The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  Our mother embraced each of us and said she would be back presently. She was not. We waited, and after a fearful interval we tiptoed downstairs but could not gain entry to the kitchen because the door between it and the hall was barricaded with stacked chairs. Eventually we forced our way through, and the sight was grisly. Her apron, her clothes, and her underclothes were strewn all over the floor, and so were hairpins and her two side combs. An old motorcar seat was raised onto a wooden trough in which long ago she used to put the feed for hens and chickens. We looked in vain through the window, thinking we might see her in the back avenue or better still coming up the path, shattered, but restored to us. There was one soldier down there, his rifle cocked. Where was she? What had they done to her? When would she be back? The strange thing is that none of us cried and none of us broke down. With a bit of effort we carried the stinking car seat out and threw it down the three steps that led from the back door. It was all we could do to defy our enemies. Then we went up to the room and waited. Our cow had stopped moaning, and we realised that she too had been taken and most likely slaughtered. The empty field was ghost-like, despite the crows and jackdaws making their usual commotion at evening time. We could guess the hours roughly by the changing light and changing sky. Later the placid moon looked in on us. We thought, if only the workman would come back and give us news. The sound of his chainsaw used to jar on us, but now we would have welcomed it as it meant a return to the old times, the safe times, before our mother and our cow were taken. Our brother’s wooden flute lay in the fire grate, as he had not the heart to play a tune, even though we begged for it.

  On the fifth morning we found some reason to jubilate. The sentry was gone from his post, and no one came to stand behind that bit of broken wall. We read this as deliverance. Our mother would come back. We spoke of things that we would do for her. We got her clean clothes out of the wardrobe and lay them neatly on the bed. Her lisle stockings hanging down, shimmered pink in a shaft of sunlight, and we could imagine her legs inside them. We told each other that the worst was over. We bit on apples and pelted each other with the butts for fun. Our teeth cracked with a vengeance on the hazelnuts and the walnuts, and picking out the tasty, fleshy particles, we shared them with one another like true friends, like true family. Our brother played a tune. It was about the sun setting on a place called ‘Boulevouge’.

  Our buoyancy was shortlived. By evening we heard gunshot again, and a soldier had returned to the broken bit of wall, a shadowy presence. Sleep was impossible and so we watched and we prayed. We did that for two whole days and nights, and what with not eating and not sleeping, our nerves got the better of us and, becoming hysterical, we had to slap each other’s faces, slap them smartly, to bring common sense into that room.

  The hooligans in their camouflage have returned. They have come by a back route, through the dense woods and not up the front avenue as we expected.

  They are in the kitchen, laughing and shouting in their barbarous tongues. Fear starts to seep out of us, like blood seeping. If we are taken all together, we might muster some courage, but from the previous evidence it is likely that we will be taken separately. We stand, each in our corner, mute, petrified, like little effigies, our eyes fastened to the knob of the door, our ears straining beyond it, to gauge which step of stairs they are already stomping on.

  How beautiful it would be if one of us could step forward and volunteer to become the warrior for the others. What a firmament of love ours would be.

  A deathly emptiness to the whole world, to the fields and the sacked farmyards and the tumbledown shacks. Not a soul in sight. Not an animal. Not a bird. Here and there mauled carcasses and bits of torn skins where animals must have fought each other in their last frenzied hungers. I almost got away. I was walking towards somewhere that I didn’t know, somewhere safe. There had been no soldiers for weeks. They’d killed each other off. It was hard to know which side was which, because they swapped sides the way they swapped uniforms. My mother and later my brother and my two sisters had been taken. I was out foraging and when I came back our house was a hulk of smoke. Black ugly smoke. I only had the clothes I stood up in, a streelish green dress and a fur coat that was given to my mother once. It used to keep us warm in bed, and sometimes when it slipped onto the floor I would get out to pick it up. It felt luxurious, the hairs soft and tickling on bare feet. That was the old world, the other world, before the barbarians came. Why they came here at all is a mystery, as there was no booty, no gold mines, no silver mines – only the woods, the tangly woods, and in some parts tillage, small patches of oats or barley. Even to think of corn, first green and then a ripening yellow, or the rows of cabbage, or any growing thing, was pure heartbreak. Maybe my brother and sisters are across the border or maybe they are dead. I moved at dusk and early night, bunched inside the fur coat. I wanted to look old, to look a hag. They did not fancy the older women; they wanted young women and the younger the better, like wild strawberries. It was crossing a field that I heard the sound of a vehicle, and I ran, not knowing there was such swiftness in me. They were coming, nearer and nearer, the wheels slurping over the ridged earth that bordered the wood that I was heading into. The one who jumped out picked me up and tossed me to the Head Man. They spluttered with glee. He sat me on his lap, wedged my mouth open, wanting me to say swear words back to him. His eyes were hard as steel and the whites a yellowy gristle. Their faces were daubed with paint and they all had puce tattoos. The one that drove was called Gypsy. That drive was frantic. Me screaming, screaming, and the Head Man slapping me like mad and opening me up as though I was a mess of potage. They stopped at a disused lime kiln. He was first. When he splayed me apart I thought I was dead, except that I wasn’t. You don’t die when you think you do. The subordinates used their hands as stirrups. When I was turned over I bit on the cold lime floor to clean my mouth of them. Their shouts, their weight, their tongues, their slobber, the way they bore through me, wanting to get up into my head, to the God particle. That’s what an old woman in the village used to call it, that last cranny where you say prayers and confide in yourself the truth of what you feel about everything and everyone. They couldn’t get to it. I had stopped screaming. The screams were stifled. Through the open roof I saw a buzzard glide in a universe of blue. It was waiting for another to be with it, and after a time that other came that was its comrade and they glided off into those crystalline nether-reaches. Putting on their trousers, they kept telling each other to hurry the fuck up. The Head Man stood above me, straddled, the fur coat over his shoulders, and he looked spiteful, angry. The blood was pouring out of me and the ground beneath was warm. I saw him through the slit in my nearly shut eyes. For a minute I thought he might kill me and then he turned away as if it wasn’t worth the bother, the mess. The engine had already started when Gypsy ran back and placed a cigarette across my upper lip. I expect he was trying to tell me something. As children we were told that why we have a dent in our upper lip is because when we are born an angel comes and places a forefinger there for silence, for secrecy. By degrees I came back. Little things, the air sidling through that small clammy enclosure and the blood drying on me, like resin. Long ago, we had an aluminium alarm clock with the back fallen off, that worked on a single battery, but batteries were scarce. Our mother would take out the battery and we’d guess the time by the failing light, by the dusk, by the cockcrow and the one cow, the one faithful cow that stood, lowing, at the paling, waiting to be milked. One of us would go out with a bucket and the milking stool. When she put the battery back the silver needle would start up and then the two hands, like two soft black insects, crept over each other in their faithful circuit. The lime-green dress that I clung to, that I clutched, that I dug my fingernails into, is splotched with flowers, blood-red and prodigal, like poppies. Soon as I can walk I will set out. To find another, like me. We will recognise each other by the rosary of poppies and the speech of our eyes. We, the defiled ones, in our thousands, scattered, trudging
over the land, the petrified land, in search of a safe haven, if such a place exists.

  Many and terrible are the roads to home.

  Aunt Telephone

  Edith Pearlman

  Edith Pearlman (b. 1936) is an American short story writer. She has published more than 250 works of short fiction and non-fiction in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies and on-line publications. She was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award in 2011, and her latest collection, Binocular Vision, won the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.

  I got my first taste of raw flesh when I was nine years old. I had been taken to an adult party. My father was out of town at an investors’ conference and my brother was spending the night at a friend’s; and my babysitter got sick at the last minute, or said she did. What was my mother to do – stay home? So she brought me along. The affair was cocktails and a buffet featuring beef tartare on pumpernickel rounds and a bowl of icy seviche – this was thirty years ago, before such delicacies had been declared lethal. The party was given by the Plunkets, family therapists: two fatties who dressed in similar sloppy clothing as if to demonstrate that glamour was not a prerequisite for rambunctious sex.

  My mother and I and Milo walked over to the party in the glowing September afternoon. Our house and Milo’s and the Plunkets’ all lay within a mile of each other in Godolphin, a leafy wedge of Boston, as did the homes of most of the other guests – the psychiatrists and clinical psychologists and social workers who made up this crowd. They were all friends, they referred patients to one another, they distributed themselves into peer-supervision subsets – a collegial, talkative crew, their envy vigorously tamped down. Their kids were friends, too – some as close as cousins. I already hated groups, but I was willy-nilly part of the bunch.

  Among the adults, Milo was first among peers. He produced paper after acclaimed paper: case histories of children with symptoms like elective mutism and terror of automobiles and willful constipation lasting ten days. I longed to become one of his fascinating patients, but I knew to my sadness that therapists rarely treated their friends’ children no matter how sick and I knew, also, that I wasn’t sick anyway, just ornery and self-centered. In his published work Milo gave the young sufferers false first names and surname initials. “What would you call me?” I asked him once, still hoping for immortality.

  “Well, Susan, what would you like to be called?”

  “Catamarina M.”

  He warmed me with his brown gaze. (“The eyes,” Dr. Lenore once remarked to my mother, “thoroughly compensate for the absence of chin.”)

  Milo said: “Catamarina is your name forever.”

  So I had an appellation if not symptoms. All I had to do was stop talking or moving my bowels. Alas, nature proved too strong for me.

  Milo’s colleagues respected his peaceable bachelordom: they recognized asexuality as an unpathological human preference, also as a boon to society. He had been born in cosmopolitan Budapest, which gave him further cachet. His liberal parents, who were in the bibelot business, had gotten out just before World War II. So Milo was brought up in New York by a pair of Hungarians, penniless at first, soon rich again. He inherited a notable collection of ancient Chinese figurines.

  On the day of that party Milo was wearing his standard costume: flannel slacks, turtleneck sweater, tweed jacket. He was then almost fifty, a bit older than my parents and their friends. His hair, prematurely gray, rose high and thick from a narrow forehead. It swung at his nape like a soft broom. He was very tall and very thin.

  Dr. Will Plunket gave me beef tartare in a hamburger bun. But the Plunket boys wouldn’t let me join their game of Dungeons and Dragons. So, munching my feral sandwich, I wandered in the fall garden still brightened by a glossy sun. On a chaise on the flagstone terrace sat a woman I didn’t know. She looked sulky and bored. Dr. Judah joined me for a while and wondered aloud if fairies nested under the chrysanthemums. I frowned at him, but when he went inside I knelt and peered under the mums. Nothing. After a while Milo found me. In his soft voice he talked about the greenery near the stone wall – basil was rumored to cure melancholy, marjoram headaches, ground ivy conjunctivitis. He bent, picked up a handful of the ivy, stood, and crushed a few leaves into my palm. “Not to be taken internally.” Then he, too, went in.

  I drifted toward the terrace. “How lucky you are,” drawled the woman on the chaise, and she drank some of her cocktail.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “To have such an attentive aunt,” she said, and drank some more.

  “My aunt lives in Michigan.”

  “She’s here on a visit?”

  “She’s in Europe this month.”

  “I mean the aunt you were just talking to.”

  “Milo?”

  “Her name is Milo?”

  I raced into the house. I found my mother standing with Dr. Margaret and Dr. Judah. “You’ll never believe it, that patient on the terrace, she thought Milo was my aunt!” My mother gave me a ferocious stare. “My aunt,” I heedlessly repeated to Dr. Margaret, and then turned to Dr. Judah. “My—” but I couldn’t finish because my mother was yanking me out of the room.

  “Stop talking, Susan, stop right now, do not say that again. It would hurt Milo’s feelings dreadfully.” She let go of me and folded her arms. “There’s dirt on your knees,” she said, though dirt was not usually denigrated in this circle. “Filth.”

  “Garden soil,” I corrected.

  My mother sighed. “The woman on the terrace is Dr. Will’s sister.”

  “I wish Milo was my aunt.”

  “Were.”

  “Were? Why?”

  “Condition contrary to fact.” As our conversation slid into the safe area of grammar, we returned to the party. Milo was now listening to Dr. Will. It didn’t seem to me that Milo’s longish hair was more feminine than Dr. Will’s black smock. But this once I would obey my mother. I would not again relate the error of the woman on the terrace. I hoped that Milo hadn’t heard my earlier exclamation. Not for the world would I hurt his feelings; or so I thought.

  Milo celebrated thanksgiving here, Passover there, Christmas twice in one day, first at the Collinses and then at the Shapiros. He smoked his after-dinner cigar in everybody’s backyard. He came to our annual New Year’s Day open house, which I was required to attend for fifteen minutes. I spent that quarter hour behind a lamp. My parents, shoulder to shoulder, greeted their guests. Sometimes my mother slipped her hand into my father’s pocket, like a horse nuzzling for sugar.

  Milo went to piano recitals and bar mitzvahs and graduations. In August he visited four different families, one each week. He was an aunt, my aunt, aunt to many children born into our therapeutic set, if an aunt is someone always ready to talk on the telephone to worried parents – especially to mothers, who do most of the worrying. Those mothers of ours, full of understanding for their patients, were helpless when their own offspring gave them trouble. Then they became frantic kid sisters, reaching for the phone. Bad report cards, primitive behavior on the playground, sass, lying, staying out all night, playing hooky – for all such troubles Milo was ready with advice and consolation. He knew, also, when a child needed outside help – strangling the cat was a sure indication. Usually, though, it was the parent who required an interpretation and also a recommendation to back off. “No, a joint today is not a crack pipe tomorrow,” he memorably assured Dr. Lenore. Dr. Lenore’s daughter was, of course, listening on the extension. We were all masters of domestic wiretapping – slipping a forefinger between receiver and the button on which it rested, lifting the receiver to our ear, releasing the button with the caution of a surgeon until a connection was soundlessly established.

  The July I was twelve I ran away from overnight camp. The day after I arrived home, surly and triumphant, I eavesdropped on Milo and my mother. Milo was suggesting that my mother praise me for taking the bus rather than hitchhiking on the highway.

  “She stole the bus money from her counselor,” my moth
er said.

  “Borrowed, I think. Encourage her to return the money by mail.”

  “Shouldn’t she be encouraged to return herself to camp?”

  Milo said: “To the hated place?” There was a talcum pause as he drew on his cigar. “To the place she had the resourcefulness to escape from?”

  “It’s difficult to have her home,” my mother said, with a little sob.

  “Yes, Ann, I can imagine,” said Milo. And then: “It is her home, too.”

  There was a silence – Milo’s the silence of someone who has delivered a truth and my mother’s the silence of someone who has received it. And a third silence, a silence within a silence: mine. “It is her home, too,” I heard. The gentle living room. The kitchen whose window looked out on birds and squirrels and sometimes a pheasant that had strayed from the more suburban part of Godolphin. The attached office where my mother saw patients during the day. The bedroom where in the evenings she received those patients’ panicky calls and where she herself called Milo. My brother’s room with his construction projects in various stages of completion – though a year younger than I, he was already an adept mechanic. My own room: posters, books, toys outgrown but not discarded, clothing pooled on the floor and draped on lamps. A long window led from my room onto a little balcony. My mother had once planted impatiens in boxes on the balcony but I let the flowers die. Without recrimination she had watched me neglect – desecrate, even – a generous space in the house. The house that was hers, too.

  For the remainder of July I babysat for the kids next door, treating them with a pretend affection I ended up feeling. (“Hypocrisy is the first step toward sincerity,” Milo had written.) I made a small effort to straighten my room. (“A token is a cheap coin, but it is not counterfeit” – same source.) In August we went to Cape Cod.