The Fortress

by Danielle Trussoni

  “Upstairs,” he said. “They didn’t hear anything, I don’t think. But then, just a little while ago, Nikolai loaded a bunch of stuff into the car.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “Suitcases and some toys. Nico’s things, actually. And a bunch of boxes of wine from the cellar. Then they left.”

  A terrible sensation came over me, as if the oxygen had been sucked from the atmosphere. The whole world seemed to fold in and fold in again, crunching down on me.

  “Left?” I said. Andy’s words were perfectly clear, and yet I couldn’t understand them any more than I could understand the German announcements echoing through the terminal. “What do you mean, left?”

  “I mean they left,” he said. “Gone. Left.”

  “I’m sure they’re just in Sommières or something. I’m sure they’ll be back soon.”

  “Well, when I saw him loading the car, I went out to the courtyard and asked him what he was doing. He said he was going to Bulgaria with his parents. And when I asked him if you knew about this trip, the guy just ignored me. Like I wasn’t even there. Just looked right through me as if I was nothing, even less than nothing. Insulting. That guy’s got some serious, serious problems. Rude, I tell you.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said, realizing the extent of my error. Instead of standing my ground and making it clear that I would be a formidable opponent, I had been a coward. He’d brought in his soldiers, and I had retreated. I’d believed I was ready to fight, but I wasn’t. I was simultaneously fearless and fearful. These two emotional states would form the poles of my behavior for the next months. It was Strong Warrior versus Retreating Coward. I would morph from one to the other on a daily basis.

  “How long ago was that?” I asked, my mind racing so fast I could hardly think.

  “I’d say three hours or so ago,” he said. “I called you right away, but I guess you were up in the air.”

  “Is Alex there with you?”

  “Right here. We’re playing Risk and eating popcorn. He’s fine. Don’t worry about him.” He paused, as if unsure of how to ask. “Does this have something to do with that fight you two had the other night?”

  I hadn’t been able to tell Andy all the details of what was happening. I didn’t know how to say the words “We’re getting divorced.” I had fought against the possibility of that outcome with such ferocity that I didn’t know how to acknowledge it now that it was in fact real. And so Andy didn’t know the full extent of the trouble I was facing. “Yes,” I said, feeling shame burn through me. “It does.”

  “Well, was he planning to go somewhere?” he asked, his voice kind. “Because this seems pretty sudden.”

  Maybe it was his tone of voice, the gentleness of it, but a wall inside me broke. I told Andy everything that had happened, about the weekend in Paris, the fight, and why I had left Aubais. I told him how just before I’d left for Salzburg I’d found Nikolai in my office. He was going through my desk, taking family documents—our marriage certificate, Nico’s birth certificate, Nico’s passport. When I asked him what he was doing, he said he was keeping these things “just in case.” I tried to get them back, but he wouldn’t give them to me. I made a grab for the passport, but he held it high in the air, so I couldn’t reach it, and then walked away. I made him promise that he wouldn’t use the passport, or any of the other documents, but he’d done exactly that. He waited until I’d left for Salzburg and took off with Nico. He had our daughter’s passport and her birth certificate, so he could travel with her. I had been outmaneuvered. I felt like the dumbest person in the world.

  “He lied to me,” I said. “He told me he wouldn’t go anywhere.”

  “Danielle,” Andy said. “When people are mad, they’ll do just about anything.”

  My hand shook as I held the phone to my ear. I pressed it closer to stop the trembling. Of course I knew that divorce could bring out the worst in us. It would push us to emotional extremes, set us up to fight a primal battle for children and shelter and sustenance. As I listened to Andy, the slow, sickening realization hit me: We were at war.

  —

  AFTER SPEAKING WITH Andy, I sat at a Starbucks in the airport and called Nikolai’s cell number. I called four, six, ten times, but got nothing except his voice mail. My skin was hot, my shirt wet with sweat. How could I be so stupid? How could I be so naïve? How could I be so dumb? These self-accusations became a kind of mantra. I blamed myself. Nikolai had left with Nico, yes, but I had allowed it to happen. Fear and worry and outrage—these emotions swirled through my mind, causing static in my thinking. I left ten, maybe more, voice messages, each one as impassioned and outraged as if it were the very first. I called and called, believing that eventually he would answer. Finally, after half an hour, he picked up.

  “What,” he said, his voice flat.

  “Where are you?” I screamed.

  “What do you want?” he said. There was not a hint of emotion in his voice. It was as if he were running out to the supermarket for milk.

  “You need to turn around and go back to Aubais,” I said, trying to calm down. “Andy is there waiting for you.”

  “I’m not going back to Aubais,” he said.

  “This is kidnapping—you know that, don’t you? Kidnapping.”

  “I don’t call taking my daughter to visit her grandparents kidnapping,” he said.

  “Driving an eight-year-old girl thousands of miles across Europe without her mother’s permission after taking her passport by force is kidnapping!”

  “Don’t be hysterical,” he said, and I imagined him rolling his eyes at his father, who was surely in the passenger seat.

  “If you do not turn the car around and bring Nico back to Aubais right now, you will understand hysterical. Andy is waiting for her. He’s going to call me as soon as she’s home. If I don’t hear from him in one hour, I’m calling the police.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ve already been to the gendarmerie.”

  This floored me. I gasped. “You have?”

  “My lawyer suggested—”

  “Your lawyer? You have a lawyer?”

  “My lawyer said that it is perfectly legal for me to take Nico out of France for a visit during the vacances de Pâques. My lawyer suggested that I file a report with the police, so that it is clear that I am taking Nico out of the country for a visit.”

  In the perfect opening to his endgame, Nikolai had anticipated my next move before I could make it. Now, even if I called the police, even if I went there to file a report, they would tell me that Nikolai was just taking Nico for a visit. I was cornered.

  “When are you coming back?” I asked, hearing the defeat in my voice.

  “In a week. Ten days at the most.”

  “How am I supposed to believe you?”

  “Honestly, I don’t give a damn if you believe me,” he said. “I prefer not to speak to you right now. Your aggression is beginning to upset me.”

  “Let me talk to Nico.” I was on the verge of tears, but I couldn’t actually cry. Something was holding my tears back, some horrible constraint that, I realized as he handed the phone to Nico, was terror.

  The phone scratched, and suddenly it was filled with the radiant sound of my daughter’s voice. “Hi, Mama!”

  “Hi, baby,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “We just stopped at McDonald’s. I got a Happy Meal.”

  “That’s great,” I said, trying to sound as if everything were normal. Nico had no clue what was going on behind her Easter trip out of France. She sounded cheerful and excited, and why shouldn’t she? She was going on an adventure with her dad.

  “I hear you’re going to Grandma and Grandpa’s house for a visit?”

  “And we’re going to Venz, too.”

  “Where?”

  “To Venz,” she said, and I realized she was trying to pronounce “Venice.” Why on earth were they going to Venice when Nikolai had told me that they were going to Bulgaria? What in the hell was going
on? What other secret plans had Nikolai made?

  “Nico, give me the phone,” Nikolai said in the background, and abruptly, before my daughter could say good-bye, the phone went dead.

  —

  I LATER LEARNED they left France on the autoroute, driving past Nîmes, Marseille, Nice, and Monaco, traveling along the Côte d’Azur into Italy. I knew the route well—the pebbled beaches and the rocketing palms and the sky so blue and hard that it seemed like blown glass. I knew a place to buy sachets of lavender that left the car with a sweet herbal scent, and I knew another place where the highway cut so close to the water that the car could tip into the immense green sea. I knew a bistro in Marseille that made good bouillabaisse and a bar in Nice with a postcard view of the sunset. I knew the spots of the Fauvist painters, those rocky terraces where sun and sea created pigmentation so bright it seemed pixelated, artificial. I knew the number of tolls on that road—four between Nîmes and Nice—and I knew the amount of change I needed to toss to pass through them. But I didn’t have a clue as to how to stop Nikolai from stealing Nico away on this road.

  The facts I gathered were these: Nikolai went to the bank to withdraw thousands of euros in cash from our joint account; he went to see a lawyer; he stopped by the police station to file his report. Then he packed the car and left France.

  I put this timeline together over the course of many weeks, examining the paper trail he’d left behind. The bank statements showed that he’d bought something from our telecom company (a new iPhone 4), and something from the pharmacy (most likely his pills), and something from the tabac. They showed that he’d filled the car with gas in Sommières and that he’d loaded up on groceries at the Carrefour. He had rushed to get out of the country, and I support this impression by the fact that a speed-control camera clocked him driving fifty kilometers over the limit near Nice. A ticket arrived some weeks later with the license-plate number of our 2009 silver Citroën C5, recording the place and date and excess speed.

  When I looked over the speeding ticket, I imagined Nico in the backseat, the window cracked, the wind unsettling her long brown hair. I imagined Stinky, her stuffed hippo, tucked under her arm. It was a warm spring in the South of France, and the smell of the sea might have made her think of the days we’d spent on the beach together, long afternoons of sand castles and beignets. Maybe she was excited to be on the road; maybe she thought the whole thing was fun. I knew how much she liked to look at the stamps that inked her passport—Bulgarian and American and French stamps—counting each one as she recalled a detail of the places we’d been together.

  —

  I CALLED NIKOLAI back, and my call went to voice mail. I tried again, and then again, but he didn’t pick up. Many more times that weekend, I called, and I always I found myself listening to a recorded message telling me, “Je suis désolée la personne que vous recherchez n’est pas disponible pour le moment.” I left messages, a dozen messages, so many pleading and angry and fearful messages, all of them asking for details of what he was doing, and when I could speak with Nico, and why he was doing this. All my messages went unanswered.

  The blanket of silence and secrecy around Nikolai’s movements led me to imagine the worst. I became so wrapped up in the dark imaginings playing through my mind that I couldn’t eat or sleep. I was dizzy when I stood up and dizzy when I lay down. I wanted to do something, anything, and so I went to the music festival, and I went to a dinner party thrown by a friend of a friend, moving through the weekend as if in a trance. My impulse was to get on a plane and fly to Bulgaria, but I wasn’t sure they were even there, as Nico had said they were going to Venice. And after Nikolai’s report at the gendarmerie, there was no point in going back to France to get the police involved. I was stuck.

  At the hotel in Salzburg, I set up my laptop and began to write backtracking messages to Nikolai, begging him to call me so that we could “work things out.” I wrote text messages telling him we needed to look at the “bigger picture” and that I still loved him and wanted him back. Those texts are lost, but reading my e-mail messages now, I see that my tone was conciliatory, desperate, pleading. At one point I wrote, “It is becoming very clear to me that you do not want to speak to me and that you have decided that you don’t want to work things out. If our marriage is over, I need to know your plans so that I can start figuring out what to do next.” It is incredible for me to read this now, because we had decided what we were doing—getting divorced. It was plain that our marriage was over. I had a lover. Nikolai had a lawyer. We were not going to work things out. All that had been decided before I went to Salzburg and he left France with Nico. I closed my e-mail message to him with, “I would greatly appreciate it if you would call me so that I understand what you are doing. I also need to understand what you want from me and how we will end this quickly without fighting and anger.” Without fighting and anger? How could there be no anger after what I’d done in Paris? How could there be no fighting after he’d driven off with Nico? I was furious and ready to go after him. And yet I was using a gentle, reasonable approach. I was remaining calm. And I see now that this pose was a new incarnation of the Angry Warrior, one used to lure her enemy close. By being nice and offering a white flag, I could woo him into bringing Nico back to France. He was playing dirty, and so I was playing dirtier. This ruse marked me as a true Machiavellian or, to put it a better way, I was being a manipulative bitch.

  But when Nikolai wrote back, it was clear that he wasn’t buying it. He said that it was baffling to him that I would think that we could work anything out. There was nothing to work out between us. We were getting divorced, and that was that.

  —

  AFTER DAYS OF trying to call Nico and having no contact with her or her father, I called Yana, who—to my surprise—answered her phone. Yana confirmed that Nikolai and Nico were in Venice with Ivan. Yana had flown home sooner so she could go back to work. That’s all the information she would give me. She wouldn’t tell me, for example, if Nikolai planned to stay in Bulgaria for one week or for one year. She wouldn’t tell me, for example, if Nikolai was filing for divorce in Bulgaria or in France. Just as she had welcomed me into her life ten years before, now she closed me out, as if I were a stranger.

  “Do you know that Nikolai did not—does not—have my permission to take Nico to Bulgaria?”

  “But why does he need your permission?” Yana said in her heavily accented English.

  “Because I am her mother,” I said.

  “It’s your own fault,” she said. “You pushed him to leave.”

  “Please tell him to turn around and bring Nico back home,” I said. “Will you tell him I said that?” Yana said nothing.

  “Because if he doesn’t bring her back to France in the next day or two, I am going to come to Sofia and go to the American embassy. Nico is an American citizen. They will not let an American child be taken like this. I’m serious.”

  “You think you are very frightening, eh?” Yana shouted. “You are very scaring us, yes? Come if you like, and bring the Americans. You’re the big woman now, eh? Come and you will see if we are scared.” She hung up and stopped answering my calls altogether.

  —

  “I NEED TO go to Bulgaria,” I said to Hadrien when I called him after my conversation with Yana. “I can’t just sit here doing nothing. I have to go there and bring Nico back home.”

  “They won’t let you,” Hadrien said. “Even if you show up at their door, they won’t let you in.”

  “I know,” I said. “But what else can I do?”

  “Come to Paris,” Hadrien said. “Come here and we’ll figure out what to do together.”

  In Paris I took a taxi to the 2nd arrondissement, where I climbed the narrow steps to the seventh floor to Hadrien’s mansard apartment and collapsed into a chair, exhausted. I had barely eaten in days and had trouble sleeping through the night. I was so worried and angry that I could hardly think. Hadrien got me a glass of water, put his arm around my shoulders, and
said, “Breathe, everything is going to be okay,” comforting me until I was calm again. I leaned against him and closed my eyes, taking in the particular scent of him, wishing that I could stop feeling so helpless.

  We sat together for a while, talking, his body warming me. At some point during the conversation, my mood shifted: the fearfulness and anxiety that had skittered through me for days became, all at once, the slow, sweet, predatory feeling of desire. I slid my hand under his T-shirt and felt his body. He was warm and soft, his skin smooth beneath my fingers. His dark eyes watched as I crawled over to the bed. I gestured that he join me. I undressed him, unbuttoning his buttons and unzipping his zipper and peeling off his socks; he undressed me, rolling my stockings down my legs, kissing my knee, my shin, my feet. I lay back in the bed and closed my eyes, feeling everything with a careful, hungry awareness. This warmth, this closeness, had the power to transform me. It had the power to open a pathway into the future, one through which I might have seen the years ahead, if I chose to look. If I had, I would have seen the beautiful afternoons together in the Jardin de Luxumbourg, the dinners at bistros where he would order his favorite food, giving me a taste for “Parisian cuisine, not that stuff from the south.” I would have seen the nights walking through the narrow streets of Paris, wending our way along the rue Vivienne to his apartment, and our eventual move to New York City. I would have seen that we would be happy, he and I, for many, many years. But I didn’t look into the future. In his arms I was wholly, completely, in the present. After we made love, I was ready to go back to the terrible fight ahead of me.

  “What am I going to do?” I asked, taking a sip of water. “I can’t even get through to Nico. Yana said they were going to be in Bulgaria, but really I have no way of knowing where they are. They could be flying to India for all I know.”

  “We’ll get through to her,” he said, resting his hand on my shoulder.

  “How? He won’t answer his phone.”

  “I spoke to my godfather, who is a lawyer, to see if he could help you,” Hadrien said. “He says you need to hire a lawyer who lives in the south, and you must go immediately to the gendarmerie and file a police report, to counter what your husband said. You have to give your version of events. I’m working on getting you the number of a lawyer in Montpellier.”