In the Red (20 page)

When they got back to their empire, they mustered an enormous army and declared war on the father. What could the old emperor do? He had to march with his own army to do battle with the emperor of the cats. In three days, the army of the son had completely destroyed the army of the father. Only the father remained alive amid the butchered remnants of his forces. When he saw that he was lost and had no more strength, he said to his son: Please pardon me. It is true that I have made a bad thing happen, for had it not happened, it would not be told. Judge rightly, and rule my empire well.

S
omething was strange right away. It was more than the strangeness innate in being haunted by the tiny ghost of a person who never was. It was in the air. Andrei had come back from a meeting with Vasilii and had locked himself in his seldom-used office. Had Irina ever even seen that door locked? Dare she knock on it?

Yes.

“What is it?” Andrei's voice inside sounded remote.

“Andrei, what's going on?”

In response, the door swung open with deliberate slowness. Irina's first thought when she saw Andrei was that he was somehow not as tall as she had always thought he was. The look on his face was frank fear, fear without shield, without irony. Irina had difficulty believing her eyes.

“You have to leave,” he said, as if he were a superstitious peasant and she the Gypsy who had knocked on his door in the dead of night.

“I'm sorry. If you're busy, we'll talk later.”

“No, you don't understand. You have to
leave
.”

He pushed so hard on the word
leave
that Irina started to understand what he meant. He meant be apart from him. Something contracted in the center of her, making a pain well up in the hollow of her chest.

“Leave for how long?”

“Leave for always.”

The pain bloomed its way up to Irina's throat, leaving her unable to speak. Andrei sidled out of his office and shut the door behind him. He ushered her to the couch in the living room with the respectful gentleness of a funeral director. He put his hands on her shoulders, pushing her to sit her down. For a moment, she stood there looking furiously into his face. Then she relented. She sat down, and once she was settled he plopped down heavily next to her.

“It's for your own good. I'm sorry,” he said.

“This is not how I thought we would part, Andrei.”

“For your own safety, really, darling. You have to leave because I love you.”

This was serious. This was deadly serious. He seldom resorted to telling her that he loved her.

“Why do I have to go? What is going on?”

Andrei shook his head slowly, his eyes looking anywhere but at her. The gray in his irises looked less like galvanized steel and more like dirty dish water. “I cannot tell you that.”

“I can't just disappear. I have to say good-bye to Elena.”

“No. She is gone.”

Irina felt herself surrounded by a vast darkness, a lightlessness so deep that she could not distinguish a single shape or movement no matter how wide she tried to open her eyes. A lightlessness into which she reached out to feel only the movement of cold air. Her hand found nothing; there was no telling how big the darkness was.

“Andrei, is she dead?”

“She is gone.”

The pain from Irina's heart spread through her limbs, knotting the muscles in her back and neck, throbbing into her brain. Irrepressible tears began to flow. She wished she could be a man right then, react to the world with the sneering distance it deserved.

“Irina, you still have the passport and card for Vasilica Andreescu. You have to give those back. If you left with them, it would be—it would be very bad.”

“Andrei,” she said through her tears, with audible anger.

He looked stricken. It was terrible to see him so helpless. Quite possibly his helplessness made her even angrier than the curt way she was being disposed of.

“Andrei, is this really how it ends?”

“I'm sorry.”

She could not recollect ever hearing him apologize in earnest for anything, and now he had said he was sorry twice in the past five minutes. His apologies should have infected her with his fear. Right now, she should be afraid for her life. She sought the fear inside herself but it was nowhere to be found. What could she be afraid of now that she had loved the wrongest man on earth? What could they do to her that she hadn't done to herself?

“I am going to go,” he said. “I cannot bear to watch you pack your things. When you are done, call Dragos. He will drive you to the airport. Get a ticket wherever you like. Do not tell him where you are going.”

She opened her mouth to say something but he raised his hand to stop her from speaking. “And please, please,” he said, “please do not tell me where you are going.”

“If this is really how it ends,” Irina said in a ragged voice as she began to cry in earnest, “then you must hold me one last time.”

Andrei didn't answer, only arranged himself on the couch to let Irina settle into his arms. She sat on his lap like an outsize child as he snaked his hands around her waist. She leaned into his neck, her tears moistening the collar of his shirt. He gathered her tightly against his warm body.

The scent of him. How would she live without the scent of him?

“Andrei,” she whispered.

“Darling?”

“Tell me a Romanian story.”

“Once upon a time something happened. Had it not happened, it would not be told,” he recited, and then fell silent.

Irina did not move, the hot tears flowing freely down her cheeks.

“A boy was born in a shithole village in a shithole country,” he continued. “This boy was the bastard son of the village slut, with the dark skin of the Gypsy father who never acknowledged him. For a reason that could not be known, the woman who had the boy did not give him to the orphanage as she should have. She kept him and loved him the best she could but she was rough and simple. The other children, though they were born under an enlightened Communist leader who would march his country into a bright tomorrow, were still the little shit peasants they always were and hated the dark-skinned boy for his Gypsy looks. They hurled stones at him in the school recreation yard and called him a thief though the boy could not remember stealing anything. The boy was unhappy, but it didn't matter, because so was everybody else.

“On the weekends, when the boy was free from school, he was volunteered to sort the potato harvest for the government. For hours he did this, one stupid ugly dirty lump after another: which ones could be eaten, and which ones could not? He had to look for rot and disease. He made a pile of the good potatoes and a pile of the sick ones. The government, in its magnanimous kindness, in its infinite munificence, allowed the boy to take home the spoiled potatoes as a reward for his earnest labor. His mother would mash them up and try to make something edible out of them, because they were hungry. They were hungry, but of course it did not matter, because so was everybody else.

“One day, as he sifted through the potatoes, the boy said to himself, Fuck this. Fuck this shit life. Fuck these little assholes saying that I steal. If they are going to think that I steal, then I might as well. I might as well proudly wear the names they call me.

“This moment of wisdom granted the boy the courage to put the best potatoes in his knapsack to take home to his mother. His mother said nothing about the superior quality of his haul, at the crisp unmarred flesh of the stolen potatoes. She did not say thank you for the good eating; she did not chide him for doing something he should not have. So, he continued to do this because the mash his mother made was tasty that week. He continued to do this and nobody bothered to catch him. He learned that it was easy to make yourself less hungry as long as you dared.

“Over the years, the boy became a lad. It was time for him to leave school and get work at a factory. His last day going through potatoes, the boy said to himself: A factory? Fuck this shit life. Fuck making myself less hungry. I want to feast.

“This moment of wisdom granted the boy the courage to steal a nice sack of bribery money from the mayor to go to America. There the lad would become a man and learn how to feast. It is not known whether he lived happily ever after, but at least he wore nice clothes and drove a nice car and wiped his ass with nice toilet paper. He even bought factories in his shithole country just to show the peasants he could own them, though he never bothered to go back again to say so to their faces. He ate and fucked his fill until he died, and that must have been a kind of happiness, no?”

Irina looked at Andrei's face when she heard the rising inflection of his question. She had stopped crying while listening to him. He looked back into her big, beautiful young eyes and smiled. He cupped her cheek with his hand.

“I might have made a mistake, darling,” he said. “I am not sure that was the Romanian story you asked for. I might have just told you an American story.”

She gave him a kiss that said, Make love to me one last time. It was the desperate kiss of a prisoner about to be executed. But he did not open his mouth against the pressure of her lips. That aborted kiss, Andrei's refusal, was the worst thing that has happened to Irina. Her tears returned, springing stingingly from her blurring eyes, now that she knew her body would never open for him again. Her body was abandoned by the only thing it had ever loved. She felt herself hollowing out, felt herself become certain that she would be empty forever.

Of course, all the pain is her fault. Her fault for being unhinged enough to kiss him in the first place.

All this time, these two years spent with Andrei, and all it came down to in the end was two suitcases. The only things she owned were clothes, and she'd decided not to take most of those. They were all from Andrei anyway, so did she really own them? She took none of the lingerie, none of the pretty things she used to wear to turn his head. She was quite sure she wouldn't be able to stomach looking at lingerie again, much less wear it.

Dragos was on his way to fetch her, in the sports car a stupid boy had tried to steal. Was that boy's body decomposing somewhere?

If she wanted to do one last thing in this apartment where she had lived with Andrei, now was the time.

The office was unlocked.

The first place Irina looked was the desk drawer where she'd found the gun. The green folders were still there, but the gun was gone. In its place she lay the passport with her picture in it that bore some other girl's name. Tucked into the passport was the bank card. She'd thought of taking Vasilica with her, but the time for Vasilica was over. The nonexistent girl was not the thing to take with her. She wanted to take something that would
perhaps
result in death, not
certainly
. What she really wanted to take was something that would make Andrei come and get her. She shut the drawer on Vasilica Andreescu.

She had carved the life out of the center of her so that she could stay, and now they were making her go anyway.

When she'd asked Andrei what was the strangest thing about America when he got here, he'd said the choice. Everything that was wrong with America he could get used to. But the choice, the dizzying, nearly limitless choice—it was the choice that drew him, that scared him most.

Irina opened the small metal cabinet. She looked over the numbers on the tags attached to each key. Her favorite was 21012 because it read the same backward and forward. Like the end of a countdown that decided to turn around at zero and count back up again. This was the one.

She could have made the choice to leave that key alone. She could have made the choice to have the baby, if she'd really wanted to. Why did these choices not feel like choices then? Why did it feel as though all the wrong things she had ever done were inevitabilities written in her very blood?

Irina pocketed the little golden key. She did not, at that moment, particularly intend to go find what the key unlocked and look inside.

She opened the desk drawer back up and pulled the green folder that bore the same number as the key. Inside the folder there was the address of a bank in a city far away.

Andrei had told her not to tell anyone where she was going. Well, she wasn't going to say a word. She was just going to take a key and the name of an American city with her. She would leave the folder behind to make sure Andrei knew which key was missing.

If he wanted it back, then he would have to come find her.

Dragos drove Irina to the airport in silence. She wanted to ask him a thousand questions, but the stormy look on his face dissuaded her. She thought he might leave her at the curb without a word, but instead of pulling up to the airport's drop-off area, he pulled into a spot in short-term parking.

“Are you coming in with me?” Irina asked tentatively.

“No, I do not want a public good-bye. But I did want a minute.”

Irina looked around. It was dim, and there were nothing but empty cars around. As isolated places went, this was a fairly decent one for a quick execution. It was unlikely that anyone would hear a gunshot. But then there was the problem of disposing of the body. He'd have to drive back out of the airport with her in the car. Or he'd have to dump her lifeless mass right there in the parking lot. No, this was logistically not very clever. Besides, Dragos would never subject his car to all the gore.

Still, when he reached inside his jacket to pull something out, Irina's heart skipped a beat.

But it was not a gun. It was a small, neat packet of hundred-dollar bills.

“This is for you,” he said, “to get you started where you are going.”

She did not yet have the banker's eye that would have gauged the packet was worth about ten thousand dollars. She did not yet have the banker's hand that would gladden that the bills were old bills, which would make them easier to count.

“I've never seen so much cash at once,” Irina said stupidly.

Dragos did not answer, only reached for Irina's purse and tucked the money into it. She would count it later in a bathroom stall while waiting for her plane and realize the amount was the same as what Dragos had offered Andrei to take her to bed. Was the money a gift from Andrei or from Dragos? Maybe it was better not to know.

She did not say thank you, only looked into Dragos's face. He smiled a disconcerting smile. It looked almost sheepish. Before she could respond, he reached across the car and held her tightly. She allowed him to. She even put her arms around him. She pulled away from his embrace when she felt something hard on his back.