Enchantment (43 page)

In the bathroom he had to turn the light on so he wouldn’t miss. It blinded him. And then, when he was done, he turned it off and he was blind again. Can’t win. He thought of getting Raid in his eyes. He thought of the wasp. What if the wasp had stung him? Got the potion into him, the curse. He would have had a bad five minutes there, but by now it would be over. He wouldn’t have this dull ache in his heart, the sharp yearning in his throat, the words trying to escape.

“You can be sure of me.” What an ass.

He opened the door and then remembered to close his bathrobe. He stepped out into the hall. Still just Father’s snoring.

Maybe Mother was up. Downstairs somewhere.

He walked softly down the stairs not wanting to waken anybody. The lower floor was dark, too. So Mom wasn’t up.

Or maybe she was in the back yard.

He walked to the kitchen door, opened it, stepped barefoot out onto the patio. The concrete felt cold on his feet. There was a breeze. It was the third of July, or maybe early on the Fourth. Shouldn’t be this cool. Breeze off the lake.

He walked out onto the grass. It was damp on his feet. Away from the house, the breeze was stronger. It moved his hair. He opened his robe, to let the breeze move across his whole body. After a moment, he shrugged off the robe. Eyes closed, he stood there wondering why it felt so good to have the wind touch your whole body at once. And if it felt so good, why did people wear clothes all the time so they could never feel it?

He remembered standing there naked at the edge of the chasm, desperate to cover himself. What a fool. Naked is how you first feel the air, coming out of the womb. That’s what it feels like—being born.

A rowboat was moving on the lake. Some predawn fisherman getting a head start on the Fourth of July crowds. In the moonlight it felt like he could see forever. But not a car moving. No fireworks, either—no late-night revelers getting a head start on the Fourth. Just silence. He imagined he could hear the dipping of the oars into the water, the tinkling of the drops falling from the oars when they rose again.

Then a bird began squawking in a nearby tree. Another picked up the tune. Not squawking, really. Just the normal twitter to announce the coming of day. But it was so loud, after the silence.

Time to go in. Go back to bed. Not that he was likely to get any sleep. He’d probably already had eight hours.

He turned around and picked up his robe, but as he was bending over to get it, he thought he saw a motion from the storage shed. Scooping up the robe, he looked sharply. Someone was standing by the door. His first thought was: The witch has found her way past Mother’s protections. His second thought was: It’s Mother, and she’s seen me standing out here naked as a baby.

Then she stepped from the shadow. It was Katerina.

She just stood there. Not a word. Not a smile. Just looking at him.

She’d seen him naked often enough. He stopped holding the robe in front of him and, facing her, pulled it on, then drew it closed, tied it. She watched, but showed no expression.

Whatever conversation might happen at this time of night, out here in the back yard, Ivan didn’t want to work that hard. If she wasn’t going to insist on some kind of empty chat, he certainly wouldn’t. He walked across the grass and the patio, then went back into the house without looking at her again.

He went back into his room and this time looked at the clock. Three-thirty. Too early to be up. He turned the CD player on softly. Skipped ahead a few tracks. “Birmingham Shadows.” Maybe the loneliest song anybody ever wrote. “Wearing the role of the young upstart.” He smiled at that—he heard it as wearing the
robe
. “You show a little—I let something show, too.” Cockburn always sounded so jaded. And hurt. On a night like this Ivan should be listening to something else. The Pointer Sisters’ greatest hits or something. “Fire,” yeah, that was the song. That old Springsteen chestnut. Or better yet: “He’s So Shy.”

Still, he didn’t change the music. He took off the robe and pulled down the sheets, but he didn’t slide his feet under the covers, he lay there on top, spread like a deerskin, feeling about as dry and empty as that. He thought of Katerina’s face. Thought of her sweet, beautiful body. Thought of her voice, the way she gestured when she talked. Thought of her in Taina, surrounded by the love of the people, knowing everyone, having a hand in every task, every frolic. Thought of her here, so afraid at first, so uncertain, but taking it all in stride, mastering it. The way she took to Mother, the way she enjoyed Father, answered his questions patiently. He thought of reaching out and touching her cheek and having her smile and lean into his hand, and then turn her face and kiss the palm, kiss his fingers.

“If I fall down and die without saying good-bye, I give you this, you’ll have lost a friend.” Cockburn was cutting too close to the heart. “It’s now or not at all.” Could that be true?

He tried not to move. Kept his hands still, though they wanted to move, they knew the way. Then finally he did move, his whole body. He got up from the bed and walked to the door and opened it.

And there she stood, leaning against the opposite wall, watching the door of his room as he had stood watching hers. He was startled for a moment, but then he realized that he had been expecting her. That this was the reason he had to get up. Not because of some lonely depressed song. But because the princess was standing at the door, waiting for it to open.

“Ivan,” she whispered. “All I could think of was . . . how close I came to losing you.”

Not close enough, he thought bitterly.

And then: How could you lose me, when you’ve never had me, never wanted me?

But he said nothing. She wanted to talk, but he didn’t. He didn’t want her in his room tonight, not to have her sit there talking through plans and worries the way she had so many nights since they got here. So he didn’t invite her in. And she didn’t ask.

After the silence stretched on interminably, he stepped back. She didn’t move. He turned his back on her and walked to the bed. He left the door open behind him. He lay down on it, facing away from the door.

He heard the door close.

“Some men rob whole countries dry,” sang Cockburn. Yeah, some women, too.

A sound. The bed moved. He felt a thrill run through him. He was not alone in the room. She had closed the door, but from the inside.

He rolled onto his back, and there she was, as naked as he was, lying on her side, leaning on her elbow. He reached out a hand, touched her cheek. She leaned into his hand. Then turned her face, kissed his palm.

He wanted to ask her: Was this a political decision? Did you decide it was time to consummate the marriage as a declaration of war on Baba Yaga? Or was it pity? That compassionate look on your face at dinner, when you couldn’t accept the pathetic token this shabby knight offered you?

But he kept his suspicions to himself. As long as no one said anything, he could pretend that it was love. That she felt about him as he felt about her. That the best thing that happened in his life was the day he came to the clearing in the woods and saw the shape of a woman under the leaves, a princess lying there asleep, enchanted, waiting for him to grow up so he could waken her with a kiss.

With this kiss. This gentle, leisurely kiss. No bear leaning over us. No curse to be removed. Just this man and the woman he loved, who also loved him. Or so he could believe, tonight on the cool sheets, in the dark, her lips brushing his, the scent of her in his head like music, drowning out all other songs.

Katerina woke just before dawn, as she always did. She saw Ivan sprawled in the bed beside her—a huge bed, large enough for a family. The faint light from the window made a meandering ribbon of reflection along the crest of his body. She wanted to touch him, touch the light on him. But she didn’t want to waken him, for she was certain that when he woke, the magic of the night would end. He would speak; being Ivan, he would apologize. For something—she had no idea now what it would be.

The women had warned her, in the days before her wedding. Most of them spoke of the casual brutality of men, like dogs that mount bitches, boars on sows. It will hurt, they warned her, when he forces his way in the first time. But it’s over soon—he’ll finish quickly.

Many of them also had private advice, which they dared not let others hear because it confessed too much about their own lives. One who took her aside warned her not to cry out in pain—some men will think it should always be like that, they’ll come back for more of your pain instead of for your love. Several told her to pretend that she enjoyed it, because a good man has to believe he’s pleasing his wife. If you don’t make him welcome, he’ll find someone else who will. Others told her to be grateful when he found someone else, because then he’d only bother her when it was time to make babies.

Another told her that Ivan looked like the type who would be weak in bed, who wouldn’t have the strength in him to finish. You have to coax him, she said. You have to entice him. Though how that was done, the woman wouldn’t say.

And then there were the few who laughed at all warnings. One of them said, “You’ll love it. He’ll never be enough for you, though, this weakling who can’t lift a sword. Better take a lover or two on the side. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him, and there’s no reason for a woman to be without the only pleasure God gives us.”

All this advice—and it had told her nothing. She put it all out of her mind. Whatever it was, women managed to endure it or there’d be no children in the world. So, after listening to all the women, after watching the animals from childhood on, she could only experience for herself, when Ivan showed her, what this man did with this woman in his bed.

None of their advice applied to Ivan.

He was so gentle, whispering to her, asking her sometimes, “Is that good? Does that please you?” and other times, “You are so beautiful.” Here, he would whisper, this curve, this hollow, this crest, I can’t believe that I am the man who can touch this loveliness, that you’re giving this to me. Unfamiliar feelings swept over her, strange changes in her body, trembling in places where she had never trembled, new tensions, new longings. He was so slow, she grew impatient. “Now,” she whispered, pressing herself to him, but he answered, “Soon, not yet, soon.”

“How do you know?” she asked. “You’ve never done this either.”

“I’ve read books,” he said, laughing softly. “I studied hard for this.”

She didn’t believe him at first—no one could
write
about this, it was far too private—and so she began to think maybe this was a kind of magic, too, that he was casting spells on her body, that he was in control of what she felt, making her body do things it had never done, could never have done before she came to his bed.

And then he told her that she
was
ready, and he was right. As the women had warned her, there was pain, but it was not as awful as they said, and even though it took the edge off the pleasure, it did not dull the love that swept through her. She clung to him, would not let him go when he finished, and he laughed again and held her, stroked her, as she also caressed him. Until he fell asleep. Until she also slept.

Now, remembering it in the morning, she wondered: Why did I wait? He had this gift for me all along.

But she knew the answer. She could not have received the gift until she loved him, and she could not have come to love him without seeing him first in his own world, his own family—in a place where he was a man held in respect, and not a despised stranger. His was a gift with no one fit to receive it, until now.

He stirred. Maybe he felt her gaze on him; maybe it was the change in her breathing; maybe it was a dream of her that woke him. He turned his head and saw her and searched her face. For what? It reminded her of yesterday, that awful time at the dinner table, when she waited too long to answer, when her silence shamed him in front of his parents. She would not wait today, with his gaze upon her. Instead she slid toward him, kissed him.

“I was afraid,” he whispered to her.

“Of what?”

“That in the morning you’d regret what you gave to me last night.”

“What did I give you, that you didn’t give me ten times over?”

He held her close. “What was it that we did last night?”

“Don’t you remember?”

“I didn’t know even at the time. Was it a man and a woman, drawn together, body to body? Was it a princess wanting to make the baby that will carry on the dynasty? Was it a strategy, to strike the next blow against the Widow? Was it the fear of death, which came so close yesterday?”

It devastated her to know what he thought of her. That he did not understand at all.

“I’ve hurt you,” he whispered. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. All of those are good reasons, don’t you see? Because no matter what
you
meant by it, what you have is a husband, a father for your children, as long as I’m alive. I love you, Katerina, whether you love me or not, whether you even want me or not.”

She pulled him close, partly because she could see how it hurt him not to be sure of her, partly so he couldn’t see her tears.

But he felt them. “No, I’ve made you cry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have spoken, I’m spoiling it and all I wanted was to—”

“Hush,” she said. As mothers said it to their babies, who still whimpered even after they had been given the breast to suckle on. Hush, you already have what you yearn for, so be quiet and take it and be glad. “Would it disappoint you so much, Ivan, if you were wrong, and last night meant only that a wife came to her husband, and gave herself to him for love alone?”

“I hate to be wrong,” he murmured. “But I can live with it.”

Esther felt the change in the house from the break of day. Even if she hadn’t caught a glimpse of Katerina in Vanya’s bathrobe, going from his room to the bathroom, she would have known. For the emotional wall that had so thickened the hall between their rooms was gone. The air was clear; the light danced brightly on the walls.

At breakfast Vanya and Katerina were giddy and pensive by turns. Inexplicable silences, and then laughter at anything that could remotely pass for wit. Halfway through the meal, Piotr, always dense about such things, actually sensed the change. “Is something going on that I don’t know about?” Which caused another burst of laughter from the young lovers. Esther caught his eye and shook her head a little. Don’t ask. I’ll tell you later. And because they had been married so long, he understood. Later, when the children were out in the back yard readying the Molotov cocktails, Esther was able to satisfy Piotr’s curiosity. “It’s love, you old fool,” she said. “Don’t you remember?”