The Uncanny Reader

by Marjorie Sandor

  “She has everything else,” Cilla said. “I don’t have anything from great-gran.”

  “I’m sure we can find something from the house,” said Mum. “But not the dress. It means a lot to Hedvig. Think of someone else’s feelings for a change.”

  Sara came down a little later with the same request. Mum yelled at her.

  * * *

  Maybe it was because of Mum’s outburst, but Sara became twitchier as the evening passed on. Finally she muttered something about going for a walk and shrugged into her jacket. Cilla hesitated a moment and then followed.

  “Fuck off,” Sara muttered without turning her head when Cilla came running after her.

  “No way,” said Cilla.

  Sara sighed and rolled her eyes. She increased her pace until Cilla had to half-jog to keep up. They said nothing until they came down to the lake’s shore, a stretch of rounded river stones that made satisfying billiard-ball noises under Cilla’s feet.

  Sara sat down on one of the larger rocks and dug out a soft tenpack of cigarettes. She shook one out and lit it. “Tell Mum and I’ll kill you.”

  “I know.” Cilla sat down next to her. “Why are you being so weird? Ever since you talked to Johann.”

  Sara took a drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose. She shrugged. Her eyes looked wet. “He made me understand some things, is all.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I’m not crazy. Like none of us are.” She looked out over the lake. “We should stay here. Maybe we’d survive.” Her eyes really were wet now. She wiped at them with her free hand.

  Cilla felt cold trickle down her back. “What are you on about?”

  Sara rubbed her forehead. “You have to promise not to tell anyone, because if you tell anyone bad stuff will happen, okay? Shit is going to happen just because I’m telling you. But I’ll tell you because you’re my little sis.” She slapped a quick rhythm on her thigh. “Okay. So it’s like this—the world is going to end soon. It’s going to end in ninety-six.”

  Cilla blinked. “How would you know?”

  “It’s in the newspapers, if you look. The Gulf War, yeah? That’s when it started. Saddam Hussein is going to take revenge and send nukes, and then the U.S. will nuke back, and then Russia jumps in. And then there’ll be nukes everywhere, and we’re dead. Or we’ll die in the nuclear winter, ’cause they might not nuke Sweden, but there’ll be nothing left for us.” Sara’s eyes were a little too wide.

  “Okay,” Cilla said, slowly. “But how do you know all this is going to happen?”

  “I can see the signs. In the papers. And I just … know. Like someone told me. The twenty-third of February in ninety-six, that’s when the world ends. I mean, haven’t you noticed that something’s really really wrong?”

  Cilla dug her toe into the stones. “It’s the opposite.”

  “What.” There was no question mark to Sara’s tone.

  “Something wonderful,” Cilla said. Her cheeks were hot. She focused her eyes on her toe.

  “You’re a fucking idiot.” Sara turned her back, demonstratively, and lit a new cigarette.

  Cilla never could wait her out. She walked back home alone.

  * * *

  On midsummer’s eve, they had a small feast. There was pickled herring and new potatoes, smoked salmon, fresh strawberries and cream, spiced schnapps for Mum and Hedvig. It was past ten when Cilla pulled on Sara’s sleeve.

  “We have to go pick seven kinds of flowers,” she said.

  Sara rolled her eyes. “That’s kid stuff. I have a headache,” she said, standing up. “I’m going to bed.”

  Cilla remained at the table with her mother and great-aunt, biting her lip.

  Mum slipped an arm around her shoulder. “Picking seven flowers is an old, old tradition,” she said. “There’s nothing silly about it.”

  “I don’t feel like it anymore,” Cilla mumbled.

  Mum chuckled gently. “Well, if you change your mind, tonight is when you can stay up for as long as you like.”

  “Just be careful,” said Hedvig. “The vittra might be out and about.” She winked conspiratorially at Cilla.

  At Hedvig’s dry joke, Cilla suddenly knew with absolute certainty what she had been pining for, that wonderful something waiting out there. She remained at the table, barely able to contain her impatience until Mum and Hedvig jointly decided to go to bed.

  Mum kissed Cilla’s forehead. “Have a nice little midsummer’s eve, love. I’ll leave the cookies out.”

  Cilla made herself smile at her mother’s patronizing remark, and waited for the house to go to sleep.

  She had put the dress on right this time, as well as she could, and clutched seven kinds of flowers in her left hand—buttercup, clover, geranium, catchfly, bluebells, chickweed, and daisies. She stood at the back of the house, on the slope facing the mountain. It was just past midnight, the sky a rich blue tinged with green and gold. The air had a sharp and herbal scent. It was very quiet.

  Cilla raised her arms. “I’m ready,” she whispered. In the silence that followed, she thought she could hear snatches of music. She closed her eyes and waited. When she opened them again, the vittra had arrived.

  They came out from between the pine trees, walking in pairs, all dressed in red and white: the women wore red skirts and shawls and the men long red coats. Two of them were playing the fiddle, a slow and eerie melody in a minor key.

  A tall man walked at the head of the train, dressed entirely in white. His hair was long and dark and very fine. There was something familiar about the shape of his face and the translucent blue of his eyes. For a moment, those eyes stared straight into Cilla’s. It was like receiving an electric shock; it reverberated down into her stomach. Then he shifted his gaze and looked beyond her to where Sara was standing wide-eyed by the corner of the house in her oversized sleeping T-shirt. He walked past Cilla without sparing her another glance.

  The beautiful man from the mountain approached Sara where she stood clutching the edge of the rain barrel. He put a hand on her arm and said something to her that Cilla couldn’t hear. Whatever it was, it made Sara’s face flood with relief. She took his hand, and they walked past Cilla to the rest of the group. The fiddle players started up their slow wedding march, and the procession returned to the mountain. Sara never looked back.

  * * *

  Cilla told them that Sara must have taken the dress, that she herself had gone to bed not long after the others. She told them of Sara’s doomsday vision and her belief that she could tell the future by decoding secret messages in the newspaper. When the search was finally abandoned, the general opinion was that Sara had had a bout of psychotic depression and gone into the wild, where she had either fallen into a body of water or died of exposure somewhere she couldn’t be found. Up there, you can die of hypothermia even in summer. Cilla said nothing of the procession, or of the plastic bag in her suitcase where Märet’s dress lay cut into tiny strips.

  She kept the bag for a long time.

  MUZUNGU

  C. Namwali Serpell

  Isabella was nine years old before she knew what white meant. White in the sense of being a thing, as opposed to not being a thing. It wasn’t that Isa didn’t know her parents were white. Of course with her mother, this was largely a matter of conjecture. A layer of thick dark hair kept Sibilla’s face a mystery. And even though as she aged, this blanket of hair turned grey, then silver, then white, a definite movement toward translucence, Isa never could properly make out her mother’s features. More distinct were Sibilla’s legs, tufts of fur running like a mane down each thick shin, and her strange laugh, like large sheets of paper being ripped, then crumpled. Isa’s father, the Colonel, was white, but it often seemed as if pink and grey were battling it out on his face. Especially when he drank.

  Her parents had settled into life in Zambia the way most expats do. They drank a lot. Every weekend was another house party, that neverending expatriate house party that has b
een swatting mosquitoes and swimming in gin and quinine for more than a century. Sibilla floated around in a billowy Senegalese boubou, sending servants for refills and dropping in on every conversation, distributing laughter and ease amongst her guests. Purple-skinned peanuts had been soaked in salt water and roasted in a pan until they were grey; they cooled and shifted with a whispery sound in wooden bowls. There were Tropic beer bottles scattered around the veranda, marking the table and the concrete floor with their damp semi-circular hoof prints. Full or empty? Once the top is off a Tropic bottle, you can’t tell because the amber glass is so dark. You have to lift it to check its weight. Cigars and tobacco pipes puffed their foul sweetness into the air. Darts and croquet balls went in loopy circles around their targets, loopier as the day wore on. The Colonel sat in his permanent chair just beyond the shade of the veranda, dampening with gin the thatch protruding from his nostrils, occasionally snorting at some private or overheard joke. His skin was creased like trousers that had been worn too long. Budding from his arms were moles so large and detached they looked ready to tumble off and roll away into the night. And as though his wife’s hairiness had become contagious, his ears had been taken over by hair—the calyx whorl of each had sprouted a bouquet of whiskers. The Colonel liked to drink from the same glass the entire day, always his favorite glass, decorated with the red, white, and green hexagons of a football. As his drunkenness progressed, the glass got misty from being so close to his open mouth, then slimy as his saliva glands loosened, then muddy as dirt and sweat mixed on his hand. At the end of the evening, when Isa was sent to fetch her father’s glass, she often found it beneath his chair under a swarm of giddy ants, the football spattered like it had been used for a rainy day match.

  Isa had no siblings and when the other expatriate children were around she was frantic and listless in turns. Today, she began with frantic. Leaving the grown-ups outside propping their feet on wooden stools and scratching at their sunburns, Isa marched three of the more hapless children inside the house and down the long corridor to her bedroom. There, she introduced them to her things. First to her favorite book, D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Second to the live, broken-winged bird she’d found in the driveway. Third, and finally, to Doll.

  “And this is my doll. She comes from America. She has an Amurrican accent. Her name is Doll.”

  Bird and Doll lived together in an open cardboard box. Isabella stood next to the box with her chin lifted, her hand pointing down to the box. Due to the scarcity of imported goods in Lusaka, Isa was allowed only one doll at a time, and this one had gone the way of all dolls: tangled-haired–patchy–bald. Forever smiling Doll, denied a more original name by her fastidious owner, sat with her legs extended, her right knee bent at an obtuse and alluring angle. From Doll’s arched left foot a tiny plastic pink stiletto dangled. Her perforated rubber head tilted to one side. She seemed interested and pleasant. Bird, also on its way to bald, cowered as far away from Doll as possible, looking defeated. Isa poked at it with her finger. The bird skittered lopsidedly around the box until, cornered, it uttered a vague chirp. Alex and Stephie, prompted by Isabella, applauded this effort. But Emma, the littlest, thinking that the doll rather than the bird had made the sound, burst into startled tears. She had to be soothed (by Stephie) and corrected (by Isa). Isa was annoyed. So, she sat them down in a row on her bed and taught them things that she knew. About fractions and about why Athena was better than Aphrodite. About the sun and how it wasn’t moving, we were. But soon enough, Emma’s knotted forehead and Alex’s fidgeting began to drive Isa to distraction. Then came the inevitable tantrum, followed by a dark sullen lull. The other three children hastened from the room in a kind of daze. Isa sat next to the cardboard box and cried a little, alternately stroking Doll’s smiling head and Bird’s weary one.

  When she’d tired of self-pity, Isa went to the bathroom and carefully closed and locked the door. She took off her shoes and climbed onto the edge of the bathtub, which faced a wall about two feet away. Only by standing on the edge of the tub could she see herself in the mirror on the wall, which hung at adult height. She examined her grey eyes, closing each of them in turn to see how she looked when blinking. She checked her face for hair (an endless, inevitable paranoia) and with a cruel finger pushed the tip of her nose up. She felt it hung too close to her upper lip. Then Isa let herself fall into the mirror, her own face rushing toward her, her eyes expanding with fear and perspective. At the last minute, she reached out her hands and stopped herself. She stayed in this position for a moment, angled across the room, arms rigid, hands pressed against the mirror, nose centimeters from it. Then, bored of her face, she jumped down and explored the floor. She unraveled the last few squares of toilet paper from its roll and wrapped it around her neck. Then she opened the cardboard cylinder from the toilet paper roll into a loose brown curlicue—a bracelet. She discovered some of her mother’s torn OB wrappers, which twisted at each end like candy wrappers. She stood them on their twists to make goblets for Doll.

  Eventually drunken guests started lining up outside the bathroom, knocking at the door with tentative knuckles and then flat palms and then clenched fists. Isa emerged, head high and neck at full extension, her OB goblets balanced on an outstretched hand like a tray. Bejeweled with toilet paper, she strolled past the line of full-bladdered guests. She gave Doll the goblets, modeled the jewelry for Bird. But Isa’s heavily curtained bedroom was too cold to play in alone. Reluctantly, she removed her makeshift jewelry—too childish for her mother to see—and rejoined the party outside. As she marched outside in her marigold dress, she glanced at the other children running around making pointless circles and meaningless noises in the garden. She avoided them, choosing instead to be pointedly polite to their parents, who were still sitting in a half-circle on the veranda, insulting each other. There was something excessive about her attentiveness as she shoved snack platters under the noses of perfectly satiated guests and refilled their mostly full beer glasses, tilting both bottle and glass to minimize the foam, just like the Colonel taught her.

  Finally her mother, annoyed, told her to sit down over by Ba Simon, the gardener. He was standing at the far end of the veranda, slapping varieties of dead animal onto the smoking brai. He reached down to pat Isa on the head, but she ducked away from his hand, ignoring his eyes and his chuckle. The saccharine smell of the soap he used mingled with the smell of burnt meat. Ba Simon was singing softly under his breath. He’d probably picked up some nasty song from the shabeen, Isa thought emphatically, repeating in her head a condemnation that she’d heard a thousand times from Ba Gertrude, the maid. There are three kinds of people in the world: people who unconsciously sing along when they hear someone else singing, people who remain respectfully or irritably silent, and people who start to sing something else. Isa began singing the Zambian national anthem. Stand and sing of Zambia, proud and free. Land of work and joy and unity. Eventually Ba Simon gave up on his quiet song, smiling down at Isa and shaking his head while he flipped steaks he wouldn’t get to eat. Ashes from the brai drifted and spun like the children playing in the garden. Isa watched the other children with a detached revulsion, her elbows on her knees, cheeks cradled in her hands, ashes melting imperceptibly onto the pale shins below the hem of her marigold dress. Stephie was sitting in a chair, depriving a grown-up of a seat, reading a book. Isa was scandalized. It was her mythology book! She stared at Stephie for a while and then decided to forgive her because her nose had a perfect slope. Unlike Winnifred, whose nose was enormous and freckled, almost as disgusting as the snot bubbling from Ahmed’s little brown one. The two of them were trying to play croquet under the not-so-watchful eye of Aunt Kathy. Younger than most of the adults at the party, Aunt Kathy always spent the day chain smoking and downing watery Pimm’s cups and looking through everyone, endlessly making and unmaking some terribly important decision. Isa found her beautiful, but looking at her for too long sometimes made her feel like there were too many things that she
didn’t know yet.

  Emma, who had cried about Doll, was all smiles now, sitting cross-legged by herself and watching something, probably a ladybug, crawl along her hand. Emma was so small. Isa tried to remember being that small, but the weight of her own elbows on her knees made it hard to imagine. The ladybug was even smaller. What was it like to be that small? But anyway, how could Emma have been so afraid of Doll when she clearly wasn’t afraid of insects, which everyone knew could bite and were much more disgusting? Isa had once retched at the sight of a stray cockroach in the sink, but it had been a pretend retch because she’d heard at school that cockroaches were supposed to be disgusting. Horribly, Isa’s pretend retch had become real and had burned her throat and she’d felt ashamed at having been so promptly punished by her body for lying. But enough time had passed to transform the feeling of disgust at herself into disgust about small crawling creatures. She watched as Emma turned her cupped hand slowly like the Queen of England waving at everyone on the television. The ladybug spiraled down her wrist, seeking edges, finding curves. Emma giggled. Isa swallowed, looked away.

  Far off in the corner of the garden, there was a huddle of boys crouching, playing with worms or cards or something. Isa watched them. Every once in a while, the four boys would stand up and move a little further away and then huddle down again, like they were following a trail. They were inching this way along the garden wall, toward where it broke off by the corner of the house. Around that corner was the guava tree Isa climbed every afternoon after school. Isa got curious. And then she got suspicious. She stood up, absently brushing ashes from her dress instead of shaking them off and accidentally streaking the yellow with grey. She noticed and bit her lip and squeezed her left hand with her right, caught between her resolve to do good and her need to change her dress. But the adults were roaring with laughter and slumping with drunkenness. Whatever inappropriate behavior was taking place in the garden, it was up to her to fix. She started running across the garden, looking behind her to make sure no one followed. When she was close, she stopped herself and began stalking the boys, holding her breath.