Little Fortress

by Laisha Rosnau

  “Well, perhaps it has a bit of French flair,” I said. “It’s like a work of art, ladies.”

  “Exactly!” Sveva looked delighted with the meal, with the two of them, really.

  After dinner, when only the Jell-O sculpture remained, gleaming and still, I got up to clear the table.

  “Oh no, you sit, Marie,” Joan said as she got up. “I’d almost forgotten, I’ve got some mail for you both.” She placed a small stack in front of Sveva, one letter in front of me.

  Sveva sifted through hers. “Where are the bills? There must be some bills.”

  “Svev, darling, I signed off on the last of your bills the day before I left. Except for the banks, you don’t owe a thing to anyone in the city of Vernon. Now, tell me that the same can be said of Victoria.”

  “Miss Jüül’s been keeping an eye on my spending, haven’t you, MJ?”

  I was still looking at the letter in front of me.

  Joan asked, “Who is the letter from, Marie?”

  “Oh, just an old friend.” I knew that both women wanted to ask more.

  “Well, come on then, open it!” Sveva said as she scraped her fingernails into the edges of the envelopes in front of her.

  I got a knife to slice open mine. It was from Sven Brandt, a short note to say that after more than a decade, he’d finally sold his father’s property and when clearing it out he’d found photographs that he thought I would like to keep. I slipped them out of the envelope, stared at a black-and-white portrait of myself. Though it appeared grey in the photograph, I knew the dress I wore, the last Hermann had bought me, was the colour of raspberries. I could remember how lightly the silk fell against my skin. There was a flower tucked behind one of my ears – how whimsical that seemed to me now – and the expression I gave the camera was a slip of a smile. My eyes looked straight into the lens, one eyebrow slightly raised. I looked so confident, so knowing, as though I could anticipate what was going to happen next. How little did I know.

  Both women looked toward me, expectant. “So?” Joan asked.

  “Yes, so?” Sveva looked at me. “Don’t leave us in suspense. Show us what you have there, MJ.”

  I placed the photos on the table, slid them toward the women.

  “This is you?” asked Sveva, picking up one.

  Joan held the other. “And who might this be?”

  I had hardly looked at the one of Hermann and I together. I would, when I was by myself. “An old friend.”

  “An old friend?” Sveva raised an eyebrow. “From a time before you were with us? Who? Come on, tell us more.”

  “Not now, Sveva. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.”

  “Oh, you tease!” She swatted at me and Joan passed me a glittering wedge of Jell-O salad. It looked as though it was lit from within as it came toward me.

  How much of my story would I tell them? Not much, I decided, and ran my spoon into the trembling dessert salad, placed a cool slip of gelatin, sweet and tangy, on my tongue.

  The women watched me as I ate. When I finished, I said, “That was perfect, ladies. Just as you two are perfect for each other.” I looked from Sveva to Joan. “Please, do everything you can to be with the person you feel you can be the most yourself. Be with someone who makes you feel good. Fight for it if you have to, regardless of what other people think.”

  The women stared at me as though I’d gone mad, and who knows? Perhaps I had. I rose from the table. “I’m going to go for some fresh air now.”

  Fifty-Seven

  Shortly before Ofelia’s death, Sven Brandt had let me know he would be passing through Vernon and would like to meet. I had made a list of errands long enough to warrant the time I would take away from the house and arranged to meet him at the hotel across the street from the train station. I arrived first, sat on my own in the restaurant as I hadn’t for years. There was a men’s group there, Elks or Rotarians perhaps, tables pushed together in the middle of the room, ashtrays set to one side of their plates.

  I saw him as soon as he came in, chimes knocking against the door behind him. I was the only woman in the dining room and he looked from table to table until he found me. Sven was a tall, slim man, like his father. As he came toward where I sat, I kept my eyes on him. He looked so much like H – even though Sven was older now than Hermann was the last time I saw him – and yet much like his mother, too. I stood, held out my hand. He took it in both of his and when he smiled, I saw him as a little boy. Our smiles don’t change.

  “Shall I call you ...?” he asked.

  I’d a lifetime of being Miss. “Oh, Marie is good.”

  “Marie, then. It’s good to see you.”

  “You as well, Mr. Brandt,” I said, his name thick and weighted in my mouth. “My condolences, please –” He stopped me with his hand between us, picked up the menu as though to change the subject.

  “Call me Sven.”

  “You’re in Vancouver?”

  “Yes.”

  “With family?” I ventured, as though we were simply friends making small talk.

  “No, no more family really. I wrote to you about my father.” He looked away, neck craned as though wanting to get the attention of the wait staff. He held one finger up as a call, then turned back to me. “My mother, she died in 1933, in Cairo. I had no siblings, no children, so now all family seems to be gone.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.” My words sounded rote, insincere, even to myself. I was calculating dates in my mind, running numbers. Nineteen thirty-three. A year before Leone was diagnosed.

  “After my mother’s death, father carried on with the business for a while, but something shifted in him – everyone assumed it was the loss of his wife.”

  “Of course.”

  “But I knew it wasn’t that. He hadn’t been happy for some time. A year after my mother died, he immigrated to Canada, put my uncle in charge of the business.”

  “Onkel?” I couldn’t help but grin, just a bit, at the thought of Hermann’s brother.

  “Uncle, that’s what I called him, yes. Did you know him as that, as well?”

  “That’s what everyone called him.”

  The waitress was there, already pouring coffee into both of our cups, but I lifted my hand, said, “Tea, please.”

  “Onkel died in ’42.”

  “The war?”

  “Not fighting, of course – he was too old by then – but something related to the war. Something to do with our family company and how it was operating in Egypt. They’d received threats before, plenty of them. My father never forgave himself for not convincing Onkel to leave – the business, Egypt, everything.”

  “What did your father do in Canada?” I tried to keep my voice natural, level, but it went from hoarse to a squeak in a moment. Emotion crackled along my throat. The waitress returned and placed a teacup and saucer in front of me.

  “He didn’t do much, at first. Joined my wife and me in Vancouver, did some consulting. He bored of that fairly quickly, and with his shares of the business, he didn’t really need the money. He bought some property and raised horses in Cranbrook.”

  Hermann had been in Vancouver; he had been in Cranbrook. He had been here, so close to me. I clutched the sides of my legs under the table.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “This is a lot of information at once.”

  I loosened my hands and looked back up at him. “Oh no, it’s not too much.”

  “He was, in some ways, a difficult man. For me, as his son.”

  I didn’t have anything to offer him, no words. I picked up the teacup, touched the hot liquid to my lips.

  “He wasn’t happy. I thought I remembered him being happy once, when I was small.”

  “Yes.” I said this involuntarily. I remembered our happiness in Egypt, though Sven hadn’t been there then, hadn’t been a part of that. Why was he tellin
g me this? He had seemed so familiar to me a few minutes before, though I’d known him so long ago, so briefly. Now he seemed like a stranger. I didn’t want him to tell me about his father and his horses and his unhappiness. That had nothing to do with me, with my life.

  “This past couple of years, I’ve been going through his things. I should have finished in the weeks after the funeral, but I lost momentum.”

  I nodded, tried to sip my tea slowly, naturally.

  “I found these.” Sven lifted a large manila envelope onto the table. He looked at me as though waiting for me to say something. When I didn’t, he told me, “They’re your letters.” I put my cup in its saucer. I tried to hold my hand steady but I shook so badly that the china rang for a moment before I put my other hand around it. “Yours to him and some copies of his to you.”

  I could not hide how my hands trembled, so I tucked them back under the table.

  “He tried to tell me, before he died. He kept repeating your name – Marie, Marie, Jewel. I thought you’d been my nanny and I asked about you. Oh no, not your nanny, she is the mother to your sibling, he said. I didn’t want to hear it. Perhaps you can understand?”

  I nodded.

  “He said, I sent her away. Forgive me, and I didn’t know for what he was asking forgiveness – for being with you while married to my mother? For sending the mother of my sibling away? I still don’t know.”

  I was shaking – my entire body, not just my hands.

  “What happened to the child?” Sven asked.

  I couldn’t say anything. Sven reached his hands across the table. “I’m sorry. This must be so hard. If I’ve got a sibling, though. My parents, they were so distant – with each other and with me. I’ve been divorced for years, no children. Now my parents are both gone and if there’s someone else. Some family –”

  I found my voice, though it was quiet, weak. “There isn’t.” I watched my own hands on my lap. “I went to a cloister in Italy to convalesce, as they called it then. I lost the baby. I never told your father. I went to work with another family and left a forwarding address. I’d hoped he would come. I’d hoped he would –” I finished the thought in my mind: find me.

  “Oh.” Perhaps that outcome had not occurred to him, though I couldn’t imagine why not. How little men knew of the lives of women. The group beside us let out hoots of laughter, as though in response to my thought.

  I looked at Sven. “It was expected in those days that I would give up the child. The baby would have gone to one of the orders of nuns. It was an honour to have them take a child born of sin on God’s behalf.” I didn’t tell him that I’d already given a child away. That I’d given her to family, not God. His father, Hermann, knew of that child, and he’d accepted that of me, though he never found out what happened to his own. “I don’t know if I could have given up your father’s child.”

  “What would have happened if you hadn’t?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  I’d disappointed Sven, I could tell. He’d come to see me not to tell me that his father had loved me, but to find out where the sibling he’d never known was. He hadn’t had enough from his family, but I couldn’t give him more. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t have told you something else, Sven.”

  “No, no, that’s fine.” He looked around the room. The men’s group was standing from their meeting, putting on their hats, clapping each other on their backs. “And your husband, he has passed away as well?”

  “Oh no, I never had a husband.”

  “Oh, but –”

  “It can’t be hard to believe that I never married,” I tried to say lightly.

  “But, my father. He told me that you were married when he came to see you in Vernon.”

  “He didn’t come to see me.”

  “He tried. He told me that he had tried to find you in Italy, years before, but was turned away. After my mother died, he tried to find you again – he wrote to everyone he could think of who might be connected to the Caetanis, hoping someone would write back. He tracked down an address – in BC, no less. He came to see you in Vernon.”

  “He didn’t, Sven. I never saw your father again.”

  “You weren’t there. The lady of the house – the duchess? – told him that you’d been there until recently. It was in the mid-thirties, I believe. She said you’d married and had gone on your honeymoon.”

  “Honeymoon?”

  “Yes, I believe that my father must have gone back more than once because the duchess later wrote to my father in Cranbrook. She told him to please not return, that you had moved north with your husband and that she couldn’t give him the address. She asked that he not try to contact you again, that it would be best to start your new life and marriage without intrusions from the past.”

  In 1935, I was in Rochester, Minnesota, caring for Leone. He’d asked me to stay with his family and I had promised him I would while I kept the extent of his illness to myself.

  “The only reason I know any of this is because her letter was with my father’s things as well.” He motioned toward the envelope. “I can leave these with you.”

  I tried to say something, or even to nod, but I couldn’t.

  “My father thought that he saw you once, years ago, at the train station in Vernon.”

  I watched my hands in my lap, turned them over so they were palm up, rubbed the pad of each finger.

  “But he couldn’t be sure it was you. He saw a man come up and embrace you. He assumed it was your husband.”

  “He did see me. I saw him as well.” My voice was small, tight. I had to force it out of my throat, each word rooted in an ache that, once it reached my mouth, gathered there. I swallowed and swallowed, and I could feel pain leach from my neck to my shoulders to my chest, harden there, a weight in my stomach.

  “I’m afraid I’ve a train to catch soon.”

  “Of course.” I couldn’t look at him. “I should be getting home, as well.”

  His father – Mr. Brandt, Hermann, my sweet H – had lived in BC. Did it matter now that we lived in the same province in Canada for nearly a quarter of a century? That he had tried to find me in 1935, that it must have been him whom I’d seen on the train that day in 1947? It was a different era, far from the one we’d once known together, yet every day I had remembered my Hermann as I had every day before. I thought he was locked in a different time, but he had been here. He had been here and so had I. We had been so close to each other in the world.

  Fifty-Eight

  While I was tipping back glasses of wine at the Danish consulate in Cairo, playing house with a married man, Leone Caetani was on the front, part of the fourth Italian regiment, fighting along Italy’s northern border. His wife, Vittoria Colonna, was waiting for him in a villa on an island on which she and their son, Onorato, were the only residents. She waited until the artist Umberto Boccioni invited himself to join her there. Boccioni painted a portrait of Onorato, the boy that Leone had never accepted even though he was the duke’s own son. The artist painted Leone Caetani’s wife’s portrait. Eventually, the artist stayed and Vittoria’s letters to Leone were fewer, revealed less. While I was tipping back glasses of wine, Ofelia was singing in a dinner club in Rome, her dark eyes as haunting as the war, her voice both mournful and stitched with a lilt of hope. When soldiers came home, they went to see her sing.

  All this was happening. None of us had met each other yet.

  * * *

  In the last week of 1960, I had circled the house to make sure the drapes were pulled shut against the cold, the doors closed. I’d found Sveva in the parlour in a chair pulled up to the fireplace, the dogs sleeping at her feet. She sat so still, I wasn’t sure if she was awake.

  “Sveva?”

  “Miss Jüül.” She didn’t turn her head. “Would you like to join me as I stoke the fire with these scraps?”

  My
eyes had adjusted to the low light and I saw that she held a stack of her sketches in both hands, slightly fanned out like a deck of cards. I moved between her and the fire. “Sveva, no.”

  “Why not? These are little – nothing – more than kindling. If I were to have any sort of artistic practice, it would need to be more than scribbling sketches on scrap paper. And I’m not going to have any sort of artistic practice, am I, Miss Jüül?”

  “Sveva, please.” I held my hand out to her. “Whatever art you can manage, you must. I’ll store these away in the basement until –” I stopped there. Until what? “Your mother is not well. She’s asleep more and more. We’ll find a way for you to do your art.”

  “Do my art? We will, will we? I recall you burning far more impressive works of mine than these. You didn’t seem so concerned with my art then.”

  “Sveva, I thought –” What had I thought? “I thought this would end sooner. I thought your mother would get better. I didn’t intend for this to happen.”

  “Well, somehow, your lack of intention and my lack of will has allowed this to happen, whatever this is.” She turned and looked at me. “I suppose this is our life.”

  “I suppose it is, for now.”

  “For now? It has been for years, Marie. It may be a new year for others, but for us? What will change?”

  “We can never know how or when things will change.”

  “Oh, but don’t you wish we could?” Sveva tugged at her hair, cut over each shoulder, pulled her head back and exposed her neck, long and pale, unmarked by sun for so long.

  * * *

  “Are you in pain?” I asked Ofelia. Dr. McMurthie had administered her medication less than an hour before, so she was likely numbed.

  “I am always in pain. I just want this to end, Marie. I want all of this to end.”

  “Here, darling.” I gave her two painkillers with water, then shook two more into my palm. “And take these to help you sleep.” Ofelia gagged a bit and held her throat as she swallowed. I stayed in the room as her breath slowed and waited until I was sure she was asleep.