I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  Two years into their marriage, I traveled to Seattle to give a university lecture on the use of solvents in tesserae restoration and stayed with my brother and Karolina. The afternoon I delivered my lecture, I returned to their house to find them screaming at each other in the backyard. Through the kitchen window, I saw my brother lunge at her, one hand outstretched like a claw, but then he stopped himself.

  He stopped himself!

  How could I be expected to believe the unbelievable thing when I myself had never witnessed it?

  Three years into their marriage, they came to visit us in Miami. Early one morning, my husband and I were awoken by a commotion in the guest room, shouting followed by a loud crash, as if someone had thrown a chair or overturned a table. We lived in a town house with thin walls and I’m ashamed to admit that one of my first thoughts was whether our neighbors could hear. I did not maintain any kind of secret or criminal life in the literal sense—no gambling habit, no affairs—and yet I had always been dogged by the fear of being found out for a crime I did not realize I had committed, of my public self being stripped away and my unsightly heart revealed.

  “We can’t let this go on,” my husband said. They had arrived in a rage, sniped at each other through meals and museum trips. We had been listening to them argue in the guest room for three days straight and I could not deny that my brother’s voice was often the louder one.

  “There is a line,” I said as I got out of bed. “And if he ever crossed it, I would not hesitate to do something.”

  After Karolina went missing, my husband would remind me of this exchange and then inform me that what I’d really meant was that I didn’t know how to address the situation with my brother, or else I knew it would cost me too much to try, and so I had stepped aside. I remember staring at my husband in our hotel room and wondering what it was like to always be so sure.

  I found the front door of our town house flung open and Karolina running down the driveway. She wore pajamas printed with trout. She was barefoot, her hair wild, her thin arms tight around her torso. It was summer; the concrete had to be burning hot. She hooked a right at the end of our street, and I was seized briefly by the fantasy that this was the last time I would ever see her. My brother went out looking and brought her back a few hours later, both of them shamefaced, apologetic. He said he had found her at Coral Reef Park, her feet blistered and filthy.

  In the final year of their marriage, Karolina called me at the museum, late one afternoon, something she had never done before. She said she needed to talk to me about my brother. She had questions she wanted to ask and she hoped I would answer honestly.

  She wanted to know, for example, what he was like as a child.

  “As a child?” I repeated.

  “Yes,” she said. “Was he ever cruel?”

  Cruel! I wanted to shout into the phone. My brother saved me.

  Our mother loved us but worked long hours and was so exhausted by her labor that she could not do much in the way of mothering when she was home. It was my brother who poured cereal into my bowl, who bought milk and laundry detergent and toilet paper when we ran out, who taught me how to swim and ride a bike. I was petrified that one day he would disappear and I would be left alone in our small, sweltering apartment. Years later, when he moved across the country to Seattle, I, despite being a married woman with a thriving career, secretly hoped it wouldn’t work out and he’d come back home.

  During those fifteen days, my husband also said that my brother loved best what he felt he had dominion over, and couldn’t I see that as a child I had been small and scared and easy to manage? His words had left me feeling both surprised and disappointed by how little he understood.

  “What do you mean by cruel?” I’d asked her, standing up from my desk.

  She paused. “Were you ever afraid of him?”

  “Never.” I shook my head for emphasis, even though I was alone in the room. “In fact, I don’t know how I would have survived childhood without him.”

  “Thank you,” she replied, and then hung up the phone.

  * * *

  “You were never this nice to me when I was married to your brother,” Karolina said in the hotel room. The decor was simple and refined, everything done in silvery grays and soft creams, water in glass bottles on the nightstands. A rectangular window overlooked Avenida Veracruz. A hospital was nearby and sometimes I heard sirens.

  “I’m worried about you,” I said.

  She stayed near the door, her hands slipped under the straps of her pack. I crossed the room to pull the gauzy drapes closed. Down below a family was waiting on the sidewalk, their faces covered in surgical masks to guard against the smog. A woman swept around them, working the sidewalk with a tall broom. I switched on the bedside lamps.

  “That would be a true first,” she said back.

  After Karolina filed for divorce, I wrote an angry letter and mailed it to her attorney. I never got confirmation he had delivered it to her, but I could only assume he had. In the letter, I told her she had been reckless, that her disappearance had caused untold damage to my brother’s reputation and his mental health and that, as a married person myself, I could attest to the fact that a problem in a relationship was like a great river of which both parties were tributaries. When was she going to take responsibility for her part?

  “That was then.” The room had double beds, and I sat on the edge of the one closest to the door. “This is now.”

  “It’s easy to be nice to a stranger.” She stared down at her boots. “It’s even easier when you feel sorry for that stranger.”

  I started to tell her that we weren’t strangers—we had once been family, after all—but then I stopped myself. I didn’t know what we were now.

  “Pity is a cheap emotion,” she added. “It makes you feel superior when you’re not.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I don’t feel as sorry for you as you might think.”

  Finally she slipped free of her backpack. She bent down and unlaced her boots; when she stepped out of them, the stench spread out into the room like a fog. Her socks were thick and a size too big, the excess material curling at her toes. She left her boots and her backpack in a heap by the door.

  “Can I take a shower?” she asked. “It’s been a while.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She moved into the bathroom, almost on tiptoe. I imagined her taking in the white tile and the marble and the stainless steel fixtures, the tub as long and deep as a grave. The door clicked closed behind her; I heard the lock turn. The sound of the shower coming on. I knelt on the carpet and pressed my ear to the door. After a while, the shower stopped and the faucet started. A little splashing around and then quiet.

  What I did next I’m not proud of, but at the time I felt—compelled. I crept over to Karolina’s backpack and started rifling through the outside pockets. Everything had the same gummy texture as her skin when I’d touched her cheek in the park. Then, carefully, I unzipped the pack. I’m not sure what I was looking for, but I could not find anything beyond the tools for basic survival—packets of plastic forks and knives; a few dried-up baby wipes; a rain jacket; a collapsible bowl, the kind meant for camping.

  An hour later, Karolina emerged swaddled in a white bathrobe, her hair dense and wet on her shoulders. I could see she had written something in steam on the bathroom mirror, though the letters were dripping too fast for me to make out the message. We lay down on the double beds. I was still fully clothed; I hadn’t even taken off my shoes. I listened to the tub drain and afterward, when the silence became too much, I turned on the TV, the volume low. The hotel got a few English channels, including Turner Classics. Breathless was on, about halfway to its bloody conclusion.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked her.

  “In Mexico City?” she said. “Or here?”

  I took here to mean the streets.

  “Either.” I told myself I was prepared to listen to whatever she had to say. />
  * * *

  Two years ago, after a run of bad luck, Karolina landed in Reno, a place she announced as the most depressing city in America, where people went to gamble and drink until they were ready to commit suicide. She took a casino job, the one upshot of which was a coworker, Francisco. When their shift ended at dawn, they would eat breakfast together at a diner called the Little Nugget. Francisco read detective novels on his breaks and in his wallet he carried a Polaroid of a floating garden in Xochimilco. When he showed her the photo for the first time, he promised to take her there. Before long, they were involved romantically.

  When Francisco’s work visa was about to expire he announced he was going back to Mexico City—would she come with him? Karolina had been to other places in Mexico—Oaxaca, Tulum—but never Mexico City. Over their breakfasts, he had told her about the parks with the soaring trees and the old woman in his sister’s neighborhood who walked her Great Dane without a leash and the pollution and the endless traffic and the weather, arid and warm. He said she should take her time, think it over, but she did not need to do much thinking.

  They moved into his sister’s spare bedroom, in a blue-and-tan high-rise apartment building in Lindavista. The sister worked at a university; her husband owned a textile shop. They had two children, both school-age. Francisco began assisting his brother-in-law at the shop; meanwhile Karolina, jobless, had the days to herself. She rode the metro all around: line 3 to the markets in Coyoacán, 8 to the crush of Centro Histórico, 1 to the vast oasis of Chapultepec. She roamed the parks, the bookstores, the shopping malls. She got nosebleeds from the dry air. She learned Spanish from street signs and books and from the telenovelas she and Francisco watched on weekends. As her bearings and language skills improved, she took over some household errands—the grocery, the post office, where she was always attended to by the same clerk, a woman named Valentina, her face brightened by a thick coat of mauve lipstick. Karolina remembered the color because it looked meant for a woman twice Valentina’s age.

  After she divorced my brother, Karolina told me in the hotel room, she had worked to convince herself that she was destined to be alone. She brought out the worst in people. How else to explain that the man she had chosen to love wound up doing things that scared and hurt her? Yet with Francisco she permitted herself to wonder whether maybe she had just chosen the wrong person to love. If she made the right choice now, would she meet a different outcome?

  For three months Francisco and Karolina worked to build a life together, and then the earthquake hit.

  She would never forget the sound of the alarm slicing open the night—like a knife sliding across the throat of a slaughter pig, a violent unleashing. Everything was moving, each body a castaway on a wild sea. The bed that held her and Francisco flew across the room as though thrown by a giant. The frame struck a wall, the mattress hurled them onto the rippling floor. The kitchen cabinets flapped open and shut. The clock spun in circles on the wall, possessed. In the stairwell, as the residents stampeded down toward the street, the handrail shook so violently the base reared up from its concrete anchor. She and Francisco were side by side, but then he stopped to help a neighbor, an old woman who had fallen, and she got knocked ahead by the others, a tide of people that could not be paused.

  Karolina made it out, along with Francisco’s sister and the children, just before the building collapsed.

  A white mist invaded the city. Entire buildings, entire blocks even, were reduced to tilting towers of debris. The night of the earthquake, civilians and military and medical teams worked alongside one another, hacking away at those towers. Karolina, barefoot and hyperventilating, had been handed a shovel by a stranger, a man in a surgical mask, and ordered to dig. The brother-in-law’s body was found the day after, in the mewling light of morning. Three days later, Francisco’s body was located by a search dog in white bootees and a camo vest.

  The last time Karolina saw Francisco’s sister was at an earthquake relief center. She was taking the children, traumatized by the loss of their father and uncle, to her parents in Guadalajara. Karolina walked out of the relief center with a blanket and a gallon jug of water and had been sleeping on the streets ever since.

  She wasn’t out there alone, as a great many people had been made homeless. One night, during her first week on the streets, Karolina came across Valentina, the clerk from the post office, her lips now bare, sleeping under a tarp with her teenage daughter.

  * * *

  As I listened to Karolina, I began to cry in silence, the tears oozing from the corners of my eyes and down the sides of my face. I hadn’t expected her to tell me so much, to be so forthcoming. In the end, I was moved not by the harrowing turn Karolina’s life had taken but rather by a sharp and sudden longing for my husband. It didn’t take a doctor to tell that Karolina was likely suffering from some kind of PTSD, and my husband, the trauma specialist, would know what to say.

  “Once I called you at your work and told you that I had questions and that I wanted you to answer honestly.” Karolina rolled onto her side so she was facing me. “Do you remember?”

  I wiped my eyes and turned to meet her gaze. I kept thinking that even though I had visited Mexico City a handful of times before I had never once been to Lindavista. “I remember,” I said.

  “Those answers, I guess they don’t matter so much now.”

  “I guess not,” I replied.

  “But the thing is, you’re right here. I’m wearing your bathrobe. I never could have imagined it.” She shut her eyes for a moment and when she opened them, she said, “I want to know. Is your brother still angry?”

  “How do you mean?”

  Karolina flopped onto her back, her feet pointed at the starched white row of pillows. As she spoke, she jabbed a finger at the ceiling. “This is what I could never understand about you. Your brother was angry all the time, the angriest person I’ve ever known. You claimed to be so close to him and you never noticed? You’re either lying or oblivious.”

  Intimacy could distort one’s vantage, that much was true. Sometimes trying to see the whole of a person could be like describing a painting with your nose pressed to the canvas, though my husband would have argued that I hadn’t wanted to see from a different angle, hadn’t wanted to step back.

  “What was he so angry about?” I asked her. “Since you’re apparently the expert.”

  “About everything. About not being what he wanted to be.”

  “And what did he want to be?”

  “A family man. Or that’s what he thought, anyway.”

  “And you didn’t want a family?”

  “Not with someone like that.”

  Earlier, as I escorted Karolina to my hotel, I’d told myself she held information I still felt somehow entitled to, so that my understanding of my brother could become settled once more. But I knew in my heart that my understanding of my brother would never be settled again, no matter what Karolina said or didn’t. I had known this ever since one late night in Seattle, when he took my hands and said, “You don’t know what it was like living with her,” and then, after a breath, “I’m so sorry”—and I had thought maybe my husband had been right, maybe my brother had done something unfathomable and unforgivable. Once you have a thought like that, there is no turning back, there is only pretending to. Really, in bringing Karolina to my hotel, I wanted to better understand how I had ended up where I had, and I could feel it coming now, that conversation, the answers I had sought and dreaded.

  On the bed, my face went fever-hot. A sweat broke on my eyelids.

  “Your brother believed life should be simpler for him,” Karolina continued. “He didn’t understand why being alive was so hard sometimes, he thought he didn’t deserve that hardness, that he had earned his way out in childhood, so he was always looking for someone to blame. Me? I grew up in an angry home and I wasn’t about to make another.”

  I thought of my brother’s new, swollen-bellied wife. Had she ever been afraid? The one
time I met her she’d struck me as affable and unambitious: an early-morning power walker, a drinker of decaf, a needlepoint enthusiast. Perhaps she was easier to manage.

  “They played the 911 tape,” I said. “The police. When they were looking for you.”

  Karolina pushed herself up on her elbows. “And you still wrote me that letter? After hearing what was on that tape?”

  “It was hard to accept what I heard.” I recalled a few of the letter’s harshest lines and felt flattened by regret. “It was hard to believe that there wasn’t an explanation. That there weren’t two—”

  “Fuck you.” She kicked at the pillows, knocked one to the floor. “Here’s your explanation.”

  That night, my brother had discovered that Karolina had been taking birth control pills in secret, after agreeing to start a family, and he had become enraged. He had punched a hole in the wall. He had grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her. He had put his hands around her throat.

  “But why did you call back, if you were so afraid?” I pressed. I could hear the pulse of a party swelling in a room somewhere above us. “Why did you tell the police not to come?”

  “I wasn’t ready,” was all Karolina said.

  I didn’t know where to go from there. On TV, Jean-Paul Belmondo was dying in the street and calling Jean Seberg a scumbag for turning him in to the police and Jean Seberg was saying, What’s a scumbag? Time felt epic, engulfing. How would we bridge our remaining hours together, after such a tense exchange? I remembered there was a minibar in the hotel room and sat up in bed like a risen corpse.

  “Drink?” I asked.

  “How about room service?” Karolina lay flat on the bed. She pointed and flexed her feet, like a dancer getting in a good stretch.