The first thing I kept was a watch escapement made of brass.
Alphonse had once owned a fine watch that ran on a battery from before, and he wore it bound around his wrist with a strap of leather. Long after they stopped making such batteries, he would show his watch to every peddler that passed through, and offer enough in payment that sometimes they would return months or even years later with acid-corroded batteries they had salvaged from old houses or pried out of spent machines at the dump, or wherever peddlers find such things. Sometimes the salvaged batteries even worked. But eventually there were no more to be had, and then his watch stopped for good, and the last peddler he brought it to in desperation frowned so deeply that my father understood it was hopeless. But that same peddler returned in summer with a watch on a chain that kept time all by itself, by only winding a spring. I was standing at the door when the peddler pulled it from his coat, with that gift all peddlers have for drama, producing it like a star plucked from the sky. And I watched as my father threw his arms around the man and wept.
Alphonse told me the watch on the chain, hooked over the button of the jacket he wore summer and winter alike, would never stop. He was as proud of it as if he’d crafted it himself, and in fact I often saw him put his hand to it and study it as though he would have liked to take it apart and make it again. He wound it at the table every night after we ate, and for several years took great pleasure in declaring the hour, though no one had asked.
And then one evening as he wound it, he looked out the window at the pinking sky and then back at the watch in his hand, and an expression of worry passed over his face. “No matter,” he mumbled and put the watch back into the pocket where it was kept. But the next evening and the next, he took to standing at the window staring out at the sky, holding the watch out before him like a specimen of study. “What is it?” I asked him, but he didn’t answer, and Daniel shook his head at me, so I knew not to ask again. After a week had passed, and he had begun taking his dinner standing beside the window, searching the clouded sky for the sun, one night he suddenly hurled the watch to the floor and Daniel and I both cried out as it clattered over the tiles and slid to a stop at the wall.
“We dine at six,” he said. “That has always been our way.”
Daniel remained seated, pity in his eyes. “Dining is a grand word for the way we eat these days, my love,” he said lightly. “And I don’t know that I’ve paid much attention to the timing of it.”
“Always at six,” Alphonse repeated, like he hadn’t heard.
“I am certain you’re right.”
He turned towards us, as I crept across the floor, trying not to be noticed. “Have you ever known the sun to set at six in summer?”
“No,” Daniel said, “I haven’t.” And he stood and took my father in his arms, and they rocked from side to side in that embrace, ever so gently, like dancers. And as they rocked, I held the broken watch face in my hand and saw that the springs and wheels that had rolled over the tiles would be difficult to ever bring together again. And in the nights that followed, Alphonse tried to do it, squinting through a special glass that made small things look large, but the parts never even turned again, and there was no one who could be found who knew how to make an old and broken watch keep time. One day when I was given a sack of garbage to drag to the dumping ground, I found inside the shining pieces of my father’s watch and I kept the largest one.
* * *
—
Eban doesn’t return the next morning. Instead, it’s one of the twins who slides the door open and heaves his load across the room. Watching him lumber back and forth like a bead sliding along a string, setting down one thing and picking up another, Judy’s impatience slowly eases. This isn’t Eban’s hesitation, but something else—a languorous caution that is somehow interesting to her.
Backing away from her, he looks up for the first time, and she nods at him. Almost smiles. His eyes are wide, faintly mystified. She imagines him asking what she’s doing here, and why he has brought her these things. She puts the word why? in his mouth and shakes her head in answer to the imagined question. She is overwhelmed by the desire to speak. To be understood by this lean, silent man with his worn face and watchful eyes.
She tries to think of a gesture to communicate to him something, anything. Awkwardly, she lifts her hand and then, unsure what to do with it, simply opens it in the air, as if to signal her attention to him, or call for his. His eyes drift to her hand and then he lowers his face again. He leaves so slowly that she imagines he is at the edge of some change of mind, and watches each step, expecting him to suddenly turn back to her. Instead he slowly opens the door, slowly walks through, and slowly is gone.
After that, it is the twin who comes every day. Whether it is the same man or his brother, she doesn’t know. Each time the bolt is drawn, she imagines Eban at the door, and sometimes there is an instant when she seems to see his face, before the imagined features resolve, submitting to the face of the other man.
Three seasons passed without any riders appearing on the road. All my life, they’d come quarterly, a veil of dust gathering at the horizon to forecast their arrival. They rode their horses fast, hurried hooves beating at the dirt, so their arrival was easily distinguished from the plodding approach of a peddler and his cart. Whoever first saw the dust rising from the road in the distance would call to the others and then stand watch. It might be hours till the rider reached our door.
Always, Alphonse would offer a meal, a night’s rest, but the riders refused even water for their horses. They wouldn’t ask for Daniel or his papers, which Alphonse and I would have copied and stitched together over the preceding weeks. They just waited, reins in hand, until he came to them.
Alphonse sometimes was offended or made a joke of their self-seriousness. “Like zealots,” he’d mutter. “For all the world like zealots. Missionaries here to retrieve the holy word.” “They’ve come,” he’d announce to Daniel. “First Knights of the Equine Order of Entomological Data.”
But he respected Daniel and the work he did, however he mocked the men and women who arrived to collect it. He spoke of it with a reverence of his own when he told me not to bother Daniel in his office, or touch a selection of specimens lined in jars at the table. “Like measuring the world in teaspoons,” he whispered once as we watched my father at his microscope. “Taking its pulse with butterflies.” Because Daniel didn’t like to talk to me of his work (“It worries him,” Alphonse once admitted. “He reads upsetting things there, the way you and I read words on the page. I don’t think he wants you to see into that book”), it was Alphonse who explained phenology to me. Though I never properly understood how it worked, because he didn’t, I saw its importance, and was pleased my father possessed this other literacy, the world’s own language, and could receive its communications. From looking at things invisible to most, he saw what had happened to us—and what would.
And somewhere there were those who didn’t want invisible things known. Or at least, that was my understanding and the reason for the reticence of the riders, the secrecy around my father’s reports. “Like teaching Latin to the commoners, so they don’t need the Church to hear the word of God,” Alphonse said once, cryptically.
And so as early as the first season when no veil of dust lofted over our road and no rider arrived to our yard, Daniel was worried, and we were worried for him.
* * *
—
Almost three weeks pass before Eban comes again. It has been long enough that she imagined, as her mind unreeled over the long and silent days, that he might not ever return.
He steps inside without his usual hesitation. There’s a changed energy about him. An intention. Still, he raises his eyes to her in the customary way that has long exasperated her, like he is both searching for something in her face and afraid of what he might find.
“I thought I’d seen the last of you,�
� she says, her tone uncertain. She’s not sure whether she means to accuse him. She doesn’t know what’s happened in the weeks since she has seen him, and somehow she is reluctant to ask.
He doesn’t answer, and she says, more gently, “Every time the door opened, I was hoping it was you.” The words surprise her own ears. She supposes she means them as an apology, because she was unkind for no clear reason when she saw him last. But he starts like she has hurt him with the remark.
“Eban?”
She feels alarm swelling in her chest as he tightens his mouth and sets to work, laying out the tray of food and drink, and exchanging one waste pot for another.
“Eban,” she says sharply.
Now he ignores her, not even slowing in his work as he stacks the dirtied dishes onto the old tray and hangs the dirtied pot over his arm by the handle. Like her, he has eaten better and more regularly than ever before in these last weeks. His face is softened, and there is a bright, warm colour in his cheeks. He always argued that they were fortunate in their life in the hills, that they were secure and well-fed, without fear for their survival. And it was true—they never starved, but she had been accustomed to a tightness in the belly, a want that was only ever briefly satisfied. All these steady, plentiful meals show on him, and she guesses they show on her too.
The thought reminds her. “Look,” she says, lifting up her layers of sweaters to reveal the unfastened buttons of her pants. She has used a bit of string to draw the pants together under the round belly now rising over her broad hips. She enjoys her spreading body and new sense of weight and strength.
His mouth falls open as he looks. He turns his chin back to the door as if trying to tug his gaze away, but he is held by what he sees. Watching now from the corners of his eyes, as if he is being told a lie, he takes in a long, deep breath and then another. She frowns, trying to make sense of his silence, when it is broken by the sound of all the dishes in his hands clattering to the floor.
She gasps as if Eban himself had fallen to the ground. He is still staring at her, hardly noticing the broken plate, the spilled white pot.
“It’s okay,” she whispers, hurrying to him. She picks up the clay plate, which has come apart in three clean pieces, and peels off a sweater, using it to wipe at the filth seeping from the white pot over the wood floor. “It’s okay.” She is frightened of him, this dogged, steady man who now stands before her like a stranger. “I can clean it up.”
She cuts a finger on one of the segments of clay and puts it to her mouth, instinctively. Only then does he seem to awaken to himself, dropping to his knees and reaching for her hand. She produces it, shyly, for his inspection. He looks at it for so long, she thinks at first that something must be wrong, that he’s worried about the wound or how to dress it. Instinctively, she attempts to snatch it back, but he holds on too tightly, clutching it beneath his bowed head and hidden face.
“Eban? Eban, please say something to me. Why won’t you—”
And then she understands.
He lives by their rule now. He won’t speak again, not even to her. The realization fills her with horror, and a wild, lonely sorrow. Now, she understands, now there can be no question. She is imprisoned here. And she can’t tell if he is, too, or if he is one of those imprisoning her.
“Oh Eban,” she says finally, surprised to find herself near tears, as if he’s someone gone from her, someone to be grieved.
He lifts his face and his expression is so anguished that she can’t be angry with him or even show her worry. “It will be okay,” she tells him. “Take the tray back, and the pot, and I’ll clean up the rest. You don’t have to come here again.”
She’s thinking to herself, as they stand, that she’ll have to leave without him. A chance will come, and she’ll get free of this place. But he won’t.
“Goodbye, Eban,” she says, turning away.
And then from behind her back, she hears him whisper, so quietly she might have imagined it, “What did I do wrong?”
She thinks, I don’t know what you’re asking. She thinks, I don’t know how to answer. But she does, and she says nothing. And he’s gone.
After the riders didn’t come anymore, my father became quieter. He spent more hours alone in his study, though he produced no more documents for Alphonse and me to copy, and he began taking his meals alone, upstairs.
Alphonse, too, spoke less to me, even as he did everything he could to reassure me Daniel was fine and we would be too. But I saw the troubled way he watched the door and stood in the yard, staring to the end of the empty road.
I heard them whispering when they didn’t know I listened.
“Who stopped them?” I heard Daniel ask again and again, wildly. “Who stopped them coming?”
Alphonse’s answers were always too quiet to make out, and I understood only from the gentleness of his voice that he was attempting to soothe Daniel.
But Daniel disagreed with whatever words Alphonse spoke. “You don’t understand. You don’t see the risk I’m taking, that we’ve all been taking. If they’ve stopped the riders, they will want me stopped too. And it won’t be hard for them to learn—”
Finally one night, after he was locked inside Daniel’s study for nearly an hour, trying to calm him, I heard Alphonse shout, “Because you aren’t important enough! Why should you matter to them? We know nothing even of who they are or what they want, but what possible trouble could you bring them, an aging scientist in the outland, counting bugs and keeping diaries of their every twitch? How can you be stupid enough to think that anyone cares what you write?”
And then there was silence. And then Alphonse appeared at the door, pale-faced, closing it behind him. And then there were no more butterflies and beetles, no more notes and no more charts. My fathers seemed to less often remember me, and cared for me only absently, and they scarcely spoke to each other at all. Once, I pushed open Daniel’s study door, expecting him to scold me for interrupting his work. But there was no work. All the papers on the wall, the drawings, the stacks of books, the jars and slides and maps, were gone. He sat at an empty table, in an empty room, staring at his own hands with tears in his eyes.
I was the first to see my father dead. We had just returned from a walk, and in the distance, I saw his body poured over the ground outside the open front door. “They killed him,” I said as Alphonse lifted him from the steps where he had fallen. “They killed him.” I sobbed, “He did matter. He did. The things he wrote were that important. And they killed him for them.”
And my father, holding the body of the man he loved like a baby, said nothing.
A day later, we travelled up into the hills. And I knew there were things that I’d been told that were wrong. I knew that it was not for love that my mother had given me to these two men. And I knew we weren’t safe anymore.
* * *
—
Waiting is a strange practice. By the time sixty-seven days have passed, Judy has begun to feel like an insect trapped in a lantern, flapping at the glass. Some days she paces the rectangular course of the room until dark. Some days she sits in taut, uneasy stillness, squatting at the centre of the floor, listening for the approach of whoever brings her food today. She scarcely sleeps, but forces herself to remain in her bedding until sunlight pricks through the broken glass. With no way to count or measure the dark hours, the nights stretch to impossible length. When the black begins to lift and blue in the first minutes of day, she is ready to sob with relief.
There is nothing but waiting. She waits and she waits and she waits. Her mind has gone crooked. Occasionally she’ll hear what sounds like a step land outside her door, and in the moment that lasts until the hand can be heard pulling back the bolt, turning the knob, she suddenly knows that she could not have waited a second more. The wait for the last sequence of sounds before the door will open is all but infinite.
And then so
metimes she has made a mistake; she hears no bolt drawn, no hand pushing open the door. It may be minutes or hours until someone comes, or longer than that, a sum of time she can’t even imagine, and she will wait it. The wait is impossible, and happens anyway.
Early on the sixty-seventh night, she hears a heavy step outside the door, which flies open before she can even feel the usual lift of heart and vanishing of patience. Sladja leaves the door open and walks directly to the table where Judy sits with her pile of pencil-scrawled pages. She smiles at Judy, and it is the first time anyone has smiled at her since the last time she came. Judy can only stare back in shock.
Sladja extends her open hand and Judy is slow to understand what she wants, but follows her gaze to the papers before her on the table and reluctantly turns them over.
Sladja’s eyes narrow and she holds the pages up close to her face. She turns the pages roughly, and Judy winces as they crumple in her tight grasp—she herself has treated them almost tenderly since they were given to her.
Her brow still lowered, her eyes slitted, Sladja nods and nods again as she reads. She shuffles the pages with increasing speed and then, finally, lets the hand that holds them fall to her side.
She looks down at Judy with clear, shrewd eyes and smiles once more. Hesitantly, Judy lifts her hand to retrieve the pages, but Sladja tucks them into her jacket and produces a key from her pocket. Stepping to the other side of the desk, she unlocks the second drawer and withdraws the stitched volume Judy once glimpsed beneath the stack of tests.
Sladja opens the history to the first page and shows it to Judy, who nods slowly. Ourselves, she begins to read, and then the older woman snatches up the edge of the page and tears it from its binding.
The Second History Page 19