by C F Dunn
Elena giggled, “Not like Sam, you mean?”
I could see her point. “Sam’s much better looking, but then his looks are not the issue… Anyway, Guy had this way about him: he could look at me and make me feel as if I were the only person that mattered – or at least the only person he wanted – and that made him quite… irresistible, I suppose you’d call it. Well, at the time anyway.”
The candle guttered as the door opened and someone came into the diner. I pulled it in front of me and began to pick at the wax dribbles around the sides of it.
“Go on, what did he do?” Elena urged, almost drooling with curiosity.
“He was my supervisor – my tutor – in my second year at uni, and he specialized in the English Civil War – also my specific period of history, so…”
“Your personal tutor,” she grinned, wallowing in the delicious anticipation of salacious details.
“Ye-es, thank you for your delicate observation, Elena,” I drawled. “He was also a Royalist by inclination and I think he fancied himself in the role of Cavalier and courtier. He made it very clear what he wanted, which made it both embarrassing and flattering.” My face grew hot as I remembered the expressions on the faces of the other students in my group as he virtually ignored them, while he plied me with questions and praise. He liked to see me blush.
I broke off a thin piece of wax and began to melt it in the flame.
“Don’t stop, Emma! Then what?”
“He did a lot of wining and dining, took me to the theatre, made me feel more adult than I was…”
“And you fell into his arms and made passionate love.” Elena faked swooning like the heroine in a silent movie. I flicked a piece of wax at her, which she managed to dodge, nearly knocking over her glass in the process.
“Not quite, no. I held out for eight months – which I found pretty hard going, given his persistence – and…”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did you take so long to sleep with him?”
“I had my morality to consider, Elena, and it was my first proper relationship. I wasn’t into casual affairs then and less so now; if there’s no future in them, I can’t see the point of getting involved in the first place.”
“Not even for the fun of it? Emma, you are so old-fashioned!”
It wasn’t the first time someone told me that and no doubt it wouldn’t be the last.
“I know, but I can’t see the fun in getting hurt and if it’s not a serious relationship – not leading to the commitment of marriage – then that’s all you’re going to get out of it, isn’t it? Yes, I know Elena, apart from the sex,” I said rapidly as she opened her mouth to interject. “Still, I would have held out for longer, except he managed to get me drunk one afternoon and by that time my resistance was wearing very thin and so…”
She clapped her hands together in glee. “He made passionate love to you!”
I stopped fiddling with the candle and the hole I made in the side filmed over as the molten wax oozing from it congealed. I shook my head at my friend.
“You’re a hopeless romantic, Elena Smalova; you’ve been watching too many soppy films, haven’t you?”
“I love romantic films. So, did he?”
“Yes, he did, well – it might have been passionate but I was pretty far gone, so I don’t remember that much. Nor the love bit, come to think of it.”
“Ugh – that is not at all romantic for your first time. Did he leave you once he had his wicked way with you? That would be so like a man – use you and then throw you away like a piece of trash.” She flung out her arms dramatically, nearly knocking the plates out of the waitress’ hand.
“Thanks,” we both said once she had placed our order on the table and Elena had apologized.
“And…?” Elena said as the girl left.
“Well, no, actually. After that it became very serious – scarily so, in fact. I reached a point where I had to make a decision.”
“So…?” she squeaked.
“So, another tutor – my bona fide personal tutor – called me in for a chat one day, about eighteen months after I’d met Guy, and she made one or two things very clear to me…”
“The cow!”
“No, not at all, she was very decent – like Siggie Gerhard in many ways – quite maternal – no, not maternal – kindly, well-meaning, benign, that sort of thing. She said that my work had gone downhill – ‘gone to the dogs, Emma,’ I think she actually said, and that she thought me at grave risk of being sent down if I didn’t sort myself out. She also said one other thing…” I took a long drink to ease my dry throat. Elena took the opportunity to sip hers.
“She told me – she asked – if I was aware that Guy was married.”
Elena clapped her hands to her mouth, her eyes quite round.
“I hadn’t been.” I leaned to one side to pick up a menu and used it to fan myself, feeling hot in our airless corner.
“What did you do?”
“I confronted him and he told me all the same old rubbish: how his marriage was failing, how he would leave her and get a place of his own – you know the sort of thing.” Elena nodded sympathetically. “But being Catholic, he wasn’t going to divorce her – not on your nelly.”
“What’s ‘nelly’?”
“Oh, uh – ‘not for anything’, I suppose. So, I had to make a decision: it was either him or my degree – and I had worked very hard to get to Cambridge.”
“But you were in love with him?”
“Possibly – I thought so at the time, but anyway, he did something I couldn’t forgive.”
Elena’s eyes almost popped; she hadn’t touched her food. I picked up a chip, examining it thoughtfully.
“Emma!”
“What? Oh yes, sorry. Mmn.” I nibbled on the chip. “The fact that he made me into an adulterer.”
Dumbfounded, she said, “That’s all? You gave him up for that? Lots of people have affairs – it’s normal.”
“Not for me, it isn’t – it’s wrong. Besides, I don’t like being lied to, Elena. What he did was enough – I can’t forgive that level of betrayal. I told you – and Sam, for that matter – never make assumptions about me, do you remember?” She nodded. “He assumed I wouldn’t care about his marriage. He thought I could live with him – and myself – after that. He thought wrong. Anyway, I made my choice,” I said with finality.
“Do you regret it?” she whispered.
“Sometimes I think I do – or I did – but not any more. I made the right decision for me at the time; I won’t make the same mistake again.” I flung the half-eaten chip back on the plate. “I felt bad about his wife – I mean really, really bad. There were some days I didn’t leave my room; I couldn’t face the world knowing what I’d done – I couldn’t face myself; it was like being eaten up inside.” All too sharply I recalled the torment of each sleepless night, shame and hurt gnawing away at my conscience. I became aware of Elena, waiting. “I wanted to make things right. I thought that breaking up with Guy would somehow be enough, but it wasn’t; if anything, the guilt intensified; I was a real mess.” A shadow of the past must have shown on my face because she put a hand over mine and asked gravely, “But you are OK now?”
“Yes,” I smiled softly, “now I am. A friend of mine – Tom – spent a lot of time with me…”
“Ah,” she said with a knowing look, before I could finish.
“No – not ‘Ah’ at all,” I laughed. “Tom sat with me, talked, listened; he helped me make sense of it all.”
“How?”
“By showing me that I didn’t have to cope with it by myself. I spent my life being independent. I relied on no one for anything – or so I thought. When I split up from Guy I thought the answer lay in throwing myself into work, but it wasn’t enough to fill the hole inside me.”
“Because you loved him so much?”
“No, because I didn’t love him enough. And, more than that, I didn’t love me.
I didn’t even like me very much. I felt unloved and unlovable. I achieved academically, was good at sport and all the rest of it – but at the most basic level, I didn’t respect myself.”
“But this Tom did?”
“Yes, he did – although I didn’t deserve it after what I did to him.” I felt a stab of remorse, recalling the disappointment on his face. “Anyway, one night – about two in the morning – I sat on my bed wondering if I could ever escape this darkness that surrounded me all the time, this endless, endless night inside me. And then Tom turned up. I hadn’t called him, I didn’t know why he came – but there he stood at my door.”
Elena wrinkled her nose and pinched a chip. “He sounds creepy.”
I shook my head, smiling. “Far from it, he came across with an inner… goodness, I suppose you could call it…” Like Matthew, I wanted to say, but didn’t, as she looked sceptical enough as it was. “Something he said that night struck a chord in me – perhaps I reached a state where I could listen after years of being walled up in myself. He quoted Matthew 11 – you know the one? ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.’ I felt as if a weight had been lifted from me, as if a light had been switched on, and all the darkness disappeared.” I peeled my jumper over my head, welcoming the temporary chill that followed. Her eyes dropped to my cross hanging in the “V” of my T-shirt.
“So, is that when you became a Christian?”
“It started then but I didn’t have a sudden conversion experience or anything, more of a gradual process as things made sense whereas before they were just words. My life took on a different purpose and everything I do – or don’t do – is with that in mind. It’s hard, though, and I get things wrong. History is still my addiction but I see things from a different perspective now. In that respect it made what happened with Guy worthwhile – life-changing – in the best possible sense.” I coughed to clear a tickle and drank again. “I hadn’t understood Donne’s lines from his Holy Sonnets until then:
Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new…
Elena’s serious countenance swam back into focus and I smiled. “As I said, I see things differently now.”
Elena disengaged a piece of pineapple from her pizza thoughtfully.
“So, no fun – no sex.”
“Hang on, I didn’t say anything about not having fun – or sex – it just has to be within the context of marriage; my marriage,” I clarified, thinking of Guy’s loose interpretation. “If ever I get married,” I tagged on glumly, thinking now about Matthew.
“Did you go out with Tom?”
“No, I missed the boat on that one – missed the opportunity,” I explained as her face puckered with a question. “We remained friends but he went his way, and I mine. I think he’s married, though. There, now you have the sorry little tale of my life – or that part of it, at least; exciting, isn’t it?”
Elena could tut more expressively than anyone else I knew.
“I still think you love history more than this man, more than any man,” she declared, as she picked at the strands of melted cheese at the edges of her pizza; “but you can’t make a life with history – you can’t make love with history. You will be very lonely – a sad, lonely old woman.” She shook her head sorrowfully.
I selected a chip and laid it carefully at right angles to another one, not as hungry now as I thought when I ordered.
“Oh, I don’t know; it has its advantages.”
She raised a quizzical eyebrow and huffed impatiently as I tried to balance one chip on another like the beginnings of a log-cabin wall.
“History’s more predictable than a man – it’s a done deal – no surprises, and it’ll never take you for granted. It’s a good enough bedfellow.” The wall collapsed and I gave up and consumed the upper third of it.
Elena’s eyes glowed with indignation. “Yes, and it will never take you out or buy you presents or… or marry you either.”
“That’s very true. But I didn’t say I wouldn’t contemplate getting married, it’s just that there are certain parameters I wish to stick to.” I dipped another chip in mayonnaise before eating down its length. It crunched satisfyingly. “Such as, he must not make assumptions, of course, and not be much older than me: there was a generational issue with Guy – his cultural references were the same as my parents’. And he mustn’t be married – except to me; that’s inviolable. Married men are a definite no-no: it’s wrong. Besides which, like Sam, they come with too much baggage.”
I recognized I came close to playing double standards on that score; I seemed to be making a fine distinction between married, divorced and widowed men. The last I saw as an exception to my golden rule even if it meant stretching the point a little. Matthew might very well come with loads of baggage, but through no fault of his own, and perhaps it might be something I could help him carry. I peeled the bun off my burger and piled on the side salad until it bulged, found the area of least resistance and bit into it. The mayonnaise gratifyingly cooled my hot throat.
Elena wore the sort of expression I thought reserved for eighteenth-century statues of the Madonna and martyrs.
“Did you break Guy’s heart?”
After everything I said, she still worried for Guy – but then she didn’t know him.
“Whose side are you on?” I accused. “You don’t think it was an easy choice, do you? Nor am I heartless, before you say anything.”
Elena shut her mouth, then cast a swift look at me before asking, “Is he why you hide from people – no, not people, from men?”
“I don’t!”
“Yes you do. Why do you not wear your hair down so it can be seen?”
“What’s my hair got to do with anything?”
My head protested as the room suddenly reverberated with the sound of an old Elvis number from the juke-box; Elena rapped her fingers to it, waiting for an answer. I pulled a face at her persistence.
“This was supposed to be a girls’ night out and all we do is talk about men. Can we change the subject? For instance, you promised to show me those sources from Stalingrad – remember? The ghouls and ghosts?”
“I would rather talk about men,” she hinted heavily. For that matter so would I, but the lack of Matthew made me morose, and I didn’t want Elena to know how I felt about him – not yet, anyway, not until there was certainty on both sides. So Stalingrad it would have to be, then.
“I don’t want to discuss it now – you will put me off my food.” She tried to evade the subject again, but the remains of the enormous pizza lay on her plate and, as I considered her to be in no danger of starvation, I persisted.
“It is better for you to see the sources yourself, but…” she raised a hand as I began to protest, “I can tell you something. These documents were among papers left to me by one of my professors when he died. He served in the army as a… what do you call it?… a secret soldier, no, an intelligence officer, da. His job was to prevent certain information destroying the happiness of the army.”
“Morale?” I suggested, trying to get the story straight in my head as she told it.
“Yes, that is what I said. There were rumours – many rumours – that people were dying in ways that were not normal, not natural.”
“How come? Surely people were dying all the time – there must have been a very high mortality rate among civilians as well as combatants; in all the chaos of the siege, who would know?”
“The doctors knew who died who were not starving, or wounded or ill. They could see the marks.”
I shivered, my skin running cold even though my head began to burn. Elena evidently enjoyed the reaction her tale evoked.
“Marks?”
“Da, marks of the Fiend,” she said in hushed tones.
I ignored the referenc
e to a cultural superstition. “But people don’t die of marks, so what killed them?”
“The medical reports only said that it was ‘a stopping of the heart’.”
“So, they had no idea what caused the deaths, then.” I sat back and folded my arms, not impressed.
“They were not allowed to say because of the morale, no, but the professor said that he was told in secret that all the victims had fear in their eyes and that they had been touched.”
“By what?”
“The Fiend. Or at least by a creature of some kind, but they could not say what exactly.”
“Because it was secret?”
“Nyet, because they did not know.” She leaned back to gauge my reaction, looking very satisfied with herself. I thought about what she said.
“What did they do with the bodies?”
She anticipated where I headed with that question.
“All the bodies were burned immediately – no more evidence, no autopsy, nothing.”
“Because of the threat of disease or… or to keep it secret, or what?”
“My professor said that it was to stop the dead from walking.”
The hairs on the back of my neck tingled; I ran my hand over them, soothing the nerves and the ache that was developing at the base of my skull.
“Go on.”
“He said that they make sure the bodies were really dead, not just a little dead.”
“Did your professor say what he thought that meant?”
Elena didn’t answer immediately. She fingered the last quadrant of pizza before putting it down again.
“He said that people talked about the Fiend walking the streets and feeding on men’s souls.” She spoke so softly that I strained forward to hear. “And that the dead would rise and fight for Germany.”
I tried not to laugh. “What – like zombies?”
She looked crossly at me. “Shhh – not so loud. He said so, yes. But he didn’t believe it; the Soviet Government banned all superstition, all religion, so it could not be so.”