Now she thought, Did I go mad there?
Outside Pietr’s hotel, she looked at the square white balconies, the flags of America and France hanging over the entrance. The automatic front doors slid back and forth as people came and went. She saw the rectangular couches and glass tables scattered across the marble lobby. When the doors opened a pungent smell wafted out: a disinfectant. The smell of America.
Music see-sawed into the street; she couldn’t even tell if it was Western or Arabic. That was the only thing that bothered her about journeying into the desert. She didn’t mind moving into silence but she minded losing the music.
‘It was a terrible house,’ Agnieska said to Pietr, ‘and yet somehow I loved it.’
She looked around what Pietr had called his suite but which Agnieska thought was a large white room with a bed in an alcove. The cold of the air-conditioning was amazing to her. The shock of leaving the warmth outside reminded her of those other times she had left the heat for the snow: to visit Koloshnovar, to search for her brother in Sicily.
A peacock came out of the dusk onto the narrow terrace, placing its feet carefully on marble the colour of clouds. The bird’s dark flags of emeralds and sapphire blues swung behind it, merging with the muted garden. Even above the voices of the drinkers around the pool, she heard the soft swish of the silky tail and the click of claws on the stone.
The bird stopped at the glass door, dipped its head, nodding at them. Pietr got up and banged on the glass so the peacock jumped, its eye rolling as it retreated, offended, its tail colours streaming.
‘Dirty birds,’ he said.
She watched it sway along the concrete path, past the concrete domes which sat like fallen moons between the palm trees.
‘A new invention,’ said Pietr. ‘Single-room apartments. Poured concrete hardens over a steel mesh skeleton and pressurised air. I would have liked to have stayed in one,’ he said, his tone wistful, ‘but apparently they were all booked out.’
Agnieska said, ‘You should have been an architect.’
He picked up his brandy glass and sat on the couch next to her. ‘There’s no money in architecture.’
Agnieska said to him, ‘Do you remember the hall at Koloshnovar? It gave me nightmares.’
He frowned, rolling the glass balloon between his hands. ‘I remember the red wallpaper.’
‘It was the long hall running the length of the house. It was lined with hundreds of heads, animals my father had killed. Thousands, it seemed to me as a child. Antelopes and zebras and lions from Africa, bears from Russia, wolves from Italy. Foxes, rabbits. After a bad day’s hunting, he would go and shoot the ducks in the pond.’
‘He was a man of his time,’ said Pietr.
‘Do you remember the death masks? His own father and mother, displayed there as trophies. As though by outliving them he had won.’
‘He was proud. He believed in the bloodline.’ He drank, a small amount, lifting his chin to roll the liquid on his tongue. He was not a drinker, she was glad to see. He had missed that addiction. She wondered what his obsession was.
‘When my father was drunk,’ she said, ‘he would go and shout at the masks. A sea of bile running down the hall.’
‘That was the red wallpaper,’ said Pietr.
She looked at him. Maybe that was his obsession: keeping the truth at bay. She wanted to shake from him this – what? flippancy? deliberate detouring of the truth? In the desert you always zigzagged into the wind. But not here. She didn’t have the time for detours. Maybe that would be what the desert would teach her. In that time-less place, she would give up her own obsession with time.
She remembered going back to Koloshnovar, secretly. The winter chill was a needle after the heat of Casablanca. She had stood in the snow, seeing the tracks of wolves, hearing the far-off howls. Someone had been breeding them – they had disappeared after the war, after the Russians had arrived with their tanks and hunger. Now they were back, maybe kept by some Politburo chief as trophy guard dogs. The money never strayed far from the top, no matter the government.
She stood in the rose plantation, saw the bare branches, imagined the buds in spring, only weeks away now. The roses would be grown in squares, arranged by colour, laid out like a patchwork quilt. There would be only one kind: the eighteen-point teacup rose so beloved by the Americans and English. The money rose. The famous Koloshnovar rose, grown by her grandmother to combat the stink of the shoe factory, the cheapening of her aristocratic name, so she said.
The pink roses had a sullen blood-red tinge, while the darker roses – the deep blues and purple – were streaked with black. Even before Agnieska knew what was in the fields, it made sense that the black soil around the house would be richer. The older servants crossed themselves whenever they went past the rose gardens. They wouldn’t look at them on bad days – those mornings after a night-time arrival which, no matter how secret, everyone seemed to know of.
‘My father,’ said Agnieska. ‘He was the only father you ever knew. Unless Stefano . . . ’ She looked around.
‘He’s running errands,’ said Pietr.
‘That man would die for you.’
Pietr looked surprised. ‘I wouldn’t expect anything so feudal. I never met him until we visited Sicily.’
‘After your grandfather died.’
‘After my uncles lost the fight with my mother over the estate.’
‘My half-brothers.’ Miniature editions of her father, unable to comprehend that they couldn’t win by shouting and bullying. Sitting in their smoking jackets, drinking, morose, the world passing them by.
‘Stefano was always more like a bodyguard,’ said Pietr. He took a larger mouthful of brandy.
Agnieska felt the weight of the objects in her pocket. She felt their coldness, their warmth. She wondered whether she would have the courage – or the anger – to use them.
‘He seems devoted to your mother.’
‘I’m glad someone is,’ said Pietr.
He was watching her. Agnieska wondered whether this was his way of seeing where her sympathies lay. She thought of the first time she saw Rosita, the way she had come into the room. No-one had expected her to travel in her condition. But it was her condition that saved her from being killed outright.
There was a shocked silence when the butler led her into the smaller breakfast room. Fading laughter curled around her like charred fragments of paper as she planted her feet wide on the floor. A small squat girl in black. The folded arms should have warned us.
‘My first impression of Rosita was that she was a witch,’ Agnieska said to Pietr. ‘Later I was ashamed of myself. It was because of the way she dressed in mourning for a man I believed she never loved. Or maybe I was jealous that she had had the last of my brother. I grew to admire the way she defied us. My brothers despised her, humiliated her, yet she never reacted, not even when my father picked up his riding crop and shouted, spittle flying from his mouth. Shouting at this dumpy Italian girl.’
‘She knew she was going to win,’ said Pietr.
‘When my uncles left her in the catacombs,’ said Agnieska, ‘I thought she deserved the estate.’
‘And now?’
The knife in her pocket was cold even through the thick material. But the other objects were small squares of pulsing warmth.
‘I’ve tried to forgive her,’ said Agnieska, ‘for what happened to Czeslaw. The fact that I can’t is my burden.’
‘I wanted to ask you to come home,’ said Pietr. ‘You’re the only one left now.’
She stood. ‘There is no home. It is all ashes.’
She fingered the knife in her pocket and the wrapped pellets of tainted opium. It seemed so inevitable. She thought, I always wanted revenge.
Pietr was drinking. She was surprised to see the brandy almost gone. Maybe she had been wrong; firewater was his addiction. He said, the clipped evenness of his words beginning to liquefy, ‘At a young age I learned my mother wasn’t a source of comfort. By my early teens she was always the last one I called. That Viennese expression you used. That was my relationship with my mother. She did not go well with me.’
The shadows of the wood panels in the glass doors made large crosses on the wall. She wondered how surprised he would be if she told him what she planned to do. Which would prevail: Czeslaw’s blood or Rosita’s?
Agnieska said, ‘We don’t talk enough about demons in our society. I thought when my father died, the demon had died. Then I realised he had been replaced – by your mother.’
Pietr laughed but the sound turned into itself almost immediately.
‘She bargained with my father to get the estate,’ said Agnieska. ‘She had something that Czeslaw was carrying. A photo in a book.’
‘A book?’ said Pietr. ‘
The
book?’
A breeze lifted the fronds of the palm trees in the huge pots outside. The shifting shadows of the trees broke up on the wall, turned the crosses into twisted vines. I think we keep entering ourselves, she thought, trying to change by layering ourselves with new experiences. With new people. Trying to beat back the dark emotions which are thrust into us. But it is like the way human flesh won’t reject embedded coral. Our bodies sense that these dark emotions are living things; not to be rejected no matter how hard we try. We grow around the foreign object. But it is always there.
He got up and faced her. ‘You want the book as a weapon.’
‘If I wanted revenge I would have shown the book to the police. The African police.’
He looked uncertain.
She said, ‘Haven’t you heard the stories about me, as a child? The way I taunted my father.’
‘You hate him because of this . . . ’ Pietr gestured at her scar.
She put her hand over the dead skin. ‘Mistakes are not mere chance. They are the result of repressed desires. That is what I learned here. What have you learned?’
‘I learned you did take the book. I wasn’t sure before.’
She said gently, ‘You know there is a family tendency to steal.’
She gripped the pellet in her pocket. The blackness was burning in her hand. Was her anger enough? And then there was still the daughter.
She said, ‘When my father met the Frenchman in the desert and heard his stories, of course he couldn’t resist. My father was an educated man – he would have known who the Frenchman was. Remember: even the Nazis read poetry, worshipped classical music. It is one of the great ironies of history: the great art that moves men to tears at night fails to stop them massacring in the morning. The creative act will never abolish death.
‘In the course of his wanderings the Frenchman had discovered many secret places. Places to hide. To store things.’
She saw her shadow rippling across the curtains. Shadows doubled the world just as reflections in the water doubled the world. But her shadow was small on the curtain: a small child falling on corrugated pavement.
She thought of the silence of water above a sunken tree, of ripples widening through the reeds. Sometimes she wondered how she could do it, live in a world where water was so scarce. Her memories of Poland were all of rain, water running down black stone.
She said, ‘My father was a man who thought history couldn’t touch him.’ The edges of the pellet were softening as her hand heated it. ‘I cursed him – did you know that? I cursed my father in the great hall in front of the family, the servants. I blamed him for driving Czeslaw away. And then I blamed him for whipping me. The whole hall was silent. Even the hounds stopped chewing their bones.
‘My father called me mad, but in the desert madness is an asset. Once your mind has split and peeled backwards, then you can cope with the ultimate nothingness of it all.’
Her hand was cramping. ‘Despair pushes you deeper into yourself, deeper into the emptiness; deeper into the desert. My mind lay open to the powers of the night.’ She flexed her fingers and began to prise the foil wrapping off the pellet. ‘I spent all my life in Poland thinking like a prisoner.’
Her thumbnail was catching on the foil. She had to take a breath, adjust her grip on the pellet. She said, ‘Your grandfather accepted Rosita. He could see that they thought the same.’
‘My mother told me it was blackmail.’ He lifted the glass, drained the brandy.
‘That too,’ said Agnieska. She remembered the dumpy Italian girl shouting up from the black hole for them all to go except for the old man. He waved them back, his skin purple and red, and she shouted one word. The word. And his mottled skin floated on a sea of white, and he told them to bring her to the surface. The servants said they found butterflies drawn on the walls where the Sicilian girl had been standing. Butterflies or figures of eight lying on their side.
And then the girl was standing on the surface, blinking in the light: small, black-browed, relentless. She said something to the old man and he fell, foam in his mouth. And the girl put her hand over her stomach and Agnieska saw the gold band on her finger.
The old man didn’t die. When the Sicilian girl gave birth to the baby with the platinum hair, he signed a new will giving Koloshnovar to the boy. Agnieska could remember her half-brothers – tall and thick-necked by then – kicking the oak panelled door of his bedroom. They wouldn’t go to his funeral.
The pellet was crumbling in her hand. She used her fingernails to separate the small grains, felt the drug under her nails, she wondered if it would enter her bloodstream. She wondered if before the end Pietr would be honest about his father.
She motioned to Pietr to give her his glass. He looked at it as though surprised that it was empty. She went across, slowly, to the drinks table. With her back to him, she took the pellet from her pocket. She watched the small dark clots of powder fall onto the shining mirror at the bottom of the glass. She picked up the decanter.
She said, ‘In my entire life I had no physical contact with my father. Maybe he held me as a baby. He would shout, at Czeslaw who was such a good gentle boy,
Du bist ein Puppenjunge
. You are a little puppet boy. One of his Nazi phrases.’ The brandy was falling in streams of burnt gold. ‘He was a cold unresponsive man. He had never been taught to give or receive affection. There was something in his own past. Before he went to Africa, he went over to Russia voluntarily. No-one would go to Russia voluntarily.’