The Fortress

by Danielle Trussoni

  When Alex left, Eve turned to me. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “But I asked the children some questions about what they saw happening here.”

  “What kinds of questions?”

  “It’s important to understand how they see things. What their perspective is about what is happening between their parents. So I asked them. Alex has a very clear perspective of the situation. He understands that you and Nikolai are separating and that his father has been acting abnormal. He said you’ve been sad. It is your daughter who is confused.”

  “How so?”

  “She told me that you don’t want her to live in France,” Eve said, looking disturbed. “That you asked her father to take her to Bulgaria. She said that you only want Alex.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. “Not at all.”

  “Of course not, but it’s what she said,” Eve told me.

  Just then Nico ran up the stairs and began to gather her books and her pencil case. “Daddy says I have to do my homework with him,” she said.

  “But we already have everything set up here,” I said.

  “He doesn’t want me to talk to…” She glanced at Eve, too shy to say her name.

  “But why not?” Eve said. “We’re having a nice time.”

  Nico furrowed her brow, looking embarrassed. “He says you’re on Mama’s side.”

  The phone rang again. Nico moved to grab it, but I intercepted. “Yes?”

  It was Nikolai. “Send Nico down,” he said, his voice flat and deep, without emotion.

  I went to the window and saw him standing in the courtyard, his phone to his ear. “She’s going to finish her homework upstairs.”

  “Don’t tell me she’s doing homework,” Nikolai said. “I know that friend of yours is trying to influence her.”

  “Of course she’s doing homework,” I replied. It was true—their books were spread on the table among cherry pits and empty glasses of water.

  “Do you think I’m stupid? Nico just told me that your friend is talking to her about the divorce.”

  “It’s not such a strange topic,” I said, still watching Nikolai. “Considering our present situation.”

  “I know what you’re doing. I know you brought your friend here from Paris to help convince Nico to live with you. This is part of your brainwashing campaign, and I’m not going to let it happen. Keep that woman away from Nico.”

  Suddenly Eve appeared in the courtyard below. While I was speaking with Nikolai, she had taken the back staircase out into the courtyard, arriving at Nikolai’s side just as he was speaking about her. He looked at Eve, surprised, then looked up at me, accusatory, as if I had sent her down there. Eve was smiling as she sat at the table and gestured for Nikolai to join her. He shifted his weight, uncertain of what to do. It was a surprise attack, and he was taken off guard. He adjusted his black hat. After giving me a final dark look, he dropped his phone on the table and sat down across from Eve. She poured him a glass of wine, then one for herself, and I realized suddenly that the emperor’s mother was even stronger than I had imagined. She was not going to bother with small battles. She was going after the black king himself.

  —

  I HELPED NICO finish her homework, and when she was done, I went downstairs. Knowing that the first floor would be unoccupied, I went to the piano in the salon. I hadn’t been in that room for weeks, and I missed it. The piano was glossy black, substantial. I sat on the cushioned bench and touched the keys, wishing I could play. I remembered the wonder I’d felt when Nikolai had first played the piano for me, the pleasure he gave to everyone at the piano shop in Iowa City. I remembered the way his long fingers skipped over the keys, the poise of his posture, his elegance. He was such a talented man. I had loved him for it. But this was the point where our paths would separate. There was no going back. Now it was time to move forward.

  And of course we would. Our divorce would be finalized in September 2012. Within weeks of signing our custody agreement, Nikolai would leave Bulgaria with Nico and relocate to Providence, Rhode Island, where he would move in with a Bulgarian woman and her two children. Nikolai didn’t tell me about his plans until after he’d bought the plane tickets, and he didn’t tell me about the Bulgarian woman at all. Nico wasn’t allowed to tell me about this arrangement, either, and so it became an elaborate secret. Nico was never good at lying, and I knew she was hiding something. Months later, when she finally told me the truth about her living situation, I filed a petition for custody in Providence Family Court. Nico was assigned a guardian ad lithem, who represented her interests, and the custody arrangement we had signed in France was overturned, and primary placement of Nico was given to me. Soon after, my daughter came to live with me in New York City. She went to school in the West Village, and made new friends, and took ballet classes, and grew strong and smart and happy. Nikolai moved around for a few years with his girlfriend, then ended up back in Bulgaria. As of the writing of these pages, Nico, Alex, and I have not seen him for years. He disappeared from my life, as if he were no more than a dream.

  In the aftermath of our separation, I was furious about how our marriage had ended. There were whole months when anger burned in me, making it impossible to even think of Nikolai, let alone forgive him. In fact, I didn’t imagine that I could ever forgive him, not in this lifetime. Not in a hundred lifetimes. But a time came when the anger stopped or, rather, transformed. I remember the moment exactly. It was April 2014, and I was walking from our apartment on West Tenth Street through Washington Square Park, when I heard the quick, hummingbird heartbeat rhythm of Chopin’s Prelude in B-flat minor, op. 28, no. 16. The song was coming from a grand piano set up near a fountain, below the Washington Square Arch. As the man played, his fingers flew over the keys in a way that was familiar. I stopped, not to listen, exactly, but to get my bearings. I felt disoriented, as if time were folding up around me. I felt myself return to the Iowa City piano shop in 2002, to the apartment in Izgreva in 2004, and to the courtyard of our old house in France, when Nikolai would get up, go to the piano, play for a few minutes, and then return to his chessboard. I stood for a moment, listening, inspired by the music. I put some money in the pianist’s jar and walked away, feeling the layers of my life falling back into their proper order as I went.

  I was almost out of the park when I began to cry. Not out of sadness but relief. It had been such a heavy burden, all that anger. Such a brutal weight could have pulled me down with it, if I had let it. I glanced at the pianist one last time, seeing him from a distance, then hurried away, the sound of Chopin at my back. As I walked, I remembered who I’d been the first time I heard that song. I remembered the young woman who had given her heart fearlessly, wholly. I remembered the magic I’d felt, and the scale of my dreams. It had been flawed, my love, but it had been beautiful, too.

  —

  AN HOUR LATER I went up to the homework table and found everything as I’d left it—the conjugations and math papers, the bowl of cherries—only the kids were gone. I walked down the hall and up to the attic playroom, where Nico and Alex were at the computer, playing games.

  “Where’s Eve?” I asked.

  “With Dad,” Alex said.

  “Still?”

  “They’re in the courtyard,” Nico said. “Talking. Daddy told me to stay up here.”

  I went to the window and looked into the courtyard. It was true: Nikolai and Eve were still talking. A second bottle of wine had been opened and some cheese and crackers set on the table. Had Eve made a cheese plate for my husband? I tried to understand what they could be talking about. Nikolai was speaking with what appeared, from that distance, to be great feeling, while Eve sat, a glass of wine in her hand, listening attentively, nodding, as if in sympathy.

  I leaned against the window frame, watching in disbelief as my lover’s mother carried on what was clearly an intimate conversation with my estranged husband. I didn’t like it. It felt wrong. I didn’t want it to continue. That kind of thing was not suppos
ed to happen. Eve was supposed to be my Trojan horse. She was supposed to sweep in, invite me to Paris with the kids for the weekend in a way that Nikolai couldn’t refuse, and we were supposed to be off, Ariadne free from the Minotaur. And instead there she was, befriending my husband over a bottle of red wine.

  But then, I thought, maybe Eve knew exactly what she was doing. Maybe, I realized as I looked out the window at their tête-à-tête, she had convinced Nikolai that she was on his side. They really seemed to be getting along well. He was talking a lot, gesturing and standing, lighting a cigarette for Eve—she was smoking with him!—before sitting down again. I had yet to see Eve say a word. Instead she left Nikolai spinning in a manic monologue, punctuated by jerky gestures—he put his hat on and took it off, he stood up and walked around the courtyard, then sat again. He was talking, and she was listening. She was gathering intelligence, making our escape easier. Not only had Eve entered the enemy camp, but from the look of it she was well on her way to full infiltration.

  Nikolai and Eve remained in the courtyard while the kids and I ate dinner—reheated spinach-and-goat-cheese quiche, french fries, and chocolate pudding—and they remained in the courtyard while I put the kids to bed. Nikolai and Eve talked while I took a bath and put on my pajamas. Finally, three hours after they sat down together, Eve came upstairs. She was as white as a sheet, trembling, rubbing her arms as if reviving herself from frostbite. There was something wounded in her look, as if she’d walked out of a boxing ring. The strong, capable woman I’d picked up at the train station had been reduced to a shadow.

  “What happened down there?” I whispered, letting her enter through to the Paris-Lyon glass door and locking it again.

  “We were talking,” she said, pursing her lips. “He had a lot to say.”

  “I saw that,” I said. I touched her shoulder. She was trembling.

  We walked to the living room and sat on the couch. Color was coming back to her cheeks. I learned later that Nikolai had told her all the things he’d been saying about me for months, but he had also spoken negatively of Hadrien, and this had shaken her.

  “Are you okay?”

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “It is clear to me that this man does not want to just end your marriage. He wants to destroy you, and even himself, before that happens.” She took a deep breath and smiled. “I’m sorry. I’ll be okay in a minute. I’m not sure I’ve ever been in the proximity of someone so…disturbed.”

  “He’s really mad,” I said.

  She gave me a long, hard look. “Yes, that’s true. But I don’t think the anger comes from you, exactly. What I mean to say is—yes, he’s angry about the divorce. He’s furious about it. But the source of this anger, the real wound in his soul, is not from you. That comes from another place.”

  I took this in, remembering all the years I’d been with Nikolai, the years spent trying to understand and help him, and I knew she was right. I remembered one of his Christmas letters from 2003. He’d written that he was scared by his past, and that he couldn’t erase the pain of his memories without me. I never knew what had happened to so disturb him. I never understood the cause or the depth of his wounds. He would never allow me to know this part of him. It had been walled up inside him, fortified, unreachable. It had kept me, who’d tried so hard to reach him, away.

  “Pack a suitcase for you and one for the children. Tomorrow we’ll go to Paris.”

  “Does he know?”

  “You’ll tell him in the morning. But we need to go right away tomorrow, on the first train. You can’t stay here another day. I am not going to allow you to stay here another day.”

  And although I was ready to leave, I felt suddenly hesitant to walk out the door. It would be the beginning of a new story, and I was not sure how to live it. Our tale had been filled with romance and adventure, quests, treasure hunts, magic spells, ghosts and demons, devotion and betrayal and torture, and love. But the end had come. The gate was open. I only had to walk through it. And with that knowledge I packed two suitcases—one for me and one for the kids—and the next morning, our stubby guardian Fly in tow, we left for Paris.

  Epilogue

  Everything changed when I left the fortress. From Paris, I took charge of my situation. I solidified my legal position and got a handle on my finances. I saw a doctor, learned that I was anemic, and began taking iron tablets. I rented a small apartment in Aigues Vives, a village ten minutes from Aubais, where I would live until Nikolai left France. I took the first steps toward a new life.

  After he was gone, I went back to the fortress. Nico and Alex were with me then, but soon Nico would leave for Bulgaria and Alex and Fly would go to the States. I planned to sell La Commanderie and needed to clean things up.

  It was a mess. The day he’d moved out of the fortress, Nikolai collected cinders from the fireplace and spread them over the floors, dumped ash in the piano and on the windowsills. I later learned that this was a kind of departure ritual, a magic rite, although I never understood its purpose, other than making a mess. I could hardly face the house after all that had happened there. Thankfully, my mom flew to France to assist with the cleanup. With her help I felt better equipped for the job. We swept up the ashes and vacuumed the piano keys and sanded down the mantra carved in the door. We cleaned out the empty wine bottles from the courtyard and the trash from Nikolai’s office. And when it was done, the house was ready for the next owners, the ones who would inherit La Commanderie’s treasures and ghosts after our departure.

  As I was packing my closet, I pulled down a box of photos. I’d been throwing pictures into this box for years without organizing them, telling myself that someday I would put them into an album. As I sorted through the box, I saw hundreds of the moments my family had lived together. I saw Alex after his stitches from running into a pole; I saw newborn Nico at Maichin Dom; I saw the four of us at my parents’ house in Wisconsin, standing before drifts of snow. There was our last Christmas in Aubais, the gifts and the food and the enormous tree, and the kids walking together on the beach at La Grande-Mott, Fly at Alex’s heels. There was a picture taken in the courtyard of the fortress, the four of us together, surrounded by the protective wall, the one that had not, in the end, been strong enough to keep us together.

  As I was packing up these photos, I found a letter in a sealed envelope. It was dated May 2010, but there it was at the back of the closet in 2012, waiting like a time capsule for me to open. It was a final love letter, one filled with all the talk of destiny and magic that had marked our relationship from the beginning. Our love, Nikolai wrote, had been like a journey, an escape into a dark forest, a place in which we hid from the ghosts of our past. He’d cast a spell on me the day we met, he wrote, but that spell had grown weaker as time passed. Magic wears off, ghosts find other people to haunt, and past lives die. He hoped that we would find our way back to each other, but his magic had turned dark. Love, like miracles, could live on nothing but purity.

  I folded the letter and put it into the box of photos. I wanted to keep it, just as I wanted to keep the pictures. They were a testament, a record of the life I’d lived and left behind, and I didn’t want to forget them. I felt a rush of tenderness for the young woman I had once been, the woman willing to ride off into a dark forest with a sorcerer, the one who needed to believe in fairy tales. I had chased a big, beautiful dream, and while that dream had failed, I’d gained something precious in the effort.

  I closed the box and packed it away, knowing that someday I would want to open it again. Someday I would read his letter and see my family photos and remember the woman I used to be, once upon a time, the woman who lived in a fortress.

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to Eric Simonoff, my kind and brilliant agent, for championing this book and being there every step of the way. Thank you to Lynn Grady, visionary editor and publisher, and to the whole team at Dey Street/HarperCollins for the extraordinary professionalism and sensitivity with which they brought this
book into the world. At Doubleday Canada, I’d like to thank Zoe Maslow for weighing in. Thank you, too, to Nita Pronovost, whose early insights kept me on track. I’m deeply grateful to Sharyn Rosenblum, Shelby Meizlik, and Michael Barrs at HarperCollins, and Kimberly Burns at Broadside PR, for singing my praises. Thank you to Lucinda Treat, Kimberly Cutter, Donna Brodie, Michele Mitchell, Lisa Smith, and Bob Harris for reading early drafts and steering me clear of pitfalls. I will be forever grateful to The Writers Room in New York City, the sanctuary where I wrote (and rewrote) this book. Thank you to Ryan Evans for his wisdom. Thanks to Eric Zohn, Trina Hunn, and Michael Ruddell for acute legal advice. Merci mille fois to Nicolas and Yveline Postel-Vinay for giving me sanctuary. Thanks to Evan Bell and Liza DeLeon for keeping me afloat. I am the luckiest writer in the world to have all of you behind me.

  I am particularly grateful to friends and family who were there during the events described in The Fortress, especially my parents, who came to France numerous times to help. Most of all, I am grateful to Hadrien and Eve. Without you, who knows how the story would have ended.