A Million Drops

by Victor del Arbol

  He gagged just thinking about it. But still, he thought about it. And he knew. Knew that when the time came, he’d do it. She seemed to sense this and pulled away, determined to live.

  The afternoon was scorching hot, the landscape turning scarlet. And when, miraculously, a breeze came along and scared off the cloud of mosquitoes buzzing all around him, Elías felt a slight ray of hope. One night he managed to catch a rat in his bare hands. He crushed its head under a rock and skinned it with a piece of flint. After dismembering it with his teeth, he softened it in his mouth until he’d formed a pinkish paste, which he forced Anna to swallow. Then, desperate in his thirst, he drank a bit of water from a natural well and spent the following two days shitting in his pants. Elías didn’t even bother to stop, simply letting the liquid run down his legs and behind him like a watery trail of death.

  The worst night came after countless others on his endless march; time loses all meaning when there is nothing to mark it. It had been raining for hours, and Elías wrung out every drop of water from his clothing, drinking it himself or giving it to Anna. The little girl began to shiver, her eyes feverish, teeth chattering so hard it was as if they might shatter; the sound of it drove him to distraction. He hugged her to his body, trying to warm her. Anna’s face had become almost transparent, veins snaking beneath her skin. The girl’s lips were horrifically swollen and purple, the same color as the bags under her eyes and the spots that had appeared on her neck. She would die that night. Elías sensed it when he rested a palm on her chest and felt her heartbeat growing weaker.

  He didn’t want her to die, and yet at the same time he wanted nothing more. For her sake, for his. For both of them. He kissed her forehead and brushed her filthy hair out of her face, stroking her gently. A hand placed over her mouth and nose, that was all it would take. No need to press hard; he’d simply leave them there until she gave a little shudder and stopped breathing. It would be over so fast she wouldn’t even realize…He wanted to, but then couldn’t, not yet. Elías wasn’t going to be the one to make that call. So he resolved to wait, not moving from the small crag he’d found by a hill. He would stay there with her, waiting motionless, for as long as it took.

  At some point Elías drifted off and had horrific, twisted nightmares. It was impossible to tell if he was awake or asleep in this perverted jumble of things real and invented: Irina and his father; Claude, pointing at him with amputated fingers; Igor holding his skewered eyeball on a stick, laughing; the detention center and that guard, offering him a huge glass of water with worms floating on the surface. And Irina, reading her poem, eyes full of seaweed. In his dream Elías killed, died, came back to life, gnawed on Anna’s bones, vomited them up, and ate them again.

  He opened his eye and blinked at the sky, filled with stars that changed position every night. For a few seconds he wasn’t sure whether he was still dreaming, but he heard an animal snarl, a throaty sound and then teeth, snapping. He reached out a hand and touched the space where Anna’s body—perhaps already dead, cold—should have been. But all he felt was a paw, slipping from his fingers. He turned his head slowly and saw a small gray wolf, straggly and sick looking, attempting to drag the girl’s body off, its fangs clamped on one arm as it backed furtively away, like a fox in a chicken coop.

  Elías felt around without taking his eyes from the wolf, which had raised its hackles upon being discovered, separating its front paws, ears pressed back. Elías grabbed a stone the size of a hand grenade. Not big enough to do any good, but he stood up regardless, prepared to fight for Anna. For her life, or his dinner? It didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to let that wolf carry her off. He’d never seen a wolf before, and this one looked like it was in bad shape, didn’t even seem to be in its natural habitat. The animal was as disconcerted as he was, but Elías realized that one stone against that wolf’s yellow teeth would do nothing. He was going to lose, and he knew it.

  He raised his arms and shouted, as though this was the way to scare off all wild animals, but the wolf stepped forward, lip raised in a snarl, growling angrily. Had it been a dog, it would have barked, but wolves don’t bark. They give no warning. They attack. Suddenly. The animal pounced on Elías, downing him. Immediately it went for the jugular, but Elías whipped to the side and instead its teeth sank into his forearm. The animal’s legs tangled around his own in a frenzied dance; with his left hand, he punched its side with the rock but the animal hardly even registered the blow.

  Then came the sound of a shot. The wolf flew into the air with a plaintive yelp and landed on Elías, body facing the direction the shot had come from. It had been hit and was bleeding, a trail of red coming from its hindquarters. Undaunted, the animal backed up and then turned and slunk away, limping into the darkness.

  Elías sat up—clutching his wounded forearm, still in shock—and saw two silhouettes at his feet. One unsteadily gripped the revolver that had been fired. The other was bent over Anna.

  “She’s alive.”

  “Give her some water.”

  Elías recognized the voices before he saw their faces. Michael and Martin.

  Michael approached Elías and held his gaze, not saying a word. Still gripping the pistol. He didn’t look like himself, but then, none of them looked like themselves. He wore no expression, like a ghost that had come out of nowhere and with a snap of the fingers might disappear once more. He tucked the revolver into his trousers and looked at Elías’s forearm.

  “Those teeth cut like a saw. We’ve been following that wolf for a week, and it keeps getting away. At least this time I hit it. Maybe tonight we’ll have a good dinner; it can’t have gotten far. Look at us—house dogs gone feral, chasing a wolf. The world’s gone crazy.” Michael’s eyes were like a river, almost frozen. He took out a cigarette—Elías’s jaw dropped in awe—and lit it. After a long puff, he smiled, a magician who’s astounded his audience with a trick.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything? We just saved your life.”

  Elías watched Martin with Anna. He was rocking the unconscious girl in his arms and holding the canteen to her lips. Clean fresh water dribbled down her chin. Elías’s throat gurgled like a clogged pipe.

  “Where did you come from?” he asked, as though they were demons from hell.

  “The same place as you,” Michael replied. Elías’s eyes searched for signs of Igor Stern and his gang. No doubt they were hiding, watching the scene unfold in amusement.

  “He’s not here,” Michael said, “but he can’t be far and I bet he’s pretty mad. We stole half his provisions. I have the pistol I took off that commander, but there are only three bullets left and at least five of them—provided they haven’t eaten anyone else. When we left the island, we were eight. A young kid from Kursk was with us. Poor guy, the only thing he did to get sent here was sleep with the daughter of a tank commander. He was the first one Igor and his pack of wolves devoured. They’re voracious, so when they started giving Martin strange looks we decided it was time to strike out on our own.” There wasn’t the slightest hint of sarcasm or humor in his words, no trace of emotion. “We’ll probably all end up dead, but not like that.”

  Elías looked away in shame. Michael noticed, glanced over at the girl in Martin’s arms and understood, but made no comment. He passed Elías the cigarette and let him smoke. Each of them had to survive as best he could.

  Two days later they came upon the wolf. It was limping, some two hundred yards ahead of them. Seen from the distance it looked like a drunk, lurching around unable to keep its balance. Michael shouted with joy, but none of them wasted energy running after it. All they had to do was wait. On the fourth night, the animal collapsed. Michael pulled out a knife and plunged it deep into the wolf’s neck.

  “They say dog meat is salty, but it’s not bad if you roast it long enough. Besides, we’ve all eaten worse things than this by now.”

  The three men laughed—hysterical laughter, a
dark malicious humor that made Anna blink, wide-eyed in shock and bafflement. Still, it was thanks to Martin’s care and ministrations that she seemed to have come back to life.

  Maybe it wasn’t so bad, after all. From the sky above, anyone looking down would have seen a weak fire in the middle of an immense expanse of nothing, a group of humans gathered around it as if the flames would keep them safe. And a few miles back, advancing in the night, a pack of two-footed wolves, human wolves sniffing the air and tracking the scent of burned meat. Life, from a distance, must have looked fragile and volatile, a series of flukes and misfortunes over which men had no control. Erratic figures, like shooting stars, flames that burned bright and then a second later disappeared, without a trace of the light that had shone in the dark.

  But men were not stars. They had beating hearts. The three of them said nothing of what troubled them, knowing that their words were clumsy and insufficient, and hid their differences behind silence because their lives were at stake. If the glances they exchanged contained resentment or accusation, they pushed it aside and focused instead on the hypnotic flames of the fire. And at dawn they set off once more, knowing that although destiny was not in their hands, they wouldn’t give up without a fight. Because fight was all they had left. They had no cause. They’d fight God and Mother Nature and themselves. Until they fell, exhausted or starving. And then, finally, it would all make sense.

  They’d left the wolf’s remains behind, its guts must have desiccated weeks ago. Martin walked ahead, with Elías. The three men took turns carrying Anna, and it was Michael’s turn. With his short, stocky legs he looked like a midget in the mines. He ambled behind them, the girl hoisted over his shoulders.

  “Michael has really taken to the girl,” Martin said. He was looking out at nothing in particular. Anything to avoid Elías’s eyes. This was the first time they’d spoken alone together since they’d met up. “I think he’s determined to get her out of here alive because he feels guilty about all the things he’s done since our deportation—and before it. For having signed that false confession against you. Saving her is like his form of redemption. Do you think it’s possible? Redemption? Do good deeds erase the bad?”

  Elías gave a wry smile, as though laughing at a private joke or something he’d just remembered.

  “What I think, Martin, is that everything we do is branded into us forever. It doesn’t matter how we behave in the future; what we’ve done here will be with us for the rest of our lives. But I’m no priest. Maybe, when we get out of here, if we bathe in the baptismal font we’ll see the light.”

  He thought of Claude and his dismal gray death on a filthy barge beached on a hellacious island. He thought of his friends, who’d done nothing to help him. And he knew that none of those thoughts were of any use at the moment.

  And then a miracle occurred. It wasn’t a burning bush or the parting of the waters beneath their feet. Their miracle came in the form of a post in the ground, a crow perched on top of it, observing them from twenty-five feet up. Then it flew to the next post, a hundred yards away, and the next one after that. Posts, every hundred yards, for as far as the eye could see. Posts that had been put there by men and would one day bring electricity or telegraph or telephone lines to a place where people lived.

  How long had it been? None of them knew. But they’d reached the fringes of the world, like shipwrecked sailors heaved onto a beach. They had no idea where they were, but they were somewhere. Even the swarms of mosquitoes stopped attacking and buzzed off in a black cloud when they crossed this invisible border, the first explorers there to settle an uncharted territory.

  But Igor Stern crossed the border, too, and he was less than a day behind.

  For a second, Elías stopped speaking. He spread his hands on the table, as though expecting someone to rescue him. But the only ones there were the girl who looked after him, Instructor Velichko, and his assistant Srolov. Aware of the cold, aware of the present moment, he pulled his reddened fingers back. Then Elías stood and walked around the room a few times. He stopped before a small portrait of Stalin in dress uniform, embracing a young Georgian girl. The Father of the Soviet Socialist Republics. The great khoziain, loving father of the people.

  He closed his eye and thought of the last night he’d seen Anna. In his mind, he brushed the hair from her forehead, stroked her face. Elías asked her to put on the locket; he wanted to see it glimmering on her little chest, which had so many times almost stopped breathing. The girl tilted her head over his shoulder, and for the first time he saw something that looked close to a smile. The locket gleamed, clean and beautiful on her dirty skin. She looked like a princess out of the kind of novel his father used to read. A real Russian princess.

  “So have you seen many princesses around here?” Irina had once asked when, after making love, he compared her to a Gorky character.

  “Yes. Every time I see you.”

  “With your one eye?”

  Elías took off his patch. He not only let her see the empty socket but placed her fingers on the amorphous flesh. She felt blood coursing through the cavity despite his blindness.

  “Sometimes I dream that this is all going to end,” she said, taking her hand away.

  “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  “Yes, there is.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because then I wake up and I’m still here.”

  “But I’m going to get you out. Some French postal service pilot is going to appear in his little biplane and fly us out.”

  “If that dream ever turns into a reality, take my daughter with you. Promise me.”

  And he promised.

  He turned back to Velichko with the locket in his hand.

  “We came from someplace, we have a past, a place where we were happy. That’s what counts. With that, we can make new lives for ourselves…That’s what Irina used to say. Do you believe it?”

  14

  BARCELONA, SEPTEMBER 2002

  Gonzalo checked the address on the business card Luisa had given him one more time:

  Tania Akhmatova, Photographer

  Calle Molino Nuevo 12, ground floor

  What he saw before him, however, was not a photography studio but a little bookshop: KARAMAZOV BOOKSTORE was painted on the faded awning. Despite its unexceptional appearance, the shop was bright and spacious inside. There was a center table stacked with new releases, a few—not many—sporting little blue cards on the cover reading “Store recommendation.” To the right was the cash register, and behind that a small area selling stationery. The rest of the space, essentially a long hall with a wider area in the back and a wooden staircase leading up to a second floor, was lined with white shelves, all full of books. The largest section was dedicated entirely to nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature, with volumes carefully organized by size, edition, author, and subject. On one wall hung an enormous lithograph of Dostoyevsky. Strategically placed around the room were several small wicker armchairs and low tables with flowers and literary journals. The place smelled clean and orderly. Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain played softly in the background, a strident mix of chamber virtuosity and folk music.

  A pair of red shoes appeared on the staircase at the end of the hall. These were followed by two very white ankles covered in tiny blue veins and a flouncy skirt in multiple shades of orange. A hand, encircled by bright chunky bracelets, slid along the banister. It was a pianist’s hand, though the nails were too long to play.

  “Can I help you?”

  Gonzalo stared in surprise at the old woman on the top step, her head slightly bowed so as not to hit the suspended ceiling. She wasn’t exactly small but was somehow slight, as if her body had withdrawn inside a gauzy white blouse that matched her skin. She wore a touch of makeup and had liquid blue eyes that looked almost gray and were hidden behind stylish glasses attached to a l
ittle leather cord. Her hair—very white, short, elegantly cut with frizzy bangs—shone like a bright smile. She could have been a hundred years old, but Gonzalo got the sense she’d just been born into the world. He got a warm, familiar feeling, reminiscent of afternoons spent by the fire, eyes closed listening to Mussorgsky, or reading Chekhov with a cup of tea.

  “I was looking for Tania Akhmatova’s photography studio, but I must have made a mistake.”

  The old woman approached nimbly, shoulders curved forward as though she had a permanent chill, and she eyed the new arrival inquisitively, with a vague sense of recognition, almost inviting him to have a seat in one of the armchairs and tell her about his life. She was the sort of person who makes you sure nothing bad can happen when she’s around.

  The sense that he knew her, that the whole atmosphere was vaguely familiar, grew stronger when he got a faint whiff of her jasmine perfume and heard the gentle swish of her skirt.

  “What makes you think you made a mistake? Isn’t that what her card says?”

  The woman’s comment disconcerted Gonzalo, as did her rapid-fire laugh. It was as if she were teasing him, or perhaps just laughing at some inside joke.

  “Is she expecting you?”

  Gonzalo told her that she wasn’t. Again the mischievous little laugh, which made her face crinkle delightfully. She must once have been breathtakingly beautiful, and in a way, she still was.

  “Tania’s studio is upstairs. Go on up, and if the red light above the door is on, then knock first, and wait. Tania doesn’t like surprise visits.”

  The red light was on. Gonzalo knocked and waited. After a few minutes he heard footsteps and the door opened. Tania blinked as though emerging from the dark into a bright sunny day, momentarily blinded.