The Fortress Read online

  But Nikolai was not always emotionally blocked. He showed love and affection to Nico, and I welcomed it. Still, the way he treated Alex continued to eat at me, and so I consciously began to pay more attention to my son. When Nikolai took Nico on a walk to the tabac, I took Alex to Sommières, the castled village just ten minutes from our home, for ice cream. When Nikolai played the piano with Nico, I played Ping-Pong in the courtyard with Alex. Alex and I would cook together, making crepes or fondue, while Nikolai watched TV with Nico.

  “I just want to point out,” I said to Nikolai one night after the kids were asleep, “that you spent half an hour reading Nico a book tonight and didn’t even say good night to Alex. You just walked by his door. No kiss. Nothing.”

  Nikolai looked at me as if I were speaking in Swahili.

  “But you were with Alex,” he said, defensive.

  “You were reading to Nico, and so I went into Alex’s room so that he didn’t feel neglected.”

  “I didn’t notice that he was feeling neglected.”

  “I wish you’d try a little harder to notice,” I said. “He sees how much time you spend with Nico. He needs a mom and a dad.”

  “And I’m here,” Nikolai said.

  “Then why don’t you do something, just the two of you?”

  “I play soccer with him all the time,” he said.

  It was true—they went to the soccer field at the edge of the village to kick the ball into the net some Sundays, but being physically next to someone does not mean you are present. There was another level of presence—engaged, honest presence—that I hoped for.

  “Okay, sure, but do you ever actually talk to Alex when you play soccer?”

  “We talk all the time. Stop imagining things,” he said, and for a moment I would doubt myself, doubt what I witnessed every day. I would think that maybe I was projecting my own childhood onto my family—imagining that Nikolai was like my stepfather, Andy, a man I became close to only as an adult. Sometimes I would wonder if my own family was a massive reenactment of my own childhood feelings, my confusions and insecurities, projected onto Alex and Nico and Nikolai. Maybe I was replaying my broken childhood over and over and over. Maybe my past colored everything.

  But then I would watch Nikolai and Alex together, and I knew it wasn’t my imagination. Nikolai might be physically present with Alex, but he was emotionally absent. It made me angry, watching this daily negligence, and hurt because I knew it was my fault. I had chosen this man to be Alex’s stepfather. As a young woman, leaving my working-class background behind had seemed so important. I’d thought that by giving Alex an educated and cultured parent, a man who was from a different class than the one I’d been raised in, my son would end up in a better place. But Nikolai’s brilliant mind didn’t mean a thing when it came down to the simple act of loving a child. It was emotional intelligence that meant something, and in this, Nikolai was subliterate.

  —

  “ALEX IS YOUR favorite,” Nico said one afternoon as we walked through the outdoor market in Sommières.

  The Sommières market on Saturdays was a bustling congregation of farmers and local artisans with tables of vegetables, handmade soap, vats of olives, pottery, woven baskets, wheels of cheese, hand-dyed yarn, and local wines. We were walking along, my wicker basket loaded with vegetables. I was going to make pistou, a soup popular in the south of France, and I had bought bunches of fragrant basil. I’d also bought a bag of chocolate-dipped orangettes from Chocolaterie Courtin, my favorite chocolate shop in the world. There were mathildettes, caramel sel camargues, chocolate truffles, over twenty varieties of tablettes of dark, white, and milk chocolate. We stopped by Chocolaterie Courtin sometimes after I picked the kids up from school, for a treat. Nico wanted an orangette.

  “After lunch,” I’d said, and tucked the pack of orangettes deep in the basket. “These are for dessert.”

  “You would let Alex have one if he asked,” she said, turning on me, her voice growing belligerent. “Whenever Alex wants something, you let him have it.”

  “Nico,” I said, gazing down at her. She looked like a boxer in the ring, her face scrunched with emotion. “That’s not true.”

  “Alex is your favorite, I know it, but that’s fine with me. Daddy told me that you and Alex can’t understand us because we’re special.”

  “Special?” I asked, steering Nico away from the market to a low wall, where I dropped the wicker basket.

  “Daddy says I can do things that Alex can’t do,” she said, her belligerence turning suddenly to wonder, as if she were showing me a sleight-of-hand trick.

  “What kinds of things?”

  She looked suddenly sheepish. “It’s a secret.”

  “We don’t have secrets,” I said, and in fact we didn’t. Nico could not keep a secret if her life depended upon it. Every year, no matter how often I asked her not to tell, she revealed my birthday and Christmas gifts before I could open them.

  She looked hesitant, as if she knew she shouldn’t tell me, and then she let it all go. “Daddy says that he comes from a magic family. Like Harry Potter. And because I’m his daughter, I’m magic, too. Grandma Yana’s grandpa was bitten by a vampire, and now we’re…special. Daddy says he’s going to teach me everything, but I have to be older, because I’m special now, and I’ll be even more special when I’m bigger. But Alex is not daddy’s real son, so Alex can’t be magic. But I can.”

  I felt my face flush with anger—or was it embarrassment? While I hadn’t heard the story of my husband’s vampire ancestry, this was the kind of magical storytelling that first drew me to Nikolai. He’d once told me that in a previous life he had stolen the fifteen-year-old me away on a horse and we’d ridden off together, far from our parents, to elope. I was always a sucker for a romantic escape.

  “Your dad is only telling you a story. Just like Harry Potter. It’s not true.”

  Nico looked at me, her eyes narrowed as if she were gauging whether I could be trusted. Nico adored her father. She believed everything he told her. It seemed suddenly cruel to disillusion her.

  “Sometimes a story is just a story,” I said, shrugging. “Your dad is a writer. He makes up stories. It’s his job.”

  Nico nodded. She understood.

  “Don’t tell Daddy I told you,” she said, suddenly sounding frightened. “Don’t tell him you know about our magic. He’ll be really, really mad.”

  I didn’t tell Nikolai what Nico had told me, but I watched her—and her interactions with her father—with a new sense of wariness. There was something growing between them, something that excluded Alex and me, and I wanted to understand it. Nikolai had always been possessive—he’d needed to take control of Nico, to feed her as he wished and name her as he wished and vaccinate her as he wished. But now Nico was old enough to be influenced by stories of special powers and vampire ancestry, and he appeared to be using these narratives to make her believe she was different from Alex and me. What I didn’t understand was why. We were a family. Our power rested in our unity. There was no need to divide and conquer, because we were all on the same team.

  —

  “DADDY SAYS THAT if I pray hard to Buddha, I’ll be able to fly.”

  Nico said this one afternoon not long after revealing her vampire lineage. Nikolai had begun to teach her about Buddhism. He’d set up an altar in a nook overlooking the garden, where incense rose around a statue of Ganesha, swirling over a bronze statue of Buddha, a number of small statues of Indian gods, a rosary carved of bone and another of wood. There was a double vajra, a small golden scepter, and a copper bell. Tibetan books were shelved below the altar, long and thin, unbound, manuscripts.

  “Fly?” I said. “How’re you going to do that?”

  “Lebi—”

  “Levitate?”

  “Daddy said he saw someone levitate in India.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “It happened,” she said, defensive. I had become the doubter, the story killer, which was an
unnatural position for me. Who the hell was I to be anyone’s reality check?

  “But how did the boy do it?”

  “Buddha helps.”

  Nikolai had amazing stories about his time in India. Many of these stories were in his novels, but because they were in Bulgarian and I couldn’t read them, he’d told me a few. One was the levitation story he had told Nico. Another story was about a boy who was publicly beheaded and who, after the saber had sliced through his neck, bent over, retrieved his head, and put it back on. Nikolai swore that these stories were true, that he’d seen them with his own eyes, and I only had to go to India to see such things myself.

  Nikolai had lived in India for nearly four years. He had become disillusioned with monastic life and left Dharamsala, and his Buddhist teachers, behind. What remained was a strong belief in the mystical and a rebel’s refusal to follow organized religious practices. My husband considered himself a mystic. He believed in spells and curses and sympathetic magic. He believed in charms to attract good fortune and charms to protect himself from harm. He spoke of spiritual warfare, a kind of chess of the mind used to wage battle on a higher plane. While he didn’t keep any of the habits of his monasticism, he continued to practice what he’d learned in India, particularly the more esoteric and mystical elements that he had described to me as being a form of ancient magic.

  I believed in magic, too. Not in Nikolai’s ancient magic per se, but in a kind of universal narrative, a law, like gravity, that held us all together. I had gone to Japan in my twenties with a strong interest in Zen. I meditated until I began writing seriously, and then my hours of writing became my form of meditation. I believed that the human brain—or at least mine—was not equipped to fully understand the workings of the universe, but that we could sometimes glimpse them. Science was one part of this, of course, but so was spirituality. I was open to learning what Nikolai could teach me.

  For my thirty-seventh birthday, he gave me three magic tools. Packed in a box, I found a mala, or a rosary with 108 amber beads; a melong, or divinatory mirror; and a scorpion protection amulet. There was a paper explaining the function of these gifts. The mala was a beaded necklace used for reciting mantras. Made of amber, the sacred substance of Scorpio, my sun sign, the mala would become infused with magic when I recited mantras, and it could be used as a sacred weapon. There was a description of a mantra I should repeat, noting that it would unlock wisdom and improve my memory. The melong, or mirror, was a shamanic magical instrument that could be used for divinations, sacred knowledge, and deflecting evil spirits and other forms of negativity. Melongs, he wrote, had been used for over five thousand years and were very powerful. The last item, a scorpion protection amulet, was an ancient image made by a tantric master and kept harmful spirits and ghosts at bay. He instructed me to hang it up outside a door, facing outward, for protection.

  After I opened my gift, I made a joke. “Oh, a rosary! Just what every woman wants from her husband!” But in truth I understood the intention behind these gifts. He was sharing his most personal, most sacred secrets with me. He had unlocked a door and invited me in. He was offering me an apprenticeship in magic.

  Nikolai made offerings of incense on the altar. He would place objects belonging to certain people on the altar if he wished to pray for them. I had been raised Catholic and grew up with the practice of prayer and confession, rituals that left in me a visceral need to communicate my thoughts with something larger, more powerful, than myself. Nikolai’s altar filled that need. I would light a candle on the altar, or leave incense. The practice reassured me. After my father died in 2006, I put his photo on the altar, where incense and candles burned. Nikolai filled the altar with objects belonging to the people he loved. Once I found Nico’s baby tooth before a statue of Buddha. Another time I found a clipping of my hair next to a cone of burned-down incense. The ends of the hair were charred, singed by a candle. I didn’t know what he was doing, but I assumed it was a kind of prayer.

  His prayers worked. After I had written my first novel, when Nikolai was in graduate school in Providence and we were living on the trickle of my part-time teaching salary, he had prayed for the book’s success. He had said 108 White Tara mantras, asking that my book find a publisher. He taught me the words of the mantra, instructing me to say them aloud while I prayed for success. White Tara and Green Tara were the two aspects of the goddess Tara, also known as the Wish-Fulfilling Wheel, or Cintachakra. I chanted the mantra “Om tare tuttare ture mama ayur punye jnana pushtim kuru ye svaha,” imagining copies of my book stacked in the window of my favorite bookstore, imagining a reader opening the cover and beginning to read it, imagining good reviews. When the novel did sell, I couldn’t help but believe that Nikolai had taught me to communicate with the universe.

  I was a receptive audience for my husband’s mystical ideas, but even so I wasn’t happy about the version of Buddhism that Nico was getting. Nikolai was a serious scholar of Tibetan and had read texts with the guidance of learned Buddhist teachers. And yet Nico was talking about Buddhism as if it were a Disney cartoon. I understood that the stories we believe have power over us. They work into our bodies and minds and change us from the inside out. What if one day these stories became something stronger, more real, than fairy tales? Nico was only eight years old and didn’t understand her father’s beliefs, but I saw his stories growing in her, and it frightened me. Even more frightening, though, was that I recognized, in my daughter, my own need to believe in the impossible.

  Buttresses

  Not long after the annual Fête Votive d’Aubais, on one of those scorching dry afternoons that sent villagers indoors for a siesta, I came home to find Nikolai sitting in our Citroën station wagon. The car was parked in the sun, its gray paint giving it the look of a metallic shark, only inside the shark sat Nikolai, looking troubled. I peered through the tinted window and into the car. The door was closed, and despite the heat all the windows were up. He gripped the wheel with both hands, his knuckles white, as if bracing for a long, steep drop. I paused, thinking through the possible reasons he might be sitting there. He’d told me an hour before that he was going to drive to Sommières, to go to Carrefour for groceries. He was supposed to bring the kids with him. But Nico and Alex were not there. Nikolai was alone.

  I rapped the window with my knuckle.

  The window descended, revealing Nikolai’s face, his black hair wet with sweat, his eyes wide and blank, uninflected.

  “What’s up?” I asked him. I could hear the fear and confusion seeping into my voice. I could hear all the questions I was not asking, the What are you doing sitting here in the car? question, the Why are you squeezing the steering wheel so hard? question. His clothes were soaked in sweat, but who wouldn’t be sweating? It was a steamy August day in the south of France, and the car was sealed up like an airless tomb. I was worried about him and wanted him to come out.

  He bit his lip, as if he wanted to say something.

  “What is it?” I asked. “Did something happen?”

  “I’m waiting for you.”

  “Why are you waiting?”

  “To go to Sommières.”

  We hadn’t discussed going shopping together. But he was waiting for me to accompany him.

  “You want me to come with you and the kids to Sommières?”

  He nodded. Yes, that’s why he was waiting. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted me to come with him.

  “Okay,” I said. “Where are the kids?”

  “In the house.”

  “I’ll get them ready,” I said. “You sure nothing’s wrong?”

  “I have stomach pains,” he said softly. “I can’t drive.”

  “Did you eat something?”

  “I think I drank too much coffee.”

  “Too much coffee?” He was in such distress that I didn’t think coffee could possibly be the cause. “How much coffee did you drink?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “Enough.”

  I wante
d to peel back the layers of his words—the “I don’t know” and the “enough”—and understand what was going on. He had always had trouble with anxiety, but our move to the village had triggered something in him, some latent terror, and I could feel him sinking into himself, descending further and further from reality. He would sit silent for hours at a time, staring out the window, doing nothing at all. He’d become listless and moody. He’d had a panic attack some weeks before and he’d stayed in the bathtub for hours, trying to calm himself down. He’d developed a fear of being alone—driving alone in particular—and had started asking me to accompany him when he left the house.

  Like me, he’d begun having nightmares. In his dream we lived in a medieval village, a place exactly like our village, with all the same winding, narrow pathways, the same clay roof tiles and secret gardens. Everything seemed perfectly normal there—the sun was shining and the flowers were blooming—but something was wrong. The village was sinister and frightening. Evil. He walked and walked through the streets, trying to understand what was wrong, until suddenly he realized the problem: There was nobody there. The houses were empty. The streets were empty. The village was totally abandoned. He was the single person who remained. He looked more closely and found bodies piled up everywhere. A plague had struck, killing the entire population. I was dead, the kids were dead, everything had been lost. Nikolai was the only person left alive.