Unseaming (19 page)

“What?” He laughed again, even more incredulous.

“You heard me.”

“How silly. You know I can’t play pipes.” Yet, improbably, on this horrific day, one of many they’d endured, many more still ahead, his smile brightened. “But for you, if it is what you want, I will learn. Now, our baby—”

But she did not know, not then, if she could ever have another child.

“If it is a girl,” he went on, “I like the name Tamara.”

Then his sky-wide grin faltered, for she had begun to shake her head, no, no, no, no. “You cannot call her that,” she said. “You cannot!”

He touched her knee, frightened. “What’s wrong?”

Furious, she turned to him. “I could tell you, and tell you, and tell you,” she said. “But you will never remember.”

Then she spoke, and no matter how many times he asked her to repeat herself, he could not hear the words.

Virginia, 1985

A warm wind wafted through the screen door into the den, ruffled sensuous fingers through Daniel’s beard. As he held up the eagerly anticipated letter—the page practically burned in his fingers—the caress of the breeze felt like Fate herself offering congratulations.

Had he sculpted a mountain and built a watchtower at its top, he could have stood no higher than he felt at that moment. Though in a way, he had done exactly that, choosing this site in the Appalachians after they arrived in New York; carving this home out of the earth; building the school through word of mouth, then advertising in print and broadcast; building a career to heights that sometimes dizzied him. And here, in his trembling hand, fluttered the ultimate reward.

As soon as the lump in his throat loosened, he pulled the screen door open, strode out onto the freshly varnished deck and bellowed to be heard in every corner of his wife’s garden terraces. Students and their easels were scattered throughout the trellises and beds. He called them all inside, his order evoking frantic protests from the silly teenagers and even sillier grown-ups. “It’s not time yet! I’m not finished!” whined the freckled girl perched beside the snapdragons—Jackie, not quite fourteen, with just enough talent that she could perhaps get somewhere if she ever took her lessons seriously.

He wasn’t unsympathetic to her complaint. Only twenty minutes ago he had ordered all the little chickadees out into Galina’s fantastic flowered landscapes with instructions to complete an oil painting from life in exactly an hour, merciless instructor that he was.

“Don’t worry about that. Put your brushes down and leave your easels. I have news!”

Once certain they were coming, he turned—to find Galina leaning on the back of the couch, wearing a paint-stained smock of her own, eyeing him with a twinkle of coy suspicion. He offered her a smile bright and broad as the sky.

When everyone assembled, he read the letter aloud.

In Daniel’s newest series of sculptures—the most attention-getting of his career—he molded busts of great world leaders: Winston Churchill. Gandhi. Martin Luther King. John F. Kennedy. He had chosen to include in the series the current president, whom he admired with fervor, whom he saw as Kennedy’s heir. Kennedy had paved the way for civil reform here in the land that Daniel now thought of as home. But Kennedy had also understood the threat posed by the monster that consumed the land Daniel could never return to, the Russia of his childhood, a monster grown from medals sown in the dirt.

Kennedy’s party lost its way in the Vietnam quagmire, lost its courage, began to act as if they no longer perceived the bear slavering inches from their exposed throats. The man who was now president, who never lost his nerve or his humor even when wounded by a would-be assassin’s bullet—he understood the world would never sleep in safety so long as the monster lived.

So Daniel had sculpted him, and the great man had somehow gotten word of it. His staff had asked a price and Daniel had named one. And in the letter he read to his enraptured students, the White House chief of staff informed him that his price would be honored: the statue given freely in exchange for a private audience with the president.

They clapped for him and hugged him, and after a few minutes of that nonsense he wrenched the smile from his face and ordered them back outside.

Only once they were gone from the room did he notice his wife wasn’t smiling. She asked, “What will you tell him, Danilo?”

He frowned. “You need to ask? I will tell him, with emphasis, not to waver. I will tell him not to listen to these new liberals in the media who speak of anyone who opposes communism as if they are raving reactionaries. They are no better than the revolutionaries who hated the Czar more than they loved their own country. I will tell him that while he fights to contain the spread of communism, he must remember he is in the right, whatever the outcry.”

Galina’s own frown deepened. “Have you forgotten that a government is not its people? Yes, the Soviet Union is not Russia, but our Russia is still there. Our families are still there, what’s left of them.” She fixed his gaze with hers, then looked away. “Have you forgotten even
that
now? There is so
much
you have forgotten.”

An awkward silence followed. “Of course I haven’t forgotten,” Daniel said. “Why would you think that?”

But as he asked the question, she left.

He didn’t try to follow her, nor did he let anger crease his brow for long. Galina had her moods. After all the terrors they’d endured together, a difference of opinion seemed too insignificant a thing to fret over.

He ventured out to check on his pupils’ progress, acting on the well-tested principle that his hulking presence would make them work twice as fast. He found Jackie again beside the snapdragons and lavender, with reasonably competent facsimiles of those blooms taking shape on her too-tiny canvas. He jabbed a thick finger at her painting. “Those shadows should be umber, not black.”

“Oh!” She started and turned around. But when he saw her face, something startled him: her eyes had flashed green, he thought, or for an instant reflected that shade.

The surprised look didn’t leave her face, but she wasn’t looking at her teacher. “Who’s that girl? I haven’t seen her before.”

Indeed, a girl Daniel had never before seen on the grounds regarded them from the gazebo. A slight breeze stirred her pale hair, made it flow like soft snowfall. She was younger than most of his students, perhaps eleven, in a dress of simple gray, face a graceful oval. He could not make out the color of her eyes.

Something about her caused a stir in the pit of his stomach, a fluttering anxiety the likes of which he had not felt in decades. He started to tell Jackie he did not recognize the girl either, but his throat and teeth and tongue couldn’t form the sounds.

When he looked back, the gazebo was empty. He forgot all about it soon after.

Virginia, 1987

Galina and her grandson Sam sat side by side on the loveseat in the den, their backs to a wall of river stone and a circular window framed with yellowed masonry, arranged by Daniel in a pattern like a sunburst or a daisy bloom.

Sam seemed to enjoy these moments much more than his older, more surly siblings ever had. Rather than fidgeting through the folktales she shared, he sat unabashedly spellbound. In the kitchen at the other end of the house, Irene—Sam’s mother, Galina’s youngest daughter—sang as she sliced carrots and cucumbers for dinner, a chore she’d taken upon herself during this afternoon’s visit.

Sam listened, and Galina told: “Everyone in the village believed the boy had run away, but she knew where he had gone. Because the Queen of the Copper Mountain loved him too. She loved to hear him play the pipes, and wanted him to only play for her.

“She lured him to her lair with promises that she would make him the greatest maker of beautiful things that the village had ever seen. And because of his master’s lies, he believed he needed the Queen’s help, and he went to her, and she named her price, that he would spend the rest of his days with her under the mountain, and never come back.”

“Did he come back?” The boy asked.

Galina answered with a thin smile and kept speaking. “But the girl he had vowed to marry did not believe he had run from their wedding. She knew where he had gone, and who he must be with. She wrapped herself in every warm thing she could find, she tied layers of old wool rags tight around her feet, and she marched to the mountain through a day darker than night.”

“Did she find him?” her grandson asked.

“Not at first. But she found the cave of flowers, beautiful flowers made from stone, made by men who the Queen took. And she shouted, and shouted, and shouted that she wanted the boy she loved back.”

Almost, almost, she felt no pang of regret. She ached so much to tell, to unburden, and this was the only way she knew to safely vent that terrible pressure. And so she went on.

“And finally the Queen appeared. She was like a woman and a dragon both, tall with eyes bright as fire and robes that gleamed. She was fiery too, like a dragon, because she was angry, because the boy wanted to be set free, wanted to break his promise.

“The Queen told the girl that she could have her betrothed back, but he would forget all he had learned from her. The girl begged her not to do this, because she feared he would be so unhappy at losing his skills that he would seek the Queen again. And the Queen told her for this to be so she must have something else in exchange. She knew the girl was with child, and she said she had always wanted a child of her very own.

“The girl cried and cried, but agreed to the bargain, and this made the Queen angrier, because she wanted the girl to refuse. She taunted the girl mercilessly. She told the girl her daughter’s name and said that some day, when it was too late, she would give her daughter back—”

“Mom!” Irene stood in the hall, arms akimbo. “How awful! You know that’s not how the story goes.”

Galina regarded her daughter coolly. “Must I bind myself to those ridiculous translations you read him?”

Irene rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to make it so
dismal
. I just don’t want you scaring Sam.”

“I’m not scared!” her son protested.

Then Daniel opened the patio door and stumbled into the room. His dark eyes scanned the walls, never settling, never finding a focal point.

He clutched a small painting in both hands—an impressionistic rendition of a pale-haired girl standing before a trellis of hyacinth bean. The paint was still wet. Some of it had smeared across the front of his sweatshirt.

“Mr. Brodsky?” called a voice. A worried-looking mouse of a girl came in behind him, a bewildered student no older than fourteen.

Danilo held the portrait toward Galina, mouth working, sound fighting to come out.

“What’s going on?” blurted Irene. She had to shout again before the girl spoke.

“My assignment. That girl out in the garden. She posed for me and I painted her. When I brought it to him .…” There were tears on her cheeks. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”

“What girl?” demanded Irene, as Galina regarded the oval face, the dun dress, the hair like snow. Her own face turned pale before her eyes narrowed.

“He’ll be all right,” she snapped. Then, to her daughter, “Take her to the kitchen phone so she can call her parents to pick her up. Lessons are over.”

The student started to protest, but Irene had already moved to intercept. She shot Galina a troubled glance as she pushed the sputtering girl ahead of her through the hallway. Sam began to cry, no doubt from seeing his beloved grandfather in such a state, but tending to him had to wait. Galina closed the distance to her husband, took the painting away from him without a word. She followed her daughter down the hall, turned to descend the basement stairs.

Daniel shook and rubbed at his arms as if he had just come in from a blizzard. Then noticed his grandson sitting alone, sobbing.

He didn’t understand how he’d gotten from the garden to the den, but what good would it do to let Sam see his fear? A graying giant, he lumbered to the boy, patted his shoulder with a huge but gentle hand. “There now,” he said. “No need for worries. There’s nothing to cry about. Nothing at all.”

Virginia, 2003

On a night when clouds hung low enough to shroud the mountaintop, Daniel stumbled naked and wet down the central hallway of the home built by his own hands.

He moved at a speed unsafe for his sagging weight and softened bones. He skidded and caromed against a river stone wall—every stone in it arranged to suit his will—and barked his elbow. He took no notice, didn’t stop until he reached the basement door, his hand gripping the knob as if it were an extension of the power that gripped him.