by Lisa Preston
“That camera was something you were going to sell?”
“She found it after we were back in Romania.” He laughed. “No one bought it. We tried. I tried so hard. I had to take care of her. And when she gathered those children, I had to mind them, too.”
Gillian gulped, with too many sordid feelings. “When did you come to America?”
“1946. We tried to come earlier.”
The answers left Gillian thinking of a million possibilities. 1946. Romania. She was suddenly glad she’d married a guy with a fascination for World War II, a history buff. Not buff like Kevin, not at all, but Paul could get her up to speed on the second war to end all wars.
“The deportation,” she asked, her voice a whisper with the terrible word, “when did that happen?”
“1942.”
Whu-hump. Agnes fell off the couch and awoke wailing, muttering, spitting. Gillian cast her eyes away from the sound and raised her chin, instinctively looking at the ceiling beyond Agnes.
Alex spoke in a rapid language Gillian did not understand, but she caught the tone of reprimand and explanation. And she thought she caught the word photographia.
Gillian held her breath and looked at them. Agnes sprawled on the floor between them, her mouth hanging open. Alex pointed at Gillian, and Agnes turned to look at her, at the photo and envelope in one of Gillian’s hands, the notebook in the other, the camera hanging around her neck. Agnes rubbed one thumb and index finger together, extending that hand toward Gillian.
Agnes took the old photo, Gillian reminded herself.
Agnes began talking at Gillian in incomprehensible, drunken gusts, still reaching for Gillian and the photo, rubbing her thumb and finger together. Was she asking for money?
Take her picture, Gillian told herself, but couldn’t. She did not want to capture the debasement.
“Bah!” Alex threw a dismissive, double-handed wave at Agnes and turned away, stepping past his sister, out the front door, where he stood with his back to them.
“Phhht … shteff …” Agnes shifted, blocking Gillian’s exit, reaching.
That was when Gillian noticed deep purple on the heels of the old drunk’s palms, the bruises on her knees, exposed as Agnes’s gown hiked up when she shifted on the floor. Gillian winced at the ugly marks, but knew, reminding herself: these are the bruises of someone who falls, not of someone who is hit.
But Agnes looked beaten.
“Can you tell me about Alexandru saving the children? Do you remember?”
Agnes murmured unintelligibly, noises, not words.
“Do you?” Gillian pressed.
“Do you, do you, do you,” Agnes hissed, until the sound became a single sloppy syllable. “D’you, d’you, d’jew, jew. Jew.”
Agnes pointed at the photograph in Gillian’s hands and gave a spitty grin that showed several missing teeth. “You Jew, too?”
Shaking her head, murmuring for the woman to stop, to settle down, Gillian backed away, ready to give up. Agnes lurched toward the threshold. Her stained cotton dress did not do enough to hide floppy breasts and bony hips. She snorted, mucus emerging from one nostril as she hocked something up in the back of her throat and cackled again. “Jew too you.” Her delight in the rhyme left her gasping. “You Jew, too.”
Gillian drew herself against the living room wall to squeeze past the drunk. “If you could let me—”
“Me, me, me,” Agnes wailed.
The reek of cheap alcohol curdled the air as Agnes hissed and shouted. Gillian felt her stomach flip. She would have to step around Agnes to join Alex past the front door and make her exit.
“I just need to step—”
“Stepfff …” Agnes spluttered, reaching for Gillian again. “Let me see. Me see. Me see!” She belched, grabbing at the photo.
Shaking, Gillian faced the photograph toward her. Agnes grabbed for it, slapping at the matte finish, seizing it between one thumb and forefinger. Grubby fingers on the face of a photograph tightened Gillian’s scalp. Even though she could reproduce the picture infinitely, it was still wrong to manhandle a photograph.
Another stained, slick hand grabbed. Agnes’s roughness would result in a torn picture unless Gillian gave up.
She relinquished to Agnes’s double grip. Agnes waved the photo, stabbed it with one finger, and shook both hands at Gillian’s face, spluttering saliva. Then knotty fingers bent the photograph, tore it lengthwise, beheading children. Half of the photo dropped to the floor.
“Ha!” Agnes cackled, then tore again, down the middle. Another quarter fell away. She stared, entranced, her lips moving, then licked the edge of the spiraling rip and continued to work her destruction. Clutching ever smaller bits of the print, Agnes crumpled to the floor, crying, rubbing the remaining scrap of the photograph on her face, her mouth.
Horrified by the woman in general, her descent almost to a drunken blackout, and the treatment of the print, Gillian quit, brushed past, and rushed outside.
Alex was gone. The Istoks’ wild front garden gave no comfort. Gillian hurried to the street, feeling guilty for leaving the old woman in this nearly incapacitated state, uncared for, but firm that she owed no babysitting. She could still hear Agnes coughing, crying, and yelling.
CHAPTER 15
Gillian shut drunks from her thoughts and told herself to get out of her mood, get grateful for her comfortable life. She read online and scanned Paul’s history books for hours. She studied the Tsigani culture and the prejudice against them. She read until her eyes watered, and she kissed Paul the next chance she had, really kissed him when he came into the kitchen from the garage.
She didn’t want to hurt him. She didn’t. He was a good man, a wonderful person. He would be a good man the next day and the day after. He would certainly answer a plain question with a solid response, with more than a grunt. If only she’d ask, if only she didn’t fear the answer. She should try.
Paul held her close. “Hello to you, too.” Then he sniffed at a small saucepan on the stove.
“It’s gruel,” she said, stirring the thin, flavorless soup she’d made out of water and a few spoonfuls of flour and cornmeal. She’d told herself to collect the water from a rain puddle in their alley but couldn’t manage to truly subject herself to the dinner the Istoks ate as interned children.
Paul looked boggled. “Gruel? Porridge?”
She nodded. “What’s the first thing you think of when you hear … Romania?”
He grinned. “I used to have the hots for Nadia Comaneci.”
“Pardon?”
“When you were in diapers, or maybe not even born—”
Gillian threw her hands up, shrinking from his comment. Don’t remind me you’re a half-generation older than me, she thought, shutting down.
“—she was the fantasy of many a boy,” Paul explained, “who liked to watch girls in leotards. She was very, very flexible. Comaneci was the first 10 in women’s gymnastics at the Olympics, on the Romanian team.”
“So, you having the hots for her—and I don’t even want to do the math to discover how pedophilic that might have been on your part—that’s the extent of your exposure to Romanians?”
“I’ve read books since then.”
“Very impressive.”
He nodded agreement with such enthusiasm Gillian felt herself smiling despite wanting to be serious. Of course he read. It was so natural when he read through their peaceful evenings. It was a decent life, it was.
In the bedroom, Gillian skipped the yoga mat and slipped into the splits, reaching for one socked toe with both hands. Her lower back complained almost immediately and she thought of the extra hours in the desk chair, of arching her back with aching want.
“Stiff tonight?” Paul asked from the bed, putting down his book.
“A bit.”
“Me, too,” he said, hopeful and playful and ignored.
She went into the next pose and the next, skipping the downward-facing dog and tucking one hand between her legs to
raise her weight onto her palms and point both legs to her left as she wavered, trying for balance and flexibility, feeling dicey.
“You’ve got a certain Comaneci-esque flexibility to you,” Paul said, trying for a leer over his glasses.
“You’ll wreck my pose,” Gillian warned. Her wrists were starting to shake and the stretch didn’t feel warm, long, or good. Her body would pop with pain if she stayed one more second.
“I’d like to,” he said.
“Oh, forget it.” Gillian closed her eyes as she fell the few inches to the hardwood. The thump on the floor felt deserved. After a listening pause, pleased to hear nothing, she rose and pulled a book of matches from the nightstand drawer, then lit a fat candle stuck on a wooden saucer. She usually lit the single candle before stretching. The night felt off with having switched her regimen. Soon the melded colors in the wax gave off the medley of built-in scents, bayberry, pumpkin, and apple. She closed her eyes to inhale as she sank back to the floor and realized it sounded like a sniffle.
Paul slid across the bed, then slid his hands across her shoulders, freezing when she tensed. She inhaled sharply as he began to massage, gentle as a whisper. He swallowed and continued to stroke her, fingertips plying her neck.
“Gillian, I wish you’d talk to me.”
He was right to ask, she thought. They had not talked about so much. She looked at the ceiling and asked, “Have you ever heard of Transnistria?”
Paul nodded. “What do you want to know?”
She lurched into a rapid regurgitation of the Istok story, sparing no details she’d learned. She spoke of their suffering, aching to escape. She told him of their deprivation and loneliness and freezing in the night. Once Alexandru found a large manure dump composting away against the last remaining wall of an old barn. In the center was warmth, eye-watering, foot-warming, ashy heat from decomposing manure. It kept them warm that night, old manure and each other.
As much as she had always found Paul’s World War II study a peculiar interest, there was no denying the breadth of things to know about the middle of the last century. He filled in gaps, how Romania had changed sides during the war, and they talked about the risks for so many people, the individual moments and decisions. The chance Alex had taken in guiding dead strangers’ children, risking himself and his sister when surely he could have gone faster and safer without extra bodies—especially needy children—was beyond description. And for what? For one’s own humanity? What of people who hadn’t such grace to fall back on? Gillian closed her eyes, unwilling to see when her mind paraded nebulous horrors.
“There are too many Holocaust horror stories to know them all, hear them all,” Paul said. But he expounded on, beyond her endurance, with another half-dozen heartbreaking accounts.
“Oh, God, stop,” she gasped at last. “It’s too much.” She rose and swung her head to bring her hair off her shoulders as she faced him, her arms snugged around her body. A stray hair dangling past the length of her mane grazed the candle’s flame and the acrid stench of burning hair threatened her with real nausea.
He nodded. “I would say so.”
“Refugees,” she said slowly, realizing as she spoke that she had nothing to say regarding another person’s life and choices.
“Precisely. And it pales by comparison, but I did talk to Liz, about where she came from, all of that, since you wondered.” He waited for her to respond, apparently ready to wait as long as it took. When she looked at him, he continued. “She is a refugee. She was wiped out in the hurricane. One of the hurricanes on the gulf coast. She got out of there with not much more than the clothes on her back and a car that hardly worked. She tried to start a new life, but with a small child and no real skills, she’d been living in her car and barely scraping by. She couldn’t get ahead no matter where she was. I think she tried several relocations. Things dwindled. She’s alone in the world. Finally, she set her sights on finding me, us.”
“Finding you,” Gillian said, for the record. And then she asked without thinking, “You’re not charging her rent, are you?”
“Ah, we are so lucky, so fortunate,” he said, “We have so much.”
They did. Gillian shuddered and looked away, no longer wanting to acknowledge what she could lose. Worse than her integrity and his trust, she risked a future she would not allow herself to name out loud.
“She doesn’t even have a car now,” Paul said. “She got rid of her old one. We have so much, Gillian. And she’s family. We don’t have much family.”
“She’s lying.”
Paul did a double take, mouth hanging.
She knew she’d shocked him as much by her words as the indifferent shrug and flip she did with her hair. “She told you she has a cheapie pay-as-you-go cell phone. She has an iPhone. And credit cards. I saw. Who knows what else she’s lying about?”
“There must be a reasonable explanation.”
She slipped into bed.
When he joined her, he said, “You worked late last night.”
She had. And she listened in the night for the baby, longing for the garage studio tenants to be gone, wondering how soon she’d summon the strength to leave.
On the morning ferry, before her drive west to scout locations for the peninsula wedding shoot, Gillian made use of the time on her cell.
“Speak up,” Tilda said, instead of hello.
“Have you talked to Kevin?” Gillian asked. “I’ve got this story of a guy who was in World War II—”
“On which side?”
“He was a kid, an orphan. I, I seem to have found a little Schindler story and the hero is living in the city.”
“Wha-a-at?” As Gillian told her about the Istoks, Tilda cut in. “Yad Vashem, here we come. Gillian, do you have any idea how few Americans are listed as Righteous?”
“He wasn’t American then,” she said, thinking she needed help just to figure out which of the million details she’d need to gather. Was Alex a naturalized citizen? When? She didn’t want to lead with his immigration, but rather with the bones of the past they’d fleshed out over sweet coffee. She wanted to give him—no, to leave him—his honor. This was the right way to start.
“And a Seattle story? Gillian, this is gold. Swing by my office later. I’ve got your check for the Hellman award.”
Hours later, on the return ferry, she texted Kevin and asked him to meet.
He beat her to the coffee shop, had her Americano waiting.
“You’re late. This is my second.” He rose and kissed her, on the lips, in what could have passed for a greeting, but on the other side of that kiss was more. Gillian let her eyes close for a second. There was possibility and freedom and breath. She felt him searching for a connection she couldn’t give as he slid his large hand over hers.
“You’re trouble, Gillian Trett.”
She sobered up in an instant. A vaguely familiar man at another table looked at them too long. “Nobody wants trouble.”
All she’d been expecting was to tell him more about the hardship and rescue of the children. She had a stunning workshop photo of old Alex, the boyhood hero, but it was her mention of Alex’s and Agnes’s ages coupled with John, the mannerless twenty-something, that raised Kevin’s eyebrows.
“Grandpa Alex had a kid in his fifties, I’m betting.”
Not every life had to follow the usual plan, she wanted to scream. Not every life did. She sat mute, wishing the Istok story would settle in one direction. Getting started, making a big change to a new future—A photojournalist? Something else?—beckoned. Straight photography had been all right, but it wasn’t big enough to fill her void. Kevin had a job that he loved, that she admired. She disliked her envy of him, yet felt creeped out by his laughter over Alex having had a child in middle age who apparently also had had a child in middle age.
She cleared her throat, her mind, ideas solidifying even as she spoke. “A complete picture … depiction, I mean. His boyhood, where he first learned bow making and went through al
l this hardship and was heroic. And he lands here, eventually apprentices, becomes an award-winning bow maker. What do you think?”
Thanks to the Internet, she’d found current mentions of Alex as a distinguished bow maker, and no mention at all of his past. She was going to break this story. Telling Kevin what she hoped for with the Istok piece, she showed him the first photos she’d captured at the Sartineau Shop of prized bows, beautiful works of art. She luxuriated in pleasure with his low whistle over the portrait of Alex that she had already pegged as a cover shot. Knowing her pale skin showed a blush easily, she gave in to the excitement of her find.
“Alex was deported with his family in 1942 because they were Gypsies. They lived for almost two years in the Transnistria area. Jews—Jewish people, I mean—were deported there, too. Only he and his sister were still alive when they came back in 1944. And they traveled with these younger orphans. One just started following them. Two were together at a bombed-out building. One they found at the side of the road and recognized from the camps in Transnistria.” She didn’t say that she’d had to look everything up, that she’d laughed at river names like Dniester and Bug. She did say they had to keep their hero’s sister out of the story.
“I think you’re really onto something,” Kevin said. “With the war history, the local angle, bow making, well, it’s great. I wouldn’t have thought of it.”
She bet he would. “And now?”
“And now, get going. Take it to the next level and get the guy to spill it. Get more sources. Get the story.” He thumped the photo of Alex staring out at Puget Sound and read Gillian’s caption beneath it about the man who escaped by sea, finding permanent refuge on faraway shores. “This is a closer. A great summation shot.”