The Red Thread

by Rebekah Pace

  In the gathering darkness, I could feel Old Peter’s eyes upon us again as he watched from the shadows. I pitied him, for he did not belong here. I was the one lying with Mira’s head pillowed on my shoulder. It might not be fair, but now that I was here, I wasn’t giving her up. There was nothing in his world worth going back for.

  She was silent so long I thought she had fallen asleep, but then she whispered, “What are you thinking about?”

  “About how we can’t go back to the way things—”

  “Hush.” She rolled over and straddled me. Her eyes looked as dark as the water in the pond.

  I lost count of how many times we made love on that hillside. Dinner turned into a late-night snack. With our hunger for each other temporarily satisfied, I uncorked the wine and we devoured the rest of the basket’s contents before I took her in my arms again.

  It was nearing midnight when I felt her leave the warmth of our shared blanket and slip away. I sat up and gathered the folds around me, watching her move with the grace of a doe toward the water. Ripples glittered and spread in the moonlight as she waded into the pond.

  Her voice, barely above a whisper, carried back to me. “I know you’re awake, Peter. Come, let me tell you a story.”

  The full moon seemed suspended inside the ring of the bridge. I followed a silvery path of moonlight on the dark water that led to where she waited.

  Little currents from the springs that fed the pond ran cool and wrapped themselves around my legs. In the darkness, it was easy to imagine they were tendrils of a mermaid’s hair or the long, curling fingers of a water sprite. Except for the touch of those currents, the water felt warm enough for a bath. The sand and pebbles were smooth beneath my feet.

  She backed away as I approached, coaxing me closer to the bridge. “It is said that anyone who passes under the arch during a full moon can enter another dimension.”

  We were already someplace that defied explanation, but she wanted more. I caught up to her and she framed my face in her cool, wet hands. She snared my bottom lip between her teeth, stopping just short of breaking the skin. The kiss that followed felt demanding. “Let’s try.”

  She had to tread water at the center of the pond. As the bridge loomed overhead, I expected the stones beneath my feet to grow hot, and the water to boil and emit the odor of brimstone. Instead, everything grew cooler, and I shivered, imagining I heard a hoarse cry carry across the water. I gathered her close, and she wrapped her legs around my waist.

  “Please,” she whispered. “Come through to the other side.”

  Above us, the curve of the bridge’s span rose to a dizzying height, and the water came up to my chest. The droplets that clung to her hair shone like pearls in the moonlight. Her breasts, slick and warm, pressed against me. I scanned the bank from which we’d entered the water. Old Peter was too weak to summon me back.

  I propelled her to where the arch met the water’s surface, and with her back against the bridge, we moved as one, generating waves that slapped against the stones already worn smooth. As I lost myself in the throes of passion, it was easy to imagine the bridge was alive, its heartbeat pulsing in the stone under my palm.

  19

  Mira woke me with kisses at dawn, and as we made love again, I realized this was the first time that falling asleep didn’t send me back to New Jersey. The first golden rays of sunlight, diffused by the mist rising off the water, threw the bridge into silhouette. The scene looked every bit as mystical as it had in the moonlight. Had the magic worked? If it had, what would that mean for us?

  We dressed in our rumpled clothes, and Mira twisted her hair into an untidy knot and put on her scarf. The picnic basket, emptied the night before, had replenished itself, and we breakfasted on the slope before making our way back to the car.

  On the road to Leipzig, I asked, “Are you game for another adventure?”

  “Always.”

  “Then let’s go to Bastei. It’s on the way back.” I remembered the spot from family hiking trips, and when we drew near, I found the turnoff with no trouble. While the devil’s bridge had been tucked away in a forgotten glade, the rugged sandstone crags of Bastei thrust themselves hundreds of feet in the air above deep ravines.

  We held hands as we climbed up the trail toward the jagged cliffs. The trail brought us to the Rockfall, an impressive cluster of granite spires striped with horizontal grooves worn by the elements. There we crossed a medieval-style stone bridge and took in the commanding views of the Elbe River, a ribbon of blue that wound through the fields and rolling hills below.

  Smaller rock formations and fir trees filled the gorge, and we used the telescopes mounted on the observation platform to take in the vistas. Rolling farmland stretched to the edge of a forest, which was nestled at the base of mountains that looked like the swing of a giant axe had shorn them off into flat plateaus. Farther beyond, individual hills melted into shades of blue and gray on the horizon. The landscape seemed too far reaching and enormous for just two people to occupy.

  We sat with our backs against the ramparts. “Mira, how did you know about the devil’s bridge?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you know by now not to ask too many questions?”

  I locked my lips closed with an imaginary key and tossed it away.

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it. You can still speak to me.”

  I shrugged as though there was nothing I could do now that I’d lost the key.

  She fell on me and kissed me until my lips parted in response and we ended up laughing. Her ferocious insistence on testing the legend of the devil’s bridge had given way to lightheartedness, and I wondered if her demeanor had changed because she believed the charm had worked.

  We remained at the gorge until the sun was halfway down the sky, and though I kept watch, I saw no sign of Old Peter lurking in the forest.

  On the way home, Mira dozed with her head on my shoulder, the ends of her scarf fluttering in the breeze. Gas streetlamps sprung to life with a hiss as I drove through our neighborhood, where we found both my house and Mira’s dark. I nudged her awake as I pulled up to the curb in front of her dream house. Yesterday, the windows had been bare. Now drapes blocked our view of the inside and lights glowed in every room. “I think we’re supposed to stop here.”

  “Yes, I believe we are.” She threw open the passenger door without waiting for me to come around and open it for her and was halfway to the front door before I got out of my seat. As before, it opened at her touch, and as she disappeared over the threshold, I heard her cry out.

  I hurried inside. “What?” Then I saw. It seemed as though a team of interior decorators, painters, and seamstresses had descended on the place the instant we’d left. Everything in the sitting room was as Mira had described—the blue and yellow upholstery, the cream draperies, the shiny lacquered furniture. It looked like a feature in a magazine. “Wow.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  She clapped her hands in delight. “It’s a fairy tale. The most wonderful make-believe come true.”

  I put out a restraining hand as she started up the stairs. “Hang on a minute.”

  “What?”

  “This is going to be our home, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then let me carry you over the threshold, and we’ll make it official.”

  We walked back outside, and I swept her into my arms with no effort at all. She pressed her lips to mine, and neither one of us seemed to want to break the connection.

  Finally, she whispered in Hebrew, so close our lips were still touching, “Ani leh-dodee veh-dodi-lee.”

  I stepped through the doorway and repeated the phrase in English. “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine.”

  ***

  The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was Mira’s tousled head on the pillow. I’d been able to remain w
ith her again. From that time on, the pathway between worlds seemed to close. Was this the bridge’s magic at work?

  Mira and I had toured a vacant house, just as young couples often did—and I’d watched her spin a fantasy into a home for us. As I lay beside her, I ran my fingers over her bare shoulder. She stirred and rolled over to spoon with her back against my chest. As I wrapped my arms around her, molding her shape more closely into mine, my lips brushed her hair. “What would you like to do today?”

  “Let’s stay right here.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  We lingered in bed, but only until noon. Mira was too keen to organize our new home, and that afternoon she supervised the moving of our clothes and personal things from our parents’ houses. In her childhood bedroom, she emptied her bureau drawers into a pair of heavy cardboard suitcases while I leaned on the doorjamb, watching.

  She glanced over her shoulder. “Are you staring at my underthings?”

  “Who, me?” I smothered a smile as I looked away.

  “It’s fine. Look all you like.” She gestured to the suitcase’s contents like she was presenting a prize on a game show before snapping the locks closed.

  I took hold of the handles and lifted both cases off the bed. “Is this all you need?”

  “What? No, of course not. There’s still everything in the wardrobe, and my cosmetics and curlers.”

  “Oh.” I shifted my grip on the handles. “Do you want me to drop these off and come back?”

  “I’ll come with you. I’m particular about arranging my things.”

  After I’d carried her suitcases to our new shared bedroom, I headed to my parents’ house and brought my own clothing and personal things back in one trip. Arms full, I looked for a place to set my clothes down, but hers were strewn across the bed.

  “Which drawers are mine?”

  She bit her lip and then giggled as she pointed. “Well, I guess you could have these two.”

  “Just two?”

  “How many do you need?”

  It took the rest of the day before Mira was satisfied, and though I teased her about taking up too much room in the wardrobe and the bureau, I loved to see her clothing mingled in with mine.

  If I had come back to our houses after the war, as I’d promised, and reunited with Mira, we could have had seventy years together instead of these few nights of dreams. Still, for however long it lasted, I was forever beholden to her for the gift of her love.

  We spent our days making up for lost time, unencumbered by responsibility, making love whenever we pleased, without a care about being late for work or a well-meaning mother-in-law or a nosy neighbor dropping by. Any worry I’d had about being intimate with her was long gone. Her taste and the softness of her skin had become as familiar to me as my own body.

  The clothes Mira wore made her look shapely while only hinting at what was underneath. That, I realized, was much sexier than clothes that leave too little to the imagination. Her blouses, skirts, and dresses might have seemed simple, but each outfit was a learning experience, full of hidden pathways to be navigated on the way to the goal, which was, ultimately, their removal. Hooks, snaps, zippers, ribbons, buttons—and especially the lacy garter belts that held up her stockings.

  Every room in the house had been decorated to her wishes, but I’d been so wrapped up in her that I hadn’t given a thought to the alcove off our bedroom. She’d called that space a nursery. Heavy drapes hung in the arched doorway, and I hesitated, hand trembling, before pushing them aside.

  The space was empty except for my toy airplane, which rested on the windowsill. I went downstairs to the kitchen, and when I returned, I raised the window sash in the alcove a few inches and left a lump of sugar on the sill.

  ***

  We’d been living together for about a week when I woke in the middle of the night to her twitching in her sleep. Before I could rouse her, she said, “No—please! Let me be,” and I drew my hand back. Would she reveal something in her sleep that she couldn’t tell me when she was awake? I held my breath, waiting for her to speak again, but she only thrashed and whimpered. Then she sat up with a heartrending cry.

  I switched on the bedside lamp. Mira looked possessed—glassy-eyed, her hair plastered to her sweating brow. Her unseeing eyes darted to the far corners of the room, near the nursery alcove, and she screamed.

  I couldn’t see anything. “What? What’s the matter?”

  She threw herself into my arms and, quaking with sobs, buried her face in my chest. Half an hour passed before she stopped crying. I was at a loss to comfort her.

  20

  At breakfast the next morning, Mira waved off everything but coffee. Unused to seeing her pale and listless, I cast about for something to restore her good cheer. “Let’s go spend the day at Augustusplatz.”

  “I don’t feel like going. I don’t have the energy to bike into the city.”

  “We’ll take the trolley and bring your violin.” I kissed the top of her head as I carried my dishes to the sink. “Remember? You were going to play a concert. Your finger is healed, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but do I really need to play a concert for one?”

  “For the most appreciative one.”

  She was slow about getting ready to leave, but the trolley was waiting to carry us to the city center, where the doors to the Markt were flung wide in anticipation of our arrival. I scanned the horizon and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

  At Coffee Baum, I held the door while she passed beneath the carving of Cupid offering a bowl of coffee to a Turk. Inside, the rich aroma of roasted beans seemed to emanate from the very walls, and we lingered over tiny cups of the deepest black coffee and fruit-filled pastries.

  Mira looked around the café. “I could play for you here.” Before I could protest, she cut me off. “There’s nothing wrong with an intimate concert setting. Especially for a small, appreciative audience.”

  “Maybe another day. This time, I want to watch you on a big stage.” I held out my hand. “Come on, let’s walk around for a while first.”

  We strolled through the shops in the arcade, a narrow alleyway under a soaring roof made of small-paned glass windows. I studied everything, from the merchandise to the shopkeeper’s ledgers, searching for a calendar or a check—anything that could speak to when we were. So far, I’d seen nothing in the dream world with the date on it.

  We were around twenty-two, maybe twenty-five years old at the most. That would place us in the 1950s, but our clothing was no different from the styles our parents had worn in the 1930s. The Mercedes was definitely pre-war vintage, and I’d noticed none of the advances in technology, like record players, radios, and televisions that should have been available to us when we were young adults. The record player at Mira’s house was the same one they’d had when we were children, operated with a crank instead of electricity. I looked behind the counter in the stationery shop. “Have you seen a telephone?”

  She gave me a sidelong look. “Who were you planning to call?”

  “No one. I was just thinking.” Without the Second World War, many great minds would have been spared an untimely death. What might they have invented to advance society? What weapons of war might never have existed at all?

  I wasn’t naïve enough to believe that erasing one terrible chapter in our history would make the world perfect. Time spent in this static version of utopia left me wishing for a little imperfection every now and then, and I itched to accomplish things I’d never done. Mira had called our dream world a fairy tale—and fairy tales always had an element of darkness. Every story revolved around a curse that must be broken, or a task to test the hero’s worth, before the players could live happily ever after.

  After the arcade, we crossed the square in front of the New Town Hall, bound for the university library. Mira ran lightly up the marble stairs to the music s
ection and made selections from the sheet music on the shelves, stacking it on one of the reading tables. Sunlight flooded the room, and a smile played over her lips as she sat and began flipping through the pages. She glanced up. “You don’t have to stay with me.”

  “It’s fine. I don’t mind waiting for you.”

  She shooed me away with a flick of her hand. “Go. I know you’re itching to look for something that interests you.”

  “All right.” With a wary glance around the empty room, I headed back into the hall and up one floor, to the history section. Though I checked dozens of books on Europe and Germany, I found no mention of Adolf Hitler, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, or the Nuremburg Laws against Jews. No Kristallnacht. No concentration camps. That meant eleven million civilians and twenty million members of the military had not died as a result of war.

  As I passed beneath the marble archways in the hall, I pondered the difference between this reality and the one I had already lived. With such a destructive chapter in history erased, who knows what those people whose lives were spared might have contributed to society. Germany would have had unlimited potential for good. But none of those people were here. Only Mira and me.

  In the reading room, clusters of leather club chairs and lamplit library tables could have accommodated dozens of patrons. I went straight to the rack on the wall for the most current edition of Leipziger Volkszeitung, but none of the newspapers and magazines I found were dated later than 1925, three years before I was born. There were no current events—only history.

  Before I could head off to the science section, Mira crept up behind me and whispered my name. She giggled when I jumped. “Are you finished?” She carried an armload of sheet music and her violin case.

  “You don’t have to whisper just because we’re in the library. There’s no one to disturb.”

  “What about you? I thought I’d startle you if I raised my voice.”