Unfettered

by Terry Brooks

  “We had nothing to eat.”

  “The cows gave milk that spoiled in an hour.”

  “You had work. A debt to your family. You think you have a gift—what about the gifts we gave you?”

  “Well I’m back—isn’t that enough? I’m in the stinking army, I send you my pay.”

  “Late remorse. Ten months late. We had to consent to Julita—”

  “Dad! Listen to me!” Anton hisses through the window. “It’s not my fault you’re a woodsmith, and I’m an artist. But just because I brought you here once, let you shake hands with the porter in his uniform, took you around in secret to gawk like a serf, doesn’t mean that you can simply show up and visit me. I’m on duty! Can you imagine what could happen to us if Faraz’s tongue is loose? Now I won’t send you out in the storm, but you must come round here, and be quiet, and touch nothing, and in the morning be gone at once!”

  Silence. His father is holding his breath.

  “It’s warmer in here, too,” adds Anton gently.

  “I’m sorry,” his father murmurs.

  “It’s all right, Dad.”

  “I didn’t understand.”

  “Forget it. Come around, let me kiss you.”

  “You’re ill. Your mother was right.”

  “What?”

  The door opens. It is his father, in his work clothes. Wood shavings in his beard, face lined with worry. The cold wind follows him in.

  Anton is mute, still holding his viola. His father wordlessly shuts the door, comes forward, takes his son’s hand. Examines it. Then he bends, and cold lips press Anton’s cheek.

  “Sit down, my boy.”

  He presses Anton down on the couch, sets the viola aside. Draws up a chair.

  “Dad?”

  “She said your mind was going. I didn’t believe her.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re barely with me. You’re somewhere else.”

  “No! What the hell do you mean?”

  “Shhh. You say you showed me round the palace—the palace of the Magar?”

  “When he opened it to the families of the troops. Some time ago.”

  The old man’s lips trembled. “Ah, child, it has been. Eighteen, nineteen years back. I’d forgotten. I took you there by the hand, and carried you when you tired. The Magar was in exile, in France. And the mayor, just once, let his friends have a look at Tchavodari Palace.”

  Anton could weep for his addled father.

  “You nearly tore the skin from my arm, you were so afraid. But later you were proud and could not stop talking about the palace, the grand dark palace, not for years. You remembered every detail, you drew pictures. Oh, how you pestered me to take you back!”

  His father is rubbing his nose. Anton glances about, vaguely agitated.

  “What’s the matter with everyone tonight, Dad?”

  The old man merely looks at him, eyes wet. Anton gives a shrill yell.

  “Why did you come here if you refuse to talk to me?”

  “Yes, hush! But lie down first—that’s it. What shall we talk about, child?”

  Around his father the room swims a bit. Anton pulls his feet up on the couch.

  “I hardly know. Such a mad night. Faraz is taunting me. Colonel Lupescu’s raving. I almost suffocated in the tower. And then you tell me I’m not a good son.”

  “You are a good son.”

  “But I left you for music school.”

  “True enough.”

  “And when I came back—”

  “We were in a terrible way. We had let Julita—”

  “But I found work again. Here. The best job in the whole town.”

  “No, Anton. You can’t work now.”

  “That’s very like you, Dad. Why can’t you respect my efforts, why?”

  “Don’t sit up.”

  “Why?”

  “Hush! You forget, no matter how many times I tell you. You nod, you say you remember, and then—gone again, away to your palace. God, it hurts me—” His father is actually crying, shaking Anton’s shoulders. “Don’t tell your mother I’m saying this. But I don’t want to let you go. I want you here with us a little longer. That’s why I keep telling you.”

  “Telling me what?”

  His father is falling to pieces. “The same things. That she’s with child, Julita, but he’s let her go. He kept his horrible bargain with you. That you did it, you got her away from him, and we shouldn’t ever have agreed to it, but we were hungry, and afraid, and you never, never wrote—”

  Anton begins to scream. His father bends down, sobbing, holding his son’s chin against his chest.

  Hiltan Posnr, nearing sixty, ox-strong, one eye bulbous and staring, splattered with pig shit to his knees, a glob of it clinging to the brandy bottle in his hand, balances high on the groaning rail of a fence in his pig stockade like a squat, greasy-haired god. He reels a bit, but holds on. There is a small, filthy dog with a torn ear on the ground ten feet to his left. Head cocked to one side, it is staring into the pond of gray feces that surrounds them, stinking worse than the foulest reek of the sewers of Constanta. The squealing of pigs innumerable, pigs for forty hectares, rends the air.

  Posnr wears an unpleasant smile.

  “You think it’s a sin, don’t you, my nobbly nephew?”

  Anton, on the edge of this sea of shit, behind a gate, says, “No, Mr. Posnr. I just think she would be happier with someone her age.”

  “You’re smart enough to remember your manners, boy. But you’re a bad bargainer. She’s my wife. Your daddy gave her to me. And thanks to me, the doctor came and stilled your mother’s fever, and the creditors left off sniffing round his shop.”

  “She’s only sixteen, sir.”

  “My mother was.”

  “But today—”

  “The first Mrs. Posnr was.”

  “But sir. Today—” Ridiculous, ridiculous! “—women want to marry someone close to themselves in years.”

  “An expert on women, Lord help us.” He tips the bottle up, lurches backward. “Glah. Call me Hiltan. What are you here for, boy?”

  Anton would like to ask Posnr the same question. He cannot fathom why the richest farmer for a hundred miles, the owner of the village’s largest house and (it is said) three thousand hogs, should be perched here, high on a fence in the center of his wallow, with only a dazed dog for company, drunk enough to topple into the swill. He would like to know why this unwanted, undreamed-of brother-in-law calls him nephew. He would like to turn and bolt down the hill.

  But Anton is not in command of the situation.

  “I wrote—I came here—when I heard you had married Julita.”

  “’Twas more’n a month ago!”

  “I was in Constanta, sir. In music school.”

  The fact catches Posnr’s attention. His grin widens to a leer; from his throat a slobbery laugh escapes. He begins to sing, a sort of depraved caricature of a sonata. He lifts the whiskey bottle to his shoulder, stabs the air with his other hand, aping a violinist. Again he almost falls.

  Anton’s stomach lurches. He can only wait, nauseated and wracked with guilt. It is a gray afternoon, his eighth in the village after ten months absence. His parents’ faces in the threshold of the house, dry, hope-robbed faces, are stamped on his eyes. He had known at once. Something had taken Julita away.

  “We couldn’t find you, Anton.” His father, ashen and morose. “And what would you have done? Your mother might have died.”

  “And been at blessed rest.” She turns back to the shadows.

  Anton bellows: “You married her to an ogre!”

  He does not even succeed in angering his father.

  “We sent her to be his maid. She chose to marry, later.” His father gestures in the doorway, impotent as death. “It was done—”

  Anton can fill in the rest. To save the home. To pay the doctor. To shoulder the burden her brother dropped.

  “She was always a good child,” says his m
other, invisible.

  Then had come a week of torture: letters, unanswered. Interviews, rejected. Visits to the city magistrate, a wallow in impotence (the old fellow worried his knuckles, looked Anton over, asked, “Have you proof that your sister has been raped, tortured, or coerced to prostitution?”). No power on earth could oblige Hiltan Posnr to meet his wife’s brother.

  Anton had felt plunged into a bog of nightmares: Julita given to Posnr! The pig man! Rich, but foul. More powerful than anyone but the Magar, but hated and feared. Immensely successful (his sausages chewed as far away as Paris), but still just a provincial, belching bore, withdrawn into his forty-hectare wallow, downwind from which houses had to be torn up and moved.

  It is Ravel he profanes. Anton forces his hands not to clench.

  Posnr glances up, still giggling. Anton’s look of rage and disgust nearly finishes him. He doubles over, tears runneling both cheeks. The dog hiccups.

  I could kill him! The idea flashes through Anton’s mind: the hard bottle, the slippery deep shit, the hogs. But he does not want to be a killer. And what if the man overpowers him? Posnr has shoulders like smoked hams, fists like Clydesdale hooves. And I have a brain, thinks Anton. A useless brain!

  “You’re a vile man.”

  Instantly he regrets his words. Posnr lifts his head, suddenly alert, eyes predatory. “You to be talking. Who cut and ran? Who took his last pay from the mill and scurried off to study music? Left mother and dad to stumble through a poorly year? Glah. She’s not been silent, my little Julita. She hates you for leaving them. She says so.”

  Anton turns his back on the pig man, ramrod straight. Fights for breath.

  “She hates you, she hates you—”

  He whirls around. “I’ll do anything you ask. Please let her go home with me!”

  “Not to be, boy.”

  “I’ll work for you.”

  “You! You’ll stoop that low for little sister, eh? Dip your toe in pigshit?”

  “I’ll pay you back. Everything you gave to them.”

  “A music school dandy.” Posnr looks as if he might be sick.

  “I worked in the mill for years.”

  “Stop it, boy. You’re a runt pup, we won’t argue that.”

  “Don’t keep her, sir. I can—”

  “You can be damned! She’s my wife! Maybe she don’t love me yet, though she hates Brother Anton more, but she’ll mellow. And my Julita knows her place. I know what you think. That I’m a savage, an idiot. But I’ve got more brain than you, my little charmer. I’m not as big as some in Bucharest, but in this town I’m on top. On top! The Magar says it—know your place. I send him hogs. He lets me be.” With a thick finger he stabs at Anton. “And you have forgotten your place, nephew, and for that you will pay a pretty coin!”

  Anton does not move or speak or breathe. Posnr watches him another moment, spits, lowers his hand and his eyes. The silence pulls out. When he looks up again, his face is changed: equally cold, but over his asymmetrical eyes has settled a glaze of milky fascination.

  “I had my way with her. What kept me waking nights.”

  Anton’s whole body twitches.

  “I can have my way with you, too, boy. I can say, ‘Come carry me out of this shit hole,’ and you will. That’s what I want.”

  Anton only stares, bewildered. Posnr’s gaze slides to the dog.

  “I want you to do it now.”

  “And you will—”

  “Now, I said.”

  He can’t believe it. He is opening the gate, slushing over the gravel margin, and then, agonizingly slow, he puts his black buckled shoe down in the shit. His foot disappears, then the cuff of his trousers.

  There is no bottom!

  Posnr howls with laughter.

  Anton finds solid ground at mid-calf. Balanced, he plants his other foot. Deeper. Warm below the surface. The dog yelps sharply. He feels the gray ooze in his shoe. Another step. And another.

  Posnr is leering with delight. Anton tastes bile.

  Another.

  Posnr gurgles. Throws his bottle away. Waves his hand, in a kind of bloated lilt.

  Four more steps. The buckle on his right shoe gives way.

  Posnr is singing. Horrible, unspeakable.

  Posies for the mayor, poppies for the king

  Three. Two.

  Violets for the merchant-man

  One.

  With his golden ring!

  “Now then! Keep me clean, boy! Ha!”

  Crusted boots clump Anton’s thighs. Thick arms drape over the young man’s shoulders. Posnr’s bulk slides down, and gasping, staggering, Anton catches him, hoists him. The dog drools.

  “Higher!” The brandied voice in his ear. Somehow, he nudges Posnr a few inches up his back. Turns. Pulls. His bare right foot leaps free like a wrenched stump, descends again. His left follows.

  “No matter what, you don’t drop me, see?”

  Another step. The gate hangs open. A wet lip grazes his ear.

  “You’re a kind lad.” Something new in Posnr’s voice. Fatigue?

  Shame?

  Then the dog growls, and growls louder. Barks, hysterical. Posnr’s limbs tighten like pythons. A splashing, sucking sound from behind. Anton reels, sways, recovers.

  The dog’s teeth close on his wrist.

  At a dead run he bursts from the library, manuscript in hand. His father shouts. The walls are failing. The moon has raised the foaming sea.

  Out through the Paris room, the great hall, the foyer. Through the main doors and into the courtyard. He is scalded with rain. Dashes toward the gardens, ducks under the laurel arch.

  Wagner grins, humming a deranged tune.

  And then—howls. The dogs have escaped! They are ahead—no, behind in the courtyard. They will smell him.

  He turns at bay between Handel and Chopin. Shadows lope among shadows.

  “Faraz!”

  God knows how long he’s starved them.

  Anton dashes on, throaty barks following. Soon he is at the very heart of the gardens, where a shallow reflecting pool churns in the rain. The wet jaws snarl in a tightening circle. He jumps into the water, thrashes to the center of the pool. His mind races: he would hide his smell. He would crouch here, motionless upon this flat disk of porphyry, be taken for a statue, he would—

  Anton would never know how Julita spent her coin of freedom. He was buried in the village of his birth, in a churchyard swept by the shadow of Tchavodari Palace: as close as he ever came to the structure, save for once as a child.

  He would not learn how Julita walked over the Bicazului in a fury of snow, holding the hands of two boy cousins who would abandon her in Brasov for factory jobs; would never know that she carried not only Posnr’s child in her womb but eleven thousand dollars of his silver in burlap over her shoulder, between slabs of salt pork; how she caught the train from Brasov to Rijeka, Yugoslavia, crossed the Adriatic to Venice on an Italian steamer, sold the silver with perfect acumen to a dealer on the Ponte Rialto, and after a night of horrible dreams, caught the train to Paris where instinct told her, correctly, the doctor waited who would take the fetus from her womb.

  Her brother never saw her skin browned by four years of sun, or the leaps that brought gasps of pleasure when she danced with the Ballet de l’Opéra. He also would not know how she fled violence again in January 1939, this time to New York, boarded a southbound train the same day, descended in Washington, danced with the National Conservatory, and married a lawyer.

  Julita did not speak of Anton. In the lawyer’s extended family, the deceased brother was simply a figure connected to an incomprehensibly distant time of sadness—the small, cold place from which Julita came.

  But one of this brood, the lawyer’s brother’s son, shook hands for the first time with Great-Aunt Julita at a Christmas party in 1986, and disturbed the old woman profoundly.

  The boy was a recovering anorexic. Thin as a whittled stick. Shuddering in a warm room, like his great-uncle half a century
earlier on the Black Sea coast. His laughter was forced.

  Julita, past seventy, knew nothing about that branch of the family—a soft-spoken, old-money clutch from Virginia. They were consistent in attaching stabilized to every mention of the boy: he had a stabilized diet, stabilized moods, stabilized glands. But they were consistently wrong, and two weeks later he fell into a coma, with flooded lungs and a heart murmur: galloping pneumonia.

  She had quite taken to him at Christmas, liked his aberrant bookishness, in a family replete with practical men who spoke of growth funds, golf tournaments, quarterbacks, tight ends. When it seemed he might die she came alone, sparrow-small behind the wheel of a huge green Buick.

  The boy thought his waking was his own death. Above him was a wrinkled angel, smiling with infinite tenderness, shrunken until she seemed almost a girl. Her hands, spread beneath his pajama shirt, burned cold through his fever. She was drying his chest with a towel.

  The boy’s parents slept on a couch, wretched and unwashed. Julita sat primly on the edge of the bed.

  “Stay with us,” she said.

  “I don’t remember you.”

  “You will.”

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  “Pneumonia.”

  “I dreamed I was a fish. Hooked.”

  “But fighting?”

  “Yes. Who are you? I don’t know you.”

  He didn’t know any of them. But he sat up, stronger than he had been in weeks, and listened curiously as Julita told him who he was, and who she was. He drank some orange juice. And since his parents showed no sign of waking, she leaned very carefully on one elbow and told him the whole tale of Anton and the pig man, the little rabid dog that killed him, and the palace where his mind took refuge.

  But the next day the boy suffered a relapse, and lay wheezing and muttering for three days. Julita was still there when he woke, but they were never alone, and uneasy in the crowded room, she kissed him goodbye and drove back to Maryland.

  The boy recovered his health, mostly, but never a clear memory of his long illness. In fact he did not think once of his great-aunt until, in March, his father called to say that Julita had been found on the shoulder of the Annapolis turnpike, frozen stiff. The Buick was half a mile behind her in a marbled sheath of ice. It was the latest winter storm on the Maryland register.