Watermark

by Christy Ann Conlin

  Then Sergei got crazy. “Are you following me?” he said. “I told you to leave me alone. I love Isabella, not you. Can’t you accept that?”

  “But Sergei, you told me to meet you here,” she said. I told the police what Lulu said. And she started crying. “But I love you,” she said to Sergei. I’m sure she said that. It sounded like that. It made me so mad.

  It happened so fast. He went up to her and grabbed her by her long hair and she fell down on her knees. And then Sergei kicked her in the side and Lulu bent over. She couldn’t catch her breath. I was frozen at first. “See,” he said to me, “I’m showing you.” He kicked her in the eye, her winking eye.

  I was crying, saying he should stop. That’s what I was doing. My hands are sweating, remembering this.

  “Don’t hurt her,” I screamed. “I won’t tell my dad you’ve been coming over. I won’t tell him about the drugs. I was just kidding,” I screamed.

  But he was out of control. When she tried to get up he came behind her. She was on her knees. He came behind her and put out his hands, really slowly. She wasn’t moving fast so he wasn’t rushing. He held out his hands like he was going to put them under her arms and help her get up. But then he moved really quickly and put them around her neck and started to squeeze. She started wiggling, thrashing around, making these horrible sounds. I can hear them now, these little gurgles, gasping for breath, and he squeezed even harder. She had on a fine gold necklace and it wrapped all around his finger so tight it cut right into him but he just kept going. Violence takes the pain away. The necklace wasn’t on her neck when they pulled her out of the pond. The police never mentioned it — it must have fallen off into the water. It’s a deep pond. I grabbed his arm to get him to stop, and that’s when he spun around and hit me in the face and I fell down.

  * * *

  I started crying when I told my father this when he first came in with all his stubble. I cried when I told the police and my lawyer, every time I’ve told them. My nose was running, snot all over my face, all over my bruised cheek. Crying is disgusting. The youth worker who came in to check if everything was okay was this really cute guy and I didn’t want him to see me looking like a blubbering mess. After he left, my father reached across the table and put his hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, Isabella,” he said. “We’ll get through this. This is my fault for not being around more . . . I’m so sorry.” His voice broke and I took my hands down from my face so he could see me, my eyes red and blotchy. There were tears running down his cheeks as he held my hand.

  * * *

  My father isn’t crying now. He just yawns and I can smell his disgusting breath. Too much coffee. He hasn’t even had time to whiten his teeth. He just waits for me to say something but I’ve said all there is to say and so for this visit, he’ll just have to sit there and learn this.

  After my mother left I used to wonder what she would have looked like if the brakes hadn’t worked on her car, what her face would have looked like if it had smashed through the windshield, glass stuck in her big sparkling eyes.

  For the last year when my mother called for our Sunday talk, I didn’t bother answering the phone. She finally called my father at work. He told me I should really find time to take her call. I just shrugged and said I’d see what I could do. He sighed. “Isabella, when your mind is made up it’s like trying to stir dried concrete.” I thought that was stupid because concrete is so ugly, and I felt like kicking him.

  But here I am, surrounded by concrete. I told the warden how ugly this place is and it was the one time he laughed. “Why would we want to pretend you’re somewhere pleasant?” he asked me. “This isn’t a boarding school, Isabella. This isn’t a hotel. Or some storybook palace. You need to grow up and take responsibility for yourself.”

  I would have liked to shove chopsticks in his temples, nice and slow, right into his brain.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  * * *

  My father finally stands up and his chair shrieks as it rubs against the floor. It’s such an ugly sound and I put my hands over my ears. My father pats me on the head and he leaves the room. He probably wants me to ask him for help but I won’t be brought down to that level. I already told him what happened.

  * * *

  Sergei and I were standing by the pond and Lulu was lying there, dead. I was hyperventilating. Then Sergei came over to me and started to kiss me. He was crazy, all pumped up on drugs and from the adrenaline. It surges through your body. I was still really stoned and I felt dizzy. When we first got there and parked, he took out this joint and we smoked it. It made my lungs burn. I don’t know what he had in it, but there was a funny taste in my mouth, and I could feel my heart go faster, like every hair on my body was standing up a bit, like my skin could feel every single bit of the wind, the warmth of the sun, like it was all magnified and it was like I was ten feet tall except my head felt like a balloon that was going to float up and away any second. And then it was like I was floating outside of myself, darting all around, a dragonfly, watching myself as we walked to the pond.

  And then it all happened and we were there with her at our feet. My heart was pounding and I was dripping sweat. I pushed him away and we stood there looking at each other. A frog croaked from the water and we both looked at the pond. And then she started moaning. She wasn’t dead. I couldn’t believe it, with all those kicks, being strangled like that, and still alive. I told Sergei he had to stop, how he couldn’t cross that final line. Just a kick to her head, he said. That’s all it will take.” She sort of crawled, but she went the wrong way, toward the pond. She got up and was wobbling. And then Sergei walked over and gave her a push with his foot and she fell in. That’s all it took, a little tap. I would have jumped in to save her but the pond looked really deep. She didn’t struggle much, just floated there, face down among the water lilies with the sun setting on her long hair.

  And then those bird-watching people came hiking out of the woods. They had a cellphone and called the police. I was at the edge of the pond holding a big stick when they saw me. I was only trying to drag her to land. They backed up like they thought I was going to hit them with it. Sergei ran away into the trees and I followed him. It was dark with all the leaves overhead. He lit a cigarette. I told him he’d have to take responsibility. It was then that he said he would tell the truth, he would make sure they knew it was him. I ran back out crying, asking the nature people to help me while the Lulu bird floated in the water and Sergei ran away to his car.

  * * *

  I can hear them coming down the hall now.

  The door opens and the sheriff is standing there with cuffs and shackles. “Time to go for a ride,” he says, no smile. “Stand up, please and put your hands behind your back.”

  I stand up and face the ugly beige wall. It seems to move forward, closing in on me, challenging me. I won’t close my eyes and give in.

  I was looking at this same wall the first time I talked to my lawyer. He was telling me that the police were interviewing Sergei for the millionth time, and if the judge accepted Sergei’s testimony, they’d drop the charges against me when I came to court to enter a plea.

  The metal snaps together as they put the cuffs on. They don’t say anything about my sweating hands. The shackles take longer. I’m just standing there, being cooperative. The shackles catch on the leg of my grey sweatpants. The sheriff apologizes to me.

  “It’s okay,” I say, looking at the wall.

  And just then, the warden comes in. He clears his throat, that’s how I know it’s him. “Your lawyer just called. Your friend Sergei is going to testify,” he says.

  I just smirk. Tell me something I don’t know, I think.

  But then he does. “The Russian says that you killed the girl. He couldn’t go through with it so you did it and he hit you, he tried to stop you,” he says in his flat voice. “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  I don’t say a word.<
br />
  Instead, I smile.

  Smile at the beige wall. You know that kind of smile, the smile of a thousand knives. The wall trembles.

  “They dredged the pond and found the necklace.” The warden clears his throat again. “They are charging you with murder in the first degree.”

  I keep right on smiling because I’m going to stick a knife in Sergei’s gut as soon as I get my hands on him, and I can’t wait to see his face then. I should have known he wouldn’t keep his word. You can’t trust Russians. No one will ever believe him. No one will take his word over mine. Or my father’s. My father is with me every step of the way. If there’s one thing I can count on, it’s that.

  I’ll see Sergei at the courthouse. I’ll make him feel pain like he has never felt pain before, and he’ll be afraid to even think my name for the rest of his pathetic life.

  I remember my father’s face the very first time I saw him in this place, the morning after Lulu died. He was so tired. He closed his eyes and then opened them — and then he opened them wider as he looked at my hand on the table. He reached out and ran his pen along the inside of my index finger where there was a deep cut like a red thread running from the bottom of my finger to the top. “Where did you get that cut, Isabella?” he asked, his voice almost a whisper. I looked at him then just like I’m looking at the warden now — with eyes reflecting back the beige.

  The Diplomat

  Wiedervereinigung, the German teacher said. Viola knew the Chinese student named Henry would translate just as he had since starting the class two weeks ago, always trying to help, but she already knew this word. It was impossible to be in Germany in 1995 and not know. The teacher, a plump middle-aged woman, told them the fourth anniversary was approaching, and she went around the circle and made them repeat, stretching their lips, raising their eyebrows, as though they were warming up for an opera.

  “Wie-der-ver-ei-ni-gung.”

  “This means reunification,” Henry said, looking at Viola from across the table. In perfect English. With an accent just like hers. She blushed. His smile was small and careful.

  “I know what it means,” she replied in halting German, her eyes closing. The Berlin Wall had come down four years earlier.

  “Die Berliner Mauer,” Viola said slowly.

  Apparently Henry interpreted this as confusion. “The wall,” he said in his remarkable English, as though he’d grown up down the road from her. “The Berlin Wall.” He stretched his arms out as though showing her how big it was, in case she thought it was a fence for goats like the one on the small saltwater farm on Campobello Island in the Bay of Fundy, near her parents’ house, the farm where Ben now was . . . without her. The teacher clucked and reminded them to speak German. Henry smiled at Viola again, and Mary from Australia giggled as though they were all still teenagers.

  It was a small class in a small language school in the centre of Frankfurt, im Zentrum, as the Germans said. Viola had been in the German class for three months. She took the train in every weekday from the small town she lived in with Ralf, whom she’d met on a trip she’d taken to Vietnam after finishing her history degree. When she spoke German at home Ralf would stroke her hair and say: “You are like a kitchen appliance, macerating every syllable. It’s very cute, Schatzie. You sound like a Turk.”

  The director had brought in the new Chinese students on Monday morning. The director was an old German hippie, always winking and telling Viola to eat muesli. Mary said that during introductions, Henry had perked up immediately when Viola said she was from Campobello Island. Viola hadn’t noticed — she often shut her eyes when she spoke German, and thought of home. It made her feel braver, to think of the good things back home. Henry was from Beijing. He had been in Frankfurt for one month. He was thirty-one years old.

  Every Monday they began with a new expression or word they had learned on the weekend. This class, Viola offered Heimweh. Henry nodded in agreement when Viola said she missed Canada.

  “Homesick,” he said, as though he could picture the sea urchins and shells she saw behind her eyelids. Viola squinted, thinking his name couldn’t actually be Henry. It wasn’t Chinese. He told her later it was a name he had taken for Westerners. His real name was Sun He Peng.

  On coffee break Henry was talking with the other two Chinese men as she walked by. Henry smiled and looked down at his feet and then back at her. He was tall. He’d laughed later when she said she thought Chinese men were all short. He told her he used to think Caucasians wore sunglasses so their eyes wouldn’t change colour in the sun. “I didn’t know the colour of your eyes at first,” he said. “Your eyes were always closed when you were speaking. They are green like the ocean.”

  Henry had worked at the Canadian embassy in Beijing. He also had worked at the Chinese embassy in Ottawa for one year, part of his training. He’d perfected his English there.

  “A translator?” Viola asked.

  “A diplomat. At first I thought you didn’t understand the language. You are just shy. Forgive me.”

  Viola laughed and closed her eyes and her cheeks were hot.

  * * *

  After the Monday class when the Chinese students arrived, Mary had proclaimed them a mini-UN. Mary was an accountant from Sydney and she was living here with her fiancé, Helmut, a banker she’d met at a conference. He had a telescope. He loved the night sky. They were going to Australia soon to get married. They would go to the desert for their honeymoon so Helmut could see the night sky without light pollution. Viola had never heard this term before.

  There was a young couple from Turkey, Gastarbeiter, guest workers doing industrial work there weren’t enough Germans for. Sixteen-year-old Farzad from Tehran who mourned the fall of the Shah and with his large aqua eyes followed every move of Kwan-Sun, seventeen and from Korea, a nanny for a wealthy German family. Padma was from Bombay, her husband an English investment banker. It was the second time they’d been married to each other and she anticipated another divorce and possibly a third marriage. They were made for each other, she said, but only incrementally. It was Padma who said the Chinese were refugees. “The riots, you know, the massacre, in 1989,” she whispered.

  And there was Lucien from Burkina Faso, married to a German historian. He and his wife Helga spoke French together, he had told the class. They’d married in Ouagadougou, and now she had a position at the university in Frankfurt. Helga’s last name was von Feldenburg. In the olden days von was a sign of nobility, Lucien stated.

  Yes, their teacher agreed, but German nobility ended with the abolition of the monarchy in 1919.

  “Ja, ja,” Lucien had said, leaning back in his chair, his eyes sparkling and his skin like espresso against the creamy white wall. “But abolition does not mean the old ideas disappear. Ce n’est jamais si facile que ça, mes amis.” He looked at the teacher and then at Viola and cocked his eyebrow.

  “Ja,” she said, eyes closing, in her mind sitting with Ben on the back porch of his family farmhouse, which had come down through five generations to him. They ate chèvre with sun-dried tomatoes on homemade brown bread. Don’t go on this trip abroad, Ben said, looking out over the beach, crying so quietly. Stay here and marry me. We’ll run your family inn and my mother’s farm, do the summer market for the tourists, and go sailing on Saturday afternoons. Viola had cried too but she did leave and had not returned.

  * * *

  Henry would always come to the park after class with the other students and they scattered to benches under the gloomy November clouds. Henry often sat by the fountain with Viola and asked her about Canada. At first she was reluctant to discuss where she had come from, but he was easy to talk with and every time they sat together she shared more and more. Viola wasn’t used to anyone but Ben having such interest in her. She told Henry she was living with Ralf, how they’d met in Saigon where Viola had moved after graduating from university with what Ralf called a useless arts degree. S
he had begged Ben to come with her but he said he already had a life on Campobello, commitments and responsibilities he couldn’t leave.

  Viola’s only friend in Saigon was her roommate, Evangeline. They shared a tiny apartment and taught ESL at the same small school. She was a girl from Nova Scotia who made friends easily and, like Henry, spent most of her time asking questions and listening. She insisted on brushing her teeth with the tap water so she could get used to the local bacteria and as a result she had constant diarrhea. She said adventure was not all it was cracked up to be and they should both go home. But Viola wasn’t ready for that. She helped Evangeline pack and went with her to the airport where Evangeline gave her a small silver necklace with a delicate starfish hanging from the chain. Evangeline said it was a good luck charm for travellers that her father had given to her, but she didn’t need it as much as Viola would. Viola cried when Evangeline went through the gate. It wasn’t long after that she agreed to come to Germany with Ralf, rather than scurry back to the island in New Brunswick, embarrassed she had left in the first place.

  After a month of their bench chats, Viola blurted out to Henry how she’d left Campobello because she wanted adventure, a journey which wasn’t halted by land’s end. She had never shared anything like this with Ralf. Viola knew he would roll his eyes. He was impatient with what he called inconsequential conversation. But Henry was the opposite and Viola couldn’t help herself. She told him about Ben and how she wept when she said she couldn’t marry him. She was too young. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life.