The Story That Cannot Be Told

by J. Kasper Kramer

  I was off in a breath, dashing across the grass and into the trees. The sound of bleating goats dulled behind me. I followed the butterfly down the slope of the hill, watching my feet so I wouldn’t go tumbling. I ducked under branches, leaped over rocks, slid through a pile of bramble and leaves. Then I came stumbling out of the woods and found myself down in the valley. I stood stunned for a moment, surprised I had traveled so far. When I spotted the butterfly in the nearby grass, riding the edge of a long, swaying blade, I dove forward, swinging, and missed her. Again I went bounding, heedlessly running through the waist-high fields behind houses. In the distance I heard voices, the rumble of a cranky muffler. The farmers were close by, my mamaie and tataie, probably, too. If they saw me, I might get in trouble, since I was confined to the cottage till my homework was done. But catching just this one bug would spare so many others, and it would mean I might actually have a shot at completing the assignment.

  The Pieridae landed again, and when I swung this time, I didn’t miss. My net smacked into the side of an old outbuilding, the butterfly fluttering wildly as she was trapped between mesh and rotted, dark planks. I was so pleased with myself—pinching the top of the net in my fist so she couldn’t escape, backing away and admiring my catch—that I hadn’t even realized where I was.

  Finally, I turned my face up. My eyes widened.

  The old church.

  Not only was this much farther than I was supposed to go by myself—even when there wasn’t homework to do—but everyone in the village knew this place was bursting with ghosts. When I helped in the fields, the other kids tried to scare me, telling how they heard crying and moans in the night. I’d try to scare them right back, talking about the ghost who liked to prank-call my apartment, but they always insisted their ghosts were worse, and that, if I had any sense, I’d better never go down to the old church alone.

  I took a step closer. I lifted up on my tiptoes at the window, but the stained glass was too grime-covered to see in. I lowered myself back down.

  And that was when I saw the tracks in the dirt.

  Big tracks. Big boots.

  I crept around to the front of the building, following, and they led me straight to the large double doors. One was ajar, hanging on by a single nail. It had an emblem above the handle shaped like a wolf’s head. There was a gap just perfect for a girl to slip through, so I looked around to make sure no one could see. Ioan and the other kids would tell me all sorts of nonsense if they found out I’d gone inside, and my grandparents would likely get mad. But the only house with windows pointed my way was bedridden Old Constanta’s, so I got down on my knees and crawled through the gap, the pole attached to my net scraping the floor.

  The moment I stood up, I knew I wasn’t alone.

  There was a smell that repulsed me. Muddy boot tracks went in but not out. I followed them with my eyes down the center of the building. A row of damp, broken chairs lined the left wall. Midday sunlight poked through the places where the roof had collapsed, vines gushing in through the crumbling tiles. Paintings covered the building from ceiling to floor, and the way the light hit them, they looked like they were on fire. At the back wall, where the tracks ended on the other side of the room, dozens of chipped, faded, two-dimensional people were dressed in colorful robes with glimmering circles drawn around their heads.

  Beneath them, a man was lying on the floor.

  He raised his eyes when he heard me come in.

  Despite all the bruises, despite the full beard and the long, oily hair, despite the dirt on his face, I knew who he was—but he did not know me.

  The net dropped from my hand with a clatter. The butterfly took off into the air.

  “Uncle Andrei,” I said.

  Soon the Securitate would be coming.

  Soon the tracks would lead them here, straight to me.

  The House with Three Eyes

  I crept closer.

  “Uncle Andrei,” I repeated. “Uncle Andrei, why are you here?”

  I crept till I was right in front of him, till I could reach down to see if he was real. Before I could touch him, his dirty hand shot up and grabbed my shirt.

  “Get out! Leave now and don’t come back!”

  I tried to protest, but he shook me so hard that I squeaked, “Okay!” and pulled out of his grasp, stumbling. In his free hand were papers, rolled up and gripped tight in his fist. They were muddy. The edges were torn. The black ink was smeared.

  When he saw what I saw, he hissed, “Out. I said get out! Go! Don’t tell anyone I’m here!”

  He didn’t know who I was, and it didn’t take much for me to understand why. His face was swollen and bruised, his eyes nothing more than slits when they opened at all.

  “I—I want to help,” I stuttered.

  “I don’t need the help of a child. Did you hear me, little girl? I said go!”

  I fell beside a broken chair. I grabbed my net and crawled till I reached the door. He was growling at me, saying nasty things, using words that made me flushed and frightened—words he’d never said in my presence before, not even while drunk.

  The sunlight outside in the valley, the bright, hot summer day and the smell of the flowers, made it all seem like a dream. There was no way he was real. No one living could look as he did. He wouldn’t have been able to climb up into the mountains. I couldn’t even picture him standing. His knees were swollen. He had only one shoe. The fingers on his left hand were dark and fat and twisted in all the wrong ways. His clothing was torn. There was blood. He was gaunt and pale and he stank. The whole church stank with him in it.

  There was only one explanation.

  My uncle was dead.

  The Securitate had tortured and killed him, just as my father had feared, and because he’d died alone, in an unnatural way, he’d come back as a strigoi mort—a terrible creature that would haunt my family and feed off our blood.

  My stories had taught me about monsters like this, but I hadn’t really believed in them. Not till now. Not till I’d seen Uncle Andrei myself.

  Tears streaking my dirty cheeks, I ran back through the valley. In the yard by the goat pen, I sat down cross-legged in the grass and rocked till I could breathe, till I could stop crying. When I realized my fist was still balled around the net, I looked down, and opened my hand.

  Half of one of the butterfly’s wings was stuck in the mesh, ripped and crushed. She’d gotten away, but she wouldn’t get far, because the truth is, once you’re caught, that’s it. My uncle had known the risk when he’d published that poem. He’d known that nothing in our country could stay secret for long.

  Once, when I was young, he took an assignment for the paper in a faraway city, and when he returned, he slipped sharp-edged photographs into my palms.

  “Look,” he said, tapping with his finger.

  In pictures of the streets, of the stores, of the homes, he drew my gaze to the sloping tiled roofs. There, little hooded windows peeked out from the attics, sometimes two, sometimes three, sometimes five. It looked very much like the houses had eyes. Tiles surrounded the small, dark openings like eyelids.

  “They were watching. Someone is always watching.”

  We all said one in three, because that was how it felt, but really it was just one in thirty.

  Just one person out of every thirty people you knew who was informing for the Securitate. Just one person out of every thirty people you knew who would watch while you ate, while you slept, write down when you came home from work, whom you called, what you said, what you read on the train in the morning.

  Uncle Andrei was always telling jokes I didn’t get.

  “I asked a Russian, an American, and a Romanian how they liked to have fun at a party,” he would start.

  The Russian, quite confident, says, “Well, the best thing to do is to take out your gun and shoot at your head, but put only one bullet in the chamber.”

  The American interrupts. “That’s so crass! The real way to have fun is to pass out expensiv
e champagne to all your guests, but stir poison into only one of the glasses.”

  The Romanian smiles, shaking his head at the others. “You’ve both got it wrong,” he explains. “To have fun at a party, all you need to do is get everyone telling anti-Communist jokes, but make sure you’ve invited only one spy.”

  My mother would snicker and snort. My father would shush his brother and wife, asking if they’d both lost their wits, because if you were caught—even joking—that was it. You’d wind up in jail, just like my uncle.

  Just like my uncle, you’d wind up dead.

  My uncle had known what he did was a risk. My mother must have known too. But they’d published that poem anyway, and now my uncle was a strigoi mort, come back to remind me there was nowhere to hide.

  When my mamaie and tataie came home, I was so quiet they thought I was sick. They put me to bed early, which was fine, because I wanted to sleep. I wanted to forget what I’d seen. But the vision of Uncle Andrei on the floor of that church would not let me rest.

  As I lay on my pallet in the dark, moonlight poured through the cracks in the shutters, striking the skeleton of the vacant loom. Crickets filled the air with the waves of their song, growing louder and louder. An owl called from above. She was perched on the roof, clack-clack-clacking back and forth as she searched for a way in.

  I imagined my uncle crawling up the stone steps of the hill.

  I imagined him in his cement cell, mangled hand chained to a wall. He was crying because he was thirsty. When he died, he was praying for someone to save him.

  And then I imagined the most frightening thing of all.

  What if there wasn’t a strigoi mort?

  What if Uncle Andrei was still alive?

  I’d never planned to return to the church, never again in my life, but as I pushed off my blankets and slipped on my sneakers, I knew exactly where I was going. I tried to keep quiet as I opened cabinet doors, searching for food that could vanish unnoticed. Most of the villagers’ animal products and crops disappeared on the trucks, carried down the mountains to be sold outside our country. However, unlike in the city, the Securitate simply couldn’t regulate everything that the villagers did. Livestock were born and raised and slaughtered without ever being recorded. Gardens were overflowing with fruit and vegetables in the summer. They went into jams and pickling jars before some man in a suit could claim they belonged to the state.

  My grandparents had food, if you knew where to look.

  Standing on a chair, I undid the rusty latch at the top of the front door and snuck outside. I hurried to the back of the house and climbed into the chickens’ rickety coop. The birds clucked, irritated, as I searched under their warm bodies for eggs. I found three.

  Using the bottom of my shirt as a basket, I crept past the porch and tiptoed through the path in the yard. At the edge of the hill, though, I paused, frozen with the feeling that someone was watching. Mamaie always said not to look back at a house once you’d left—that if you did, something bad would happen while you were away.

  Branches rustled just out of sight. The undergrowth shivered.

  I turned toward the path that traveled through the forest, all the way up the ancient mountain. Whenever I walked it with Mamaie to forage for herbs or fat mushrooms, we had to clap our hands and make lots of noise so that we’d scare off any bears.

  There were even more reasons not to be out past dark, though.

  Shortly after I’d arrived, my tataie had gone to the front porch at dusk and asked me to follow. He’d cupped his hands, howling. I’d thought he was just teasing me, since I was from the city and looked easily tricked. But then the wolves had begun to howl back. Their calls came down through the trees. They came from the path through the forest—the path I was now standing beside.

  When I heard the Ural owl hoot behind me, I couldn’t help spinning around.

  There, perched on the mossy thatched roof, she sat staring. Pale gray and mottled, streaked with dark brown, talons clutching the peak of the cottage just above its one eye. In the attic, my grandparents hung meat from the rafters. Smoke drifted up from the stove to flavor and preserve it.

  “The window helps the house breathe,” my mamaie had explained.

  But I knew what eyes were really for.

  I hurried past the path up the mountain and took the steps down the hill two at a time. If I’d missed even one, I’d have gone tumbling and broken my neck, but I made it to the bottom alive. Somehow the eggs didn’t crack. I looked back up the hill, afraid of what would be there looking down. The forest was empty and quiet—the cottage out of sight.

  When I was sure I was alone, I made my way through town, keeping off the dirt road with the well that led between the rows of closely packed houses. I walked through the tall grass in the moonlight instead. And then I was at the edge of the village—at the abandoned old church, slanted and crumbling.

  As I crept up to the front of the building, pulse beating in my ears, my body thrummed, tingling from top to toes. Of all the villages in all the world, he’d come here because of me. I was certain. He loved me and he knew I would help him. As I gripped the three eggs nesting in my shirt, though, I felt anxious. It was such a meager offering—such a worthless reason to return when he’d shouted at me to leave only hours before.

  Then I saw it, sitting outside the broken double doors. A wicker basket covered with a yellow cloth. The same one I’d spotted from Mrs. Sala’s front porch.

  I hesitated before looking around. The grass was unbent but for where I’d stepped. The brush was unmoving. I knelt and lifted the cloth: bandages and a bottle of clear, corked liquid. The gift was for my uncle—that was obvious. Someone was leaving him supplies. Turning in a circle, I scanned the nearby houses, but the lights were off in all the ones close enough for me to see. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. Equally elated and disturbed, I picked up the basket and added my eggs, then ducked and wiggled through the broken doors.

  The darkness in the church was so thick that my body felt weightless.

  I stood up straight, trembling, and whispered into the black, “Uncle Andrei?”

  No reply. I paced a step forward into nothing at all.

  “I haven’t told anyone you’re here. But I’ve brought you food and bandages. Something to drink, too.”

  Only silence. I took another step forward.

  “Uncle Andrei, it’s me, Ileana.”

  This time there was a deep, throaty noise that made me go stiff. “Lies. Tricks and lies. Go. Out. Leave me be!”

  Clouds shifted overhead, and moonlight coming through the fallen roof flooded the back half of the church. I saw his shape then, lying near the altar, just as I’d left him. I straightened up and forced myself to be brave.

  “I remember the poem you gave me. The one that made the Securitate so mad they took you away. Tata stole your poem from me, but once a story is told, it stays with you forever.” And then I began, whispering:

  You arrived in the dark while we slept.

  Our paper weapons

  no match

  for yours.

  Pen in hand,

  name on tongue,

  you killed us with words.

  I close my eyes and still hear them screaming.

  “Stop,” he said, and I did. But I also stepped into the light, ice blue and floating with dust.

  “I let an electrician into our house, but he wasn’t an electrician. He wasn’t a burglar, either. He put bugs in the walls and the phones. They were listening when I told stories.” After a moment I added, “I wanted to save your poem. I knew someone might try to take it away. So I wrote it in the Great Tome, but Tata took the Great Tome and he burned it.”

  “Ileana?” Uncle Andrei asked, voice cracking.

  I moved till I was standing in front of him. He didn’t reach out to grab me this time. In fact he barely even breathed.

  “Are you dead, Uncle Andrei?”

  “No,” he said.
<
br />   “Are you going to die?”

  “Maybe.”

  I set down the basket beside him. I helped him sit up as he wheezed. I handed him the eggs one by one, and he sucked them down raw. When I uncorked the clear glass bottle, I was surprised by the smell, but Uncle Andrei smirked beneath his grimace. With my hands bearing the weight, he turned the bottle up and drank till he started to cough. The rest he poured over his face and his wounds, breathing hard through his teeth when the liquid touched his torn skin. I wrapped one of the bandages clumsily around his broken hand. I tried to ask him questions, but everything took us in circles, like the fairy stories in children’s books.

  “How did you get here, Uncle Andrei?”

  “I walked.”

  “But how did you walk here?”

  “On two feet.”

  I was fairly convinced that he didn’t really know where here was anyway. And the truth is, neither of us was entirely sure that the other was real. I wanted to bring him to the cottage. I swore again and again that Mamaie and Tataie wouldn’t tell. But anytime I mentioned getting help, he’d grip the papers in his hand tighter and start cursing, making me promise all over.

  I agreed because he was an adult—and not just any adult, but the one I most wanted to please. Never before had I had the chance to prove myself to him. Never once had he needed me. I swore I’d return the next night. I left the empty basket just outside the door. Remembering the owl and the cottage’s attic eye, I hid my face, ducking my head when I reached my grandparents’ yard.

  The next day was the hardest. My mamaie was worried about me, convinced all the signs were pointing to illness, so she forced me to stay put at the table and focus on homework. My whole body was rigged like a bomb in an American cop movie. I was certain that at any moment—with just the wrong question, just the wrong look from my grandmother—I’d explode, telling everything I wasn’t supposed to.

  “Ileana, take a break and go see if the chickens have anything for us.”

  “They don’t,” I spat, then scrunched up my toes. “I mean, I checked already this morning. They should work harder, right? Worthless chickens.”