Rosa and the Veil of Gold

by Kim Wilkins

  “Yes?”

  “Stay away from Ilya.”

  Rosa almost laughed, then realised he was serious. “Oh? Why?”

  “He’s trouble. Trust me.” This was thrown over his shoulder as he walked to the door.

  Rosa hid a smile. Anatoly’s jealousy thrilled her. His warning added fresh layers of excitement to the idea of Ilya, his smooth young body and his strange mismatched eyes. “You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “I’m well used to dealing with trouble.”

  She put out her hand to open the door, and he grabbed her wrist forcefully. “I’m serious, Rosa. This isn’t a joke.”

  “I know,” she said, smiling at him, “I’m not laughing.” She silently dared him not to let her go, to crush the bones of her wrist until they ached.

  But he didn’t. He released her and opened the door a little. His tone was low and thick, his breath tickling her ear. “Rosa, you—”

  “Papa?” A little voice in the gloom outside.

  Rosa peered out to see Makhar at the bottom of the stairs. “Hello, Makhar,” she said, and realised her voice sounded constricted and guilty. How must the scene have looked to the little boy? Anatoly’s lips close to her ear, Rosa’s body inclined towards the older man’s, her eyes turned up and smiling. Dangerous flirtations were amusing around adults, but too sad for children. “How long have you been there?”

  He held out a book. “I found this. Under my bed. It’s poetry, so you could find the one you were looking for.” He wouldn’t meet her eye, and Anatoly caught his spare hand.

  Rosa took the book. “Thank you, Makhar.”

  “Come on, boy,” said Anatoly gruffly. “Back to the house.” About a hundred feet away, Makhar broke from Anatoly’s grasp and ran back towards Rosa.

  “Makhar!” called Anatoly.

  “What is it?” Rosa said, crouching to be at the little boy’s level.

  “You aren’t as pretty as my mama,” he said in a harsh whisper, then ran off to rejoin his father.

  Rosa watched him, feeling vaguely depressed. Anatoly’s secret visit had upset the boy, and it had upset her too. Now she had to reassess the situation. Was accusing Anatoly of stealing her magic a way to deal with the disappointment of losing it just when she felt she was making progress? She closed the door and turned the heavy poetry book over in her hands. Five Hundred Great Russian Poems. It had to be in here.

  “Here we go again,” she said. She made coffee and pulled out her pages of notes and her mother’s books.

  It had been a warm day, giving way to a balmy night. Rosa heard the first rumble in the distance shortly after ten, and by eleven a storm was full upon her little guesthouse. The rain drove hard against the panes, and the roof rattled in the wind. The hollow of cold air the storm dragged in its wake had her climbing into bed to work, pulling the blankets up into her lap as she forced her mind onto the code once more.

  An hour had passed before Rosa discovered an index of first lines in the back of the poetry book. She skimmed them all, recalling the old poem about the butterfly and the cliff from her memory. What had been the first line? Something about a golden butterfly? Her eyes darted, looking for the word “butterfly” and didn’t find it. But the word “cliff” did jump out from time to time. She decided to go backwards through the index, looking for cliffs, and had returned to the second page of the index before she found the line: “A little golden cloud slept on the breast of a giant cliff.”

  “That’s it,” she breathed. It was a cloud, not a butterfly. The poem was called “The Cliff” and was written by Mikhail Lermontov. She thumbed through the book to find the right page, then read the poem under her breath. She tapped the page. “That’s it.” A rush of familiarity as she read it all the way through. Her mother must have recited it for her hundreds of times, while smoothing the blankets over her shoulder in bed at night, or sitting on the tiny patio of their townhouse in the brief summer sunshine.

  Rosa contained her excitement. It was certainly the poem she had been trying to remember, but it might not be the one written in her mother’s book. She flipped the book open. The poem matched the structure of the coded piece: two stanzas, four lines each. Rosa quickly scribbled the code on a separate piece of paper, and interspersed the poem line by line. Now things didn’t seem so easy. Letters she expected to see repeated weren’t. She threw the books aside and tapped her feet against each other. Frustration on top of frustration, and the unrelenting tiredness was now descending too. Outside, the downpour continued, though the wind had died off. She thought about Daniel, and wondered if he was wet, or cold, or even dead. Determined, she flipped her mother’s book over again. It was upside-down, and this fresh perspective caught Rosa’s eye.

  The patterns were there. They were just backwards.

  Rosa pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, copying out the code again. This time she wrote the poem in, line by line, but with the first word at the end of the line and worked right to left.

  Now she transcribed it; found herself working faster and faster as the code appeared. Leave out the vowels, this letter substituted for that, this number of words and then a change of substituted letter…By midnight she had it.

  Her tiredness melted away like the clouds overhead. A fever of excitement gripped her. She copied out the key for the code then turned to the first page of her mother’s book, translating the first line.

  To make bread rise quickly. She flipped the page.

  To show the face of a beloved in a dream.

  To determine whether a journey will be safe.

  On and on she went through the book, translating the first line of each page, filling in the missing vowels: to keep a fire burning in the hearth; to make a man impotent; to help babies sleep at night; to spy on your neighbour unseen. There were close to a hundred spells, all there for Rosa to learn now that she had the code.

  Rosa realised that her mother’s repeated recital of “The Cliff” over the years was borne of more than just love of the words. She was programming it into Rosa’s brain, so that, if the notebooks should one day fall into her daughter’s hands, she would be able to decipher them.

  Beyond that, Rosa understood at last how much her mother had been steeped in magic. She had once thought that Ellena was a dabbler, a collector of lucky charms and tea-leaf tales. Now another truth was apparent: the strength her mother possessed, the command of magic, all hidden away for the sake of Rosa’s father and a life in the free West. Towards the end, when Ellena could no longer be relied on for coherent words or sentences, she had garbled bits and pieces of spells and magical advice, but Rosa had barely paid heed. She had imagined them all the product of an ailing mind, of the disease which was closing down her mother’s brain: light by reluctant light, door by reluctant door. Yet Ellena had magic to rival Anatoly’s. No wonder Anatoly didn’t want Rosa’s bracelet anywhere near him.

  And, in an unexpected moment between thoughts, Rosa made a connection. Tarabarshchina. The magician’s cipher of which Anatoly had spoken. This was it. Those scribbled, impenetrable marks Rosa had seen in the margins of the day book—Anatoly’s magical notes. Now she would be able to read them.

  Rosa put the books aside and turned off the light. She stood on the bed, gazing into the drenched garden. All the lights were off at the house. The Chenchikovs were sleeping. She felt like a kid before Christmas. Tomorrow, as soon as she could get her hands on the day book, Anatoly’s secrets would come to her.

  TWENTY

  Makhar was not the friendly little boy he had been just twenty-four hours past. With a surly expression that made him resemble his father so much it almost made Rosa laugh, he waited for her at the kitchen table, kicking the underside restively.

  “What do you want to start with this morning, Makhar?” she asked, hoping to win back his favour.

  He shrugged, silent.

  “Maths? You like maths.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “We could make up a shopping list to add up.”


  He shrugged again, and Rosa took the chair next to him and turned him to face her.

  “Makhar, are you upset with me?”

  He nodded, the angry set of his mouth quivering towards sadness.

  “Please don’t be upset with me. I’ve done nothing bad.”

  “The second lady said that, and Papa nearly left.”

  The second lady? So Anatoly hadn’t been lying about his previous affairs. “Your papa isn’t going to leave you, and certainly not for me. He loves your mama.”

  “Then why does he make her so sad?”

  “I’m sure he doesn’t mean to. Sometimes adults are…” She searched for the right words. “Sometimes we can be insensitive, or jealous, or emotional. I promise you, I’m not trying to steal your papa. He’s teaching me some things, that’s all.”

  “Like you teach me?”

  “Just like that.”

  “Is he teaching you maths?”

  Rosa smiled. “No. Other things.” She tapped his exercise book. “Enough of this. It’s time you did some work.”

  “Can we play the shopping list game?”

  “Of course.” Rosa eyed the day book where it lay in the hutch. “I’ve got an idea. Let’s go back through the day book and look for all Luda’s shopping lists, and work out how much money Luda has spent in the last six months. Maybe we can do a percentage? How much for bread, how much for eggs, and so on.”

  “That sounds like fun,” he said, racing to the hutch and returning with the day book clasped against his chest. He thumbed through the pages and Rosa leaned into him to look over his head. His tanned fingers scanned down the list, scribbling down prices for bread and milk and vegetables. Meanwhile, Rosa put her mind to Anatoly’s coded messages. On this page, there were three in a list, in small writing above the date. The cipher was no longer fresh in her mind; sleep had intervened. She concentrated on the first line: two words. Counted the letters in her head.

  Move bees.

  Makhar flipped the page. “Next one, Rosa,” he said.

  “You just keep going,” she replied. “You’re doing great.”

  Move bees turned up again. Underneath it, protect fire. They were the only two on that page. Makhar was flipping back through the book again. Two again. Move bees and Hide Rosa. She checked the date. It was the day that she and Anatoly had buried Luda’s button in the ant hill. It clicked into place. Just as the day book documented all their daily tasks, it also documented what daily magic Anatoly had performed. No spells, no secrets. A record for practical purposes and nothing more.

  Disappointment set in. No grand mystery here.

  As Makhar worked backwards through the book, two annotations kept cropping up again and again. Move bees was obvious. Anatoly used his magic like other beekeepers used smoke, to control bees. The other was not so obvious in its meaning: Shift. And yet it appeared on almost every second page.

  Shift. Shift what? And shift it where?

  Makhar had worked all the way to January, and Rosa set him up with a page for calculations and a pie-graph to start work on. She sat on the other side of the table with the day book, and searched Anatoly’s notes more thoroughly.

  All the magic they had done together was there. She turned back to the date she had first arrived, and found a note that said: Hide bracelet 549. Well, she knew he’d hidden it, but where? What did the number signify?

  “What are you reading?” Makhar said curiously.

  Her head snapped up, and she flipped the pages over guiltily. “It says here you’re going to the dentist tomorrow,” she said, pointing at the note for the following day.

  Makhar made a face. “Does it?”

  She turned the book around to show him.

  “Yuk,” he said. “I hate the dentist. All those drills.”

  “At least you won’t have classes. Will Luda take you?”

  “We all go, even Elizavetta. The dentist only comes to town twice a year.” His face brightened. “Will you come too, Rosa? Papa says that Russian dentists are the best in the world.”

  At least she was back in his favour. “I had a check-up just last month in St Petersburg,” she said. “I guess I’ll be home alone.”

  He showed her his pie-graph, already measured and divided. “Can I colour it in?” he asked.

  “Let’s leave it until the day after tomorrow,” she said. “There was a big storm last night. I bet there are puddles.”

  “And mud,” he said, in a very serious voice.

  “We’ll call it a science lesson,” she said, shooting out of her chair. “Fetch your coat.”

  Rosa heard them leaving the next morning: doors banging, the car engine warming up, Ludmilla’s voice snippy with anxiety, and Elizavetta’s exasperated weak tone. It was a hot morning, and Rosa had woken with a thin layer of sleep still clinging to her. As soon as all was silent outside, she went up to the house for a long shower.

  It was a luxury to stand under the shower until the hot water ran cold. Normally she had to hurry in and out. In the kitchen she lazed at the table in a wedge of sunshine, eating toast with honey and drinking two cups of coffee while she checked every page of Anatoly’s day book for clues to her bracelet’s whereabouts. There were none.

  The morning was warming towards eleven o’clock when she heard a thump. She sat up, flicking her damp hair off her shoulders, and listened. Nothing further.

  It had sounded as though it was coming from the shed on the far side of the house. A glimmer of danger: what if a thief, knowing that the Chenchikovs were all away at the dentist, had chosen this morning to break in? Nobody would expect to find Rosa here. Or would they? What about that oily bartender who knew she was staying with Anatoly? Miles from anywhere, completely alone, her vulnerability prickled over her skin.

  Rosa closed the day book and went to investigate.

  She strode down the hallway and through the laundry to the back door of the house. She stopped to listen at the threshold. There was definitely someone in the shed, trying to be quiet, but betraying himself with the occasional soft clatter and thud. As she moved closer, she could hear the sound of running water. She crossed the grass and threw open the door.

  Ilya turned sharply. “Oh, Rosa,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “What are you doing here?” She glanced around the shed, which was filled with plastic tubs and bits and pieces of equipment. Cobwebs were caught in corners and the benches were made of rough-hewn, unfinished wood. Ilya himself was stripped to his jeans and a singlet as he worked at the deep stone sinks. A home-made tattoo of a heart, in faded blue ink, decorated his right arm. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the dentist?”

  “Yes,” he said, twisting the tap off, “but Elizavetta wouldn’t have me in the car with her. She’s upset with me for some reason.”

  Rosa felt a twinge of guilt, soon cast aside. She moved inside the shed. The concrete floor was sticky with honey, which clung to the soles of her bare feet. “So you’ve been hiding here all morning?”

  Ilya brushed his hair out of his eyes with the back of his hand. “Not hiding. Working. Anatoly wants all these drums cleaned up before he gets back.”

  “Not hiding?”

  He smiled, glanced away. “Well, Anatoly did tell me not to leave the shed. And to work quietly.” He picked up another plastic drum, and Rosa admired the way the muscles on the back of his arm moved. His skin was silky and olive, lightly tanned. “Anyway I’d better get back to it.”

  Rosa hitched herself up onto the bench nearby. “You mind if I stay?”

  Ilya shrugged. “No,” he said guardedly.

  “I won’t tell Anatoly.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” he muttered, but Rosa knew he was lying.

  “I want to ask you something,” she said. “Anatoly has hidden my bracelet, and I really want to get it back. I know that the number 549 is significant, but I don’t know what it means.”

  Ilya didn’t stop working, picked up another drum and lower
ed it into the sink. “He numbers his trees,” Ilya said.

  “His trees?”

  “Every tree on this property, including the woodlands right out to the road.”

  “Is there a map?”

  “Only in his mind.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “He told me. He makes no secret of it.”

  “So he’s hidden my bracelet in a tree?”

  “I’ve said this before: you’ll never find it. If Anatoly wants it to stay hidden, it will.”

  “Would you help me?”

  He looked up, amused. “I don’t know what help I would be. I just told you—”

  “I don’t believe that. I believe I can find it. I’ll work out a way.”

  Ilya didn’t answer. He stacked six drums inside each other and put them aside, reached for another.

  “How do you feel about Anatoly forbidding us to spend time together?” she asked.

  “He hasn’t forbidden it.”

  “Yes, he has. Not directly. He warned me that you were trouble. I should stay away from you.”

  Ilya looked puzzled. “He did?”

  “What has he said about me?”

  He hesitated a few moments before answering. “That you might be a liar. That you like to manipulate people.”

  “I wouldn’t lie to you,” she replied. “I’ve no reason to.”

  “And the other accusation?”

  “Anatoly is describing himself. Unfounded accusations are always drawn from personal experience.” Rosa lowered herself from the bench. “We don’t have to listen to Anatoly.” She grasped his hand.

  “Rosa, let me go, my hands are all sticky.”

  She pulled him towards her and he caught his breath. She took a hand in each of hers, placed one over her heart, the other she held to her mouth. Her tongue darted out. “Your fingers taste like honey,” she said. “I’d like to taste the rest of you.”

  He pulled his hand away. “Rosa…”

  “He won’t know, Ilya. Anatoly won’t know, nobody will know.”

  “Can’t he…read minds?”