I sat with the pen balanced over paper and decided I’d write none of this, but simply:
Dear Hermann,
I am not sure if you can be reached at this address or if you will receive this letter. I believe that you wrote to me in Vernon in 1935 but, I regret to say, I never received the letter. I have just recently found the envelope that may have contained it, and I am writing you in hopes that you can still be reached here. I think of you, and our time in Egypt, often and with great fondness. If you receive this letter, please do respond.
Here I paused. With what sentiment would I sign my name? If I were to write With respect or With admiration, I would be dishonest. I wasn’t sure I had respect or admiration for Hermann, who must not have persisted for long in trying to contact me, despite the envelope I held in my hand. I was not so hard to find; I had rarely left the same house for three decades. I wrote:
Yours truly,
Miss Inger-Marie Jüül
I had never been his, truly or otherwise, and he had never been mine, but I could offer myself to him again, at least symbolically. After all, I had so little to lose.
Forty-Four
I sat beside Ofelia as she lay in her bed, turned her head to the window. “It’s already getting dark so soon.”
“Just a month and it will be getting a little lighter each day.”
“Well, hardly. Seems a long way off, in any case.” She turned her face. When she looked back at me, her eyes were red. If I’d followed the doctor’s schedule, I would have given her the prescriptions a half an hour before. I could tell that pain was building, her body stiffening against the bed. Part of me wanted to reach out and touch her hair, smooth it from her face. Part of me wanted to take a fistful of it and yank her head back, expose her throat. As if sensing this, Ofelia turned toward me and pushed her hair off her forehead so that it rose up on the pillow behind her.
I smiled in a way I hoped seemed genuine. Ofelia reached for my hand as though to squeeze it, though her hold was weak. I didn’t respond, my own hand limp, and she coughed, held her chest. Pain cinched along her neck, her face. She took a ragged breath, then reached out to me again.
I pulled away from her touch, felt sparks of pain travel along my arms and into my fingers, across my cheeks until they burned with nerves. I took a shallow breath. “Ofelia, I found an envelope in the basement. It was addressed to me.” I paused. “From a Mr. Hermann Brandt.”
I thought I saw a tremor set off in the skin below her eye, a slight jump in her hand, open-palmed on the bed between us. Ofelia looked directly at me. “Yes, and?”
“I never received the letter. Do you know what became of it?”
“No, of course not. You are the one who handles the mail, Miss Jüül.” Ofelia smoothed out her bedding rapidly, as though brushing off crumbs that were not there.
“This was from some time ago – 1935.”
She stopped brushing and threw up her hands. “Nineteen thirty-five! How am I to remember correspondence from 1935?” Ofelia met my eyes, but her expression wasn’t calm or even neutral; it was challenging – or I may have been imagining that.
I tried a different tack, spoke in a soft, even tone. “Ofelia, the duke told me that he turned a Brandt man away from the villa in Rome so many years ago. He believed that he was protecting me.” I took her hand in my own, tried not to squeeze it too strongly. “Were you trying to protect me, as well?” Just tell me, tell me something.
She slipped her hand out of mine, brought it to her chest. “Of course, I’ve always wanted to protect you – to protect all of us – Sveva, myself.”
“You remember the letter then? Do you remember what you did with it – did you read it?”
“No, I don’t remember any of that, Marie.” Ofelia faced the wall, ran her thumb and forefinger along her slight eyebrows. “Who was he?”
“My employer in Egypt.”
She turned, looked at me without blinking. “And your lover?”
“Yes.”
She broke my gaze, tucked her bedclothes around her hips. “Nothing good could have come of it, you must know that, Miss Jüül.”
“You can’t say that, Ofelia. You can’t know that to be true.”
She slapped the bed with her palms. “Can’t I? Look at the choices I made and where I am now. My actions were never intended to be noble and – as if reminding me of every one of my weaknesses – God has granted me this life.”
I leaned toward Ofelia, took her hands in mine. She wouldn’t look at me. “The letter arrived when I was at the clinic with the duke, but it was addressed to me. It was mine to open and read.”
Ofelia turned her face toward her pillows so her speech was slightly muffled. “I suppose Sveva could say the same of those letters addressed to her, but we haven’t always thought it in her best interest to read them either, have we, Miss Jüül?” She looked directly at me.
“Please, just tell me, did you read the letter, Ofelia?”
She pulled her hands out of my hold, ground them in fists into the bed beside her and faced the ceiling, as though appealing to it. “Miss Jüül, Marie, I honestly cannot remember. Why does it matter now?” She turned toward me. “Now, after everything Leone and I did for you? Taking you in, inviting you into our lives, treating you as one of the family. We rescued you, Marie, and you’ve led a good life with us.”
“Rescued me? Is that what you believe, Ofelia?”
“Yes, of course. Do you not? Tell me, where do you think you would be without us?”
“Without us? I’ve been caring for you for more than half of your life, Ofelia! A life that Sveva and I have tried to make as comfortable as possible for you. I have not left – you, this house, this way of living – because of my care for you, Ofelia, and you believe it’s me who’s been rescued?”
“You have been so good to me, Marie, there is no question of that.” She ran her fingers through her hair again, left her hand around her neck and sighed heavily. “And, it’s been a mutually beneficial relationship, yes? Leone and I gave you a life that there is no way you could have led otherwise.”
“Yes, and after he passed I stayed with you, Ofelia, not for my own good but for yours.”
Ofelia rolled to her side, tucked her knees into a fetal position. “I’ve forced you to do nothing, Marie.”
Her voice was so quiet, but I had heard what she had said. Was this true? I supposed it could have been, but then it was so difficult to parse out what was truth, what was fallacy, where reality lay between the two, if there was such a thing.
* * *
Each day I waited for his response. I had always monitored the mail – what was brought into the front hall and placed on the sideboard, what was opened and dealt with between me and Ofelia and what was burned or disposed of before Sveva might happen upon it. I had been to the mailbox at the end of our drive nearly every day of our time in seclusion, an act of interference as much as anything else. The letter came three weeks after I’d sent mine, but it wasn’t H’s handwriting. It was addressed to me, and the return address was the same, but the handwriting was smaller, boxier, more contained than I knew Hermann’s to have been. Not knowing where else to go, I opened the letter in the dog kennel, crouched on a bed of straw.
The envelope was so thin. Inside was one page:
Dear Inger-Marie Jüül,
I received your letter addressed to my father, and I am writing to you on behalf of his estate. I am not certain if you remember me, Hermann’s son, Sven Brandt. I remember you warmly, though vaguely, I will admit. I was quite young when we last saw each other. I know you and my father were very close and kept in some contact after your departure from Egypt.
I am sorry to write you now with sad news. My father passed away last year. It has taken me some time to go through his estate. I have found some things that I believe he would have wanted you to have. Now th
at I know where you can be reached, I can send these things by parcel post, or perhaps drop by with them when I’m next in the Okanagan. Please advise. I can be reached at the phone number above should you wish to speak to me.
With fond memories of long ago.
Sincerely,
Mr. Sven Brandt
How easy this sounded, to simply stop by on one’s travels. I thought of my passage from Alexandria to Sicily, how sick I was. I remembered my days at the cloister, the letters addressed from Onkel, when sometimes I would get just one sheet of a letter that referred to so much more, pages that weren’t there, communication broken, lost. There was a sea between us. Years later and how easy it was for Sven Brandt to write, to suggest he stop by.
I read the letter over again, and then two, three, four more times. Heat surged in me, became a pain on the crown of my head, a sting in my eyes, then drained and left me so cold I shook. My mouth slackened as it filled with moisture that then poured out of me – tears, mucus, streams of spit from my mouth. I crumpled the letter in my hand and slumped over onto the dogs’ bed, straw sharp and cool against my cheek, the smell of animal both comforting and rank at once. Get up, I told myself. Get up. Keep going. You always have.
Forty-Five
A faint line of smoke rose from the chimney, and I was both pleased and surprised that the ladies had thought to build a fire without me. I came up the steps, slick with new rime, and made note to throw down some salt. It was early afternoon, but the sky was already fading. I opened the door quietly in hopes that I could move through the house unnoticed. The only smudge of light I could see flickered from the parlour. As I was about to take the back stairs, I heard, “Oh, Miss Jüül?” I went toward the voice. There were no lights on, and the fire was struggling. “You’ll help me with stoking this?”
I was astonished to see Ofelia out of bed, standing. At first, I thought she had cinched a robe tightly around her, but when she turned as I came closer, I saw that she was wearing one of the gowns I’d packed away in the basement years – decades – before. She had arranged her hair, pulled it into a messy topknot. Ofelia smoothed her skirts and raised her chin, as though to say, Yes, and? I couldn’t see very well but knew that the dress hung from her. Where it had once skimmed her curves, it now fell like fabric from a hanger. I hadn’t seen her on the main floor for months, had rarely seen her out of bed.
“Ofelia, are you –”
“Shh.” She backed away from me, finger to her puckered lips, then placed both hands on her cheeks, raised an eyebrow and leaned toward me. I stared and her expression fell. She dropped her arms to her sides and then pointed at the fire. “Please, get that burning, Jüül. I cannot keep it burning.”
I tried to meet Ofelia’s eyes, but the light was too low and she had raised her chin, cast her gaze to the sides of the room. I waited a moment, then moved toward the fire. It was clear that she’d had no help in building the fire so far. There was a pile of ashes topped with small pieces of paper and a couple of logs, charred by attempts to light them, lying dormant in the fireplace. “I’ll need more kindling.”
“What do you mean, you’ll need more kindling? What do you think that is?” Ofelia pointed toward the scraps of paper covered in full-sized logs.
“That’s good,” I started. “We’ll just need something more, some smaller pieces of wood to keep it going, or once the paper burns, it will be out again. I can split up larger logs with the hatchet.”
“The hatchet!” Ofelia put both hands over her heart, bowed her head and sucked in breaths against her ragged throat.
“Yes, the hatchet. It’s what I use to make kindling.”
“It sounds dangerous.”
“Where’s Sveva?”
Ofelia dropped her arms, then stood straight. “Where is Sveva? I suppose she’s in her room, brooding over those ridiculous sketches.” Ofelia pointed toward the fireplace, all flames now extinguished, small embers remaining, smoke entering the room. “I tried.” When she first said this, it was a whisper, and then louder, “I tried, Miss Jüül!” She smoothed the fabric of the gown that hung off her as though she were a child playing dress-up, took a breath and continued speaking in a smooth, moderated tone. “I tried to tell her that she need not disappear into those pointless sketches. Sketches! There are far better things to do with her time. I suggested that she and I play cards.”
Ofelia hadn’t played cards in years by then. “Sveva wasn’t as interested?”
“Interested? Sveva was as spoiled as you might expect she would be. She was more concerned with her precious sketches – which are not, I might add, very good at all. Nothing worthy of being treasured – than with spending time with her mother.”
The room felt like it was getting cooler by the moment, the fire all but out. Ofelia began to sway. She reached for furniture to steady herself. When I motioned to take her arm, she jerked away from me and knocked into the table. A vase rocked against the surface once, twice, then rolled off, as if in slow motion, and shattered on the floor. Ofelia screamed and I moved toward her instinctually, but she backed away from me. “What have you done?” she yelled.
“Ofelia, I ...” I wanted to be able to do something – to calm Ofelia, or light the fire, or get us both upstairs and into our beds. I wanted to know if and where Sveva was in the house and what she was doing.
“You what?” Ofelia was now on her hands and knees and appeared to be looking for something as she yelled at me. “You what, perfect little Miss Jüül? You just want to help? Is that what you’re going to say?”
I didn’t respond. That was, perhaps, one of the things I might have said.
“Haven’t you helped enough?”
“I will just get the fire started, Ofelia. If that is help, so be it. I have years of practice in getting the fire going. After that, I will leave you to do as you choose.”
“You will leave me, will you?”
“I will go to bed and we can talk more in the morning.”
“What makes you think I want to talk?”
“If you don’t want to, we needn’t.” Fear spiked through me. I’d been with Ofelia when she was unpredictable, but this seemed different. It was silent for a moment, then Ofelia howled, her cry as plaintive and sustained as I would have imagined a wolf’s. Then it died in her throat and she stood shaking, a silhouette in the room. I didn’t move, waited for her. Ofelia picked up the skirts of her gown, raised her chin and walked past me without a word. I stood still some time after she left, then went to the fire and pulled out the papers. They were Sveva’s simple, almost comic-like sketches of herself as Beo, the nickname her mother had given her. Not great art, perhaps, but it was one of the only artistic outlets for Sveva after Ofelia had burned all her watercolours and pastels, or had me do so. I brushed the ashes from the papers and slipped them into my pocket before I went upstairs.
On the landing I stopped and listened, heard nothing. There were no lights visible on the second floor. I opened the door to the stairs that led up to my quarters. When I turned on the light as I entered my room, I saw Sveva curled against my single bed, her body too big for its frame. I took off my cardigan, not wanting to disturb her, not knowing where I would go if she remained asleep on my bed. I had my back to her when I heard her sit up. “Miss Jüül.”
I turned. “Sveva?” I spoke as though it wasn’t unusual that she was there, lying on my bed.
“She found my sketches.”
“Yes, I know.”
“They weren’t much, but they were the last thing I had that was only mine, I suppose. What I wouldn’t give to be able to paint, to draw – to live! – but without any of that, at least I had my measly sketches. Now, even those are gone.”
I went to my cardigan, hung over the back of a chair, and pulled out what I’d salvaged from the fireplace, handed them to her. Sveva took them, looked at each one as though studying it, seeing it for
the first time, then she pulled me to her. I felt a sob break out in her chest. She backed away from me, dragged one palm, the other, against her eyes and cheeks, offered me a weak smile. “Thank you, Miss Jüül.” She leaned to me, pressed her hands on either side of my face so that I heard nothing but my own blood moving in my ears, and kissed the top of my head.
Forty-Six
There was another Christmas, the twenty-fifth that had passed since the duke’s death. Every year, the holiday was far more melancholy than it was celebratory. We had both the birth of Christ and the death of the duke to observe, but only one of them had risen again, and so far he did not seem able to save us from our self-imposed exile. Nonetheless, I prayed for some kind of release from our situation, as I did every year, asked for signs, divine intervention. If they came, I was unqualified to recognize them. It seemed nothing changed, nothing would ever change, and we were stagnant as time moved through us. We were steeped in so many times, so many places and yet, as the rest of the world spun on, we remained in continuous retreat. Each year on Christmas morning we handed each other embossed cards, finely wrapped Christmas gifts of French-milled soaps and tiny bottles of perfume.
In the last week of 1960, Dr. McMurthie made house calls each day between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. On the last day of the decade, I sent him home. “You’ll want some time with your family.”
“I can stay. Mrs. McMurthie will drag me out to some kind of party, but I’m really not one much for them.”
“No, no, go.” I didn’t say that his wife needed him – that wives need husbands, and wives need celebrations.
“I’ll be by tomorrow – you’ll be all right until then?”
“Of course.”
He showed me again the row of prescriptions and explained what to give Ofelia when. “I know that you are experienced in giving Ofelia her medications, but it is up to me to remind you to give her some time between these three – and none of those with alcohol, of course, despite the season.”
Little Fortress Page 25
