by Tanith Lee
She rolled sideways, and curled herself up by the table, which still bore a scatter of their normal life, plates, glasses, for these objects clattered, jittered, as he moved about the room.
He tore things apart in the room. Her few clothes, one curtain. Oddly he did not go to her bag lying in the bottom of the cupboard.
It was violence he wanted most, and acquiescence. She must give him the poison, drag it and present it to him on her knees. Tonight she was the one to blame. But she must answer now for all the world, which had hated and harried him and driven him insane.
Dully she thought, He’ll kill me anyway.
And in that moment he turned and veered back towards her, blundering mechanical and blind, like the darkened tram.
The light must be coming, morning, or a fire. There was redness on the room, and he was in the eye of it, the storm of the redness.
His face was unrecognisable, rags of scarlet and grey. His eyes were framed in blood.
Now she did wail in a fey lost voice, No, no, something like that, as he pulled her up once more.
He did not demand anything of her. He shook her, and she thought her skull would crack from her neck, but then she was falling and again the table rattled, and round her dropped, fellow casualties, bits of china, glass, cutlery, and the pot of dorisa, also red, to break and shatter. He trod the glass and blooms under, and drawing back his foot, he kicked her again, full in the stomach.
This was death. Surely it was. Blackness bulged, with inflamed edges, nausea, and a swimming out. Voices called in ocean.
Then only one voice, Árpád’s voice, shouting in her face, his spittle hitting her like the foam.
She felt it under her hand, and brought it round, not really thinking, and slid her arm powerlessly, half-caressingly, up his body, as if making love to him. And then she stroked over his shoulder and stuck the knife, the sharp knife from the bread, straight into his throat, where she knew, even in the state she had reached, that it would kill him.
There was no longer noise, but for a throbbing and grinding in her ears. Hot sea water had dashed her face and neck, nothing else, and then one last heavy light thing, his arm falling across her body, as it had sometimes done in deepest sleep.
When she woke, the day was already beginning to be hot. Light flushed the room.
She had been sleeping by him on the floor, and he was still asleep. How silly of them, not to have moved to the bed. But it had been the night of carnival, hadn’t it?
Anna knew she had drunk too much. Her head, her entire face and body, ached, and in her belly there was a large black stone, heavy, and pulling on her. She got up, and retched, but then the illness subsided. She drank some water. She took her bag from the cupboard. What an odd way that curtain hung…
She would have to go quickly to the shop. She was very late, she knew she was.
Only as she went down the stairs did she think she had not said goodbye to him, or even tried to wake him. But then, he would want to sleep.
On the street, people glanced at her, very often. She must look a sight. She had forgotten to wash her face and comb her hair.
And she had the dress on still, the white dress. And look, she had spilt some red wine on it, like the other girl with the expensive jacket.
But she owned this dress. Árpád had bought it for her. The stain didn’t matter.
On the tram, it came to her she still had on her mask, which covered the eyes. She thought of taking it off, but simply couldn’t be bothered.
On the tram too she was stared at, but then they turned away. Once an old woman came up to her. The old woman spoke to her in a hushed voice, and Anna could not understand what she said. All at once, she had forgotten the language of this place. How strange, she had been in the city for a year or more – or was she mistaken? What was the name of this place?
As she was getting off the tram, somehow she fell to her knees.
Some people rushed up to her and tried to lift her, questioning her anxiously, excitedly.
Anna grasped some of the words. She said, but only in French, “No, thank you. I’m quite all right. Please don’t distress yourself.” She said this brightly and firmly, to show she knew her own mind. She was acutely embarrassed.
Someone else had said to her, she thought, that about not distressing herself. But Anna wasn’t distressed.
She walked trimly along the street to the dress-shop, and went straight through, where an assistant stood, her hands flying up to her mouth like hungry birds.
There was no one in any of the back rooms, nor in the dressing room. Some flies buzzed in tangerine sunlight. Even empty, there was the smell of scent and make-up and women.
It was a nice smell, Anna had liked it. Now she doubled over, and water erupted from her throat and mouth.
When she raised her head, the lesbian woman, Peepy, was poised in the doorway in her dark blue muslin.
Anna laughed, still embarrassed.
“I’m so sorry. I drank too much last night. How awful. And I’m late.”
Peepy said slowly, as if she too were finding her way about in an alien language, “No, it’s only morning yet, Anna. Why don’t you sit down?”
And then Peepy came up to her and led her to the chair, and sat her there.
“Oh, my dear,” said Peepy.
Anna thought, after all, Peepy was going to want to make love to her. And although Anna didn’t mind, she hoped Peepy wouldn’t, exactly now. For Anna felt so sick, so dizzy, and this stone in her womb weighed so heavily and hurt so much, and there was another pain too, but what was it?
Peepy had put a second chair in front of Anna, and raised her legs gently on to it. Then she pulled Anna’s skirt right up to her hips. Oh God.
“It’s all right, darling,” said Peepy, “don’t be frightened.”
“No, I’m not – but – couldn’t we wait a little.”
“No, darling. We mustn’t wait.”
But what was Peepy doing? She had bundled a costly garment, now another, from the rail, and was stuffing them in quite hard up between Anna’s legs.
Anna giggled with genuine astonished laughter.
“What are you doing, Peepy dear?”
“Nothing at all, darling. Just sit quite still. See if you can’t have a little sleep. I’ll be back in only a moment.”
And as Anna sank away, downwards, somewhere, glad to have been given permission, she saw Peepy amusingly run out of the room, and far off heard her frenziedly shouting, incomprehensible words, as if war had come and an invasion.
Margot, (her name) had a rambling apartment in an affluent area of Preguna, which she shared with the elderly, eccentric and kohl-eyed female lover who had shouted Harlot at the dress-show. This woman, Peepy – Margot – introduced to Anna, not by name, but, by a title. “This is my Great Love.”
And the Great Love bowed her head theatrically, her gigantic earrings jangling, acknowledging Anna’s presence, and the title, together.
The flat was very large, rather strange in arrangement. The bedroom, which Margot and the Great Love shared, opened directly from a vast cavern of a drawing room, with cricked chairs of bulging, faded, dark-pink brocade, tall lamps on taller stands of bronze, patterned rugs and hangings, and prints from Bakst’s Firebird. In the ceiling was an ornamental fan, and a huge Moroccan birdcage that had no bird in it, yet hung on a chain, door wide open, as if awaiting one.
Beyond the drawing room trailed like a stream a winding corridor. This took in an antiquated bathroom of luminous green-rusted marble, a stuffy study for Margot, something which was a sort of toy room, (where Anna slept), and a little dining chamber with red brocade walls. The corridor ended finally with five funny narrow steps down into a most dismal stone-floored closet, possibly meant as a kitchen, with a thick brown sink and grumbling water tap.
Food was seldom if ever prepared here. Meals were brought from a restaurant across the street, while coffee was ground and Russian tea concocted in the dining room.
The toy room had a slender bed, with white lace curtains. It was almost a doll’s bed, but the dolls had been moved from it. Now they sat on a chaise-longue by the wall, all the dolls, seven in number, and two toy animals, a cat upholstered in ‘fur’ with flame-green eyes, a wooden chicken, intricately carved and painted.
Sometimes all these personalities were carried out and solemnly placed in the drawing room, for an afternoon, or in the dining room for supper. The Great Love saw to this, also to replacing them in their room in seemly attitudes.
To Anna she remarked, “You think the old lady is crazy, yes? You think I have my dolls for babies, because I never get babies?” While the Great Love was saying this, Peepy, (Margot), stood across from them, stiff with unease, glancing at Anna over and over. But the Great Love only concluded, bleakly, “What are children? They tear you open and then ruin your life. And then they grow to men and women and leave you. But these dolls are my friends. My youth, when I was girl, like you.”
Anna nodded sympathetically. She saw nothing wrong, not even substitutional, in the dolls, the cat and chicken. They quite charmed her, well-groomed and attractive, demanding nothing.
Margot approached Anna presently.
“I’m so sorry. She forgets things. She’s so – not selfish – but wrapped up in her own body, her past. She’s kind, really. But she forgot.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” said Anna airily. She didn’t, not at all. What had been said to her at the hospital in Preguna seemed to have nothing to do with her, someone else’s news. She had never thought of it, before, and now it was as if the doctor first, and currently Margot, expected her to take seriously to heart something only read of, once or twice, in books.
“Shall I keep the dolls out of your room?”
“It isn’t my room, Margot. It’s your room. It’s a lovely room. I like her dolls.”
“Just as long as you’re quite comfortable.”
Anna said she was.
She was.
They let her live among them, both these women. They shared meals with her, very good meals, every day, the sort she and Árpád would have indulged in once a week, perhaps, or less. And they played cards with her, Margot patient and the Great Love cursing her and laughing, and pouring her tiny goblets of Kirsch, giving her spoonfuls of rose-petal jam. They lent her novels and volumes of poetry. Margot took her for walks in the gardens across the street, and glanced at her so repeatedly, worriedly, when children were playing on the grass, or by the fountain.
Her washing was done for her. Margot had even brought three dresses and some underthings from the shop. And shoes. And other items she would need.
Everything in the hospital had been arranged by Margot. Margot had lied and possibly given bribes. She had said to them all that Anna was her niece, that Anna had a fiancé in France. That Anna was called Annette.
Margot had brought flowers and fruit and chocolates, and once a dish of cabbage dumplings. She had sat with Anna. Indeed Margot was the first person, as the last, Anna saw, opening her eyes again out of the long sleep she began in the chair at the dress-shop.
There had been appalling dreams.
Margot said, as if apologizing for these, “I’m so sorry, sorry.”
But Anna felt not unwell, although painfully sore. She wondered, bewildered, if she had been run over by a tram.
“Where is Árpád?” she asked Margot.
But she had never told Margot, or anyone, about Árpád, so it was not extraordinary Margot did not apparently follow her. Then Margot said, sternly, “You mustn’t say anything to the doctors. Can you remember, Anna? It will only lead to trouble.”
“Do you mean don’t speak at all?”
“No. I mean don’t say a word to them about – who is it you said?”
“Árpád.”
“This man. Oh Anna.”
Anna felt wash in towards her, like a returning tide that could not be halted, some dreadful immanence. Not even memory, knowledge.
“It was in some of the papers,” said Margot. “Even before that, at once, it was quite obvious to me. What you must have done, and why. He nearly killed you, Anna, you were only defending your life. But it’s much too dangerous to speak of. Don’t tell them anything. They think you’re my niece and went dancing at the carnival, and drank a little too much, and then you were sleepwalking – which you had been used to do, but which hadn’t happened since you were a child – and you fell down the stairs at my flat.”
“But…” said Anna. She closed her eyes.
Margot said, “That was how you bruised your face and cut your mouth, you see. On the stone floor. And the bottom step hurt your stomach. And it was all this that caused the haemorrhage. Naturally I said I was with you, and I brought you here, of course.”
Anna said, “I killed him. Did I?”
“Hush, Anna. Don’t say this now. I saw there was all the other blood. And you’d cut your hand on the knife. But no one else bothered with it. I’ve lied for you, Anna, to keep you safe. You mustn’t speak.”
The tears ran slowly, hurting her as the welling blood had hurt.
That evening, when Margot was gone, the doctor questioned Anna. But Margot had told Anna everything she was to say, and where she must be vague and confused, and want her fiancé, the man in France, who had promised to marry her, and give her a beautiful diamond ring.
In the papers, Margot had said, people reportedly had seen a young woman with a badly bruised face, her white breast and white evening gown covered in blood, wandering.
But Margot had insisted that Anna was her relative. Somehow Margot had patched things up, with lies and money. Or no one cared enough, perhaps. Árpád was nothing to them. No one really knew who he was. A disfigured grotesque. A freak.
In an hour or so, another doctor entered and told Anna that she had lost her child, and would never be able to conceive another. They had saved her life. That had been the most urgent task. One could not perform two miracles at once.
She had been with so many men. Never to her knowledge had she been pregnant. She never thought about it. But Árpád had put into her his child, and she hadn’t known.
All these messages, warnings and foretellings were only stories, like something overheard on a train.
She lied because Margot had wanted it so badly, and Anna was used to liars, to abetting and assuaging liars.
When she thought of Árpád she cried. Or, the tears simply ran from her eyes. But then she would start to think of something else. And the tears would dry.
After a while, Margot took Anna to the flat. Anna was polite and grateful.
As the car went along the roads, Anna saw the sunlight glimmering on Preguna. She smiled. She wasn’t even upset. Grief – was this grief? – so easy.
There must have been embattlement and then truce, between them, Margot and the Great Love.
Margot treated Anna always – as a niece. Demonstrating by every nuance and gesture that she was fond of Anna but nothing else, did not desire anything but to be kind.
And the Great Love, whose volcanic tirade must surely have cracked plaster off the walls, broken glass, filled the air with a laval burning, now acted out this performance of impartial mildness, looking on, intending only to be generous, and noble.
Every move the Great Love made was redolent of these things. A symmetry informed even her rustling breath when she smoked her swarthy cigarettes. She tossed her head and her earrings clashed like a tocsin, but she smiled at Anna, and at Margot. She would be just. She would think no evil, nor speak none.
When she cursed or reviled Anna, at cards or elsewhere, it was lovingly. Affectionate, she was not jealous. She said to Anna over and over, sometimes even in words, You are so young. I have no quarrel with you about this. God is to blame. We are friends.
And Margot did not touch Anna. She was comradely. If Anna came from the bath in her robe – the embroidered robe Margot had loaned her – Margot’s eyes slid over her, as if over some nice arti
cle without meaning.
And the Great Love didn’t even watch. No. She turned her huge eyes away; I? Not trust you? What nonsense.
Outside the flat, summer would not end, as if the seasonal needle had stuck in a groove. On and on. The sun-lit days, the dusty dusks, the nights of blurred stars.
Anna said, now and then, that she could now go. She could effortlessly regain her old room. It would be simple to find work.
No – oh no, they clamoured. They vied with each other to keep her there, the symbol of fiery gold by which they knew they had each been virtuous, and would never doubt each other.
Sometimes the Great Love rested in the afternoons, when Margot was at the shop. Anna, instructed also to rest on her white bed, always had.
About three, Anna got up. She went softly and listened through a door to the deep raspy breathing of the Great Love, asleep.
Anna had put a few things into her bag. She wore one of the dresses and a light coat and some shoes, and the little bell-shaped hat Margot had obtained. It no longer hurt Anna to walk. But her stomach felt so light. Like a balloon on a string. Her sense of gravity was affected. Occasionally she paused, and leaned against a wall of the apartment.
Margot’s cash was kept in a drawer of the study, very unwisely, the Great Love had always told her so.
Anna stole some of the money. Not very much. It was a horrible thing to do. She wished she hadn’t had to, but she had nothing of her own at all.
She wrote a note to Margot, but then tore it up. Anna left the pieces, the bits of words that mentioned sadness and regret and thanks, left them lying in the drawing room on a table.
The birdcage lilted, beckoning the bird. But no bird would come. And the bladed fan, not turning, was as grisly as a guillotine.
Outside, alone, on the hot street of a dying summer that would not admit its death, Anna felt faint as a spectre.
But she made her journey across Preguna to a station, and here she found a train. Margot’s thieved cash facilitated a seat, which bore Anna successfully away.
Sitting there in the train, as it churned towards the border, Anna and her lightness, her absence of all centre, seemed tossed in the air, a vile levitation.