by Asa Avdic
“Do you know what the fucking ironic part is, Nour? It’s that you’re giving me advice about parenting. If I were you I would keep my mouth shut about that.”
I walked into the hall, my head held high, then bent to tie my shoes with hands that were shaking with rage. It was already more difficult for me to reach my feet easily, even though I wasn’t showing very much yet. Then I put on my jacket and walked through the door and down the stairs. I knew I would spend the next few days, weeks, months, playing this conversation backward and forward in my head, that I would regret every word a thousand times over, that I would want to take them back; I would curse myself for not saying something totally different, or for saying anything at all, but at the moment I was full of adrenaline and self-righteous anger that caused my feet to fly over the street. It felt like liberation.
I didn’t see Nour again during my entire pregnancy. Not until after Siri was born and she showed up at the hospital with that confection of a dress and a new chapter began.
FOOD WAS BROUGHT and taken away, more bottles were uncorked and passed around. Cheese and dessert. More wine. The company had broken into smaller groups. Franziska had traded places with Katja, and now she and Jon were engrossed in a conversation that looked more like foreplay. Franziska was laughing with her head thrown back, fingering her collarbone; Jon sat with his legs spread, leaning forward, as if he might dip his face into her décolletage at any moment. Katja had initiated a conversation with Lotte; it seemed to be of interest to them both, something about cross-country skiing. The buzz of conversation grew louder and louder around the table. Most people were starting to become noticeably tipsy, myself included, as I discovered to my own horror. When Katja served the small glasses of port, not a single person declined, nor did anyone notice that neither she nor I was drinking from our glasses. It was around ten o’clock, which placed my impending death five hours in the future.
I found Henry watching me several times during dinner. He didn’t look away when I gazed back. And when some of the company began to rise from the table, he suddenly stood up, rounded the table, and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“Can I get you anything? Whiskey, brandy, wine?”
“I’d love a big glass of water.”
I wondered if Henry would do what he always used to at those few work parties he had actually attended in previous years—suddenly make a move, thank everyone, and vanish—but he came back with the glass and sat back down across from me. Our fingers brushed when he handed me the glass; I wondered if that was by accident. After a while, I felt his foot against my own. I looked at him; he was listening to the colonel with an attentive expression, pretending not to notice me even as he moved his leg slightly farther between mine, until our knees overlapped. The tablecloth was quite long on the end, where we were sitting, so no one could see what was going on. I gently squeezed my knees around his; he pressed back.
So that was that. It wasn’t just in my head, everything that had happened within me. It was in him too. It was both a relief and a sorrow. The timing could hardly have been worse. When the colonel eased his grip on the conversation, Henry leaned toward me. His eyes were large, his pupils dilated.
“Do you know if there’s any way to land a boat on the other side of the island?”
“No idea, why?” I lied.
“Now that the wind has come up it might be good to know if there’s anywhere besides the pier where the boat can put in to get us.”
I looked at him curiously until I realized what he was getting at.
“Maybe we should go out and check.”
Henry looked like this was a brand-new idea for him, and it struck me again how good he was at putting up a front.
“That might be smart. Shall we go for a walk?”
We stood up at the same time.
“Are you off to bed already?”
The colonel looked disappointed. The alcohol, and maybe even the drugs at the bottom of his empty port glass, had begun to seriously affect him. Gone was the attentive person I had met earlier that day; in his place was a self-absorbed old man who droned on and on about his own affairs, his gaze turning ever more inward. The secretary had been right about the colonel’s alcoholism—he was draining and refilling his glass more and more swiftly.
“We’re just going to check how windy it is; we’ll be right back!”
The colonel pushed his chair back and I was afraid he was about to offer to come with us, but Henry cleverly warded him off.
“Maybe you could go explore the wine cellar in the meantime? I hear you know all about vintages and grapes and stuff. Anna told me we have you to thank for the fantastic wine we drank with dinner.”
The colonel allowed himself to be flattered and promised he would do his best to pick out a few exceptional bottles for the table by the time we returned, and before he could elaborate we managed to leave the room.
HENRY HANDED ME my jacket from the rack in the hall. We dressed in silence and opened the large front door. Outside, the wind was stiff. Henry had to lean against the door with his shoulder. He wasn’t a large man, but he managed to force it open. We walked beside each other, down to the beach behind the house, in silence. It was as if the gale had interrupted our flirting. Henry walked with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his coat, and I wondered if he regretted his move, or if he simply hadn’t made one; perhaps I had misunderstood or misinterpreted him after all.
We stopped once we reached the shore. Henry looked around.
“No chance you could put in here with this wind,” he said after a moment. “Look at those cliffs out that way. And if this keeps up, the boat won’t be able to dock on the other side either, even though it’s more sheltered there. If it storms, we’ll be totally isolated.”
I had almost managed to forget the reason we had come out, because I had assumed it was all pretense, but this caught my attention. He turned around to look at me.
“And the storm is coming. Look at the clouds; look how fast they’re moving.”
Gray clouds were racing across the moon, impossibly fast, as if in an animation. I looked at Henry again. Our faces were close. His gaze was like smoke in a globe of glass. Our eyes locked. I couldn’t break away and I couldn’t get closer.
“What are you really doing here?” he whispered.
“What do you want with me?” I whispered back.
Suddenly Henry broke the spell.
“Well, maybe it’s best to go back,” he said curtly, as he turned back toward the house and started walking.
I trudged after him. With every passing second, I felt dumber and dumber, more and more duped, exposed, unmasked. I had lowered my guard, I had shown myself to be weak; my actions were just as stupid and embarrassing as you would expect from an amateur with no experience in top-secret assignments. I had acted like a lovesick teenager, just as awkward as I always feared I would be in Henry’s company. I knew this part of my tipsy self, a part of me that could get hung up on an injustice, a wording, an offense, and then ruminate on it for hours—and I hated it. I felt the lump in my stomach grow and the tears spring into my eyes. Just as I was about to open my mouth to say something to Henry, he tugged at my arm and roughly dragged me around the edge of a cliff. He put his hand over my mouth, gently, and whispered “shh” and pointed at Lotte, who was coming down the steep path. She stopped and stood there just around the corner of the house, quite close to where we were, and to my great surprise she opened her purse and took out a large, ungainly satellite phone, which by all appearances was fully functional. She was calling someone, and I heard her greet the person on the other end. I concentrated on trying to hear what she was saying, but she was too far away and the wind carried off her words.
Henry was standing close behind me. I felt his breath against the exposed portion of my neck, between my coat and my hairline. He pressed his body to mine, his lips brushi
ng just behind my ear. It felt like sticking a key in a lock and turning it, and when I placed his arm around my waist I realized I didn’t care about all the rest. The assignment, who he truly was, how it would end. Or anything but this.
Some small part of my consciousness heard Lotte bring the conversation to a close and vanish back up to the house. I remained in Henry’s arms, as still as if I had spotted a deer.
“Come on,” he said. “We can’t stay here.”
HIS BODY WAS slighter than I thought, thinner. His face was slightly round, and that was probably why I expected him to have the typical middle-aged male office body, with extra layers of fat as insolation, soft bulges on either side of his spine, and a protruding belly. But as my hands and eyes searched their way forward in the bluish darkness of his room, I realized that he was much closer to gaunt. His chest was flat and his collarbones cast shadows on the skin below; I let my fingers follow them toward his midline and down his sternum. His body, which had been so impossible to imagine, became almost repellently real under my hands. To see him at such close range, every hair, every angle, was like the beam of a flashlight straight into my eyes, so I closed them and let my hands go before my gaze. His hands were moving over me as well, as if he were reading Braille, registering the line that was the lower edge of my shoulder blade, the vertical protrusions of my spine, the hard roundness of my hip bones. When I was little, I had a “magic coloring book,” a book with clean white pages, but when you dragged a wet paintbrush over them, shapes and colors and flowers appeared. That was how it felt when Henry moved his hands on my body, as if each part of me he touched came to life in tiny bubbles of carbonation.
I didn’t cry out when I came, and neither did he, because this wasn’t the sort of sex you had to exaggerate. And it wasn’t the best sex I ever had, but it wasn’t far from it.
AFTERWARD, AS WE lay on our backs next to each other on the bed, he distractedly ran the back of his index finger across my cheek. His room was dark, but the curtains in the window were open, and the clouds were still rushing past the moon, untiring in the night sky.
“What are you thinking about, Anna?” he murmured, almost to himself.
“Betrayal,” I said. He sleepily turned his face to me.
“What did you say?”
“Betrayal. I know how it feels.”
I turned my face to the ceiling and studied the thin cracks in the paint; they stood out in the pale moonlight like blood vessels. My thoughts welled up, fast and overwhelming. If I allowed myself to think about it, even the tiniest bit, I would still be able to taste the iron on my tongue, the flavor of betrayal, of being betrayed, of failure, of making the wrong decision. I couldn’t let myself think like that, I knew it was bad for me. But my thoughts drifted off of their own accord, and suddenly I was back in the cold tent camp. I was gripped by the sudden longing to tell him everything, everything about Kyzyl Kum and what really happened there at the end, everything about this assignment, everything about the betrayal I was about to commit, about the betrayal I had, in some ways, already committed.
Henry stroked my cheek with the back of his finger again.
“Try to get some sleep,” he said, and then he kissed me on the cheek, turned over so his back was to me, pulled the blanket over his head, and grew still. I lay there staring at the ceiling, listening to his breaths become long, even, deep. There was a faint rattle every time he inhaled, so I stayed a little bit longer, just so I could be close to him for one last stolen moment. Then I stood up, put on my clothes, sneaked through the dark room on bare feet, slowly pressed the door handle down, opened the door a crack, and cautiously slipped out to be murdered.
WHEN I ARRIVED in the kitchen, Katja was already there. She was pacing back and forth in annoyance.
“Close the door behind you and lock it. I thought you would never show up!”
Katja kneeled on the floor. She was dressed in some sort of exercise outfit, and as she dove into her bag I noticed the logo of the Leningrad ballet on her back. That explained her good posture, but I assumed she must have been pretty young when she quit, before she had time to get injured and worn out, because she appeared to move with no pain or stiffness in her body even now, in the middle of the night.
“When did you quit dancing?” I asked, mostly to have something to say.
“Are you really going to make small talk right now?” Katja hissed quietly.
I sat down on the floor beside her and shut up while she removed one thing after the next from her bag. Syringes, cannulas, small glass bottles with labels, compresses—she arranged it all in straight, even lines on a small towel I assumed was hospital green, but it was hard to determine the color in the dark. I looked at the instruments and shuddered.
“Lie down on your back,” Katja whispered, and I did as she said.
And then it began. Katja picked up a strange ink pad. She donned a pair of vinyl gloves and pressed her fingers against the pad one by one. Then she grabbed my throat and squeezed gently, letting her fingernails dig in a little deeper.
“Move your head a little, or else this won’t leave believable bruises.”
I did as she said and she held on with gentle but determined hands. When she was done, she took out a little flashlight and shone it on my throat, then nodded, satisfied.
“Looks good,” she said.
I was about to thank her out of sheer reflex, but I stopped myself. Instead I lay there in silence as Katja tinkered with different syringes next to me. She bent over me.
“I’m going to give you an injection in the top of your tongue now, so it looks like you’ve been strangled in case anyone looks in your mouth. Your airways will remain open, so you can still breathe.”
I nodded.
“Ready?” Katja asked, and without waiting for my agreement she grabbed my head firmly. “Open wide and stick out your tongue.”
I did as she said. But just as she was about to stick me, I realized this was my last chance to say something.
“Katja?”
“Yes?” She looked at me, irritated.
“Are you sure this is going to work?”
“Of course. I’m a doctor, you can trust me.”
She bent over again to stick me, but I raised my hand and placed it on her arm.
“Tell me I will wake up again.”
She sighed, but I stood my ground.
“You tell me to trust you, and I do, but you’re not the one doing this—I am. So I want you, as trustworthy as you say you are, to promise me I will wake up again.”
I stared at her; it was hard to read her eyes in the darkness, because when she leaned across me all I could see were two black holes where her eyes were. She didn’t say anything for a moment, but then she spoke.
“I promise you’ll wake up again. You have my word, on my honor as a doctor.”
“Good.”
I laid my head back down.
“Can you open up now, please?”
I opened my mouth, stuck out my tongue, and felt the sting. My tongue started swelling right away. I felt panic rise in my head.
“Relax, just breathe through your nose. There you go, long, deep breaths through your nose. Think about babies; they always breathe through their noses when they sleep. There. Good.”
I caught my breath and felt the panic sink back down.
“Now I’m going to put drops in your eyes to paralyze your pupils. There will also be tiny bleeds in the whites of your eyes. They’ll go away. I’m going to open your eyelids now . . . good. Keep your eyes closed and it won’t feel as strange.”
I did as she said, and she kept talking. The irritation had vanished from her voice; she was speaking in a calm doctor voice now.
“Now, Anna, I’m going to give you the last injection. This is a sedative and muscle relaxant. It will bring your breathing down to a minimum and your body
will go limp. In just a second it will feel like you’re falling asleep. It’s possible that you will see or hear something while you’re out, but it won’t be coherent and you won’t be able to communicate. Once you’re asleep, I’m going to wait until I’m totally sure you’re out and then I will run over and pound on the colonel’s door just as we agreed. He’ll follow me down here, and hopefully he’ll be so drunk and drugged that he agrees that you’re dead, and we’ll carry you down to the chest freezer, where I’ll wake you up with an injection as soon as I can. It’s going to be uncomfortable, Anna, but you can handle it. Then I’ll wake the others, and . . .” Her voice faded as if she were walking backward through a marble hall.
“Count backward, Anna.” I heard her voice from the other side of the marble hall, and I started counting silently to myself, one number for each breath. Ten, nine, eight the floor felt cold and sticky underneath me seven, six, five I thought about Siri in her bed surrounded by the staring stuffed animals with their button eyes it smelled like snow or maybe tasted four, three skinny arm soft cheek with sleep hair stuck brush it away with index finger two, one good-bye.
IT WAS LIKE waking to an elephant sitting on my chest. The pain was sudden and indescribable. I couldn’t tell if it was a contraction or an expansion in my rib cage, just that it was horribly painful. I tried to take a breath, with very little success. I tried in vain to focus on the face that was dancing before me, and after a few seconds I realized that it must be Katja’s pale face and blond hair I was looking at.
“Anna! Anna! Can you hear me?”
I tried to respond, but the sound that left my mouth was unidentifiable. There was something in my mouth. I turned my head and tried to spit, until I realized it was my own tongue I was trying to spit out. Saliva ran down my cheek. But Katja still seemed satisfied.
“Good. You’re coming back. I’ve given you an injection. Take it easy, you’re still under the influence of the drugs.”