There Is a Snake In Swans
“I try not to put too much stock in dreams,” Wolf said, laying in bed next to her, with his arm thrown over his eyes, only to block the dull red glare of the alarm clock’s block numbers: three forty-seven. But even in that dim light, a lie lived in his twisted lips and rough voice, more rough than sudden waking could account for. He wasn’t a very good liar, at least not about this.
“Easier said than done.”
“What were you dreaming about?”
“I don’t even remember,” Eva replied. He peeled his arm off his face and looked over at her, then smiled. Maybe she wasn’t a very good liar, either. “Felix,” she said.
That lie, close enough to the truth, he accepted, and he pulled her close, nestling her into the warmest part of his body, as if to protect her from the purely artificial cold of the air conditioning. The heat bloomed outside, the beginning of the Phezzani summer. Although she hated the rain, she looked forward to monsoon season for the breaking of the heat.
“Do you want me to go check on him for you?” he offered.
“No. No reason to risk waking him.” Felix slept badly— a restless child— and waking him now would keep him up the rest of the night.
“Alright.”
She tried to offer him something else. “I read him The Ugly Duckling when I put him to bed,” she admitted.
Wolf turned towards her and cracked one eye open in the dark, amused skepticism taking over. “I didn’t think you’d pick that one.”
“I didn’t know the story. I had never read it before.”
Wolf laughed, then closed his eyes again. “I would have warned you if I’d seen you with it. I hated Andersen’s stories when I was a kid. Something about them…” He trailed off.
“Felix asked for it. Alex gave the book to him. Fleet Admiral Wahlen gave it to Alex.”
“Oh— I see.” He closed his eyes again. “That was the name of the ship he served on when he met Kaiser Reinhard— Ugly Duckling . I’m sure he thought it would be a good memento.”
“I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by it other than that.”
“Did Felix like the story?”
“Yes. He did.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said with a yawn..
Wolf pulled her yet closer, which she could do nothing to resist, though she felt sticky and uncomfortable in her own skin. She usually didn’t mind, and at other times enjoyed, the feeling of how much stronger than her he was. How he could simply take her and hold her there, without noticing that he was doing it.
When they first married, she found it exciting. She couldn’t put aside the awareness that she was trusting him, and that love was the only thing that distinguished trust from terror, so she had to play with the feeling. This sensation was rarer after years of marriage. It was especially rare after several years of eerie peace in the galaxy, where he slept at her side almost every night, rather than roaming out in space for months at a time. When he left for long trips, the feeling was very present, as she thought about his duties out in the universe. The smells of ozone-rich ship-air, industrial soap, and lingering sweat on his uniforms when they reunited at the spaceport reminded her how force, rather than gentleness, was his natural mode.
She wasn’t sure why this awareness of the strength of his arm had come to her so strongly now, laying peacefully in the dark— and without the protective enjoyment that usually accompanied it. If she wiggled to get up and go to the bathroom, he would let her go without any hesitation, but this knowledge wasn’t reassuring— it, too, weighed on her. She lay under his heavy arm and tried not to twitch as he breathed and his heart beat in her ear.
Her faux ignorance lied to her, and not just to Wolf: her dream discomforted her, in her own bed and in her own body, and that sensation only grew the longer she stared at the dark ceiling above, and the more she dwelt on it in the darkness.
Wolf was already asleep again. He had that soldier’s ability to snatch rest anywhere he could find it, though it meant he’d wake easily too. So, Eva lay perfectly still and tried not to startle him awake with another nightmare.
The dream, as she recalled it, was unremarkable. It followed the usual anxiety that any mother had about their child: that one day the chubby four year old who squirmed in her arms and squealed when she tickled him would stop loving her. It was an irrational fear, made only marginally more sane by the fact that Felix had some other mother, a realer one, somewhere far away.
It was silly to lie to Wolf. Certainly he nursed his own anxieties about Felix openly: “When he’s older, he can use his real father’s name.”
She closed her eyes. Still, there was the shadowy figure off in the distance, and Felix pulled out of her grip and ran towards that other woman. The dream hardly required interpretation, but nevertheless, she woke already thinking about what it meant.
Grasping for anything other than the obvious, she remembered something a self-professed spiritual doctor said on the radio. She only ever listened to this kind of program after moving to Phezzan. Radio stations on Odin, even after Kaiser Reinhard’s lifting of restrictions on acceptable public speech, tended to be staid, out of long habit. But on Phezzan, where the Neue Reich hadn’t yet cracked down on airwave pollution, at any hour of the day or night, she could spin the radio’s dial and catch faint, overlapping voices: people broadcasting out of homebuilt towers on the top of their apartment buildings, picking a frequency and whispering into it with the hope that anyone was listening. That cut to the heart of the difference between Odin and Phezzan— here, everyone was desperate for anyone to hear them; on Odin, the safest thing to be was very quiet.
She listened to these voices when home alone, letting anyone keep her company. So the sonorous mystic’s voice drifted across her attention one afternoon as he said, to a woman who called in asking for help interpreting a repeat nightmare, “Beloved daughter, the most important thing to remember about dreams is that everyone, everyone in them— is you . Why are you afraid of yourself?”
The advice, facile as it was, now struck her with its original intent, and she turned it around in her mind. For the dream Felix, running, she understood very well the complicated and unhappy tensions at play. She was an orphan herself, taken in by Wolf’s parents, and often cried herself to sleep in her teen years for want of her father. But she understood and sympathized with whatever Felix would feel as he grew, and she knew, or at least hoped, that she could talk to him about it without rancor. The aspect of the nightmare that woke her was not really Felix— it was that woman, waiting to steal him away from her.
If Felix ran away to some shadowy woman’s arms, and yet that shadowy woman was herself, perhaps the true anxiety was guilt, rather than fear. After all, through a mechanism that she never understood— perhaps never wanted to understand— Eva took Felix from his real mother.
The monumental unfairness of it all should have made her pity the shadowy woman. Although Heinrich said Elfriede von Kohlrausch abandoned her baby willingly, they all were lying to themselves. She was an enemy of the state, and Fleet Admiral Reuenthal died a traitor. If Kohlrausch kept her infant, he would grow up on the run, and as an adult end fixed in the gunsights of the Reich in his own right, all because of his parentage. Abandoning him was the only way to save him.
If Eva stood in Elfriede’s position, she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that she would have done the same. It might have killed her, but she would have done the same.
The lack of choice, realizing she lacked the strength to resist, was familiar, perhaps even universal. Eva, beneath the weight of Wolf’s arm, called it trust. What Elfriede had called it as she cast her baby and bassinet into the river of fate, pushed the swan’s egg into the duck’s nest, she didn’t know.
She never saw even a picture of the woman who had given her a son, and Felix looked so much like Fleet Admiral Reuenthal that there was no trace of his maternal heritage in his face to give Eva a clue what she looked like. No one offered her an intelligence dossier on the woman, nor had she asked Wolf to tell her about any of Reuenthal’s many mistresses while he was alive. The lack of curiosity was, and always had been, simple fear. But she decided, in the morning after her latest bout of interrupted sleep, that it was long past overdue for her to look into it. Putting a face to the woman’s name would do her good— removing the shadows and mystery that formed her current discomfort.
Elfriede von Kohlrausch was just a woman. A woman just like herself. She repeated this like a mantra as she lay in bed, listening to Wolf turn on the water for his shower.
She broached the subject with Wolf over breakfast. He usually left for work around seven, long before Felix got up, but Eva treasured eating breakfast with her husband, stealing quiet morning moments from both of their otherwise too-busy lives. Wolf was already dressed when she made her way to the kitchen in her pajamas, and he smiled at her.
“Felix is still safe in bed,” he said by way of greeting. “Hasn’t molted into a swan and flown away yet.” He sat on a stool at the kitchen island, a mug of coffee already half empty in front of him, and some toast with jam going slowly soggy on his plate as he looked at some urgent business on his phone. “But since you didn’t kick me awake with any more nightmares, I guess you knew that already.”
“I hope you didn’t wake him up. He’ll be cranky in the afternoon if he doesn’t get to sleep.”
“I was as quiet as a mouse.”
“Hmm.” She walked behind him and stopped to kiss the top of his head, still damp from his shower. “I don’t think that really suits you.”
“I’m ashamed that you think that even after years of practice, being a house mouse isn’t one of my virtues.”
“Ashamed?” she asked.
“Well, at least I have you to make up for where I’m lacking.”
“I suppose.” She fixed herself a bowl of cereal and mug of coffee from the pot, then sat down across from him, looking out the window at their yard. The sun had only just risen outside, not high enough for direct light to peer in over the trees and through the windows, but enough to turn the sky outside a yellow-pink, and illuminate the wedding-veil of steam rising and drifting up from the ground.
They ate in silent companionship, and Eva kept looking out the window for so long that she didn’t notice that Wolf’s attention had fallen away from his work, and he was looking at her.
“You’re quiet this morning,” he said.
“Busy day coming,” she said. “Just trying to save my energy.”
“What big plans do you and Felix have without me?” Wolf said. “I’m jealous.”
“It’s nothing— I was just thinking about having Heinrich help me find some information.” Her caginess was her own fault, and Wolf’s furrowed brow caught her out immediately. She tumbled further into the lie. “Felix’s physical is coming up next week, and the pediatrician has been asking me for his family medical records. I was hoping Heinrich might know who I should ask for them,” she finished lamely.
“Kessler would know,” Wolf said. “I can get it to the doctor for you.”
“It seems like too silly of a thing to trouble two fleet admirals with,” she said. “I can take care of it.”
“I don’t think taking care of my son is beyond the scope of my duties.”
“No, but it really is nothing,” she said. “And I can deal with it.”
Wolf’s shoulders turned forwards with tension, and he leaned hard on his elbows on the island, looking away from her out the window. He wasn’t offering to send the medical records to the doctor to take a menial errand off her shoulders— something lived in those records that he wanted to protect her from.
“I can handle it,” she reiterated.
“I’ll let Kessler know you’re coming,” he said with obvious reluctance. “He’ll make time for you. It’s not that hard to pull out a file.”
She brought Felix with her, holding his chubby (and mysteriously sticky) left hand as they walked up the tall marble steps to the headquarters of Kessler’s military police. Felix was still too short to take the stairs with a regular gait, so he mounted them one at a time, with as much of a heavy stomp as he could muster. He wasn’t angry or annoyed at running the errand, but she thought he was imitating the black-uniformed soldiers who rushed past them as they climbed. He tried to pull his hand out of hers, but when he did, she squeezed it ever-tighter.
They were an odd sight as they slowly climbed the stairs, she in her yellow dress and him in his blue sailor suit. It gave her time to look at the building, which she never considered in much detail before. The building was new— constructed over the course of months two years ago— and youth left a sharp edge on the marble. On Odin, the buildings were decades, if not hundreds, of years old, with every outside surface softened by rain and wind and the acidic drippings of pigeons. The gentle ravages of time took the noses off of gods and the talons off of eagles, and the corners off of the edges of stairs. It left rust-colored streaks down the faces of statues. The Lady Justice wielding a sword outside the Military Police’s office on Odin cried beneath her blindfold; the one that guarded the top of the steps here expressed no such guilt for the punishments she meted out, though perhaps she would in time. When they reached the statue’s shadow, Felix hopped over the line of the sword on the ground. The shadow passed across the top of his head.
She picked him up, and he squirmed unhappily in her arms, though he didn’t fight her completely. Soon, he would be large enough that she wouldn’t be able to do this anymore.
It took her and Felix long enough to walk up the steps that a soldier waited to escort them directly to Kessler’s office when they arrived at the top.
“This way, Frau Mittermeyer.”
Through the echoing lobby and into the hallway, her shoes clicked on the floor. There weren’t many MPs around, and the few they passed rushed by without giving them a second glance.
“I wanna walk,” Felix said in her ear, and tried to squirm out of her grip again. He dropped his legs from where they curled around her waist, so that in her arms he became twice as heavy. This recently learned trick made her stumble forwards as the soldier led them through the cold hallways. She relented— if she didn’t, she would have to stop walking to get a better grasp on him— and let Felix walk again. Before she could take his hand, he ran in front of the soldier, out of her reach, and then marched, or stomped, his way down the hallway. Beneath the shadow cast by the military policeman’s hat, the soldier tried not to smile.
Kessler’s office was all the way at the rear of the building, with a wide window overlooking the city street. The noontime summer light of the equatorial city made shadows fall unnaturally straight on the street, and the shiny glass buildings looked like harsh paper cutouts of themselves. Even the space elevator off in the distance cast no shadow on the ground, though it cracked the sky in half. Kessler stood with his back to the window, and it was so bright outside that she couldn’t see his face properly as he greeted her.
“Frau Mittermeyer, it’s been so long. And, of course, Sir Felix, you get bigger every day.” His voice was warm, so he must have been smiling. Felix attempted a salute.
“Thank you for taking the time, Fleet Admiral,” Eva said. “I’m surprised my request needed something more than printing out a file.”
“Please, take a seat. Would Felix like to go visit the cafeteria and get a snack?”
“No,” Eva said, a little too quickly. She picked him up once more, and he complained in a mumble as he sat on her knee. The ornament on Kessler’s desk, an antique brass globe with the unfamiliar continents of Earth, quickly attracted his attention, and he abandoned his protestations as he spun it around. “I don’t want to trouble all your staff, too.”
“It’s really no trouble, Frau Mittermeyer. It is just a file.” Kessler sat down, then from a drawer of his desk pulled out the file in question. It was thick, and whoever had printed it out went to the trouble of glue-binding it together, so that it approached the form of an actual book. Before he handed it over, Kessler rested his hands on it and steepled his index fingers. “I would, however, like to know what you’re interested in knowing.”
“Didn’t Wolf tell you?”
“Fleet Admiral Mittermeyer requested you be given Kohlrausch’s whole file.”
Before she could stop herself, and surprised at both her own bravery and curiosity, she asked, “Not Fleet Admiral Reuenthal’s?”
Kessler’s face, what little of it she could see through the shadow, was impassive. “Do you want to see his file?”
“No. I was just wondering.” It was lucky that she didn’t want look at Reuenthal’s file. She might not have gotten it, or not all of it. It seemed like the offer of Elfriede’s complete file was a conciliatory gesture, meant to dissuade her from asking for more. She nodded at the packet. “I just thought it was thick, for only one person.”
“It’s mostly transcripts. They take up space.”
“Transcripts? Of what?”
“She was in custody for some time,” Kessler said. “Several people conducted comprehensive interviews.”
“You?”
“No, not my office. It was a civil affair, rather than a military one, on the side of the woman. When it became a military matter, it fell under the jurisdiction of the Chief of Staff, not the military police.”
“Should I have gone to the Ministry of Justice instead?” Eva asked.
“No, it’s good that you came to me. My office inherited a good number of the relevant records. But I am curious what you want to know.”
“Nothing, really,” Eva said. There was something fearful in Kessler’s voice and bearing that made him difficult to lie to; luckily, she had no reason to lie. Looking into his shadowed face, he might have compelled her to reveal every dark corner of her heart, even ones she didn’t herself know about. “I’ve been having nightmares about her— Kohlrausch. I thought maybe seeing, knowing what she’s like, knowing what happened to her, it will stop me from thinking she’s around every corner, and going to—” She looked down at Felix, still spinning the globe.
“I see.” He pushed the file across the desk, and Felix reached for it. Eva stopped him from opening it, putting her hand over his. “You should rest assured, Frau Mittermeyer, no one here or in the Internal Security Department would allow anyone to lay a hand on your son.”
“I know,” she said. She laughed, but it came out faint and unconvincing. “Mothers just get paranoid about that kind of thing.”
“Certainly, I can’t blame you. But there is a point when worry becomes detrimental.” He looked at the file as her thumb flicked the corner of the pages, as if he expected her to decide she didn’t want to see it after all, and would hand it back over to him.
“What happened to her?” Eva asked. “After she gave Felix up. Do you know?”
“Regrettably, no,” Kessler said. “There was some attempt to find her after order was reestablished in Neue Land, but it was not a high priority. She probably stayed on Heinessen— we would have seen her if she had crossed a border back into the Reich properly. But if she’s on Heinessen, there’s nothing I can do. My office has no jurisdiction there.”
“I see.”
There was a moment of silence.
“You don’t want me to look at this, do you?” she said suddenly.
“It’s not my place to have an opinion on something like that,” Kessler said. “But I’ll be frank with you— I don’t see what use there is in bringing up the past.”
“When Felix is older, he’ll want to know. It will be my responsibility to tell him. Which means that I have to know something, don’t I?” Her hand still covered his over the file, and he looked up at her at the mention of his name.
“Then consider that I am acting on behalf of the State, herself a protective mother towards her children. I can tell that you would prefer he didn’t ask— so do I.”
“Why not?”
“Let me ask you— is there anything in there you could possibly learn that would make you feel more secure?” He nodded at Felix. “Or anything you could possibly tell him?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted.
Felix had been listening, though he didn’t understand the full context of the conversation. “Let me ask,” he said. “Tell me.”
“Tell you what, my darling?” Eva said.
“Let me see,” he said again. “Let me see it.” He tried to turn the cover of the book, but she stopped him once again— the easy power of her adult hand against his small one.
Kessler laughed. “You understand.”
There was something about the way he spoke that made her change her mind and steel herself. She pushed Felix’s hand aside, then opened the book. “Look, Felix, here, look at this.” She kept turning the pages, looking past the table of contents for a photo that she knew must be in here. “Let me find a picture of your mother.”
She flipped forwards another few pages, then stopped with a jerk when she found what she was looking for. Glaring up coldly from the glossy page was Elfriede von Kohlrausch.
Felix’s fat finger landed on the photograph, and he smiled. “Mama,” he said.
Although Elfriede’s expression was one that Eva couldn’t picture herself wearing— mixed anger and terror in the press of her lips and the squint of her eyes against the interrogation-light— looking at the photograph was like looking in the mirror.
BRUCKDORF I appreciate your candor, Fraulein Kohlrausch.
KOHLRAUSCH I wouldn’t call it candor.
BRUCKDORF Pardon?
KOHLRAUSCH I didn’t know it was so easy to confuse the barrel of a gun and the eye of a camera— one shot can be candid, the other cannot.
BRUCKDORF Honesty, then.
KOHLRAUSCH [Laughs.]
BRUCKDORF Are you not taking this seriously?
KOHLRAUSCH What do you want me to tell you? That I should be honored that the Minister of Justice is paying personal attention to my case?
BRUCKDORF Fraulein Kohlrausch, if I may remind you: you are not the person under investigation.
KOHLRAUSCH I’m aware.
BRUCKDORF Your cooperation—
KOHLRAUSCH What would it take for me to be the one under investigation?
BRUCKDORF I’m afraid I don’t understand.
KOHLRAUSCH You forget, Minister, this is the second time in my life I’ve visited the Ministry of Justice to give a statement, though the first time was on Odin. Of course, I was beneath your personal notice back then.
BRUCKDORF I didn’t forget. I have your former statements right here.
KOHLRAUSCH I’m sure they’re enlightening.
BRUCKDORF Not very.
KOHLRAUSCH What was I supposed to say back then that would have enlightened you?
BRUCKDORF The statement was for the record. If the person taking it had tried to get you, personally, to confess to involvement in a crime that didn’t involve you—
KOHLRAUSCH My cousin Eduard was fourteen. Did it involve him?
BRUCKDORF We’re not here to discuss—
KOHLRAUSCH Well, what does it matter? They sentenced him in the evening, and he was dead by noon the next day. Very efficient when it comes to that.
BRUCKDORF It is…
KOHLRAUSCH I just find it funny, Minister. I suppose I should be lucky that I haven’t committed the offense of being born a man. Something marks you all as criminals the moment you come out of the womb.
BRUCKDORF If you committed a noteworthy crime against the state yourself, you would be considered responsible for it, your sex notwithstanding. I can assure you of that, Fraulein.
KOHLRAUSCH Oh, yes, I remember. You kept this job between one dynasty and the next because of your involvement in the Benemunde affair, didn’t you? [Laughs.] I should be more afraid that you will find some crime to execute me for.
BRUCKDORF Fraulein, I would like to return to the matter at hand.
KOHLRAUSCH If I’ve committed no crime, what purpose is there in investigating?
BRUCKDORF I did not say that you had committed no crime. Traveling with falsified documents, bribery, attempted murder—
KOHLRAUSCH You don’t scare me.
BRUCKDORF I’m not trying to.
KOHLRAUSCH Of course.
BRUCKDORF You say you came to Fleet Admiral Reuenthal’s house to kill him. You hid in the bushes and attacked him with a knife.
KOHLRAUSCH Yes.
BRUCKDORF There are several curious things about that— it isn’t relevant, exactly, but why a knife?
KOHLRAUSCH It’s more difficult to buy a gun. Women require the consent of a husband or father— you are well aware that I have neither.
BRUCKDORF You know how to get false papers. I’m sure a signature would not be that hard.
KOHLRAUSCH Not worth the risk, or the money.
BRUCKDORF So you took a much greater risk? Surely, you didn’t think you would succeed with a knife? I have it written here that your father once made a bet on a duel that the fleet admiral participated in— which he won, fatally. Your father lost a significant amount of money on that bet. And he is a career soldier in the peak of health. You were aware of his reputation?
KOHLRAUSCH Of course I was aware.
BRUCKDORF Then you attacked him without actually expecting to kill him.
KOHLRAUSCH What’s the aphorism? A soldier goes into battle balancing the scales of the possibility of defeat and the hope of victory.
BRUCKDORF I’ve never heard anyone say that.
KOHLRAUSCH Maybe I’m misremembering. I’m not a soldier.
BRUCKDORF Did you expect him to kill you? [A pause.] Answer, please.
KOHLRAUSCH I don’t remember.
BRUCKDORF Fraulein Kohlrausch.
KOHLRAUSCH I can tell you the facts. I don’t think I have any desire to make up a story about what I might have felt or reasoned.
BRUCKDORF I would find it illuminating.
KOHLRAUSCH Get this gods-damned light out of my face.
BRUCKDORF Of course. Is that better?
KOHLRAUSCH You tell me what you’re looking for. What’s the alternative motive to a suicidal last stand?
BRUCKDORF I see that there are alternatives, considering that you then lived in his house for months. And are pregnant with his child.
KOHLRAUSCH Tell me what they are, then.
BRUCKDORF Let’s move on. After you attacked the fleet admiral, what happened?
KOHLRAUSCH Do you need the graphic details? I would prefer not to recount it.
BRUCKDORF Did he rape you?
KOHLRAUSCH Does it matter?
BRUCKDORF I’m afraid it does.
KOHLRAUSCH Why?
BRUCKDORF Because, Fraulein, I am trying to discern his motives.
KOHLRAUSCH You might as well ask a worm why the sparrow sings.
BRUCKDORF Maybe an apt comparison. Nevertheless, I am asking.
KOHLRAUSCH It’s a matter of perspective.
BRUCKDORF In what way?
KOHLRAUSCH You have said yourself that in terms of strength and ability, he would be able to do whatever he liked with me— and you see what he has done. The difference lies only in what I decide to call it.
BRUCKDORF No.
KOHLRAUSCH Then, please, enlighten me what the difference is.
BRUCKDORF Did you approach the fleet admiral with the intent to form an alliance against the current government with him?
KOHLRAUSCH That’s not the question you were asking before.
BRUCKDORF It’s the question I was trying to ask, through discerning the facts.
KOHLRAUSCH No.
BRUCKDORF Then why did he allow you to stay in his house for so long? He brought you all the way from Odin to Phezzan— again, under a false identification. That isn’t something done casually.
KOHLRAUSCH Where else was I supposed to go?
BRUCKDORF The universe is a big place. If I were in your position, I would find somewhere else. And it wasn’t wanting him to provide for your child that made you stay with him. You must not have been pregnant— or known you were pregnant— when you traveled. Interstellar travel can harm a developing baby.
KOHLRAUSCH Pity.
BRUCKDORF Did he know you were pregnant?
KOHLRAUSCH He assumed. As you say— based on the facts— we can divine that it was his intention.
BRUCKDORF You never asked him, or told him, or talked about it with him?
KOHLRAUSCH Oh, we talked. [Laughs.]
BRUCKDORF And what did he say?
KOHLRAUSCH You’ve brought me here because he’s an ambitious man. He said that he’d aim even higher, for the sake of the child.
BRUCKDORF How high?
KOHLRAUSCH That was the difference between us. He always accused me of trying to reclaim my family’s old glory that we hadn’t earned.
BRUCKDORF Your great-uncle was Prime Minister. Was that the position he was after?
KOHLRAUSCH [Laughs.]
BRUCKDORF I see. But you claim that you didn’t approach him intending to form an alliance— you really wanted revenge for the death of your family. What changed?
KOHLRAUSCH Nothing changed.
BRUCKDORF Something changed. At the very least, you didn’t keep trying to kill him.
KOHLRAUSCH I didn’t? Maybe I’m biding my time.
BRUCKDORF Were you?
KOHLRAUSCH Probably.
BRUCKDORF Probably? Nevermind.
KOHLRAUSCH [Laughs]
BRUCKDORF What was life like, when you lived in his house?
KOHLRAUSCH The definition of domestic.
BRUCKDORF He treated you well?
KOHLRAUSCH I wasn’t his prisoner.
BRUCKDORF Fraulein, I’m afraid you’re not providing me with any clarity.
KOHLRAUSCH It’s as clear as day. It’s not even complicated.
BRUCKDORF To you, perhaps. I’m a much simpler man, it seems.
KOHLRAUSCH I’ll tell you something, Minister. And maybe you don’t know it, though I don’t think you’re a stupid man. I think maybe I was the only person in the galaxy who didn’t know it before I got to his house.
BRUCKDORF I appreciate that. I’m listening.
KOHLRAUSCH He took my grand uncle prisoner, and executed those members of my family who didn’t cooperate immediately. Of course my ire pointed towards him— a better man would have looked the other way and let some of them escape out into the night. He was very thorough.
BRUCKDORF If you’re expecting me to argue with you about that, I won’t. But go on.
KOHLRAUSCH So he remains at fault for that. But he told me something that— let’s say— broadened my scope of thinking.
BRUCKDORF What was that?
KOHLRAUSCH You’ll think I’m a poor daughter of my family. I assumed that my grand uncle was responsible for the things he was accused of.
BRUCKDORF What are you implying?
KOHLRAUSCH He told me that my uncle was set up as a scapegoat, in order to provide an opportunity for Kaiser Reinhard to take full control of the government.
BRUCKDORF And you believed him when he said this?
KOHLRAUSCH It’s a nice story, isn’t it?
BRUCKDORF It is, if he wanted to redirect your hatred elsewhere, and give a plausible reason why a union between the two of you would provide a suitable basis for a new regime.
KOHLRAUSCH He didn’t need me for that. Even I understand that the only legitimacy he felt he needed was that of force.
BRUCKDORF Most people who really believe in that philosophy don’t manage to survive as career soldiers. The army requires discipline to function, and people who don’t understand how to bow to authority are quickly removed.
KOHLRAUSCH Well, what is this interrogation, if it’s not that? Snipping off a little malignant tumor from His Majesty’s Reich? Cleaning house?
BRUCKDORF I am not here to persecute Fleet Admiral Reuenthal. I hope you understand that.
KOHLRAUSCH Yes, it’s very honorable of you to want to stick to the facts.
BRUCKDORF There is another thing I don’t understand.
KOHLRAUSCH What?
BRUCKDORF Fleet Admiral Reuenthal is well known for having affairs with women. But you are the longest lasting of these affairs by far, and the only one he allowed to live with him, and the only one who ever fell pregnant. What makes you the exception?
KOHLRAUSCH How am I supposed to know? Maybe he just liked the way I looked.
The heavy report on Kohlrausch stayed tucked in the bottom of Eva’s desk drawer at home. She read over as much of it as she could stomach, and found that she learned nothing new. The facts, as the report presented them, were clean and cold. She could read as much as she wanted about the Kohlrausch family history, at least the personal side gleaned from marriage and birth and death records, and public squabbles recorded in newspapers, and clips from recovered diaries that had ended up tucked away safely in the state archives. Although the section of the transcript discussing Kaiser Reinhard’s setup of Litchtenlade as a scapegoat for the death of Admiral Kircheis remained whole and unredacted in Kohlrausch’s interview, there was no further mention of its truthfulness or lack thereof in the rest of the massive pile of texts, nor was there any further clarity on Reuenthal.
Kessler was right— there was nothing she found that provided any clarity or comfort, and every page she turned disturbed her further. She kept flipping back to the scowling photograph of Kohlrausch at the beginning of the report, and tracing her fingers over the shiny ink on the page. She was photographed against a height chart— Kohlrausch was only a few centimeters taller than herself.
Looking at the photograph closely, there were differences between them, but the most visible ones were all in bearing and expression. Kohlrausch squinted her eyes against the harsh light of the photo, and her lips, still smeared with a dark red lipstick, were pressed together in an angry scowl. Eva’s face was round where Kohlrausch’s had the bite of hunger taken out of her cheeks— time in exile had probably been difficult on her physically. Aside from Kohlrausch’s hair being unkempt and falling in a wild mane, the color and curls were the same, and they both had the same blue eyes.
She put the report in the bottom of her desk drawer, and tried not to think about it.
Over dinner that night, Wolf said, “Kessler told me that you managed to get what you were looking for?”
“I think so,” Eva said. “I appreciate the help.”
“It was nothing.”
If he didn’t want to bring it up any further, then they wouldn’t discuss it. Eva didn’t want to talk about it, but it weighed on the edges of her mind.
It manifested in her being unable to take her eyes off of Felix. She couldn’t even let him play in the playroom on his own for a few minutes— she ended up picking him up and trying to find excuses to keep him on her knee, even when he squirmed and tried to get down.
“I think I just miss it when you were a tiny baby,” she said to him. He was still young enough that she was certain that he wouldn’t remember some of the things she said, especially when they were beyond his understanding. “You were so easy to pick up back then.”
“Put me down,” he demanded, and tried to slip out from her grip. She let him go after a moment, but less than ten minutes later, she was itching to pick him up again.
“Let me read you a story, Felix,” she said. “Let’s read The Ugly Duckling .”
“Come here, Felix. Let me brush your hair,” Eva said.
He rushed past her legs, the frantic run of a kid still figuring out how fast he could coordinate his legs moving underneath him. She leaned down to grab him as he sped, laughing, past the bathroom door, and she managed to get her hands around his waist and pick him up.
He felt strangely light, like he had when he was very, very young, like she could toss him up into the air, like he might simply fly away.
She stood him on the bathroom counter like a doll, looking over his shoulder into the wide mirror. Elfriede von Kohlrausch stared back at her from the glass, disheveled and hungry, and Felix smiled and reached out towards her reflection.
“You don’t look anything like your mama, do you?” she said.
DOCTOR KAINES It’s getting late, but we have time for one last caller. If there’s something on your mind, let me talk it through with you. You know the number: 9942-4882-1194. That’s 9942-4882-1194. If you need an ear, I’m listening. 9942-4882-1194.
CALLER Hello, Doctor.
DOCTOR KAINES Hello, my beloved. What’s your name, and where are you calling from?
CALLER I’m in West-Central City.
DOCTOR KAINES A local caller! Though I can hear you’re not really from around here. We have friends all over Phezzan— and the galaxy, it’s a blessing isn’t it? What is it that’s troubling you, my beloved?
CALLER You said to someone, once, that you shouldn’t be afraid of the people in your dreams.
DOCTOR KAINES That’s right.
CALLER Because they’re all just you.
DOCTOR KAINES They’re all coming from your mind. That’s what dreams are.
CALLER I’m dreaming of this woman— she’s just like me. I see her when I look in the mirror. She’s in my house, like I’m her and she’s me.
DOCTOR KAINES And you’re afraid of her?
CALLER I don’t know.
DOCTOR KAINES Can you tell me about it, beloved?
CALLER I don’t think I can.
The next Sunday, around noon, the Mittermeyers accepted an invitation to the palace, on the behest of Kaiser Alex. It wasn’t an invitation that was necessary to extend— they could come and go as they pleased— but the small emperor had demanded, in his limited vocabulary, that he have a picnic with his one and only friend. They could hardly refuse that request, if the Kaiser was lonely.
The boys played together a few times a week, but the three parents had privately discussed that soon the two could spend most of their days together, with a tutor. Eva wasn’t sure if she should agree to the arrangement or not— it seemed to both be depriving Felix of a normal childhood, and giving him a responsibility that he didn’t deserve to shoulder. But Wolf was enthusiastic about the plan, and they would have a little time to decide still. Felix was four— a five year old should certainly start going to school. The question was only in regard to Alex’s age, as the younger of the two by a year. When Alex turned four, proper lessons would start for the Kaiser.
The day of the picnic was bruisingly hot. The summer weather remained unbroken, and the air settled thick and sticky in the palace gardens. These gardens were nothing like the ones of Neue Sanssouci, which Eva had visited with Wolf a few times. Although the gardens took up several city blocks, they were much smaller than the ones on Odin— there would be no wild hunts in the grand forest here— and much more carefully managed. The management showed in the even way the trees were arranged, some needing supports that held them straight.
Everything had been planted just the year before, on freshly cleared land that once held several dense blocks of normal Phezzani city. The plants that now filled the garden came carted in on huge trucks— transplanting grown trees more of a feat of engineering than building the palace itself. Even with the carefully manicured greenery, and the walls of the palace beyond that, the omnipresent rush of city life drifted in— a buzz that Eva could never tune out.
The two boys didn’t notice or care about the noise or the newness. They were of the new generation themselves, both born and raised on Phezzan. Things that Eva would never adapt to were second nature to the two of them, and certainly not worth a second thought. Maybe, when they were both grown, they’d look back on photographs of this garden in its early days and be able to recognize how strange and stilted it looked. Flat, like the set of a play. Maybe in twenty years, they’d be grown into themselves, and the garden would too.
The boys abandoned their bowls of cut summer fruit to go chase each other and Alex’s puppy, shrieking. The dog was an energetic miniature poodle, not sure if it was desperate to be chased or pet by the boys. The two of them stumbled across the grass after it, tripping over each other. Even falls that would have made the boys cry and return to their parents had they been running alone were ignored in the enthusiasm for the chase. They got back up and resumed running without even thinking about it. Felix was older and faster, but when Alex fell too far behind in their race around, he would turn back around to chase him, the dog figuring out the game and yapping at his heels.
Eva and Wolf lazed on the blanket on the grass, watching the scene. Kaiserin Hildegard was not there— she needed to go address some business indoors. Although there were plenty of servants around making sure that no harm came to the tiny Kaiser, it was still a sign of trust to let the Mittermeyers be there, and allow them to speak to Alex as they would their own son.
With their faces softened by distance, and their voices the unmistakable shrieks of early childhood, Eva took her eyes off of Felix for the first time in days. She alternately tilted her head up to the sky, or looked at her husband. Wolf kept watching the two children, with a moody but fond expression.
“You can get up and chase them,” Eva said. “They’d probably think it’s funny.”
“No need to bother them. They’re having fun.”
“And you wouldn’t have fun running around with them?”
“Hah. Maybe.”
“You would.”
“It’d be more fun if I was young again,” he said.
She reached over and tugged on a lock of his hair. “You’re still young.”
“Not like that.”
“Would you really want to be a child again?” she asked. “I certainly don’t.”
“No, not really,” he said. But she understood what he meant, as he watched the boys play. The nostalgia in his voice bordered on pain. “It’s just funny.”
“I suppose—” she said.
“What?”
“If I could see my father again— that would be worth having a second childhood, despite everything else.”
He understood her statement for the offer of sympathy it was meant as, and nodded. Then he rolled down onto his stomach, laying with his chin propped on his crossed arms, and his feet kicking the air. His nice white shirt was only spared from grass stains by the picnic blanket. She put her hand on his back and rubbed between his shoulder blades, which made him smile.
“Were you really unhappy, as the ugly duckling in our house?” he asked her.
She laughed. “I’m not much of a swan. At best, I’m a goose.”
Wolf laughed. “I don’t think so.”
She looked off at the kids, rubbed her knuckles against his spine. “No, I know. And it worked out for me in the end. The right nest after all.”
“Do you worry about that— with him?” He nodded towards Felix.
“I shouldn’t. I don’t.”
“Mmm,” he said, meaning nothing, but letting her have her ardent white lie.
“Why didn’t you like that story?” she asked suddenly.
“Hm?”
“You said you didn’t like that kind of fairy tale when you were a kid.”
“I don’t know.” He was surprised by the question. “I liked adventure stories better— rescue the princess, slay the dragon.” But he stopped and tried again. “I guess most of the stories like that felt like they were written for somebody else. Nobody could ever call me an ugly duckling.” There was obvious discomfort in his voice. “And I don’t like sad stories. Reuenthal probably did— I don’t.”
“Felix liked it.”
“I know— you said. It doesn’t surprise me. He is his father’s son.”
“Does it worry you?”
Wolf shrugged, as much as he was able from his position, and rested his cheek on his arms.
She looked off at the kids, who had found the one stray stick the manicured garden had to offer, and were taunting the puppy with it, dangling it just over its head so that it had to jump, whereupon they’d pull it just out of reach again. The puppy never caught on to the fact that it would never catch the stick, and the boys didn’t realize that they were teasing it. The simple power conferred by height, and the ignorance by innocence.
“They do look like their fathers,” Eva said.
Wolf nodded. He was silent for a little while. “Kessler told me you asked for Reuenthal’s file.”
“I didn’t ask for it,” Eva said. “I just wondered where it was.”
“Do you want it?” he asked. “If you want it—”
“No,” Eva said, and meant it.
“If you change your mind—” But he cut himself off before he could finish the thought.
“You already know everything there is to know about him, and I’m sure there’s nothing more to know. I just had been thinking I didn’t know anything about her . I felt— I should know. For Felix’s sake. If he asks about his father, you can tell him. But if he asks about his mother— I should know. I said the same thing to Kessler, when he asked why I was looking.”
Wolf nodded.
“Have you seen her file?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She thought about the photograph, and with her hands on the knots in her husbands back, she realized that she had no need to ask the one important question: she already knew the answer. Nevertheless, she said, “She looks a lot like me.”
Wolf’s face fell, but didn’t deny it, looking away and off towards the kids. “She did. Does, I guess. She’s still alive, as far as I know.”
“Did you ever meet her?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve just seen her photograph.”
She nodded.
“He didn’t like me to meet any of his mistresses,” Wolf said after a moment. “I never really wanted to, either.”
“I know. I don’t blame you.” As if there was something to blame him for. “I’m sure nothing good would have come of it, if you had.”
“It never felt like my business,” Wolf said. He was the one digging himself in deeper now, unable to stop providing unnecessary justifications.
“I know,” Eva said. “I know.”
Wolf was quiet for a little while. She continued rubbing his back. “I think he was a little jealous of you, you know.”
“Of me? What could he possibly be jealous of me for?” She didn’t know why she was pretending. She had heard Reuenthal’s tone and seen the look in his eyes when he had visited their house soon enough.
Wolf turned his head, so his cheek pressed into his arm, and grass tickled his nose. “Some people wish they were orphans,” he said.
“It’s a stupid thing to wish for,” she said. For some reason, this quasi-confession from Wolf annoyed her.
“He hated his father,” Wolf said, closing his eyes. “Had this long story about not actually being his son he told me once…” He trailed off. “It doesn’t matter.”
She pressed her lips together. “I guess I should have taken him at his word when he said he didn’t want a family.”
“Not wanting what he grew up with just meant he wanted…” Wolf trailed off again. “It doesn’t matter,” he repeated. Maybe it didn’t matter. Reuenthal was years dead, and his son, running on the grass, was happy.
“Alright.”
Wolf shook her hand off his back so that he could roll over and look up at the sky, where a flock of birds was passing from one glittering Phezzani spire to another: a swarm of pigeons with the squeaking of their wings audible even though they passed high above the garden.
“Most people who like The Ugly Duckling aren’t orphans,” Mittermeyer said. “Just people who wish they were.”
“And you never did?” Eva asked.
Wolf had no answer to that.
“Felix liked it,” Eva repeated.
“I don’t think he understands anything about it yet,” Wolf said. “He’s too young.”
As if he realized he was being talked about, across the garden, Felix looked up at the pair and waved at them, brandishing the stick in his chubby hand like a sword. The blond Alex caught the puppy, and was tugging on its ears happily as they sat on the grass. Eva waved back to her son.
“He’ll figure it out soon,” Eva said. “All it takes is a mirror.”
Wolf closed his eyes against the sun. “Maybe it’s too bad Felix doesn’t take after Kohlrausch. Then he’d look at least a little like you.”
“No. Fleet Admiral Reuenthal was a good man,” Eva lied as Felix trotted over. “There’s nothing wrong with Felix looking like him.”
She was at home, and she knew that it was before Felix was born, because it was their old home on Odin. It was the nice house outside the city, surrounded by Odin’s pines. She couldn’t see the trees now, leaning on the counter in the kitchen, because they were swallowed up by the darkness and the blowing snow outside. The wind was howling, and she was waiting, anxiously, for Wolf to come home through the snow. The house smelled like baking bread— buns in the oven.
Headlights approached through the dark night, the car roaring up into the driveway. She turned away from the window— it was so fogged that she couldn’t see much anyway, not even her own reflection. He was coming up the front stairs now, stomping the snow off his shoes as he pulled open the door.
For some reason, although she was waiting at home for her husband, she was afraid of the sound of the door opening. She walked out of the kitchen, down the hallway to the living room. The door slammed shut as he came in the house, and he took off his coat and shoes at the door.
“Welcome home, darling,” she called from the other room. “Were you held up at work? It’s late.”
She didn’t get an answer to her question, but she did hear him walking towards her. She didn’t turn around, instead keeping her eyes fixed on the fireplace, where the low gas-fire flickered over the fake logs, unnatural blue and white heat rather than a warm and crackling red. He came closer and closer, every footstep taking twice as long and covering half the distance of the last. She begged that he would never arrive, but he did.
“You were waiting for me, Evangeline? How kind of you.”
When he touched her, her skin crawled. His hands walked up her side, roughly grabbed her breast, snaked up her neck like a noose, and then his fingers were in her mouth, forcing themselves past her tongue, down her throat. She gagged and tried to pull away, but he held her in place with one hand in her mouth and the other clawing at her waist. She couldn’t make any sound, not even to scream or cry, no matter how much she struggled. She couldn’t breathe.
She was able to lift her head a fraction, just enough to catch a glimpse of the mirror above the mantle. Reuenthal’s mismatched eyes met hers in the reflection, and then he buried his face in her curly blonde hair. She looked at herself, and the anger and terror in her face rendered her unrecognizable, or a different woman entirely.
DOCTOR KAINES I’m not usually in the business of taking messages. [Laughs.] This is a radio show, not a classified ad.
CALLER Please.
DOCTOR KAINES Beloved, you’ve called in about three or four times. I have a good ear for voices, even over the phone like this. I’m not convinced the woman you want to leave a message for is real. And if you want to send a message to the spirit world— [Laughs.] I wouldn’t pick radio. Prayer tends to work better.
CALLER She’s real.
DOCTOR KAINES And you think the message will get to her?
CALLER No.
DOCTOR KAINES Beloved—
CALLER I can’t ask anyone else. If I ask someone else it will be— different. Anything I say to them wouldn’t be to her. And I need to tell her something before I do that. Just to see if—
DOCTOR KAINES And it sounds like you can’t even tell me what her name is.
CALLER I’m sorry.
DOCTOR KAINES Does your dream woman even have a name?
CALLER Yes.
DOCTOR KAINES I’ll take your word for it.
CALLER Can I just tell her—
DOCTOR KAINES What?
CALLER I understand it all, or I hope I do. If there was ever anything I could do for her— if she wanted me to, if I could— I could try—
DOCTOR KAINES You’re hesitating?
CALLER No.
DOCTOR KAINES Beloved, I can hear it in your voice. [A pause.] What is it that you’re afraid she’d ask you for?
CALLER Nothing, I—
DOCTOR KAINES You won’t tell me. No— well, if that’s the reason you are calling the radio, and hoping the universe forgives you, but the message never gets to her, so that she demand whatever it is… No take backs. Hah. [A pause.] Oh, she’s hung up. Well, it’s the end of the hour, and we’ll be back tomorrow. We’ll let Phezzan’s finest voice sing us out. Here’s a good one, off her last album…
[Music.]
DOMINIQUE ST. PIERRE The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine — It had a consequential look, like everything else, And all I could see was dangers: doves and words, Stars and showers of gold-conceptions, conceptions! I remember a white, cold wing And the great swan, with its terrible look, Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river. There is a snake in swans. He glided by; his eye had a black meaning. I saw the world in it-small, mean and black, Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act. A hot blue day had budded into something. I wasn’t ready.
The heat of the summer was never going to break, not for a thousand years.
Felix was at the palace with Wolf: one gone for business, the other to play on the grass. Eva restrained herself from accompanying them, having an appointment to keep. Whatever the summer had done to her to make her unwilling to leave Felix’s side, it was ridiculous to let it hold her back.
She spent the morning speaking with a man proposed to be the boys’ tutor, some specialist in early childhood education who wanted to postpone his retirement with a new and interesting task. Kaiserin Hildegarde conferred the responsibility of interviewing the teacher on Evangeline, trusting her judgment completely. Their children would be sharing the tutor, after all, so Eva had just as much of a stake in it as the Kaiserin did. It was a kind thought, if untrue.
Sitting across from the man in his office, Eva’s list of questions to ask seemed stupid, and her hand and voice shook as she read them out. She asked how the children would spend their days under his care, and what kind of good behavior he’d attempt to instill in them, what values he thought should characterize the leadership of the Neue Reich. The notes she jotted down came out nearly illegible. The man took pity on her, and talked to her like she was a young student herself. He was a Phezzani, and he kept calling her “Ms. Evangeline” rather than Frau Mittermeyer. She twisted her wedding ring around her finger and looked out the window.
“I assume you won’t need my services immediately,” the man said. “Kaiser Alexander is only three.”
“Yes,” she said. “We’re considering multiple people, and we’ll want to give the boys time to meet you, get used to you, you know…” Her hand trailed vaguely in the air, and she dropped her pen on the ground accidentally. It rolled beneath his desk, and he picked it up and handed it back to her with a smile.
“An excellent idea, Ms. Evangeline. I look forward to meeting them.”
“Yes, of course. Of course.”
When she left his office in the university building, she almost ran to the nearest park, finding a low wall to sit down on. She pressed her hand to her mouth to calm her breathing.
Her seat was at the edge of a pond, with a fountain in the center. Swans and ducks paraded across the water in little family units. The two types of birds avoided each other, and while the ducks paddled up to the edge of the pond to nip at the bread tossed in by passing children, the swans had no interest in it.
There were no ducklings or fuzzy little cygnets this late in the season. The young ducks were almost indistinguishable from the older generation, though the juvenile swans were still black and mottled grey, not shining white like the adults. But they moved with the selfsame grace, clearly belonging among their kin. The swans all towered above the ducks when they passed each other by, unmistakable in their differences.
Eva searched through her purse for a granola bar to feed the birds, but came up empty handed. As her fingers scraped the bottom of her purse, she found the crumpled envelope she had been carrying around, though it bore no address as of yet. She lacked the courage to deliver it, and lacked the courage to ask Wolf to make the petition on her behalf.
Dear Fleet Admiral Kessler, she wrote. After our conversation some time ago, I’m afraid that I have done nothing but think about Elfriede von Kohlrausch. I know that it’s a strange request for me to make, and I know that it perhaps isn’t within your power, but I would like to know if it would be possible for you to find her. I am not a judge or a jury or a person with any authority at all, but the more I have thought about Fraulein Kohlrausch, the more I have come to see her as a victim of circumstance, and someone who deserves pity and pardon…
She took the envelope out of her purse and turned it over in her hands. It was wrinkled from being carried around for many weeks, and her fingernails worried the sides of it, fraying the fibers at the envelope’s folded edge.
The swans’ motion was hypnotic, slow and meandering, with their long necks weaving back and forth. They left trails across the surface of the water where they passed. An undergraduate student with black hair threw rocks at the birds, who scattered into the sky and landed again on the opposite side of the pond, the black juveniles following their parents. They would lose their color soon enough. In a year or so, they would be those white adults— there would be no way to mistake them for anything else.
Like with like, ducks and swans. If she asked the government to pardon Kohlraush, there was a chance that she would want her son back, and Felix was the one thing she wasn’t willing to give the woman. She could find a way to give her a pardon, a government pension, a place to live in the Neue Reich, get her a comfortable home, a social circle— anything but that one thing.
When Felix was older, when he grew up into himself and lost his black plumage of youth, when he didn’t need her anymore, then maybe she could let him go. But not when he was small. Not when he still needed her. It was selfish, wanting to take and keep what wasn’t hers.
Nightmares circled her mind. Beloved, everyone in your dreams is just you— just you. The image of Reuenthal’s stolen domesticity invading her quiet home was invented from whole cloth— just her own guilt again, transmuted and placed on someone else’s shoulders. Reuenthal was a perfect scapegoat, an easy man to conjure in the darkness, with a verisimilitude to the imagining that came from reality. But even if her dreamed accusations were true of him , Eva had not been the one to suffer for it. Just Elfriede, again and again and again.
A young woman lay napping with a book over her eyes on the pond’s retaining wall across from Eva, and when one of the swans took off, its wingspan was the length of the whole woman’s body, or so it seemed. The shadow passed over her, covering her completely.
Elfriede might not ask for Felix back. She might not have any further interest in him at all— maybe he was a bad memory for her, a reminder of a man who had taken what he wanted from her. She bent the edge of the envelope beneath her fingers.
Eva looked down into the water. Her reflection was murky and hard to distinguish. The water was too dark and dirty to see who she was looking at, and the growing wind rippled and wavered whatever images formed.
She crumpled the envelope in her hand and dropped it over the side of the wall into the water, where it sank beneath the greenish algae. When the ripples of its passing erased themselves, she stood up and turned towards home.
The house was not empty, though it should have been.
Eva turned the key in the front door’s lock, but the door swung open with just a touch, already unlocked, like an invitation to the scene of a crime. Felix and Wolf were still at the palace, and only her own footsteps creaked the floor when she stepped inside. The wind rushed around, rattling the bushes against the windows.
She put her purse down on the hall table, then walked slowly through the house. Everything remained where it should— nothing had been disturbed in the living room, and she tried to tell herself that she had just forgotten to lock the door when she left, and that she was just being paranoid. All the photographs were where they had always been on the walls, and the drawers of the cabinets were shut. No thieves had been rifling around in her home. She listened carefully, but the moaning of the wind made it difficult to pick out any sounds.
She walked up the stairs, towards the bedrooms on the second floor. It was too hot inside— maybe the air conditioner had turned itself off. There was no hum of central air to soften the sound of her breathing as she turned towards Felix’s room. He wasn’t there— but why would he have been home? His chewed on stuffed lion still sat on his pillow, and his bed remained made. His toy ships lay scattered on the red carpet, and the picture book with illustrations of birds lay abandoned on the bedside table, open to the last page, with the picture of the crying white swan among its anonymous kin.
Eva headed towards her own bedroom, where the doors of their wardrobe were open, and the sheets of the bed, though still made, were wrinkled in the shape of a body. Maybe Wolf laid down after Eva left. The vanity top with Eva’s mirrors and makeup was complete, but everything looked slightly out of place. Her heart crawled up her throat. She should leave, call for help— but maybe she was just being paranoid.
She went back downstairs, or started to. She stopped on the hallway landing and noticed that the recently bloomed red natal lily, growing on the landing windowsill, had been beheaded. The tall flower stalk lay discarded on the ground. She rushed down the stairs, heedless of the noise of her feet, and tried to go back towards the door.
But then she heard it coming from the kitchen: the radio on its lowest volume playing that station she sometimes listened to, broken and fuzzy as its low-power broadcast barely made it across the city. She wouldn’t have left the radio on— she only listened to it when she was home alone, and she left the house before Wolf and Felix this morning.
DOCTOR KAINES And it’s the end of our hour— it always comes so quickly. We’ll be back tomorrow, same time, same place. And the voice of Phezzan will sing us out…
DOMINIQUE ST. PIERRE If I were a bird— If I were a dove— If I were a crow— I’d go on gossiping about hope. I’d keep on chattering about love. But I—
The music stopped abruptly with the click of the heavy radio button turning it off, that sound louder than the music itself.
“Are you home, darling?” someone asked from the kitchen. “I’ve been waiting for you. I got all dressed up.”
“Who’s there?” Eva called, unable to say anything else.
The woman laughed, and when Elfriede von Kohlrausch stepped out of the kitchen, it was like looking into a mirror.
She was wearing Eva’s clothing: the yellow sundress she had worn just last week, and her blue baby heels, and her wide brimmed hat. They fit Elfriede perfectly, like they had been bought for her. She held a knife in her right hand, the chef’s knife from the kitchen. Eva couldn’t take her eyes off the glint of the blade, and she stepped back in terror.
Elfriede walked towards her. “I got your message, so I rushed home just as soon as I could. It took me a few weeks to travel. I was glad I could make it to Phezzan before the real end of the summer.”
Eva backed up as far as she could go, ending up with her back pressed against the living room wall. Her head knocked one of the pictures hung on a nail there, jostling the photo of young Felix so that it hung sideways, and she dug her fingernails into her palms, trying to wake up from this dream. Elfriede just kept walking forward, inexorable. She raised her knife and traced the tip of it delicately across Eva’s lips, her mouth slack and open with fear.
“Didn’t you want to talk to me?” Elfriede asked. “Didn’t you think you had something to say to me? Isn’t that why you were sending me little messages?”
Eva didn’t want to move her lips— the knife blade as it pressed into the delicate part of her mouth, scraping up against her teeth, would start to cut soon enough.
“I wouldn’t have come, except that I’m not the only one who listens to the radio. We don’t like our peace and quiet disturbed, do we?”
As the wind picked up, clouds gathered in front of the bright sun, muting the light inside. Dappled shadows from the wind-tossed trees flashed across Elfriede’s face.
“Didn’t you think you had something nice you wanted to give me?” Elfriede asked. She didn’t take the knife away from Eva’s mouth, but she reached over her head to take down the photograph that was resting against her ear. She looked at it in her left hand idly. “This?”
“No,” Eva said, the blade of the knife clicking against her teeth.
Elfriede laughed and pulled the knife away from her face. She tossed the photograph onto the ottoman. “Then why did you call me?” she asked.
“I—” She couldn’t have explained it to the spiritual teacher on the radio, and she couldn’t explain it to Elfriede either, even if she’d wanted to. She couldn’t breathe. Her hand crept towards her pocket, hoping to find her phone and call for help. Elfriede saw the movement of her hand and preempted it, reaching into the pocket of Eva’s skirt herself and pulling out the phone. She threw it across the room, where it hit the piano in the corner, crashing discordantly on the keys and falling to the ground with a thud.
“Answer my question,” Elfriede said. “What was it that you wanted to tell me? What did you think you could give to me?”
Eva could feel the heat of Elfriede’s body. It was strange to see her so close, a woman who had existed only in photographs and nightmares. She was wearing Eva’s lipstick, too— light and matte— and her perfume, the nice one she wore when she went out with Wolf, a heady little rose scent. For some reason, Eva fixated on the baby hairs that curled before Elfriede’s ears and across her forehead. They seemed like the only soft things about her. She couldn’t look into Elfriede’s eyes, nor could she see the knife any longer— it was held too low, the flat of it pressing into her sternum.
“Answer me!”
“I’m sorry!” Eva said, her voice cracking as the words tumbled out. “I understand, and I’m sorry, and I wanted—”
Elfriede cut her off with a laugh.
“I should make you apologize more sincerely than that,” she said. “I should.” She turned the knife so that it poked Eva through her green silk blouse, though it wasn’t enough to tear the fabric or pierce her skin. “You’d kneel if I told you to kneel, wouldn’t you?”
Eva nodded, which made Elfriede laugh.
“I should have done this a long time ago…” Elfriede said, talking to herself. Then her tone became wry: “Maybe it would have gotten me somewhere.”
“What do you want?” Eva managed to ask.
“Hah,” Elfriede said. She poked Eva with the knife again, and Eva twitched in fear, knocking her head against the wall and making the decorative plates above the lintel rattle.
“Please,” Eva said.
“Begging— yes, that’s nice.” Elfriede tilted her head and studied Eva’s face. “Did you think if you got me a pardon, I’d be grateful to you? If you let me have a nice little life back, I’d say thank you ?”
“No, I—”
“Did you pity me?”
“I understood you,” Eva said again.
“You did pity me,” Elfriede said. She withdrew the knife from where it was poking Eva’s stomach, but she stuck the tip of it against one of the mother-of-pearl buttons on Eva’s blouse, playing as if to use it to open her shirt. “Don’t lie.”
“Yes,” Eva said. She would agree to anything asked of her.
“You can only pity someone you think you’re better than,” Elfriede said. “You with your nice life, must be a pretty easy thing to think.”
“No,” Eva said. “No, I don’t—”
“You don’t?”
Eva started to cry. The tears dripped down hot with fear, and her cheeks were red. Her mouth opened wordlessly, soundlessly save her ragged breathing, and Elfriede looked in at her teeth.
“You can’t make me pity you by crying,” Elfriede said. “It won’t help you any.”
Eva couldn’t say anything more. Elfriede jiggled the knife intermittently at the top button of her blouse. She seemed almost bored, a blank expression as she listened to Eva’s choked breathing. It wouldn’t take very much for the knife to end up back at her throat.
“I didn’t think I was better than you,” Eva said, trying to get herself under control. If she could keep Elfriede talking, it would stop her from killing her.
“Then what?” When Eva took too long to respond, Elfriede raised the knife higher. “Then what?”
“It was just bad luck,” Eva said. “That it all happened to you and not to me.” She stuttered as she spoke. “I don’t deserve— I never wanted—”
“Bad luck,” Elfriede repeated.
“I named him Felix,” she said with a pathetic sniffle. “Lucky me.”
Elfriede’s mouth twitched. “The lucky pity the unlucky. That’s nothing new.” The knife flicked upwards again, and traced the hollow of Eva’s throat when she swallowed, pushing aside the collar of her shirt.
She might be able to fight Elfriede, if she made a sudden rush for it. They were exactly the same size, so Elfriede didn’t have an advantage there. And maybe she could wrest the knife away, or knock it to the ground, or run fast enough that she could get onto the street and scream for help. But that attempt might kill her, if it shocked Elfriede into acting. And, somehow, looking at Elfriede through her own veil of tears and the haze of fear, she found she still only felt that emotion that Elfriede called pity and that she called compassion.
The unhappiness written on Elfriede’s face wasn’t relieved by holding the knife. Her hesitation to actually kill Eva— or even seriously hurt her— seemed like she was trying to resolve that dissatisfaction. She hadn’t even made Eva kneel and beg, as she threatened to. It was a strange and delicate balance. Eva reached up and wiped her tears away on her sleeve, and Elfriede didn’t stop her.
“I wanted to thank you,” Eva said, even if it was partially a lie. “That was all I wanted.”
Elfriede laughed, though it was an unpleasant sound, and she found the artery on Eva’s neck and poked at it with the tip of the knife. She traced the metal up towards the underside of Eva’s ear.
Despite the closeness of the blade, the fear was less present in her mind. The power was in Elfriede’s hand— but Eva twisted the emotion around. It just depended on her point of view. The difference between fear and trust was just a diluted reflection of the difference between love and hatred. And there was nothing in Elfriede for Eva to hate.
Eva steadied her breathing, though her heart still beat in her throat. Her rapid pulse was visible in the place where Elfriede pressed the blade. “I didn’t pity you. For Felix’s sake— I loved you.”
The knife stopped moving, though it still pressed Eva’s throat. Elfriede’s face was impassive, but she studied Eva for a long second.
She leaned forward, closer and closer. Her hot breath tickled Eva’s nose. And then she kissed her, with the blade of the kitchen knife nicking the underside of her chin and drawing first blood, like a careless shaving injury. Her teeth roughed Eva’s lips, leaving a smear of matching lipstick where they passed. Eva did not move, and did not make a sound, even as the trickle of blood slid down her throat, even as Elfriede’s other hand traced her side and pushed her harder against the wall, slipping momentarily underneath her shirt, skin to skin. Her skin crawled, but she was as still as a marble statue.
Elfriede pulled away after a moment, and looked at the blood on the knife. “It is a pity,” Elfriede said. “I don’t think I know what love is.”
Outside, the wind cracked open the eggshell clouds, and it started to rain.