The Barter (26 page)

“The little girl was afraid, but the ghosts were so pitiful that she was afraid to say no. What could she do? She said, ‘It might be better for my parents if I let you eat me, because then my mother would be happy and my father would have one less mouth to feed. You may eat me, but let me kiss my mother good-bye first.'

“The ghosts said, ‘Please, please hurry. We are so hungry, and so cold.'

“The little girl rose sadly from her chair and went to her mother's bedroom door. The key hung on a peg, and she unlocked the door and went inside.

“There she found her mother sitting in her chair by the window, crying and crying, unable to stop. Her mother's hair had grown very long, and her face was pale as the moon for being washed so constantly with tears. The little girl thought her mother's hair looked as if it might warm her, so she went toward her mother and nestled into her long thick hair.

“The mother looked down at her and said, ‘Daughter, why are you here? Leave me alone.'

“The little girl said, ‘I'm here to kiss you good-bye.'

“The mother said, ‘Where are you going?'

“The little girl said, ‘I don't know. Somewhere far away, where the ghost children live.' Then she cried, thinking that where she was going, she would be a ghost child, too, and always hungry and cold.

“The mother said, ‘What do you mean?'

“Then the little girl explained about the ghost children who lived in the house with them, who could never be made warm and whose bellies could never be filled. She told her mother that she was going to let herself be eaten by the ghost children because she couldn't bear their hungry cries.

“The mother was horrified and wrapped her little girl tightly up in her hair. ‘You won't be eaten, not while I live.'

“The little girl had left the bedroom door open, and the seven ghost children had crept into the room with them. They were hungry for the sight of the woman they had loved so well when they were alive, and hungry to eat her little girl, too.”

The little ghost children in the mirror reached out their hands, opening their mouths like hungry birds, their eyes dark and shining. It was a terrible sight. Rebecca shivered and slipped her hand into John's.

And now the magician turned and looked at Mrs. Brandt, still in her chair, refusing to glance at him or the mirror. He said something to her in a low voice.

The older woman shook her head sharply—
no, not that
—and responded, loud enough for the auditorium to hear, “They save each other.”

The magician nodded, then briskly concluded:

“When the ghost children saw the little girl wrapped up warm in her mother's long hair, they began to melt. They melted away like snow and became the woman's tears. Finally the woman's tears dried on her cheeks, and as her tears dried, the little ghost children were no more.”

The faces in the mirror disappeared, and the lights rose again. The audience shifted creakily in their chairs and then burst into heated applause. The magician stood for a moment, shoulders slumped as if projecting the figures in the mirror had exhausted him. Then he turned and thanked the audience with a brief, professional bow. He strode to Mrs. Brandt's chair and helped her to her feet, then, inexplicably, invited the audience with a broad sweep of his arm
to applaud her, as if she'd somehow had a hand in projecting the figures onto the glass or supplying the tale, and in fact Mrs. Brandt did look a bit strange and moonlike as she stood, stone-faced, accepting their applause.

*   *   *

H
err Krause told three more tales that evening, each time inviting an audience member to come up on the stage first to inspect the mirror and then to sit onstage in the chair, revealing each time that he knew exactly who they were. The stories were all made from the same pastiche of Grimm fairy tale and German
Volk
talk that he must have known would particularly appeal to them. One story was bawdy and funny and violent and involved a miller's wife who fed her husband his rivals in a series of stews. The final story was about a princess who pulled her entire country underwater, as if pulling it under a blanket with her, house by house, rather than marry her father, the king. And each time, before concluding the tale and the mirror's ghastly show, the magician consulted the person sitting in the chair onstage, as if he didn't know without asking how his story would end. There never seemed to be any apparent connection between the stories Herr Krause told and the people who sat onstage during the telling—these were people well-known to other people in the audience, and there were no dramatic revelations or trembling fingers pointed that night. But as the magician spoke, eerie images flashed and grew, waxed and waned on the mirror, and the people seated on the stage were not the only ones who were perceived to grow silent and unhappy.

After the last story was told and the images had faded away, the magician caused the mirror to be rolled back behind the curtain and
offered for his final act to predict the circumstances of a single volunteer's death.

“No one?”

No one stood up or came forward. The audience laughed uneasily as the silence unspooled.

Rebecca, feeling reckless, rose to her feet. John looked up at her, and she smiled down at him, as if nothing she did could really harm him, which sometimes she thought was in fact the case.

“Oh, but you, my dear”—Robert Krause squinted at her from far away, through the haze of the stage lights—“you won't ever die.”

Rebecca laughed. “But surely—”

“Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you, but I've reached the extent of my powers when a beautiful young woman asks me to imagine the end of her life.” Robert Krause smiled and bowed, sweeping off his hat, and the audience applauded expectantly, but then he strode off the stage in long-legged lopes and they were given to understand that he meant it, and that the show had truly concluded.

*   *   *

T
he night, therefore, ended on a strange, deflated note. John and Rebecca found themselves forcefully congratulated on the way out of the theater.

“Well, the immortal beauty! You've caught quite the wife, John!”

“What will you do with the rest of your eternal life, Rebecca?”

“If you don't plan to die, make sure you've got a lot of money.”

“Brave of you to call his bluff, Mrs. Hirschfelder.”

John and Rebecca were all laughter and easiness with their neighbors, but it seemed to her that they were afraid to meet each other's eye. They accepted an invitation from Betsy Hart to come to
her house for punch and cake, along with a good number of their old friends from school, where Betsy's sister pounded away on the piano and a group of the men sang “Das Glühwürmchen” and “In the Good Old Summertime,” and the piano-playing sister was serenaded with “I Can't Tell You Why I Love You, but I Do.” It was a merry night, and the hour was late when the party broke up.

Rebecca was conscious that she looked to be in higher spirits than she perhaps felt as she and John made their way back through the chilly streets to her father's house. She was thinking that if she hadn't stood up in the theater and reminded Betsy and her town friends that she existed, she and John probably would have just driven home in silence.

John, for his part, had retreated back to the dark-lidded place in which he dwelled when he was with her. She'd seen the other John, her old John, at Betsy's, in conversation with the people they used to know, and she'd had to acknowledge anew what everyone else seemed to understand already: He was handsome; he was good-natured. He was often friendly. He was well-mannered and gentlemanly. He could be funny. But he lived behind a wall.

Out in the cold, her breath creating vapors, Rebecca said to him, “Did you enjoy the party?”

“I enjoyed it more than the show,” John returned, with a charged glance at her.
Here it comes,
she thought.
Well, I gave him the opening after all. Even if I was feeling tenderly toward him just now, it's clear enough he's been angry at me all night.
“What could you possibly have meant by it, Beck? Why did you stand up? What on earth could you possibly have wanted to know from him?” He caught himself short and shook his head quickly, staring straight ahead at the road.

“Oh, I don't know. I don't have an idea. I'm sorry if I embarrassed
you.” Rebecca shrugged. “I was curious. I suppose I did want to call his bluff, as Mr. Bieder said.”

“You were charmed. You were snake-charmed.”

Rebecca stared at John, astonished and amused. “You're jealous.”

John turned on her a brief glare, then looked away.

“Herr Krause is a handsome devil, everyone says so,” she teased. John stared ahead at the horse's cold-bitten ears. “He fell in love with me upon the instant and couldn't bear to think of me in peril,” she put the back of her gloved hand on her forehead in pantomime.

John grasped her hand a bit roughly and pulled it away from her face. “Don't,” he warned.

“You're a funny one,” Rebecca said, letting her hand rest in his but looking a challenge into his eyes. “As if you had any real reason to fear,” she finally muttered. “You must know you haven't any rivals. You never have.”

John turned away to frown at the horse's ears. “I don't know what you're talking about.”

Rebecca sighed, watching his profile against the passing darkened houses. “No, I don't suppose you do,” she said. “I don't know why I feel such impatience tonight.” She shook her head. “I can't say. But I'll show you. I
will
show you,” she added, with something of the magician's abruptness, and she lunged across the wagon's seat with her husband's hand in hers and took his chin in her other gloved hand. The reins jerked with a metallic chime. Rebecca brought her mouth to John's and curled her arm around his neck.
I'll feed you, I'll warm you
, she thought crazily.
What's gotten into me?

She felt his arm encircling her waist, and suddenly the layers of woolly clothing that she wore felt as restricting and cold as a tightly wrapped shroud. She was bursting outward from within, the heat of
her self—her real self—spreading and reaching out toward the surface, penetrating her own skin from within, hot inside and cold without, warming the surface from below.

They were in the middle of the street, exposed together alone. John released any pretense of driving the wagon and pulled Rebecca's body into his. She felt her knee lifting, felt his hand pulling her, and then she pushed herself off the wagon seat and straddled his lap, holding his face in her hands and driving her tongue down into the heat of John's mouth. He made a sound then, a sound that she remembered from their first kiss, and it broke her heart afresh even as she felt a delirious triumph rising from her chest. She answered with a moan against his lips and felt his body stiffen.

She pulled her mouth away with a laugh, feeling dizzy and untamed. “We're out in the middle of the road, John.”

“I don't care. Kiss me again.”

“We'll be arrested,” she said, dipping her head to brush her lips against his. “Thrown into separate cells.”

“Frau Nussbaum will post our bail,” John murmured, and she cracked a decidedly snort-like laugh. His body surged up against hers. “Don't let go of me,” he said. She tightened her legs around him, and he pulled close about their bodies the lap blanket she'd disarrayed in her mad lunge. In the protected embrace of the blanket, in the dark, his cold hand slid under her skirt and up her woolen stockings to where her legs parted, and her cold hand reached down between his legs, rudely forcing his pants open. She heard herself beginning to pant with hunger and eagerness, and felt herself, too, drawing from behind John's wall some burdened, hungry thing that she'd been allowing to starve.

“You,” she managed, his mouth hot on her throat. “You. You must know. You must know by now.”

Meanwhile, the horse continued slowly down the street without either of their guidance, moving methodically toward home, a warm barn, a little sleep.

*   *   *

W
hen they arrived at the Doctor's house sometime later, Rebecca's mouth swollen and John's thin face flushed with exertion, they found all the downstairs lamps lit, blazing into the street at nearly one in the morning. It was their first sign that something was terribly wrong.

Neither of them leaped to react, although the sight of the glaring house was a bad omen at this hour. Rebecca looked a question at John, who shook his head, eyes dark, and swiftly steered the horse down the lane toward the shed behind the house. He paused at the post that marked the corner of the Doctor's yard, though, and without a word between them Rebecca jumped down.

In an instant, despite the sweetness of the cold night, they were separate again. Perhaps they'd grown too accustomed to the old, hard habit of answering challenges alone and in their own distinct ways, she with decisive, swift movements and he with the quiet relentlessness of a stone. If she had known in that moment what would happen in the weeks to come, she might have taken John's hand and insisted that he come with her, that the horse could wait—that, indeed, it might be better to leave the horse harnessed and ready in case they had to go for help. She might have waited for John instead of dashing off into the house alone. She might have remembered, in that
moment of stomach-freezing fear, that they belonged to each other, that they had married each other in part to help each other through just such moments as these, and she might have tried to reinforce the tenuous thread that bound them to each other. If she had known that in the weeks to come that spider-skein thread would seem to snap entirely, leaving the two of them floating aloft and tetherless in a terrifying blank space, she might have done something differently. But she didn't because they weren't together in that way, not even yet. They'd never found a way to be.