They Do the Same Things Different There (20 page)

And she begged me. She begged me not to make her go through with it.

Eat me, she said. Eat me. Because you know just what to do. You’ll enjoy the meat so much more than I will. Don’t waste your chitterlings on a palate as weakly sensitized as mine. And she said, Eat me knowing that I give myself to you in full cooperation, I give myself to you as a present; feast on me, and enjoy, and know that I’ll be in heaven looking on. Eat me, and let your last meal of child be the best meal of child you’ve ever had, let me be the apotheosis of all who have gone before, let me be the reason you can stop afterwards, because there’ll never be a child as succulent as me.

And I said, All right.

And then she told me her name. Her proper name. And I let her.

(Sieglinde asked, “What was it?”)

Ach, what does it matter now?

(“Did she ask you your name?”)

Yes.

(“Did you give it?”)

No. What good would it have done her? I was about to hang her on a tree upside down and slit her throat. I gave her a name. A made-up name, it was a perfectly good name.

(“Is that what really happened?”)

It’s the way that I remember it.

(Sieglinde said quietly, “And was she succulent?”)

Oh yes.

(The grandmother lent forward, and Sieglinde thought she was going to impart some terrible secret, something that would be so dreadful that it would taint her even to hear it—and she lent forward too, she wanted to hear it, she knew she wanted her innocence destroyed, let it be now, she thought, let it be now. Großmutti Greta smiled. And said, softly, “Shall we go up and find that suitcase, once and for all?”)

The dark of the attic was now solid, like a wall; the light from the staircase touched it and died. “You can’t go in there,” Sieglinde said to Greta, and Greta agreed: “No, my dear, now it’s your turn. You go into the attic, and fetch for me the best suitcase you can.” Sieglinde thought it would be impossible—that that solid darkness would knock her back—and she looked at her grandmother’s face, and it was so old, and she saw now how close it was to death. Sieglinde stepped forward, and the darkness pooled around her, and all the light was gone, all the light was gone completely.

There were things there, in the dark—things that feed off the dark, that aren’t afraid of it, that need the pitch black to survive. She felt something leathery, like a bat, but it was too scaly for a bat; something tickled against her hand, a spider? But it was too large for a spider. And the blackness was thick like syrup, and it was pouring out all over her, into every last corner of her body—a syrup, and she could bite into it if she chose, she could eat it, if she didn’t eat it, it would eat her, she knew. But she didn’t want to eat it.

She heard her grandmother’s voice. There was an echo to it. As if it came from a long way away.

“Don’t panic,” she said. “Just listen to my voice. Listen to me, and all will be well.”

And Sieglinde knew nothing would be well again, that she would never more be able to see, or speak, or feel—because if she opened her mouth to speak the darkness would swim down her throat, if she dared to feel, then the darkness would feel at her right back. But she listened to her grandmother’s voice, and to her surprise, it worked—her heart steadied, she stopped shaking, she began to calm.

“You think you now know why I’m leaving your grandfather? Yes? You think it is guilt? It is not guilt.

“Oh, I feel guilt enough. But not for the children I’ve killed. I feel guilt because I married a man I did not love, and have never loved, not one day in all these sixty years. I feel guilt because I never loved my children. I kept popping them out, just to see whether I’d produce a single one I might feel some affection toward. I didn’t. I hate them all. Your father, he’s an especially cold fish. He deserves that bitch of a mother of yours. You do know your mother is a bitch, my dear? And that she has never cared for you?”

Sieglinde didn’t open her mouth to answer. But, yes, she thought. She hadn’t realized it before, and now she did, it didn’t much seem to matter.

“I have spent so many years trying to be what I am not. The scent of childmeat clings to me. I taste it on everything I cook. Just a hint, mocking me, telling me that out there is something tastier, richer, better. And I will be dead soon. And I must not waste another day on this little excuse for a life.

“I need to eat the flesh of innocents again. I was wrong. All these years, I was wrong. I should never have left my brother. I will go to him. I will go, and see whether he will take me back. I shall fall into his arms, and apologize, and beg his forgiveness. He may not recognize me. If he doesn’t recognize me, he will eat me. But if so, ach, well then, there’s an end to this suffering.

“I am so hungry. I am so hungry. I am so hungry.

“Now, get me a suitcase. Come out of the darkness, and bring the best you can find.”

Sieglinde thought she would stay in the dark. It might be safer in the dark, after all. But the dark began to drain away from her—and she tried to cling firm to it, she reached her arms out and grabbed—onto the bat, onto the spider—and then she saw she was clutching onto a suitcase, a nice, neat, little suitcase—and the bat leather was its shell, and the spider legs were its straps.

Großmutti Greta took it out of her hands. She looked it over. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, good choice.” She held it against Sieglinde’s body, as if measuring it against her.

And Sieglinde knew. That she was going to be put into the suitcase. And then her grandmother would take her into the forest, and she would find her brother, and together they would hang Sieglinde upside down and gut her and eat her.

“Please don’t kill me,” said Sieglinde.

And it was as if Sieglinde had slapped her grandmother. It made her step backwards.

“You think I would eat you?” said Greta. “Oh, my darling. Oh, blood of my blood. I could never hurt you. Because you’re like me. You’re just like me. All these years, I’ve been waiting to find someone in this family I could love. And it is you. Don’t be afraid. Be afraid of everyone, but never of me.”

And Sieglinde saw her grandmother was crying, and realized she was crying too.

“The suitcase,” said Greta, “is for you.”

“I don’t understand,” said Sieglinde.

“Ach, you think I need a suitcase? At my time of life? What would I want with a suitcase where I am going? But you. My darling, my blood. You will leave. You will leave this place, thank God, because you cannot stay here, with these people, with these passionless people. And when you do, this suitcase is for you.”

She gave it back to her granddaughter.

Sieglinde weighed it in her hand, and it felt right. Not too heavy, the right size, none of those annoying buckles. The strap fitted snugly in her fist.

“There is no forest anymore, Granny,” said Sieglinde. “They chopped it down. Father said they chopped it down years ago. There are factories there now.”

“I know where my forest is,” said Greta. She bent down, kissed Sieglinde on the cheek. It still felt awkward, uncomfortable, like being brushed by a wrinkled bag of onions.

Greta walked into the attic. The darkness swallowed her.

Sieglinde waited to see whether she would come out. She didn’t. Sieglinde went home.

Sieglinde tried to think of an excuse to explain where she’d been. But when she got home, Father was still in the study, Mother was still in the kitchen; they hadn’t even noticed she’d gone. They hadn’t cared.

She phoned Klaus. He wasn’t in; she got the answering machine. She told him she had never loved him. She told him she would never see him again.

She took the suitcase up to her bedroom, opened it. It seemed so big inside; you could fit a whole world in there, a whole future. She opened up her wardrobes and closets, worked out what she wanted to take with her. There was nothing. She needed none of it. So she closed up the suitcase again, and carried it down the stairs, and out of the house, and into her new life. She would fill it up along the way.

There was little magic left to those dark times. The world seemed cracked somehow, too weak for the magic to hold; latterly, as he’d performed his tricks, he’d begun to doubt they would work at all, he’d stand before his audience behind his patter and his sheen and a beaming smile that was well-oiled and ready practised, and he’d felt himself starting to sweat, he’d felt the fear take over—the magic wouldn’t hold, the magic would fail. Lucy never seemed to notice. Lucy never seemed to get nervous. And he supposed that if Lucy couldn’t see how frightened he was, then neither could anybody else. The magic
had
held. Still, it worried him.

They hadn’t performed for a month. It would be better, he supposed, when they reached the town. The villagers wanted nothing to do with their conjuring. They had no coins to waste on such a thing. But he had strong arms, they said, he could work alongside them in the fields—and the little girl, she could join the other children, there were always berries that needed picking. Sometimes the coins they earned were enough to buy them shelter for the night, and sometimes not.

And in the meantime they’d keep on walking, trying to keep ahead of the darkness. Because what choice did they have? He pulled the cart behind them. It would have been much quicker without the cart, but then they couldn’t have performed their magic. She walked by his side, and matched him step for step, and kept him company, though she never spoke.

“Is this the town?” he said one day, and Lucy of course didn’t answer, and he knew already that this couldn’t be the town, it wasn’t big enough, it was little more than a street with a few houses either side. But maybe it might have grown into a town, one day, had the blackness not come.

One of the houses was marked “Inn.” He put down the cart, and beat upon the wooden door with his blistered hands. There was no reply, but he knew that someone was inside, he could hear breathing just an inch away, someone trying very hard to be quiet, someone scared.

“Please,” he called. “We mean you no harm. We’re two travellers, we just want a room for the night.”

“This is no inn,” a woman’s voice came back. “And the people who called it one are long since gone, or dead most like. There is no room for you here.”

“If not for my sake, then for the little girl’s.” And at that, as if on cue, Lucy lifted her head and flared her dimples, and opened her eyes wide and innocent. It was an expression she could pull at a moment’s notice, and it had been a useful trick in the old days, to gather about a sympathetic crowd, to persuade the crowd to part with coins. He saw no signs that anyone inside could see them; there must have been a secret window somewhere, or a crack in the wood, because next time the woman spoke her voice was softer.

“D’ye have money?”

“We are, at present, financially embarrassed,” confessed the man, but he puffed out his chest, and his voice became richer—somehow Lucy putting on her pose beside him gave him a little swagger too—“But we propose to pay you with a spectacle of our arts. We are magicians, conjurors, masters of the illusory and the bizarre. We have dazzled the crowned heads of three different empires with our legerdemain, the only limit to how we can surprise you is your own imagination. I am the Great Zinkiewicz, and this, my assistant, Lucy!” And at this he delivered a sweeping bow, directed at where he hoped his audience was watching him.

There was silence for a few seconds.

“You can come in anyway,” the woman said.

The inn was dark and dirty, but welcoming for all of that, and warm. The woman showed them both to the fire, and the magicians stood before it, and baked in it, and the man hadn’t realized how cold he must have been. But now the heat was on his skin he felt a damp chill inside him it would take more than one night’s shelter to rid.

“My cart?” he said.

“It’s safe. No one will touch your cart.”

“It contains everything we own.”

“No one will touch your cart.”

The man nodded at that, turned back to the fire, turned back to Lucy. Now that they were at rest, he realized once again what an incongruous couple they made. For all that he spoke like the gentleman, his clothes were ripped and mud-spattered; there were ugly patches in his grey beard and his face was bruised. Burly and broad shouldered, he stood nearly seven feet tall. Lucy, by his side, somehow still looked refined. The mud of the fields had never clung to her quite, and as ruddy as his face was hers was as pale as milk. She seemed dwarfed next to him, she seemed small enough to be folded up and put away in a little box—exactly, in fact, as one of their tricks required.

“There’s no food for you,” said the woman. “But there’s a room upstairs, just for the night, you and your daughter are welcome to it.” So, she thought Lucy was his daughter. Perhaps that was for the best.

There was noise on the staircase, and the man looked up, and realized why the woman had taken pity on them. Grinning at them in wonder was a little girl, surely no older than Lucy. And she was a proper little girl too, the man could see that, she had somehow managed to keep her youth, unlike Lucy who just pretended. She was dressed in pink; there was some attempt still to curl her hair.

“My daughter,” said the woman, and she said it gruffly enough, but the man could see she was trying to hide her affections, he could sense how she burned with love for the girl, he didn’t need his magic arts to tell. He was glad for them. He wondered if there was a father. He knew better than to ask.

Her mother said, “We have guests, make up their bed.”

The little girl’s eyes widened. “Like in the old days?”

Her mother hesitated. “Yes,” she said. “Like in the old days.”

The innkeeper and her daughter ate their bread and cheese. The innkeeper wouldn’t look at her visitors, but the daughter couldn’t help it, she kept stealing glances in their direction. The man knew not to make eye contact yet, not to ask for a single crumb of food. Lucy just stared into the flames, as if fascinated by something she saw there.

“What’s your name?” the little girl suddenly asked her.

“She’s called Lucy,” said the man.

“How old is she?”

“How old are you?”

“I’m seven.”

“Then Lucy’s seven too.”

The little girl liked that. And the magician looked at her directly, and held her gaze, just for a few seconds, and he caused his eyes to twinkle. Lucy never looked up from the fire.

“The magic you perform,” said the mother. “It’s an entertainment?”

The man nodded gravely. “Madam, many have told us so.”

“But it’s not
real
magic? I wouldn’t have real magic in my house.”

“I assure you, it is nothing but tricks and sleight of hand. There is a rational explanation for everything that we do.” The woman nodded at that, slowly. “We would be happy to give you a demonstration.”

At this the little girl became quite excited. “Oh, please, Mama!”

The woman looked doubtful. “But what good can it do?”

“It cheers the soul somewhat. It amuses the eyes. If nothing else, it makes the night pass that little bit faster.”

“Please, Mama!” The little girl was bouncing up and down now. “I do so want the night to go faster!”

“No magic,” promised the man. “Just a little trick. So simple, your child will see through it. I give you my word.”

Words counted for nothing in those days, but the woman chose to forget that. “All right, if it’s just the one.” And then she smiled wide, and the man could see how beautiful she was when she did that, and how much younger she looked, and how she wasn’t that much older than her daughter, not really, nor so very different either.

Lucy rose from the fireplace, stood as if to attention. The man said, “We’ll get changed into our costumes.” The woman told him there was no need for that. The man said, “Please, madam, you must allow us to present ourselves properly, presentation is what it’s all about!”

The magicians went outside to the cart. They changed into costume. No one was in the street to see, and besides, there was no moon that night, it was pitch black.

When they went back to the inn, the little girl clapped her hands at the sight of them, and her mother’s smile widened even further. What a pair they looked! The Great Zinkiewicz wasn’t a tramp, how ever could they have thought him so!—he was a lord in a long black evening coat, and his blistered hands were hidden beneath white gloves, and the top hat made him taller still, my, he towered over the room! And he looked smoother, softer, he was charming. Lucy was in a dress of a thousand sequins, and when she moved even the slightest muscle the sequins seemed to ripple in the firelight.

“The Great Zinkiewicz will ask his beautiful assistant to give him a pack of playing cards.” His beautiful assistant did that very thing. Zinkiewicz held the pack between his thumb and forefinger. “I shall now ask a member of the audience to confirm these are just ordinary playing cards. You, little madam? Would you do me the honour? Would you be so kind? Would you tell everyone, we have never met before?”

The little girl giggled. She inspected the cards. She confirmed they were very ordinary indeed.

“I shall now ask you to pick a card. But don’t let me see it. Don’t let my assistant see it. Trust neither of us, keep it secret from us. Yes? Good. That’s good. Now, put it back in the pack. Anywhere you like, good.”

He handed the pack to Lucy. Lucy fanned the cards in her hand, held them out. The Great Zinkiewicz produced a wand, and tapped at the deck once, twice, three times. “Abracadabra,” he said.

“What does that mean?” asked the girl.

“I’m glad you asked me that. I don’t know. No one knows. That’s what’s makes it magic.”

“All right,” said the girl. She seemed unconvinced by that, so he winked at her.

He took back the cards from Lucy. He shuffled them. He removed one. “Now,” he said. “Is this your card?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Zinkiewicz pulled a face. He looked at Lucy. Lucy pulled a face back. It was so perfect an imitation, and was so unexpected, those blank passive features suddenly contorting like that, really, you had to smile. “Oh. Well. I’ll try again. Hmph. Is
this
your card?”

“No!”

“This one, then?”

“No!”

“Then this one!”

“No!” She laughed, she could see something good was coming.

“Well then,” said Zinkiewicz. “Well, I’m stumped. Lucy, do you have any idea?”

And Lucy sighed, a big mock sigh, why was she saddled with such a dunce for a partner? She walked up to the little girl. She reached behind the girl’s ear. She seemed to tug at it, gave a little grunt of exertion. And then out she pulled a piece of card, and it was all rolled up tight like a straw. She opened it, presented it to Zinkiewicz.

And, as if taking credit for the magic himself, Zinkiewicz then presented it to the little girl, with a bow and a flourish.

“Yes! Yes, that’s the one!” She clapped, so did her mother.

There were a few more tricks performed, for as long as it took for the fire to burn out. And, at length, the innkeeper offered the magicians some bread and cheese. Zinkiewicz thanked her, and they ate.

“I know how you did the trick,” said the little girl.

“Oho! Do you, indeed?”

“Yes.”

“Well, we have to keep these things secret. You better whisper it in my ear.”

The little girl laughed, looked at her mother for permission, and the mother nodded, laughed too. So the man got down on his knees, and the girl bent close, putting her lips right up to his ear, and whispering softly, and covering her mouth with her hand so no one could see. She told him the secret, and the man rolled his eyes, slow and despairing.

“You’ve seen right through me!” he wailed. “You’ll become a magician too, I’ll be bound, like my Lucy!”

But the little girl had got it wrong. The man had broken his promise. There had been real magic tonight, he had felt it flow right through him, he had felt the old confidence back, and it had been good. There had been no fear at all; it had been so very good. And the innkeeper and her daughter need never know. Lucy would know, but she’d never say.

“Does she ever say anything?” said the woman suddenly. “Is it just part of the act, or . . . ?”

The man shook his head, put his finger to his lips, as if it were something mysterious he wasn’t allowed to divulge. But the truth was, he had no idea.

They sat up late that night, into the small hours, the magician and the innkeeper. The children had gone to bed. The woman fetched an old bottle of Madeira wine, she said she’d been saving it for a special occasion. Maybe this was one.

He said to her, “Aren’t you going to run away?” And then he blushed bright red, because he supposed that would sound like an invitation to accompany him, her and her kid, and he didn’t want that.

“We’re going to stay,” she said. “We’ve decided. We’re happy here. There’s nowhere out there that’s better. And maybe, maybe they’ll leave us be.”

The man nodded, and finished his glass, and went to bed.