A Short Story in Five Parts
1
“The tale ends the way you want it to, Alba. It’s all up to you.”
Alone in the tavern, Aditsan behind the counter, patting her hand gently.
Her tale – well, one day. For now, she would continue Kanski’s tale.
2
The rush of people around Basluly Square. Eli threaded his way through the throng, filled with furred capped chestnut vendors, joyful holiday shoppers and ice skaters of all ages who skidded gracefully, clumsily and freely under the candle bedecked fir tree looming over the square.
Overlooking the fir tree was the saturnine face of Edvard Busluly, Saint Petri’s ferocious founder, who fought off swathes of marauders to turn this boggy, peaty wasteland into the metropolitan jewel of the north. The bronze, equestrian statue looked so out of place with the messy mass of life teeming under its stern gaze. Eli Kanski had no love for the emperor and his entourage, but he felt a kinship and love for the people. The oblivious, babbling masses who made the city tick and pulse – they were Saint Petri. The people would bring the city forward, out from the rotten, antiquated past into a gleaming future. It was in moments like these that Eli managed to forget his personal woes and feel a sense of contentment as a cog in this machine – giving way to the youth, their vigour, their imperturbable optimism.
He drew up to the National Bank, waiting in line to make the monthly transfer. He transferred what he could – and the sum was getting bigger. He had more left over each month. His wants were decreasing. Going to the bank each month returned him, momentarily. He felt like he was defying the laws of time and place to be back. To say sorry for everything.
He was near the front of the queue. Behind him, a mother holding a baby. Eli smiled at the infant, despite himself. Made his eyes bulge, flared his nostrils. The baby broke into a grin.
“Sir, you’re next.” said the mother, nodding towards the waiting banker at the hatch.
Eli handed in the payment transfer slip, carefully folded the receipt, and made for the exit.
He stopped just outside the door. No…
He swivelled around. He could have sworn he’d seen HER. The woman. The woman who would pursue him and goad him into admitting the failures of his life.
But she was nowhere in sight.
3
She was here now, brushing snow off her ragged shawl, his unwanted pursuer.
She had followed him, relentless, breaking into his life, rooting around and pressing where it hurt most. She had found out about Luna. He had not felt such explosive rage since…
Since…
Since Rouen, when he had proved himself just as bestial and savage and violent as the most wretched brute. Northern France, the last port of call in a meandering odyssey which had slingshot him out of the village of his youth into a futile, bloody war in the Pacific and washed him back, broken, unrooted, in Europe.
All those years, scraping by. Just about. Drinking himself into a stupor. Doing meaningless work. Knowing that he shouldn’t be there. Talking to no one about the horrors he had witnessed. And then he’d taken it all out on the unwitting husband of a woman Eli had begun going to for comfort at night. The husband who had made the error of coming home to discover his wife in bed with another man. And Eli had beaten him to an inch of his life– the man pulped and bloody on his own bedroom floor, his wife screaming.
Eli found himself yanked back to Saint Petri. Berlot from the abattoir, the closest thing he’d had to a friend in Rouen, with whom he’d played chess in silence during lunch breaks, accompanied him to Paris, where he was bundled onto a goods train headed home. Berlot pressed his shoulder briefly before the train left. The last contact with anyone.
He landed in Saint Petri to a carnival atmosphere under a stippled blue sky, no one recognising the violent beast he had become. No one caring. Out of sight, he began to unspool – holing himself up in the dingiest dosshouse in the city, He let himself go completely. The man of meticulous military habits went to seed – unwashed, defiled, debased, a beard and matted hair making him indistinguishable from all the most piteous vagrants vomited up by the city. And in the dosshouses and taverns no amount of alcohol could extinguish the horror when he closed his eyes. The interminable battleship. The bloodshed at war. The crushed, unmoving bloody pulp at his feet in that tiny attic flat in Rouen.
Crushed by remorse, he used his meagre savings to clean himself up, restoring a shadow of his proud former self, and found work in a pawnshop – a lifeless, shabby little pawnshop where he brought his education in banking and bookkeeping to use.
The pay was measly, yet he didn’t need anything but a bed to sleep in. He sent everything else he earned to Berlot in France, who would see to it that all the money would end with the widow. Eli could only assume that he had killed her husband.
He wasn’t dead. Berlot reported seeing him some months after Eli’s departure. A man meeting Eli’s description. A man peering down through a jaundiced window in the cursed flat. A haunted, vapid, lost face.
Eli was not a murderer, then. But he had surely wrecked a family for the second time.
The adult world was not the fairytale of his youth – picking strawberries and swimming in the clearest of streams in a bountiful, unblemished heaven. The adult world was negotiating one’s place in society, tempering one’s basest instincts, and helping build a world for the future to flourish. Yet Eli had failed – twice. He’d left the village of his youth and everyone he’d loved, showing the highest degree of selfishness. Then he’d destroyed another household – turning the husband into a cripple.
Everything he had touched since leaving the village had been destroyed. He deserved to die, alone and forgotten. He was a stain on society. He would drink up the courage to wipe himself off the face of the earth, so he could no longer stain anymore lives. Let his stain be washed away and forgotten.
Let the rain come and wash him away.
Untouched by human hands.
4
Alba wanted to hug him.
She looked at Eli Kanski, crushed by the anger and frustration which still defined him, no matter how long he had tried to escape it. His face bathed in tears. The man she had harried and pursued and stalked into fury – he looked defeated and spent.
“What do you want?” he asked, wearily.
“What do I want? I want to go back to the tavern where it’s warm and dry, so I can tell you about Luna.”
“What do you want to tell me about Luna?”
5
Luna.
Staring out proudly from the photo in Kanski’s office at the dingy little pawn shop.
The missing piece of the puzzle.
Alba felt like a girl again, playing on the streets of Saint Petri, the world hers. The sense of moving forward – she had not felt it for years.
She closed her eyes and allowed the early morning sounds to sway around her as she stood over the hot plate in her kitchen, preparing her food for the journey. All that money, those worthless little pennies that couldn’t buy a bean individually, When she collected all of these coins, they could buy her a return ticket out of the city into the vast, enchanted countryside. She had found her destination after going to the library and going through the maps. She’d found what she was looking for – a small village, such a funny little name, but it would give her all the answers she needed. As she sat on a bench on the rickety train amongst the rattling conversations of her fellow passengers, she basked in the warm winter light, which bathed the train in a soft, creamy yellow glow.
She felt like she was coming home.
She presented herself at the school, the one mentioned in the newspaper caption under Luna’s image, almost empty. She asked to see the school principal about a matter of great importance, but was greeted instead by the deputy who eyed Alba with wary disdain, saying that the principal had already finished for the day and had gone home. But when Alba had finished blurting out her tale, the deputy, wide-eyed and shocked, gabbled the location of the principal’s house.
Alba made her way through the bewitched, serene, still woodland. They say that wolves and bears made the woods here their home – but she wasn’t scared. She found the house as described by the deputy – a carousel of colours. Outside, raking the leaves, was a woman. She was older than in the photo. She had silver hair tied back into a severe bun. She looked up at Alba with proud, piercing eyes. The face of the little doll carved by Eli in his little apartment.
6
Alba looked at Eli and smiled.
“What do you want to tell me about Luna?” asked Eli.
“I want to tell you that it’s time to go home to her.”
He shook his head.
“No. I just want to curl up next to the fire and die.”
“Is that so?” Asked Alba face full of scorn. “Then why are you paying money to Luna’s school each month? You can’t do that when you’re dead, can you.”
He didn’t answer.
“Each month all these years since the flood. Transferring money to her school.”
His expression remained blank.
“Living like a monk, going to the tavern to drown your sorrows, then going to work each morning. What for? Working to say sorry. Sending off your money to say sorry. But not having the guts to REALLY say sorry.”
Eli sighed.
“Yes.”
7
After sending everything he had to France, he had seen no point in continuing. But then the flood changed everything – the once-in-a-century flood which raged and ravaged Saint Petri. The rain had lashed and whipped him awake, and he had feared the worst for the village.
He had to return, just to see that she was okay. He came back to see the ravaged detritus of his childhood home, bubbling in the raging soil. He visited the graves of his parents, dead some ten years. He made his way to the house he had built – beaten by the fury of the rain, but still standing, protected on its slope in a scrum of spruce trees.
Luna wasn’t there.
She was at the school. She was okay. She was formidable. She stood outside, directing reparations, emptying buckets of rainwater, unbowed by the Herculean task of making the school fit for use.
And hidden in place in the briars, a beast with the wolves bears and bats, Eli watched his wife for the last time, knowing what he could do to try and make things right.
8
“Luna knows it’s you who did this,” said Alba.
Eli didn’t answer
“I talked to her. She always knew you were alive somewhere.”
He stared on into the distance.
“She knows you’re here. I told her where you live.”
Alba smiled.
“Maybe you expect her to come here and take you away like a naughty little schoolboy. Or…”
He was looking at her.
“Or maybe you’ll go to her. You’re not invisible anymore.”
They looked at one other.
The snow swirled and eddied around them. Eli’s face, smoothing into resolution.
Just his face.
Just his eyes.
.
Epilogue
Alba’s head bobbed gently as she took in the familiar tavern scene – the levity of the big throng of people she knew so well; their stories, intrigues and inconsequential concerns.
“What have you got there then, Alba?”
Old Anatole took a seat beside her and looked at some letters on the counter.
“You remember that bloke from the corner of the room, the mopey one? This is from his wife,” chuckled Alba. “Just a little invitation to join them for a little holiday. Have a little paddle in the stream next to their house, pick strawberries, make jam – the wholesome country life. I have half a mind to join them,” she smiled.
“Good on you, girl,” said Anatole. “But don’t forget me and my missus – you’ve got to join me and her for a little holiday too, remember? In the hills? You promised! Here, take a pistachio.”
Alba muttered a thanks as she grabbed a handful of nuts from those trusty old hands of his.
“What’s the other letter?” he asked, nodding at the second sheath of papers on the counter.
Alba breathed slowly through her nose and moved her empty glass to the side.
“My son” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “I thought I’d lost him forever. I thought that he’d been sent far, far away. But the bloody state bungled it. They didn’t send him anywhere. He’s here! All these years he’s been in prison, here, and he’s served his time. He’s out tomorrow.”
She wiped a tear from her eye.
“I am allowed to pick him up. I am allowed to say sorry.”
Old Anatole slammed his fist on the counter in triumph and hugged Alba, her quivering, shaking, purple shawled frame in his big bear arms.
“Oh Alba, I’m so glad. This calls for a drink! What will you have?”
Alba shook her head.
“Nothing for me, thanks. Not tonight.”
And she gave Old Anatole a squeeze on the shoulder, wished Aditsan a nice evening, slid into her winter coat, and made her way into the amnesia snow.
Tom Miodrag 