Lost

  “I don’t know whose hands they are and I don’t care.”

  “They’re yours. You are trying to intimidate me with tactics borrowed from some campy American movie.”

  “I don’t go around making impressions of my hands in wet cement like some starlet outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Give me a break, Allegra.”

  “Put your hands in there and let me see that the prints aren’t yours, then.”

  “I’ll do no such thing. Look, I didn’t ask you in.”

  “This is the last straw,” said Allegra. Her voice went up, to compete with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who’d moved on to another meditation on loss. “I did fourteen impressions over the past week, what with the holidays coming, and when I go to finish them with glaze and framing I find sixteen tiles. I won’t have it. These are not child’s hands! Put your hands in here, Winnie, and show me they’re not yours.”

  Ruminatively Winnie took the tile and then shattered it against the wall, which left a chalky scrape and flung plaster crumbs on the bedspread. “Rather friable, your work. Must be a lot of repeat business from clumsy kids running to show their grandparents your handiwork.”

  “John is right.”

  “John is right about what?”

  “You really are mad.”

  “I am not mad. I’m not even annoyed. Maybe you did these in your sleep. Ever think of that?”

  “Right. I’m leaving now. Shall I let John know you’ve moved out? Since I take it you’re being incommunicado again?”

  Winnie stood up and went to her suitcase, and laboriously heaved it up. “I could use some help getting this down the stairs, if you’re that eager to see me go.”

  Allegra set down the remaining tile on the edge of the bookcase. “Now hang fire, Winnie. I’m saying things I oughtn’t because I’m upset about this. Let me take it back. I know things are hard. I shouldn’t have accused you.”

  “Let me just go,” said Winnie, with some degree of exhaustion.

  “I’ll help you,” said Allegra. “Allow me that much, as apology.” Winnie tried not to suppose that Allegra offered so she could report to John that with her own eyes she had seen Winnie actually pack up and leave.

  “All right,” she said.

  By the time they were on the ground floor, huffing with the effort of hauling the luggage, some of Winnie’s irritation had dissipated. “I’m sorry about breaking your tile,” said Winnie. “I just really, really resent being accused of madness if I have nothing productive to show for it, okay?”

  Allegra looked poised for flight, but ventured, “You could have had the tile if you hadn’t broken it.”

  Winnie laughed. “If I go mad, I’m going to keep very careful notes so I can write a self-help book from the other side and make a million bucks. You know, if you weren’t so edgy, I’d tell you even more to make you mistrust me. There’s another twist, this time involving weird Mrs. Maddingly.”

  “Well, finding those tiles was upsetting,” said Allegra. “What would you have thought? Having your home broken into is not delightful.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  They were at the corner where Allegra would turn to head up Rowancroft Gardens, and Winnie set course for the Tube station. “Well, you might as well tell me,” said Allegra.

  “So that you have more dirt on me to laugh about with John? Not in this lifetime.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Allegra. “I don’t laugh about you with John. John and I aren’t even seeing each other anymore, actually.”

  Winnie looked at Allegra over the top of her glasses. A ploy of some sort? But to what end? “That’s not what I get from John.”

  “John would say what he wanted to get what he needed, wouldn’t he?” said Allegra. “I mean, I love the bloke, but he is a bloke.”

  “What does he need, though? From me?”

  “He needs you—oh, why should I say? What business is it of mine?”

  “It has to be someone’s business,” said Winnie, starting to tear up. “Something has to be someone’s business, or where are we all?”

  “All right,” said Allegra crossly. “But I’m not standing here gossiping in the cold. Nor am I inviting you back to my house. Too awkward.”

  “Because John still has a key.”

  “He does,” she said defiantly, “and he’s welcome to use it when he likes. Come on. Have you been to Zinc’s? It’s on the site of the old White Horse Pub down Flask Walk. It’s a really trendy little place, so overpriced even for Hampstead that it won’t last long. We can get a drink in the bar. There’s a jazz trio most evenings and they don’t play too loudly.”

  They had to wait for a table, but when one came free they dove upon it, poking away other after-work party animals. In a few moments they had settled with two tall glasses of Pimms. The jazz trio turned out to be a pianist accompanying a blonde chanteuse in a classic black cocktail sheath. “A far cry from Schubert,” murmured Winnie.

  “Or maybe not all that far,” she added, when the singer segued into “I Get Along Without You Very Well.”

  They sipped and didn’t talk for a while.

  “I do wonder,” said Winnie, when enough time seemed to have passed, “what reason John gave you for his mounting this disappearing act for my benefit.”

  “Winifred. I do heartily object to getting involved.”

  “Another round,” said Winnie to the waiter. When two more Pimms arrived, she continued, “John’s likely to have said something to you.”

  Allegra remarked, “John is more circumspect than you might give him credit for being. He is, after all, English.”

  “Really.” Winnie tried not to be too sincere. “It might help. It might help me, I mean, to know what he’s doing, and why.” She felt downright naked and disgusting.

  “ ‘It all depends on you,’” sang the cocktail waitress, fingering her pearls and biting them in well-practiced syncopation between notes.

  “Oh, John,” said Allegra, shrugging, yielding, Winnie could see it.

  “If he has a key, it might after all have been our own John who made those handprints, and left you a mark.”

  “He’d never.” Defensively.

  “But he’d say of me that I might?”

  “He wouldn’t know what to say of you. That’s the truth.”

  “But what does he say of me?” Winnie leaned forward. “Come on now. I’m about to go. I’ve got my last suitcase packed and I’ve been forced out. What’s to lose now? Tell me.”

  She saw Allegra hesitating again. The damn reserve of the En-glish! Winnie pressed her. “What does he say about Romania?”

  “You really do have me pegged wrongly, Winnie. I know he went there with you and that things went bad. Don’t ask me to reveal his secrets. You might as well tell me what happened there.”

  But that was what Winnie couldn’t do.

  Aspects of a novelty. The long white walls of snow built up on either side of the road. The romance going through a hundred permutations, as, daily, they were kept from moving on. Doroftei bringing pine branches into her room, and the haunting smell of Christmas hanging about. Real beeswax candles when the power went out. Soon they had to huddle not for sex but for warmth.

  An apple left on a bedside table froze overnight--nothing but mealy pulp in the morning.

  “It’s not as if I mind now. I might have once,” said Allegra, “but not now. I have my own fellow. Look, you who need everything spelled out, look.” She went pawing through her purse as the chanteuse began another torch song, this one a hymn to hopelessness, another rough music. The accompaniment was organized around a three-note motif, obsessively reiterated, the last note always falling, missing the mark. A breath rising but always falling.

  “Not a day goes by,

  Not a single day

  But you’re somewhere a part of my life

  And it looks like you’ll stay.”

  “This isn’t worth it,” said Allegra, the drink blurring her speech and blunting
her fingers. She fumbled at the catch of the wallet. “I mean this regretting music, sung over a man.” She was trying to make a point about Winnie and John. “Can you imagine? All these torch songs are about obsessive-compulsive nymphos or something. Here, look.”

  She had located a snapshot in her wallet. She tossed it, derisively, on the table toward Winnie. “There he is, my new beau. A few months now.”

  Winnie looked. In the dark she could hardly see it. “Very nice. Very handsome.”

  “Maybe you know him. Malcolm Rice?”

  “Old guy? Not John’s investment adviser? What do you know. And whatever does John think of that?”

  “Oh, you know John.”

  “No, not anymore. That’s the problem, isn’t it?” She took a huge swallow. “Look, maybe I better just go.”

  “Come on, stay till the end of the set anyway. Don’t you want more of these sad songs? In a perverse way they make you feel better. I miss John too, you know. In my fashion.”

  “As the days go by,

  I keep thinking, ‘When will it end?

  Where’s the day I’ll have started forgetting?’

  But I just go on

  Thinking and sweating

  And cursing and crying

  And turning and reaching

  And waking and dying. . . .”

  It was Winnie’s turn to fumble through her purse, looking for a ten-pound note.

  “You called Malcolm the first night you arrived, didn’t you?” said Allegra. “I was at Malcolm’s that night, though John was off in Latvia, I think.”

  “Denmark. Or so he told me. Did John know about you two already?”

  “Of course. He introduced us.”

  “For the purposes of romance?”

  “Oh, well. As you know. Romance arises when least expected.”

  As you know. Winnie was so eager to leave now she tore at the Velcro fastening her purse and a sheaf of business cards, credit cards, and other slips of paper spilled out, some on the floor. “Sorry,” said Winnie. “At least here’s the money. I can’t stay, Allegra, though it was nice of you to ask me out. Sorry. I really am leaving, I’m leaving entirely. Leaving London, leaving John, leaving. Just going. Sorry. Sorry.”

  Allegra had leaned down to pick up what had fluttered to the floor. “Twenty quid,” said Allegra, sitting up. “Ooh, I’m light-headed. Thank you, Pimms. And here, some old underground passes by the look of it, and a photo. You have a new man too?” The photo was facing Winnie and she snatched for it, but Allegra already had rotated it and picked it up.

  “Oh,” said Allegra, “oh, what a sweetheart!”

  “Give it to me, give it to me, give it to me.”

  “Yes, of course. I’m sorry. Of course. But he’s so darling! How old is he?”

  Her hands closed on the snapshot, the only one. It felt rimmed over with hoarfrost. The singer concluded her song as Winnie stood.

  “So there’s hell to pay

  And until I die

  I’ll die day after day after day after day after day after day after day

  Till the days go by.”

  Winnie couldn’t speak. Pine boughs choked her esophagus.

  “Winnie, I’m sorry. Lord, I’m sorry. Look, let me get you a minicab anyway.”

  The baby’s face in a three-quarter shot, showing his scrappy hair, his poky little nose, his serious eyes, his tentative toothless smile.

  “Not a day goes by

  Not a single day

  But you’re somewhere a part of my life

  And it looks like you’ll stay.”

  The heat was off for the next two days. Wendy slept in her good wool coat, a pair of leggings pulled over her head down to her ears, her hair tucked up into the waistband, the legs tied together in a topknot. It could have made such droll comedy. So much for romance, anyway; the electric naked skin of John was no longer available. Even huddling together with all their clothes mounded on top of the bed it was just too cold to be intimate.

  Ice had brought the phone lines down, and there was no way to contact Emil. She did her best not to think about it.

  On the morning of the third day power was restored and the hotel furnace began to cough and kick. Pipes had frozen all over the building. Laborers came wandering through the rooms without knocking to look for water damage in the plaster and to trace the source of the trouble. By now it seemed John and Wendy were married to each other, and they would never leave Bras¸lov. To avoid being surprised by hotel employees, they spent the third day of the snow emergency in the hotel lobby, in full outside gear, reading paperback copies of Georgette Heyer and Jeffrey Archer, the only books in English they could find in the rack.

  But on the fourth day Costal Doroftei showed up, having located gasoline somewhere, and having learned that the roads were cleared again at least as far as Rupuea. He was full of beans and declared that it was time to set out, and they would take a hearty meal wrapped in newspapers to protect against hunger. They managed to wheedle two handfuls of potato chips from the aggrieved kitchen staff. The lone bottle of water froze before they were an hour on the road.

  But they were on the road again, that was the important thing, skimming treacherously along the valley floors and hillsides, making their way slowly north and west without incident, through Feldiorara into tiny M(breve)aierus. Except for a few carriages mounded to twice their height with hay, obviously dispatched for the emergency feeding of snow-locked livestock, there was nothing but the occasional emergency vehicle on the road. This was not so surprising, for the road seemed unsure of itself, at times less a plowed passage than a curve in snowdrifts carved by the wind.

  They found a café in M(breve)aierus that gave hot dense coffee, sweet as melted pecan pie; Wendy chewed the grounds for nourishment. She hadn’t realized how hungry she’d been. At the hotel she’d had little appetite, so she had paid scant attention when the food ran thin, and the bread plates were empty in the morning.

  M(breve)aierus on to Rupuea, its little clutch of houses with roofs made blunt, prettified, by thirty inches of snow. On again to Vân(breve)atori, where they had a car accident. They left Doroftei to scream at the driver of the other vehicle, and Wendy and John took what shelter they could in the frozen hulk of a church with an unlocked front door.

  By late in the day they reached Sighisoara at last, on the north slopes of the Transylvanian Alps. It was a picturesque town, perhaps more so for the blandishments of the blizzard. Gated buildings and Romanesque towers, streets that ran beneath stone arches. “Oh,” said Doroftei, rising to the occasion, “Sighisoara she is our city having most beauty. She is full of the bright unknowns, she is thorouffly populate. Very very well known to her peoples who live here.”

  They stopped and asked for directions. Doroftei fell into a long and muttered conversation with a police officer. Then Doroftei shrugged and spat and nodded, and when he turned back to his passengers he said, “He is not wanting me to show you Asylum, so he is not telling me where she is. I say him we go back to Brasov, but I lie. With police you must always lie with very clean teeth showing. I ask another peoples.”

  He did. Their destination was not far, but the car could not manage the streets anymore; in the older part of the city, the lanes were too mounded with snow. The travelers abandoned the car and Wendy most of her parcels. She brought only her purse and documents, and she made John carry a plastic string bag with cold stuffed animals inside.

  The Asylum, as Doroftei called it, listed like a sandcastle, the stonework of its ground floor flaring at the base. The walls of the upper two levels had been painted some fierce orange color that, in the decades since its last repair, had faded to a warm and milky coral, not unlike a Venetian palazzo.

  The gate was open. Unshoveled stone steps rose a full flight to a pair of double doors. Doroftei kicked and thrashed his way up, saying, “You wait, you wait here for governor to permit you entry,” but they didn’t wait. Not after all this time. Wendy pushed into the huge icy foyer,
and stood under several dark oil paintings of saints levitating on sunny afternoons. They were hung so high that the paintings themselves seemed to be levitating into the gloom.

  No light cast from the wall sconces. Power still off here.

  An adult was wailing upstairs in a back room.

  “Jesus,” said Wendy, “Asylum is the right word. Not a moment too soon!”

  John gripped her hand. Doroftei had disappeared down a hallway, opening doors, calling. He was hustled back into the lobby by an old man with a broom, yelling at him and threatening him. Doroftei raised his voice and his fist, and struck the old man. “Stop, you bastard,” said John ineffectually, but before more could be done, a couple of young women, hardly more than girls, appeared in the gloom at a railing overhead. One of them called down, English lightened with an old-fashioned rural Irish accent, “And are ye Americans, then, come all this way, the loves?”

  “We’re here,” said Wendy. Craning upward, pushing past John and Doroftei, mounting four steps, one hand on the rail, the other hand clutching the small photo, her heart in her throat, glad to hear English spoken again, and by women no less. “We’ve come, the snow kept us, we’re later than we said. Where are the babies?”

  “Oh, Mother of God, I couldn’t begin to tell ye’s what they do for a mortuary in this black pit of a place,” said the one who had spoken earlier. “Ask your translator to find out from old Ion, who ye have standing right there before ye.”

  “Kathleen,” said the other in a moment, “they’ve not heard the news.”

  “Oh, Jaysus,” said Kathleen, running down the steps, turning corners, her face appearing again and again over the diagonal of the rail, getting closer, larger, as the words fell on them like stones, “ye haven’t come all this way for your baby, then, without knowing? Oh, Jaysus have mercy.” She was crying, clearly not for the first time but all over again, in a way that might never stop. “They’ve all died, the whole lot that stopped here the week last. The eight of them died of exposure in the nursery when their nanny died and let the fire go out.”