Precious (14 page)

“Why,” he asks today as he and Natalia sit on the veranda, listening to the rain, “did I ever love that wretched woman?”

Natalia leans back and thinks again how conversations too often grow repetitive, the mind always circling over the past, to times that no longer exist. She stares out to the cobbled streets of Florence and takes
in the aroma of bread that drifts from the bakery across from them, the old stone building with its windows always blank-looking, open to cool the heat from the ovens. In the people here there is a tiredness as old as the city, and in Natalia there is a growing tiredness, too. This life is not her life after all, nor could it ever be. This is not her home. She considers first her circumstances, which she dismisses in her mind as too painful to think about or discuss: her children back home in the States, left to Frank, his moods. In twenty years of marriage he hasn’t even managed to cook a decent meal; the children would be reduced to bones already, no doubt, probably living off pumpkin paste and canned tomatoes. When she thinks about Frank and the girls, she feels a heat rise within her and she grows irritated and finds all the doctor’s talk distressing; but when she sighs in an effort to indicate that he is being a colossal bore, and then sighs again when he stops his reverie but won’t look at her directly, he only asks her to pass the ice bucket—black, trimmed with silver. He adds three cubes to his glass, and that seems to settle whatever disagreement between them there is, if any.

“Silence between people,” she says after a while, listening to the rain hit the terra-cotta roof, “is its own story, isn’t it?”

The doctor says nothing. A maid mills into the room to refresh the ice, a young girl, no more than twenty with sleek black hair cut at the line of her jaw. Natalia notes her full, tender lips. When the girl takes the doctor’s drink to refresh it, he smiles, and Natalia nods as the maid leaves.

Finally, he says, “We’ll make this a good experience yet, my dear.” He tells her, “Take note of it,” reminding her that she is, after all, still his secretary. “It’s been difficult to forget,” he says, apologetically. “Especially about the boat.”

She makes no note at all. There has been rain in Florence for five days, and down the street the flowers set in buckets hang their heads, and the women hurry by blindly, their heads also hung. Watching them, Natalia remembers women in the camp, that time when she was
only a child, and she can no longer say she is sure of her own footing. She inhales, feeling a familiar hunger, wanting to stuff her mouth with bread, wanting something in her complicated heart to take hold and rise.

She chastises herself for her whimsy and childish belief in starting fresh again, one that moved her to forsake everything.
How foolish,
she thinks now,
to believe that I could leave things behind.
At first, when they arrived in Florence, there was a steady succession of activity: trips to the market for vegetables and bread, bright smells that bloomed in the air. There were decorators who furnished the space the doctor had rented— a finely woven rug was laid, fused with gold and black thread that fringed on the edges; pillows were placed on a leather seat in the main room, the seat squat and boxy, with its ends curved, like cupped hands. There were daily walks through the city, a newness to everything that made Natalia forgetful. She and the doctor discussed the architecture produced in the Renaissance, the dome of the Church of San Spirito, the pre-Baroque style of Michelangelo’s Laurentian Library, the voussoirs of the Palazzo Strozzi. He was versed in all this, articulate in a way Frank never was. He’d chat happily as they walked narrow streets and meandered between the buildings, thrilled to be released from his practice. Natalia admitted that she, too, was happy to be away, that she had always held an irrational fear of hospitals, but that she’d ended up working for him anyway because, of the twelve applications she’d completed—the doctor’s done in desperation—he had been the only one kind enough to offer Natalia a job at all. Still, she told him, every time she entered the building, she would cross herself and kiss her fingers.

After a few months in Florence, though, Natalia found she no longer listened to the doctor’s musings and banter. Instead she listened to the voices of people lifting from the streets, language that was fluid and unknowable as it drifted by her. She remembered reading once of two brothers who spoke the same dying dialect—the brothers were the only ones left in the world who shared the language, the only ones left
of their kind—but they hadn’t spoken after fighting over the same woman. Their language went dead within them and was lost entirely. To her surprise, she often thought of Frank then. She thought of the girls, too. She’d expected that after she settled in with the doctor she would bring the girls to her, but that hadn’t happened. She wrote to them once and, at a loss for words, told them only about simple things: the trips to the market, the crumbling buildings, the fading sunsets.

Her efforts to enjoy the time dwindled. A certain incompatibility grew then between her and the doctor. Petty disagreements arose between them. Natalia didn’t like the arrangement of the living room and didn’t see the practicality of a white leather sofa that she could never sit on; he didn’t like a dress on her and thought it the wrong color, unpleasing to his precise eye. “Gray,” he told her, “makes you look foppish and, if I might add, slightly malignant.”

At night, too, Natalia began having nightmares that startled her from sleep, the subversive maneuverings of the mind, the firing synapses of the brain sneaking up on her like silent soldiers. Some of the dreams had a quality of old habit: She and Frank were young again, childless, and they drove down a stretch of abandoned road to a region of coal, to a town that had an underground fire burning in the mines. How eerie that town was to Natalia with all the empty houses, the windows boarded, businesses closed up, bicycles abandoned, the residents having fled quickly, and yet the houses and buildings still marked the traces of those very same people. In her dream, the sky was unnatural like sea glass and there was a tranquillity that Natalia sensed was easily broken. Up the road it turned dark, and a crack of thunder sounded like a shotgun. Rain pelted down on the windshield, but Frank stubbornly refused to turn on the wipers. She looked over and told him, “We need to go back.” He turned his head and calmly said, “You’re on fire, Natalia.” And she looked down at her blouse; it peeled from her skin and broke apart, floating around the car.

She’d wake with a start. Although she seldom thought to seek comfort
in others, she would turn to the doctor and nudge his mottled back. She would begin to speak, but he’d shift and settle into his own dreams without argument or care. Natalia would lie awake for hours, breathless, waiting for light to bobble through the window slats.

After the rain, there are four gorgeous days when the sky stretches, uninterrupted, and Natalia decides to leave.
Seven months,
she thinks,
is too long to be away from family.
She packs only a few items: a green silk blouse the doctor bought for her, two pairs of pants the color of cream, a clingy red V-neck, a few shirts. It’s a trick she’s learned in life. A light packing, one glance behind her as she walks away, but only one—and in that glance the old story is certainly proven false: We do not turn to salt, and no God proves us inexplicably wrong.

There are so few things we can actually hold on to. Love, maybe. The remnants of it, our memories, the scraps of ourselves we hold on to, despite our journeying.

She wonders if her home with Frank and the girls will feel the same now, after she’s been gone from it. She has no idea when things changed, when Frank became more distant, opting to spend days out under the car, which Natalia took to mean that he was somehow avoiding her. She could blame work, she supposed, the long hours, his need for quiet, but it still made her feel inconsequential and inept, left to the girls and the house all day. At times she wonders if it is only her own flaw: to never quite feel at home anywhere, to always be on the periphery of things, just enough to feel a nagging sense of displacement that exists on the edge of inclusion, on the fringes of love, to realize nothing is entirely familiar.

Natalia has always been traveling. Her first trip to America was by boat. After the barking German shepherds (how their bared teeth frightened her, their alert ears, the saliva that dripped from one of the
kutya’s
mouths), and after the fences and barbed wire and the two headlights illuminated
in the dark woods, the old German, Clara, a woman already in her early fifties, scrubbed Natalia’s face and body clean and put her to bed as if Natalia were a plaything. “I don’t mind that you’re a Gyp,” she said as she pulled up the covers. “I always wanted a little girl, a little girl just like you.” Although Natalia’s parents and her brother were dead, and although in one moment her life had changed for the worse, and then in another moment, changed for the better, she dismissed everything the second her face pressed against the pillow. She moaned with pleasure. She had survived. She was the moth that had flown over the barbed wire, unnoticed, suddenly freed. If she was cursed, that must have marked the moment the accusations were hurtled from graves: the second she drifted off to sleep, the second she forgot those left behind and abandoned herself to the care of strangers—without burden, without thought to their histories and rooms.

Within months of that night, she made the journey to America. It was a terribly clear day. As they embarked from the port in Germany Natalia smelled salt water and fish. Her new father, a former messenger in the army (how he feared the occupation), was a man with a smooth face and gray eyes and legs that were swift, made for running. Clara, who was much heavier, less demonstrative with affection but competent with meeting basic needs—the bed, the fresh linens, the roasted pork and peppers on the table—looked back at her homeland for a long while and then whispered, suddenly, “
Deutschland Erwache!”
After they fled, it was Clara who always held fast to her reimaginings of history. She often spoke of her belief that the Jews and the Gyps had lied, spoke of her denial that people were turned into soap and ashes, their blanched hair sold at markets. Even if Natalia protested, even if she spoke of the stench that hung in the sky, Clara would hear none of it. After Clara’s beloved Dresden was bombed, she spent considerable time penning letters to Churchill, ones she’d send once a month, from a mailing address belonging to someone else.

On the boat it was Natalia’s new father who held her closely so that she could see over the rails to the turbulent water below, and, in the
process, he pinched her skinny sides and caused her doll’s head to press into her rib cage, up under bone. He danced with her while her new mother leaned over the railing and vomited with great regularity. Clara glanced over to them, her hand holding her stomach, her face yellow. She pleaded with the fates to give her a reprieve from motion. She hated it all. She hated having to sell her silver and rings, to barter for passage. She hated having to give up her servants and the house. In America, when they took up residence in their small house, she hated having to give up her language, a language Natalia had always thought too harsh, too guttural—a language of spit.

Natalia didn’t hate America. She embraced it as best she could, with an always cautious distance. She told herself she was lucky enough to have a life, even if Clara did fret too much over her, afraid perhaps that what had been stolen might be stolen back. Years later, during their last phone call, she told Natalia that she prided herself on her care, on keeping Natalia safe and close, on teaching her to read. “I never took my eyes off you,” she said, and Natalia responded, “I know, that was the problem.”

A young Natalia found comfort in the daily rituals: school, the predictability of afternoon chores—hanging out laundry on pleasant days, folding the crisp towels and sheets afterward—the need to please both of her new parents even as she quietly snatched provisions from the cupboard to store under her mattress, just in case. Her father would come home from work as a night watchman and let Natalia pick through his coat pockets for candy or change. “Gypsy thief,” he’d say, smiling, touching her under her chin. “My little Gypsy girl.” In school, she learned the language with the help of a well-meaning English teacher who tutored her over lunch until her accent gradually lessened, and then mostly disappeared. She later met Frank and married. After their boy died and Clara suggested the child suffered from weak blood, Natalia would stop talking to her parents altogether, even her father, whom she always missed.

Now Natalia makes the second trip to America by plane, her ticket
paid for with the doctor’s weekly allowance. She looks out the double-paned glass and tries to ignore the man next to her, whose fleshy sides spill into her seat. However tired she is, she can’t sleep. Below, the ocean stretches for miles and hours, under clouds too thin to hold anything.
Eighty percent of the earth is made of water,
she remembers from school. Also,
eighty percent of a persons body A tear is salt water. A tear is an ocean.
Once she heard that if you press deeply into a person’s stomach, you can unleash a flood of tears. Natalia always wonders if that is the place in our bodies where our histories and memories and hopes are stored. What in a person’s mind and heart and body holds on to what went before? What clings to the nagging ghosts—the memories of others, calling their shrill, ecstatic songs that speak of belonging and making everywhere a home? What parts of her brother and her mother and father, what parts of those people never known still passed through her, their blood coursing in her veins? What parts of Sissy and Eva? She tried to ask the doctor this once, but he shrugged and said, “According to science, very little.”

Just as she teases herself into thinking the entire world is made of water, she spots umber and chartreuse and citrine-colored patches of land that stretch out like a grid below her, the tops of verdant trees and smooth mountain ridges, and then, as the plane descends, the roofs of houses, the bright blue pools and roads that scrape in every direction. America, a land that, unlike Florence, is always content to reimagine itself, a Gypsy nation.