“We can go someplace else,” Neil said.
“No, no, it’s okay. I think I must show him how to make it working again.” She led Neil through a living room into a sort of study. At first Neil didn’t see anybody, just lots of cardboard boxes, some of them open and filled with plastic spools of photo negatives. Books with titles in various languages stood on a bookcase with World War Two army helmets acting as bookends. There was a large photograph of a naked girl on the wall. Something about it made Neil feel that it was only polite to look away. Which was when he saw a man sitting in the blue glow of the computer monitor, watching him.
“She’s beautiful, yeah?” the man said, and Neil thought for an awful second that he was talking about what’s-her-name. “Picked her up at an auction in Leeds. Fucking five hundred quid, but she’s worth it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Neil said, looking at the photograph in what he hoped was a mature and thoughtful way. “Oh yeah, wow,” he said. “I’m Neil.”
“Barry,” the man said. He wasn’t British; he sounded Australian. His chair was the rolling office type and he scooted it on well-worn furrows in the carpet toward Neil to shake his hand. “Magdute said something about you coming. American, eh?”
“Yep,” Neil said. “I’m studying in London.” Magdute, he thought to himself, trying to print it into his brain. Mag-doo-tay.
“London’s a great town,” Barry said.
“Oh yeah,” Neil said. “Yeah, definitely.”
Magdute shifted behind him.
“You made it working?” she asked.
“Hardly. Get me out of this blue screen, okay?” Barry said, and added something in another language. The sound of it was so different from Barry’s Australian accent that it took Neil a moment to realize that the words, whatever they were, were coming from him.
“Yeah, okay,” Magdute said. She clicked on a couple of things on Barry’s computer.
“So you’re studying—” Barry tipped his head back to look at Neil. “Economics?”
“History, actually,” Neil said.
“Ah-hah!” Barry said. “Bit of a history buff myself. What’s your area?”
“I haven’t totally decided,” Neil said. “I have a professor who’s an expert on medieval France, and, I mean, I think that’s pretty interesting.”
“Mm,” Barry said. “I go in for the more recent events myself. See those casings there?” Barry pointed to a glass jar of what looked like bullets sitting like a paperweight on his desk. “Dug those myself out of the Ponary forest, just outside Magdute’s hometown. A hundred thousand executed from 1941 to ’44. Give or take.”
“Okay, Barry, don’t start with this now, okay?” Magdute said. She dug the router out from under some papers and unplugged it.
“You get east of Berlin and they’re fucking allergic to history,” Barry said. “Lits are the worst. Couple of skeletons in that closet, ja Liebchen?”
“You have Explorer like from 2002,” she said, not looking up. “I am getting you new, okay?” She plugged the router back in and got Barry’s computer downloading, then turned to Neil and said, “So you will wait please? I am going to get you those things.” She went out and Neil tried to think of something to say. He could still see the naked photograph out of the corner of his eye. It was making him uncomfortable, but when he turned his head he saw there were others. He didn’t want Magdute to come back and see him looking at them, so he focused on a dusty case filled with old army canteens and a gas mask that stared back at him with black apocalyptic eyes. It gave him the creeps, but he was running out of places to look.
Barry jiggled the mouse, then shouted something in the direction Magdute had gone. Neil knew he ought to know what language it was. He took a guess.
“Gosh you can speak Russian?” he asked.
“Lithuanian,” Barry said. “Roots in ancient Livonian. Don’t let her hear you call it Russian—too long under the Soviet boot, yeah?”
“Oh, right,” Neil said. Some history major he was. “So, did you live there or something?” He was glad to have a reason to stop looking at the walls.
Barry laughed. “God no. It’s a hobby of mine, languages.” Magdute came back in with a shopping bag and a chair for Neil. “Magdute helps me,” he said.
She said something in Lithuanian to him, and then to Neil, “He does the endings no good.”
“Poorly,” Barry said to her. “I make my declensions poorly.” He turned to Neil and said, “Estonian is easier.”
“You know Estonian?” Neil said.
“And six or eight others. Bulgarian, Latvian, Polish—a hobby. I’ve been trying to learn Ukrainian, but I can’t find a girl, and the tapes are shit, you can’t do it with the tapes.” He said something else to Magdute. She rolled her eyes and left again, and there was the sound of banging from another room. Barry shouted something that made Neil jump. It was incongruous, the switch to those strange-sounding words from Barry’s big-voweled accent.
“Always banging into things, that one,” Barry said. “Blind as a bat.”
Magdute came back in with lemonade. She said something to Barry and he said something back. It was a language that sounded like sticks rubbing together, occasionally making a spark. As she bent to give him a glass of lemonade Barry brushed his hand over her cheek, like there was an eyelash there.
Neil wanted to leave. He tried to drink his lemonade quickly, but it only made him remember that he needed the bathroom. He wondered how soon he could ask for it without seeming rude.
“You must be really good at languages,” Neil said.
“The girls help. You’ve got to use the words, you know. You’ve got to speak. A new language, a new girl, sometimes the other way around. Take Lithuanian. Filthy language, but I just had to have little Magdute here.”
Barry chuckled. Neil wasn’t sure, but he might have chuckled too. His hangover was making him sweat.
“For Polish I have Zosia, for Bulgarian there’s Desislava, Veronika for Czech, but for Ukrainian, nobody. Little Galya lied to me, didn’t she?”
“She was Russian,” Magdute said.
“Stupid cunt,” Barry said. “But what can you do? Some of these girls’ll put on a real show for a place like this, eh? Rent-free. And I have such a hard time saying no.” Another wink. “You know, that Baltic charm. Ees veery nice, yah?” he said, in perfect imitation of Magdute’s accent. Neil’s mouth tasted vinegary. He was sweating a lot. “Am I right?” Barry asked.
“Oh yeah,” Neil said. He wasn’t exactly sure what they were talking about.
“Just no Russians. I have a rule against Russians. Germans too. Goddamn Bolsheviks and Nazis, yeah?”
Neil really needed some gum. His mouth tasted like something had died in there. He finished his lemonade.
“I have to go to work,” Magdute said.
She left the room, and Neil looked at his watch—which actually wasn’t there, he’d forgotten to put it on that morning—and said, “I’d better be going too.”
“Right-oh,” Barry said. Then, with Magdute out of the room, he scooted his chair toward Neil again and said, “Listen here. Wouldn’t you like to stay a bit? For a historian—I’ve got a few things that might be of interest.”
“I can’t,” Neil said. “The bus, it’s at three, I think, three fifteen . . .” Barry was nodding.
“But there’s another bus you know. Tomorrow.”
“Yeah, but I’ve got to get back.” A warm drop of sweat broke free of Neil’s armpit and rolled down his side. It hesitated for a moment on his ribs, then gathered momentum and rolled purposefully down into his underwear.
“I’ve got a bit of footage from the Kriegsberichter film crews—official cameramen for the Waffen SS. Himmler at the horseraces, a burlesque show in Minsk—that one hardly for official purposes. Real collector’s items.”
“Wow, I’m sure,” Neil said.
“Spend the night,” Barry suggested. “We can set up the projector.”
“Gosh, th
anks,” Neil said. “But I’ve got a paper to write.” Which was possible, even likely, but at that moment he couldn’t remember whether or not it was true.
“I’m only joking,” Barry said, thumping Neil on the arm and leaning back in his chair. “Only ladies welcome here, yeah?”
Neil could feel his thoughts banging along behind what was actually happening, like a kid pulling a tin can on a string.
“Can I use your bathroom?” Neil asked.
“Left and left again,” Barry said, pointing toward the hallway.
The house was strangely noiseless. Neil’s socks left footprints in the thick carpet, but his steps didn’t make a sound. In the silence, Neil could almost hear his breathing reverberate against his bladder, stretched tight like a drum.
Neil flushed, then stood at the sink, letting the cold water run over his hands. Finally he had a chance to look at himself in the mirror. Nothing out of the ordinary about his face, although it was hard to tell; the mirror was more like a plate of tinted glass than a real mirror, as if it hadn’t been intended for actual use. Like the rest of the house, the bathroom had an impersonal feeling. It was clean enough, but clean in a way that left a film over everything. Soaps shaped like sea horses sat unwetted in a dish and there was a little silver padlock on the medicine cabinet. Only an eye pencil without a cap that had been left beside the sink gave any sign that the bathroom had been used.
Neil splashed some water on his face and cupped his hands to drink. The water had the same plasticky taste as the water in London and it left his tongue feeling chalky. He needed some mouthwash or a dab of toothpaste, anything to cut the taste in his mouth, a sign of what was surely inexcusable breath. He looked closely at the padlock on the medicine cabinet and saw that it wasn’t entirely closed. He opened the cabinet.
It could have been a TV commercial, Neil thought. The medicine cabinet was empty, except for a tin of Altoids sitting like the Holy Grail on the middle shelf. Curiously Strong Peppermints when you need them most. The box had obviously been there for a long time, it was stuck to the shelf. But Altoids don’t go bad, and when the lid wouldn’t open Neil worked his fingernails under the lip, which was a little rusty. It always bothered Neil when people groped around in Altoids tins and ended up touching every one of them. He got the lid open and looked inside. There were no little white candies. Just a bundle of black wire cinched with a red elastic hair band. Neil nudged the wire with his fingernail. One end led out through a little hole drilled in the back of the Altoids tin and disappeared through another hole cut into the wall. The other end of the wire attached to what Neil thought at first was the cap of a black magic marker, wedged sideways into the box. Another little hole had been cut out of the front of the tin, and when Neil leaned in to look at it he saw the glass eye of a tiny camera lens staring back at him. It was pointed in the direction of the shower, and Neil noticed that what he’d thought was a mirror on the outside of the medicine cabinet was actually translucent from the inside. There was a bit of paper stuck to the underside of the shelf.
naerata
uśmiechnij się
pasmaidiet
šypsokis
smile
it said.
There was one more thing Neil saw before he slipped his shoes back on without even tying them and hurried after Magdute out onto the street. Back in London, when he tried to make Veejay understand why a house full of Eastern European girls with cameras in the walls was not cool, it was creepy, and Veejay looked at him with his I-don’t-get-it eyebrow raised, it was the thing Neil couldn’t quite explain, the image that would stay with him forever, labeled “The House in Swindon” in the archives of his mind.
As Neil left the bathroom, a door in the hallway closed quickly—he hadn’t even noticed it was open. But before it closed he saw a girl with blonde hair wearing a going-out dress. Her makeup was smudged and she was carrying her shoes—Neil had the sense that she’d been tiptoeing. The girl turned quickly, her eyes flicked up and two fingers pressed against her lips, as if keeping them shut. For an instant they stared at each other. And as they did, an unwelcome flash of a memory came into Neil’s head: someone he’d known when he was a kid, her eyes red from crying, glancing up, startled, looking at Neil with the same sudden panic in her eyes. Some complicated psychological process was responsible for bringing her face to mind at just that moment, and Neil intended not to think too much about it. But he knew it meant one thing for sure: He was not going to call his father when he got back to London. He was not going to say that he’d finally delivered the Christmas present, or that he’d been chosen to go to Paris for the summer—which meant that the entire day had been a waste. But with that particular memory in his head, Neil knew there was no way he was going to be able to tell his dad about Barry and Magdute and the other girls all living in that house.
Magdute walked him to the bus station. They were quiet and Neil imagined the things he might say, how he might take charge of the situation and calmly, carefully tell her what he’d seen, downplaying things a little bit so she wouldn’t freak out. But each time he made up his mind to tell her about the camera, he wasn’t sure exactly how to start, or, when he’d decided on a way to begin, what had seemed simple became suddenly much more complex and nothing came out. So they kept walking and Neil said nothing, feeling the moment passing him by when, for a second or two, he had the chance to really be someone and life could tip like a seesaw toward—well, who knew what? That was the point. A life as a person with guts, the kind of person who, at the right historical moment, would be raising a peasant army or hurling paving stones at the Bastille, the kind of person Neil never quite managed to be.
“Barry’s really into that World War Two stuff, huh?” Neil said, because he had to start somewhere.
“Oh yeah,” Magdute said. “He’s totally obsession for this. He is going over all country for buying cigarette lighters of German army and such.”
“That’s weird,” Neil said.
“Yeah, totally,” Magdute said. The heels of her boots tick-tocked against the sidewalk, reminding Neil that time was running out. He took a breath.
“That’s a really beautiful church,” Neil said. Why was he talking about churches? Anyway, it was a lie. The church had the studied boringness of the interwar style.
Magdute looked up and squinted her eyes. The church was made of yellow bricks, squat and intent in its ugliness. God, he was such a moron. I think you’re being spied on in the shower, Neil said inside his head.
“Yes?” Magdute said. “I am not so much looking at this church before.”
They were a few blocks from the station, and Neil could see the bus was waiting. Magdute was standing, looking at the church sort of vacantly, like she was thinking of something else.
“There’s my bus,” Neil said. “I’d better run.” Magdute looked up the street.
“No, I think it will come only at three o’clock,” she said.
“Oh,” Neil said. It looked like his bus, but he didn’t argue. They walked slowly up the street.
“You know, I have really liked churches when I was young,” Magdute said. “I am thinking about becoming some kind of nun, how about that?” She laughed. “But now we are all fuckshit heathens, yes?”
“I guess so,” Neil said.
“This is what Barry says. This land is full of fuckshit heathens still praying on rocks and things. And when he says this I was looking all over for rocks and crazy English praying on them, but I’m not finding it so much.”
Speaking of Barry, Neil said in his head.
“Well, there’s Stonehenge,” Neil said. The line to get on the bus was getting shorter. He was starting to be certain that the little sign in the windshield had LONDON written on it. “I really think that’s my bus.”
“Is here?” Magdute said.
“Yeah, it’s right there,” Neil said. “Shoot, I’m really sorry, I have to run.” The door to the bus was closing. “It was really nice to meet you,” he sai
d.
“Okay, good-bye,” Magdute said, and Neil waved over his shoulder as he sprinted up the street. The driver opened the door, and Neil dug in his pockets for his ticket. Coins and gum wrappers fell out.
“Hey,” the driver said. “You with her?” He nodded out the window. Magdute was waving her arms. She started up the street toward the bus, then hesitated, looking confused. She turned and went the other direction, but she was still waving and calling his name, like she hadn’t seen where he’d gone.
“Hang on just a second,” Neil said to the driver. He got off the bus and ran toward Magdute, who had an odd look on her face, like a kid lost at a shopping mall, hollering “Niii-yell!”
“Yeah?” he said. Her head turned toward him and the lost look disappeared.
“You are forgetting the present!” she said. Sure enough, Neil’s father’s package was still under his arm. He’d been holding onto it so tightly that there was a little imprint of an arrowhead on his wrist.
Magdute took a paper bag out of her purse and gave it to him, and Neil handed her the package. The bus driver honked the horn.
“Gosh, thanks,” Neil said. “Merry Christmas.”
“Okay, bye,” Magdute said.
Neil waved to her as the bus pulled away, but she didn’t seem to see.
{MAGDALENA}
Swindon, May
The shape of Neil disappeared into the layer of permanent fog that was all that was left of Magdalena’s vision beyond an arm’s length. The colors he had been melted their membranes and Magdalena was turning to go, when she remembered that her mother’s package was still in her bag.
She almost didn’t call him back—Magdalena hadn’t decided whether or not she ever wanted to see Neil’s face again. On the one hand it was unnerving. No one, not her mother or Lina or Ivan, as far as she could tell, had Magdalena’s name written on their skin. It didn’t say anything else about her, or give any explanation of how those particular letters had ended up under the eye of an American she’d never met before.
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