The Barter

by Siobhan Adcock

  “I ought to sell this place,” Rebecca said, feeling at the same time a wave of crashing exhaustion at the very thought. “You should come out to live on the farm with me and John,” she went on. But with their debts, the house in town was now more valuable than the farm. They’d be foolish to sell it—even John had said so. The question was what exactly they should do with it, and that question, lacking any better answer, was to be met in this way: she, alone with her boy and her old relative, drifting through the rooms every day, either looking for something to do or doing nothing at all, playing with the boy or looking out the window or reading the Doctor’s newspapers.

  “Ja,” Frau said, and then said no more, and Rebecca dropped the subject and went upstairs to take a nap with Matthew.

  March arrived, powerless to stir them from their torpor despite the near-violent greening of the countryside beyond their windows. Rebecca longed to clap eyes on their old friendly fields.

  She knew she was needed on the farm—she could be useful there, when John and the Heinrichs and Dusana were working themselves half to death with the first planting. John warned them that there would be several weeks during which he wouldn’t be able to come to town. He was in a fever of planning when Rebecca had last seen him, scarcely able to talk for the thundering pressure the corn and oats were producing in his imaginings. This year had to be a good one for the farm, and too much depended on beginning the season the right way, right now. “Dusana will cook for us and keep things up a little. As much as she can. We’ll be out in the field so much we’ll scarcely see the inside of the house,” he said distractedly, climbing into the wagon for the return trip.

  Rebecca held Matthew in her arms, both of them blinking up at John from below. She thought with a surge of intense homesickness of the yellow-green yard around her house, the kitchen garden she ought to have started planting in February, the smells of growing things reaching out to them wherever they stood, inside or out, in the barn or the orchard, like the good strong handshake of the earth. Even standing in her father’s yard outside the horse shed, she was assailed by powerful smells: Frau’s old garden, looking fresh even in neglect, the shivering bushes and grasses that crowded up against the house, even the pungent oat and manure smell of the horse shed itself. “I want to come home,” she said to John suddenly. “Please take us with you.”

  John looked down at them, troubled. Matthew reached up to his father, and John released the reins and took his boy with a grunt of happy effort. “Strong fellow,” he said, smiling into Matthew’s dazzled face.

  “John. I can’t think here. I want to come back out to the farm and do something useful with my time instead of sitting around the parlor, growing roots.” Rebecca put a boot up on the wagon’s side step and pulled herself up, balanced there on one foot, holding to the side of the wagon board and leaning close to her husband, who sat stiffly with his boy on his lap, avoiding, it seemed to her, both the question of her return and the pressure of her body. “Please. Answer me. Why won’t you take us with you?”

  “Beck,” he said quietly, “I think it’s better this way.”

  She swallowed a gulp of the muddy, green-scented air of the yard for strength. John was so close to her she was practically pressing her breasts against his arm as she stood balanced on the wagon step. She saw him so clearly then, as if the spring air were a lens. Sadness and resolve had hardened him into a whetting stone that made his body—pressed against hers but even now beginning to pull away—into a knife-edge sharp enough to cut her heart.

  “How can it be better?” she whispered miserably.

  John shook his head. “We have a chance now to stop making each other unhappy. I’m sorry that it had to happen this way, but now that it has—”

  “You mean my father’s death is looking to you like a good opportunity to get away from me?” she flashed out.

  “I don’t see it that way, no,” John said, his careful, neutral tone signaling his characteristic retreat from conflict. “We’re both orphans now, and I’m nothing but sorry about that,” he added softly. Then he said nothing else for a maddening pause, and Rebecca realized that was all he intended to say on the subject. Her exasperation pounced.

  “You won’t fight with me! Don’t you think we’d be better off if you’d just fight with me, just one time? We could have it all out between us!”

  Matthew, seeing his parents in disagreement over his head and hearing his mother’s sharp tone, immediately turned on his peacemaker’s charms, smiling and unleashing a squeal, giving his father a hearty pat on the chest and struggling to stand up in his lap.

  “He’s just like you. He won’t brook an argument,” Rebecca observed.

  John wrangled Matthew in his arms until the boy discovered and fell to examining the leather strap his father held loosely in one hand. “I won’t fight with you, Rebecca. It’s not respectful to you. My parents taught me that a man who fights with a woman is worse than the lowest dog,” John said slowly. “I just want to give you both a good life. The best I can anyway.”

  “That’s foolish,” Rebecca snapped. “How are you supposed to understand me if you won’t fight with me?”

  John looked at her with some real amusement then. His eyes were fond and tired. “How indeed.”

  Rebecca felt her cheeks grow hot. She looked at the ground below the wagon, the compressed little grasses and the pale-yellow earth of the lane. She struggled for a moment, then said, “I know I’m—not always good to others. To you. But try. Try, please, to understand me. If you can’t, nobody will. I want to come home, and I want to get back to work. I want to be part of your life. I want us to be together and make something, mean something. Don’t leave me here.”

  Having delivered her final plea, Rebecca forced herself to look up again. John’s dark eyes were on his son, and a small smile was on his lips as Matthew bounced in his lap on springy, rubbery legs.

  “You aren’t listening,” Rebecca said.

  “I am, Beck. I am.” He made a face at Matthew, who chortled with joy.

  “Well then, if you are listening, and you still take the absurd position that we should be apart when you know I want the opposite, then in fact you are arguing with me, and as you said, only a lowly dog would do that,” she pointed out reasonably.

  John spared her a wry glance then.

  “Think about it. Please. Take us back.” Rebecca leaned in and kissed his cheek, then stepped back onto the ground and squinted up at the two of them, shining down from above her like a sun. “I’m not so terrible, am I?”

  “You are the love of my life,” John said simply. He handed Matthew down to her, and she took him and kissed his sweet, soft temple. “You both are. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye, then.”

  * * *

  A few lonely weeks later, Frau and Rebecca were in the kitchen, sewing and reading while Matthew played on the floor, when the bell hung on the scrolled iron hook outside the house’s front door rang once, tentatively, then again with strength. The women looked at each other mutely, then rose and went into the parlor, Rebecca carrying the boy.

  They rarely had visitors. Rebecca, with Matthew on her hip, opened the door to the house and saw an unknown figure bathed in gold spring sunshine. She stepped back and the darkened figure resolved into a man, and then a man she thought she half remembered, and then his hat was off and he was bowing deeply and saying with a trace of an accent, “Mrs. Hirschfelder, I may assume?”

  Rebecca peered into the man’s handsome, shadowed face. “Herr Krause? Is that you, sir?”

  Robert Krause smiled thinly. “Indeed, and thank you for remembering me, Mrs. Hirschfelder.”

  “How could I forget? You promised me eternal life.” Rebecca laughed. “Please, come in. May I introduce my aunt, Miss Nussbaum.”

  Again the deep bow. “But I am afraid I have come to visit you during a time of sorrow.”


  Rebecca smoothed her hands down the skirt of her mourning dress and said, “My father, Dr. Mueller, passed away this winter. My son, Matthew, is our bright consolation. Will you sit?”

  “I will fetch some coffee,” Frau offered. “It would be my pleasure, sir.”

  “You are from near Bonn, madam?” the magician asked abruptly.

  “I am,” Frau said, a flush of pleasure in her face. “Duisdorf, in the western country outside of Bonn.”

  “I knew within a moment,” Herr Krause said warmly. “I am from Bonn myself.”

  “Then my pleasure is doubled,” Frau replied. “Excuse me, I will return in a moment.”

  “I thought you had left our town in January for your next engagement,” Rebecca said, seating herself opposite the magician with Matthew in her lap.

  “I had. I returned,” the magician said, fixing her with such an odd stare that she felt herself obliged to sit up straighter. His look wasn’t amorous—far from it. He seemed almost irritated by her.

  “I hope you traveled well,” she said politely, not sure how else to broach his hostility.

  “I confess I did not,” Robert Krause answered. “I found I had unfinished business here. I see now that I am not likely to gain any satisfaction of it despite the effort I made in returning.” He paused, then blurted, “Tell me, Mrs. Hirschfelder, you are not of— Your parents, they are not both German, are they?”

  “My late father was born in Duisdorf, like my aunt Adeline with whom you are acquainted,” Rebecca answered calmly. “My mother’s people were from Italy.”

  “Ah.” Herr Krause nodded with a great upward jerk of his cleft chin. “That explains it. Your darkness, you know. You stand out. When I saw you in the theater, I thought, this woman cannot be from Germans.”

  “You did seem rather swift to make up your mind about me,” Rebecca said, with some haughtiness she couldn’t restrain. He really was hostile, she thought. She kissed Matthew’s creamy cheek, then set him on the floor near her feet on the rug with some of his scattered toys.

  “I did, I am afraid. I apologize if I seem rude,” Herr Krause said. He jerked to his feet and strode across the room to Matthew, then knelt beside the boy before Rebecca could make a motion to protect him. The magician gazed into the boy’s face; then suddenly in his hand was a toy wooden turtle, brightly painted.

  Altogether it was the most astonishing thing Rebecca had ever seen—at such close range, Krause did seem to have magical powers—and she laughed and clapped her hands before she could stop herself. The young man relinquished the toy to the little boy, who promptly put it into his mouth. “Danke sehr!” she exclaimed, delighted.

  The magician settled back into a seated position on the rug and looked up at her in a way that was now familiar and friendly. But his cheeks, she saw, were as scarlet as if he’d ridden through a rainstorm. Is he ill? she wondered. She fought an impulse to pluck away the turtle in Matthew’s mouth, as if it were poisoned. “I’m more comfortable down here with the little creatures, if you don’t mind, madam,” Herr Krause said.

  “Not at all.” At that moment Adeline returned with a tray of quick breads and fragrant coffee, and if she was surprised to find a young man who was not Rebecca’s husband seated on the floor at her feet like a conquered swain, the woman gave no sign of it. She merely poured the man a cup.

  “Black, bitte,” he said.

  “Sehr gut,” Frau replied, and handed him the cup without a twitch.

  “Miss Nussbaum attended your performances, of course. My entire family saw them. Matthew included.”

  “You did me more credit than I deserved. My performances here were flawed by a multitude of mistakes,” the young man said. “I reentered town this morning expecting to be met with flaming pitchforks at the train station.”

  Rebecca wondered at his casual reference to pitchforks—the story of the murdered ghost children had returned to her many times in her disquieted winter hours. She had theorized, too, about its application to poor Mrs. Brandt. A woman like Mrs. Brandt, who had been young when the country was at war, might have witnessed atrocities, but something as horrible as seeing children stabbed to death with pitchforks seemed beyond the pale even for those grim times. She had turned over the possibilities like playing cards but never produced a satisfying explanation. “Your effects seemed so well done,” she protested. “You had us all believing you could read our minds.”

  “A woman is invited up to the stage, and everyone in the theater begins to whisper her name—it’s not a difficult thing, if you have a sharp ear, to surprise her and everyone else by having overheard it.” Robert Krause tapped Matthew’s little ear gently and produced a penny between his fingers. “A mirror may function as a screen. A box may have secret compartments, themselves with mechanical surprises. The truth is, Mrs. Hirschfelder, the tricks of my trade are so well-known that to make a living, a man like myself must seek out those rare pockets of humanity that haven’t already divined that magicians are far from divine.”

  “Oh, no one accused you of that, I hope.” Rebecca smiled.

  “I haven’t seen your like before,” Frau put in. “You are a gifted young man, Herr Krause. You should not sell yourself short.”

  “No one has accused me of doing that, either.” Herr Krause nodded. There was a brief pause, followed by a tumble of words: “But I did feel that I needed to return here, Mrs. Hirschfelder, to find you and to—if I could—rectify my error.”

  “But not to apologize for dooming me to a long and lonely life here on earth?” she teased.

  “Ah, is it so lonely?” He looked at her with sharp eyes. If the question had been posed by a young man similarly seated at her feet even two years ago, that young man’s purpose might have been romantic. But she sensed that something else entirely was afoot here and began to feel uneasy.

  “No. I have my little boy, as you see. And my good friend—” She nodded to Frau across the room. “My husband also, who has a successful farm not far from here.” She was surprised at how naturally the lie came to her.

  “But a long and solitary existence, that’s what you perceived me to mean,” Robert Krause pursued, his eyes narrowed and stark. When she didn’t respond, he said bluntly, “That was what I saw for you, madam. If you will forgive me. What I saw was that you will not remain in the earth when you are buried. You will not remain quietly interred.”

  After a shocked pause, during which everything in the room seemed to wheel around and come to a stop in front of the young man looking at her with such intensity, Rebecca regained herself enough to retort, “You just said you weren’t a divine medium. You admitted you had nothing but a few well-worn tricks.” She shrugged. “I didn’t take you seriously, whatever you saw.”

  Krause, however, hardly seemed to hear her. He went on, with some of the relentlessness that they had paid good money to watch on the stage, while Rebecca stared at him in growing consternation over her little boy’s fair head. “I thought I might have made a miscalculation, you see. It’s rare to see a ghost on earth before she walks, and I thought I’d made a fool of myself—I did, I did indeed make a fool of myself that night, rushing off the stage without pausing to bow! I was— How do you say it? I was rattled. Do you know how it works? You have heard how this trick is done?”

  Rebecca shook her head, lips dry.

  “I will tell you. It is simple. You observe what everyone else in the theater expects for that person, and you calculate the difference between how that person expects to die and how others expect him to die. The difference is the sum! The sum of the years the person has left, multiplied by the way those years will end! Another magician taught me the trick of it in Chicago, years ago. Really it is simple once a few times you have done it.”

  His words were coming fast now indeed, his accent thickening in his excitement. “One never—almost never—calculates a difference of nothing. Of zero. Do
you see? Everybody else thinks you are already dead! But what is plain in you, my dear Mrs. Hirschfelder, is that you don’t know it yet!”

  He nodded briskly, professionally, and Rebecca saw with a profound sinking of heart that the golden-haired young man was mad.

  “No. You don’t, and you never will accept that you will die. And,” he added significantly, his face turning cold and rude, “you won’t sacrifice a second of your life for anyone else, neither! Ha! What do you say to that, Fräulein?”

  “Get out of here,” Frau thundered, suddenly rising to her feet like a mountain with a storm gathering over its head. “Get out of here, you terrible man. What you know about death and about this woman would fit in my hand, here.” She thrust her cupped hand toward him. “Imposter.”

  Rebecca stood hastily as well, tears of pity in her eyes. “It’s all right, Frau. I think Herr Krause is tired. He may be saying things he doesn’t mean. I’m sure he didn’t come here intending to offend me.”

  Sitting on the floor beside her son, the insane magician stared up at her with a narrowed focus; then his brow cleared abruptly and he scrambled to his feet, looking lost. She extended her hand to Robert Krause, and he clasped it in his. His hands were slick with sweat, cold and hot at once. The poor man, she thought. Such a waste.