The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards (14 page)

But the bullets were not coming from behind us. Up ahead, Union Square was thick with the smoke of musket fire. Colette and I stopped short as we saw hell’s own horror in front of us. The rioters were making their last stand. Soldiers and citizens alike were rampaging through the lines. The sun was blotted out completely. A black-coated fireman with no legs cried on the cobblestones, ten feet away. Flames consumed the square from the inside out. Charred black corpses hung from nooses in the trees—now blacker still. And there were no golden rays of light glinting in the musket fire. And there were no golden medals on the uniforms of the valiantly slaughtered. And there were no golden wings of angels hovering above.

I looked into Colette’s eyes. In the face of this carnage she seemed like someone else entirely, for whom my love was unfamiliar. The golden paint still rested in the crook of my arm. Colette looked back at the hall and then, scared, almost reluctant, she tugged at my elbow. The look on her face was clear. We’d come too far to go back.

When Anton woke up we left the little town in our dust and traveled east on Cross River Road, through thickets of trees, past snow-covered barns and frozen lakes. Maybe it was just the caviar, but there really was something restorative about the countryside. And though our teeth were chattering, we powered the windows down and hummed along to “Matchmaker” as we zigzagged across the iced-over back roads. As we passed through a sleepy, nameless town that had not yet dug itself out of the snow, I looked over my shoulder at the hatbox.

“So. Did it remind you of anything?” I ventured, thinking of a story he’d written ages ago, back in college.

“It’s
clearly
about you and Rose,” he said, “I told you.”

“No,” I said, “I meant—did it remind you of anything of
yours
?”

Anton’s face betrayed a small but earnest smile. “Maybe,” he said. “Something terrible, which I scrapped
completely
, as I recall.”

Was it my imagination, or did he seem—strangely—proud of me for having had the nerve to steal it?

“So do you think it’s fixable?”

“It’s
fixable
,” Anton said gingerly. “I just don’t know if you want to fix it.”

“
Of course
I want to fix it—” I began to shout. I’d worked on the damn thing for more than a year. I’d spent months thumbing through metric tons of library books about the Draft Riots and biographies of the great gilders and genealogies of Southern railroad families. I’d lost hours of sleep over each of its three hundred pages. But as I tried to muster my outrage, I felt these arguments simply evaporating in my windpipe. Before I could explain the strange, sinking feeling to myself, Anton suddenly began shouting.

“This is it right here!”

He was pointing wildly at a snow-covered sign for South Shore Drive. Just in time, I swung the wheel and we skidded around the icy corner, onto a little winding dirt road that led us over the crest of a hill. At the bottom sat a small boxy log cabin, its only frill a stovepipe chimney and, behind it, the frozen lake.

An apple-cheeked boy, about our age, was shoveling snow off the walkway.

“Dr. Ivanych, I presume?” I wondered aloud.

“Don’t be silly. That’s Pasha, Ivan’s son,” Anton said, waving with the goofiest grin I’d ever seen. “We were kids together.”

Then I remembered Anton’s ramblings the night before, when he had shouted “Pasha.” I’d assumed it was simply his delirium, but maybe this guy, not the painkillers, was why Anton had been so eager to see the good doctor. Pasha was sandy-haired and strapping. Anton had the door half open before we slid to a stop, and a moment later I found myself watching them in the warmest of embraces.

“Shto sloocheelos s’ tvoyeemee volosami?”
Anton cried.

“Ty tochno takzhe vyglyadeesh!”
Pasha replied with a laugh.

I lingered getting the parking brake on. They seemed as though they wanted a moment—and as I rewrapped my scarf, my eyes fell on the yellow hatbox. Anton’s comment was still swirling around in my head, and I wanted to dig inside the box and pull out pages at random, scanning them for glints of literary gold so I could prove to him that it was certainly worth fixing. Angrily I grabbed the hatbox on my way out of the car and kept it tucked under my arm.

“This is my oldest friend!” Anton cried, smiling at Pasha. “The best cormorant catcher in Belosaraiskaya Kosa!”

I shook Pasha’s hand and introduced myself. I could just picture them as pale boys, chasing each other up the pebbly shores of a frozen Cyrillic Sea.

“How . . . is your trip?” he asked, fumbling with the words. “You . . . slip-slide?”

He mimed twisting an out-of-control steering wheel and I laughed—it certainly had been a slip-slide of a trip.

“Pasha lives in Russia with his mother most of the time,” Anton explained. “His father’s English is a
little
better.”

“Papa is on the ice,” Pasha interrupted, stabbing at the air, which was heavy with our misted breath. He motioned for us to follow him. Trudging through knee-high snow, I kept the hatbox under my arm as Anton and Pasha bantered in rapid-fire Russian, their guttural laughs echoing through the woods as we came down to the lake. About fifty yards out was a small hut, made from the lashed-together limbs of trees and covered in what appeared to be bearskins.

Pasha and Anton trudged onto the ice without so much as a pause to check its thickness. “Don’t be a pansy, now,” Anton teased. Cursing at him and clutching the hatbox like a life preserver, I held my breath and stepped onto the ice. It held.

“You stay?” Pasha asked eagerly as we treaded out to the bearskin hut. “If Papa catch a fish, we have some dinner?”

Anton looked back at me eagerly. I bit my lip and smiled, hoping we might be able to discuss an exit strategy later. My mind wandered to Rose and the Tea Room, but it was too late to interfere with that now. How could I get her to see the truth? She wasn’t in love with Prince Philippos, or Umberto, or whomever. I’d seen her losing her usual composure on the divan in the warmth of the fire—she loved
me
.

At last we arrived at the fishing hut. Pasha held back one great flank of bearskin and revealed the inside, lit with a dangling brass lantern and lined with great barbed hooks and augers of all sizes. And seated in the center was the wooly Russian himself. At long last, Dr. Ivanych.

“Zdravstvooytye, doktor!”
Anton cried, racing around a wide hole in the ice to embrace the elderly man. Pasha stood behind his father’s folding chair, and Anton crouched beside them. Immediately the three of them launched into an intense debate in Russian. The good doctor listened to Anton’s descriptions of his illness while tending to a line that dropped straight down into an icy hole, nearly two feet in diameter. Pasha bent down occasionally to chop at the constantly refreezing ice with a little chisel.

As they jabbered on, the doctor suddenly reached into his things and produced a bottle of
, with the familiar golden bison label. He waved it in the air like a murder weapon.

“
Kak ti syebya choostvooyesh?
How much have you been drinking?”

Anton blushed and squirmed as he mumbled his reply. I have no idea how much he
confessed
to drinking, but if our recycling bin was any indication, Anton was burning through several liters of
each week—and he only drank more of it when he got sick, as he claimed that it fortified him against disease and had antibacterial properties.

“The buffalo grass in this contains a natural toxin called coumarin,” the doctor barked, “which is
why
it is
banned
by the FDA! Of course, it’s not enough to make you sick unless you’re drinking ten liters a week!”

Mute with astonishment, Anton stared at the tiny bison design on the bottle like Caesar examining Brutus’s knife.

I set the hatbox down on the ice and reached for Anton’s phone again. “Guess I should go tell Rose to set the apartment up for detox again.”

Anton scowled and Pasha began teasing him in Russian. Soon they began to jab at each like little children.

I ducked out of the fishing hut and stepped back onto the glacial lake. A few birds were rustling on the far end, and some smoke drifted from a distant chimney. The winter was dead silent. The cell phone barely got any reception, but after a few tries I managed to get a static-filled call through to Rose.

“Anton . . . darling . . . there?” she sounded very far away. Static burst on the line.

“It’s me,” I said. “Anton’s going to be fine. Dr. Ivanych cracked the case. He’s been poisoning himself with all that Polish vodka.”

More static. I could not tell if Rose had heard me, so I went on. “Too bad. He was almost the first person to ever die of homesickness.” Was she laughing on the other end?

“How’s the prince?” I asked stiffly, after a moment. More static.

More static. “. . . he’s well . . . look let’s not . . . right now” and more static.

Suddenly it seemed that my whole life was static. Years of garbled nothingness, sitting at a library carrel, letting my imagination do the living. Static. She and I looking after Anton together, but whenever things got hard she went off on auditions. She went off with her princes. And Anton and I would drink and drown our weary ears with fizzing gin and tonics and crackling cubes of ice. Her fiancés were called on and called off like extras in a crowd scene. She and I would drink until our minds snowed over; TV sets tuned to channels that never came in. Static. I’d thought that maybe once she read the novel I’d written for her . . . But no, it was all wrong. Anton was right.
Masterful
, she’d said, just like Colette in my story. But then, what had I expected? That was the line I’d written, and she always stuck to the script.

Static. We were always. Stuck.

“I love you,” I said, and, as if the phone knew that these words were not on the approved list, it hissed and burped. “Rose, don’t you know I love you?”

Another burp. And then the call ended. I was alone again on ten acres of frozen water, listening to birds crying in the empty white sky. Had she heard me?

It didn’t matter. If she had, she would pretend that she hadn’t. We’d been there before.

For a minute I thought I might cry, and I wanted the tears to freeze to my eyes and ice them shut. But then I heard a chorus of shouts from the fishing hut.

“Ya spoymal bol’shooyoo riboo! Ogromnaya riba!”
The whole framework seemed to be shaking, the bearskin coming to life as the three Russians danced around inside of it.

Spinning on the ice, I tried to slide back toward the tent. It seemed to get only further away from me. Careening on shoes never meant for such surfaces, I collapsed inside the tent just in time to see Dr. Ivanych thrusting the enormous spear down into the hole in the ice, which had doubled in size and seemed to have come alive. Water sprayed up in every direction. Pasha had the line tight in both hands; Anton ducked for cover. With a mighty effort, Dr. Ivanych raised the spear from the water, bringing up with it the biggest fish I’d ever seen. Its scales were black and iridescent, and its eyes opaque. The primeval thing thrashed around in the tiny space. Watery, red blood pumped from its side as it struggled to somehow escape its fate. I was in awe of it. I pitied it. In one moment, it had been the elusive monarch of its frigid kingdom, and in the next, it had been yanked upward into the bright and unbreatheable heavens.