The Fig Eater

by Jody Sheilds

  This sentence will now haunt him like an accusation.

  In the evenings, when Erszébet brings her husband a glass of sweet wine from Badacsony in the library, her presence — the momentary grace of her hand on his cheek and shoulder — soothes his unease. After she leaves, his sense of restless waiting returns, as if the trace of her perfume in the air reignited his fears.

  He watches her movements around the house more assiduously. He finds himself in the kitchen, studying the leftover lime-blossom tea in her cup as if the fragrant liquid holds a secret message for him.

  Lately, he’s noticed she’s been acting strangely. A fiaker edged too close to the curb, splashing her coat with gray water from a puddle. A gentleman jumped from his carriage and profusely apologized. The Inspector assumed she would graciously accept the man’s regrets. Instead, she turned her back on both of them and walked away.

  She moves in the presence of her husband’s distress. She is aware of it. In her language it is lidércnyomás, a state of fright and intense depression. Their nightly ritual — when she serves him a glass of wine — serves to keep her connected to him. She does this as much for herself as for him, since it is her habit to ignore any unpleasant situation between them.

  She believes she has the tools to reveal the murderer. Once she knows the name, it will relieve her husband’s pain, which is now directed at her.

  Wally has been waiting in the Volksgarten for one cold hour, hoping to find Rosza. It’s just past three o’clock, but twilight has already worked a transformation on the park, soaking the snow in its solemn, violet gray tint.

  Since her visit to the photographer’s studio, Wally has been afraid. There’s a waiting connected with this fear, and it seems as if it never leaves her. It occupies the same space as a depression. It’s a presence, like her fear of digging, of uprooting, which she can’t free herself of or embrace.

  She walks to shake off her mood. Near the Temple of Theseus, two small figures scuffle silently on the walkway. She recognizes the boys she’s seen with Rosza.

  And Rosza stands in the distance, a diminutive figure in a dark coat. Wally watches the woman shift the fur muff in her hand and lift her veil to puff on a cigarette. She’s startled when she hears her name called.

  They tour the Volksgarten together, talking about the freezing weather, their thin boots, the care of children. Wally barely hears what the woman is saying; she’s focused on when to slip Dora into the conversation. They turn to watch the boys. Rosza shifts her feet from side to side to keep warm, forcing the fringe on her coat into shivering motion.

  Wally glances back over her shoulder, and the impression of their footprints reminds her of the photographer’s glass plates, the positive and negative images. Now is the moment.

  “Do you remember if Dora ever posed for a photographer?”

  “No. I don’t think she did. Not while I was at her house.”

  “But I discovered a strange picture of Dora. Maybe she was photographed when you were away.”

  “Possibly. Or perhaps she went with her mother or father to have it taken. Her parents should know.”

  “Her mother doesn’t remember the photograph. I showed it to her.”

  Rosza shrugs impatiently. “I really have no idea. Why are you asking me about this?”

  “Please, don’t be angry. It’s a serious matter. I believe the person who arranged for Dora’s photograph was blackmailing her. Or perhaps the photographer is the blackmailer. She threatened to expose one of them, so she was killed.”

  “Blackmail Dora? That’s ridiculous.”

  “Dora’s mother said she’d stopped wearing her jewelry, and I think it was because she’d given it to the blackmailer.”

  “Why are you concerned? You didn’t even know Dora. Let the police take care of it.”

  Angered by her questions, Rosza pivots and strides away, kicking her skirt out in front of her. Wally hurries to catch up with her. The path is banked with snow; it’s only wide enough for one person. She won’t let Rosza escape. She clambers over the drift and blocks her way. They face each other, their breath a cloud between them.

  Wally senses that pleading won’t persuade her to reveal anything. Rosza is beyond her youthful skills of negotiation. She is slipping away, taking Dora and Erszébet with her. Rosza tries to get around her, but Wally grabs her arm.

  “Please, just answer one question. Did Dora have an injury? You must know, since you helped her dress. Was she hurt somehow below the waist?”

  Rosza squints at the boys. They’re off in the distance. She slides her hand into the crook of Wally’s elbow.

  “Very well. Tell me about the photograph of Dora.” Her voice is calm, confident.

  “I saw a Krankengeschichte, a medical photograph of her from a doctor’s office. Dora was naked, and her face was blacked out. Her skin was dark all around here. As if she was burned.” Wally points to her abdomen. “Other parts of her body looked injured too.”

  Rosza holds up her fur muff and buries her chin in it. Wally knows she’s considering something. In the next moment, the suspense her information created is gone. Rosza lowers the muff, and her frosty breath scatters around her face.

  “I never saw Dora without her nightdress. She was modest. A prude. She didn’t mind if I changed my clothes in front of her, though. She’d watch. Maybe there was something wrong with her, but she never told me. Where did you find this picture?”

  “I saw it in a photographer’s studio.”

  “Whose studio?”

  “Egon. You met him. We’ve played tarok.”

  “Egon? What did he tell you about the picture?”

  Rosza’s eyes are fixed on her, following her expression as closely as her words. Now Wally feels as if she’s the one being examined. She hesitates.

  “He said a man paid him so he could spy on Dora through a hole in the wall while he photographed her. He doesn’t know his name. I think it was Dora’s father.”

  “He told you this?” Rosza is incredulous.

  “Yes. I didn’t even have to persuade him. He seemed happy to tell me. But who took Dora to the photographer? Do you think it was her father?”

  Suddenly Rosza turns sharply on her heel and calls the boys.

  Wally clutches at her sleeve. “Tell me who took Dora to the photographer.”

  “I can’t help you. But I’m certain the picture has nothing to do with the murder. Just forget it.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  But Rosza has already moved away from her.

  Standing in the empty park, Wally can hear horses stamp and the cold click of their harnesses out on the Ringstrasse.

  Erszébet comes home late one afternoon with a headache and goes straight up to the bedroom to nap. Her husband waits until she sprinkles eau de cologne on a handkerchief to put on her forehead and the familiar scent drifts down to him before opening her satchel. Nothing but small change inside the coin purse. He examines her cigarettes and a sketching pencil. A silver vanity case holds a mirror, powder, and a pressed leaf, a souvenir from their tryst near Balatonföldvár. He finds a piece of paper tucked in the inside compartment and takes it to the window. Unfolded, it’s a map of Vienna with crosses darkened over a few parks: the Botanischer Garten on Rennweg, the Palmenhaus at the Hofgarten, the Augarten, the Volksgarten, the Belvedere Garten, and Esterházypark.

  He figures it’s some botanical pursuit of hers, or locations for watercoloring. He replaces the items exactly as he found them.

  Afterward, he can’t dismiss the idea that everything in the satchel was there by deliberate design. She prepared it for him to find. In the same way she arranges objects for a still life, which only look haphazard to his eye.

  In the morning, she can tell he’s searched through her satchel. She understands this comes from his possessiveness of her.

  Her discovery of his trespass makes it easier to examine his notebook. She reads through the most recent entries about Dora’s investigation. When she f
inds the list of Jószef’s possessions, she closes her eyes. She visualizes a rough stone building, and then a bright line of color against white snow. A coral pink colored pencil, rose carthame. A gift from her husband. Did he recognize it? She wants to tear the page from his notebook, although she knows it is already too late.

  Her husband is vague when she quizzes him later about Dora’s case.

  “But what about Frau Zellenka?” she asks, careful not to say more than she is supposed to know. “Surely she has something to do with the crime. I feel there’s something suspicious. The woman resented Dora. Dora was jealous of her. And Rosza, has she been found?”

  “No, no. Franz is still looking for her. She seems to have disappeared without a trace.”

  “You have such patience with him.” They’re in the library and she’s holding his evening glass of wine.

  He shakes his head. “It’s not simple to find a servant who’s disappeared. After Rosza moved in with another family there was no way to trace her. The whole case is complicated. With all the time that’s passed, I have to depend on something unexpected. A mysterious friend of Dora’s. Or perhaps the mad stranger who accosted the girl will confess.”

  She holds the smile on her face while frantically reviewing what she and Wally have discovered. She can’t separate what she has learned from his information. Did she overlook something? Has he found Wally? She silently watches his face.

  The wineglass slips from her hand and shatters on the floor. It reminds him of another shattering glass. The broken vial containing the fig. Does she think of it too?

  Only her eyes make it clear she had the same thought. Strange. He puts her reaction out of his mind. He’ll think about it later.

  Erszébet is an impatient figure, pacing by the Kaiserin Elizabeth statue in the Volksgarten. She stabs her umbrella into the snowdrift near the statue and leaves it there. It’s midmorning, the time when nursery maids and governesses escort children here to play. Today there are few children, since the snow is inches deep, covering the ground with a dry white blankness, as if clearing space for another scene to replace it. Even the kaiserin’s statue is thickly swaddled in white from her throat to her lap, a change of dress. The image reminds her that the kaiserin was reportedly sewn into her clothing every morning, beginning with a skintight chemise of kidskin.

  A sudden movement between the tall junipers catches her eye, then a man with a shovel stands up. She’d missed him, motionless against the dark trees.

  Now she recognizes Wally’s figure at the gate in the distance. They took a chance, meeting here at their usual place, their usual time. Perhaps the police have followed the girl here. Perhaps they’re both being observed. Before Wally is halfway across the park, Erszébet circles the boarded-up fountain to intercept her. She hurries her down another path cleared through the snow and into a waiting fiaker. The driver’s formidable whistling urges the horses down the Burgring, past the Naturhistoriches Museum. Erszébet collapses against the seat in relief.

  “We must be very careful from now on.” She lifts her veil, lights a cigarette, and offers one to Wally. “I was afraid my husband had discovered you.”

  The idea that her presence might be tracked is peculiar. Wally still gets lost; the narrow and illogical streets in the inner city are as twisted as the calli in Venice. “I have information about Dora’s photographs,” she announces.

  But Erszébet is distant, thinking of something else. Wally is afraid to interrupt, but she’s eager for Erszébet’s attention, for her praise. Perhaps Erszébet intends to stop their investigation.

  “I’ve seen Egon,” she repeats, more anxiously.

  “Egon? What did he tell you?”

  Wally describes the photographs of Dora she’d seen in his studio.

  “So he photographed her?”

  “Yes. It was all very secret. A man came with Dora to the studio, but Egon doesn’t know his name. He described him as ordinary looking. But the man did something strange. He spied on her when she was naked. Egon let him do it.”

  “He watched while she was being photographed? It must have been Philipp. What about Dora’s mother? Did she explain the photographs?”

  Wally turns aside the memory of her encounter with Dora’s mother, wanting to forget the woman’s shocked eyes, how she walked blindly out of the room. This feeling of selfish deceit is new to her.

  No, she says. She didn’t recognize the pictures. She cried. Wally looks at Erszébet, hoping to replace the vision of the woman’s teary face. Perhaps Erszébet already knows what happened. Wally sometimes thinks she could never say anything that would astonish her.

  The fiaker suddenly runs over a line of train tracks, jolting them into momentary silence.

  “Rosza doesn’t know anything about Dora’s photographs.” Wally’s voice is sullen. “I saw her in the Volksgarten. She wasn’t helpful. She ran away from me.”

  “I see.”

  Erszébet sets a thin parcel in Wally’s lap.

  “What’s in here?”

  She picks it up. The parcel isn’t heavy.

  “The photographs, my colored pencils, and Dora’s earrings. I can’t keep them any longer. It’s too dangerous. It was very foolish of you to leave them at my house. What if my husband had answered the door, or found the parcel?”

  Wally doesn’t answer. Nothing has taught her how to hold through the anger that shakes her. It feels permanently pressed into her body, as if there’s no space now for her feelings for Erszébet.

  “But they’re Dora’s earrings. I want you to keep them.”

  “I’m sorry. Look, I have new earrings. They’re from my husband.”

  She shakes her head, provoking points of light to appear in the shadowed space between her hair and her shoulder. Diamond earrings.

  “You can look at them.”

  Wally puts a tentative fingertip under one earring, balances it tenderly as a butterfly. She touches Erszébet’s neck.

  “They’re beautiful. Like stars.”

  “Yes.”

  Erszébet pulls her collar up, as if to erase the touch of Wally’s fingers on her skin.

  Erszébet realizes that her investigation has reached an impasse. Her surreptitious reading of her husband’s notebook has revealed nothing new. Neither Dora’s mother nor Rosza can identify who took the girl to Egon’s studio. Unless her husband discovers fresh evidence, there is nothing for her to do.

  At that moment, she decides to begin a ráböjtölés, a black fast. She believes there isn’t much time left to her.

  For nine weeks, she will abstain from food and water every Friday, and pray three times a day. All the energy of her black fast will be directed at Dora’s murderer. When this magical process is finished, the identity of the murderer will be discovered — or the guilty person will become ill or die. Some believe if the subject of a ráböjtölés dies, that person will then haunt the living as a revenant. If ten years were abbreviated from the revenant’s mortal life, he or she will return ten times.

  The person conducting the black fast is in peril too. If the ráböjtölés is stopped before nine weeks, or if the fast is broken by a meal, a crumb, or even a sip of water, everything is reversed and the spell-caster will die. The same thing will happen if the fast is against an innocent person.

  Erszébet tells no one of her plan. She is alone with her practice.

  During the period of ráböjtölés, Erszébet’s artistry in the kitchen is unsurpassed. She prepares gánica, corn-and-wheat dumplings that are first boiled, then fried in bacon fat, bread crumbs, and paprika. She grinds sausage, roasts a suckling pig. She searches for the finest ingredients, even cajoling some of the merchants from the Hoher Markt and the Naschmarkt and the fruit sellers from the Stefanie Brücke to bring their specialties to the house. One day, a man knocked at the back door with a precious handful of truffles wrapped in a cloth. An old woman delivered live szalonka, snipe that had been captured in a net. The maid swiftly dispatched the tiny birds while
Erszébet watched. Another time, two shy girls brought a fat goose that had been force-fed corn and white clay dissolved in a special mineral water to enlarge its liver. When the bird was butchered, its blood ran yellow, discolored by its own fat.

  On Fridays, Erszébet watches her husband enjoy these spectacular meals while she drinks and eats nothing. Late every evening, she continues to serve him sweet wine.

  He eats heartily, has nothing but praise for her efforts. Joking about these endless rich feasts, he accuses her of tightening the waists of his trousers while he sleeps. The first Friday of her fast Erszébet complained of a stomach ailment as the reason for her lack of appetite. By the second Friday, he would begin to feel like a condemned man enjoying a meal before his captors.

  The morning after one of her elaborate dinners, Erszébet told him she’d lost her Cumberland colored pencils, the set he’d brought her from Paris.

  “I must have packed up my supplies and left the pencils next to my chair. I think I was sketching in the Volksgarten, that last warm day we had. I didn’t want to tell you since they were your gift. I’m sorry.”

  If his relief and gratitude surprised her, she didn’t show it. He promised to buy another set of pencils. Maybe they would travel to Paris together this spring. A second honeymoon.

  A week later, he announces he has a surprise. Mystified, Erszébet dresses quickly, scenting her skin and clothing with the perfume he pleaded with her to wear. They leave the house directly after dinner.

  A fiaker takes them along the Ringstrasse, past trams and the Palais of the Prince Coburg-Gotha. They stop at the Gartenbau, an ornate building where flower shows are held at other times of the year. The cavalry officers waiting in front of the building are more splendidly dressed than the ladies they accompany. It is still a source of pride that the Austrian Artillery was awarded first prize for its elegant uniform at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900. Erszébet picks out the Hungarian Guard lancers, in blue uniforms with bordeaux red trim and gold embroidery.