The Gentling Box Read online

  “I won’t be,” I said, adjusting my pistol, and checking my pocket for ammunition.

  “I’m afraid of wolves,” she said and I saw her round eyes lift to the dark blue horizon where the moon was a dull lamp barely visible in the sky. “All day I’ve been worried about wolves.”

  I couldn’t tell her not to be, but I said, “I didn’t hear any.”

  “I did,” she breathed. “Sometimes I thought it was the wind, but it wasn’t.” She shuddered, closed her eyes, as if she heard their mournful cries rippling in the steeps. Then a small tired smile touched her lips. “You’ll be quick,” she said. “I’ll wait. Unless I hear the shots.”

  I nodded, marveling that my daughter could tell herself the parting words, the reassuring things I’d been about to say. I kissed her again. “Very quick,” I said, then started down the road. I turned once, gave her a final wave.

  “Wolves,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Be careful of the wolves, Papa.”

  Months later, her words came back to haunt me. But that night I was thinking about the old man’s power, about his clairvoyance, forgetting we all have a little, overlooking my daughter’s share.

  ***

  Near the bridge was an old cart path used by drovers to take their teams down to the water. Vaclav had followed the track and left the wagon near the bank. Mimi and Zahara weren’t inside the caravan, but I felt better for having checked it to be certain. I began walking downstream, looking for a place to enter the woods different from the one they’d used. I didn’t want to run right into them, I wanted to scout the edges of their camp. I used the moon as a guide, and quietly threading my way through the heavy brush I began moving up on them. A half hour later I was in earshot of their lair. A careful parting of the greenery showed me the two men sitting by a fire just outside the entrance of a small cave. The old man’s attention was focused on some kind of handwork in his lap. Vaclav was angry.

  “What’s taking so long?” Vaclav said, then got up and paced rapidly before the cave.

  “Precision is important,” the old man said, holding up one partly constructed gentling device. My heart lifted with the gesture.

  “I don’t care if she dies.” Vaclav spat. “I don’t care if the goddamn spike gets driven out the other side of her fucking head!”

  “I cannot take a life—not even hers,” the old man replied evenly, then turned his slow hand to drilling the holes.

  “I could’ve made a dozen of the damn things by now!” Vaclav said in a lower voice. I saw his eyes flick toward the black mouth of the cave and reasoned the women were inside.

  “Yes, if you knew how, but you are not a Lovari.” Joseph blew on the shavings and began drilling again.

  “If you don’t hurry,” Vaclav said with a glance at the moon, “he’s going to find us before we can do it.” His mouth turned down in a furious mask of frustration.

  “There’s time yet,” Joseph replied. He stared toward the trees, nearly making me start. I was glad for the darkness and the heavy brush. I wondered if he sensed how close I was. I saw his gaunt face break out in a grin, then I watched him insert a spike into the hole he drilled. Testing carefully, he turned and locked the device. I saw the thin needle click home.

  “I’m through waiting,” Vaclav shouted. He stooped suddenly and retrieved something I couldn’t make out. Was it a spike, a second device? I didn’t know. He shoved his father backwards with the heel of his hand. Joseph wailed in protest and tried to heave himself onto his feet. In the firelight I saw his face go violent red, a coughing fit took him, and he fell heavily onto his hands and knees. Vaclav took two long-legged strides into the cave.

  I heard the sound of female voices shrieking in alarm, and my heart jolted in my chest. Seconds later, Vaclav had Zahara by the hair, and he was dragging her trussed body back out of the cave. The gentling cap circled her brow. She tried to twist out of his grasp. Her head jerked free of his bunched fingers, and I saw her swivel her jaw, bare her teeth, trying to bite. He clamped down on her shoulder, then drew back his other arm and pummeled the side of her head. He flipped her on her stomach, seized the ropes that held her hands behind her back, and pulled her through the dirt. I saw the dark gleam of blood covering her face.

  Mimi suddenly cried out. “Hurry, hurry!” she screamed from inside the cave. I flashed on the thought she’d used the power of the hand and sensed I was there. Relief washed over me, she was unharmed, she was begging me to save them both. I didn’t dare wait, didn’t dare stop, think. Instead, I broke my cover and leapt into the fray.

  -20-

  Mimi ran from the cave. She shrieked Vaclav’s name. I felt a trembling vibration that seemed to be gathering force and bearing down on all of us. Her voice rose into a hectoring scream, her small hands flew to her head, and I saw something pass with the speed of wings between her and Zahara. Zahara’s face screwed up into a mask of terror and agony.

  I saw the old man rising to his feet, saw Vaclav raising his arm to twist the screws, when the camp was suddenly rent by the sound of crackling thunder and a huge blue flash that sent Mimi and the old man sprawling backwards and knocked Vaclav across Zahara’s body. At the same time I heard a high pitched snapping yowl, the sound of heavy pads racing over the ground. I turned to see the feral gleaming haunches of a wolfpack break out of the treeline. Their eyes were lit with a deadly blue-green luminescence. I caught a glimpse of bared fangs, wet lolling tongues. Three of them sprang on the instant. The leader clamped his long jaws onto Vaclav’s body. The others tore into his thrashing legs.

  “Do it,” Mimi shrieked. “For the love of Christ, do it!”

  My first bullet shattered the leader’s snout in a mass of splintered teeth and bone. Vaclav screamed. I saw clots of hair and blood rain over the screaming struggling humans. I aimed, cocked the gun, fired twice more, blasting the heads of the others into a bloody mash of brains and fluid. The air was suddenly filled with thick black smoke.

  Nerves jangling, I pivoted, facing emptiness. The smoke grew heavier, spinning here and there in swirls and thready patches. I heard the sound of shrill laughter and turned to see Zahara yanking the device from her head.

  Beside her Vaclav lay unmoving, streaked in a glistening slime of blood. The lower half of his jaw hung by one drippy sinew. Broken teeth poked up from the shredded gums. His left eye socket was a fist sized bloody hole. At the side of his head, a long ragged flap of scalp flesh was flung backwards showing pulverized bone and leaking brains.

  “You killed him!” Mimi screamed at me. “He was going to do it—”

  “Wolves,” I babbled, at the same time I heard a low hissing. I saw the three crumpled bodies—the great furred paws splayed out, their bloody heads slack jawed in death—waver for an instant, then disappear. My eyes bulged. No wolves, there were no wolves, only a vision, I gibbered inwardly, and I shot him . . . one eye stared blankly at the moon, the top of his head was torn away, his jaw ruined like the blasted snout of the wolf . . .Do it, do it, Mimi’s voice clanged in my head, and I realized with a sickly kind of dread she had not been exhorting me to use my gun, she’d been urging Vaclav to hurry. I saw there had been one device—meant for Zahara alone.

  The air seemed to ripple. Through a shifting haze I saw the dead wolves lying on the ground again. I saw Vaclav’s big hands still clutching dense fur, his head thrown back in agony, his long body crushed under the dead weight of the beast. My mind suddenly reeled, I felt the gun slipping from my hand, my knees went weak and watery.

  “Fight it, fight it!” someone screamed.

  But the smoke-filled air went hot, hotter, seeming to suck every sound, every sight around us, until there was nothing left. I felt my chest being squeezed, then slowly crushed with a weight like a stone slab. I gasped, barely able to breathe in that dead air. I sank to my knees, and I thought, this is what the silence of death sounds like, and then I heard a voice whispering low in my ear, breaking through the poisonous fog.

  Arms pulled me
up, pulled me along, set me running pell-mell through the woods. I never felt my feet moving over the ground. “This way, this way,” the voice called out to me. Behind me I heard the sounds of pursuit. Confusion wracked me, I couldn’t shake the terrifying image of slavering hungry wolves running us down. All around me, the night was alive with the deadly sound of throaty growling, moans, flesh being torn and snapped from bones. The stink of their pelts, of hot breath rolled over me. Something snagged at my leg, my heart vaulted in one long, looping, erratic lurch, and I staggered and fell full length. I felt the shock of icy water, heard my pulse drumming in my ears.

  My collar was jerked back and up, my shoulders lifted out of the stream, and I realized I was with Zahara. “We have to run!” she panted. “Get up, Christ, Imre, please get up! Don’t you hear how close they are?” I got to my feet, she pulled me after her. We ran the length of the stream, splashing clumsily through the shallow water. I remembered thinking the water would stop the keen-nosed wolves from tracking our scents; I remembered being shoved onto the box of my caravan, then hearing the crack of the whip as we sprang forward. But beyond that—until I woke to a life that was forever changed—I remembered nothing at all.

  -21-

  I woke to the thickest darkness I’d ever known. Lying on my back, I held up one hand in front of my face and gasped, genuinely astonished at the sensation: I knew it was there, I felt the pull of tendons in my forearm when I turned my palm to and fro, but I couldn’t see it. The velvety blackness was like a cloak thrown over my head, dampening my emotions, muddling my thoughts. I felt numb; as if something that was an integral part of me was suddenly missing. I took a deep breath.

  I was alone in my bed. The caravan was still, silent. Slowly, wisps and tatters of memories floated in my head: sprawling in the stream, feeling the flood of icy water drench my skin and clothes. The madcap flight through the dark woods. The sound of feet moving through the underbrush. Wolves. In my mind I suddenly heard Mimi screaming Do it! and the sense of shock fell away as easily as you might pull down a sheer, sun-rotted curtain.

  Mimi was in league with Joseph, I thought, feeling anger rise in my throat like a bitter juice. Together with Vaclav they plotted gentling Zahara. How could Mimi consider it? She knew what it was. I shook my head. Mimi believed Zahara had killed her mother, but Christ! Christ, there was nothing on the face of the earth that could bring me to gentle a human.

  For the first time in all the years I’d known her, I felt a terrible sense of disappointment in my wife. Her wanting Zahara gentled was like a dagger to my heart. How could you, Mimi? I mourned, at the same time an answer was bubbling to my lips. Joseph. Joseph had bewitched my wife all along.

  For some reason I couldn’t begin to fathom, Joseph wanted all the power in the troupe. He was hideous. Evil. This was my father’s friend, this bastard, this Lovari. “He sent the vision,” I whispered, feeling the truth of it welling up inside me. Joseph sent the vision of the wolves and he wanted me to kill his son. Wanted to reclaim his place as the prima.

  Where was Mimi now? I wondered. My anger gave way to a depression as black as the night around me. Where was she? I felt my heart speed up, and suddenly, a new fear, another anxiety caught me, made me cry out in my agony, bellow like a wounded animal: “Lenore,” I screamed, “Lenore, Lenore, where are you?”

  A lighted candle moving through the darkness. The sight of fire-pinked fingers shielding the flame, the ghostly outlines of a shadowy face, the sound of bare feet whickering over the floor. I threw the covers aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. My pulse raced and fluttered.

  Zahara stood over me. I took one look at her dark brimming eyes and I knew.

  “Gone,” Zahara said, shrugging her shoulders helplessly. Her voice was tentative, pain-flecked. “Lenore—she’s not—she wasn’t here.” Zahara reached out with one shaky hand and touched my arm lightly, and a knife-edged sorrow sliced through me.

  “Gone, both of them gone,” I cried, covering my face with my hands.

  ***

  It poured out of me: all my suspicions, my hatred of Joseph, how he’d used my wife as a pawn. Zahara sank on the bed, her hair hung down over her shoulders, the tears rushed down her cheeks and dark-spotted the fabric of her blouse. She wouldn’t meet my eyes. She begged me to stop. “No more, please,” she whispered, “I can’t bear it.”

  But it was inside me: festering, ugly, raw. “My fault,” I said, plucking uselessly at the bedcover. “I told Lenore, ‘Drive on if you hear three shots.’ And then, and then—” I wept harder. “The wolves, Christ, the goddamn wolves; he knew and he sent them. I saw three attack Vaclav. Three of them,” I repeated. My chest heaved, I bent over and clutched my belly. A sickly nausea spiraled through me, my brain was giddy, whirling. Oh, mother of Christ, the depths of the man’s cunning.

  “Lenore, she—oh God, she heard the shots and she drove, because I told her—she thought it meant Mimi was inside his wagon.” In my mind’s eye I saw Lenore running up the rickety steps to the old man’s door, saw her small hands turning the knob, trembling with anticipation, calling to her mother, and then—then what? Did she see an illusion? I didn’t know. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth.

  “Oh God forgive me, she was so worried, so frightened, she must have gone right inside his caravan to see her mother, to make sure Mimi was all right. She wanted her mother! and I did it, I sent my daughter to this—to him—”

  “No, no,” Zahara clutched my wrist. “No, he did it, he did it! Don’t you see.”

  I shook my head. “Mimi,” I said, sniffling back my tears. “She was good, a good woman. The things she did for me . . . and for Lenore.” I paused. “Once we were in Old Buda, in the city. Lenore saw a porcelain doll in one of the shop windows. It had blonde hair, a tiny string of pearls around its neck, white gloves. We couldn’t pull her away from the shop. Then Lenore was seeing dolls everywhere. Every time she saw some well-dressed little gajo girl carrying one of those fancy dolls around, she cried that she wanted a real doll, too—not another shabby homemade rag baby like the gypsy girls had—but one with yellow curls, a picture hat, pantalets. I don’t know where Mimi found the money, or what she sold to buy it, but on her feast day, Lenore found that satin-dressed doll sitting on her chair when she came in for breakfast.”

  I sighed, once again hearing Lenore’s whoop of excitement when she saw the beautiful doll. Talking in a high, eager voice, Lenore sat at the table, held the doll on her lap like a baby and fed it spoonfuls of the porridge she was too excited to eat. I remembered the joyous, satisfied look in Mimi’s violet eyes, and how she took my hand in hers while we stood watching our daughter’s delight.

  “I loved her,” I said. “Mimi filled the house with love, she—” I stopped. “Oh goddamn that bastard! He’s destroyed everything, taken everything I love—”

  “I loved her, too!” Zahara cried out. “Mimi was my cousin. She loved me, and Joseph poisoned her against me.” Zahara shook her head back and forth. “I can shut my eyes and see her, dancing the night of your wedding, her saucy mouth smiling, laughing behind the silky veils. She was so in love, so happy.”

  “The wedding feast,” I said. But no one had seen her dance for me in the caravan. The hot light in her violet eyes.

  “And do you remember your betrothal? The pliashka?”

  I nodded, seeing the bottle of brandy covered with the red silk scarf and festooned with a necklace of gold coins. We drank from it to seal our engagement. I saw Mimi’s face, her eyes locked on mine.

  “And she told me,” Zahara said, “she told me about Sighisoara—”

  ***

  I closed my eyes, lost in the old memory. Sighisoara was a medieval fairy-tale town set high on a hilltop and less than a day’s drive from Tirgu Mures. Not long after we became engaged, I took Mimi there. I recalled that summer afternoon spent climbing up the narrow winding streets; Mimi’s delight in the ancient clock tower; the turreted houses—like minarets—with their mosaic tiled roofs;
the crumbling citadel perched above the town like a brooding cormorant. I remembered holding Mimi’s hand while we stood in a jewelry shop, her fingers squeezing mine (for yes, that one!) when the girl who ran it showed us a necklace that was a small crescent moon hung on a silver chain. I bought it, then fastened the links about her slim throat. Mimi smiled, preening, the shop girl nodded, saying it looked lovely on her, so becoming! I recalled wanting to lift the heavy mass of Mimi’s dark hair to kiss the place on her nape where the small white clasp rested; regretting I couldn’t because we were in a public place. Later we paid a penny for a tour of a huge old ochre-colored house that a withered man with a squeaky voice told us was the birthplace of Romania’s bloodthirsty hero, Vlad Dracul.

  At dusk, it was cool in the mountains. I took her to a levnerker, a public house, for supper. I smiled, now, recalling how I’d set out to get her drunk on tuica—brandy made from plums. She knew I was trying and she let me; she giggled, only half-pretending to snatch away the glasses I filled for her as we sat by the fire.

  “Get us a room, Imre,” she crooned. She was at that stage of tipsiness where a whisper has the force of a shout. I was tiddly myself, and her voice was loud enough so that by the time I turned my head to look for the bald-headed innkeeper, he was already popping the hinge to raise a section of the mahogany bar, then striding toward me and rubbing his hands.

  “A room, yes, for the night? My wife serves a very fine breakfast—” He was holding two long-knuckled fingers up.

  We glanced at one another; we were only engaged, we could not stay out all night. I put up my index finger, “A room for one—for a few hours, so my wife can rest before we journey home.” He didn’t look happy but he agreed, and I counted the money into his hand.

  I let the bald-headed proprietor show Mimi up to the room, and as soon as he was out of the way I went bounding up the wooden stairs, scratched at the faded blue door marked 3 in rusty brass. The room was paneled from floor to ceiling with narrow wainscoting painted a cloudy white. The windows were pushed outward, open. Pots of brilliant red geraniums filled the sill. I stood just beyond the threshold, waiting, scarcely breathing. Mimi opened her slim arms, welcoming me onto the narrow iron bed. She was a virgin when we’d set out that morning. I made love to her twice.