, so I’ll start with the facts.

  They met on the Skykomish River. Karolina was a guide for a wilderness outfit that specialized in white-water rafting. My brother, recently relocated from Florida to Seattle for a middle-management job at Alaska Air, had been invited by his new colleagues on the rafting trip, some kind of trust-building exercise.

  What they didn’t tell him: they were rafting the wildest part of the river. (In time, he would learn that this was a stunt they always pulled when an East Coast person joined the team—so much for trust.) My brother would have been bounced right out of the boat were it not for Karolina—if she hadn’t spotted his greenness before they even left land, if she hadn’t shown him how to hold the paddle and explained the commands: lean in, high side.

  They married six months after the Skykomish trip. My brother wanted very much to have a child with Karolina and he claimed that this disagreement—he wanted to, she did not—was at the root of their troubles.

  A year into their marriage, she quit the guiding outfit, and after that her jobs included spending a season on a commercial fishing vessel; being a yoga instructor, a docent at the Center for Wooden Boats, an assistant at an herbalist school; selling antiquarian books. She felt it was unnatural to do the same old thing day after day. Whereas I always felt that there was something unsettled about her, the way she flitted from one activity to another—a quality that tested patience.