I brushed my teeth and washed my face and considered getting in the shower, but the plastic curtain was black with filth, crumpled up on the sopping-wet bottom. I put on my pajamas, wrong like the rest of what I’d packed, and went back to the bedroom.
Giuliana had taken off only her jacket and shoes, tossing both on the floor, and was now lying in fetal position, on the side by the window, with her back turned to me. Stock-still, as if she were already sleeping.
I hesitated for fear of waking her up, but finally I asked her: “Where are we going tomorrow?”
“To Lofthellir,” she replied.
“What’s that?”
“A place up north.”
“Is he there?”
“Yes.”
From that perspective, lying with her back to me, with her shaved head, she looked even more like a man. She did not turn around, and by then I understood that she wouldn’t. I climbed onto the bed, first with one knee only, unsure whether to share that forced intimacy, then with the other as well.
“Why didn’t he come?”
“He couldn’t. Tomorrow you’ll see why.”
I don’t know what came over me, why I started shaking Giuliana the way I did, repeating why didn’t he come with you, I want to know why, I want to know right now; shaking her until she grabbed my arm and shoved it back with equal ferocity.
“Don’t you dare touch me again,” she said.
After rearranging the pillow under her head, she added: “Now get some sleep. Or stay awake, I don’t care. Just keep quiet.”
She went to sleep. I remained propped against the pale wood paneling. I realized that I hadn’t seen a single tree on the trip from the airport to there. The smoke detector on the ceiling emitted green flashes at regular intervals. The window was covered partway down by a plastic roll-up shade, so a little light filtered in. It wasn’t day, nor was it night, and I lay there waiting for I didn’t know what, in that endless twilight.
* * *
—
WHEN I OPENED MY EYES, Giuliana was putting on her boots.
“It’s six o’clock,” she said. “We have to go.” She finished tying the laces, stood up, and opened the door. “See you downstairs.”
I heard her stride down the corridor, the sleeves of her synthetic jacket rustling. For a few moments I was paralyzed, incapable of anything, then I gathered up the things I’d left scattered around. Before leaving, I took one last look around the room: the bed was only half disturbed, at some point I must have felt cold and gotten under the cover, but I didn’t remember it. On Giuliana’s side the blanket was drawn taut, the turned-down sheet barely wrinkled.
I went to the bathroom again and this time I clearly recognized the smell of sulfur that I hadn’t been able to name a few hours earlier. It rose up from the pipes or it was the water itself.
Downstairs, the lobby was deserted. There was a coffee machine, but it was out of order. I saw Giuliana’s off-road vehicle waiting by the front door, with her in the driver’s seat, impatient.
“You can have these for breakfast,” she said, tossing a supermarket bag in my lap.
I looked inside: a pack of triangular sandwiches and a few snacks, some familiar, others with unknown names.
“What, you don’t like them?”
“Sure, they’re fine.”
I opened the crustless sandwiches, which were in pairs, took one out and offered it to her. Then she seemed to relax a little. After taking a bite and chewing it, she said, “All you find is crap here. After a while, you stop noticing. But up ahead we can stop for coffee. If you want.”
I’m not sure I can faithfully reconstruct the conversation we had in the following hours. The words all form a solid chunk of memory, and the order gets mixed up, not only because of Giuliana’s way of speaking, which often became agitated and disjointed, but also because the sleep that I had not managed to make up for during the brief night at the guesthouse was suddenly overtaking me. I’d nod off for a few minutes, and when I woke up Giuliana continued talking, or I would ask her a question. I’m sure I must have interrupted her more often than I remember, but my voice has been erased, irrelevant compared to the account of the time when she and Danco and Bern had been fugitives, and to the tortuous sequence of events that had finally brought her and Bern, just the two of them, to that island. My brain must have rearranged the information in whatever order suited it, but it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t matter anymore at this point.
At each turn the landscape was less recognizable. Endless, uniform meadows, farms in the middle of nowhere, rocky expanses riddled with holes, precipitous fjords and volcanic beaches, and that one exposed road, smooth and always slightly sloping, winding interminably in front of us. The road that Giuliana preferred to speak to instead of me. At a certain point she may actually have said, “Well, I suppose you want to know,” in that malicious tone I remembered. And maybe I really did reply, “Yes, I want to know.”
What I’m sure of is that her arms jerked up futilely, letting go of the steering wheel, and her cheeks trembled as if she were gritting her teeth. “And what gives you the right to know?”
I looked down at my wedding ring, turned it halfway around my ring finger. Engraved on the inside was Bern’s and my date: September 13, 2008.
This, I thought, this gives me the right.
“We stayed in one place for a long time,” Giuliana said, still struggling with reticence, “hiding. It’s a miracle we didn’t kill one another in that time. Three of us shut up in a garage day and night. For months.”
“In Greece,” I said faintly.
“Greece? What gave you that idea?”
“That’s what everyone said. That you had fled to Corfu in a rubber dinghy. Or that you had gone there via Durrës.”
She shook her head. Her laugh was caustic. “I must have missed that. Well, apparently Danco’s idea worked in the end.”
“What idea?”
“Leaving the jeep on the coast. I was sure no one would swallow it. The life jackets on the rocks, fuck! It was so theatrical. The only thing missing was a note saying ‘We left from here.’”
I recalled the images on the television news, the streets of Athens strewn with flyers. I let that backdrop fade out of my mind, then I said, “So you didn’t stay in the tower.”
“No, we never stayed in the tower. And we were never in Greece, we never even thought of it. We had decided from the beginning to head north.”
I kept silent, an implicit encouragement to her to go on talking. Head north, where? And how far north? With whom and for how long, and to find what?
“Through one of our people we had made contact with a truck driver, a Polish guy who traveled up and down the Adriatic coast. You just had to look at him to know he couldn’t have been involved with the cause, he didn’t look anything like an environmentalist. He drove a semi.”
“What’s a semi?”
Giuliana didn’t turn around this time either. “You really don’t know?”
She let a moment pass before explaining it to me, just enough time for that grain of ignorance to settle between us, marking a further distance.
“It’s a big rig for transporting cars. The double-decker carriers, you know? It seemed like a safe-enough solution. Someone drove us to the parking lot he would leave from.”
“Who took you?”
“Daniele.”
I don’t know why, but at the moment I didn’t register how odd it was that she would mention Daniele, as if she took it for granted that I knew him.
I felt slightly nauseated, the taste of the sandwich was sour in my mouth. I felt overcome by the urge to sleep and at the same time gripped by an uncontrollable agitation.
Giuliana went on: “I didn’t know what had happened. Only that Bern and Danco had come running down through the olive-tree grove shouting, �
��Let’s go, move!’ And then we were in Daniele’s car, and Danco was constantly turning around to look through the rear window, while Bern, seated up front, didn’t do so once. He kept his hands oddly on his knees, as if they weren’t his. And even later in the parking lot, as we waited for Bazyli, there was something strange about his posture, a kind of stiffness. He asked me for a cigarette and I gave it to him and only then did I see why he had kept his fingers pressed to his knees the whole way: his hands were wounded, there were two patches of dark blood, already dry. I rubbed them with a handkerchief, but without water the blood wouldn’t come off. So Bern spit on them. He held out his hands with a docility that wasn’t like him, they were . . . limp. I asked him if I was hurting him, and he said not to worry. I cleaned the blood off of one hand and then the other; there was no wound underneath. I looked at him, but he remained blank, letting the information pass from his eyes to mine in silence. I too lit a cigarette and we waited there in the parking lot with nothing more to say. It was Danco who explained that it had been an accident: ‘They attacked us.’”
Talking about the cigarette that she had smoked in the parking lot on that crucial night made Giuliana search for the pack in her jacket pocket and reach for the car’s cigarette lighter. She touched the glowing circle to the tip with a precise gesture. Only after she had exhaled the first stream of smoke from her nostrils did she ask me if it would bother me at that hour.
“No, go ahead,” I told her. She lowered the window a few inches, and after that she blew the smoke into the opening.
“Bazyli wasn’t surprised to see us,” she continued. “He didn’t ask any questions. He simply repeated the name of the destination where he would drop us off. A figure had already been agreed to, two hundred euros for each person he would transport, and he demanded that we pay him the money immediately. Each of us had gone to the Relais supplied with cash, because we had no way of knowing how things would go. Bazyli showed us which cars we would travel in, one person per vehicle, because we had to lie down and not raise our heads for any reason. I got a white Citroën and saw Danco and Bern get into theirs. We didn’t exchange a word, no goodbye or good luck, not even a look. The seats were covered with nylon sheeting and I lay down. Even before hearing the clanking as the semi started out, I had fallen asleep.
“I woke up because of the cold. Two or maybe three hours had passed, but the sky was light, a dense white. The inside of the car was an icebox. I huddled up, trying to wrap the nylon around me, but it didn’t help. Bazyli had mumbled that the trip would take sixteen hours or so, I would never make it at that temperature. Plus I had to pee. I held out for almost an hour, but finally I couldn’t take it. Bazyli hadn’t mentioned any stops, hadn’t left a mobile number, and anyway, Danco had seized our SIM cards so we wouldn’t be tempted to use our cell phones. There was nothing else I could do but crawl between the two front seats and start sounding the horn, for ten whole minutes. Finally I realized that we were pulling over, that we were stopping, but it took quite a while before Bazyli opened the door. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ he laid into me. When I explained that I needed a toilet immediately, he helped me climb down and told me to hurry up.
“Outside the bathroom I met Danco, but we pretended not to know each other. It’s strange, we hadn’t decided on it before, we hadn’t agreed on that point, but there was a kind of instinct that guided us. I let him see that I was cold and he went into the service station to look for something that I could put on, but all they had were kids’ raincoats with ridiculous designs of superheroes. He took two from the display rack. I had no more money. Near the exit I touched a package of snacks and then put it back. Again, Danco understood. He bought the snacks and a box of crackers. We went out one at a time.
“When we went around the corner to return to where the truck was parked, we saw Bazyli with two policemen. He was explaining something, gesturing. I was so scared, I couldn’t move, until I felt Danco’s hand clutching my arm and pulling me back. We stayed like that, practically not breathing, leaning against the wall that the police might appear around at any moment. Bern hadn’t left his hiding place. By this time they might already have found him. I told Danco that we had to get out of there, climb over the guardrail and run through the fields. He said leaving Bern there by himself was out of the question. When we peeked around the corner again, there was no sign of the cops. Bazyli was waiting beside the semi.
“‘What did they want?’ I asked him, but he motioned for us to get back to our places as quickly as possible. He handed me an empty plastic bottle, saying, ‘Next time, here.’ Then he pointed to the packages of food I was holding and with an unmistakable gesture let me know that he would strangle me if I spilled any crumbs in the car. I think he meant it.”
* * *
—
GIULIANA CRUSHED the cigarette stub in the ashtray between us. There were others in there, the little pile reeked. She must have noticed my glance, because she said: “Ten years of decomposition, I know. And here on the island cigarettes cost a mint. But this is no time to quit.”
She closed the lid on the ashtray.
“Do you have any chewing gum?”
“No.”
Her eyes twitched constantly, a nervous tic that I didn’t remember her having before. To avoid a truck coming from the opposite direction, she swerved too far to the right, and the wheels ended up on the dirt shoulder. A pebble flew up and hit the windshield.
“And do you know how long it takes for chewing gum to decompose?”
“No.”
“Five years. Alkaline batteries?”
“I don’t know.”
“Go on, take a guess.”
“Can we drop the riddles?”
Giuliana shrugged. “We used to play that game in Freiberg. One of the many ways to pass the time.”
“Freiberg?”
“At Bern’s father’s place. We stayed with him. He sent a friend of his to pick us up where Bazyli had left us. He had us brought to a garage of his.”
“Bern hadn’t seen his father since he was little,” I said.
Giuliana turned for just a moment.
“Well, maybe he didn’t see him, but he certainly was in touch with him. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the phone number memorized. Maybe he didn’t want it known. Bern can be very private about certain things. I imagine his father is one of those things, and I certainly can’t blame him.”
Talking about Bern that way, letting me see that by then she knew him better than I did, gave her heartfelt pleasure. But I couldn’t help asking her why.
“His father is not the next-door neighbor that everyone would like, let’s put it that way. He mostly deals with reselling works of art of somewhat dubious origin.”
“Stolen?”
Giuliana put her thumb to her mouth and bit her cuticle.
“I’m convinced he fences them for someone else, otherwise he’d be much wealthier. But he has a storehouse full of the stuff. Masks, vases, sculptures, and so on. All heaped together in that garage, which for some reason has a bathroom and a small refrigerator. And an internet connection. He must have spent fairly long periods of time there. Anyway, that’s where he kept us. For eight months.”
Before our wedding, when I had asked Bern if he wanted to track down his father to invite him to the ceremony, he had stared at me with an incredulous expression and shook his head, as if the idea were absurd. Instead, his father had always been in the same city, Freiberg, and he spoke to him on the phone. When had he done that? At times when we were not together? When he went off among the olive trees alone, as though responding to an irresistible call of the countryside?
“Our German period,” Giuliana said, and chuckled. “Freiberg. Not that we got to see much of the city. Sometimes we went out, we took turns, but we had to be very careful. The German didn’t want us to.”
The German. The grave-robber,
my father had told me. An unexpected sadness came over me. Giuliana didn’t notice.
“Danco was uneasy. The business about the artworks bothered him. All that stuff should have been in a museum. By staying there, he said, we became accomplices. As if that were the real problem. But he wasn’t very lucid. He’d wake up in the middle of the night, unable to breathe, and yank the sheets suddenly, uncovering all three of us. Then he’d start pacing around the room, gasping for air. Something like that had happened to him at university too, panic attacks due to the exams, but it was nothing compared to Freiberg.”
“All three of you slept together?” My mind had focused on that insignificant detail.
“There was only one bed,” Giuliana replied expressionlessly.
“Danco said it wasn’t he who killed him.”
After pronouncing those words, my cheeks began to tingle, then the tingling became a burning sensation and spread to my neck and arms.
“Have you seen his lawyer?” Giuliana asked. “Hired by his father. Viglione Senior couldn’t wait to make himself useful. Danco always knew he had his back covered. But I imagine that’s how it is for all of us: ultimately we go back to where we started. Which is a rather serious problem for me.”
She burst into caustic laughter. I remembered her stories, from when she and Corinne would vie to see which of them had had the worst childhood. None of that interested me now.
“He was lying, wasn’t he?” I asked.
Giuliana’s fingers flicked up for a moment, then settled again on the steering wheel.
“Who can say?”
“You can. You were there. And afterward you were with them the whole time.”
“Sorry. I can’t help you with that. I understand that it may seem important to you, but to me it isn’t.”
I sensed a tension in her body now, as if she were preparing for a fight. Or was I the one spoiling for one?
“It’s not important? You mean to say you never asked him what really happened?”
Heaven and Earth Page 33