The Apex Book of World SF 2 (13 page)

It was two days
before the Hungry Ghosts' Festival when the smooth glass pebbles started
appearing in little plastic bags. He had noticed his unfinished glass shards
disappearing a couple of weeks ago and was concerned because he had to make the
wind chimes for the fairies. The glass pebbles intrigued him. Someone had
smoothed the edges, made the glass pleasant to the touch. He made wind chimes
out of these glass pebbles and hung them on the trees. The music they made was
different from the sharp-edged glass shards. Softer, sweeter, lighter.

Like fairy laughter.

At night, he would
sometimes catch glimpses of the wind chimes and the way they drew groups of
stray cats who would just sit and watch the glass bits twinkle intermittently
under the light of the streetlamps. Or there would be small little moths
fluttering close to the wind chimes, drifting like white petals in the breeze.

More letters came
from the town council. He shredded them and threw them into the gunnysack
designated for recycling. All this happened during the weeks within the Hungry
Ghosts Month. He could hear the funeral wakes during the day and, at night,
Buddhist chants wafting in the quiet-estate air. Oddly enough, he felt
strangely protected and did not worry about hungry spirits haunting his abode. The
food and pebbles still appeared as if on schedule and he was grateful for these
little gifts.

 

Cedric. The police
are here. We need to go.

 

Cedric?

Listen…

Can't you hear them?

 

The wind chimes are
still there, singing in the breeze: still serenading the fairies, still warning
of secret dangers.

 

A Single Year
Csilla Kleinheincz
 
Csilla Kleinheincz is a
Hungarian-Vietnamese writer living in Kistarcsa, Hungary. Besides translating
classics of fantasy she works as an editor of Delta Vision, a major Hungarian
fantasy publisher. She is the author of two novels and a short story
collection. The following story appears in English for the first time in this
anthology.

 

I had learnt love with and for
others, so when I met Iván, I almost knew what it was. I was confident enough
to make the decision to leave the hospital and move to the country of curry and
red plains. I visited my father for the first time in two years to tell him: I
am moving to India with someone I met only three months ago, but I wish to spend
all the following months to get to know him better.

 

I didn't expect his
blessing; we never had that kind of father-daughter relationship. Rather, my
visit was the work of defiance: I wanted to look into his eyes to prove to
myself that I dared. He usually disapproved of my decisions, although he never
explicitly forbade anything. He left me to discover the consequences. This time
he never even waited for me to finish before he announced that I may not go
with Iván. He spoke forcefully, almost like a normal dad would.

"Why not?" I asked
and didn't look away because I had promised myself I would be brave and bear
anything he might say.

He didn't answer at
once, but the pity in his eyes jarred my teeth.

"Why not?"

"Because he will die
in one year."

I watched my father,
his face covered in grey stubble, his eyes that, even in my childhood, seemed
tired—tired and as resigned as the planets that circle on the same route
forever and know everything that can be known.

"Are you sure?" I
asked. "Do you feel it? Even so, I don't care what you know."

"What should I tell
you, Judit?" His gaze stole my breath from me. Cassandra must have had the same
look as she faced the Troyans.

"Even so," I said,
rising. "Even so."

I trembled. His
study felt cramped.

Then I was standing
on the doorstep, looking back. He was sitting in the same hunched pose,
clasping his hands in his lap and regarding me with the same insufferable pity.
I slammed the door and, in the next moment, was running down the stairs;
another blink and I sat in my car, my hand on the ignition key. The time I had
left behind caught up with me, swept through me, bringing the flotsam of rage
and helpless frustration. I hit the steering wheel, and I couldn't understand
why I hadn't hit my father instead, when he told me what he shouldn't have.

For even if I told
myself repeatedly,
even so, even so
, hoping the undulation of words
would loosen the knot in my belly, I knew he told me the truth.

Iván will die in one
year.

 

My father was no
Cassandra. You had to believe him because he told the truth. We knew that.

 

Others thought this
a gift, but they never knew the man beyond his reputation and they never got
their prophecy. I wasn't even three when my mother left him. As his other women
left him later. Not because he wasn't a good person or a suitable partner; he
brought in a good income, he was nice and polite, never even raised his voice.
But when his eyes turned to inhuman holes, showing the future, all the women
fled. They tried to cope with it but it's impossible. You cannot live with
someone who is sometimes older than the solar system.

I had visited him
every two weeks but, as I grew up, it became less and less. After I divorced
Gábor, I had taken up talking to my father, first on the phone, bouncing
accusations back and forth, then more gently and in person, but once that
faraway mist appeared in his gaze, I shied away for months. I didn't want to
let him chip at my life.

You can never really
get used to having an oracle for a father. You may forget it for a while, but
then something happens to bring forth the strangeness. Often, he didn't even
realise it. I remember once, when I was still in primary school, he stepped
onto the crosswalk while the lights were still red. The horns blared crazily
but when I held him back, he pulled me with him and said, "Not yet." He hurried
like those who, unlike him, didn't know the exact time of their death. But his
steps were surer. He knew that, until his appointed time, he was invincible. I
looked up at him as I would upon a wonder. That passed, too. No big deal in
being brave if you know you are invulnerable.

Now I know exactly
what Mum must have felt when she took me and left him, finding that my father
had ironed and folded her clothes beforehand. She knew she had to break away, but
she also wanted to be held back. We all want that deep down inside.

So Mum entered the
flat with the prepared words of goodbye on her tongue. The clothes were folded
in neat piles on the sofa.

"I saw that he
wanted to call me back," said Mum after my divorce, when we talked about the
end of relationships. That time she was more like a friend. Not so much since. "I
saw that his heart was breaking; he wanted to hold me back so much, but he knew
what would happen and he didn't even try to change it. I couldn't forgive him
for that for a long time. That he didn't even try."

At first, I didn't
understand why my father never attempted to change fate. I tried to pry into it
but he always dodged the answer by saying that he didn't see the future in
order to change it, the same as I didn't control the lives of people I saw on
television. After many years, I realised this was the only answer I would get.
He cannot change the future just tell it. He wanted me to know that. That was
why his girlfriends had left him. That was why I said goodbye to him when, as
we were talking, I saw the planets relay to him a sliver of the future. When
you cannot fight fate, it is better not to know.

No, this is not
entirely true. I asked him many times what he saw. I just stopped asking about
Gábor.

As a teenager, I
nagged him to tell me if I would pass my exam; would I be a doctor, a
pharmacist, a nurse? No, no, yes. It had been a kind of vocational guidance.
What could he tell me about Márton? Béla? Attila? When he told me whether the
love affair ended in a nice or ugly manner, I realised I didn't need to know. I
shouldn't know beforehand, never, because it is poison, a permanent ache, a
constant search for faults and defects. Why wouldn't it work? Because of him?
Or because of me? Which of us wasn't enough for the other?

I told my father to
keep the messages of the planets to himself. For a while he complied, but I
knew from the shadows crossing his face that he saw my future. I pressed my
lips together and didn't ask. Perhaps it was defiance rather than the good
sense not to let myself be controlled by my father's prophecies. I managed to
refrain from asking. For a while.

When I married
Gábor, I asked my father what I should expect. It was stupid but I wanted to be
sure I'd done the right thing. I wanted affirmation. When he said, "Three
years," I felt betrayed. I didn't invite him to the wedding. He still came; he
stood in the back row and didn't come to congratulate us.

It really was three
years. Whether there couldn't have been more time, or whether it was because I'd
known from the beginning that I would have only three years with that man and
had therefore allowed my marriage to slip through my fingers, I don't know.
Perhaps my marriage had been dead even at the moment I said my vows.

After that I didn't
ask him anymore. Not even now. He had decided to tell me because he had no
other leverage to hold me back. To protect me?

Will Iván really die
in one year?

 

Iván was a doctor,
two years younger than me. We both worked in Rókus Hospital, saw each other
every day, and even if there was no time for intimate talking, we were never
short of a quick touch, a hurried kiss on a flight of stairs where our
colleagues couldn't see us. The day after I'd visited my father, I saw Iván
briefly several times. Once he stopped for a moment to stroke me between my
shoulder blades, then he continued walking. Words burnt my tongue: "I went to
see my father and…" How could I end the sentence?

 

How could I tell
him? I should. He should know in order to be prepared, even if he didn't
believe me, even if he laughed at me. Maybe, if he took the warning as a joke,
I would be able to see it more light-heartedly. "Ha-ha, what a strange bird my
father is," I could say, and pretend.

As if I didn't know
the future. Just like my father does.

At the end of my
shift, I was close to snapping like a cord. I craved a cigarette so badly that
when I finally got down to the garden and lit one, I realised only during my
third that I couldn't remember smoking the first two. Anna from Surgery came
after me, and asked me between two puffs:

"Why are you so
nervous? You two had a fight?"

I don't think she
was really interested. She had her own quiet lake-world; she never let anything
from the outside disturb its water. Therefore it was easy to answer.

"Just my father…
Now that I am over thirty, he's started to discipline me and he began with
prohibition."

She nodded, finished
her cigarette and pressed out the stub.

"And you are really
going to India?"

"Of course."

"Well, good luck! It
must be more difficult for a nurse. To talk those weird languages. It's easy
for Iván. Patients rarely chit-chat on the operating table.

She went in.

Sometimes I think
Anna's calmness comes from taking it from others. Her remark hit me. Iván and I
had planned everything perfectly. There was a hospital in New Delhi where we
would work. It would be good experience for him, but for me…? Patients were
patients everywhere, but Anna was right: I would have to talk to them; simply
turning the sheets was not enough. Every doctor spoke English well, but my
patients…? And the native nurses, my colleagues…?

Will I feel
unwanted? Still, Iván will be there.

For how long?

The thought knotted
my stomach. When Iván sneaked behind me and touched the nape of my neck, I
jumped as if licked by fire.

"Let's go home!" I
beseeched him, looking into his surprised eyes. "The sooner the better."

"Let's go then," he
said. I liked his way of knowing the difference between the important and the
unimportant, when fuss was annoying. He didn't expect an immediate explanation.
He knew I would come around to that.

"Well?" he asked
later, at home after ten minutes of silence and my nostrils had filled with his
cinnamon scent. "What's the matter?"

"I am afraid of
losing you."

He laughed—not with
irony but with relief, as if my fear were a mere silliness not worth even a
little consideration.

"What makes you
think you will?"

"I went to see my
father and…" I couldn't bring myself to tell the whole truth. "He forbade me
to go with you."

"Aren't you adult
enough not to let him dictate your life?"

"Of course I am but…"

Because it was
easier, I talked about my father: what it was like to see him only every two
weeks, how much he helped or didn't help as I grew up, how I wasn't sure I
loved him at all. Iván listened devotedly like a child would, and at the end he
generously said he understood. This annoyed me because I knew he knew nothing.
I didn't tell him what my father said about his future.

 

Unspoken words have
weight. First you barely feel it, then, as they proliferate you realise you
cannot carry them anymore. You either release them or keep them in, in which
case they start to press and pinch your heart. You feel the grip even if you
are happy. Especially then.

 

I didn't tell Iván,
partly because I wasn't sure, partly because I didn't want him to lose the
light. He was happy. In a sense, so was I—but while I was laughing, caressing,
loving, part of me peeled away from me and, watching us, said, "Not much
longer."

It drove me wild. If
you close yourself off to the future, the present seems richer. I felt every
moment was perfect because there would be no more like it.