The Barter

by Siobhan Adcock

  “I apologize, Mrs. Hirschfelder. I do apologize. But this may save you yet.”

  He leaned toward her over her little boy’s head, uninvited, and kissed her gently at the corner of her eye, then in the center of her soft, dry mouth. He was so shockingly hot, perhaps with fever, that she felt his body radiate warmth at hers like a coal. Then in the stunned silence that followed his transgression, the magician Robert Krause turned on his heel and left the house.

  Rebecca got to the parlor window in time to observe him leaning heavily against the ash tree in the front yard, as if overtaken, and then he stumbled to the street and made his way out of their lives.

  * * *

  In the brooding, quiet hours after Matthew had been put to bed, Adeline and Rebecca had been in the habit of sitting in neighboring chairs by the kitchen stove in silent companionship, like a pair of old spinster sisters. With the weather beginning to take a pleasant turn, Rebecca and Frau now sat outside on the small back porch in the evenings, wrapped in shawls against the crisp oncoming spring, and they found themselves on the back porch that evening, both of them unhappy and preoccupied.

  On the porch in the dark with Frau in the cool spring night, breathing the fresh scent of the growing things around them and longing for the home she had abandoned and for the love she had wasted, Rebecca said softly, “What do you think he meant, the poor man?”

  Frau grunted.

  “Don’t you think it was strange? What he said—that I would be a ghost? And that I would never sacrifice anything for anyone? Didn’t it remind you of— And the kiss? Aren’t you thinking of my mother?” Rebecca pulled her wrap around herself. She’d been feeling chills all afternoon. “I am. I’m thinking of that story you always told me,” she said accusingly. “If I had never heard that story, I would just think Herr Krause was a sad wandering madman with a few clever tricks.” She looked at Frau. “It’s as if he knew that story about my mother. But he couldn’t have, could he? And if he did, he knew it wrongly.”

  Frau cleared her throat with a great, defensive harrumph. “He certainly knows it wrongly, if he knows it at all. Men always observe women’s lives to be sacrifice,” she said brusquely. “It is a word I dislike.”

  Rebecca looked over at her old friend with some surprise. “That’s quite a declaration, Frau,” she said with a little laugh. “What on earth do you mean?”

  Frau sniffed. “We women have lives that are not easy, never easy. But they are not for sacrifice. That makes it seem like a thing that is weakly done, a surrender. I believe in more like Tausch. Exchange. Whatever a woman does, she must get something for it, if it is done with will and with purpose. Your mother say to me once, ‘A woman cannot have happiness without purpose, or purpose with no happiness.’”

  Rebecca chewed on this for a moment out of deference to Frau, who she knew had faced deprivations of the sourest and loneliest sort, and who she believed had lived without much love, purpose, or happiness in her long years, other than what little she and her mother and Matthew had given her. She then said slowly, “I don’t think it’s that simple.”

  “Simple. What she did was simple?” Frau demanded, pointing to her. “Would you have done it? Give up an hour of your life, and your Matthew’s? And for what would you make this exchange? To save his life, or yours? To save your marriage? To save your family?”

  Rebecca stared at Frau, startled. And then the older woman’s indignation began to seem like an insult.

  “What are you suggesting, that our lunatic fire-breathing magician was right?” Rebecca retorted, mocking. But he did take my kiss. He did take my tear. “Or that because you made up a story about it, my mother really bartered the last hour of her life to save mine?” She had never spoken harshly to her Frau before. Her chest hurt; it felt like she was stomping boot-shod on her own heart. But Frau had never before flung in her face what was so obviously, openly wrong between John and herself. Neither Frau nor the Doctor had ever once commented on how cool Rebecca and John were with each other, how they seemed to speak to each other and to everyone else with bitterness, how they’d lost touch with friends and grown remote toward their loved ones, how even their little boy seemed afraid to misbehave, afraid to be anything but good, good, good, reluctant to prompt any more love to fall out of his universe than was already so clearly missing. Frau, of all people, wasn’t supposed to have eyes to see or ears to hear. What could this old woman know about the thorn in Rebecca’s heart? “I don’t believe that simply telling a story makes it real, Frau. And I certainly don’t believe I am to be an unquiet, graveless, lonely soul, who never gave anything to anybody . . .” But here her archness failed her, and she found that she couldn’t go on.

  Frau burrowed into her shawl and shivered. “I have no opinion.”

  * * *

  Late and starry and dark. Only a quarter-moon lights the road. It is difficult to see, but she thinks the animal may have traveled this route a few times. The horse seems to be able to pick her way through the darkness as if picking berries with her dainty hooves. Only the wind courses through the grasses and the distant live oaks. She is out here on the country lane alone, the lantern is insufficient, and the farm feels farther distant than it ever has before. Still she knows she must get there.

  It is now several hours since she began to feel peculiar, dizzy, uncertain. The world clouds over, then clears, clouds over, then clears. Like a white sheet flung across a bed and yanked away, or like a nightgown floating over her head and coming to rest around her ankles before being pulled up again.

  She feels as if she is dissolving.

  She is trying to understand what is happening to her. Perhaps the magician has cursed her and she is dying. Or the magician’s stolen kiss was laced with a slow-acting poison that is only now taking effect. Or perhaps she is mad with the magician’s madness, because she, too, is seeing things, as if she is projecting them on a mirror from which she cannot turn away. She keeps closing her eyes and willing the visions to leave her be, but there they are, right in front of her on the road she travels: A cold house in a burning place, filled with magical objects, unimaginable luxuries. A woman curled up around a little girl, filled with fear, and with love, love, oh, desperate love. The beloved face of a mother suspended on a rope swing, wheeling far overhead, moonlike and as far out of reach as the moon. A window overlooking a dark street like a river, a pool of shockingly blue water, other houses, too close, with ugly eyes glaring in like a giant’s face at the panes. A staircase she must climb and climb and then descend and descend, tirelessly, even though the scissor of every step is like a blade slashing through her limbs. A beautiful little girl, clever and special like her own Matthew, worth everything.

  She is gasping for breath, the night air thin and cruel. Perhaps simply by making his prediction about her, the magician also made it come true. She won’t reach home in time, but she also won’t die. She’ll always be on this road.

  She feels as she felt standing at the foot of the staircase: There is something she wants badly just ahead of her, if only she can get there.

  She opens her eyes and looks up at the stars and realizes that she has slumped backward in the cart’s seat and she must sit up again. It is hard, so hard. But she does it, and she is relieved to see that the horse is still moving ahead, good old girl, dear old girl. Whose horse it is, she scarcely knows. She came out of Gruber’s livery stable down the street, and Rebecca hasn’t given her a name yet. Mercy, Prudence, Patience, Courage, Fortitude.

  What is inside me? What am I looking for? The visions descend from the sky overhead like a screen swinging into place, and begin to flicker and fade on the road ahead of her, just past the horse’s ears. The good thing about closing her eyes is that the images cannot follow her here into the dark. The bad thing about closing her eyes is that it becomes difficult to breathe.

  When she can no longer stand it, she opens her eyes again, and the stars and the
road and the horse and the window and the house and the mother and the girl are all still there, seething and growing and shrinking on the other side of some unthinkable membrane.

  John. Be there waiting for me. Be there, love.

  She thinks of what will happen to them if she doesn’t make it home, if she’s trapped on this road. She thinks about John, his beautiful face and his sad, hard eyes, and she sees his face become a little boy’s face, her Matthew’s. These thoughts are intolerable.

  The hour is unimaginably late. At some point that evening Frau went up to bed, but Rebecca stayed out on the back porch alone, thinking and then not thinking. The wind picked up, lifting leaves and grasses across the darkened yard and flying up the steps to where she sat draped in her shawl. And there on the back porch, something overcame her. Something: her own soul, a tribe of witches, her mother’s spirit. Something. It lifted her. She went into the house, moving toward the stairs, and, climbing them, felt herself dropping through them again and into this horrible place, not here, not there, knowing neither. Pulling with all her might, she finally gained the house’s upper story and hovered like a mist over her darling boy asleep in his cot, cheeks flushed scarlet, breathing too rapidly. She knew it then, didn’t she? He’s ill, he’s dying, but I can still save him. She called for Frau, called and called from Matthew’s bedside, and the old woman never came. My boy is ill, we’re dying, but I can do what my mother did. I can give up an hour of my life and an hour of my darling’s, and in that way we can save each other. But some thing, some crucial part of the exchange, was still absent: She was still missing something, looking for something. Something she loved and needed.

  And then she was out in the night, at the stable, taking a neighbor’s light horse cart for the journey home, with these images flashing before her eyes.

  She has been on this road a long time.

  Something has overcome her—her self, that hot and hungry thing, latent in her but growing all along—and caused everything inside her to rise to the surface and evaporate. That must be it. She has finally turned her insides out. And the fear and loneliness and doubt in which she has encased herself are causing her to dissolve. Her self, her real self, that thing she felt rising to the surface from within its cold container that night in the wagon with John, the night her father died and the magician’s calculations failed: It is here, now, outside in the world, but it is disintegrating inside of an acidic mist, a sheet of white, a cloud. She knows well this kind of evil whiteness that envelops and imprisons: the nightgown, the smoke, the snow. The bedsheets.

  She is trapped inside, looking out. Watching these scenes.

  Can she touch them?

  She can try.

  The night is black.

  She wants to be home. She wants to see her fields again and see John’s dear, good face.

  She left her little boy behind.

  She is a monster.

  But not forever, she wouldn’t leave him forever.

  Just for an hour. An hour of his life, sleeping and unaware, and an hour of hers, out here alone on the road. The hours are given freely in exchange for their release from the tower and her release from the white, and in exchange for their return home, to each other, to safety together. What mother wouldn’t exchange an hour of her life for her child? What child, if he understood what it meant, wouldn’t exchange an hour of his life to save his mother?

  Make the barter that I made. I am what you are.

  She’s ready to do it now.

  In exchange for love, I give this hour. In exchange for happiness, for purpose, for worth, I give this hour. It’s that easy—it’s such a small thing, to give and to take. On the road in front of her she can see the burning house in its tiny matchbox of a field, and the terrified mother curled around her little girl, and she wants to tell her: It’s not so hard as you think. Make the barter that I made, and you can both be free.

  The farm is over the next rise, she’s sure of it, and in the farmhouse she will find her happiness, her purpose, and her power. It’s not just John, although he’s part of it, and it’s not just the work and the farm and the things she learned how to do there, but that’s all part of it, too. It’s not only Matthew, either, although he is always there with her, a part of herself that she’s always known and yet has a whole lovely lifetime to learn. Joy rises in her throat, and she urges the horse onward, hurrying toward the woman in the road.

  Don’t you know who you are? Don’t you know by now what you can do?

  You are the only one who can give so monstrously. You are the only one.

  The horse missteps in the dark, and her foreleg is suddenly off the road. She is a light animal, and the cart is not heavy, but there is a bank by the roadside here, protecting a ditch through which a shallow springtime creek runs. The angle is not steep, but it is enough to render the horse off-balance, unable to correct her stride, and the front wheel of the cart follows the animal off the road and catches her on her back hoof. All at once the cart is on its side, and then the horse is beneath it, bucking with her heavy hooves against the muddy earth until she is upright again. The cart rears up with her weight and then crashes back down again, still attached to the horse and still on its side, dragging behind her on a broken harness. The horse takes a few lurching steps, and the cart’s rear wheel catches on a rock emerging from the creek’s gravelly bank. The horse pulls mightily, making a frustrated sound of effort, and the cart’s cheap wheel breaks off. Up onto the road the animal pulls herself, the wrecked cart trailing. With a triumphant little shake of her head the horse continues on her way, slowly, dragging the ruined cart on its side and favoring her back left leg.

  There is a woman by the side of the road.

  She is still moving.

  She followed the little cart’s cartwheel into the ditch and shattered her right shoulder on the rocky outcrop that just a minute later would catch the cart on its way back out of the ditch. Striking her head on the ground at the creek’s edge and then tumbling into the water, the woman saw the cart following her flight into the creek, and then the cart’s weight landed on her body and rolled, breaking two ribs. She was aware of a forceful, splashing lunge, a whicker of air overhead, and then the horse’s flailing hoof struck her skull.

  This woman is able, after some time, to fight her way out from the creek water to lie on her side, and then on her back, lying in her blood- and mud-soaked black dress in the grass on the edge of the road, smelling the wet earth all around her and gasping up at the stars.

  And then, because she’s strong, and because if she’s gone this far she might as well go on, she might wait here, and in an hour, after the sound of the broken, riderless cart clattering past the farmhouse over the next rise awakens the farmhouse’s occupant, she might be discovered and, after a long night of anguish and uncertainty, ultimately saved by the doctor who replaced old Dr. Mueller. She might in time recover and build a successful farm with her husband. Because of her, Matthew might survive the night, too, and grow up to distinguish himself at school and marry a smart girl of a good family. He’ll be too young for the Great War and too old for the one that follows it. He’ll be one of the lucky ones. And after enough time passes she might not think of the barter she made—like the meaningless, random accident that followed, it simply won’t seem to have taken place. She could almost have imagined the white flickering images, the road, and the magician’s cursed kiss. She might still go on to have a happy life, with few regrets. She might die an old woman, loved and accomplished.

  She might survive this. Or she might barter her hour and still die, just as her own mother did.

  But she still wants to tell the woman ahead of her on the road something—I have something for you. Something important. Even here by the side of the road, she feels so alive with power that her body seems to be singing with it: She’s outside of the white now, and she knows what she passed through it to do. She want
s to tell this woman, wants to tell her—what? To do exactly as she herself has done. Risk the safety of an hour for what it might yield in exchange: power. You are the only one who can do this. The power to define the meaning and shape of your own life, and not have it shaped for you by an acid shroud of fear, self-doubt, misperception, powerlessness. You are what you are looking for. The power to walk right through that white, shapeless barrier of fear and self-loathing and render it meaningless, a bedsheet flapping on a clothesline in the breeze.

  Even now, even here poised on the crumbling edge of this road, she is filled with compassion for the woman ahead of her—the other one, the one she’d been racing toward through the white of her fear and the black of the night. If only she can be brave enough to make the same barter. Let me show you. Let me help you. My mother did it, and now I will do it, and you must do it, too. An hour, it is such a small thing, and it could save all of us. All of us.

  She can taste blood in her mouth. Every breath brings with it a shocking pain, and then an awareness that the pain is fading. She’s sorry to feel it leaving her, but she feels ready to reach out for whatever might be coming next.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  She makes it to the top of the stairs, chest heaving—there’s some air up here, now that she’s put some distance between herself and the thing downstairs. But her legs are still shaking so badly that somehow on the last riser she trips and falls to the floor. The ghost is coming. She keeps her eyes on the rectangle of air above the stairway. She knows what she will see there, soon, very soon. Behind her, on the other side of the yellow-outlined rectangle that is the bathroom door, Julie is gamely splashing with her father, her rarely glimpsed great love. And in front of her, just over the horizon line where the upstairs hallway meets the staircase, something is coming for her, something so hungry and insistent that even though it can move only by shambling, shuffling grasps at the air, it won’t stop until it reaches her again.