Spindrift (Exit Unicorns Series)

by Cindy Brandner

  Yevgena took a long, shuddering breath, eyes on the table, shadows of flame flickering through the dark mass of her hair.

  “I fell asleep. I only meant to close my eyes for a moment, to gather such strength as I had so that I might be there through the night for her. But I slept right through until morning and when I woke, she was gone. She didn’t look peaceful or restful, she just looked empty. Her soul had flown during the night and I had not even witnessed it going, I had not even said goodbye to my darling. I had to go to work that morning like every other morning, trudging off through the mud and snow to dig ditches. I had to leave my first born there, like she was a sack of dirty laundry and go off to do the monsters’ bidding.

  “They threw her outside the barrack while I was gone that day, off to one side of the path that we trod to work every day and back to our miserable beds at night. Her body lay there for a week, with layer after layer of snow coming down over it and her mother walking past her corpse day after day, afraid she would still be there come night, and yet more afraid that she would not. I hated myself, I couldn’t understand why I did not die, when all my family was gone. I was a coward, Pamela, I should have taken my own life, I cursed myself for a craven, for eating the thin gruel each night and each morning, for sustaining whatever hope my body had for life. Something had died in me when the twins were ripped from me and then something more with each of the children.”

  Yevgena looked up then, and Pamela felt a visceral pain in her chest at the expression in the woman’s eyes.

  “The boys were sent to Auschwitz. They were both Roma and twins, there was no way they could escape Mengele’s net. Jemmy’s grandfather searched for them later, searched for years and then one day I just knew he had found out what had happened to them. I asked him, my heart pounding and up in my throat at the same time. I wanted to know, I didn’t want to know. I couldn’t decide. I was angry with him for knowing, I was angry because he might tell me. I thought I might be sick right there in the study. He simply took my hands and said, ‘Yevgena, it is up to you, they were your sons, but they have been long at peace and would not want you to suffer further than you already have.’

  “Oh, I was furious with him for saying that—I wanted to weep and tear my hair out, I wanted to hit him until he was bloody, just for the knowing, just because he was carrying that knowledge in his eyes. I wanted to hate him, but, of course, I could never do that. I stood there shaking for so long, the words stuck in my throat like acid—how could I be a coward again and not know what had happened to my babies? But was the imagining worse, I asked myself, did I not owe it to them to know their fate? Would it take away my memories of how they had been, so tiny as babies, how Pali’s baby toe on his left foot was slightly crooked, and how Yoska always smiled, even through his tears? How dearly they loved each other, so much so that they could not sleep if separated even by a few feet?

  “If they had been a set of the twins whose hearts were injected with chloroform and killed immediately, I think James would have told me. Because that would have been a mercy, to know that it was quick. So when he did not tell me, I knew that my babies had not been so fortunate.

  “He said to me, ‘Yevgenka, I can carry this for you, until you know if you need the knowledge. Let me do that for you, my love.’ And so I let him carry it because I was too afraid to know. He wrote it down for me, in case I ever changed my mind. Jamie holds the letter, still sealed, gathering dust somewhere in the family vaults.”

  “You must miss him very much,” Pamela said softly. Around them the night had grown silent, the frost on the windows like long, delicate fingers now. The small stove hummed away to itself, but it could not keep the long winter night out entirely.

  “You know he found me when Auschwitz was liberated? He was there that day, right behind the soldiers. He was meant to take notes, to report, so that there was a record of what they found. Meeting him was bashert, or what you would call serendipity. It works in strange ways. He was not meant to be there in the camp that day, he was taking the place of a man who had gotten sick. And I knew him at once, for Athalia had told me he would come. It was after she got sick, and there came a night when I thought perhaps she would get better, the fever had gone and she was talking to me, just quiet, for her voice was weak and she said, ‘Mama, there is a man with such pretty hair who waits for you, his hair is like golden coins in honey. You will love him very greatly, and he will love you in the same measure.’ I thought it was just the sentimental ramblings of a girl who had been sick with a terrible fever, but later I knew better. Athalia told me many things that night, and they have, each one, come to pass in their turn. If James had not come along, I would have been lost forever, a woman without a soul. Like a ghost who appears alive, but knows she is not. He forced me to live, sometimes in ways that made me hate him because I did not want to. I did not believe in love or kindness anymore and he would always open my eyes to the humanity left in the world. I think, my darlink girl, this is something his grandson does for you.”

  Pamela took another drink of the brandy-laced tea, hiding her face in the glass. Yevgena was right, but she was not ready to acknowledge it. Yevgena merely gave her a knowing look from those dark eyes which had always seen too much, and resumed her tale.

  “Where we had lived in those mountains, at the edge of the forest, was near to a farm and the wife there was friendly to me. She had never had children of her own, and she doted over mine. When the Nyila took us away, she had her husband haul our vardo into their barn. She saved everything she could from our little home. Inside was every piece of our everyday life—the children’s clothes, our books and keepsakes from our families. She gave a box of things to a family of Roma who were passing through years later. She said she thought I might be in France, she knew my family had connections there. So these shoes went to Paris, but first they had to travel the mountains of Hungary and cross Austria.

  “James and I were in Paris, and he went to visit an old acquaintance from the diplomatic core. This man told him about this box which had wound up on his desk, but he had no idea what to do with it. James had a look inside and found an old diary. He knew enough Russian to read bits and pieces. Imagine his shock when he came to the realization the box was filled with my past, the shards that were left of it.

  “He brought it to me at the house in the Marais. I was in the kitchen, making dinner. The wine was uncorked, the beef simmering on the stove and I was wearing a lovely dress, and his favorite perfume, simply a woman anticipating her lover. He came in with that box, and this strange look about him. In all the time I had known him, in all the time I had loved him, I had never seen such a look on his face. He understood what that box was going to mean to me, what it would do to me and he had struggled with the decision of bringing it to me. But, he said, it was my history and he had no right to take that from me.

  “I sat for a very long time, unable to open it. There were many years and many walls by then between myself and who I once was, that wife, that mother. In the end, James opened it for me and took each item out, one by one. The pictures were in the box. Seeing their faces after so many years…I cannot tell you what it meant to me and yet how painful it was. For they were not exactly as I had held them in my memory. I thought I might actually die of the pain in my chest when those shoes came out of the box. James placed them in my hands, stood up, kissed my forehead and then left me alone with the shoes. I fell to pieces, I cried for the first time in years, for the first time since Athalia had died. Cried for my children and for their father. Cried for the life we never had together, the grandchildren I lost with each of them, and cried for the young man who had been mine, who had never grown old. I had been afraid to cry for all those years, because I was certain if I began, I would never be able to stop. But even tears have a limit and when they ceased, the dawn was just creeping in over the windowsills and it caught the edge of something white, a small piece of folded paper tucked inside one shoe. It was from the farm wife. She had
written me a note. It said that she had found the shoes one morning on the edge of the clearing where we had parked our vardo. She swore they just appeared, they had not been there the day before. Inside one shoe she found an arrowhead, tipped in ocher, and in the other a small bunch of flowers.”

  “Do you think that Athalia somehow put them there?” Pamela asked, for she had her own strange experiences of ghostly visitations and knew there were many things in the universe that beggared the reach of the human imagination and ability to understand.

  “The older I get, the less I know for certain and the more I understand that many things happen every day, for which we have no explanation, and yet they happen just the same.

  “I told myself Athalia’s ghost wore those shoes and that is how they wound up on the edge of the forest. My sweet girl with her wandering soul. She had gone back to the place she was happiest, and maybe found her friend who was also lost.”

  “Perhaps she has gone home, to that real home that we all long for inside,” Pamela said quietly, “that place we seem to have lost somewhere in the mists of human time.”

  Yevgena stroked the back of her hand, and Pamela could feel the warm metal of her ring and the frail parchment of her skin, and the strength that had borne this woman through unimaginable loss and given her the courage to love again.

  “We are none of us home, my darlink girl, we just keep circling the place of loss, though the loss is a hundred thousand years ago and as many miles behind us on a road we can no longer find in the darkness we have created. So we make a home in those we love, that is why when they leave us, we are so empty and bereft, because they have taken our home away with them.”

  Pamela understood that feeling too well, the circling of loss, the trying to make sense of something that could never—in its inhumanity, in its cruelty, in its pitiless grinding pain—make sense.

  “Turn the page, there is only one more.”

  She turned to the final page. This is a book that ends at the beginning, Yevgena had said, and she understood now what she had meant. For Athalia was the beginning of that portion of Yevgena’s life that had been told, and she was its end as well in some strange circular way that made sense only, perhaps, to a mother.

  It was simple. There was a road made from freshwater pearls that wound away into an invisible distance and a dove formed from fine grey feathers which rose up against a horizon of pale silks, managing to convey both dawn and dusk. Trees had been formed from autumn debris, and grew there on the page—a primeval forest incarnate. On the path was a tiny pair of red shoes, made with tender skill, the stitches so fine they were hardly visible, but the shoes stood empty, waiting to embark on that trip to the Western stars upon the final luongo drom.

  “Athalia is the dove, she can fly now, she no longer needs the shoes. The shoes wait for me, when it is my turn to walk the long road.”

  “Oh, Yevgena,” Pamela said and stood, going around to where the woman sat and putting her arms around her.

  Yevgena reached up and took her hand, and held it to her face for a moment. “Do not worry for an old woman, my dear girl, I have my ghosts and they visit me more often now than once they did. I think it is because I am drawing closer to that road where they wait for me. I lost my home a long time ago and then for a time I found one again with Jemmy’s grandfather. It can happen more than once in a lifetime, though I did not believe it to be so for a very long time.”

  Yevgena touched a hand lightly to the road, the pearls luminescent with the light of the sea beneath her trembling fingers.

  “It was a psychiatrist who told me to make a memory book, to tell the stories with my hands which I could not with my mouth. She was Jewish and a survivor of Auschwitz, too. I wouldn’t have taken her advice otherwise. I met her at a party in Paris, just a small gathering in a beautiful house in the 16th Arrondissement, and she saw the numbers on my arm. I refused to keep them hidden, I refused to allow the Nazis to shame me into that.

  “James was across the room, talking to someone he knew, and I was hiding in a corner as I often did at gatherings. It was a beautiful night, the balcony doors were open to the streets, and the scent of hyacinth and roses was washing in from the balcony below.

  “This woman came over to me and pushed up her sleeve, and showed me that she too bore the Nazis’ stamp. We spoke of other things, we did not speak of the camps, though she did say she had been in Auschwitz and I said I had been there too. We spoke then of other things: her garden, her grandchildren and her travels in Greece the previous summer. Then suddenly she took my hand and said, ‘It’s a beautiful night, you’re wearing a beautiful dress and that is a beautiful man across the room who keeps looking at you with his heart in his eyes. It would be a shame to lose such a man, because you could not allow him to love you properly.’

  “I asked her how I was to do that. Because I knew she was right, I was going to lose him if I couldn’t stop the bitterness from eating me alive, if I couldn’t find my way out of perpetual mourning. She told me that we need to tell our stories, tell them again and again until the poison of them comes out, tell them to ourselves until we feel safe to tell them to another, and then another and another, until our story becomes part of the greater collective. Only then, she said could the story become part of our life, rather than a great black wall in it, that one could not get around on the road. She said, ‘If you choose to stay there beating on that wall, you will lose everything, including that man at whom you also look with your heart in your eyes.’

  “I stood there and simply looked at her, dumb, I understood what she was saying, but I couldn’t respond, because it frightened me, if I let go who would I be, what would happen to the ghosts of my family?

  “I quoted a poem to her finally, because I couldn’t find words of my own and it expressed something I had felt deeply for a long time. Now it would be called survivor’s guilt, then I merely thought I should have died in place of my children, even one of them.

  “‘Blessed is the heart with the strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.’

  “She touched my face and said, ‘There is another line in that same poem that says ‘Blessed is the match that is consumed in kindling flame.’ Life’s kindling flame is love. To turn your face from it is a sin, the gravest sin there is.’

  “But I—I don’t know where to begin,” I said and she told me, ‘Tell it with your hands, dear one.’ And so I did. But only with James, and now tonight, have I ever found the words to speak of it.”

  Pamela wanted to ask her how one lived with it, how one found a place of peace with such loss, but was afraid that the answer would not be the one she sought. Yevgena had, after all, once kept her family fed and clothed on her ability to read the minds and more importantly, the hearts of others. And so she answered the question that had not been given words, but hung there, nevertheless, in the air between them.

  “James told me once, long ago, that if we took the linearity from time, every life, however short, becomes a cross-section of eternity and that it always exists, even if it’s only for those left behind. That if you believed in time as a construct that went in loops, rather than a straight line, all lives were forever. I do believe we got into one of our famous arguments over that, the man could be maddening at times when he had a bee stuck in his craw.”

  Pamela resisted the temptation to untangle Yevgena’s mixed idioms. “It’s that circular Celtic thinking,” she said, “it can be infuriating, but it’s often right.”

  “I have lived long enough to know now that it is true; love and memory together can make an eternity.”

  Yevgena’s hand rose, pale still as that long ago ghost, and closed the last page of the book.

  “Thank you, Yevgena, for sharing your story with me. It was an honor to be your listener.”

  “I want you to keep it for me, tell it to your children when they are old enough to hear it. Tell it to Jemmy one day too, should the time come when he wants to know it. Perhaps he will write it ou
t and it will become part of that larger collective. Someone must remember for the Roma, long after I am gone. And I would like for someone to hold my Athalia in their heart, someone beyond myself.”

  “I can do that,” Pamela said softly.

  The quiet came down then, and time returned, for the storyteller’s glass had dissolved and midnight had come and gone. The fire had burned low in the stove and the tea turned cold in their cups. Around the vardo the night was still, everyone long gone to their rest, the only sound that of the wind soughing restlessly through the treetops.

  “I had best go, I’ve missed the children’s bed time.”

  She stood and Yevgena rose with her, her exhaustion palpable. It was easy to forget that this woman was in her late seventies.

  “You will come back with the babies, I want to see how they have grown. Jemmy is to bring Kolya to see me tomorrow, perhaps you will bring Conor and Isabelle then too.”

  “I will,” she promised and kissed Yevgena once on each cheek, which was how they always parted from one another.

  Outside the vardo, the night was even colder than it had been when she entered. She turned her face up toward the heavens. The wind had moved across the skies and shredded the clouds so that here and there a star showed its burning face. She shivered, longing for her bed, and the warmth of her children breathing soft in their dreams beside her. She knew that Yevgena had a double purpose in telling her story, and she had understood the things the woman was trying to tell her without saying them straight out. This was an act of outstanding tact on Yevgena’s part, for generally speaking she was blunt about the things that mattered. Yevgena knew there were things she was not ready to hear now, but would remember later when she needed them, when she could begin to touch the edge of understanding what this new life meant for her.