Along the Infinite Sea

by Beatriz Williams

  “So,” he said. “It seems the good Johann has let us both go.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  “On the contrary. It is the only possible reason I am lying here in this bed next to you and my son. I wonder whether he has discovered a tender spot for me after all, or whether I owe all this to his love for you.”

  I seized Stefan’s hand. “He doesn’t love me, not the way you do. Not the way I love you. He loves me as an object, as an ornament. As a substitute for his first wife.”

  “No, he is very much in love with you for yourself, Annabelle, and I have never blamed him for that. I am guilty of the same crime.”

  I laid my head next to his on the pillow and stared at the white scar that trailed down the side of his face. “What have they done to you?” I whispered.

  “My dear and innocent love. You do not really want to know.”

  9.

  I brought my cot into Stefan’s room and slept with Florian there, so we could be a family. By the next day, Stefan was taking a few steps out of bed. He went to the window first, and looked across the autumn trees to the distant lake. “I presume we are on the German side still,” he said.

  “Yes. I didn’t dare cross over while you were unconscious, and anyway, Matthias said it would be better to wait a few weeks, until the alarm fades. But I have papers for you. We can cross whenever you like. Or we can take our chances with a boat on the lake, but Matthias says it’s risky, there are guards everywhere these days.”

  “Very wise of Matthias.”

  For some reason, he looked taller in his new gauntness. His wide and fleshless shoulders stuck out like the arms of a clothes hanger. I hadn’t shaved him, and his beard bristled from his chin. I put my arms around his waist. “We’ll go to Monte Carlo and take the Isolde to Capri. We’ll have our vineyard at last. We’ll give Florian a sister and a brother and teach them how to press the grapes and the olives.”

  “This is a tempting picture.”

  “It’s our picture, and it will be real. I’m going to drown you with my love, Stefan, and make you all better.”

  He braced one hand against the windowsill. “I had better return to bed, then, and get my rest.”

  10.

  The weather continued warm. Back in America, they would have called it an Indian summer, but here in the Alpine foothills it was just a pleasant warm autumn, crisp in the mornings, bright with foliage. After a few days, I brought Stefan outside, where he played with Florian on the lawn. I told Florian not to be rough, that Stefan had been very sick and needed his strength.

  “What have you told him?” Stefan asked, lighting a cigarette as Florian went off to play with the croquet set he’d unearthed in the shed.

  “Nothing, yet. He was very fond of Johann. I don’t want to confuse him, and anyway, if we tell him you’re his father instead, he might resent you. We’ll know when the time is right.”

  “You are a good mother.”

  “You’ll make a wonderful pair, once you get to know each other.”

  “I already know him. I know him like I know my own palm. Whether he will appreciate me is another matter.” He lay back on the grass and stared at the blue sky. “It is a lovely autumn.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  I lay back next to him and took his hand.

  “Thank you for my son,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  11.

  Matthias Himmelfarb’s summer house was not especially large, but it was comfortable and well loved, smelling of pine and a hint of camphor against the moths. There were four bedrooms upstairs—we slept in the largest one—and two ancient bathrooms, one of which connected to the master bedroom. Downstairs, there was a kitchen and an informal dining room, a living room, a small library, and a sunroom. A pair of small bedrooms communicated with the kitchen, for the use of the maids. They were both empty, of course, and twice a week I took the car into the village and collected groceries, which I cooked myself, not very expertly. Eat, I told Stefan, and he ate, but as a matter of duty, not because he was hungry.

  You don’t understand, he told me. I do not know what to do with a large meal anymore.

  I threatened to hire a cook if he didn’t eat more, and so he did eat more, mouthful after mouthful, a forced march of nutrition. His face filled out a little. One evening he asked if there was any wine, so I brought back a few bottles from the village the next day, and we drank them both together that evening, after Florian was in bed, and promptly fell asleep on the sofa. When I woke up, he was gone.

  I sat up in panic, but he was only standing by the window, staring at the lake, which was pregnant with a whole silver moon. You frightened me, running off like that, I said, and he told me not to worry; he couldn’t sleep, that was all.

  “Why not?”

  “There is too much in my head now, love.”

  “Then push it out. Let me inside instead. I can make you sleep.”

  “Ah, Annabelle.”

  We stood next to the silver window, staring and staring.

  “You are such a fool, Annabelle. You should have stayed with him.”

  “What are you talking about? I couldn’t stay with him.”

  “You deserve better than me. I smoke and drink and fornicate, all to excess.”

  “Yes, but only with me. Our covenant, remember?”

  “Yes, I remember. And all this time, I have been true to this covenant and its commandments. Can you believe that?” He laughed. “But then I have not had much opportunity, and we have seen how little I am to be trusted with a beautiful woman.”

  “Only with me. You can’t be trusted with me.”

  He sighed, as if acknowledging a religious truth. “Only with you, Mademoiselle. If that is what you want from me.”

  I knelt before him and pulled the drawstring of his pajamas.

  This is what I want from you.

  Annabelle, no, he said, but his hands went to my hair and he leaned back against the window with a sigh that was more like a groan. After a moment, he whispered, You have not ever done this thing before, have you?

  I said I hadn’t, that he would have to show me what to do.

  Ah, no, you will kill me, he said, but his hands were already guiding me, his bony hips were already moving in rhythm with me, and it was like the dream I had, the first night I spent in his bed, except that the adulterous woman kneeling between his legs at the window, enjoying the clutch of his fingers in her dark hair, was me. Was Annabelle von Kleist.

  He lasted only a minute or two, and when he finished, he could not stop shuddering. He sank onto the hard floor with me and wept into my hair, and we didn’t say anything. Not a single word. Just holding each other, until we fell asleep.

  12.

  I woke up the next morning in bed, nestled inside the skeletal curve of Stefan’s body, and his smell and touch were so familiar, it was as if the past three years hadn’t existed. I opened my eyes in joy, expecting to find a Mediterranean sunrise.

  Instead, I saw Florian’s empty cot.

  I bolted upright. “Florian!”

  “He’s all right. I gave him a little breakfast. He is reading some books in the library. I can hear him from here.”

  “But he can’t read yet.”

  “He does not seem to accept this limitation.”

  I smiled. “Like his father.”

  “I would say, like his mother.”

  Stefan lay flat on his back, watching me from the pillow. His pajamas were buttoned primly to the neck. He had begun shaving his beard as soon as he could walk to the bathroom, and the flesh on his jaw was now a little thicker, a little more substantial. I touched it with my finger.

  “We have a son.”

  “Yes, Mademoiselle. A wonderful son.”

  I lay back down on my side, pressing against him. “D
on’t look so somber. It’s over. We’re safe.”

  “Not quite safe. We are still in Germany.”

  “We can cross the border whenever you like. You should grow your beard or a mustache first, though, and maybe let your hair lengthen a bit.”

  “I suppose that is sensible.”

  He reached for his cigarettes, but I lifted myself across his chest and stopped his hand.

  “How busy is Florian?” I said softly.

  “Not busy enough, I think.”

  “We can be very quiet.”

  He reached again for the cigarette case. “You are a very reckless woman, Annabelle von Kleist, and always have been.”

  I took the case from his hand and plucked out a cigarette. They weren’t like ordinary ones you bought from a drugstore or a newsagent; they were long and wrapped in brown paper, like a cigar. I slipped one between his lips and lit him up myself. “I won’t let you do this, Stefan.”

  “Do what?”

  “I won’t let you barricade me outside your skin.”

  “I am not barricading you.”

  “Yes, you are. You don’t want me in. You think I’ll be appalled at what I find there, and you’re wrong. I already know what’s inside you. I’ve already been inside your skin, remember?”

  “You have no idea, Annabelle, no possible idea what is inside me now.”

  “It doesn’t matter. That’s the point of having this thing, this rare and perfect thing we share. Whatever is in you, it’s mine. You’re mine. You can’t resist me, so you might as well stop fighting and let me back in.”

  He turned his face to one side and let out a long stream of Turkish smoke, but his eyes didn’t leave me. He was thinking about the night before—I knew he was, I could see the tiny reflection of the memory as it reeled behind his eyes—and what I had done to him before the window. The brief moment of his resurrection, the instant of hope.

  I took his face in my hands. “You see?”

  “Yes, Annabelle. I am yours. That was never in doubt. But you see, I am not now perfectly certain that you belong to me.”

  I turned on my back and pulled him over me.

  “Then let me convince you.”

  13.

  We made love without speaking, almost without moving, listening for signs of Florian through the doorway. Stefan’s hips ground carefully into mine. At the end, I stifled my cry into his shoulder, and he bent his face into the pillow while his body made a series of rapid convulsions and then went perfectly still, except for the tiny stroke of his thumb against my temple. The room was so quiet, I could hear the last of Stefan’s cigarette sizzle to ash in the tray. I could name each individual bone of Stefan’s body, each rib, each breath like a bellows, each section of brutalized skin. The scent of tobacco and sweat, the soft reek of sex. Stefan, lost and found.

  For God knew how many minutes, we lay just like that, transfixed by the audacity of what we had just done, by the fact of Stefan’s intimate flesh inside me, as if in obedience to some natural law. The slow crash of his heartbeat against mine. Over and over. Again. And again.

  Until life returned to us. Until the small sound of footsteps climbed the staircase and we broke apart, straightening our nightclothes like guilty lovers. I swung my feet to the ground just as our son appeared in the doorway, looking so much like his father that I couldn’t say a word.

  Florian didn’t seem to notice this curiosity, that he had found me here in Stefan’s bed, flushed and disheveled. He hoisted an enormous illustrated book onto the white counterpane, next to my legs, and pointed to a painting of Frederick the Great on horseback. “Papa!” he said, and his face shone with hope.

  14.

  November arrived suddenly, in a gust of cold new wind that made the roof shriek and left six inches of surprised wet snow across the landscape. Florian jumped on our bed at half past six with the news, and Stefan valiantly rose from beneath the covers to bundle his son in an inadequate coat and take him outside to make snowballs.

  They came stomping in half an hour later, red-skinned and shivering and identical, and I directed them to the old stove and the hot cocoa as if we’d been doing this for years. “To think it was sixty degrees and sunny yesterday,” I said, when we were curled up together on the sofa, mugs in hand, watching the fire. “Maybe it’s time to fly south.”

  “Like birds,” said Florian.

  “Yes, darling. Like birds, to Stefan’s ship. He’s going to sail us to a beautiful island, where the sun is always shining and warm, and we can grow grapes and olives.” I turned to Stefan. “What do you think?”

  “I think you are right. It is time to move on, before we are found.” He disengaged from us gently and rose to put another log on the fire. He had gained weight, but he was still too thin, and he no longer moved with the fluid grace I had loved. He moved like a marionette, or rather like a man who was trying not to move like a marionette. He straightened from the fire and put one hand on the stone mantel. A cigarette dangled from the other.

  “Do you think they might find us here?”

  “Frankly, I am surprised they have not found us already. But then, we seem to be the children of good fortune at this moment.” He turned and smiled. “Florian, how would you like to go into the library with me, and I will show you how to make a paper airplane.”

  Florian jumped from the sofa and took Stefan’s hand, and they came back an hour later with their arms full of paper airplanes, which they flew into the fireplace, one by one, to the screeching delight of Florian as each one burst to its spectacular end.

  15.

  “Are we really in danger?” I whispered to Stefan, when we crept into bed that night.

  “Of course we are in danger.”

  “Then why haven’t we left already?”

  “We are in danger wherever we go, Annabelle, and this place is as good as any. Besides, I like it here. The peace, and the lake, and no people at all.”

  “Except me and Florian.”

  “Except the two of you.”

  “Are you happy? Would you rather be alone?”

  A long pause, and then: “Annabelle, I am grateful to God for every day he allows us together.”

  “There will be thousands more days to be grateful for. Years and years.”

  Stefan was lying on his back, while I curled around him. His arm lay around my shoulders; mine crossed his concave stomach. “Yes, of course,” he said.

  “That wasn’t very convincing.”

  He shifted around me and quietly kissed my neck, while his hands found the edge of my nightgown and drew it up my legs. “Then let me convince you,” he whispered.

  The action caught me by surprise. We had made love often as October bled quietly away, but always it was Annabelle who first laid her hands on Stefan, always it was me who led him, inch by inch, past the possibility of resistance. He seemed to act under the conviction that God had allotted the two of us, Annabelle and Stefan, only a finite amount of sexual consummation, like coins in a purse, and he didn’t want to spend them all too quickly and be left with nothing. Ah, Annabelle, he would whisper, the sign of his capitulation, and we would mate in silence, under the covers, slow as tar, hot as blazes, straining to maintain the perfect tranquility of the bedsprings, so that release came like the smothered hiss of a blowtorch, and we would fall asleep exactly as we were, too depleted to move, while Florian turned in his sleep and snored innocently in his cot nearby. (It was unthinkable to us that he should sleep in another room.)

  But this time was different, as if a shallow but significant tide had turned between us. This time Stefan was the one who urged me along, who pulled back the covers and lifted my nightgown to my waist; Stefan who trailed his lips up my legs until I had to stuff my fist into my mouth; Stefan who then turned me on my stomach and entered me with lazy grandeur, like the unfurling of a giant canvas; until he could g
ive no more and sank down to cover me, flush against my back, breathing in my ear.

  I am inside your skin, he whispered. I am reading your thoughts.

  What am I thinking?

  That you have fallen in love with me all over again. That you love my scars and my sinful habits, and my loyal heart that beats for you. That you want me to make another baby inside you, so there is no chance God will put us asunder again.

  (I shut my eyes.)

  Very good. But you didn’t mention the rest. You forgot your beautiful eyes, and your skin, and—and—

  Don’t cry, Annabelle.

  Let’s not talk anymore.

  (He lifted himself on his elbows and began to move inside me.)

  If that is what you want, mein Engel.

  16.

  The next morning, my period arrived.

  “Don’t say it’s God’s will,” I told him. “Don’t say it’s a sign of a perverse universe.”

  Stefan held up his hands. “I am not saying anything. I am only here to give you what you want.”

  “I just want you, and Florian, and the three of us together, and nothing to pry us away from each other, ever again!”

  “Shh. Calm down.” He held me close against his chest. “Then I will find a way to hold the three of us together, Annabelle. If I have to take on the entire universe, I will do it. I will give you what you want.”

  I listened to his heartbeat beneath the pajama shirt.

  “But what do you want?” I whispered. “Do you want another child?”

  “I want you to be happy. That is all. That is all that is left.”

  17.

  That night, I dreamed about Johann.

  Probably it was Florian who planted the seed. The two of them had grown so exceptionally close over the past year. At times, it sickened me to remember how Johann had chased Florian around the nursery floor, pretending to be a great bear, while Stefan’s son squealed in delight. Other times, I thought how peacefully they had sat together in a sunlit window, reading from a book, and I marveled that Johann could have loved this boy so profoundly, this Jewish boy sired by his great rival, and whether that love was born of perversity or generosity. I alternated between rage and pity, hate and wistfulness. I would focus my brain on his duplicity, I would recall every scar on Stefan’s body, and then into my head flashed Wilhelmine’s words—He killed the agent with his bare hands; he had a wife and three sons—or Frieda’s blond head under Johann’s huge and gentle hand.