Byzantium (18 page)

The others were waiting for Mota at a camp not far from the canyon. They betrayed the same muted astonishment at the woman’s presence as Fernando had, but otherwise kept their distance from her and avoided her gaze, as if fearing she might be ill luck. Once Mota was helped off the horse Baltazar poked his fingers inside the splint. “Better,” he pronounced. “But it’ll need at least six more weeks.” Meanwhile, El Sepo launched into his own version of how they found the mine, telling how he had danced a quick jig and Father Pascual had refused to smile. Mota seemed to miss every other word. Night had fallen, and on the far side of the fire, where its light bled into darkness, Beatriz was bedding down, away from them. The distance ached. When El Sepo finished his story, Baltazar leaned over to Mota and said, “I bet she was hungry for it, she ride you cross-eyed?”

TWO DAYS LATER they came to a shelf of rock beneath which the country flattened. Mota and Beatriz had shared a mule, she mounted in front of him as he kept his hands on the reins, his arms around her. The country from atop the shelf of rock looked no different from anywhere else they’d ridden through, but here they stopped and Father Pascual took his horn from his pack and blew. The first echo was faint, but the second came back louder than the original blast.

“Tayopa,” Father Pascual said, pointing to a break in the valley’s far side. The last echo had come from there.

They crossed the valley, halting at a stream that purled out of the break, which, Mota saw now, was the mouth of a narrow
barranca.
Alongside the stream led a trail covered with broken shale, disappearing as it bent. A breeze coursed out of the
barranca
’s mouth, fluttered over Mota’s face. In front of him Beatriz shifted as she cursed the mule’s backbone. They rode in.

After forty
varas
a red shoulder of rock forced path and stream into a tight embrace, and once they eased around the shoulder they came to a round, two-story building.

“The first guardhouse,” Father Pascual said.

Past the guardhouse the trail and the stream twisted north. The walls of rock began to widen, and the bunchgrass and the
madroños,
which had granted the narrow path a dappled green light, started to thin, giving way to ropy thornbushes. Then the trail swiftly mounted several layers of rock, and Mota and the others found themselves in the wide, barren bowl of a box canyon—Tayopa. In the middle of the bowl, attached to the roofless skeleton of a church, stood a bell tower, its sides licked with soot. Machinery from a smelting works lay broken and half-buried, and patterns of mud and stone rubble were scattered between the bell tower and a circle of kilns. Beyond loomed the dark piles of slag, and all around, in the basin’s walls, watched the black, hollowed eyes that were the entrances to the mines.

Mota tightened his grip on Beatriz—she had shuddered, at what he wasn’t sure—and took in the brown and red slope of the far ridge. The air smelled of dried, flaking dirt, and the wind coming over the ridge carried an empty sound. Mota closed his ears to it, buried his nose in Beatriz’s matted hair, erected once more in his mind the vision of their return. But this did nothing to still the shadow that had stirred once more in his heart.

With the aid of his crutch, he slipped down from the mule. They would be weeks, assaying samples from the mines and the slag heaps, logging troves, scouting new routes from the mine. The sooner they started, the sooner they could leave.

I
HAD BEEN IN WIESBADEN FOR TWO WEEKS. This was in October 2009. The German semester hadn’t started yet, and so neither had my job, and after a first week surrendered to various bureaucracies I was spending a chain of sunny days exploring. On the third such day, after taking the little yellow funicular up the Neroberg and hiking down, I was walking in the pedestrian-zoned city center and had paused to look through the window of the gummy candy store. Thoughts of a present shipped home to my nephews took breath then perished (the postage, the hassle) before somebody behind me said, “Holy shit,” and grabbed me by the arm.

The words with their three flat American syllables leapt at me from the German public’s constant guttural hum. I turned and a short, nicely thick-bodied woman with light green eyes and rusted blond hair was looking up at me, mouth hanging open in a display of shock. My memory fumbled, then immediately I had a flash of her at fifteen: studded leather choker around her neck, bottle of cherry soda constantly stowed in her backpack, Mod Podged collages of ads from
Spin
magazine covering her folders. Amy Heathcock. She’d been two years behind me in high school, and we’d been members of separate outcast cliques that shared the hallway outside the band room for standing around in the mornings before class. Once we’d gone on a date, and later, when I was home from college, I ran into her at the Corny Dog in the Longview Mall, where she dipped hot dogs in batter. But by the time she clutched my arm in Langgasse I’d forgotten she existed.

“What are you doing here?” she said. She smiled and freed her other hand from a stroller to pull me into a hug.

“I’m teaching,” I said, neglecting to mention I was also fleeing a failing marriage—arguably the truer answer. “What about you?”

“I’m staying with a friend,” she said. The friend’s husband was army, she explained, stationed at the airfield outside town, and they lived in one of the blocks of married housing on the other side of the train station. I nodded. The day before I’d taken a bus in that direction and seen a Popeye’s and a Taco Bell locked behind a tall, guarded fence. “This is my Macy,” Amy added, looking down at the two-year-old who lay in the stroller’s seat, passed out. “She likes it when I push her through here. Sometimes it’s all I can do to get her to sleep.” Amy looked up again. In that moment she seemed barely changed in the decade-plus from the girl I remembered. The same freckled nose with its mousy tip, the same sly light in her eyes, the same thin T-shirt fabric pulling across the same soft pouch of belly. She said we should hang out and I agreed.

WE WENT TO THE CAFÉ MALDANER, just around the corner, where we picked slices of cake from a glass case and sat in the high-ceilinged, wood-paneled tearoom. I’d wanted to go inside the Maldaner since I first saw it. According to the gold lettering on the window, it dated to 1859, and I imagined Dostoevsky, who’d lived here in the 1860s, drinking coffee inside as he fretted about the previous evening’s losses at the gaming tables.

As we sat Amy tended to her daughter. She had woken, and, after staring silently at me for three minutes (“Macy, this is one of Mommy’s friends,” Amy had said), she started throwing her toys at a mink-coated frau whose spun-sugar sphere of white hair made an irresistible target. The toys kept landing short, and I would pick them up and give them to Amy, who would give them back to the crying Macy, who would throw them again. I wondered if this was all that would happen and if it was for the best. But after Macy’s fit, as Amy asked me about high school—who I still saw, if I remembered this or that drama—she took my hand, and once we finished our cake I walked her to my apartment. There we parked Macy in front of the TV, which I turned to KiKA, the children’s channel, and we went into the bedroom. As we stood together, Amy’s back pressed against me, I lifted her skirt and bit her neck. She squealed—I remembered that squeal, heard sometimes in the hallway before class whenever another sex-deprived, aching boy poked or tickled her generous flesh. Then she told me to hurry. We only had until the cartoon ended.

AFTER WE FINISHED she wheeled Macy out of my apartment, and I sat down to work on my syllabi. I’d given Amy my phone number and my e-mail address, but as I looked at my laptop’s screen I hoped that was it, that she would step back into her life and I into mine. The last thing I wanted was a new entanglement.

So when she called me a few days later, asking if I’d like to meet her, I was worried.

“Just for an hour,” she said.

“My wife,” I said.

“You said you haven’t talked to her in a month.”

“Macy.”

“I’ll leave her with Beth.”

She waited while I said nothing. I found myself thinking of the large, milk-white breasts that I’d admired at sixteen and that, as we’d stood in my bedroom, had remained bound behind her bra, unexplored.

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“Think of it this way. We’re friends. What’s wrong with being friends?”

But we’d never been friends. She was just a girl I’d happened to know years ago. Still, it was enough. Two hours later I was waiting for her outside the Karstadt, one of the massive, glass-walled shopping centers downtown. She showed wearing jeans and hoop earrings, and I felt twelve years younger, the entirety of my life spread before me, unmade.

MY WIFE SAT enshrined chief among the mistakes and disappointments I’d come to Germany to escape. I met her in my third year at Michigan, when she was a first-year fresh from a small liberal arts college in Maine. Clara came from an old-money family of Chicago lawyers, bred for summers at Saugatuck and seats on museum boards, and attended our graduate seminars in peasant dresses no peasant could afford and high leather boots that pressed smoothly against her calves. At parties she would stand in the corner telling practiced stories to a small, rapt circle of fellow students clutching bottles of Oberon or Winter White. About the night the president (before he was president) came for cocktails: “He had really hairy ears. You think someone would tell him.” About the year after her parents’ divorce: “I met my dad each week at this Chinese place. I always ordered the Happy Family.” A pause, then a half smile. “He never got the joke.”

That I made her love me, that I somehow entered her existence and found a place in it—the comfiest chair in the living room of her soul—I still count as the greatest accomplishment of my reinvention. I had been a sweaty, acned nobody from a small town in East Texas that most people had never heard of, then a scholarship student at the state university with no claim on anything higher than the dreary futures (pharmaceutical sales, a chain store’s management track) touted at the job fairs held each year in our basketball arena. But a marathon semester spent polishing an application essay ended with me in a grad program where my peers were people with the kinds of East Coast, private-school educations I had long envied. By the time I met Clara I had transformed myself, through the alchemy of a research assistantship with a famous theorist and a paper on Spinoza and Coleridge given at a major conference, into a promising scholar, a rising star of the department. I was climbing, never so sure of what I was climbing toward until I saw Clara standing in her circle—her hair loose over her temples, her upper lip pooched by the slightest of overbites—exuding class privilege like a musk.

We married a year later. The ceremony was small, in the chapel of a large downtown Chicago church, St. James Episcopal. The other graduate students dubbed us the power couple, and we took an apartment in a house in the Old West Side with a porch we’d sit on when it was warm, drinking gin and tonics, and two spare rooms we used as offices. Clara dressed me in thrift store blazers, idly ran her fingers through my thinning hair while she read. In the summer we spent long weeks at her family’s place on Lake Michigan, swimming and working through stacks of books. Our happiness seemed unquestionable. But the following spring, after a semester spent trying to break ground on my dissertation—“Representations of Eastern Europeans in the Nineteenth-Century Novel,” chosen after a misleadingly exuberant seminar—I had a crisis. I saw all my future years spent waking to wrestle with murky thoughts, to put cold words on cold pages no one would ever read. It was a rather mundane crisis, my adviser told me, but I didn’t get over it. Meanwhile, Clara had turned into a plodding worker, in her office every morning, and only now that we were married did I discover that what I’d thought was a quiet, aristocratic disdain was instead pure shyness, that her affected coolness shrouded a sentimental heart. I had expected the air in this new world to which I’d laid claim to be different, to ease me past imperfection and strife in a narcotic mist. But sealed together in that house, Clara and I began to fight. Usually I was the provoker, coming to Clara with some correction I thought she could make to her habits or person (the dissertation abandoned, I had little else to brood about). At first, whenever I caught the sound of her crying behind her office door, I’d go to her, apologize, but eventually I chose to leave her be and waited instead for her to come to dinner, amnesic smile pinned to her face. When, at the end of summer, I told her about the job in Germany, a one-year exchange appointment I’d begged from our grad director, she said she didn’t want me to go, but within a day she’d packed my things in a box.

AMY AND I BEGAN MEETING on Mondays and Fridays. I taught the other days of the week at the university in Mainz, and the weekends, I told her, I needed for grading, though in fact I simply wanted to keep them to myself. Sometimes we took trips: In Bad Homburg we strolled through the Kurpark with its Thai temples and miniature Russian church, then toured the kaiser’s summer palace where the guide showed us first the kaiser’s telephone cabinet, with its private line to Berlin, then the kaiser’s flush toilet, with its view over the palace roof. In Höchst we wandered into the toll castle’s moat, a green, ivy-strewn park abandoned that day under a gray sky, and in Rüdesheim we sat on a rock in a muddy, bare vineyard, getting drunk on grape brandy while we watched the Rhine flow by, its long, thin cargo barges easing their way to Rotterdam. On our trips I found it difficult to contain myself. In the vineyard I brought her head to my lap and unzipped my jeans as hikers passed a hundred feet above us, and in the Höchst moat I’d leaned her into a corner and slipped my fingers inside her waistband before a man overhead whistled, his head poking out from the castle’s high tower, which cost a euro to climb.

The days we didn’t take trips we spent in my apartment, and the days we did take trips we always ended there. As soon as we closed the door we’d shed our clothes and scurry to bed, me getting up and dressing only to fetch our dinner from the dimly lit takeaway—Indian food, pizza, schnitzels—four doors down. We never talked of our lives beyond the age of nineteen, only of prom, football games, and the bored, unending nights spent driving the Longview loop. One afternoon she went through the catalog of girls we’d known, asking which ones I’d had crushes on, and giggled anytime I said yes and for at least two declared, “Skank!” Another time I brought up our date.

She blushed. “I was wondering when you’d ask about that.”

“So you do remember?”

She looked at me. “What about you? What do you remember?”

“You barely spoke to me. I took you to the Jalapeño Tree and we ate fajitas, then I asked you what you wanted to do and somehow we ended up at a soccer game. We sat in my car and all I wanted to do the whole time was feel you up, but I could tell you just wanted to go home.”

“I was horrible!” she said. “I was really into you when you asked me out, but by the end of the week I wasn’t. I was like that all sophomore year.” Then she kicked back the sheets and sat atop me, leaning down so that her breasts pressed against my chest. “Have I made up for it now?”

I admitted she had.

SINCE ARRIVING IN WIESBADEN, I’d been trying, off and on, to find out where Dostoevsky had lived during his time in the city. I’d had no luck (even Google had turned up nothing) until early in November I spent an afternoon hiking on the Neroberg. At the Russian cemetery I happened upon a faded display, in Russian and German, recording the history of Russian notables in the area, and next to Dostoevsky’s name I saw Hotel Viktoria.

I was going to wait until Saturday to look for the hotel, but Amy said she wanted to come with me. As we were walking together down Wilhelmstrasse, the street where most of the old spa hotels had stood, she asked me why I wanted to find where Dostoevsky stayed. The truth was I hadn’t read him since college. But he’d lived in Wiesbaden, and now I did: there was hope in the parallel, depth I could glom on to. If nothing else, the search for his hotel would be a good detail to drop over drinks in Ann Arbor. Before I could make up some different, better answer, though, Amy took my hand in hers and swung it a little and said, “If you wrote something, what would you write about me?”

I thought for a moment. We passed the Meissen shop, its porcelain goat staring mutely through the window, and then I said, “That you had nice thighs and you helped me through a bad time.”

The question had been asked in a jokey tone, and I had answered in a jokey tone, but at my reply she grew quiet.

After we walked another block she slipped her hand from mine.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure what you wanted me to say.”

“Nothing,” she said. “I was just being stupid.” When I glanced at her she smiled. I was practiced at detecting false smiles, but I was practiced at ignoring them, too.

I’d asked about the old Hotel Viktoria in the tourist office, and the woman behind the counter had first consulted a book and then made a phone call before telling me that it stood on the northeast corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Rheinstrasse. We arrived there and I stopped and looked up. The Viktoria was dressed in red stone and had curving, wrought-iron balconies. It wasn’t a hotel anymore but offices, its bottom floors given over to an interior design firm and a shop selling ballet clothes. In the summer of 1865 Dostoevsky had holed up here and feverishly churned out his first draft of
Crime and Punishment.
Judging by the names on the plate next to the main door, his room belonged now to either a notary or a foot doctor. I’d expected to feel something, for inspiration to zap out from the stones and grip me, but it was just a building.