While staying at her grandmother’s house with the boys, Sofia reflected on how little time she had spent apart from her mother in her whole life. Before, when she went into the bathroom in the morning, she would walk over a soft carpet of tights and underwear that her mother had kicked off messily before getting into the bathtub, and that no one had got around to picking up yet. It was like moss on the floor. If her mother were an animal, Sofia would say she was in her natural habitat. Her mother’s perfume and cigarettes were still absorbed in her dress. She missed the wonderful stink of home.
The boys would try the radio every day, to see if there was information about the war that was going on beyond their purview. Sofia was afraid of hearing her mother’s voice on the air, but there was the same radio play on a loop all day and every day. It was clear the Enemy had taken over the airwaves, preventing any news from being transmitted to people in this country, and also neighbouring ones.
“They’ve gone too far,” Balthazar said. “The other countries don’t know what is happening. They don’t understand about the internment camps. They don’t know about the executions. When word gets out about the atrocities being perpetrated against a pacifist, educated people, they will come to rescue us. When the war is over, the first thing to do is make immediate friends with the liberators.”
Sofia fell quiet. Her mother’s book would have relayed to the outside world what a precious culture was being destroyed. If she had been able to get it out of the country. The world couldn’t put faces to the people. The world had forgotten how civilized they were. Her mother had spent so many years working on making the country appear civilized and modern and forward-thinking. And wasn’t it exactly for this moment? Wasn’t it for a moment like this? Wasn’t it so that others would see them as human and come and rescue them?
The boys slept together in her grandmother’s enormous bed. It was an old-fashioned bed that had been passed down for several generations. It was meant for large families to sleep in all together. But her grandmother had only one child, and her husband had left her. So she had always slept in the giant bed by herself. When Sofia was little, one of her favourite things was to jump into bed with her grandmother. The mattress was so soft, and the purple comforter was stuffed with goose feathers. You would feel warm almost instantly when you got into it.
It was strange to see the boys in her grandmother’s bed. They sometimes passed out fully clothed. And other times they were naked.
Balthazar had chosen those of her grandfather’s clothes he felt most comfortable in and proceeded to wear that outfit every day. He began to smell rather rancid. Especially since he slept in his clothes. Sometimes simply hanging his jacket from the bedframe before flopping into the bed. But he didn’t care what the others thought of his smell, since he could not smell himself.
Abelard dressed rather extravagantly. He was wearing a purple jacket that had belonged to her grandmother and a pair of black trousers that had belonged to her grandfather. He had tied a silk scarf in the most dramatic fashion around his neck. He had pushed his blond hair straight up into the air. He was very vain about his hair. He said they ought to invent a sort of blondish oil paint and call it Abelard Yellow.
At night he said a prayer by the side of the bed that his hair would never fall out of his head. “I need my hair because I want to be able to play twenty-five-year-old men until my fifties.” Sofia was confused about what god he was praying to. It seemed alarming. He had grown up in an orphanage. That was why he was so versed in the old ways.
He was magnificent during a game of charades one evening. “Show her some of your impressions,” Balthazar said. “Surprise us with one of your animals.”
Abelard began to gallop and neigh around the living room, in what was clearly a rendering of a horse. It was so realistic. It was uncanny. It was almost as though he had been possessed by the spirit of a horse. The other children knew exactly what he was trying to be. But they refrained from guessing because they didn’t want the performance to end.
Sofia was stricken by how real his imitation was. It was as though he had suddenly transformed, as if by magic, into a horse. She found it unnerving. But she had always had a fancy for theatre—a propensity to suspend her disbelief.
When they went back to their room, the Goose grew immediately more relaxed. He flung himself onto the bed like a shirt tossed off a hanger. He let his neck hang over his body. The Goose would go over the events of the day. But he would spin them in the most negative way. He didn’t see anything worthy in either of the boys’ personalities. The Goose gave a very cutting analysis of Abelard’s performance when they were in bed together.
“Abelard is preposterous. Someone needs to tell him he has no talent. He is embarrassing himself. Imagine he does begin performing for the liberating army? He will embarrass the whole country. They’ll think we don’t know anything about the thespian arts.”
“What does it matter if he is untalented? But I don’t think he is.”
One afternoon, Abelard brought out a clarinet that he had found in a closet. “Who knows how to play?” he yelled.
Sofia held the clarinet to her mouth. She began to play a very simple children’s tune they all knew from when they were little.
The Goose had never heard anyone play the clarinet before. The Goose was shocked that she was able to create such a pretty tune. It sounded so familiar to him. He felt so raw and emotional. It was the language of geese, but so polished and sweet.
He wondered why he had tried to say anything in human tongue. He had thought it was more sophisticated. Because he alone, among all the other geese, was able to speak human, he elevated it in his mind. But now he heard his mother tongue and realized how beautiful it was. He opened his mouth and began to sing along in his own language.
The others began to laugh and look at him with delight and amazement. But also condescension. And when he noticed the hint of ridicule, he immediately stopped singing. He clamped his mouth shut and moved to the corner. Noticing the Goose’s pain, Sofia instantly stopped playing her song.
“Perhaps when the war is over, we can return to my farm and you can play that tune to the geese there. I can assure you, you will have an appreciative audience. Although who’s to say which of the old geese will be there. Every day is a war for me. You wonder who has disappeared. Which of your friends have been killed. Do you realize that being an animal always implies being in an occupied country? You don’t even have the slightest idea about what my day-to-day reality is like. You couldn’t begin to fathom it. You have no idea what it is like to wonder whether one of your very best friends has been turned into a sandwich.”
Sofia looked at him. She started to laugh. A shout of laughter burst out of her—as though she were drinking laughter, had choked on it, and had spit it out. Then she began laughing in earnest.
She could tell the Goose didn’t find it funny. She tried to restrain herself. But the very act of trying not to laugh made her want to laugh even more. There were times when she forgot the Goose was actually a goose!
Balthazar was somehow excused from doing any housework. One day he stood up and announced, “I have to go work on my shot.”
Sofia’s blood ran cold when he came out of the bedroom with a gun in his hand. She was certain he was about to shoot her or the Goose. But instead he began moving around the living room, taking figurines off the shelf. He headed outside, and Abelard and Sofia both ran after him.
He placed a porcelain ballerina on the fence and walked about fifteen feet back from it. He aimed. Sofia didn’t say anything. She thought the figurine had a chance. She was so lithe and skinny. There seemed to be no possibility the bullet would hit her. She would whisk out of the way. A bullet is so heavy and lugubrious and dull and stupid. How could it approach and destroy something so pretty? Even though she was frozen in porcelain, she always seemed to be dancing. She was on tiptoe, frozen in place—moving—and she would possibly dodge out of the bullet’s way. But the bullet struck her violently, severing all her limbs at once.
Sofia went and picked up the pieces of the porcelain statue. She put them in her pockets quickly. She intended to glue them back together. She wondered what state of mind the ballerina was in now that she was shattered in so many pieces. Any broken bone was particularly devastating to a ballerina. But to have every part of you broken. How must that feel? To be holding your nose in your hand. To be looking at your foot and see that three of your toes are gone. To have to pick up your cheek from the ground and stick it back into your face like a puzzle piece!
Ballerinas were already hopelessly neurotic. A friend of Sofia’s mother’s was always threatening to kill the launderer, who she was convinced shrank her leotard and had ruined a performance and got her a bad review in a newspaper while on tour.
Balthazar proceeded to massacre the other figurines. Sofia found herself asking him where he had got the gun.
“On the Black Market,” he answered.
“Where is it? Is it nearby?”
“Who knows. It was on the side of a road. We weren’t looking for it. We just drove and came upon it.”
“So south of here?”
“Yes, south of here. Who wants to know? Are you building a case against me for when the liberators come?”
Sofia hurried to her grandfather’s old desk. She picked up the large pad on top, stuck it under her arm, and grabbed a pen. She walked back to Balthazar. She sat on a large rock near him and began to sketch the territory around her as best she could. She had a map of the city on her wall at home that she had made herself. She drew maps of all the neighbourhood spots she knew. She was quite good at it, she found. She put in all the little details. Even her mother looked at the maps and said, “That’s unusually concise.”
When she was done her new map, she held it up to Balthazar. “So the Black Market, might be on any of the roads south of here. Might it be the Lorgus Pass?”
“The Black Market! What in the world do you know about the Black Market? You look too young to be able to go to the Black Market.”
“I’m only two years younger than you.”
“Well, it isn’t about age, is it? It’s about maturity. I am far beyond my years, which anyone would be able to see.”
“I’ve gone to the Black Market in the Capital myself.”
“Liar.”
“I know exactly how to negotiate.”
“Liar.”
“I’ve carried items from the Black Market on the metro.”
“Liar.”
“I’ve carried them right past guards.”
“Liar.”
“Even though they smelled.”
“Liar.”
“And the dogs were barking at me because they smelled the sausages.”
“Liar.”
She stamped her foot. She had finished her story. She was determined to get to the end of her lie once she had started it. He had taken the wind out of her with his assertion that she was a liar, and each additional sentence felt harder and harder. They sounded ludicrous even to her own ears. You can believe your own lies only if the person you are telling them to believes them too.
“It’s for the deviants,” Balthazar said smiling, clearly including himself as one. “What in the world could a person like you want from the Black Market? It’s where adults go to find what they have lost and are missing. Coffee and alcohol and dirty pictures. And weapons and drugs. And pretty undergarments for developed bodies. If you know what I mean. Tell me what you have to trade on the Black Market, and I will tell you where it is. You can’t go empty-handed.”
It had not occurred to her that even if she made it to the Black Market and they had her mother’s book, they would expect something in exchange for it.
“Well, if you weren’t so clueless and stopped destroying things in the house, I would have items to trade at the Black Market. Those ballerinas are each worth more money than your parents make in a month.”
As if on cue, Balthazar aimed and shot the last solo ballerina. Sofia’s body jolted when he did it.
“Why did you do that?” she yelled.
Balthazar gestured for Sofia to follow as he strode into the house. He walked into the kitchen and then bent down beneath the sink and emerged with a wooden box. Sofia recognized the chest of silver utensils immediately. It had been a wedding gift to her mother from her father’s side of the family. They were made of Elysian silver. Balthazar opened the lid. Clearly some of the utensils were missing. They were trading this family heirloom away piece by piece.
Sofia instinctively reached for the box, but Balthazar slammed it shut, nearly crushing one of her fingers. And then he placed his elbows on it and looked at her with a smirk.
“Well, I think you should give me at least a tablespoon,” Sofia said.
“Sorry, these utensils need to be traded for arms. You cannot trade them for lipstick or perfume. That is a waste. If you were an older, more attractive woman, I would give you a spoon for that. But it won’t do you any good at all. Trade your goose for whatever it is you seem desperate for.”
Sofia looked around the house. Her eyes fell upon a painting. It was a small oil painting of a nude young woman by Arturo Zersat. His works were famous because he went into brothels and painted teenage prostitutes. All the elite wanted to have one on their wall.
“That painting is the object that is worth the most money in the house.”
“It isn’t even good.”
Sofia walked over to the painting. She had never thought much of it before, but now, while looking at it, she felt she was looking at herself. There was an uncanny resemblance. She was the same age as the young girl in the painting. The girl had a sultry look on her face, but her body had not yet reached puberty. There was something of her conundrum that Sofia related to. She stood in front of the painting and positioned her body to match that of the girl.
For the first time, Sofia realized how a piece of art changes every time you approach it. There is an age at which you suddenly become aware of the hidden subtexts that are right in front of your eyes but still entirely invisible. There was sex and darkness everywhere.
Was the painting vulnerable or violent? She could not say. It was the power and arrogance of victimhood. She imagined how terrifying an army of such girls would be. She would join them. They would kill together.
Perversity is an acquired taste, her mother had once told her. And Sofia internalized her mother’s comment, right at that moment. Because it was truly the most beautiful and valuable item in the house.
And there was no way this would not fetch a pretty penny on the Black Market.
“You can keep your spoons,” she said haughtily.
She went into her mother’s room. She pulled one of her mother’s childhood books off the shelf, opened it, and stuck her head inside and inhaled.
She wished she had her mother’s manuscript now. She would arise immediately, fully formed from the page. That was the power writers had. When you read them, the author was right there with you, sharing their ideas. As though they had been invited over for tea.
Her mother would appear before her. In a beige coat and a fur collar. She would be smoking a cigarette. How Sofia missed the smell of her mother’s tobacco, which had perfumed everything in the apartment. It sank deep into the chairs and the pages of books. Even her body. Her skin and hair and clothes always carried the scent.
If she had the manuscript, Sofia was certain she could hold it up to her nose and smell the cigarettes on the pages. And were she to read the words, swirls of smoke would surround her.
How she wished she could read those words. She would choose a particularly severe passage. One that condemned women for not seizing their own destiny, for being terrified of their own independence, and for waiting for men to come rescue them from their lives.
When Sofia returned to the living room, Balthazar looked at her with a loaded sneer. She didn’t know what it meant, but then he looked over her shoulder.
It was as though she read his mind because she turned and looked at the Zersat painting. The girl in the painting, who had thought herself so defiant, who gave a look that indicated no one could touch her, whose body seemed possessed of sexuality that was unknowable, had been defiled. The boys had scribbled a coarse patch of pubic hair on her body with a black pen.
It changed everything about the painting. The girl seemed trapped and miserable. She looked tawdry and disillusioned. She looked like someone the Enemy would drag out onto the street and shoot in the back of the head. They had spoiled a masterpiece.
Sofia turned and saw that Balthazar was pleased. He enjoyed watching people react to his cruelty. It was the point of it. To see the pain he was capable of causing. It was like an artist stepping back and admiring his own work. That was what he thrived on. He had developed a taste for it during the war. If he had lived in the Capital, he surely would have been a collaborator.
Sofia felt as though she too had been defiled in some way. She felt like a broken thing. An insect. A speck of mud. A monster. A deformation. Someone who should be in hiding. Someone without worth. A person who ought to be rubbed out with the eraser at the end of a pencil. He made her feel unworthy.
It was as though she were less than the boys. Because she was a girl. But also because she was unattractive to them. They were unable to see any worth in her. She was a distorted, imperfect male. If she were older and more beautiful, she would have some sort of power and dignity. But they had no interest in her as a sexual being. So they did not know the point of her.
Abelard was under the table. She loathed that. He was a coward. He was equally guilty, but he wanted to act as though he wasn’t. She considered Abelard to be in the position of all the civilians in the Enemy country. Who would arrive and move into their homes. To reap the spoils of war without feeling complicit in any way. They closed their eyes. They gave no orders. But they were the ones who profited off the war.
Their apartments would be occupied by people who believed themselves pure and untouched by violence.
Sofia looked from Balthazar to Abelard. “You have gone too far. You have destroyed a masterpiece. You will be tried for treason when the war ends. You will be hanged as war profiteers and collaborators. I have many connections in the Capital, and you can rest assured I will turn you in.”
With that, she stormed off to her room.
“Are you frightened?” Sofia asked the Goose as they were lying in bed.
“I am always frightened. I am always in a state of abject terror. Why should right now be any different?”
“Don’t be. You’ll see, the Black Market will be wonderful.”
“For you, but what is in it for me?”
Sofia whispered into the Goose’s ear all the marvellous things she hoped to find at the Black Market.
There would be many things for sale. She would not want any of these. She only wanted her mother’s manuscript. But she couldn’t help dreaming about the other delightful items that might be up for sale.
She liked the idea they still existed somewhere. And even if the Capital was destroyed, it hardly mattered. Because all these things continued to exist, somewhere, wandering around in the country. Like a circus caravan that would unpack its trunks of marvels for children in various spots.
They would have a jewellery box. And when it opened, the sound of her doorbell would come out. There would be a tambourine, and when you shook it, the sound of girls laughing on the bus would erupt from it. There would be a salt shaker that made the sound of her father’s wristwatch when she held it up to her ear. There would be a perfume that smelled like the bakery next door to her apartment in the Capital. There would be a crystal that captured the way the dawn looked in the city.
There would be postcards of the Capital and its stars. And it would be as though they were sent from a faraway country, known as the past. Was there ever any road that brought you to the past? If there was, it would be treacherous and difficult to find. Almost impossible, some would say. And yet, that was where she intended to go.