Abroad (2 page)

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you, though. The neighbors are farmers?”

“I mean they grow plants, for
spinello.
Or they try.”

I shook my head.

“They like drugs,” Gia said, patting my arm. “You?”

“Not particularly.”

“Smoke?”

“Now and then.”

“Well,
bella.
” Alessandra gave me another squeeze. “I’m glad. You are very sweet. Very cool. And you want to farm? You farm! Basil, pineapples. Anything you want.”

The house was tiny for four people, true. I was still comparing every space with my flat back in Nottingham, but I was heavily charmed. There was a small wood table with a bright ceramic bowl sitting on it, full of shiny apples. The walls were freshly painted white. The floor was cheap wood, but scattered with bright, clean rugs. Above the Lilliputian sitting area that consisted of a small sofa covered in a knitted blanket, van Gogh’s
Starry Night
was tacked up, along with two posters of Johnny Depp. The kitchen was modest, but the countertops were scrubbed to a shine and the pots, pans, and knives hung in an orderly fashion. It was a poor house, but these were good Italian girls, clearly, and they had burrowed in and made themselves a home.

There were two free rooms right next to each other, flanking the tiniest bathroom I’d ever seen. The spaces were simple but clean, with one twin bed each, a dresser, and a desk. The two rooms were exactly the same in every respect, save that the one in the back had a window that opened up to a wide green-and-gold view of the Umbrian hills.

Gia stood behind me, looking out. She stood closer than an English or Irish girl would. I tried not to visibly stiffen—I had never been good with strangers.

“You have boyfriends?” I tried.

“Sure. You?”

“Not right now.”

“Not yet,” Gia said. Alessandra looked me up and down in a way that was frank, but somehow not rude. These girls were older than I was. Twenty-five, twenty-six.

“It is very easy in Grifonia,” Gia said.

“But don’t pick the first one you see,” Alessandra said. “You are too nice for that.”

“Yeah, for you it will be a barrel of fish shooting,” Gia said, suddenly switching into English. I laughed, and they led me to the kitchen, where Gia poured us all a glass of wine, even though it wasn’t even noon. It was terrible, worse than the cheap stuff we drank in Nottingham.

“From the
enoteca
around the corner. You take a water bottle, they fill it for you. Three euros.”

“Mmmmmm.” I took another sip for show. Alessandra took off her little cardigan now, revealing an emblazoned T-shirt straining against her motherly curves:

YOUR NEVER FULLY DRESED WITH OUT A
SMILE!!!

“We are gone a lot,” Gia said, getting back to business.

“I understand. I’ll be busy as well. My Enteria exchange—”

“Ah, Enteria. Good,” Alessandra said, pulling her long, dark hair up and fanning her neck. “Not that we won’t be around for you. You will be welcome to be with us at any time,
bella.
”

“Any time,” Gia repeated.

“Still, you will have many friends.”

“And there is an American girl, too, who just rented,” Gia said. “She’s away now, but you will be friends, I think. She is very sweet.”

“Lovely.” I put down my wine. “So, then, it’s three hundred a month?”

“
Sì.
” They gave each other a look. Obviously, they themselves were paying significantly less. But it was their lease, and though three hundred was high, between the scholarship and the money my father had given me, I could afford it. “What do you think?”

I looked around at the terrace, the little table, the warm faces of my potential flatmates. I didn’t want to look too excited, but this seemed exactly the place I’d been dreaming of.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll take it.”

“Fantastic!” Alessandra cried. And the girls embraced me again, showering me with more cheek kisses.

“I hate to ask,” Gia said, stepping away first, “but do you have … a deposit?”

“Certainly.”

“It’s okay to give it later,” Alessandra said.

“No, no—it’s fine,” I said. I reached in my purse, pulled out the envelope, and gave them two months’ worth of rent.

“Well,
bella
, here is your kingdom,” Alessandra said, kicking the bedroom door open lightly with her foot. “You see? The bed, the closet, the desk. All yours. It is not big, but it has everything. Sheets and towels you can get at the co-op.”

As I stood in the threshold, I heard a sudden roar, far away but insistent. The room seemed all at once airless. I leaned against the doorjamb, in order to catch my breath. I knew something was going to happen here. Something colossal. The sensation never happened again in this particular place, but that was it. My first ghost.

You see, it all started very simply. A girl packed a suitcase full of soap and clean underwear and went to Italy. She was young—open as an empty highway. She met some people there. Love happened. And then, her ending began.

“Tabitha?” Alessandra asked, touching my arm. “You okay?”

I looked at her, blinking.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“You sure?”

“Positive,” I said, managing a smile. “I’ll just go now and get my things.”

Ido, 10th century BC

Ido. She wasn’t the strongest sister, nor was she the weakest. She had blue eyes, and it made those in her Umbri tribe uneasy. Though she was already thirteen, no one had claimed her for a wife.

She was good at being quiet. Living with the Umbri wasn’t easy. Her survival depended on positioning herself with the hunters, with the aunts who could coax the most from the arid ground.

The Umbri tracked time by growing seasons. Ido’s tribe had built a stone Sun Temple, a structure that took eighty years to construct; the three-ton boulders were heaved, one by one, up from the valley a mile below.

When Ido was fourteen, there was a blizzard. No one could remember a winter so harsh. The families huddled by their fires day and night, but the snow wouldn’t stop. All their food stores were frozen. The mothers were unable to produce milk. Seven nights. Ten. By the eleventh darkness, three babies and two elders were dead.

The priests prayed day and night at the Sun Temple. Reluctantly, they sacrificed a sheep. Then a goat, already frozen to death. Twelve nights passed. Thirteen.

On the sixteenth night Ido woke to see her father bending over her. He pulled her up off her pallet. From the frightened moans of her sisters, she knew where she was going. She hoped she was wrong.

Her father didn’t bother to wrap her in blankets. Her skin was coated in a thin sheet of ice.

At the temple, the priests grabbed Ido from her father and dragged her across the ground. She felt a sharp pain as her left cheek scraped against stone. She struggled, smacking at the priests. After a moment, another rock smashed her skull.

Blood ran down the frosted altar. Sharp clouds of steam rose from the snow.

Ido, fourteen years old, 10th century BC

2

The past runs deep in Grifonia, even in a topographical sense. Below the streets, a great network of black tunnels. Often I would wander into a stone opening that would evolve into a dark passageway leading to some other unfamiliar part of town. Though I knew it was silly, I had a notion of the Grifonian hill as a thin shell, bored into by former generations until it was fragile as a used beehive. In the beginning, I often woke covered in sweat from a recurring nightmare in which the whole place crumbled, throwing all of us down into one great, lethal heap.

My early days were laced with terrible loneliness and longings for home. Still, the fact that I belonged to the prestigious Enteria exchange—an elite program for Europeans only—cheered me. I said the strange word as often as I could.
Enteria.
Just uttering the term brought nods of recognition from Italians and looks of respect from the other foreigners. I wasn’t a brilliant student, but the letters of recommendation from my father’s heavy-hitter medical friends bolstered my application. I didn’t care how it had happened. I was here, my place exchanged with some Italian who was now going to Nottingham University. Often I wondered whom it was now wandering through that cold British web, shadowing the life I’d left.

Our initial orientation was held on a Monday, in the last week of August. More than five hundred students from all over Europe gathered in the auditorium on the campus, talking to one another in eight or nine different languages, voices swelling in a sickening wave. Having gone through two years at a big uni, I was used to the bedlam of large, crowded rooms, knew to coolly look at no one, to sit near the front in order to hear, but not so close that I would be actually noticed. Still, I almost fainted with relief when I saw Jenny Cole, a girl I knew a bit. We’d been on the same hall during our first year at Nottingham. She’d even called me over the summer to “connect” before the trip, though we had never actually gotten together; I spent my summer working to save money, and whenever I could get away, she always had social engagements.

Jenny smiled and flittered her fingers at me. Is there anything better in a strange place than someone saving you a seat? To be lost, and then found, even if the girl beside you barely even knows you at all? She stood and made a show of kissing my cheeks, then removed the huge red bag she had placed on the chair beside her and patted it, indicating that I should sit. She was a large-shouldered girl with thick, covetable wheat-colored hair and skin the color of freshly poured milk. Legs a bit muscular, maybe, wide-ish hips, large breasts, often slyly exposed from within expensive blouses and dresses that wrapped. She wasn’t heavy, exactly, but was the sort of healthy-looking person you could imagine gracefully surviving any sort of hardship or plague. It was the Jennies who’d rule come the apocalypse, whereas girls like me—the thin, meek reeds with quietly lovely manners—we’d all be swept away without so much as a parting word.

At university, Jenny had spoken to me only twice. I remembered each instance, because when Jennifer Cole spoke to you, it was an occasion. She leaned in slightly, as if she had the most fascinating bit of confidence in the world. Her voice was low and throaty, and if she really wanted to engage you, she spoke softly enough so that you, too, had to lean forward, in order to get that much closer to the secrets she held. Back at Nottingham, she had asked if I knew a certain boy she was interested in meeting (I didn’t) and if my roommate and I would consider switching rooms with her, as she was forever getting in trouble with the hall proctor for late-night noise. (I’d been willing; my roommate hadn’t.) In fact, I was surprised that someone like Jenny Cole had called me at all.

“Tabitha, thank God you’re here,” she said. “My other mates didn’t make it this morning.”

“You look well,” I said as we sat.

She allowed a small, disappointed smile and looked around the room. I tried again.

“Oh, this is nice,” I said, giving her purse a respectful pat.

“Yes.”

I looked at the label, then moved my hand away. My sister had once pointed out the same sort in a magazine. It had cost upwards of five thousand pounds.

“Is this real?”

“Of course.” Jenny gave me a frosty look.

I tried to hide my embarrassment by fumbling in my own cheap, fake-leather satchel. She looked at me for a moment more, then relented.

“It was a gift from Martin. My boyfriend back home. He’s practically divorced, or so he says. I met him at a house party, you know, one of those weekend things.”

I did my best to maintain a neutral expression. There was a reason I didn’t know Jenny well: she ran with a posh group I’d observed only from afar. Though Nottingham was supposed to be the new utopia of student equality, the class system was alive and well on our campus, with girls like Jenny circulating imperiously at the top, waving to the underlings as they buzzed about in the passenger seats of properly worn Aston Martins and posted photos of themselves at hunts and polo matches and dinners at large country manors. Though she had lived on my hall our first year, she was away so much I had rarely seen her. The posh group rarely stayed on campus during the weekend. For them, a better, smarter world was always waiting just a jaunt away.

I pretended to write in my notebook while trying to think of something clever to say. All around us students shouted and gossiped feverishly, as if they’d known one another for years. There was a buzz in the room of being in a place where others wanted to be. The people sitting to my right—a boy and a girl with multiple nose rings—were jabbering in some mystifying Scandinavian language. I continued to scribble nonsensical notes, as if absorbed in important business.

Just then the head of the program, an impeccably dressed woman in her fifties, stepped up to give a welcome speech in blessedly slow Italian. If we didn’t understand everything at first, she said, not to worry. Our Italian would improve in the course of time, and we could always take extra language classes. Thousands of students had gone successfully through this program, she assured us.

At first we listened politely, but as she went on the students began to get restless. There was no air-conditioning, and it was even hotter inside the room than out in the merciless August sun. After covering class schedules, the
directora
paused, as if not exactly sure how to approach the next topic on her agenda.

“You are here to experience our great country of Italy,” she began almost regretfully. “The art, the music, the food, the people.”

“
Could
this be more boring?” Jenny said—not even bothering to whisper—and took out her phone. “I mean, I can’t understand a word, can you?”

“I’m actually pretty good at Italian,” I said a little eagerly. “Want me to translate?”

Jenny shrugged.

The
directora
took off her glasses now and laid them on the podium. “So I must advise prudence. Grifonia, you see, is a lively city. A city of music. Of festivals and—”