by Lori Lansens
Ruby and I were served last, and after all the men had picked up their spoons, Uncle Stash nodded that we should begin too. It was then we saw that although we’d each been given a spoon, there was only one bowl, and we were meant to share it. I whispered to Ruby to swallow her humiliation and just eat the halushki, which was less oily than Aunt Lovey’s, saltier and creamier, made with fresh curd instead of cottage cheese.
The stone house was quiet but for the clanging of forks and gnashing of teeth as Uncle Stash and the other men pulverized their dumplings and started in on fat slices of pear strudel the women set before them. I just happened to be watching when Uncle Stash put down his fork. I froze as his hand moved slowly to his chest. His heart, I thought, and couldn’t breathe. But he thumped himself and belched, picked up his fork, and went back to his dessert.
There were footsteps on the stones outside. All eyes turned to watch the door swing open to the night and two men swept in by the wind, carrying three heavy sacks apiece. One of the men was very old and stooped, his teeth broken and black where he had any at all. The other man was young, our age, dark and handsome, with long eyelashes and groomed stubble. The men were shocked to see all the relations in the house, but too weary to wonder why we were there. Perhaps they’d forgotten it was St. Katarina’s or thought it was Christmas all over again.
The old man’s eyesight must have been poor because he did not spot Ruby and me right off. The young man did, though. And stared—boldly.
Seeing the old man with the black teeth, Uncle Stash turned pale. He rose, scraping back his chair, and went to the door.
“Who are you?” asked the stooped old man in Slovak.
Uncle Stash didn’t speak right away, and I wondered if he’d lost his voice again. Then I saw that, this time, he was choked with emotion. “I’m Stanislaus,” he said, but the old man was hard of hearing.
In the kitchen, Cousin Velika made the sign of the cross as Zuza wept into her apron.
“You know me?” the old man asked doubtfully.
“Yes, Marek. I know you.” Uncle Stash put a hand on the old man’s sloped shoulder. “It’s me,” Uncle Stash said. “Stanislaus.”
I could wonder what Uncle Stash’s work as a butcher had done to his psyche, but I could see what the mines had done to Marek. Cousin Marek shook his head, looking around the room, searching faces for the prankster responsible for this elaborate and unfunny joke.
“It’s me,” Uncle Stash insisted. “Stanislaus Darlensky.”
“Stanislaus?” Marek said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Stash,” he whispered, and could say no more.
And then it was Uncle Stash’s turn to introduce Ruby and me.
Ordinarily Ruby and I like to rise, to look people in the eye, but I was utterly exhausted from the climb up the hill and found my legs unwilling. We waited, as Cousin Marek looked from Ruby to me, then made his way across the room to the table where we sat. He kissed the top of my head, and the top of Ruby’s, which was both sweet and mortifying.
“He said, ‘God bless you girls,’” Uncle Stash translated. “And welcome to Grozovo.”
Marek pushed his grandson forward. “Jerzy,” he said.
Jerzy was our age but looked and seemed like a man. Ruby shivered and I swallowed as gorgeous Jerzy, sexy Jerzy, Cousin Jerzy moved toward us. Ruby and I were afraid that Jerzy would touch our heads the way Cousin Marek had just done, and if he did we would die of humiliation. (I believe that’s possible.) He didn’t. And he didn’t smile either, which made me trust him.
“Hello,” Jerzy said.
“Hi.”
“How you are?” he queried.
“Good,” I said. “And you?”
“Fine. And you?”
“Good. And you?”
“Good. And you?”
It hit me that we were speaking English together, and I felt giddy at the prospect of a conversation with someone outside my immediate family.
“You come from America?” he asked, licking his lower lip, unintentionally lurid.
“Canada,” Ruby piped up. “Everyone here gets that wrong.”
“Everyone?”
“Yeah.”
“Everyone? You know all Slovaks?”
Ruby giggled.
“What is different? Canada. America.” He shrugged. His accent was thick, his voice smooth. “What is different, tell me?”
Ruby giggled again. The giggle that says “Don’t ask me questions. I’m just here for show.” “Well—what’s the difference between night and day?” she trilled.
“Day is light. Night is dark,” Jerzy answered confidently.
“What’s the difference between you and the Czechs?” I shot.
Jerzy laughed, then paused to consider. “It’s different the Slovaks and Czechs,” he said slowly, then shrugged. “It’s different.”
“Same for Americans and Canadians.”
“This comes from America,” Jerzy said, yanking back his sweater sleeve to show the diamond-encrusted Rolex watch on his wrist.
“Wow,” I said.
“Is it real?” Ruby asked.
Jerzy laughed, pressing a tiny button to illuminate the time. “Of course! How I should know time?”
“That’s not what she meant,” I said.
Jerzy looked back and forth from Ruby to me. “You think what she thinks?” (I thought he was asking me.)
“No,” Ruby and I said at once, then, to each other, like a freak show, we added in unison, “He was asking me.”
Jerzy laughed. “You are hilarious twins. You come on the airplane?” he asked. Then, “You want slivovitz? My grandpa doesn’t mind if I take.”
“How old are you?” Ruby asked.
“Seventeen. How old you are?” Jerzy asked.
“Nineteen,” I answered.
“And you?” he asked Ruby.
“I’m the same.” She giggled. “We’re twins!”
“I know,” Jerzy said blankly. “Is joke.”
We were aware that it was creepy to have a crush on your cousin, even if he was thrice removed and not even a blood relative to begin with, but we didn’t even try to resist Cousin Jerzy.
Jerzy went to pour slivovitz for himself, posturing, aware of our watching eyes. Ruby kept asking, “Is he coming back? Is he coming back?” I was annoyed with her for being so eager, though I wanted the same thing. Jerzy poured a shot of liquor and was coming back toward us, when he was suddenly seized by the hairless man we had seen before at the church. The hairless man pulled Jerzy apart from the crowd, and after a short conversation, the two fled the house without a word of good-bye or a backward glance to Ruby or me. I watched the door for the rest of the night, hoping Cousin Jerzy would return.
(I regret now that my preoccupation with Jerzy cost me my observation of Uncle Stash and his reunion with Cousin Marek. Cousin Marek must have seen his life flash before his eyes when he saw Uncle Stash standing there. The life that he almost lived.) There were many visitors, and each time the door was opened, Ruby and I hoped it was Jerzy, but it was only this neighbor or that, coming to glimpse the “join-together girls.”
Very late, Uncle Stash and Cousin Marek sequestered themselves in a corner near the fire, stoking a political discussion. At least Aunt Lovey said it was political. “People here get passionate about politics,” Aunt Lovey said. (Aren’t people everywhere passionate about politics?) Cousin Marek slammed his hand on the table. Uncle Stash shouted over the top of the banging. Cousin Zuza put the slivovitz away. And soon it was time for bed.
Cousin Velika led us to our sleeping quarters, an unused shed at the rear of the main house, lighting the way with an oil lamp. I could smell the goats that were kept in a small barn fifty yards away. Inside the little shed, which was stone and mortar and drafty like the house, we found four cots, two of them pushed together to accommodate Ruby and me. The cots were plump feather-filled beds, which made Aunt Lovey recall how the mattresses were filled with dry corn husks when she was a child on the
farm. “We would have given anything for feathers,” she sighed.
“Sleep well,” Velika said in careful English, taking the lamp and its light.
“Dobru noc,” Ruby said.
Ruby fell asleep right away, but I stayed awake, listening to Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash whisper. I couldn’t hear a word they said, but I suspected they were talking about Marek. Uncle Stash sounded regretful, Aunt Lovey sympathetic. Uncle Stash started coughing and had to sit up. I could hear Aunt Lovey in the dark, thumping on his back. I pretended to be asleep. Ruby really was.
When the coughing fit had passed and Uncle Stash was horizontal again, I heard him whisper, “You.”
And I heard Aunt Lovey whisper back, “You.”
I felt the stiff breeze from a hole in the wall and reached out instinctively to make sure Ruby’s legs were covered. I touched Ruby’s earlobe, our version of “You,” and wished she was awake to touch mine.
I couldn’t guess how long I had been asleep, or what time it was, when I felt a finger prodding my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see light flickering from the oil lamp left outside the shed door. I glanced at the cots beside us and saw in the flickering light that Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash were still deeply asleep, groaning and snoring, respectively.
I could hear someone moving in the shed but couldn’t see who it was or guess who it might be.
“Cousin Velika?” I whispered. “Cousin Zuza?”
“Shh!” came the reply.
Then Cousin Jerzy moved into my periphery. “Be quiet,” he said. “Don’t wake them.”
I liked his concern for Uncle Stash and Aunt Lovey. “Why are you here?” I asked in a whisper.
“Shh. Wake your sister. Can you wake her?”
I pulled on the skin of Ruby’s abdomen. Pinching just enough to get her attention. She opened her eyes, groggy and confused, to find our handsome cousin hunched over our pushed-together cots.
“It’s me, Ruby,” Jerzy said.
“Hi,” Ruby squeaked.
“Shh,” I whispered. “Don’t wake up Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash.”
“Okay.”
“You want to have adventure?” Cousin Jerzy asked.
“Yes,” Ruby and I said together, then pinched each other, like we do.
“Come with me,” Cousin Jerzy whispered, offering both arms to help us rise from the cot.
“Okay,” I said too quickly.
Cousin Jerzy helped Ruby and me off the cots, comfortable handling our conjoined proportions, as if he’d known us all our lives. He’d already found our coats in the darkness and was helping us into them as he hustled us outside.
“It’s good adventure,” Jerzy encouraged as he led us down the black path.
“My shoes,” I said, realizing I was wearing the pink wool slippers with the pom-poms that Nonna’d made Ruby and me for the trip.
Jerzy hushed me, hurrying us down the muddy lane. “It’s our secret, this. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ruby said. But I knew Ruby, and I knew that she was already having reservations about this “good adventure.” She pulled at me, and I stopped. “Maybe we shouldn’t,” she said.
“We should!” Jerzy said. He pressed the button on his wristwatch to see the time. As if to confirm, he looked up at the moon. “Hurry,” he whispered. “Let’s go.”
“I don’t think so,” Ruby said.
“You don’t like adventure?” Jerzy asked accusingly.
“Yes, we do,” I answered. “Yes, we do, Ruby.”
“Well, what kind of adventure?” Ruby asked.
“Secret adventure.”
“Maybe we better ask Aunt Lovey and Uncle Stash,” Ruby said.
“Oh,” Jerzy said sneeringly. “I understand. You are grown-up girls, but you are like little girls. I understand.”
“No, we’re not,” I protested, suddenly eager for this good secret adventure Jerzy was promising us. We were nearly twenty years old. We were not children. We were not.
“Let’s go! Prosim, let’s go,” Jerzy said, clapping his hands.
“All right,” Ruby said with sudden daring, “let’s go.”
I saw a glint of metal on the road ahead but didn’t make out that it was a truck until we were close enough to smell fuel. Jerzy rushed us toward the truck, opened the door, and helped us climb in the passenger side. I arranged Ruby beside me in the darkness, startled to feel the heat of a body at the wheel. I shrieked in surprise, because I hadn’t seen the driver inside. I looked out the corner of my eye but could not make out the person’s face in the dark.
“Wait for me,” Jerzy said to the unseen driver. “I have to get her shoes.”
My feet were freezing in the wool slippers.
Our cousin disappeared. The driver, grunting words in Slovak that we didn’t understand, turned the key in the ignition and jammed on the gas. In the faint green glow of the old truck’s dashboard, I strained to see his face. The outline of his profile became clear, and I shuddered to see that it was the bearded man whose pregnant wife had touched our heads and fainted on the steps of the church.
I nearly fainted myself.
“Rosie?” Ruby whispered.
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Where’s Jerzy?”
“He’s getting my shoes.”
“But why’d we leave without him?”
“Maybe he’s coming in his own car,” I offered.
The headlights on the truck were so sharp and low they seemed to slice the road. The man was breathing through his nose like a bull, wet and rattly. As we careened down the hill with the bearded man at the wheel, the story began to crystallize for me, as in a work of fiction, when you realize there’s only one direction for it to go. I saw with perfect clarity the events leading us all to this place, and saw in my crystal ball what would happen next.
The bearded man had taken his poor young wife home after church, where she’d gone into labor and died giving birth to their stillborn baby boy. Now, with his present gone, his future not to be, he wanted revenge on Ruby and me. I busied myself with the next plot point in the mystery to ease my panic, glad that Ruby had not seen the driver and didn’t know it was the bearded man. I did not know how to tell my sister that we were about to die.
The driver jammed on the gas pedal again, muttering. The woods were so black we might have been traveling in space. My feet were frozen. We made a sharp turn down another road. I clung to the dashboard and Ruby clung to me as we rocked over potholes, the back tires skidding in mud.
The moon appeared from behind a blanket of clouds, bathing the dense forest in its glow. I wondered if the bearded man would leave us in the forest to die or kill us right away. I didn’t know what to root for. I felt the truck begin to slow down. The driver turned down another road, at the end of which was a short stone house where burned a single oil lamp in the small front window.
The bearded man brought the truck to a stop in front of the stone house.
“Whose house is this, Rose?”
“Shh,” I said, and could say no more, as the driver had disappeared from his place beside me and reappeared at the passenger door. Ruby saw him full face in the moonlight. He must have resembled a demon. “Rose?” she choked.
“Don’t be scared. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“You’re not alone.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t be afraid.”
“Okay.”
I felt Ruby reach for my ear as the man grabbed at us, unsure which one of us he should be holding to expedite our removal from the truck.
We made our way to the house. Beside us the bearded man’s heavy boots made no sound at all, while in my pom-pom slippers I clomped and lurched down the pebbled path with my sister on my hip, feeling every inch the monster I saw in his eyes.
The man opened the door and guided us inside, not roughly, but not gently. There was a faint smell of ammonia. The interior of the cottage looked much like Velika and Zuza’s home, except that this house had anot
her room, with its door ajar, and there a second lamp was burning. No movement or sound therein.
I felt that I might vomit and considered backing out the door. The bearded man came around from behind us, standing directly in front of Ruby and me. Without a weapon in his hands. I wondered if he planned to strangle us or pummel us to death with his huge hands. Instead, he just regarded us, looking from my face to Ruby’s, in the ping-pong style to which we’ve grown accustomed.
When the door to the second room creaked open, we all turned to find the hairless man from the church standing there in silhouette. The hairless man was the connection to Cousin Jerzy, who’d given us up for slaughter. I shouldn’t have been surprised to see him there, but I was.
The hairless man took a long look at Ruby and me before whispering something in Slovak to the bearded man.
The bearded man nodded slowly and pushed us toward the room, where we could see a bed. And in the bed, a body.
“Oh my God,” I heard myself say.
“Is she dead?” Ruby whimpered, recognizing that it was the pregnant woman from the church.
I stopped at the edge of the bed, nearly weeping with relief when I saw the woman’s toe wiggle beneath the blanket. I would have been glad to see her open her eyes, but she appeared to be sleeping very deeply.
“She’s not dead,” I breathed, as if I’d brought her back to life myself.
Then Ruby saw what I only heard—a mewling sound—so tiny it might have been a newborn kitten or a fallen baby bird. Ruby urged me to turn so I could see, in the faint glow of the oil lamp, two babies swaddled tightly in soft cotton blankets, placed side by side in an old wooden cradle, both plush and pink and very much alive.
The babies could not have been five pounds each. (“My mother made a bigger roast for Sunday dinner,” Aunt Lovey used to say about the preemies at St. Jude’s. I found her choice of comparison rather curious.)
“Twins,” I breathed.
“Oh my God,” Ruby said. “Oh my God. Do they think she had twins because of us?”
“I guess,” I answered slowly.
“But that’s a good thing, right?”
The bearded man, when we found his face, did not smile at us or look at us with any expression I understood. He gestured at his friend (or brother?), the hairless man, and together they lifted the babies from the cradle.