Kathleen paused seven or eight steps up, unwilling to come near the small photo that Wendy held out.
Winnie bought a Zone 1–2 travelcard, but she didn’t use it. She just needed a place to dump her big suitcase. It was too heavy to carry. She regretted the sweat and bother to the law enforcement officials who would need to have it sniffed for Semtex. And she regretted running out on poor Allegra. But really there was no choice.
She stood at a corner. For a minute it didn’t even seem like London, but some city of the dead. Everyone rushing, everyone stalled in the traffic of NW3. She could not bear to go into a shop, nor back to John’s, nor forward—to Romania? To Boston? The pain that had broken behind her breastplate made of her interior a hollow sack. Turn as she would, in her plans, in her schemings, there seemed little hope of relief.
Unable to settle on a destination, she wandered up and down the slopes of Hampstead. She paused outside Keats’s house in Downshire Hill and murmured, “The world is too much with us, late and soon,” before remembering the line was Wordsworth’s. She pushed on. She passed the church building in which the Beatles were said to have recorded Abbey Road, and singsonged “in my ears and in my eyes,” but was “Penny Lane” from Abbey Road? She wasn’t doing very well. She passed the Victorian pile said to belong to Boy George and kept her mouth shut.
How gray the world seemed, how savage and hollow, with winter coming on, with Christmas jangling its tinsel bones and jeering its carols. Eventually however the gluttony let up and even Hampstead shops closed their doors to the purchasing public. She didn’t want to drink anymore, nor to see people trying hard to be cheery. But the cold was coming on, and since she also didn’t want to ride the Tube like an indigent person she found herself walking through one of the few doors that stayed open all night, the emergency clinic at the Royal Free Hospital.
She wandered upstairs, pretending she was a nurse reporting late for her shift. The hall lights were partly dimmed. Coded pings occasionally echoed down the halls.
With effort and zeal Mrs. Maddingly’s roommates were snoring. Between them, Mrs. Maddingly looked at Winnie out of frightened eyes, as a hostage will stare from above its gagged mouth. But her mouth was free; her lips rotated and worried over soundless syllables.
Winnie sat close and pitched her voice low so as not to wake the roommates. “There isn’t any need of this. Don’t abuse an old lady. Gervasa. I’m talking to you. I don’t know who or what you are but I’m making contact. Gervasa—is that how it’s said? If you want a hostage, take me. Leave Mrs. Maddingly alone. You with the slashed cross—is that sign the denial of Christian solace?—or defiance of it?—well, I’m an atheist, you wouldn’t find better quarters than I. I have no need of my life. I don’t know what you do but make your move. I’m on offer.”
She leaned forward and gripped both of Mrs. Maddingly’s hands. The old woman held on, hung on. The grasp was stronger than an old woman’s should be. She said something in that dead language; Winnie couldn’t get it. “Don’t talk,” said Winnie, “just come aboard.”
Once as a girl Winnie had fallen backward off a swing. She had been pumping very hard, and out of a suicidal glee at flight she had simply let go. Her back had hit the ground first and knocked the breath out of her. The slam of her skull rattled her brains. At first she’d thought she was dead. Still she actually managed to roll over on her side and then get up, not breathing, and she had begun to wander toward some grown-up at the edge of the playground. She didn’t know what she would do when she got there, as she was trying to draw breath to scream and couldn’t. She merely wanted to indicate to the grown-up, to mime if need be, “I just want to let you know that I realize I’m about to die, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it”—when at last the first knife-thrust of breath cut through again, reviving her sense both of destiny and of incipient disaster lurking somewhere further out, waiting for her.
The memory of that accident—like a foretaste of Sighis¸oara—came back now, with her hands trembling. She shuddered, not able to tell if she was being drilled in the sinuses or drained of blood. Perhaps, like Alice after the tea cake, she was suddenly grown larger than the rest of the world could accommodate. It was a physical rather than a mental sensation, but to the extent she could observe herself, she was merely leaning forward in an intrusive position, grabbing onto Mrs. Maddingly’s hands, and quivering.
Then she slumped into a chair and began to lose consciousness. The last thing she heard was Mrs. Maddingly’s voice, somewhat tentative but very much her own, saying, “And if I find they’ve cut my hair, I’ll write a disapproving letter to the Times and carry it down there myself. Bring me a mirror.”
“Yes, I know her,” said a voice.
“Winnie Rudge. There’ll be a purse, surely, have you looked? Yes, I see. Oh, yes, well that’s her married name. Winifred Pritzke née Rudge, then. Though I don’t know that she’s still married. Certainly separated and likely divorced. Can it be of much importance? I should very much like to speak to the clinician on duty if you don’t mind.”
She tried to stir, if only to give her middle initial. W.
“Is she sleeping? Have you put her on medication already?”
“Is it too early to ask for a diagnosis?”
Just ask for solid identification.
Gervasa.
Winifred Wendy Rudge. She’d dropped the Pritzke after the divorce.
Gervasa. Gervasa.
She couldn’t be two people. She struggled to open her eyes. They opened and didn’t open. Everything was mothy, felted with dusty static. Ragged, feathery, unraveling. A sense of lumpen shapes indistinctly drawn, like cows seen across a field in early morning mist, or huge stones. Everything the color of the wren’s plain breast.
Gervasa. Talking.
Talking to me?
“Just a minute now, missus; you’ll feel better.”
Why could she see nothing but bevels of brown and cinnamon, insinuating almost anything but conclusively stating nothing?
Something for the pain in the gut. Please.
The needle slipped in, making a small welcome point of now. Pain is a great aid to certain tasks of concentration and a deterrent to others. The needle withdrew, and as it did something more like Winnie sat up in her skin, feeling the hospital sheets first and then seeing them.
“I’ll stay with her. No, I’ll ring if there’s a change. Of course. Just tell me where’s the gents?”
The Gervasa migraine began to dissolve, to sponge away into the dry surrounds of Winnie’s life.
Wendy dissolved. So did her fictions of Jack the Ripper, her fiction of herself with John. Gone. Gone, as she stood on the stairs, suddenly straight and with shoulders thrown back, as if at this last possible second, good behavior, positive attitude, correct posture even, could cause the Irish girls to relent, to wipe away their tears and say, “All dead but one, we mean, one little one who’s been waiting for his mam: let us look at the picture and see if luck is with ye!”
John talked her into abandoning her demands to visit the city’s mortuary. Instead, the Pritzke-Comestor party took poor distraught Annie Ní Fhailin with them as they made the trip back to Brasov and, a day later, to Buchares¸t. Thirty miles out of the capital, no snow had fallen at all. Above the trunks of the pollarded trees on either side of the road, a thin cloud of yellow leaves still clung to their stems, waving Doroftei’s brother’s car by.
In his sudden and precisely calibrated distance, John Comestor became the soul of kindness, as she tried later to say, and he was in no way responsible for the collapse of her marriage. But they both knew, in months and years to come, that there could never be any way of assessing whether this was true.
Winnie did not so much float on tides of Halcion or Ativan as imitate the movement of tides themselves. Adrift from herself, she saw her clumsy maneuvers in a cool and pallid light. Her tentative fictions of Wendy Pritzke, even with the introduction of a standard-issue villain like Jack the Ripper,
had not proven robust enough to obliterate the sorrier truth about Romania.
As a character, Wendy Pritzke had been judged and found wanting. Her punishment, then and now, was to be trapped in an old story with an inevitable ending. The baby who flew away before she could get there was still outside the barred window. But she could knock all she wanted and never get his attention.
Winnie went down on the playground in slow motion, the breath leaving by molecules, the blow to the head not so much a slap as a blanket of pain, applied with slowly mounting pressure. This time she blacked out.
Gervasa. A shadow, a manikin. Dissolved, evaporated, eclipsed by time and happenstance. A virus cloaked in the biochemical matter of a host.
“I do think there’s some flicker in the eyes. Look.”
Desperately she wanted to bleat the lines of a heroine from the days of the silent film, to see her words in a balloon over her head: “Wh—wh—where am I?”
Then she could open her eyes and be Dorothy at the door of the house, looking out on Technicolor Oz, or Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole, still holding the marmalade jar she’d clutched for security from some shelf she’d dropped past. Or any one of a hundred intrepid kids for whom a mere shift in universe was not necessarily the onset of schizophrenic illusion. How she wanted to put away adult things and go back to seeing through a looking-glass, darkly. Not merely her tragedy, not merely the tragedy of the baby—Vasile, his name had been, he was to have been Vasile Pritzke, and she didn’t even know where his frozen body had been laid. No, she wanted to be buffeted away from the disgruntlement that disguises itself as wisdom.
But she opened her eyes. She was in the Royal Free Hospital, she remembered. And she was not alone. John Comestor was out there, and Gervasa, whoever that was, was within. Winnie was now without anything worthwhile as an adult life, but she had a rich inner life—someone else’s. Who was Gervasa?
“Can you hear me?” said John. “At last! Allegra rang me that night to say you had moved your things out of Rudge House, and I went back there the next morning to shower and get some things. While I was there, Irv Hausserman rang. He told me he’d been round to your hotel and they said you weren’t answering the phone or the door. I got on to the police stations and then the hospitals and the description fit—they found you in Mrs. M’s room. What is it? Can you hear me?”
Her tongue felt like sludge. She prodded herself to learn the shape of her teeth. So many of them, so rounded and smooth and anonymous, without any little pressure points to claim identity within her mouth. Like polished stones at the sea. “Mrumph,” she said. Another few syllables, working things out, and then: “Shit.”
“I bet,” he said, pleased at a word he could recognize. “I just bet.”
She garbled a few words more, and then tried harder, and then managed to push words, like cabbage through a grater, falling on the table without the shape of cabbage leaves but still, redolently, cabbage: “Maddingly. After.” (Garble.) “Together.” (Garble.) “Menace,” she said, or had she meant to say “medicine,” or “nemesis”?
“That’s more like it,” said John. “I can’t tell you how relieved I am. Are you alert enough to answer me? Can you nod or shake your head for yes or no?”
She bobbed and bucked and made reply, though she felt at a certain disadvantage, as if her body were both trying to comply and trying to obfuscate that same reply. Down, girl, she said to Gervasa. Get a grip.
That’s just the point, said Gervasa. I have. But this seemed to Wendy like her own voice, being tart, taking on a new persona, not like the voice of the airy thing hanging inside her like a cloak on a hook. Talk about having your personal space violated. But the Gervasa thing had been invited, so it wasn’t a violation. Just an inconvenience, or an opportunity.
John seemed satisfied. “All right, then. Let me know. Do you want me to ring Emil?”
It was of no significance to Gervasa, so she let Winnie take this one. Without effort or misunderstanding Winnie was able to shake her head vigorously. No. Though her voice, when she tried to rally it, came out sounding absurd, certainly not linguistic in any sense.
“No Emil,” said John. “Well, not yet anyway. Is there anyone else I should be in touch with?”
Gervasa, understanding, but cautious, unwilling to commit an opinion.
Winnie shook her head.
Who are you? she said to Gervasa. Can you say it?
But Gervasa was something to wait for, perhaps not to understand through language. Or not yet anyway.
“Irv,” Winnie managed to growl.
“Irv Hausserman? You want me to get him?”
Again, Gervasa was unconcerned, and Winnie nodded her assent.
“I’ll ring him. He was here earlier, you know, sitting by your side. We’ve been taking turns. You’ve been here more than a week.”
Nonsense. It was not even a full night.
“M,” said Winnie, “M. M. M.”
“Hungry?”
“M. M.”
John lifted his shoulders tentatively, and his eyebrows, and ventured, “Music? You want music? You were listening to Die Winterreise, according to Allegra; shall I bring it over?”
She neatly brought forth bundles of expletives, hoarse and pinched, uncharacteristic and extremely effective. John recoiled. It felt rather nice to see him recoil. She went on for several minutes, telling him something most urgently, or asking it. He just shook his head in very very small motions, as if not wanting her to notice that he couldn’t understand a word.
“Bitch!” she finally managed.
“Oh,” he said, “you mean Mrs. Maddingly. It was a stroke and she’s in rehab. Only a mild one and what language she’s lost she seems to have regained. Is that it?”
It was, except Winnie pressed her hands on her hair and mimed cutting it. John was unable to decipher her question, and she let it go. She smiled at him, to thank him for the patient attention, and only after he didn’t smile back did she realize she was chattering away again in a burble of watery syllables, and his look was one of panic or grief.
Stop, Gervasa, she said, and Gervasa stopped.
He left. She slept. What Gervasa did she didn’t know or care to find out.
When next she came to—the same day? The next day?—Irv Hausserman was in her room. He had a huge bunch of papery daffodils, looking well past their sell-by date, and he’d stuck them in a vase without any water. On the edge of the bed was the tape recorder.
“Now it’s for you,” he said calmly, when she was more fully awake.
She said something that even to her sounded faintly like bonjour, but maybe that was wishful thinking. “Hi,” she managed, faintly.
“Are you in there?” he said.
“Sometimes,” she said, and corrected, “all the time.”
“Who are you?”
English asks that question the same way, whether the audience be singular or plural. Winnie heard it easily but found it hard to answer. She finally managed to say, “Us,” and hoped that would do.
He didn’t seem alarmed. But he didn’t believe in possession. He was the staunchest skeptic she knew. “Will you mind if I get your voice on tape?” he asked.
The voice he was referring to had a strong opinion, but Winnie didn’t know what it was. When she could get a word in edgewise, she squeaked, “Go ahead.”
He inserted a tape and pressed Record.
“What do you want to tell me?” he asked. “Can you say how you are?”
That was two questions, the fool, and Gervasa had some things to say and Winnie others, so they struggled and interrupted each other for a few moments, until Gervasa in a fit of pique cried out in a loud voice, and Irv’s eyebrows went up but he managed not to flinch, and in the backwash of silence Winnie muttered, “What had Mrs. M said, what? Tell me.”
“On my tape of her?” said Irv. He smiled for the first time. He seemed pleased to hear that Winnie had that much memory, however faulty her ability to steer a conversatio
n had become.
Winnie nodded. Gervasa was sulking somewhere. Good riddance.
“I don’t want to plant ideas,” he said.
“Tell me, fuckhead,” she answered.
She’d gotten his attention; he laughed. “Oh, Winnie! Well, you’re the boss.”
Not anymore, muttered Gervasa, but as a teenager will mutter, from a sidelines, ineffectually.
“I won’t diagnose nor will I hypothesize,” he said. “There are a great many gaps in understanding. But it’s not a nice story such as I’ve been able to piece together. Are you sure you’re up for it?”
Of course he didn’t know that the Gervasa germ had migrated. But too bad. What was left of Winnie was curious enough to want to know. She nodded as if to say: Hurry up and tell me.
“Mrs. Maddingly seems to have been speaking in the first person. Not in her own first person, you understand, but speaking as someone else.”
Yes, yes, that much was abundantly clear. Fire code was going to require that the place be cleared if Winnie got any more stuffed with identity. She tried to make a motion with her fingers, roll on, speed it up. But her finger got confused, and in a moment she realized her thumb had been resting comfortably in her mouth. She pulled it out, horrified, and tried to pay attention.
“The other voice, the French one, gave a narrative of sorts, broken by poor pronunciation and archaic or half-said words. And Mrs. M interrupted constantly in her own voice. I’m not sure that the non–Mrs. M speaker was all that—coherent.” His struggle for the word was admirable. He was clearly trying to keep from saying bright. On Gervasa’s behalf Winnie took offense.
“A certain Gervase, perhaps of Normandy.”
“Gervasa,” said Winnie, easily enough, and hiked her boobs to make the point.
“Gervasa?” said Irv. “I don’t think there’s a feminine variant.”