The Swan Thieves

by Elizabeth Kostova

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  him. I've sent him to both individual and group therapy, but he doesn't speak there either, and he's stopped going. If he won't talk, then I need to be able to talk to him myself with some sense of what might be troubling him."

  "To provoke him?" she said bluntly. Her eyebrows were up again.

  "No. To draw him out, to show him I understand his life, to some degree. It might help him start speaking again."

  She seemed to think hard for a moment; she sat up straighter, raising the line of her small breasts under her shirt. "But how will you explain knowing in detail things about his life that he hasn't told you himself?"

  It was such a good question, such a direct, keen question, that I put down my coffee and sat watching her. I hadn't expected to have to answer this right away; in fact, I'd been struggling with it myself. She'd caught me out in the course of five minutes' conversation.

  "I'll be honest with you," I said, although I knew it sounded like a professional line. "I don't know yet how I'll explain that to him if he asks. But if he asks me, it will mean he's talking. Even if he's angry about it."

  For the first time I saw her lips curve away from; even teeth, the top front ones slightly too large and therefore very sweet. Then she pursed her mouth again. "Hmm," she said, almost a soft little song. "And will you bring my name into it?"

  "That's up to you, Mrs. Oliver," I said. "We can talk about how to handle that, if you'd like."

  She took up her coffee cup. "Yes," she said. "Maybe so. Let me think about that and we'll agree on something. Call me Kate, please." That small movement of her mouth, the look of a woman who had once smiled often and might learn to again. "For one thing, I try not to think of myself as Mrs. Oliver. I'm in the process of changing back to my maiden name, in fact. I decided just recently to do that."

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  "Kate, then--thank you," I said, glancing away before she did. "If you're comfortable with it, I'll take some notes, too, but only for my own use."

  She seemed to ponder all this. Then she set her cup aside as if the time for business had come. I realized at that moment how extremely clean and neat the room was. She had the two children, whom she'd said were at school during the day. Their toys must have been elsewhere in the house. Her blackberry china was immaculate and apparently stored somewhere out of reach. This was a woman who managed prodigiously, and I hadn't even noticed that until now, perhaps because she made it look effortless. She folded her hands on her knee again. "All right. Please don't tell him I talked with you, at least not yet. I need to think about that. But I will be as open as I can. If I'm going to do this at all, I want the record to be complete."

  It was my turn to feel surprised, and I thought I showed it in spite of myself. "I believe you'll be helping Robert, however you may feel about him at this point."

  She dropped her eyes, so that her face aged suddenly, dimmed without their blue. I thought of the name of a color in my Crayola set from childhood: "Periwinkle." She glanced up again. "I don't know why, but I believe so, too. You know, I couldn't help Robert very much in the end. In fact, I didn't really want to, by then. That's the only thing I've truly regretted. I think that's why I've paid some of the residential bills. How long will you be here?"

  "You mean this morning?"

  "In general. I mean, I've reserved two mornings. We have until noon today, and again tomorrow." She spoke as dispassionately as if we'd been discussing checkout time at a hotel. "If necessary, I can take a third morning off, although it would be difficult. I'll have to double up some of my work assignments as it is. I already work at night sometimes to be freer for the children after school."

  "I don't want to trespass on more of your time when you've

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  been so generous," I said. I finished my coffee in two sips, set it aside, and took out my notepad. "Let's see how far we get this morning."

  For the first time, I saw that her face was not merely guarded but sad, with its colors of ocean and beach. My heart twisted inside me--or my conscience? Was it my conscience? She looked directly at me. "I guess you want to know about the woman," she said. "The dark-haired woman--right?"

  It threw me; I had planned to ease into Robert's story, to ask her a little at a time about his earliest symptoms. I saw from her face that she would not appreciate hedging on my part. "Yes."

  She nodded. "Has he been painting her?"

  "Yes, he has. Nearly every day. I noticed that she was the subject of one of his shows as well, and thought you might know something about her."

  "I do--as much as I want to know. But I didn't think I would ever be telling a stranger about it." She leaned forward, and I saw her small body rise and fall. "You're used to hearing very private things?"

  "Of course," I said. If my conscience had been a person at that moment, I might have strangled him.

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  Mon cher oncle:

  I hope you will not mind my addressing you thus, as a true relative, which I am in spirit, at least, if not by blood. Papa bids me thank you for the package you sent in response to my note. We shall read the book aloud, with help from Yves on his evenings at home--he is also much intrigued. These lesser Italian masters have long been of interest to him, he says. I am going to my sister's house for three nights, where I stay to feast on her lovely children. I do not mind telling you they are my favorite models, in my own dabblings. And my sister is my most admired friend, so that I understand very well your brother's devotion to you. Papa says of you that because of your modesty no one knows that you are the bravest, truest man on earth. How many brothers speak so warmly of each other? Yves promises evenings will be all for reading to Papa while I am gone, and I shall pick up where he leaves off.

  With warmest thanks for your kindness,

  Béatrice Vignot

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  CHAPTER 12 Kate

  I first saw her, the woman, at a highway rest area somewhere in Maryland. But I should tell you before that about when I first saw Robert, too. I met him in New York City in 1984, when I was twenty-four. I'd been working there for about two months, it was summer, and I was homesick for Michigan. I'd expected New York to be exciting, and it was exciting, but it was also tiring. I lived in Brooklyn, not Manhattan. I took three trains to work instead of strolling through Greenwich Village. At the end of the workday, hours as an editorial assistant at a medical journal, I was too tired to stroll anywhere anyway, and too worried about the cost to go to an interesting foreign movie. I was not meeting people quickly either.

  The day I met Robert, I went after work to Lord & Taylor, which I knew would be too expensive, to get a birthday present for my mother. As soon as I was inside, away from the summer street, the perfumed air-conditioning hit me hard. Meeting the contemptuous gaze of mannequins in their bathing suits with the new high-cut leg, I wished I'd dressed better for work that morning. I wanted to get my mother a hat, something she would never get for herself, something lovely she might have worn as a young woman meeting my father at the Philadelphia Cricket Club for the first time. She might never wear it in Ann Arbor, but it would remind her of her youth, with its white gloves and feeling of stability, and it would remind her, too, of a daughter's love. I had thought the hat section would be on the first floor, near the silk scarves signed by famous designers I had barely heard of, near

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  the upside-down disembodied legs with their long, smooth stockings. But there was some construction going on there, and a lady in a makeup smock told me to go upstairs to the temporary hat display.

  I didn't want to venture farther into the store--my own legs were starting to feel bare and scratched, ugly because I hadn't worn hose to work that morning. But it was for my mother, so I went on up the escalator--always that little catch of breath as I stepped off safely at the top--and when I found the section I was glad to stand alone among the hat trees, each of which blossomed with pale or bright colors. There were sheer hats with silk flowers pinned to a grosgrain band, and navy str
aw and black straw, and a blue one with cherries and leaves. They were all a little gaudy, especially taken together, and I began to think this hadn't been a good idea for a birthday present after all, and then I saw a beautiful hat, a hat that was out of place there and just right for my mother. It was broad-brimmed, covered with a tight swirl of cream-colored organdy, and over the organdy was fastened a spray of different kinds of blue flowers, almost real flowers--chicory, larkspur, forget-me-nots. It was like a hat decorated in a field.

  I took it down and stood holding it in both hands. Then I turned the paper tag over very carefully. The hat cost $59.99, more than I usually spent on groceries in a week. If I saved this amount only three times, I could take the bus home to Ann Arbor to see my mother. But when she opened it she might smile, might hold it very carefully and try it on in the hall mirror at home, smiling and smiling. I held the hat by its delicate edges, beaming with her. I felt sick to my stomach and my eyes were beginning to fill with tears, which was going to ruin the small amount of makeup I wore to work. I hoped no salesclerk would come around the hat tree and accost me. I was afraid that one word from someone else would make me buy it.

  After a few minutes I put the hat back on its knob and turned toward the escalator, but I went to the wrong one, the up escalator

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  again, and I had to back away as people came off it. I walked blindly to the down escalator on the other side and rode to the first floor, holding on with both hands. The railing wavered under my grip, and as I neared the bottom I felt very, very sick. I thought I might miss the step off, stumble. I bent over farther so that the surge through my stomach would recede, and then I did stumble. A man passing the bottom of the escalator turned and half caught me, quickly, and I threw up on his shoes.

  So the first thing I knew about Robert was his shoes. They were pale-brown leather, heavy and a little clumsy, different from other people's, something an English guy might wear on a farm or for walking across the moors to the pub. I later learned that they actually were English, hand-sewn, very expensive, and they lasted about six years. He had two pairs at a time, changing them irregularly, and they had a broken-in, comfortable look without getting shabby. Apart from this, he paid no attention to his clothes, except that he had an interesting feel for their colors, and they tended to come and go, usually to and from flea markets, thrift shops, friends. "That sweatshirt? It's Jack's," he would say. "He left it in the bar last night. He doesn't care." And the sweatshirt would be with us until it disintegrated and became a rag for cleaning our house in Greenhill, or for wiping paintbrushes--we were married long enough, after all, for clothes to become rags. None of that mattered to Robert, because meanwhile Jack had the gloves or the scarf he'd left on Jack's sofa when they argued about pastels until two in the morning. Most of Robert's clothes had so much paint on them that they weren't likely to appeal to anyone but a fellow artist anyway. He was never careful about that, as some artists are.

  But his shoes were his prize. He saved money for them, he saved them, he put mink oil on them even though he wouldn't eat chicken, he was careful not to get paint on them, he lined them

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  up side by side at the foot of our bed next to a pile of his recently shed clothes. The only other expensive item in his life--besides oil paints--was normally his aftershave. But I later learned that, by strange coincidence, he had come into Lord & Taylor to buy a birthday present for his own mother. When I threw up on his shoes, he made an involuntary rude face, a kind of "Oh God, did you have to do that?" I thought at the time that he was merely disgusted by my vomit, not by where it had landed.

  He pulled something white out of his pocket and started to wipe his toes, and I assumed he was ignoring my apologies. In the next second, though, he seized me by the shoulders. He was very tall. "Quick," he said, and his voice was quick, too, low and soothing in my ear. He hurried me through the most direct aisles, past a wave of perfume that made me clutch my stomach again, past mannequins holding tennis rackets, their collars turned jauntily toward their ears. I ducked, I tried to get away. Each new sight, all those things to buy, all those things that I couldn't afford and that my mother wouldn't enjoy, sent a new wave of illness through me. But the stranger who had me by one arm and one shoulder was strong. He was wearing a short-sleeved denim shirt and stained gray jeans, and when I tried to turn my bowed head, I got a glimpse of someone rough, of curly hair, unshaven chin. He had a kind of linseed smell that I recognized vaguely even through my nausea and that I might have found pleasant under other circumstances. I wondered if he was using my illness to abduct me, take my wallet, or worse--this was New York in the '80s, after all, and I didn't yet have my requisite mugging story to tell in Michigan.

  But I was too utterly sick to ask him his intentions, and after a minute we burst out into the open air, or the relatively open air of the crowded sidewalk, and he seemed to try to steady me. "You're okay," he said. "You're going to be okay." As soon as he said it, I turned and threw up again, this time aiming far away from his shoes and into the corner of the entrance area, away from the shoes

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  of the passing crowd as well. I began to cry. He let go of me while I threw up but kept rubbing my upper back with what felt like a big hand. I was somehow horrified by this, as if a strange man had made a pass at me on a subway car, but I was too feeble to resist. When I was done, he handed me a clean paper napkin from his pocket. "Okay, okay," he murmured. Finally I straightened and leaned against the side of the building. "Are you going to faint?" he said. I could see his face now. There was something sympathetic and matter-of-fact in it, direct, alert. He had large greenish-brown eyes. "Are you pregnant?" he said.

  "Pregnant?" I gasped. I had one hand on the outside wall of Lord & Taylor. It felt tremendously solid and strong, a fortress. "What?"

  "I'm only asking because my cousin's pregnant and she threw up in a store, too, just last week." He had stuck his hands in his back pockets as if we were chatting in a parking lot after a party.

  "What?" I said stupidly. "No, of course I'm not pregnant." Then I began to feel hot and red with embarrassment, because I thought he might think I was revealing something about my sex life, which in truth was nonexistent at that point. I'd had exactly three relationships in college, and a short-lived one in the postcollege gloom of Ann Arbor, but so far New York had been a complete flop in this area--I was too busy, too tired, too shy, to keep an eye out for dates. I said hastily, "I just felt weird all of a sudden." Remembering my first huge retch onto his shoes--I couldn't bring myself to look at them--made me weak again, and I put both hands and my head against the wall.

  "Wow, you really are sick," he said. "Do you want me to get you a drink of water? Do you want me to help you sit down somewhere?"

  "No, no," I lied, moving my hand toward my mouth in case I had to try to cover it again. Not that covering it was going to help. "I have to get home. I have to get home right now."

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  "Yeah, you'd better lie down with a bowl," he observed. "Where do you live?"

  "I don't tell strangers where I live," I said faintly.

  "Oh, come on." He had begun to grin. His teeth were beautiful, his nose ugly, his eyes very warm. He looked just a few years older than I was. His dark hair stood up in crisp locks, like gnarled branches. "Do I look like I'm going to bite you? What's your subway line?"

  People were pushing past us in droves, into the store, along the sidewalks, toward home, the end of the workday. "The... there... Brooklyn," I said weakly. "If you can maybe walk me in that direction, I'm fine. I'll be fine in a minute." I took a stumbling step and covered my mouth. I wondered later why I hadn't wanted a taxi. My habit of thrift was very strong, I guess, even in that situation.

  "Oh, like hell you will," he said. "Try not to puke on my shoes again, and I'll get you to your station. Then you can let me know if there's someone you want me to call." He put one arm around me, propping me up, and we moved in a clumsy knot toward the subway en
trance at the end of the block.

  When we got there, I held on to the railing and tried to put out a hand, getting in everyone's way on the steps. "Okay, thanks. I'll just catch my train."

  "Come on." He went ahead of me, shielding me from the fray, so that I could see only the back of his denim shirt. "Down the stairs."

  I held on to the stranger's shoulder with one hand and the railing with the other.

  "You want me to call someone? Your family? Roommates?"

  I shook my head. I shook it two or three times, but I couldn't speak. I was about to vomit again, and then my humiliation would be complete. "All right, now." He was smiling again, exasperated, friendly. "Get onto that train."

  And we got on together, into the horrible mass of people. We

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  had to stand, and he held me from behind, not pressing himself against me, to my relief, but gripping me firmly with one big hand while he grasped a ceiling loop with the other. He swayed for both of us as the train rounded corners. At the first stop, someone got off and I sank into a seat. I thought that if I vomited again in that closed space, where my excretion would reach at least six other bodies, I would decide to stop living. I would go back to Michigan, because I was not made for the city--I was weaker than the rest of the seven million people there. I was a public vomiter. My biggest pleasure in leaving or dying would be never again seeing this towering young man with his denim shirt and the dark stain on his shoes.

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  CHAPTER 13 Kate

  At my stop, I hardly knew where I was, but the gallant stranger got me out of the train and up to the surface before I threw up again--this time into a rain drain at the curb. I realized feebly that my aim was getting better each time, my choices more appropriate. "This way?" he asked when I was done, and I gestured down the street toward my apartment building, which was blessedly close. I believe I would have pointed the way even if I'd really thought he was going to cut my throat when we got there, and it was the same with opening the front door with my brass key, which he took out of my trembling hand, and with the elevator. "I'm all right now," I whispered.