by Sarah Dunant
Prowling. A winter pursuit. She thought of all the layers of clothes on his body, the sweat on his skin, and his clammy weight on top of her. Her mouth filled with saliva. Let it go, she thought, let it rest. But the taste persisted. She imagined it being sperm, saw herself crouched over the limp little cock, sucking it into a fountain of aggression. She ground her teeth together and heard a different kind of groan. Don’t come back, she thought. Don’t even think about it. She let the saliva mingle with the fear and swallowed them both together.
Once she could see him—or, rather, the absence of him—she set about making sure that he could no longer see her. Again the attic helped. Among the boxes left unopened since her mother’s death she found one filled with linen and dug out a set of lace curtains that had once graced their living-room windows. They reminded her of years of teenage imprisonment and her mother’s relentless obsession with privacy. Nets, she used to call them: “So we can see out but they can’t see in.” “They.” She had made them sound like the enemy. How ironic that her refusal to follow her mother’s rules had made her the object of a stranger’s obsession. If she ever had children would they, too, find themselves in flight from her conventions, furnishing a house with lace curtains and strict moral codes?
The feel of the material in her hands brought back memo-ries of spring cleaning. “You have to wrap them in pillowcases, darling, then they don’t shred in the machine.” How was it that everything her mother had taught her had been of so little use? Were they the wrong things or had she simply not listened to the right ones?
Sometimes she thought that her mother had died simply to get away from her sense of disappointment in her daughter. Would she have been able to help her now? “You see, Mother, I had no option but to take the hammer out of his hand and stick his prick into me. Except now I can’t be sure if I’m soiled or healed.”
Maybe it wouldn’t be a question of words. Maybe what she really needed was a pair of arms to hold her and let her cry it out. Forget it, Elizabeth. She’s dead and you’re raped. Use her curtains for comfort.
She closed the box and took her spoils downstairs. One of the sets fitted the bedroom window perfectly. She had no rail or rod so she nailed them up instead, apologizing to her mother for the brutal little holes created by the hammer (hers, not his, though it still felt strange in her hand).
The kitchen proved more problematic, the remaining lace strips too narrow for the large expanse of the French windows. Here she resorted to a sheet instead, hammering it securely along the wooden frame above so that the glass was completely covered, with a train on the floor. Millie would have to learn to negotiate her way under it to the cat flap.
She was halfway through when the phone on the wall rang, quivering with the noise, like some neurasthenic little animal clinging to a tree. Whomever it was she didn’t want to talk to them. The machine took the call. From the hall she heard a mumble of voices, hers followed by another. She couldn’t make out whose. She returned to the window. In a house across the back gardens something caught her eye, a flash of movement from what might have been a first floor. She grabbed the binoculars and focused fast. The lenses located the movement and it jumped into view—the 3-D vision of a woman pulling back a curtain with a small child clinging to her hip. Right direction, wrong house. She swept the glasses slowly to the left, to a set of first-floor windows that were still closed eyes. She checked above and below. Still no sign of life. From anywhere. But someone must be up, surely? He wouldn’t have the whole house to himself, he wasn’t the sort. She couldn’t imagine him in so much space, saw him more as a man crammed in, head bowed under the weight of life’s ceilings.
She put the binoculars down. Why was she bothering? It was not his style to be out in the day: not enough darkness to hide his inadequacies. Anyway, he had been up all night, too. Probably longer. No, if she was going to keep him in her sights then she would have to follow his pattern: sleep when he slept, wake when he did. Cat rhythm. Why not? Her only responsibility was to the translation of a dozen chapters of Czech and, like the princess with her heaps of straw, she might find the night hours more conducive to spinning them into gold.
She checked the gardens one last time and went upstairs. The bedroom felt good, the lace curtains filtering the winter light, making the room softer, more contained. She took off her robe and slid naked under the covers. She closed her eyes. In her mind the house remained empty. Benign. She didn’t remember falling asleep.
She woke with a start. It was dark and there was wet between her legs, a slow dripping from thigh to sheet. The panic made it hard for her to breathe. She fumbled for the light as she slipped a hand down to her legs.
Her fingers came out red and sticky. She pulled back the covers. There was blood everywhere, caught in her pubic hair, smeared over her thighs, and a fat stain of it soaking into the sheets. The panic turned to jubilation. She was bleeding early, her body joining in the victory, sluicing out all final remains of him, even down to the lining of her womb. There would be no need for doctors or morning-after pills now. She was doing her own healing. She got up and made her way to the bathroom, enjoying the bright threads of blood that ran down the inside of her leg onto the carpet, comforted by her own warmth after the coldness of his sperm.
As she washed and slid the Tampax in she found herself thinking properly of work for the first time in days. She imagined Mirka marooned in her basement cell. How would she cope if the stump of her little finger wasn’t the only blood she had to worry about? You keep a woman kidnapped for long enough and it has to happen. It made her think about how rarely periods featured in books. Could it be that fictional women menstruate less often than real ones? Clarissa, Anna Karenina, Scarlett O’Hara—not a soiled sanitary napkin among them. The few books in which she could remember the heroines bleeding were ones set in convent schools—studies in hothouse guilt where the only acceptable blood was the miraculous kind, transubstantiating from alcohol to plasma in the communion cups.
She stripped the sheets again and scrubbed at the dark spot where the blood had seeped through to the mattress. It reminded her of a smart hotel in Glasgow where she and Tom had been staying once when her period had come early, and she had been too embarrassed to leave the sheet to the chambermaid. Don’t be so uptight, Tom had told her. That’s what they’re paid for: to clean up stains on the beds.
Not this kind of stain, she’d replied, unless, of course, you want them to think of it as a memento of deflowerment. He had laughed. But it had been an unfair jibe. Among the many men she had had in her bed Tom was one of the few who genuinely had no problem being smeared with blood as well as semen.
It wouldn’t have been the same for him, she thought. What would he have done if he had pulled his prick out of her only to find it bleeding? Would the fear of one kind of blood have led him to another? Hammers and nails. Rape and crucifixion—maybe Catholic girls have learned more about life than they realize. The thought of him took her to the window, but she had slept through the day and the semicircle of houses was lit up with a different rhythm: a dozen households eating evening meals and watching flickering TV screens, no telling one window from the next. When she found what she thought must be his it was like all the rest. Lit but impenetrable.
She slid her finger up inside herself, feeling the wad of compressed cotton and the moistness already gathering at its edge. She ran her finger down the glass, leaving a smear on the pane.
“See that,” she said softly into the glass. “My blood’s stronger than your sperm.”
But whether she really believed it or simply needed to hear the sound of her own voice in the night was hard to know.
fifteen
She lowered the printer onto the kitchen table, feeling her back give slightly under the weight. It took her a while to reconnect all the cables—input to output, the right male to the right female—but eventually she cracked it, and the computer hummed to life. The smell of fresh coffee was everywhere. Midnight Thursday an
d she was ready to start work.
It had taken some time to reach this point. The first night had been taken up with the pain and the blood—such a river of it that she began to wonder what exactly it was that her body was rejecting. With one threat gone it allowed her the space to contemplate another. But the twenty-four-hour AIDS hotline told her only what she already knew. If she was infected it would take two months for it to show, and then she would need to come in for a test. What were the chances? Well, that, of course, depended on who he was and where he had been before. Which in turn led her to wonder where he was now. The rest of the night had passed in an orchestration of surveillance: checking the windows, prowling the staircase, alert to every whisper of the floorboards.
So it was that inch by inch, hour by hour, the house became new again, and because even fear dulls when there is nothing to fuel it, and there is a limit to how long one can live on one’s nerves, she began to relax. By the second night, she could discern a rhythm to the hours of darkness—the way the world fell gradually asleep around midnight or one, leaving only the hum of occasional night traffic until even that died away in the dead hours between two and four. At that time you could almost believe that you were alone in the world, that your isolation made you unique, special, and that there was something to be learned from inhabiting the still dark center, a kind of wisdom or calm.
As the familiarity brought comfort she began to feel almost privileged. She checked his window less often and each time she did it was dark. Maybe she had helped him to sleep at night after all.
But not her. She was getting used to it. So it was that on the third evening she climbed the stairs to the attic. And this time it was not the ketchup stains that brought her down again but the more practical fact that the night was colder than the day and the central heating didn’t work so well at the top of the house. So she decided to move. Besides, she thought, as she dismantled the plugs and wrapped up the cables, she was not the only woman being persecuted in this house, and it had begun to feel almost unsisterly leaving Mirka alone and captive while she was doing so much to make herself free.
The room was damp and small, no more than six feet by four, no window or skylight, only a grimy overhead bulb that was kept burning constantly. There was a bucket in one corner and a makeshift iron bed with a thin mattress and a few threadbare blankets.
The woman lay still, the naked light harsh and unflattering to her features. But the fat man wasn’t looking at her face. He had pulled back the cover and was studying the way that sleep had dragged her skirt up over her thighs. He grunted with appreciation. He liked the way women slept when they were drugged—careless, abandoned, as if they were too shagged out to move. Like after sex.
He checked the damaged hand that she was cradling by her side. The dressing was holding and the blood was stanched. No worries there. He was good at his job. Both the hurting and the tending. It was always a surprise to him how the better you do one, the more they need the other. Nobody screams forever. Even in his dreams.
“Keep your hands off her, Christopher.” The voice came from behind the grille high up in the door. “You heard what they said. She’s not like the other one.”
The fat man lifted his head toward the peephole and grimaced. “Not yet, you mean. But what happens when her American husband comes to find her, eh? Then I bet we get to play with both of them.”
He grinned and ran a finger up her thigh toward her crotch. The woman didn’t stir.
Nothing like anticipation, she thought, as she refilled her coffee cup. The perfect mechanism of fear—never letting you rest, always threatening something worse. Except the fat man was enough of a caricature for the reader to understand that whatever goes around comes around, and that there would be a time when the bad guys had better keep their hands on their balls, too. Simple rules of the genre. One good cut deserves another. Not that Mirka would be the one to do the cutting. That was man’s work, of course. How many adjectives could a translator come up with to describe a scream? She’d find out soon enough.
She flicked back the sheet and checked outside. The binoculars tracked over a landscape of darkness. Was he really asleep? Three nights on and no sign. He had listened to what she had said. Or maybe he had recognized the change in her. If fear has a smell, then presumably one also notices the lack of it. She topped off the coffee with a hit of whiskey and went back to the screen. Back in the capital, Jake was waiting, impatient for revenge. Well, she thought, let him wait awhile longer. Now was the season for the women to be awake in the night and find their own voices to put against the men’s. Mirka’s story. All it needed was a little imagination. Chances are, in the hands of a good translator, you probably wouldn’t notice the seams.
In a country of rationing, the jailers were scarcely more comfortable than the jailed. On his camp bed in the corridor the fat man was snoring, his jacket wrapped around him, making up for what the blanket couldn’t cover. His companion stepped over him, peering into the cell through the grille before putting down the tray and unbolting the locks.
She was lying in exactly the same position—back to the door, the damaged hand cradled up by her side. That made five hours without moving. He knew because he checked her regularly. Poor slob. He’d warned Christopher not to give her more than two pills. Christ, they’d be in real trouble if she died on them. No payment then. Better try and wake her up. She’d be pretty hungry by now.
Mirka registered the sound of the key in the door and closed her eyes. In her head the ache of her finger throbbed in time to her pulse. She used her good hand to push the sleeping pills, which she had retrieved from her cheek after the fat man had left her, farther under the pillow.
The first few hours had been the worst. Then the temptation to take them had been almost unbearable. She couldn’t think straight with the pain. But she was more scared of sleep than of agony. Of what they might do to her when she was unconscious. In the end she had found that if she held her hand upward in a certain position against her stomach then the pain lessened, and she could cope with it. So she had lain like that, immobile, face to the wall, willing herself to look at the blood-soaked gauze until the sight of it became almost normal. She was a woman with nine fingers and a stump. And nothing she could do would ever change that fact.
Little fingers. As a child she remembered tales her grandmother had told about how some women were born with the beginnings of a sixth digit on their hands—how it was known as the devil’s teat, the suckling of evil, a mark of a witch in the making, and how, in certain country areas, they were still superstitious enough to have it hacked off at birth.
For years after, she had checked the edges of her hands to see if there was any scar to mark her out as one of them. Even then she knew that she was no witch in the making. Or that if she was, her witchcraft would take on a different physical manifestation.
She had been lovely even as a child—delicate, with honey-colored hair and good bones—but at puberty her beauty had ripened into a voluptuousness so immediate and exotic that it disturbed the peace of the family and brought the local boys, like a pack of dogs, sniffing around the front door.
She knew she could have had whichever one she wanted, and so, of course, she wanted none of them. It wasn’t that she was cruel, simply that she didn’t know what else to do. All she knew was that she yearned for something better. Even then she had an idea as to how to get it. While her friends contented themselves with shop jobs or secretarial posts in local government, she slaved away over inadequate English books, turning down dates in favor of extra study and evenings spent in the company of short wave American and British radio: the language of cultural propaganda but still more subtle than the type she was used to.
Finally, in her early twenties, she used her uncle’s connections as a Party member and a bureaucrat in the Foreign Office to get herself a visa for a holiday to America. If she’d given it a few more years, history would have done it for her, but she was not to know that, and anyway, h
ad she waited, she and Jake would never have found themselves on the same express subway train heading downtown from Eighty-sixth Street.
He had been off duty at the time, sitting reading a newspaper, some punk had started bothering her, picking up on her funny accent, offering to show her the sights and not taking no for an answer. Jake stepped in and set him straight.
He was different right from the start—older, colder, his control marking him out as a professional in a man’s world. He was so at odds with the notion of chivalry that once he had saved her he seemed not to notice her further. It was this apparent indifference, of course, that made him so irresistible.
In the end it was she who had told him that she needed a drink, allowing herself to take hold of his arm as he propelled her out of the car and up the steamy subway steps. During that first date he reminded her of a dozen clean-cut American movie stars she had seen on flickering screens—traditional tough guys who didn’t whine or pout when they didn’t get what they wanted but simply went out and took it. It was such a recognizable fantasy that she immediately took his dislocation for strength. It was only later that she realized it was based on other things—fear, repressed anger, and the seeing of too many unseeable things. But by then she was already in love, as much with the idea of being his savior as with the man himself (another myth from another movie), and she had thrown off everything to stand by her man.