The Autumn Castle

by Kim Wilkins

  Pete, who sat next to her, pointed at her beer and said, “Did you know that Germans drink around 127 liters of beer per person per year?”

  “No, I did not know that.” Christine smiled. She was discovering that Pete had an endless store of facts and figures. He had been lauded as a genius since he was twelve, and perhaps that meant he had never outgrown some of his adolescent obsessions.

  “It’s topped only by the Czechs, who drink 160 liters.”

  “What’s that in pints, Pete?” Jude asked.

  Pete looked skyward briefly, did the math, then returned with, “About 336.”

  Jude doubled over with laughter, deep lines arrowing out from his eyes. She loved his smile, the gorgeous changeability of his expression. His face settled smooth again as he got serious about the business of lighting a cigarette.

  “I don’t know how many liters they piss every day though,” Pete added in a solemn tone.

  Gerda, as she did so often, looked at Pete with an expression bordering on alarm. She hadn’t caught the rhythms of his humor yet. Jude glanced across at Christine and winked; she felt herself smile and blush like a teenager. She downed more beer and began to shed the day’s despondency.

  The first band finished and the second came on—Duke Ellington in thick German accents. Christine grew drunk but Gerda was always drunker. Sometime around two a.m., while Pete, Jude, and Fabiyan were making enthusiastic conversation with Sparky, the club owner, Gerda pulled Christine down next to her on the sofa.

  “Here, here,” she said, trying to shove a lit cigarette in Christine’s mouth.

  “No, really. I’ll be sick.”

  “You’re the luckiest girl in the world,” Gerda said, reaching for her drink and missing by at least six inches. “Oops.”

  “Yeah, I know.” Christine and Gerda had had this conversation before. Gerda had a big crush on Jude, but then, Gerda had a big crush on every second man she met.

  “He’s so beautiful. Why couldn’t he turn up on my doorstep?” Then Gerda laughed, because that was exactly how Christine had met Jude. He had been sitting on the stairs in front of her West Twenty-third Street home, trying to read a badly drawn map directing him to a gallery party.

  “Don’t despair. You and Garth might work things out,” Christine said.

  Garth was Gerda’s husband back in Stockholm. He had refused to come with her to Berlin. Gerda was shaking her head. “No, never. You just keep your eye on Jude, Miss Starlight. I’ll steal him the first opportunity I get.”

  “You’d better not. I don’t know where I’d find another one just like him.”

  Gerda waved her hand dismissively. “Impossible, of course. He’d never look at another woman.”

  Christine knew this was true. Her silly jealousies had so often been directed at a paintbrush, never at a person. But it was nice to hear someone else say it. “Do you think so?”

  “Darling, he’s always got his hands all over you. He never lets you out of his sight. It’s damn frustrating. Look at my tits, they’re wonderful—not like your tiny little things—but he’s never looked at them once.”

  Christine laughed loudly, then said, “Well, thank you for being so reassuring. You know, he’s so gorgeous, and with the age difference and all . . .”

  Gerda scoffed. “Three years? It’s nothing. He’s twenty-eight, not eighteen. But don’t worry . . . if I ever see another woman making a move on him, I’ll do everything in my power to keep her away. Lie, cheat, steal, whatever.”

  “That’s very sweet,” Christine said, giving her a squeeze.

  Gerda lit another cigarette. “So, what’s up with you lately, Miss Starlight? You seem a bit blue. It’s not just the pain in your back, is it?”

  Christine shook her head, her eyes darting off to locate Jude. He was on the other side of the room, a cigarette jammed between his lips, drawing a shape in the air with his hands for Sparky, who laughed enormously.

  “What’s it all about? Not Jude?”

  “No, not Jude.” Christine shrugged. “Autumn, I guess. Gray skies, winter coming.”

  “Bullshit. It’s more than that.”

  She tore her eyes away from Jude and met Gerda’s gaze. “It’s weird, Gerda. Just the last few days I’ve been feeling on edge. Like something’s about to happen. And I keep having these flashes of old memories, things I haven’t thought about in years.”

  “Like what? Stuff to do with your parents?”

  “No, actually. You know we lived here in the seventies, but not here, not in the East. Berlin was still divided. We had a big house out at Zehlendorf. My best friend was the English girl who lived next door. A cute little redhead. I keep thinking about her, and then the memory gets all caught up with something else which I can’t put my finger on. Something to do with a crow I saw once . . .” She trailed off, realizing what she said made no sense.

  “A crow?”

  “Yeah, I know it sounds nuts.”

  “No, not at all. What was her name? The little girl?”

  “Miranda. Her father was an English soldier, Colonel Frith. But nobody ever called her Miranda; we always called her Little May.”

  “What else?” Gerda prompted. “Just these memories, this feeling of anxiety?”

  Christine reached for her near-empty beer bottle, and swished the contents around halfheartedly. “She was murdered,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Abducted from her bedroom one night. God knows what awful things she . . . They never found her.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So it’s no wonder it gives you a bad feeling to think of her.”

  “I guess so.” She drained her glass. “Only, it’s not just an ordinary bad feeling. It’s dread, and it’s half-remembrance, and it’s a weird foreboding about that bird and trying to remember where I saw it.”

  Gerda snapped her fingers, her eyes round and bright. “A ghost!” she said. “Christine, maybe Little May is haunting you.”

  “Huh?” Christine adjusted her frame of reference quickly. Gerda had a strong interest in spirits and crystals and psychic powers, and conversations with her often took this turn.

  “Yes, it makes sense. She died all those years ago, when you were here as a child. Maybe she’s been wandering on the earthly plane all this time, and now you’re back she’s attached herself to you.”

  “I don’t know, Gerda. I’m more likely to think it’s a change-of- seasons melancholy.”

  Gerda shrugged. “Believe what you like. Do you want another drink?”

  Christine looked at her empty beer, then nodded. “Yeah, a big one.”

  She watched Gerda go to the bar. The band was still playing, Jude was still talking in the corner, the air was blue and thick with smoke and conversation. But she felt lonely and isolated and strangely afraid, and it had something to do with a twenty-five-year-old blurred memory of black wings.

  CHAPTER TWO

  —from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.

  I first conceived of the Bone Wife as a child of eight in Bremen. My mother had taken me to a traveling exhibit of puppets, dolls, and automatons in the town square. I had always been, and continue to be, overly interested in contraptions, inventions, gadgets with wheels and cogs. The exhibit was set up in the shadow of the Dom—its dark spires pointing toward the broad sky—on a summer afternoon that stretched on for miles. I wandered between the exhibits, clutching my mother’s fingers in one hand, and a sticky ice cream in the other. Such an array of painted faces: some plain with round black eyes and pointed noses, some so garishly colorful that even I could sense their brightness; clown faces, girl faces, boy faces, cat faces, elephant faces; spindly legs, silk feet, straw-stuffed arms, antique lace, and stiff linen. I was swept away by the sea of ghastly wooden smiles and laughing fur eyebrows. One doll in particular caught my eye as it was the exact image of my mother, but without her stern hairstyle and clothes. This little doll had perfect ringlets and a pretty frilled dress.
Oh, I cried for that doll!

  “Mama,” I said (in German, of course, as it is my native language), “if you do not buy that doll for me I shall die.”

  “Nonsense,” she replied, dragging me farther into the exhibit.

  She did not understand that I needed to possess it, to have a version of my mother with pretty curls and a frilly dress. I hated her for dragging me away from it. We stopped in front of a display of an automaton, which from the front looked like an ordinary doll but from the back was a mass of whirring wheels and gears. The doll’s owner—a hefty, mustachioed man dressed like a nineteenth-century traveling salesman—wound it, and the doll began to bounce up and down, its arms scissoring through the air and its head bobbing, its mouth articulating silent words. Then the mustachioed man placed a peanut on the table in front of it, and the doll bent down to pick it up. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen and all the way home to our farmhouse at Niederbüren I pictured that automaton over and over, and in my mind the face of the mother-doll became imposed over it, for it was often that I had seen my mother pick up the objects that my father and I left behind us when we had tired of them.

  I secluded myself in my bedroom that evening, drawing plans for a mother-doll. A life-size automaton shaped like a woman, who could pick up my toys and could not speak. That, I thought, would be the perfect wife for me. I was not interested in women then, and I’m not now. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I am interested in men either. I have never experienced the faintest twinge of the sexual urges with which the rest of the world is obsessed. I believe it to be a legacy of the genetic damage suffered by our family, and I have never envied the passions of others, as they too often lead to vulnerability.

  I shelved my plans for a mother-doll or a wife-doll, partly because I was a mere boy with no idea how to build an automaton, but also because soon after this occasion I saw my first faery, and it had such a profound effect upon me that most childish thoughts were permanently driven from my mind.

  My parents had told me about faeries, and about the special connection our family had with them. I had taken for granted that one day I would meet one, and perhaps thank him or her for our good fortune. I imagined they would look like the faeries in the books in my bedroom: tiny people with little wings and sparkly eyes. I didn’t know then, as I do now, about the many different breeds of faeries and how vastly they differ from one another; the complexities of their bodies that I now understand so intimately.

  On this day, on the day I saw a faery for the first time, I was playing with my toy boat in a puddle on the banks of the Weser. It was the first fine day in a week, and the grass and trees were clean, washed. I was concentrating hard on the boat in front of me. In my imagination, I was making an Atlantic crossing. A shadow fell across me and I looked up to see a man smiling at me.

  “Hello,” he said, “that’s a nice boat.”

  My body had never before performed such a complex reaction to the mere sight and voice of another being. My eyes dilated, my skin grew warm, my body felt stiff, and a fist of nausea pushed up inside me. I opened my mouth to scream, and only a low groan came out.

  “What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t be afraid.” And then he knelt down across the puddle from me and reached out to touch my boat. I could smell him then, I could smell his bones deep under his skin, and such a thrill of revulsion shuddered through me that I felt I might actually lose control of my body, that I might explode or die. Instead, I took a deep breath and called at the top of my lungs, “Mama!”

  The stranger stood immediately and took two steps back. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said.

  “Mama!”

  But it was my father who heard my calls and emerged from the house, peering across the narrow road at me. “Immanuel?”

  “Immanuel,” the stranger said. “That’s a fine name.”

  I sprang to my feet and ran to my father, locked his right leg between my arms and buried my face in his soft stomach. “Papa, that man is strange,” I managed to say. Then I heard the stranger’s voice. He had followed me.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten him,” he said in a soft, tender voice.

  Then my father’s voice, rumbling deep in his stomach. “Oh, you’re a faery. That’s why he’s frightened. He’s never met one before.”

  Now I looked around, glared up at the stranger. So this was what a faery looked like. I was disappointed and disgusted. While he was near me, I felt as though my skin might be sick.

  “How do you know?” the stranger said.

  “My family knew faeries. In 1570 the first child of that union was born.”

  The faery’s eyebrows arched upward, and I marveled that such a revolting being could look and move so much like a normal human. “Really?”

  “So you see, Immanuel,” Papa said, “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  The faery reached out to me, and I spat on his hand. “Don’t you touch me, you foul creature.”

  My father gave me a hard smack on the side of the head and apologized to the faery.

  “I should leave,” the faery said. “I don’t want to distress the child further.”

  He walked off, and I tried not to think about the obscene bones and joints that moved under that skin.

  “What was all the fuss?” said my father.

  “I could smell his bones.”

  “The faeries are our friends.”

  “I feel sick. I hate the faeries, they make me sick.”

  “Their bones gleam like silver. I’m sure they don’t smell bad.”

  Gleam like silver! I wanted to open up the faery and see such a bone. Carve away the layers of flesh and muscle and discover the grand secret inside. It made me quiet, and Papa thought that his reprimand had touched me. He fetched my boat and brought me inside.

  Despite the sunny days that followed, I spent all my time in the corner of my room with my drawing pad. I drew dozens upon dozens of pictures. Pictures of the faery, whose eyes were dead crosses, with flaps of his skin peeled back to reveal shining bones. Pictures of the bones with tiny sparks drawn around to indicate the gleam of precious metal. Pictures of the bones emerging, as if spontaneously, from the faery’s mutilated body. Pictures of body parts, half-stripped to reveal the surprise within, like the silver coin in a plum pudding. Drawing the pictures provided me with an addictive sensation of relief. Such an ache would well up inside me just thinking about the faery and the odd smell of his bones that the only way to feel relaxed and peaceful again was to imagine him divested of those bones.

  When my mother found these pictures, I was pulled by the ear to appear before my father and my grandfather and answer for my sins. She waved the sheaf of drawings in front of them, and their mouths became little circles of shock.

  One by one, in the white sterility of the room, their faces loomed in front of me.

  “Immanuel, no,” Papa said, “you are not to think such things about the faeries.”

  Opa, who was a terrifyingly large man with a white beard and gleaming eyes, grabbed my upper arms in his strong hands and shook me. “You rotten little scoundrel! You evil boy! Why do you think we have so much money? Why do you think you live in a giant farmhouse with every toy you could ever want? It’s because of the faeries.”

  “You must put every one of these ideas out of your head,” Papa said, brandishing the drawings.

  “You must respect the faeries.”

  “We have our good fortune because of them,” Mama said. “You owe them gratitude and love.”

  But no matter how long they nagged and bullied me, no matter how many clips around the head and bruising shakings they gave me, I knew the opposite was true.

  I owed the faeries only contempt. I owed them only my sincerest hatred.

  The afternoon air bit cold as Christine walked home from Friedrichstrasse Station, vainly pulling her cardigan tighter. Of course, she could have taken the U-bahn down to Oranienburger Tor, which was much closer, but underground
travel was something she avoided at all times. Thirteen years of bad dreams about tunnels meant an obsessive frostiness stole over her skin every time she approached an underground space.

  Her back ached in hot buzzes. It had been a bad day. Busy and tiring, and the continual stress of those half-forgotten memories haunting her as though they were desperately important. As she crossed Weidendammer Bridge, she scratched at her left thumb. It had become irritated around lunchtime and now an itchy red blotch had spread across its tip. She paused, leaning on the bridge railing above the pale gray Spree, and examined her thumb. An old memory fought back toward her and she shook her head in wonder. This was too weird. May Frith had disappeared nearly twenty-five years ago, but her memory was alive in Christine’s body. At seven, after reading a cowboy story together (May was a precocious reader), they had decided to become blood sisters. They had each pricked their thumbs, then smeared the tiny drops of blood together. Christine touched the spot now, and it prickled gently. Surely coincidence. Surely she had received a tiny paper cut during the day, and it had grown inflamed. She put the tip of her thumb in her mouth and sucked it delicately; thought she could faintly taste blood.

  “I’m going nuts from the pain,” she muttered to herself, turning and heading home.

  Hotel Mandy-Z was a gently crumbling, late nineteenth-century apartment building on Vogelwald-Allee, a dead-end street that dipped into an enormous storm drain and a square of green behind Friedrichstrasse. It had once been the head office of an Asian travel agency, but the Reisebüro sign had been painted over in gray (she could still see the letters faintly underneath) and “Hotel Mandy-Z” had been added in gold by one of 1998’s Zweigler Fellows. She let herself into the tiny lobby, checked the mail, dashed past the gallery door so Mandy wouldn’t see her, then proceeded upstairs. The gallery was situated on the lower floor with the studios, Gerda and Pete lived across the hall from each other on the first floor, and Jude and Fabiyan on the second. The third, fourth, and attic were Mandy’s.