The Gentling Box Read online

  I felt my mind spinning. “But how?”

  “When you go to mass and take the host, are you not one with the Christ? Has no priest told you of that miracle?”

  “Of course, but—”

  “And do you believe you are one with Him?” He didn’t wait, but went on in the same crushed voice. “Then there is your answer. If she eats the flesh and blood of one who has claimed the hand, they are hers.”

  “She’s already in Mimi,” I said, thinking aloud.

  “Mimi is strong, Anyeta wants someone weak she can overpower, obliterate. A child.” He paused. “Lenore is a child,” he said dismally.

  My eyes locked onto his and in a mindless fury I bolted from the chair, grabbing his frail shoulders. “You said it yourself, old man,” I shouted, shaking him. “Mimi is strong, Mimi can hold her back! Not Lenore, not Lenore!”

  He began to laugh, a long bubbling sound rising higher and higher, startling me, so that my hands fell weakly to my sides and I realized the laugh had become a throaty bray of hysteria.

  “Yes,” he said, “your wife can keep her at bay by using the old woman’s fears against her. And what is Anyeta afraid of? Pain, stabbing,” he spat each word, and his dark eyes glittered with fear. “So tell me what you’ll do the first time you see Mimi, with the tshuri clutched in her hands, cutting herself and grimacing with the pain to keep that she-demon inside?”

  I had no answer, there was no answer. Only the sinking feeling that between us, we’d opened some hideous door that yawned wide and would never close.

  -39-

  Winter, 1864

  “Sisi has one like this,” Lenore said, fingering a long strand of garnet beads the shopkeeper held up for our inspection. It was getting on toward little Christmas, the feast of the Epiphany, and just lately Mimi had seemed more like herself, less prone to the wild outbursts and violent mood swings that signified Anyeta was on the rampage. “But Sisi’s has gold spacers and those,” Lenore made a squiggly line in the air with her index finger, “filigree caps—like little hats around the beads. Mother would like this one, though . . . .”

  But no, not another necklace, I thought. Anyway, the price on the discrete cardboard tag was out of my reach. I shook my head to signify no, wondering if we should try one of the other shops in the cobbled square.

  “The young lady and her Madame Mere admire the Empress?” the proprietor asked. He was as long legged as a stork, and he took a sideways step at the same time he spread his narrow hands with a flourish to point out another case—but Lenore had already lighted on the target and was dancing on her toes in excitement.

  “Oh,” she cried out, “it’s the most cunning, the darlingest . . . .”

  While Lenore crooned, the man’s eyes rolled up to mine. I was his real customer, the one with the folding green; I was sure he wasn’t about to hand over the diamond brooch in the shape of a bouquet of miniature roses for her to look at, but he slid open the wooden door behind the case and brought it out, laid it in her hand. “It’s not real, of course,” he said, and I nodded, both of us pretending I’d known it was sham. “Austrian crystals, but of a nice quality—and set in silver—not platinum. But it is an exact copy of the one the Emperor gave his bride.”

  “It’s very brilliant, and just like diamonds,” Lenore prompted. “Is it terribly terribly expensive?” she asked.

  I’d already seen it wasn’t, guessed if I bought the brooch for Lenore plus another item I had in mind there was room for some bargaining to be done.

  “Please?”

  “Well,” I hesitated, knowing it wouldn’t do for Mimi; she disliked gaudy jewelry, and the pin was as ugly as it was garish. On the other hand, I knew that Lenore’s heart’s desire was to have a mauve colored velvet dress (like Elizabeth’s, only not so grand, she begged showing us a copy of a lithograph torn from a newspaper) like the one the slim-waisted twenty-six-year-old Empress had worn to an Autumn cotillion. But there was no velvet in the local shops, and Mimi had even written to a seamstress in Buda. The letter had come back three days ago marked “unknown,” and we’d both felt bad about it. Then I’d found my wife standing in the middle of our caravan. The room was an explosion of shawls, blouses, dresses, petticoats yanked from a trunk and strewn helter-skelter like a display of second hand clothes in a Turkish bazaar, saying, “Where is it, where is it?” At first I thought Anyeta had come to the fore, but no, it was Mimi and she’d hit on the idea of cutting down and remaking one of her old dresses for Lenore. It wasn’t velvet, it was a sort of shiny cotton, but it was lavender. It would do. And the fancy pin in the shape of a bouquet and made from crystals would be just the thing for a certain young lady to pin on the bodice of her new dress. I had to get her out of the shop, though.

  “Have you bought anything for your uncles?” I asked, my hand going to my pocket for coins.

  Lenore began ticking her fingers. “I made each of them a clay dish and painted it. Uncle Joseph can use it as an ashtray, and I suppose Uncle Constantin can put gold pieces in it. Also, I drew some pictures—”

  “Go on now,” I said, handing her the money. “Go get a little something for each of them. I’ll meet you in the square in a few minutes.”

  “Are you trying to get rid of me?” Her small face was wreathed in a huge grin.

  “Nope.”

  “I like jewelry, too, you know, Papa,” Lenore said, moving toward the belled entry of the shop.

  “I know you do,” I said, laughing. “Now, scoot.” There was no fooling Lenore: As she passed the store window I saw the lilt in her walk, her broad smile, her upturned eyes and knew she was lost in a happy vision of possessing the facsimile of the Empress’ brooch.

  Twenty minutes later I was out in the square, leaning against the base of a bronzed statue of a rider on horseback, waiting for Lenore. In my coat pocket were two drawstring pouches; one held Lenore’s brooch, the other, a pair of small amethyst earrings I thought would accent the violet light in Mimi’s eyes.

  I saw Lenore crossing the square, went to join her; we turned down a narrow alley, the tiled roofs of the crowded shops hanging low over our heads, the tiny slitted windows like eyes peering down on us.

  “I bought Uncle Joseph a pipe,” Lenore said, walking along and unwrapping a straight stemmed pipe, its bowl rough hewn of some dark burly wood. “Don’t you think he’d look nicer with a pipe, instead of those nasty brown cigarettes?”

  I nodded, and she put it back into her cloth purse. “And a game for Uncle Constantin. It’s called opre t’a tele—ups and downs; it has little wooden cubes and it’s just like snakes and ladders and he can play it with me.”

  I saw she was serious, hid the bark of a laugh that was threatening under a cough, and said, “Those are good choices.”

  Lenore suddenly stopped, murmuring, “Oh no.”

  “What’s wrong?” I said. I saw the hurt expression on her face, the color draining from her skin. I followed the line of her vision. Across the pavement was a butcher shop, I saw the carcasses hanging in the window; plump, skinned holiday fare. Lambs and goats and chickens . . . .

  “Mooshie,” she whispered, pointing, at the same time my eye picked out a long string of ducks tied by their feet, their dark bills draggling downward.

  “Lenore,” I sighed. We all knew, thanks to Lenore’s chatter about the Empress, that Elizabeth was wild about all kinds of animals, and ‘Mooshie’ was a pet Constantin had given her. The week before, Lenore had carried the big white duck outside for a breath of fresh air, and it had squirmed out of her arms and gotten away. She tried chasing it down, but in the end she went to bed crying—Mooshie was gone. All of us—Joseph and Constantin and myself—felt bad about it, and we thought that was pretty much the end of the duck, but there was worse in store. A day later, they told me they heard Lenore screaming. Constantin rushed out of the caravan. Something—a fox perhaps—had attacked the duck, then dragged him into the weeds nearby, and Lenore had found him. He was still alive. There were deep
bites in the soft flesh of the abdomen, and one wing was crushed and broken. They came for me. Except Lenore, we all knew the duck was dying. I made a sort of splint for the wing, tried to bandage the wounds. It was a bad, clumsy job at best, with the duck feebly trying to get away from me, Lenore weeping.

  “Mother would make a poultice,” she said. “Sowthistle and agrimony is for internal complaints, and the other one, I forget,” she cried, gently stroking Mooshie’s head. “But it’s for blood poisoning.”

  Yes, she’d make a poultice, I thought, or if Anyeta let her she could just heal the damn thing. But there wasn’t anything I could do except let Lenore grieve, cradle her stricken pet on her lap, stroke its ruffled feathers.

  When it was over, Constantin and Joseph buried him for her. She had seemed all right since then, but now the row of ducks in the butcher shop was bringing it all back, and I saw tears glittering in the dark fringes of her lashes. She brushed at them, and then to my surprise, I felt her small hand stealing into my coat pocket.

  She plucked out the red leather pouch that held her Christmas gift. I knew what she was going to do, but before I could stop her she was opening the pouch and shaking the crystal pin into her hand. “Uncle Joseph told me about it,” she said, as if she were answering an unspoken question. “He said it’s the Romany custom when you’re reminded of someone you loved, you give something away to the first stranger you meet. The Lovari, the horsemen, buy a harness or a saddle; sometimes the women make a meal, or give away a blouse or shoes. . . .” Her voice was low, sad.

  It was the custom: to show that you loved someone who’d died you gave something away in their memory—and the more precious the gift, the more you relived that love.

  “But, Lenore,” I began, nearly blurting Not the brooch! Not for a damn duck; the words died on my lips. I was suddenly caught on the memory of Mimi, scarcely past her girlhood, giving away the anklet of gold coins that was her wedding gift after she lost Elena.

  It was in a village in the Tirgu Mures district, shortly before we left for Hungary. I recalled feeling her hand tighten in mine as we walked along the high street: two silent mourners made a poor man’s procession following a coffin drawn by a single horse. The black casket was no bigger than a bassinet. “Elena,” Mimi whispered; then she turned, gazing through a window, cringing when she saw two children—a brother and a sister—begging at a restaurant table for the scraps some fancy dressed ladies left on their plates.

  A thin sour-faced matron in a black dress suddenly shouted and went after the children with a broom, literally sweeping them away from the white-clothed table and out the doorway. “Get out of here! Go eat garbage, but leave my customers alone!” She shook the broom at the children, I saw a lock of her gray hair tumbling messily from one of its pins.

  Then I watched as my wife unclasped the narrow bracelet and held the string of coins in her palm. She went over to the ragged children, who had moved a few yards down the street and were loitering in front of a glove shop.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Mimi said, stooping down so that her long skirts brushed the curb. “What’s your name?” she asked the girl, a gamin with dirty blond hair and mahogany colored eyes. The girl sniffled, brought a grubby finger up to her nose, wiped, and sniffled again. “She don’t talk,” the boy said. “She’s seven, I’m eight.”

  “What do they call you?” Mimi asked the boy.

  “Ion. She’s Eva.” He jerked his thumb at his sister.

  Mimi put her hand gently on the girl’s head. At the same instant I saw the boy’s hand fly up. He snatched at the length of bright yellow coins Mimi held in her other hand and began to run toward the church. His sister seemed stunned for a second, her jaw dropped into an O, and then she streaked away after him. They turned a corner, disappearing from our sight.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, coming up to me, when I commented that the Romanian people always blamed this kind of thing on gypsies; any beggar, any thief was a gypsy. “It doesn’t matter, Imre,” she said, “because the money was in memory of Elena, it was for them, anyway.”

  In the narrow street of Sibiu, I looked up, saw Lenore handing her brooch to an old beggar woman sitting in a doorway, knees sprawled under a ragged gray dress, while she rattled her cup. In a low voice I heard my daughter say the Romany words her mother had whispered twenty-odd years before: Te avel angla tut . . . she began reciting. May this brooch be before you and in your memory. I knew she was thinking of what she’d loved, of what she’d lost.

  ***

  It had snowed the day before little Christmas, just enough to make a stingy layer like a gray-white net over the frozen grass that poked through the crust. But the temperature had dropped, and on my way to Joseph’s caravan I saw sheets of ice in the gutter, the water barely flowing beneath the surface. A fountain I passed had the look of an arctic field, greenish chunks bobbed and collided like miniature floes; the spray had dwindled to a soft bubbling, bright and glassy in the sunlight.

  I climbed up to the field where Joseph’s caravan was parked. Below me, the bells from the tower were ringing out the Epiphany, and from a distance I saw villagers moving leisurely over cobbled streets. Faces lit with broad holiday smiles, babies lifted from their prams for inspections and kisses, old women with fat arms carrying packages, white pastry boxes carefully tied with string. My boots made a crunching noise as I hurried toward the wagon. Then I saw a flurry of canvas flaps—Lenore sticking her nose out. She disappeared and I heard her voice drifting on the cold air. “He’s here, it’s Papa.”

  ***

  “‘Outside Hungary there is no life; if there is any, it is not the same,’” I quoted. It was late afternoon, I sat leaning—sprawling nearly, at the table, fingers loosely curled around the stem of an oversized goblet filled with brandy. “Even the Romans knew it,” I said. “‘Extra Hungarium non est vita—’”

  “Shhh.” Joseph held one finger against his thin lips. I nodded drunkenly, mumbling sorry. He grinned at me, rolling his eyes toward the other end of the shabby wagon where Constantin and Lenore—her “Empress” dress spread round her legs like a pale lagoon—sat playing the game she’d bought. I heard the wooden cubes rattle and bounce, Lenore cackling with glee when the score rose in her favor.

  I refilled my glass from the bottle on the table. “I still say this is a miserable damn country.” I’d awakened that morning expecting Mimi to come here with me; instead I found the caravan cheerless and cold. The fire in the stove had guttered out, Mimi was gone and I was alone. She had seemed nearly well these past few days, I had been harboring the secret hope we could have Lenore home again soon. And now it was Christmas, I mourned, and no sign of my wife. I dressed sluggishly in the dismal gloom of the caravan, thinking I’d tell Lenore her mother had relapsed, was ill with another bout of fever.

  On the kitchen table I’d found the large pasteboard box that held Lenore’s dress tied with a dark green ribbon. Visions of Anyeta raging and cursing flickered in my mind. I don’t have to stay here another minute! I don’t have to live with some fool of a jackass! she’d scream while bundling herself into one of Mimi’s shawls, lacing up thin leather boots. Sometimes in the middle of the commotion Mimi would emerge, looking slightly puzzled. Why am I wearing my shawl? Where are we going? The words would no sooner be out of her mouth when she’d realize. “Oh,” she’d say in a small, resigned voice, one hand rubbing her temple, “Anyeta.”

  I hesitated, my hands around the box. It would be like Anyeta to do something vindictive, I thought. I imagined Lenore excitedly untying the green ribbon and hearing her voice break when she found the lavender dress shredded into pieces with scissors. I felt my pulse throbbing in my temple, untied the ribbon, pushed aside layers of tissue. The bodice of the dress, neatly stuffed with more white tissue lay on top, the long wide skirt folded beneath. I rewrapped it, told myself over and over: Here was proof of Mimi’s love, she had kept Anyeta in check and she would find her way to us.

  Now in Joseph�
�s caravan, I felt my disappointment turning to anger. Part of me had waited, trembling with hope during all the day: watching Lenore open her gifts; showing me the decorations she and Constantin had hung; hearing her high sweet voice singing an old carol while Constantin played his violin; both of them excitedly turning over their dinner plates to find the coins Joseph had placed there. The afternoon wore on, the light fading early from the sky. Then Christmas was nearly over, and Mimi hadn’t come.

  “I’m grateful for all you’ve done,” I said to the old man, “but more and more I think I ought to pack it in and go back to Hungary.”

  “With Lenore?”

  “Certainly,” I said.

  “And with Mimi?”

  I shrugged one shoulder. Swear to leave when we no longer love, swear to love as long as we both shall live. Well, I did love her. I didn’t want to leave her. It was Anyeta I wanted shut of, the miserable country I wanted to flee. I felt Joseph’s gnarled hand touch my wrist lightly. His eyes were soft with understanding.

  “Hungary,” he said, plying a match to the pipe bowl and sucking smoke, “has a special fascination for you. I see it differently. 1848—the year Franz Joseph ascended the throne—the same year as the revolution and its aftermath is very clear in my mind—”

  “But Kossuth, the leader, was right—”

  Joseph hushed me with a sideways wave of his hand; I sensed he was trying to tell me something, but I wasn’t sure what it might be. “Yes, calling for the end of aristocratic privileges, of censorship, and demanding a constitution—all of it was morally right; but the world is not made up from morals, it is steeped in politics. I was in Buda then, and what did I see? Imperial soldiers entering homes, bayoneting old women; spies pretending to be partisans in order to arrest those who supported the revolt; a reign of terror; prison and death sentences. La Tour—the Minister of War—was dragged from his house and hung on a streetlamp; the people tore his corpse to pieces with their hands.”