Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  “Compared to what?” Rosella asked.

  He pushed up his sleeve and showed her the back of his arm where a patch of hair had been singed away and still hadn’t grown back. “Bunsen burner. Magnesium oxide experiment.”

  Rosella cringed. “I’ve got one uglier than that.” She rolled up her sleeve and showed a paler slash on the brown of her forearm. “Hot glue, last holiday season.”

  Emil winced. He held up his left hand, showing her the patch of tightened, shinier skin that crossed two fingers. “Reconstituting stearic acid. Tube clamp slipped.”

  She pulled down the neck of her sweater. A thin scar notched across her collarbone. “Leather awl, two years ago.”

  Emil sucked air in through his teeth. “What the hell were you doing, hugging it?”

  She laughed.

  He had made her laugh.

  He would probably never have the kind of charm his mother had, the kind that softened everything. She could critique how someone was arranging strawberries haphazardly in a tart or setting an oven at the wrong temperature, and it would sound like a compliment. She would take knives out of friends’ hands or stop them in the middle of salting meat. No, no, ma chérie, you must do it this way. And always she made it sound less like she was correcting them and more like she was sharing some family secret. You don’t do that, his mother said when people turned on the stove too early and then shut it off again. You don’t heat up a pan and then cool it down and then start it back up again. The oil, the metal, they are ready the first time.

  It wasn’t a talent Emil had inherited. The same as how he’d missed whatever gene made his mother and father the kind of academics everyone wanted at dinner parties, the kind whose historical facts drunk people loved—did you know there was a kind of marriage between men in medieval France? Affrèrement!

  Emil would probably turn out to be the kind of academic written off as pedantic by everyone except his cat.

  But he could do this. He could, sometimes, when he was lucky, make Rosella Oliva laugh, even while he was trying not to think of kissing that scar on her collarbone.

  Graham Davies passed by on the sidewalk. “Hey, Hot Pocket.”

  She was down the block so fast Emil couldn’t even tell which one of them she’d been talking to.

  Rosella looked like she wanted to hide behind the hardware store’s sidewalk sign.

  Emil opened his mouth, hesitated, tried again. “Do I even want to know?”

  Rosella answered before he was done asking. “Absolutely not.”

  Strasbourg, 1518

  There is satisfaction in feeling something crumble beneath her hands. Lala puts her arm and her anger into it, the grinding of oak galls.

  When the oak galls are ground, there is still rage in her hands, so she kneads hot-water dough for the gougère.

  “You are fortunate.” Tante Dorenia stands alongside.

  “Oh?” Lala asks. “And why is that?”

  Tante inspects the rhythm of Lala’s palms. “Because in your great-great-great-grandmother’s day, la gougère was prepared in a sheep’s stomach.”

  Lala kneads on, not in the mood for Tante’s history tutoring.

  “Lala,” Tante says. “Why does the hare run to the forest?”

  Lala tries to smile.

  Garude lava, the kind of riddles Lala’s father, Tante’s own brother, so loved.

  “Because the forest will not run to the hare,” Lala says.

  “And who is the brother who runs after his brother but can never catch him?”

  The thought of the miller’s son glaring rises in Lala’s throat like bile.

  She turns over the dough, still warm on her hands. “Is that all you can think of? Riddles?” The rage that kneading the dough calmed now flares. “Why did you bring us here?”

  “Because this was where we could afford to live,” Tante says.

  “Not this house.” Lala looks up from her kneading. “Why Strasbourg?”

  “Because it is a free city, not beholden to laws either French or German,” Tante says, her voice trimmed down to a whisper. “Because we needed a place large enough to let us disappear and large enough for us to sell our blue. Because I knew there were families we could help here.”

  Yes, Lala wants to say. And look how long it was before the gadje took even that.

  “But why here?” Lala asks. “Why a place where they walk the streets with such hate in their hearts?”

  “There is hate in all hearts.” Tante takes Lala by her sleeve. “I should think you would know that by now.”

  “And in your heart?” Lala asks. “What do you have for me and Alifair?”

  Tante’s gaze sharpens. Not in anger. More like Lala has caught her attention.

  “I heard you,” Lala says. “Four years ago. With the elder.”

  Tante looks not even a little surprised.

  “The only defense you had for Alifair is that he hadn’t touched me,” Lala says. “So what is your defense of us now?” Her voice grows defiant. She knows she sounds younger but she cannot stop it. “What is it you think of us now?”

  “I think it is against Romanipen,” Tante says. “And I think you know that.”

  “So is your remaining unmarried.”

  Tante’s stare grows hard edges. “And I have not judged you, or him. So don’t you dare stand in judgment of me.”

  Lala feels herself both shrinking and returning the glare.

  With a sigh, Tante’s face softens. “I have only feared for the lives you will have. They are difficult enough each on your own. But together”—she pauses, closes and opens her mouth, as though collecting her words—“what is it you want me to tell you? What fairy story do you wish to believe? That you two being together would lessen your burden? That you both carrying something you must hide would make this life easier for you? That is not the way the world works. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many of us who feel we have no choice but to marry gadje.”

  “Why is it that you have choices more than the rest of us?” Lala asks. “You do what you like.” It is times such as this that Lala feels how small the years between them are, the gap more between an older and younger sister than between a mother and daughter. “You never have to draw yourself back or hide anything.”

  “I am with child,” Tante says.

  The words cut off any Lala has left. They drift away as quietly as woad seeds on the wind.

  So much of the strangeness comes in the sudden remembering that her bibio has a whole life of which she knows nothing. She does not know whom Tante admires and whom she despises, not beyond what Tante tells her. Lala has been too caught in the weave of her own worry.

  “Who?” is all the answer Lala can manage.

  “Onfroi,” Tante says.

  It takes Lala a moment to place the name.

  “The flax farmer?” she asks. She has rarely thought of the man by his Christian name. “But … he is so old.”

  “Everyone looks old when you’re sixteen,” Tante says, as though she herself is eighty. She is young enough and beautiful enough that boys Lala’s age leer at her.

  “Did you want to?” Lala asks, and even as she says the words she hears how clumsy they are. She does not know how to ask any other way.

  “Yes,” Tante says. “I did.”

  Lala falls into relief and then wonderment. The man is quiet and plain as a pail of milk, so what could Tante have seen in him? Does she watch him scattering the flax seed in April, stooking the sheaves in September, and find it graceful as a dance? Does he stroke her hair like the pure strands of linen combed from the stalks?

  “Then you love him?” Lala asks.

  Tante gives a small shrug. “I am fond enough of him. And he is a dear friend.”

  “But do you love him?”

  The roll of Tante’s eyes flutters her lashes. “Yes, a love to move the heavens, he and I.”

  The things Lala comes to understand in a single instant knit themselves together.

 
; Her aunt has lain with a man she perhaps cares for, but does not truly love. Whether it happened once or a dozen times, it has got her a baby. This is why she has taken to her bed so often, a week’s worth of mornings. This is why she cannot stand when the air inside grows stagnant and ripe, why she refuses the lift of thyme and marjoram, the fresh sharpness of parsley for the settling of her stomach.

  She will not eat greens, because she will not risk the life of her baby.

  This is why she would not join everyone else at the city dance, for fear of losing a child. With as many souls as have leapt into their own graves, Tante would not risk dancing to nothing the life inside her.

  Lala’s fear spins into a desire to pack as many of their things as they can, take Tante’s and Alifair’s hands, and pull them out of Strasbourg. She would take them to the far meadows of the Alsatian countryside, the forest, or the low, green mountains of the Vogesen. Or deep in the Black Forest where Alifair was born. Anywhere free from dancing plagues and suspicious eyes.

  Lala looks for a rise in Tante’s stomach. Her skirts and apron are loose enough, and Tante holds herself upright enough, that if she had told Lala nothing, it might have been another month before she noticed the slight curve.

  The only further reply Lala can manage is, “When?”

  “October, I think,” Tante says. “Maybe November.”

  Autumn. They will welcome this baby into the world amid the amber flurry of beech leaves tumbling from their branches.

  If they all survive until then.

  Not just Lala and Alifair and Tante, but now the small life inside Tante.

  Each time Lala breathes, she discovers there is more to lose.

  “Lala,” Tante says.

  Lala looks up.

  “Who is one who goes to town and stays there?” Tante says.

  Lala shakes her head, to say she does not know this one.

  “A road,” her aunt says.

  An idea flares within Lala, and catches fire.

  Any blame cast toward Lala will stain not only her, but Alifair, and Tante, and now Tante’s child. And the dancers cannot be made to stop, so it is the affliction itself that must be stanched.

  If it will take a cure to the fever to spare them all from being blamed, Lala will defy the laws of the earth and the heavens to see it end.

  She will defy even the dead.

  Rosella

  I snuck into the workroom, slipping into this world whose colors shifted every time I crossed the threshold. Tonight it was heeled shoes the gold of saffron threads. Slippers that looked made of olive leaves. Beading as delicate as hoarfrost.

  If the shoes sealed to my feet were made by my abuelo and taken apart by my abuela, then maybe, somewhere in their things, was something that could help me pry them off.

  On a high shelf sat my abuela’s sewing box, the top upholstered in worn cloth. I took it down, setting it on the floor and kneeling in front of it. It held the things my parents no longer used, but couldn’t even think about throwing out. Needles still holding the last of thread dye lots. A moss-green measuring tape gone brittle with age. Bits of my grandparents’ favorite velvets and satins. Old tea tins filled with straight pins.

  A seam ripper.

  My eyes caught on its point, still gleaming silver even after years untouched.

  The workroom door creaked open.

  I whirled around.

  “What are you doing down there?” my father asked.

  With my hands in the sewing box, and the red shoes glinting on my feet, I almost, almost thought of telling him.

  But every way I could explain felt like these needles, sharp, and so easily dropped and lost. How would I tell him that I had sewn these beautiful shoes back together, and this was what had come of it, a terrifying fever dream?

  And what could my father do for me? I was the one who had done this. I had made Briar Meadow’s magic flinty and dangerous. My hands, my body, had turned the gentle enchantment of red shoes to a bitter spell.

  The thought of disgracing my family, and their craft, was a deeper ache than the soreness in my tendons. My great-grandparents had worked to get out of the maquiladoras. They had learned this trade in the poison air from the blowdown stacks, from fingertips lost to equipment that never got kept up, palms stained with burning varnish. They had gotten out, and they had turned all of it into their craft.

  Everything my family had worked for. If anyone found out about my red shoes, I would ruin it all.

  “Nothing.” I shut the sewing box. “It’s silly.”

  My father opened the woven top of the basket. “It’s not silly.” He took one of the beads rattling around in the top tray and looped it onto a length of indigo thread. “I miss them too.”

  He gave my red shoes a pained glance.

  “Especially this year,” he said, with a sad smile that cracked my heart in two.

  I said nothing, and then I bristled under the lie of my own silence.

  I would have to come back for that seam ripper later, in the dark, while my parents slept.

  My father tied the bead onto my neck. In the hollow of my collarbone, it looked like a rose hip.

  It grew heavy with the weight of lying to my own father, about his own parents.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  As she approaches la cathédrale in the early dawn, she prays into her hands. Not just into her palms and fingers, but into three blue ribbons cupped in the hollow.

  Until she reaches the cave of Saint Vitus, these dyed ribbons, laced with her prayers, are all the protection she can leave for those she loves.

  The thought of the forested road to Saverne casts a shiver onto her back. But she must go. The stares of Strasbourg’s wives, the piercing gaze of the miller’s son, drive her on. If she cannot stop la fièvre de la danse, there is only so long before she, and Alifair, and Tante will be blamed for it.

  Tante, with her baby growing inside her.

  As Lala steps through the cathedral’s heavy door and into the nave, her stomach both hollows with awe and roils in revulsion. The vaulted stone of the ceilings seems to reach heaven itself. The stained glass looks like rainbows woven together. The gilded pulpit gleams with the same gold from which the city mint stamps coins.

  Geld und gut. Gold and goods. It is a song that men hold dearer on their tongues than any prayer or communion host. All this, built off the wealth of wine and grains, off the profit of the cannon foundries, and off the backs of those so poor they sell their last seed to pay their taxes.

  All this, built on marsh, so soft that wooden piles had to be driven deep into the earth and then tipped with iron just so the ground could support the weight of the stone.

  Lala passes the Dreikönigsuhr, the Three Kings Clock of iron and gilded copper. She stares with wonder at the wooden rooster that, at appointed times, spreads his wings and opens his beak to reveal a clockwork tongue. The astrolabe dials and the carillon of bells always seemed like a kind of forbidding magic.

  The astrolabe. A reminder that the Strasbourgeois consider each illness to correspond to a configuration in the sky.

  Lala has become, to them, some wicked star.

  She tucks the ribbons into her pocket. Alongside the waldglas bottle they seem nearly weightless.

  A silent prayer to Sara la Kali mixes with the taste of hyssop still on her tongue, the green, bitter tone of protection and penitence.

  With a glance over her shoulder, she nears the stone steps that lead down.

  She takes a last full breath, as though plunging into water.

  But just as she means to throw herself in, a candle and a cassocked form emerges from the shadows.

  Her heart and throat tighten as one.

  “Lavinia?” the priest asks.

  At the familiar voice, Lala catches her breath.

  It is a voice she is more used to hearing at l’Église Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux. He is one of the few kind priests left in Strasbourg, one who does not press money from his poorest parishioners s
o he can dress in furs. One who polishes altar rails himself, telling the acolytes to go home to their families before dark.

  And one, it seems, that the canon priests, the ones who wear jeweled rings and sire children by their mistresses, have pressed into guarding the cathedral crypt.

  “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “I…” She means to lie, but in the presence of this man, with his thinning, silvering hair and soft eyes, only half a lie comes. “I came to bless the dead.”

  He pauses. “It’s good of you,” he says, hesitating. “But I fear I cannot allow it.”

  “Please,” she says, desperation so deep in her voice it wavers. “I cannot sleep until I have done it.”

  For just a moment, the light he carries seems to take flight.

  The priest places the candle in Lala’s hand.

  “Recall the Gospel of Matthew,” the priest says. “The story of The Demons and the Pigs.”

  Lala grasps the candle, trying not to let her bristling show. The Demons and the Pigs? Which one is he about to declare her?

  “Remember that it was not only demons who were cast out into pigs,” the priest says. “It was our very Lord who was then cast out from the whole region.”

  She tries to grasp the words, but they slip from her hands. He cannot be likening her to Christ more than the demons.

  The priest lowers his gaze. “Powerful men may count you as lowly as an animal, Lavinia,” he says, “but remember that the Lord counts men hating you as a sign of that which is holy within you.”

  It is a small gift, only a few words. But the weight of them is enough that Lala can barely hold them. For just a moment, they lift the stain of the rotted fruit, and the bailiff’s words, and the oath that still lingers bitter on her tongue.

  The priest glances over his shoulder into the dark. “If I were to see you approaching the crypt”—he looks back to her—“I would be obliged to stop you.”

  She understands only when he turns his back, repeats, “If I were to see you,” and saunters toward the shadows beneath the Three Kings Clock.

  Lala breathes out, and takes this small light with her into the dark.