In the Forest of Forgetting

by Theodora Goss

  THE BELT

  My story has the contours of a fairy tale. Once, there was a shoemaker’s daughter named Sophia. She lived in the city you see from your morning-room windows, in a part of it that you don’t see. A poor part, a shabby part, where the shoemakers lived, and the laundresses, and the sellers of coal. Her father was, as I have mentioned, a shoemaker, who served neither the merchants, nor the professors at the university, but their clerks and students, men who wished, at relatively small expense, to dress like their masters. He served also members of the theatrical profession. His most celebrated shoe was worn by Herr Grünwald, in the character of Macbeth.

  Her mother, a grocer’s daughter, died when Sophia was just old enough to understand that the priest who performed the burial rites could offer no consolation. I tell you this because if her mother had lived until Sophia’s seventeenth birthday, my story would not have happened.

  One day, after delivering a pair of short boots to a clerk who worked—exalted position!—in the Hauptbank, within sight of the Winterpalast, Sophia decided that she would walk home by way of the park. For the first time in three days, the snow had stopped. She was tired of being cooped up in the back room of the shoemaker’s shop, with its smell of beeswax and alcohol, and wanted to see the branches of the trees encased in ice. They sparkled in the sunlight—your diamonds, Madam, are as nothing to them—and filled her heart with delight so that, as she walked home along the frozen streets, she looked up at the sky and sang a little song under her breath, one of the country songs her mother had sung to her in the cradle.

  That is why she slipped on a patch of ice and fell to the ground.

  The hands that lifted her up were encased in leather gloves trimmed with ermine—their tails hung over the wrist. When she looked up, dazzled and in pain, for she had twisted her ankle, she discovered that the person assisting her was a young man, with a very white face and very blue eyes, and an ermine hat.

  I am not like your men of letters, who can write he said and she said for seven hundred pages. Before my mother died, she told me stories, by firelight after I had finished my schoolwork, while my father sat in a corner preparing leather for a riding boot or stitching satin for a lady’s slipper. I can only tell you this story as she would have done.

  For three months, Nicholas sat in the shoemaker’s shop, courting Sophia. Once, he asked her to marry him. Twice, he asked her. And the third time she said yes. Why did she wait so long, why did she risk losing what was obviously a match beyond her most extravagant expectations? For Nicholas had explained his position to her father, the timber harvested from northern forests, the mines that gave forth coal, the mills that produced cloth. And it was obvious to both father and daughter that Nicholas was in love. The shoemaker had not gone to school past the age of fourteen, but he was an able judge of men, for the city had made him so, and Sophia had taken in with her mother’s milk not only the romantic ideas that made her tell stories of princes and beggar maids by firelight but also the shrewdness of a grocer’s daughter, who understood two things as thoroughly as though she had studied them at the university: customers and money.

  And they were not deceived. For when Sophia stood in the cathedral, in the satin wedding dress that had been her mother’s one extravagance and shoes that her father had made for her, and said that she would love and obey her husband, she became a Baroness, the owner of a village in the south and a townhouse in the city. Her father would never make shoes again, except for pleasure. It was her seventeenth birthday.

  You think this is the end of my story. Wait, Madam. This is its true beginning.

  After the wedding, Nicholas told Sophia that he would take her to a hunting lodge he owned in the Eisenwald. They rode in the carriage for hours, with the mountains rising on either side of them, the fir trees covered with snow. He held her hands. Once, he let them go to wrap her cloak more tightly around her. It was a cloak of ermine, which he had given her as a wedding gift. Occasionally they talked, in the way people do who have a great deal of time together, and no immediate need for conversation.

  Once, he pressed his lips to her hands, and she realized, with a start, Why, he loves me more than I love him. It was a revelation for her, that love in marriage could be unequal, and for the first time she wondered what her mother would have said to Nicholas’ proposal. I believe, she thought, that Mama would have told me to send him away. For she guessed, and in this I think she was right, that her mother would have shared the scruple which had kept her from accepting his proposal for three months. I cannot give him as much as he gives me, and that is a bad bargain. There, you see, spoke the grocer’s daughter.

  At last, they arrived. It was late, and the stars were shining, more stars than she had ever seen, in the city with its gas lamps. Nicholas himself lit a fire in the great stone fireplace, beneath the head of a stag, and himself unpacked the basket of food they had brought. He filled the wine glasses.

  “I have told the driver to sleep in the village,” he said. “I wanted our first night to be altogether alone.”

  She realized that she had seen no servants. She would not have expected them in her former life, but here their absence seemed to make the rooms more silent, and lent a strangeness to their meal. She wondered who would unlace her dress and blushed, then felt foolish for blushing. She smiled, to show him that she appreciated this romantic gesture. Already, you see, a note of pity had crept into her relation to him. She promised herself that she would turn it into tenderness, for she had taken her marriage vows seriously, and intended to love and obey him.

  So she appeared neither shocked nor disgusted when he showed her the belt. “Without it,” he said, looking down at the bearskin laid across the carpet, as though ashamed of his confession, “I can do nothing. If you would wear it?” It was an ordinary leather belt, but with a buckle at the back, to which were attached two smaller belts, whose use was evident enough. His white hands held it toward her, and his blue eyes pleaded.

  He buckled it over her waist, and buckled her wrists behind her.

  I know, Madam, what you are expecting. But if my story contains perversions, they are not the ones you imagine. Nicholas’ and Sophia’s marital relations were as proper as your own, and merited the blessings of the Church. The only difference was, that Sophia wore the belt.

  In the morning, when she woke in his arms, Nicholas begged her, “Wear it, just for today.” What could she do? Stronger than the constraint of the belt was the constraint of her pity: she did not love him as he loved her, and so she must treat him with tenderness. In addition, her enjoyment of their wedding night had been adequate, but had not equaled his ecstasy. And when he had asked her, in the morning, she had resorted to a fib. For this she felt shame, but an even greater sense of injustice, as though she had cheated a customer by placing her thumb on the scale.

  He dressed her with gentleness and considerable skill. She was surprised to see that he was not hindered by the belt. He found ways to modify her costume to accommodate its limitations.

  That day, they walked through the forest, and when he shouted her name, icicles crashed from the trees, like a symphony of breaking glass. He breathed on her cheeks to warm them, and showed her a white owl as it flew through the trees. They ate cold chicken, and potatoes he had roasted in the fireplace. The wine came from a hillside in Italy. He told her they would go there someday, and roam through the galleries of Florence, and swim in the Mediterranean. She imagined it as a sheet of water as blue as his eyes.

  That night, when he asked her to wear the belt for another day, she knew she had a problem. It was this: she knew that if she asked him to remove it, he would do so. But she could not ask him. She was her mother’s daughter, and her sense of pity, and of justice, forbade it. And then, too, she had promised in the presence of the Holy Mother to love and obey him. Since she did not love him as she ought, she must try to do the other. But he would never remove the belt of his own volition. She had begun to understand that, had seen it i
n his blue eyes, in the joy with which he looked at her, and the helplessness. So what was she to do?

  She sat on the bearskin before the fireplace and said, “Tell me about the belt.”

  He looked down at his hands, and then a blush rose from his neck to his cheeks, making him look as though he had a fever. When he looked at her again, his eyes were filled with tears.

  “Do you know what I saw in your face, that first day, when you slipped on the ice?” he asked. “I saw that we were alike, you and I. And when I brought you home, and spoke to your father, I discovered it was true. You lost your mother when you were young. I lost my father. Your father raised you, while my mother—” He looked into the fire.

  Startled, Sophia thought, It is as though he has looked into a mirror and seen my face, and assumed it is identical to his own. But a face seen in a mirror is not identical, but opposite, to its original.

  His mother had been a possessive woman, of a hysterical temperament. After his father’s funeral, she had brought Nicholas to the hunting lodge. She had dismissed the servants, and arranged for deliveries of whatever they might need from the village. Then, she had presented him with the belt. He was just fourteen. It had been made according to her request by one of the shoemakers in the city, perhaps one of the shoemakers in the quarter where Sophia had lived with her father.

  For three years Nicholas had worn the belt. For three years she had fed him and bathed him and clothed him, attending to all his needs.

  “You see,” he said, blushing again, like sunset on a mountain covered with snow, “she loved me. She wanted me to be her child. But I did not understand her. On my seventeenth birthday, I accused her of imprisoning me, like the witch in a fairy tale. I told her that she was cruel, and that I hated her, that I would always hate her. That day, she unbuckled the belt. I ran through the forest to the village, and ordered a room at the inn. I spent the night drinking and listening to the men tell hunting stories. I paid for all their drinks, with money I had stolen from her bureau. They slapped me on the back and teased me about girls, as though I were one of them. The next morning, they told me she was dead. The village woman who brought our milk had found her. Since her payment was not on the doorstep, she had knocked on the door until it swung open. My mother had hung herself from one of the beams, with the belt.”

  He looked into the fire again, then said, “Would you like to see a picture of her?”

  In the miniature, Sophia recognized his blue eyes, the indeterminate chin that was hidden in his case by a small beard. The painted lips looked as though about to tremble. His long, mobile mouth had come from his father. But suddenly, she saw that it was trembling as well.

  “So you see, I am a murderer. And a liar as well, because I loved her, almost as much as I love you.”

  Sophia thought, And I love him. I do. So I will endure this thing which after all he endured before me. And again she felt for him a great pity.

  But on the second day that she wore the belt, something happened. While she was standing by the kitchen door, watching Nicholas throw the crumbs of their breakfast to the sparrows, she realized that she was bored.

  You think, Madam, that the opposite of love is hatred, but it is not. The opposite of love is boredom. When the mind is bored, the heart cannot love, nor can it have pity, because the mind asks, What do I care for such things?

  In that moment, Sophia thought, This man is a stranger to me, and this is not my home.

  And yet she could not ask him to unbuckle the belt. She was constrained by all that she had previously thought and promised to herself. Perhaps you think, she should have been more practical. But she was her mother’s daughter, and both her sense of justice and her romanticism prevented her from breaking a promise. Besides, what girl was ever practical at seventeen? Yourself excepted, Madam.

  But she was a shoemaker’s daughter, and if there was one thing she understood, it was leather. That evening, when Nicholas asked if she would like some wine, she said, “I have drunk already,” and he was so joyful in his love for her, in the feel of his fingers tangled in her hair, that he did not wonder how she could have drunk without his help. On the next day, she insisted that she was not thirsty, and once she coughed when he put a glass of water to her lips, so that it spilled.

  By the evening of that third day, her wedding ring could slip from her finger, and her hands could slip from the leather straps at the back of the belt. Remember that it had been made for him, and she was a shoemaker’s daughter, who had not been fed all her life on beef and cream. Even when buckled on the smallest holes, it did not fit her as tightly as it had fit him at fourteen.

  That night, she slept in the belt.

  The next morning, she woke before him and slipped her hands out of the straps. She unbuckled the belt from her waist, and placed it on the bed beside him. She waited for three minutes by his pocket watch, which he had left on the table, one minute for each day that she had worn the belt, and each year that he had worn it. Or, she thought, one minute for the Son, the Father, and the Holy Ghost. That was the time she had decided to wait, in memory of her former love and pity. If he wakes now, she told herself, I will put it on again, and God, and not myself, will have decided.

  But she knew that while a shoemaker’s daughter wakes at dawn, a Baron’s son does not wake until the maid brings him his coffee and rolls. On previous mornings, she had woken before him. This morning, he did not wake.

  She followed the road until she came to the village, and the carriage driver recognized her as the Baroness, so she ordered her breakfast on credit.

  And that is the end of my story.

  Forgive me, Madam. I forgot that in your father’s court you were taught philosophy and geography and French, but that you were never told even one small fairy tale. If you had been, you would not need me to explain further. Someday, you must let me tell you the stories my mother told me. They are the stories of your people, and even an Empress should know them.

  Well then. The ending of a fairy tale is as inevitable as death. I, Madam, am a murderess. After Nicholas’ body was taken down from the beam, Sophia had the belt cut and sewn into a pair of shoes, which she wore to Mass every Sunday. I have them still, although I no longer wear them. One becomes bored, eventually, even of penance. Do not blame Sophia, Madam. Boredom is a healthy impulse. It is a sign of the will to live. Fear the man who is not bored by suffering.

  I will tell you, too, that every fairy tale has a moral. The moral of my story may be that love is a constraint, as strong as any belt. And this is certainly true, which makes it a good moral. Or it may be that we are all constrained in some way, either in our bodies, or in our hearts or minds, an Empress as well as the woman who does her laundry. Indeed, perhaps you are more constrained, Madam. For your laundress, whose name you do not know, can do something that you, whose fingers are covered with diamonds, cannot—she can walk through the streets of the city at night and look up at the stars. Perhaps it is that a shoemaker’s daughter can bear restraint less easily than an aristocrat, that what he can bear for three years she can endure only for three days. That is a moral your husband and his counselors, Madam, would do well to learn, for a shoemaker’s daughter is very like a laundress, or the seller of violets on the street corner. And what if someday there should be no shoes or violets, and the laundry should not be washed? Even now, in a part of the city that you don’t see, men are marching with placards: shoemakers and sellers of coal, but also clerks from the Hauptbank and university students. Your husband has not told you this, I think. Or perhaps my moral is that our desire for freedom is stronger than love or pity. That is a wicked moral, or so the Church has taught us. But I do not know which moral is the correct one. And that is also the way of a fairy tale.

  HER MOTHER’S GHOSTS

  Her name is Ilona. The other children at school call her Smellona. She is not me, but I have been her. Here are the things I remember most clearly:

  She lives in a townhouse in Washington D.C. w
ith her mother and younger brother, whose bangs are always cut crooked. It is the seventies. She and her brother wear clothes they will later call hideous in photographs, but now, today, they are not hideous, because brown is still a respectable color. They are playing under the cherry trees. The blossoms are everywhere, lying on the asphalt in heaps like pink snow.

  In the kitchen drawer are silver spoons, smuggled in socks, the sleeves of pajamas. They are heavy, dulled with use. They are older than her mother, her grandmother. One is much worse for having slipped into the garbage disposal. In the kitchen cabinet are margarine tubs, more than ten, perhaps more than twenty, washed clean, ready in case the world runs out of margarine tubs. Don’t laugh. It could happen.

  Since Ilona turned seven, she has been haunted by her mother’s ghosts. Once, late at night, she saw a train conductor coming out of the bathroom.

  “Do you have your visa?” he asked her.

  She shook her head. She was in a pink nightgown, and her feet were bare. The floor was cold.

  “Then you can’t cross the border,” he said, looking down at her sternly. “You’ll have to get out here, and speak to the station master.”

  She nodded. She really needed to go to the bathroom, but she was afraid that if she tried to slip past him, he would grab her. Then she would scream, and her mother would wake up. She would have to explain that she had had a nightmare. She could never tell her mother that she had seen her ghosts.

  Once, when she was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework, a man in a green plaid suit said to her, “You can’t go to medical school. You’re not qualified.”