The Fortress Page 7

  Soon the band arrived and started to play covers of American pop songs from the eighties, and the combination of something familiar with something foreign—songs of my childhood sung with a French accent—made me even happier. The makeshift dance floor was packed. Lulu and Lord danced; the woman from the boulangerie danced; Nico and a pack of village girls danced. I wanted to dance with Nikolai in this strange place, hold his hand under the impossible abundance of stars, to face my new life with laughter and an open heart. I finished my wine and grabbed Nikolai by the hand, pulling him toward the dance floor.

  “Come on!” I said, smiling, hoping to entice him.

  Nikolai shook his head. No way.

  “What’s wrong?” I opened my arms to Nikolai: Take me! I’m yours. “It will be fun.”

  “I don’t dance,” he replied.

  “So what?” I said. “Nobody cares here. Everyone is so sloshed they won’t even remember you tomorrow.”

  Nikolai gave me a dark look that said no matter how much wine was consumed, he would go nowhere near that dance floor.

  “But why not?” I asked, realizing that I sounded like Nico when she wanted candy. I was pleading. “Just one dance.”

  “Dancing is for idiots.”

  “Then be an idiot with me,” I said, and what I meant was this: Let’s let go of our disappointments and our problems and dance until we believe, just for a moment, that we’re in love again.

  —

  I VISITED FRANCE for the first time when I was sixteen. I had never been outside of Wisconsin, let alone the United States, and my high school had organized a trip to Paris. To me, France was as abstract as the moon, but I knew I wanted to go somewhere, anywhere, and France seemed as good enough a place as any. I begged and pleaded and lobbied my mom, and she, seeing that this was something I really wanted, paid for my ticket.

  In Paris I was dressed like any American teenage girl: jean shorts, Converse tennis shoes, Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt. I wore a black leather motorcycle jacket and black nail polish and too much eyeliner. I noticed right away how different the American girls were from the natives: French girls wore simple, elegant clothes, light makeup, and they were stick-thin. They seemed to have an aura of melancholy and restraint about them, as if they’d been trained like geisha. We, on the other hand, were loud and fun and brimming with energy, our presence filling the boulevard Saint-Germain to bursting.

  I walked the streets of Paris for the first time feeling as if someone had dropped me into a movie. We went to the Tour Eiffel, the Louvre, and all the other places tourists go. One afternoon I stood on the Pont Neuf, looking into the gray Seine, the bateaux-mouches swooshing by, and for the first time I understood the incomprehensible bigness of the world, the vastness of it. Girlhood was just the beginning, the starting line. There was more, much more, waiting for me.

  At some point during my week in Paris, I went to Shakespeare and Co. I’d read about the bookstore in my guidebook, but I hadn’t imagined that it would be quite so wonderful. I stayed for hours and bought so many books that there was no room for clothes in my suitcase. When one of the chaperones of our group asked me why I would buy English books in France, I shrugged, but the truth was that I had felt the possibility of my future there. In those books, and in that store, I found the promise of who I could be. I bought the books because I wanted to carry that promise home with me.

  Back in Wisconsin, I’d tried to slip into my old life and continue as if I were the same person. I closed my bedroom door and looked at my belongings—the Doc Martins and the Cure posters on my walls—but nothing seemed to be mine anymore. Something had shifted. I wanted something else, something far away. I didn’t become a Francophile, and I didn’t throw myself into learning French, but I was altered. It’s possible that this change would have happened had I visited Barcelona or Rome. It’s entirely possible that when my marriage seemed hopeless and I searched for that perfect place to restore it, I could have chosen Spain or Italy. But what I’d felt in Paris at sixteen had always stayed with me, buried under layers and layers of experience yet there nonetheless, waiting.

  —

  THERE WERE NO whisperings in the long hallways of La Commanderie and no eerie reflections in the glass panes of the French doors. She just appeared in the kitchen late one night as I was making a pot of tea. The house was dark, my children asleep, Nikolai locked away in his office playing online chess. I’d put the kettle on the stove and was waiting for the water to boil when I found myself gazing into her clear blue eyes. She was dressed in old-fashioned clothes—a full blue crinoline skirt and a white blouse with buttons climbing to her chin—and seemed to be about my age, mid-thirties, perhaps a little older. Her hair was braided and piled on her head, giving the impression that her pale face was set in a band of gold. She looked at me with tenderness, as if she understood something that I couldn’t quite grasp. A secret. A lesson. Some truth I had only just begun to understand.

  I turned my gaze slightly, as if blinking against a bright light, and the woman disappeared.

  I stared at the empty space for a moment before turning back to the tea. I filled the pot with chamomile flowers and poured the boiling water. I noticed, as I grasped the kettle, that my hand was steady. My heart wasn’t thumping in my chest, and my breathing wasn’t irregular. I wasn’t frightened, and I didn’t doubt what I had seen. A phantom had stood before me, so close that I could have touched her, and I wasn’t unsettled in the least. Instead I felt a sweet, reassuring calm. I couldn’t think of her as a ghost—she seemed too real, too good, for that. Whatever she was, something in my mind had opened to allow for the existence of this strange presence in my house and to accept it. I couldn’t explain what had happened, but I felt that this woman had come to offer me comfort.

  I sorely needed it. In the months since we’d moved into La Commanderie, I felt more and more estranged from my husband. While I’d hoped that our move to Aubais would bring us closer, we’d fallen even deeper into a state of mutual isolation. We marked off territories in the house and made our separate spaces, spending most of our time on different floors—he had the first floor (or rez-de-chaussée, as the French called it), and I had the second. One of the previous owners had installed a small kitchen on the second floor, and I found myself more comfortable there than in the larger one downstairs. Nikolai, who had never liked to go to sleep before midnight, stayed in his office all night, working or playing online chess or listening to music or studying French, arriving in our bed at four or five in the morning and sinking into a dead sleep. There was no official declaration of our separation. We simply drifted to where we were most comfortable—far away from each other.

  As if to secure his solitude, Nikolai begun installing locks on doors throughout the house as soon as we moved in—a lock between the hallway and the salon, another lock on his office door, another lock between the downstairs kitchen and a sitting room, two bolt locks on the back door leading to the rue Droite, and a chain lock on the Paris-Lyon door between the stairwell and the second floor. The Paris-Lyon door had been custom-made for a train, clearly the route between Paris and Lyon, and its weathered oak panels held a huge Art Nouveau frosted-glass vitrine etched with bursting flowers. The words “Paris-Lyon” were inscribed into the glass. One of the many previous owners had installed the door, and it now separated the upstairs bedrooms from a deep stairwell that opened onto the first floor.

  I disliked the locks as soon as they were installed. I would hear the clicking and turning of a key in its mechanism many times a day as Nikolai moved through the interior of our home. When I asked him why he did this, he shrugged, as if his reasons were obvious. He later told me the locks were for our safety, that there had been stories of Gypsies breaking into houses all through the south of France. The locks kept thieves out. The locks kept us safe.

  He was right—there were stories of Gypsies ransacking homes in the area—but it was too safe for me. Hating the sensation of being caged up, I would sometimes
walk though the house and open the doors after he locked them, propping them wide with heavy stones from the garden. To the outside ear, my ritual must have sounded like a postmodern symphony, all arrhythmic metal clicks and wooden percussion, but to me it was an act of resistance against an ever-narrowing world. My efforts didn’t have much effect—the doors would be relocked the next time he passed through them—and so I began to take the keys and hide them, throwing the keyless doors open so that anyone—kids, dogs, cats, Gypsies, anyone at all—could pass unimpeded.

  The night I saw the woman in our kitchen, I stopped at the door of Nikolai’s office. The doors in La Commanderie were huge, fashioned of thick wood. His door was locked, of course, and so I knocked lightly until he let me in. His office was warm and comfortable, with a leather couch, stacks of books, and the soft glow of a desk lamp, but I always felt like a stranger going to see him, as if I were not his wife but a neighbor dropping in for a chat. You know this man, I would remind myself. He’s your husband, he’s the father of your daughter, he’s the man raising your son, you’ve been married to this guy for nearly ten years.

  He didn’t join me on the couch but returned behind his desk, slid his Bose headphones around his neck, and waited. It was late, and I was usually in bed by midnight. I could see him mentally scrolling through the reasons I might have come: Kids? No, they were long asleep. Fly? Fed and walked. Sex? No, we hadn’t touched each other in months.

  I’d come for reassurance. I wanted to tell him what had happened in the kitchen and for him to tell me that I wasn’t going out of my mind. The ghost hadn’t upset me when I saw her but, nonetheless, I was spooked. If anyone could help me make sense of what I had seen, it would be him. During his years in India, he’d come to view the world as a system that worked on the principles of spiritual transfers, of reincarnation and karma, mind over matter. He’d shown me how to burn incense at the altar he’d installed upstairs, and he’d taught me to say the correct Tibetan mantras to build positive karma. He’d told me stories of seeing spirits in India and Bulgaria. He believed in what he’d seen. But I’d never seen a ghost before. I’d never even entertained the possibility that such things existed.

  I leaned back on the couch and took a sip of my tea. After a moment of working up my courage, I said, “Something weird happened in the kitchen.”

  This got his attention. “Downstairs?”

  “By the old wall,” I said.

  He thought for a moment. “Near the trapdoor?”

  “Right over the trapdoor, actually,” I replied.

  I hadn’t even considered the trapdoor. Not long after we moved in, we discovered a square carved into the floor of the kitchen and immediately connected it with the stories of secret passageways below the fortress. One afternoon we’d cracked open the floor, cutting away the white marble, and found a narrow trapdoor, just big enough for a grown person to squeeze through. We hoisted up the wooden door and peered into the darkness. There was a chamber below. One of the men from the village, whom we’d invited over for the floor-cracking, inspected it and declared that it was a concrete cuve, or vat, for storing olive oil. The chamber below the house was filled with nothing more than fungal, deoxygenated air.

  “I saw something, actually someone, a person.”

  “Was it a woman?” he asked. “A woman in blue?”

  I sat up, feeling a prickling sensation in my spine. How had he known I’d seen a woman? And how did he know she’d been wearing blue?

  “How did you know?”

  He removed his headphones, set them on his desk, and said, “Because I’ve seen her, too.”

  Battlements

  The Christmas after Nico was born, Sam asked me to bring Alex back to the States for a visit. I readily agreed. Alex hadn’t seen his father for over a year, and the trip was long overdue. Yet, there was more to my eagerness to leave Sofia than that. With six months of his J-1 homestay requirement left, Nikolai couldn’t leave the country. I would be going alone.

  I couldn’t wait. There were a thousand small reasons for this: I wanted to eat American food; to see a dozen movies in English; to buy something, anything, from an American bookstore and read it cover to cover; to listen to NPR, letting the sweet sound of my language wash over me. And then there were the larger, more profound reasons. In the past months, ever since Nico was born, we had been in a state of conflict. I realized, as the plane took off into the sky, lifting over the snowy peaks of the Vitosha mountains and turning over the endless blocks of concrete apartment complexes, that I was relieved to get away. It was my fault.

  The problems started after we brought Nico home from the hospital. There were all sorts of superstitions surrounding the birth of a child. There was a belief that a baby’s soul was weak and easily harmed, and so a newborn should be kept inside the home for at least forty days, to avoid its being hexed. Guests and visitors were kept away during these forty days, so that they didn’t accidentally (or intentionally) curse the child. If anyone except the parents complimented the baby, that person should say “Pu! Pu! Pu!” so as not to curse the baby.

  I didn’t believe in any of these superstitions. I had taken Alex out walking the week after his birth, believing that fresh air would be good for him. But Nikolai did believe, or believed enough to follow these dictums, and so we stayed inside for the first months of Nico’s life, taking her out only rarely and only when no one was around. It was winter, and cold, and so I didn’t object.

  For the first month, I stayed with Nico night and day, sleeping on a twin bed near her crib, to be close at hand when she woke. I would feed her, change her, and put her back to sleep the way my mom had taught me: quick, without talking or playing or singing, so that the baby would understand that she must sleep through the night. One morning I found Nikolai standing in the doorway, watching. When I asked him what was going on, he told me that Z had excluded him from the nursery after Rada was born and that he wanted to be a part of Nico’s nightly routine. His first wife had believed in the strict division of traditional gender roles: that a man should work and provide money while a woman had control of the house. It had been a parenting power struggle, and Z had won. Now, with Nico, he wanted to be part of the action.

  That sounded like heaven to me. I didn’t believe in the traditional division of gender roles at all. The combination of breast-feeding, exhaustion, and postpartum hormonal fluctuations made me feel like a carnival mirror image of myself: Distorted and slow and hazy. I was thrilled to have Nikolai’s help. In fact, I expected it. But, it turned out, we had vastly different ideas about how to care for Nico. We had disagreements about how she should be bathed and changed and put to sleep. He wanted to make her sleeping schedule, and he wanted to decide when she could go out for a walk and when and how she should be fed. When I tried to explain my way of doing things or impose rules of my own, he brought in his parents, who defended his choices.

  Things got particularly heated about breast-feeding. Nikolai told me he wanted to feed our daughter, and while he was equipped to provide her with care in every way, he didn’t actually have breasts. The solution: formula. Nico was over two months old, hungry all the time, and needed a lot of milk. We consulted a doctor and was told it was fine for a baby to have a mixture of breast milk and formula, so there was no reason not to add formula. And honestly, I hated breast-feeding. My breasts were always sore, and Nico wanted more milk than I could produce. I couldn’t leave the apartment for more than a few hours at a time without leaking, and I had all sorts of dietary restrictions. I felt like a cow, pumping milk and bottling it, and I didn’t feel like being intimate with my husband with stinging, leaky, cracked nipples. And so we agreed that Nico would transition to formula. We would begin slowly, introducing just a little formula into her diet while continuing with breast milk for a few more weeks.

  It was Nico’s midnight feeding, and I was groggy with sleep when I found her in Nikolai’s arms, a bottle of formula in her mouth. I stared at them, my husband and my child,
trying to put it all together. We had just agreed to wait. Yet here he was feeding the baby a bottle.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” I said, squinting in the darkness.

  “Go back to bed,” he whispered. “I’ve got this.”

  “You’ve got what?”

  “Shhhh!” he said. “You’ll wake her up.”

  “But we agreed that—”

  Nikolai gave me a look: Stop overreacting. He put his hand on my back and gently ushered me out into the hall.

  “Go back to bed,” he whispered. Then, he closed the door.

  From that day on, Nico had formula instead of breast milk. She was a healthy girl and was absolutely fine without breast milk. But the problem wasn’t really about breast-feeding versus not breast-feeding. I’d been more than ready to switch over. The problem was that we had agreed to wait, and he’d gone ahead anyway, ignoring what we’d decided. He had closed the door on the discussion. He’d said one thing and done the opposite. And I stewed, silently, adding this slight to a growing stockpile of slights, storing them up. The formula-versus-breast-milk conflict hurt us, and our marriage, more than it hurt our child.

  Thus the dynamic that would define our relationship as parents was set: Nikolai told me what I wanted to hear and then did exactly as he pleased. This kind of thing happened with many small, daily decisions and with bigger ones as well, such as the naming of our daughter. Months before Nico had been born, even before we knew the sex of our child, Nikolai and I had made a deal. If the baby was a boy, he would have Nikolai’s family name. If the baby turned out to be a girl, she would have mine. I had made the same bargain with Sam before Alex was born, and Alex had Sam’s family name. I felt strongly about this system. I didn’t particularly like hyphenated names, where the father and mother stick their names together so that both parties will be equally represented, but I wanted my identity as a parent to be recognized. I didn’t believe it was right that the father’s name was always passed down. It seemed outdated and out of step with the modern world, where mothers were equal to fathers in every way. Nikolai agreed with me. His parents listened to our agreement and did not object, chalking it up to my American need to upend tradition. It seemed fair enough, this deal. Fifty-fifty odds. After we learned that our child would be a girl, we agreed that she would be called Nico Sidonie Trussoni. The name Nico was inspired by the female singer of the Velvet Underground, and simultaneously had an echo of her father’s name. Her last name was to be my family name. The middle name was French, a reference to the given name of the writer Colette. I loved our daughter’s name, and I thought Nikolai did, too.