The Land Across

5 A MAN IN BLACK

When Martya and I returned to the Willows, I took down the mirror. I was on the top step of our stepladder, and it was all I could do to get down the steps holding the mirror out in front of me. Martya screamed and I nearly dropped it.

There had been, just like Martya had told me, a dead woman behind it. She was scooched down in a hollow in the wall, looking like a mummy nobody had wrapped up. She had long, pale hair.

“We must get her down.” Martya was still gasping. “With one of these sheets we will cover her. A Christian burial. She need that.”

I said, “It might be better to leave her right where she is and call the police.”

“What is this! You wish to rot in Herrtay? Never do you get out, fool! Someone they must blame. No!”

It was hard to get myself to touch the dead girl at first, but pretty soon I was worrying about hurting her when I did it. She felt like I might break off an arm or something trying to get her out. Her skin felt like rotten leather and it seemed like she might fall apart any minute. I was about to lay her on the floor when I saw Martya had pulled the dustcover off a narrow couch upholstered in peacock blue silk. As reverently as I could manage, I laid the dead girl’s mummy on that while Martya made the sign of the cross. When the old couch’s dirty white dustcover was back in place, you could not see the mummy anymore, but boy oh boy did we ever know she was in there.

“She is dead already, do you think, when they are put her there? Or she is lives, and—and…”

I comforted Martya as well as I could.

She must have cried for ten or fifteen minutes, maybe longer. Finally she said, “I will go home, and you must come too so I do not fear. Tomorrow we come back, perhaps. Or you alone. I do not know.”

I said okay. It seemed like she got it together while we walked back to Kleon’s place. If she ever smiled I did not see it, but she stopped crying and it seemed like she was not so scared. If we talked, I guess I have forgotten everything we said. Maybe we did not talk about anything. I know I was thinking about the dead-girl problem. What were we going to do about her and how should I handle it? Only I knew it would be way too fast to spring anything about it on Martya.

When we got to Kleon’s and were sitting at the kitchen table sipping hot tea, I took a big chance. “According to what we heard that guy from the ministry say, there’s a big lake near here. Is that right?”

Martya nodded. “The city crowd it, but it does not move. Formerly, the rich houses pressed upon it. These were blow up when the Russians came. Now there is a park and a beach. There are thieves, also wolves, so this park is most dangerous by night. There is the beach beyond and the wolves are sometimes not hungered, so people take their children there to swim.”

“Wolves?” I had heard it but I could not believe it.

“Yes, for the thieves. They hunt by night, like them. They come into the city from the east. The streets they do not like, there is too much houses, too many people. In the park, they think, is better. The thieves hide there. They wait for someone to come, such women as me or old bent men. The wolves do not wait. They fall upon the thief and he is dead. They eat him. The police say we shoot them, but they shoot only two, I think, and there is trouble about those. So they let them live and the wolves do not attack them. If the sun is bright and you are more than one, you are safe.”

I asked, “What about women like you, and the old people?”

“We do not go into the park alone because of the thieves, so we are safe. Do you wish to see the lake?”

Of course I said I did.

“Do you fish? Many fish there. I have fished, though I am not so skilled. My father took me when I was small.” She giggled. “I promise him I bait the hook myself, but when we are in the boat he must do everything. There are many fish, some most big. What you catch, I will cook for us.”

I said that a lot of fish were not good to eat.

“No, no! All our fish are good. This you will see. We have…” Martya reeled off the names of a couple of dozen fish, but they were in her language. None of them meant a thing to me. “You fish,” she finished. “You row the boat, also. What you catch I clean and cook for us.”

I said okay, only I told myself I would not row any boat if I could help it.

There were no motorboats, but for twice the price of a rowboat we could rent a little sloop. It was about noon when we put out. I am no expert sailor, but I know the rudiments. Besides, the rig of our little sloop was as simple as a rig can be, and sailing the quiet blue waters of Lake Perilimna was nothing like crossing the North Pacific from Dutch Harbor to Hokkaido. My dad and I did that one time.

Martya was in her glory, lounging on a beach towel spread on the roof of our cabin and looking sexy as hell. She had brought a bottle of stinking oil that was supposed to keep you from getting sunburned and greased her skin with it whenever she thought somebody was paying attention. Since she had nothing on but the faded bottom of what had probably started out as a bikini, her skin took a lot of greasing. When the sail and the tiller could handle things on their own, I kept busy rubbing stinky oil on her back and drying my hands on my face and ears.

With the sloop the man had let us have a couple of long bamboo poles and a few hooks. Our bait was pretty various. Martya had supplied balls of flour and rancid fat. I had added a can of chopped fish and a big can of slimy little animals I suppose must have been newts. I trolled, putting my pole in a socket and changing bait from time to time. Each fish we caught delighted Martya. As for me, I was happy there were not more.

Lake Perilimna is big, irregular, and cold. Really long, too. Martya told me the capital was at the other end. There are bays and inlets all over, and islands covered with trees scattered around. They probably have names, but Martya did not know them and I never learned them. When we had sailed along the coast quite a ways, and had begun to sail back toward the yellow bricks and church spires of Puraustays, I broke down and asked Martya where Vlad’s summer home had been.

She shook her head until her amber curls danced. “I have never hear of this place. It is a tale to frighten children, I think.”

“That man from the ministry of whatever it was seemed pretty serious about it. He was warning us, and trying to do it without putting down his own country.”

“Then ask him! I do not know.”

“If there’s anything like that here, it will probably fill a whole chapter in my book. I can’t just pass over a thing like that.”

We were nearing an island bigger than most of them, and it was like what I said had broken a spell, or maybe cast one. I caught sight of battlements above the tops of a bunch of hemlocks, and I pointed and shouted.

Martya would not look. “What is this? You are not nice all today.”

“A castle! There’s a castle on that island.”

“You will go there.” It was not a question.

“Damn straight!”

“Also you will wish me to go with you, into another terrible place like your house.”

“Not unless you want to,” I told her. “You can wait here on the boat.”

“Then you do not come….” Martya’s voice was so low I could scarcely hear her. “I will think he has fallen. Somewhere he lie with the broken legs. Perhaps he scream, or lie quiet with the strike of the head. I must come to help. I come, and we are seen no more.”

I said, “I don’t think it will be like that.”

“It will not. I will cut the rope and go fast away. You will see. No! You will not see, because I wait until you are out of sight.”

“Can you sail?”

“Yes! I am the fine sailor. I do not speak of this because I wish to sun myself.”

I dropped the sail. “In that case you’ll have an easy time of it. Only if you just let her drift, you’ll go anyplace the wind takes you, and you could spend tonight out here on the lake. If you try to sail but don’t know how, you’ll probably capsize and drown.”

She did not say a thing to that.

“An American boat would have life vests stowed somewhere. This one doesn’t. I looked.”

“I will not worry for you, and you have not to worry for me.”

“Good here,” I told her, and put the tiller over. Ten minutes later I had our little boat moored to a tree.

The edge of the wood was choked with brush. I pushed through it. As the hemlocks got bigger and the sunlight faded, the brush turned to ferns and moss. The wall of the castle (which I got to pretty soon) was damp gray stone so dark it looked black, big stones only roughly squared but fitted together so well that the placing of each, trying one stone then another, must have taken twenty or thirty men I do not know how many years of patient work. There were no windows, and no doors I could find. I walked along the wall, hoping to find some kind of gate.

A stretch of fallen wall fixed that. Whether it had been undermined by besiegers or just fallen because it was old, I had no way of telling. Whichever it was, the big stones had been laid low, and I climbed over them feeling like I ought to have had a sword and worn a knight-shirt of chain mail.

I thought I was going to see a courtyard, but there was none. Instead I saw empty rooms that had been open to the wind and weather for five or six hundred years. I got into one of the biggest and from it went into a bunch of others, each one darker than the last. In there, pretty well lost in the dark, a stair with high narrow steps went up to the next floor.

I went up and found another stair, one you could see only as a darker area on an uneven floor that was already plenty dark. This one went down, hundreds of worn, broken steps that got slippery with water if you went down far enough. That was enough for me.

“Martya was right,” I said out loud. “She’d hate this place.” Echoes were the only answer I got.

I had thought there was nobody on the island but me, but when I left I found a man in black sitting on one of the tumbled stones as if he were waiting for me. I spoke to him in German until I saw he did not understand it. He got up. I am tall, but he was a quite a bit taller than I am, NBA tall. When he talked it was in a language that was not like Martya’s, one I could not even recognize. Pretty soon he saw I did not understand, and so we talked with signs.

He came here to think, or it seemed to me that was what he said. Maybe he meant he was mourning. His black clothes would have been just right for a funeral. He knew the ruined castle well. He had been in every part of it and would show me around, although a lot was dangerous. (He pretended he was falling.)

The shadows had gotten long, and I was anxious to get away. I tried to say that I had to go, that somebody was waiting for me, but that I hoped to come back later to take pictures.

He said he would rather I not take his, and I promised I would not. I would only photograph the castle. That was what we said by signs, or at least I think it was.

The boat was still tied up where I had left it, which to tell you the truth did not surprise me a whole lot. I thanked Martya for not sailing away.

She sat up. “I could not find the knife. I looked and looked but you have take him with you. It was a bad place you went?”

“An old place,” I said, “and I doubt that it had running water.”

“When it rain.” She giggled. “What you think of me? I am red a lot?”

“You are, and if I were you, I’d go into the cabin and put on your clothes.”

“We go back? Go home?” She smiled.

“Yes, I think we’d better. We have six fish, but they won’t live long with a string through their gills.”

“First we go in here, where you tire me.”

I shook my head. “We’d have to lie on the floor. Try me tomorrow morning.”

“You mean!” She stuck her lip out.

“It’s all this German,” I said. “It has that effect on Americans. Now get ready to get mad, because I want to sail around the island before we go.”

“What is use of this? We must go into wind. Such a boat cannot do this.”

“We’ll never sail straight into it,” I told her. “Stay down off that roof and you’ll see. If I can buy a decent camera here without breaking the bank, I want to take pictures of Vlad’s castle. One I’ll certainly want will be a picture of the whole island taken from a boat, with the castle showing as plainly as I can get it through those damn trees.”

We made our circuit, during which I found two good angles from which to shoot the castle, and sailed away.

There is a lot more I could tell here, but it is pretty ordinary so I am going to skip it. After that I lived at Kleon’s for a couple of weeks. He did not like that or me. Martya did, maybe too much. Eight or ten times we waited until he was asleep and went out to the clubs to dance and drink and listen to lousy rock. There are only three clubs in Puraustays, and I never did decide which one was the worst. They were all cheap. They all watered the drinks, and all of them would push you around, or try to, if you complained. Days she showed me around the city or I searched the Willows, and three or four times we went to the beach.

Kleon kept getting worse if you know what I mean. I think a big part of it was that nobody came to see if I was still at his house. Then one evening Martya and I were talking and I was watching her peel vegetables for supper when someone began rattling the front door. I told her I would get it, and I did. I had just long enough to recognize Kleon and see he was drunk before he knocked me down.

For a moment or two I must have been dazed. When I realized what was going on he was kicking me, kicking as hard as he could but not always effectively. Somehow I managed to roll away from the kicks and get back on my feet.

For a few seconds we fought—or to cut the crap, I tried to fight Kleon while Kleon fought me. Then I was down again, and Martya was clinging to Kleon and begging. I could tell from her tone that it was begging, and I thought she was begging him not to kick me again. She may really have been begging him to forgive her and swearing I had forced her mornings, which was when we made love. That is a pretty good bet.

Whatever it was she said, it worked. They went off together to their bedroom. I limped out the open door and down the little path to the street with no ideas beyond putting as much distance as I could between Kleon and me.