Oh Karen, dear Karen, what have I done?
Helen's face began to wrinkle. Tears ran down her cheek. Her hands began to quake badly, and Jan thought she was building her rage. But Glenn's face was suddenly white; he'd seen something else in her.
“You do it, you pig!” he growled. “You do it or I'll pound you to a pulp, you hear me?”
Her mouth suddenly cracked to a frown and a high, squeaking sound escaped her throat. Her eyes closed and her hand balled into a fist. Her cry wasn't a wail of rage. It was a cry of anguish. She was being torn to shreds.
Helen suddenly moaned loudly and she swung her hand in a wide arc.
The blow may have landed, Jan didn't know, because in that moment the nightclub vanished.
With a brilliant flash of light, it was gone.
He wasn't in the colored light, propped up like a side of beef. He was standing on the edge of an endless flowered field. The same white desert he'd seen once before, when he'd first touched Helen.
And then suddenly he knew that he'd seen this scene more than just once. He'd seen it a thousand times! This was the scene from his dreams! The white field that flashed into his dreams! How had he not recognized it?
It lay absolutely still.
Still except for the weeping.
He noticed her then. There was more than the field of flowers before him: There was a figure wearing a pink dress, lying on the petals not fifteen feet from him, looking at him. It was Helen.
Helen!
Only Helen hardly looked like Helen because her face was as white as cotton and her eyes were gray. She looked as though she'd been in a grave for a while before they'd dug her out and placed her here, on the bed of strange flowers.
Her chest rose and fell slowly, and she stared at him. But if she recognized him her blank look did not show it.
The weeping was for her.
He knew that because it came sweeping out of the sky on the lips of invisible mourners. Like a Requiem Mass for the dead. Such sadness, such anguish over Helen.
Still she gazed at him with flat, pale lips and dead eyes, breathing slowly while the sky filled with a million baying voices. Then the voices suddenly descended upon him, drowning him in their sorrow.
He was weeping immediately. Without warning. The pressure of grief fell so strongly on his chest that he couldn't breathe. He could only expel his breath in a long moan. He began to panic under the pain. He was dying! This was surely death flowing through his veins. He fell forward, unable to stand.
Jan collapsed among the white petals, prone at her feet. At Helen's feet. He gasped and rolled onto his back. The sky sustained a long howl; the mourners' undying grief. And Jan wept bitterly with them. He held himself tight to keep from falling apart and he wept.
Jan's eyes were closed when the sky went black and silent. Only his own weeping sounded. His eyes snapped open. He was back in the nightclub, hanging limp between the two men and blubbering like a baby.
Glenn was yelling. “. . . you hear me, you piece of trash!” He was towering over Helen, who had fallen to her knees, cowering and sobbing. “You make me sick!” Glenn spat at her. “Sick!”
Jan strained against the hands that held him, but succeeded only in inviting a new surge of pain through his head.
Helen, dear Helen!
His face twisted in empathy
. Oh, God, please save her! I love her.
Tell her that, Jan. Tell her!
She sagged on the floor, heaving with sobs, her face white and her lips peeled back in desperation. Jan spoke to her. “Helen.” It came out more like a moan, but he didn't care now. “Helen, I love you.”
She heard and opened her eyes. They were blue. Deep blue. Swimming in tears and red around the edges and stricken with grief, but blue.
“Helen.” They were both crying hard then. Looking at each other with twisted faces and weeping without words.
Glenn took a step back and glanced between them. For a moment his eyes widened. Then his face flashed red and screwed to a knot. He leaped forward and swung his foot like a place-kicker. The black boot struck Jan in his ribs. Something snapped and Jan's world began to fade.
Helen had stretched her arms out to him; her fingers spread and taut, like desperate claws. Glenn whirled and swung his foot at her. The blow knocked her to her side and she quieted to a quivering lump, but her eyes did not leave Jan's.
The brutes dropped him and he collapsed onto his face. Another blow landed on his back. And another.
He lost consciousness then, thinking the world was ending.
THEY LEFT Jan tied in the corner for another day, alone and without water. During that time he saw no one. He drifted in and out, through fields of white flowers and chambers that echoed with the sound of weeping. Heaven was weeping. Heaven was weeping for Helen.
He could only guess what the beast had done to her. But he could hardly bear to guess and so mostly he didn't. New wounds on his chest had soaked the carpet at his feet with blood before finally coagulating. Glenn had kicked him twice; he remembered that. But the aches and bruises were all over. They had beat him after he'd passed out.
They came for him at nightâtwo thugs and Glenn. The monster was wearing a grin and he looked freshly showered. If Jan had been in working order he might have thrown himself at the man and choked him.
“Dump him in his backyard,” Glenn said with satisfaction. “And tell him the next time he messes with my woman, he won't be so lucky.” He chuckled and the men hoisted Jan to his feet. His world faded with the pain.
When he awoke he was in his backyard by the pool, staring at the stars.
“If you were to put all of the world's pain in one fifty-five-gallon drum, it would look silly next to the mountains of gold and silver found in each moment with God. Our problem is that we rarely see past the drum.”
The Dance of the Dead, 1959
SUNDAY PULLED Jan along a hazy road of reawakening with fits and starts.
Evidently he'd pulled himself into the house and passed out on the carpet by the couch. It was light out when an incessant ringing had awakened him again. He remembered thinking that he must get to that phone; he needed help. He hauled himself to his feet and answered. It was Ivena. The sound of her voice brought tears to his eyes. Ivena had been trying to reach him for two days now, and what in the world did he think he was doing not answering his phone? “I don't care if you have woman problems or not, you don't ignore me! I nearly called Roald looking for you.”
“I was beaten, Ivena,” he'd said. And she was at his door five minutes later.
She took one look at him, appalled, all that dried blood from head to foot, and she was immediately the war mother. No time to bemoan the injustice of it all; this one needed attending. He actually thought he was feeling much better and insisted that he could shower and eat and everything would be fine. But she would have none of it. They were going to the hospital and that was final.
In the end, he acquiesced. He hobbled out to the Cadillac, his arm over Ivena's shoulder, and she drove him to St. Joseph's Hospital. Everything started going blurry again when they turned the first corner.
When he awoke again, an IV tube snaked out of his arm, chilling it to the shoulder. A doctor hovered over him and pulled at his chest with strings. They were stitching up some cuts there. This time consciousness came and stayed; the IV's hydrating solution was primarily responsible, the doctor told him. He was as dry as a cracked riverbed. Another day and he would've been dead. And how did all this happen anyway?
Jan told him and an hour later there was a cop standing by the hospital bed, asking questions and taking notes. Ivena heard it all then for the first time as well, sitting in the corner, his concerned mother. They asked her to leave once but she wouldn't, and Jan insisted that she stay. The policeman seemed to hurry the interview along just a bit when he learned that this was all supposedly done at the hands of Glenn Lutz.
The
Glenn Lutz? he'd asked. Jan presumed so, although he'd never met
the
Glenn Lutz before. The description certainly fit. The cop left soon after, assuring Jan that the proper authorities would pursue the matter.
All told, Jan had a mild concussion, two deep cutsâone above his right ear and one on his chestâtwo broken ribs, a half dozen smaller cuts and bruises, and a severe case of dehydration. By early afternoon they had him fully rehydrated, sewn up, and adequately medicated to get about. He asked to be released and the doctor agreed only after Ivena assured him in the strongest terms that she would care for him. She had cared for worse. Anyway, his concussion was already three days old, his cuts had been bandaged and his veins flooded; what else could they do but observe? She could observe.
Once home, it took Ivena an hour to arrange him on the couch and satisfy herself that he was settled. She would make supper, she announced. It didn't matter that it was only four o'clock, he needed some real food in his system, not some hospital Jell-O. So they ate a meaty cabbage soup with fresh bread and they talked about what had happened.
“I know what you told the police, Janjic, but what else happened?” Ivena asked.
He remained quiet for a few moments, looking out the window now. Yes indeed, what did really happen? And where was Helen now?
“This is beyond me, Ivena.”
“Of course it is.”
“I told Karen.”
“Hmm.”
“She wasn't happy.”
“You broke your engagement?”
“No.”
They sat quietly for a moment.
“I had another vision.”
“Yes?”
He watched the swaying willow beyond the pool. “I was tied there waiting for Helen to strike me. He forced her to hit me, you know. I didn't tell the policeman that, but he did. He made her spit on me . . .” A lump rose to Jan's throat and he swallowed. “She didn't want to, I know she didn't want to. And when she swung, I went into a vision.”
They had stopped eating for the moment. “Tell me,” Ivena said. “Tell me the vision.”
Jan told her what he remembered, every detail. And as he told her, the emotions of it came back. Heaven was weeping for Helen. He too was there for Helen, weeping at her feet. It was so vivid! So very vivid, paling the beating in comparison. By the end, Ivena had set her bowl aside and was wiping tears from her eyes.
“Describe the flowers on the field again.”
He did. “And there's something else, Ivena. It's the same field that I've seen in my dreams for twenty years now. I saw that.”
“You're sure? The same field?”
“Yes, without question. Not the dungeon, just the very end of the dream. The white field.”
“Hmm. My goodness. And where is Helen now, Janjic?”
“She's with him.” He sat up and pushed the pillows aside, wincing. “Dear God, she's with him and I can't stand it! We should go up there and throw the man out!”
“You're in no shape to play soldier. Besides, you've told the police everything. This is America, not Bosnia. They don't tolerate kidnapping and beating so easily here. They'll arrest the man.”
“Maybe, but I did go there on my own. He made a point of mentioning that. Said I was trespassing.” Jan stood and paced to the window. “I'm telling you, Ivena, there's more here; I can feel it.”
“And I agree, my dear. But this battle is not yours to pursue. It's one to receive.”
“Meaning exactly what? Just let things happen? It wouldn't surprise me if she were dead already.”
“You mustn't speak like that! Don't speak that way!”
“And yet you're suggesting that we just sit by and allow the police to deal with Glenn? When they do launch their investigation, you think a powerful man like this will have nothing to say in his defense? I'm telling you he will say it was me who went to threaten him. At the very least it will be days, weeks before anything is done.”
She scrunched her brow. “I'm not saying we should do nothing. Simply that the police will do something, and we should wait until we see what they do. And I'm saying that you're in no condition to run around.”
She took up her bowl and dipped into it again, but her soup must have been cold because she set it down. “Then again, I may be wrong. I could easily be wrong. I wouldn't have suggested that Nadia do what she did, and yet it was the right thing. It was beyond her.”
“It
was
the right thing. And if this madman were to kill Helen, I think I would kill him.”
Ivena sat in her armchair, glassy-eyed. Neither of them was seeing things too clearly, Jan thought. Yes, he had seen the vision clearly enough, but it gave him no clues how to save Helen. And that was the one thing they both did see: Helen
did
need saving. Not just from the monster, but from her own prison.
“I wanted to, you know,” Ivena said.
“You wanted to what?”
“I wanted to kill Karadzic.” A tear left its wet trail down her cheek. “I tried, I think.”
“And so did I.”
“But Nadia didn't. She didn't even
want
to kill him. And neither did the priest. They chose to die instead.”
Jan turned back to the fading light. What could he say to that? His head was hurting. “Yes, they did.” He returned to the couch, suddenly exhausted.
Ivena stood and took their dishes to the kitchen and just like that the conversation was over. They did not return to the subject until late that night. “So I guess we just sit tight and see what the police do for now?” Jan asked after Ivena had announced her intentions to retire.
“Yes, I guess so.”
“And we'll deal with the ministry tomorrow. The employees will be concerned about my absence.”
“Fine.”
And that was that. She made sure that he was in good shape, fed him a painkiller, and left him to sleep.