Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  “That’s good work,” Richter said. “You do your job, and then when you’re finished, when you look at what you’ve done, you get to see that you’ve made something better, made it work, made it beautiful. There’s pride in that. You’re a lucky man.”

  “Gavrilenko called me that too,” Jansen said slowly. “I don’t think I’m so fucking lucky.” Richter regarded him curiously. Jansen said, “I’m good with my hands, with wood and tile and plastic piping, but that’s it. Sinks and toilets, cabinets and countertops? Sure. People? Forget it. My exes, my kids, they’re all right about me. Since I got back from Germany, I can’t think of one damn thing that’s gone right, except work. Not one damn thing in forty years.”

  Richter said, “It’s the Wall.” Jansen looked up in surprise. “People I work with—former refugees, their families—they tell a story that one guy who didn’t make it over put a curse on the Wall with his dying breath. He made it so even if you escape, even with the Wall down and gone, there’s still a curse that follows you in your life. Because you got out and he didn’t.”

  Jansen thought nobody ever gets out. But what he said was, “No offense, but that’s bullshit. Anyway, I didn’t have anything to escape from. I did my time, got rotated to Stuttgart and then stateside. Period.”

  They walked a little way further in silence before Richter continued. “Maybe. But people tell stories like that because they mean something. And you said yourself that your troubles started here. It wasn’t all snowball fights, Henry.”

  “Crap. I was a kid.”

  “Which makes it better how?” Richter’s tone had shifted, the hint of impatience becoming more pronounced. “Jesus Christ, man, you know I’ve been through the East German records fifty-seven times. I’m the guy with the damn database. So why are you dancing with me like this? Even on the official record there are at least three or four deaths that correlate with the time you must have been here. Fechter, he’s the most famous, but there were others. And at least twenty, thirty more the Society is researching. Are you telling me none of that ever touched you, that you never saw anything? If not, then why the hell are you here? What’s our connection?”

  Jansen was shaking his head before Richter was halfway finished. “That’s not it! It can’t be it.”

  “What can’t be it?”

  Jansen started to turn away, but Richter squared off on him. The tall man’s hands came down on Jansen’s shoulders, and they were bigger hands than Jansen had noticed. He said nothing. He only waited.

  Oh, God.

  Jansen said tonelessly, “You can’t put this on me.”

  “I didn’t,” Richter answered. “But you can take it off.”

  “Shit!” For just a moment Jansen couldn’t breathe.

  Richter’s eyes were hot behind a face suddenly flattened into an unyielding mask. “I’m not an idiot. You’ve been wanting to tell me something since we were back at the sandbags. Spill.”

  “I—I don’t know who it was. Just some girl, some woman… I never knew her name.” Jansen heard the sirens and shouting, the gunfire; only by Richter’s lack of reaction did he understand that the blaring cacophony was all in his head. “But I’ll never forget what happened. Fuck, I still dream it.”

  Richter nodded him on.

  “It was 1963. I was almost out, just screwing around on duty in the observation post, joking with Harding about making a midnight run to clip a little barbed wire off as a souvenir, something to take home with me. Then his eyes went all spooky and he said ‘Fuck me Lord,’ just like that, quiet as if we were in a library… and I saw what he was seeing. This woman—”

  “Wait a sec. That was the Axel-Springer-Strasse OP?”

  Jansen nodded.

  Richter bored in. “July or November?”

  “July. I wasn’t here in November.”

  “Tell me what she looked like.”

  Jansen felt himself snapping. “Don’t make me do this!”

  “Tell me.”

  “You have to hear me say it? It was your mother! Of course it was your mother. She had your goddamn eyes, you bastard, and she came out of nowhere on the far side of the Death Strip, and maybe she would have made it if she were a little faster, or maybe she wouldn’t, I don’t know, I only know it was like they were playing with her, like they could have cut her down at any time, but they waited until she was halfway over the top. Then somebody took her out with a single shot and she lay there on top of the wall for two hours, two fucking hours, bleeding out, never making a sound until the end, and the whole time I… the whole time….”

  He turned his head, unable to bear looking into Richter’s face.

  “I wanted to go to her. Harding wouldn’t let me. I did call the NCOIC and scream for a doctor, for help, for somebody, but nobody came. Nobody came. It was just me and Harding, and he wouldn’t look. But for the whole two hours I did. I saw her die.”

  Richter’s hands closed once, briefly. They seemed to sink past flesh and muscle to leave their fingerprints in his bones; yet, strangely, Jansen felt no pain at all. When Richter let go and lifted them away, something iron went with them that Jansen never tried to name.

  “Yes,” Richter said without expression. “I thought that might have been the one.” He turned away.

  “That’s not all,” Jansen said to the tall man’s stiffened back.

  Richter slowed down, but didn’t stop.

  “Here’s the thing.” Jansen had to raise his voice as the other man moved away. “You fell asleep in your car, and you woke up here in this theater set, but you didn’t get to see the play. Me, I had to watch it all over again. So did Gavrilenko, from his guard tower. The run, the bullets, her death on top of the Wall. Everything. Do you hear me? I saw your mother die all over again… and when it was over I saw her climb back down, just like she was getting ready for another show. That’s why Gavrilenko and I were supposed to meet. I don’t know why I’m here, I swear to God I don’t, but whatever I’ve done wrong in my life I can’t possibly deserve having to see that again—and you don’t want to see it either. Trust me on that!”

  Richter stood still and said nothing for what felt to Jansen like a very long time, but which was certainly only seconds. Then he heard Zinzi Richter’s son say, simply, “Huh,” and had to hurry to catch up with the tall man as he walked, with quickening strides, toward the darkness.

  The guard tower had looked considerably more impressive and ominous from a dingy room in a crumbling apartment house across from the Wall than it did at close range. At once splintery-new and yet already rickety, it had far more of an agricultural air than a military one, looking somewhere between a flattened silo and a hayloft. Jansen felt that there should have been a weathervane on its squared-off roof.

  Richter stopped in his tracks so suddenly that Jansen bumped into his back before he could halt himself. At the foot of the tower stairs stood the ghost of Zinzi Richter.

  Ashen, slender, with dark auburn hair limp against her skull, as though with sweat, she paid absolutely no attention either to Jansen or to her staring son. All her concentration was directed up the single flight of rusted metal steps to the doorway where a big old man stood hugging himself as he rocked erratically against the doorframe. Zinzi Richter made no attempt to go up to him, but simply stood waiting at the foot of the stair.

  “That’s her,” Richter whispered. “The Bruckners had one photo. Oh my God.”

  As though she had put on her Sunday best for the occasion, the ghost looked as clear and solid as any human being whose heart still jumped in the cage of her ribs, still ordered blood out to her fingertips and back through her throat and her thighs. Richter took a step toward her, but this time it was Jansen’s hand clamping hard on his arm. Jansen said softly, “Wait. She’s here for him.”

  Through binoculars—the closest acquaintance he had ever had with Leonid Leonidovich Gavrilenko over the Wall—Jansen had always seen the Russian as bull-featured and powerfully built, with an undomesticated mass of
heavy black hair that stood up crazily on either side of his broad, high-boned face when he pulled off his knit woolen cap. The man he saw now had none of that force, nothing of that implicit swagger: he only slumped against the door frame, his lips moving as though in prayer. Jansen thought, He’s old; and then, No, I’m old, and I don’t look like that. What’s happened to him?

  “That’s why he didn’t come to the checkpoint. He can’t come down,” Jansen said to Richter. “She’s there, and he’s afraid of her.”

  Richter ignored him. He pulled away from Jansen’s grip and approached the ghost of Zinzi Richter, plainly trying not to run to her. He said, “Mother, it’s me, I’m your son. I’m Bernd.” He tried to take her hands in his, but she did not move, or look at him, or respond in any way. She stayed where she was, looking up the stair at Gavrilenko.

  Jansen said, “Ben.” A strange calmness was upon him, as though for the first time in his life he actually knew what to do. He said, “Ben, we have to go up there.”

  Richter turned to him, so determinedly not crying that Jansen felt tears starting in his own eyes. “I can touch her—I didn’t know you could touch ghosts. But she doesn’t see me, she doesn’t even know I’m here. I don’t understand.”

  “She’s waiting for Gavrilenko,” Jansen said. “She’ll wait forever, if she has to. You want to find out what all this is about, we have to bring him to her. Now.”

  The last word snapped out in a tone that surprised him; he hardly recognized his own voice. But it seemed to help Ben, who managed to get hold of himself and follow Jansen as the older man started up the guard tower stairs. Well, I did make it to corporal before it was all over. Might have made sergeant if I’d stayed in. Things I could have been. Jansen looked back once at the ghost. She had not stirred at all from her position, nor changed the direction of her gaze. Holy shit, the Russian’s treed, is what it is. She’s got him treed. He could not control a swift shiver.

  Near the top of the stair he looked away from the tower and saw the darkness closing in, pitilessly paring away everything that was not itself.

  The guardroom door was open. Gavrilenko backed away as Jansen and Richter came in, still seemingly holding himself together with both arms. In a rough, throaty grumble, a ghost itself of the striding peasant vigor Jansen had heard over the phone, the Russian said, “Unavoidably detained, Rawhide. Trouble on the range, I am afraid.”

  “You have to come down to her, Gavrilenko,” Jansen said. “It’s time.”

  “Is time, is time.” Something of the jovial telephone derision flickered in the Russian’s gruff voice. “Now you are sounding like a priest come to walk me to firing squad. No, Rawhide, I do not go with you. I stay here until she goes away. I can stay here.” He rose shakily to his full height, arms firmly folded across his chest.

  “Leonid,” Jansen said. “That woman down there—the man with me is her son. Talk to him.”

  Gavrilenko turned to face Richter. His still-powerful face had gone grayish-white, making the beard stubble stand out starkly, like the last stalks of a gleaned-over wheat field.

  “Her son….” Gavrilenko did not move, nor take his eyes from Richter’s face for a long moment; then, to Jansen’s astonishment, he began to smile. His teeth were remarkably white, unusual for an East European of his generation. He drew a short breath and recited, in the classic half-chanting Russian style, “After the first death, there is no other. Mr. Dylan Thomas, English poet.”

  When there was no response, Gavrilenko repeated, “He understood. Shakespeare, Pushkin, they did not understand so well as Mr. Dylan Thomas.” He seemed unable to take his eyes from Richter. He said suddenly, “Your mother—I knew her.” The smile drew his lips flat against the good white teeth. “This one—” he jerked a thumb at Jansen—“he only sees her dying, no more. But I… I saw her living—she was good at living, Zinzi. Only a short time, we had, but we made of it what we can. Could—what we could. You see, I forget my English so soon.” The wide smile still clung to his lips, fading only slowly, like the shape of a cloud.

  Richter’s face was also taut, but his eyes remained steady and composed. He said quietly, “You were not my father.”

  Gavrilenko sighed. It was a long, slow sigh, almost theatrically Russian, and its wordless tone carried the suggestion of sorrow at once too deep to be born, and too hopeless to be worth bothering with. “No, I am not your father—that was some student, she told me, gone off to the West before she even knew she was pregnant. But I could have been. For three weeks, I could have been.”

  It was not said boastingly or mockingly, but was somehow part of the sigh. Jansen thought about Arl’s vanished husband and had to shake free of a sudden spasm of pure rage. “You helped her plan that run, didn’t you? Had to be someone who knew the triggers, the timing.”

  “I do more, Rawhide. I show her the weak places, I show where the big searchlights are, where the VoPos hide—everything I know, she knows.” His voice had taken on the same singsong quality as when he quoted the Thomas line. “She had a little money, not so much. I spread it among the VoPos, everybody getting something—so when she runs we are all turning into very bad shots, you understand? No big deal, everybody getting something.” He clasped his big hands at the waist, like a child set to recite at school. To Richter he said, “I do all that for Zinzi Richter, for your mother. Because she was funny, and I liked her, you know? Also, I was young.”

  “Because you were screwing her and taking her money,” Richter said harshly. “You used her.”

  “So? She is using me too.” Gavrilenko appeared genuinely indignant. “You think she sleeps with me out of love? Chort—she knows what she does, and so did I. She comes to me, straight to bed, down payment, right? Was a bargain, and both kept our word.” He laughed abruptly. “Like I said, young.”

  Jansen said, “Something obviously went wrong.”

  Gavrilenko was silent for a long time. He did not turn away from them, but he ceased to look directly at Richter, and his glances at Jansen had become defiantly despairing. He said finally, “The Stasi, Stasi, KGB—eyes everywhere, even when you know they have eyes. The day she makes her run… suddenly, no VoPos I recognize, no VoPos I pay money to, whole new crowd. Stasi agents, every one—I know this. What to do? I want to warn her, but I am on duty, they have made sure I have no chance. You understand?” He was glaring at them both now, looking more like an old bull than ever. “You understand? I had no chance!”

  After a moment he shrugged, long and deliberately. “Also no choice.” Now he clearly forced himself to meet Richter’s eyes, and the physical effort was visible on his face. He repeated doggedly, “No choice.”

  Richter’s silence was more than Jansen could bear. He had to speak. “So you shot her. She trusted you, and you killed her.”

  “They were watching me!” It sounded as though Gavrilenko’s throat was tearing from the words. “All of them, firing wide, missing and missing, watching, looking like this—” he mimicked someone stealing covert side-glances—“waiting for me to shoot and miss, so they know I am traitor. Her or me, and what would you do, brave Rawhide?” He was breathing like a runner whose strength has ended before his race. “Sweet, funny little Zinzi, nice girl—you tell me what you would do, eh? I wait.”

  Neither Jansen nor Richter responded, nor did they look at each other. For his part, the constant image in Jansen’s mind of Zinzi Richter’s doomed attempt to reach her baby kept being replaced by one of his own daughters. Outside the guardroom door, the edged darkness was slicing in closer, while through the window, in a strangely dizzying sweep, he could see back across the Death Strip and the Wall to the apartment where he had spent much of two years staring at this very room.

  “I wait,” Gavrilenko repeated, and this time it was not a mocking challenge. This time it was soft and urgent, almost plaintive, as though he really did want an answer, was in desperate need of any reply at all. For a third time he said, “I wait to be told what I should have done. Speak,
wise Amerikanski friends.”

  “That’s a comedy word,” Jansen said. “Nobody uses that anymore.”

  Then Richter answered him at last, his words falling like the muffled strokes of an old clock. He said, “Mr. Gavrilenko, I have to thank you. If your guilt were not so great, if you had just been an agent, a VoPo, who shot my mother and went off to lunch, it would never have dragged you here to see her again. It would never have called to Henry’s guilt, or to my own guilt for being born, and causing her death… her stupid, stupid, needless death.” For those few words there was a sound in his voice like claws on stone, and his hands kept opening and closing at his sides.

  “You can’t think that,” Jansen said. “She could have died the exact same way, even if you hadn’t been born. Believe me, you do not want to spend your life thinking—”

  Richter cut him off. “What I think is not important. We’re here, and this has got to be why we’re here. What we do now is what matters. We go down to my mother, to look into her face. All three of us. This is not a request.”

  He looked sharply at Jansen, who nodded. But Gavrilenko backed away, shaking his head, saying, “No, no, I cannot, will not, no, never possible.” He wailed and struggled frantically when Jansen and Richter caught hold of his flailing arms and literally dragged him out of the guard room. Old and ill, half-mad or not—his eyes were rolling as wildly as those of a terrified stallion—he was still stronger than either of them alone, and their cramped passage down the guard tower’s stairway was a battle. Jansen had a bloody nose by the time they had the Russian near ground-level, and Richter’s shirt was splitting down the back seam. Through it all, Gavrilenko wailed and cursed in an absurd and piteous mix of Russian, German, and English, going utterly limp at the last, which meant hauling him the final few steps like a side of beef or bale of hay, until they were finally able to dump him at Zinzi Richter’s feet and step back, breathless and exhausted.