When they reached Abeu Ivor, it was evident that the tiny city had been bombed. There were no human victims she could see. The ambulances had already come and gone. The first thing they did was to remove the bodies. You couldn’t get anything done with bodies around.
The strangest thing was how there were objects that were completely out of place.
There were objects that were never meant to be on the street.
There was a beautiful rocking horse in the middle of the road. Who did the horse belong to now? Had it escaped? Had it been liberated from the child who previously owned it? Was it now wild?
There was a doll whose crown was cracked in half. You couldn’t tell if she was attractive. She had no eyes to see. The eyes of the doll were still back in the house, witnessing the past. There was a chest of drawers. One of the three drawers was open, and there were ladies’ undergarments all over the ground. There was a single pair of blue silk underwear hanging from a branch of a tree. It was as though a piece of the sky had torn off on the branch.
They passed the sweet shop. The window had been blown out. There were bits of glass all over the ground. It made a crackling sound as they walked, as though the world were on fire.
There was nothing left of the town. It had been burnt into a pile of black rubble. The smell of the burning went so deep into Sofia’s lungs, it affected her too much. Everything she smelled for the next several weeks would reek of smoke. Even flowers.
There was no chance that she would find Celeste. Whoever was in this town had obviously had to leave. “Oh no, no, no, no, no,” cried Sofia. “I just wanted to see someone from home.”
She knew it was a hospital because it had a red cross in a white circle out front. Part of the eastern wall had collapsed, but otherwise, it was rather miraculously intact. It was clear the army had been there at some point in the recent past. There were tire marks all over the front. The wheels of all the vehicles had made barren whatever possible garden was there. Sofia did not believe the soldiers were returning. Not for a while. They had already ransacked the building. From what she could tell, their raison d’être was to go around laying waste to places.
“Let’s go into the hospital,” she said to the Goose. “Maybe we can find some food and blankets. If it’s empty, we can sleep there and continue to the Black Market in the morning.”
“Wherever it may be,” added the Goose, tired himself.
There was a swimming pool behind the hospital. It was rather pretty, with white and blue tiles all over the bottom. But it hadn’t been maintained. The surface was covered with leaves and a small pond of floating scum. And when she looked at the bottom, she could see there were leaves that had sunk down there. There was also a wheelchair that had perhaps fallen in during some shenanigans.
The Goose didn’t mind the state the pond was in at all. He climbed in almost immediately and seemed to fall into a stupor. As though he had forgotten for a moment all about Sofia and the war and had gone back to the simpler state of being a goose.
Sofia decided to go and look around inside. She had never been in such a large building unsupervised before. It seemed impossible that a building this size could be empty. She kept expecting a soldier to appear, or an abandoned patient with missing limbs and bandages on their eyes. And if it was empty and had truly been abandoned to its ghosts, what would they be like? Would she encounter a coughing ghost of a child who had died of influenza? Or the ghost of a woman who had died in childbirth, scouring the hospital for her baby? It gave Sofia chills.
“Stop it!” she whispered harshly to her imagination.
The first room she walked into was an amphitheatre. There were chairs around a small podium in the middle and glass cabinets on all the walls. The cabinet drawers contained the most remarkable specimens. This was what the human body was made up of. But it was kept on the inside. She came to a section with jars of fetuses. They looked like the drawings of trolls that were in the fairy tale book her mother had ripped apart. It was hard to accept that these babies had grown in the uteruses of women. They seemed to have grown underground with the roots of trees.
Perhaps these weren’t the fetuses of babies at all. Maybe they were the babies of trolls that had been discovered in the woods. They were killed but then kept in formaldehyde for the scientific community to examine.
Sofia called out to ask if there was anyone in the hospital, but there was no answer. The building did not have the anaesthetic smell of cleaning products that most hospitals had. Instead there was a musky smell of male perspiration.
Everywhere she wandered, there was evidence a large group of men had been there.
She walked into the cafeteria. There were dirty plates all over the tables. There was the stench of food that had rotted many days before. She opened the fridge door to encounter a putrid smell and heaps of mouldy food swarming with tiny bugs. She slammed the door shut so quickly, it seemed to shake the whole building.
She looked in the large fireplace to discover the fire had long since been put out. It didn’t radiate any heat at all.
She came across ashtrays that were overflowing with cigarette butts. She came across makeshift ashtrays too. She opened up what appeared to be a cookie tin and found it filled with cigarette butts.
The most evidence that men had been there was in the bathroom. There was a pile of newspapers in the Enemy language stacked up next to the toilet. She picked one up. From the photographs on the front page, it seemed as though they were having the very opposite headlines as her country. Elysian newspapers had sadder and sadder headlines. The Enemy’s paper had a photograph of people tossing their hats in the air, with triumphant grins on their faces.
She found a book on the edge of the sink. She walked to it immediately. There had been an order to destroy all the books. So she was surprised there was one hanging around where soldiers had been. As soon as she held it up, she saw it was in the Enemy language. There was a drawing of a man on a boat in gold on the cover. She had somehow assumed that since they had ordered all the books in her country destroyed, they also didn’t publish any of their own.
There was a pile of dog turds in the hallway. There had been dogs here.
She found a small wing of rooms on the top floor. This was a wing where patients with terminal conditions most likely once stayed.
The rooms had a more permanent feel. When patients entered into them, they were meant to stay there until the end of their lives. They were much more like rooms in a hotel than a hospital. They were quaint. They seemed very feminine.
Sofia walked into one. The wallpaper was a light pink with a pattern of roses that were a slightly darker pink. There was a round mirror on the wall. And there was a small dressing table underneath that had cat figurines on it and a rusted gold-plated box filled with makeup. The bed was still a hospital one, but it was disguised by a floral comforter and a pile of about ten pillows with frilly covers.
Even though the room managed to look very homey, it was still in a state of disorder. It was apparent that men had been staying in these more decorated rooms too. There was a pile of dirty plates next to the bed. And Sofia would find out in the coming days that there were more dirty dishes under the bed. Someone had been in the habit of eating in bed and then simply pushing the dishes underneath it and forgetting about them.
There was an abandoned pair of men’s army boots with holes in the soles in the corner of the room, and a man’s hat was on the windowsill. And there was a broken tobacco pipe on the nightstand. The mattress had a dent in the middle, as though an unexpectedly large man had lain down on it.
Sofia figured it was probably the more elite officers who had stayed in these rooms.
Whenever she saw a faucet, she was in the habit of turning it. At the beginning of their journey, water had still occasionally come out of them. But the infrastructure of this small city was completely destroyed, so it was unlikely any water would come out of the faucets in the hospital. She liked to turn them on just the same.
She turned on the faucet, and nothing at all came out. Then came a hollow, maniacal woman’s laugh. Sofia hurriedly shut the faucet. It seemed that laughter was far more horrific than sobbing during wartime.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said the Goose. “It’s perverse. Nothing good ever comes out of those pipes.”
They thought no one was in the hospital. Because there wasn’t the sound of anyone moving around. She called out loudly. There wasn’t a response from anyone. She and the Goose took a peek in each room. The beds were all disorderly and empty. There didn’t seem to be anyone there at all.
When the sun went down, she walked around the hospital to see whether there was a light on in any of the windows. She assumed every human was as addicted to light as she was. They wouldn’t be able to resist turning one on.
There was no evidence anyone else was in the building. She wasn’t sure why she continued checking. She felt a presence. But since she was in a hospital, she thought she might be feeling the presence of a ghost.
She took the little paper she had been guarding so carefully out of her pocket and placed it on the windowsill, where it might dry out in the morning sun. She fell asleep in the pink room.
Sofia woke up with a horrible start. There was something that felt very much like a tarantula crawling across her stomach. She shuddered with horror. She didn’t want to look but couldn’t help it. She seemed to need to have concrete proof. She sat against the wall, looking on in terror at the bedcovers, which were bundled up at the foot of the bed. She was thinking that perhaps she had imagined the sensation of a giant spider crawling across her body when she saw a figure sneak out on multiple legs from under the bedcovers.
But it wasn’t a spider at all. It was a small, delicate hand. It crawled out from under the covers. It stretched out, looking to touch someone, looking around for Sofia. It moved to the right and then the left. It went as far as its arm would allow it to extend. Then, reacting to its limitations, it paused. Of course it wasn’t going to remain immobile, but she quite hoped it would. The hand abruptly moved into reverse and disappeared under the blankets. When it appeared again, this time it brought the rest of the body with it.
It was a girl with strawberry-blond hair. Her hair was thin and straight but in a great tangle, especially on the back of her head, where it seemed to have formed into a giant mat. She was pale. Her eyes had huge bags underneath them. They were so puffy it seemed as though she couldn’t open them. When she smiled, her eyes squinted.
Like most people when interrupted in the middle of a deep sleep, she smiled broadly and hopefully. She smiled as though she were in love.
It took Sofia a moment to accept that she was a human being. She was so sure she was a fairy creature who had come from the woods.
“Celeste!” Sofia exclaimed.
Celeste was wearing a long white nightgown that went to her feet. She had on one silk sock, and her other foot was bare.
They all sat down in the small kitchen in their wing. To Sofia’s absolute delight, there were cans of food on the shelves. “The soldiers left quickly, but they are coming back. They always have food.”
Sofia opened a large can she had found on the kitchen shelves, and it was filled with a mushy spaghetti with sauce. She dumped it into a pot and put it on the gas stove. When the blue flame licked out of the range, she was so surprised she jumped. It was then that Celeste told Sofia and the Goose the story of how she came to live in the hospital. She had to be shaken awake three times during the story. Despite it being the story of the most harrowing adventure of her life, she seemed to lose interest in it. As she spun her noodles around her fork, it began to hypnotize her. Her head slipped, as though off her neck, and fell forward into the spaghetti. She sat up again abruptly. She continued the story, albeit with spaghetti sauce on the tip of her nose and her eyebrows.
“They barged into our apartment building. It was so hot that night that I was sleeping on my balcony. They didn’t see me there. They made my mother and father get dressed while they pointed guns at their heads. They had to change right in front of the soldiers. When I saw that, I knew it doesn’t matter if you get dressed during wartime. It doesn’t matter if you are naked.
“I climbed down the fire escape in my nightgown. I would have got away. Or I would have at least got away from the square and the audience. But I saw them take my mother out the door of the building. They were pushing her and yelling at her. I had never seen anyone treat my mother that way. Everybody loved my mother.
“I saw my mother being dragged into a truck. When I cried out, she turned and saw me and she looked horrified. And she yelled, Run, Celeste! Run! But that was all she told me. She didn’t say where I should run to, so I stayed right there. Everybody stopped and looked at me. I was in the square with my bare feet and my nightgown.
“A soldier came and asked me to get in his car. He said, You don’t want to see this ugliness. I’ll protect you. The thing I will never forget is the expression on my mother’s face when she saw me being taken away from her. I wish she hadn’t been upset. I wish she hadn’t seen it. That was the worst. Why do mothers have to get so upset?”
Celeste lit up a cigarette. She had taken up smoking, like the boys at Sofia’s grandmother’s house. She took a drag and held the cigarette between her fingers, forgetting about it as it burned down to the filter and singed her skin. The ashes fell into her noodles without her noticing or caring.
“I was very, very sad about my mother. But the soldiers who took me swore they were not the ones who had killed her. They said it was other soldiers. They said: There are bad soldiers and good soldiers. It must have been the bad soldiers who murdered my dear mother.
“I tried not to cry too much. I knew if I cried too much, they would get tired of me and throw me out. Then I would be murdered too. I cried for three days. They gave me some whisky in my milk. It was the only way I could fall asleep. The whisky made me fall asleep, but I felt even worse the next morning when I woke up. I thought I would die from missing my mother so much.
“I really started thinking I would have been better off dead. I would have much preferred to be murdered with my family. Then I would not have known what was happening to us all. Actually, I would have preferred to be shot around the dining room table. Then we would have all died with our heads in our bowls of soup.”
Sofia and the Goose took a moment to visualize this peculiar scene that Celeste had created for them. The symmetry of it was fascinating.
“That’s when one of the soldiers gave me medicine. He said I would be able to think about my mother as much as I wanted. But I wouldn’t be sad at all.”
She began taking the pills every day. It made her popular with the soldiers, who were also interested in seeing such a tiny girl knock herself out. They believed all girls should be inebriated all the time. They were much funnier in bed. It was lovely when they stumbled on their way home. They did very amusing things. They slid off their chairs and ended up on the ground. They sucked their cheeks in to look like a fish and then kissed you. They put your face in both palms and declared that you were beautiful. They said they loved you.
“I stayed with them for three months. I was meant to go with them when they left. But I fell into a deep sleep. I took more medicine than usual. I think I was asleep for three days straight. When I woke up, everyone was gone. I was so surprised. One of the officers was so in love with me. He said he wanted to marry me. He is coming back for me.”
“You don’t speak the same language. You can’t really know what he said,” Sofia reasoned.
“If they weren’t coming back, they would not have left their belongings.”
And later, Celeste showed her an operating room that was filled with large, unmanageable tanks of gasoline. It was like looking over the deck of a ship at an ocean of sharks. Their presence was so sinister to Sofia that she shut the door quickly.
In Sofia’s folklore book, there was a story about a woman who put fly tape all over her porch. There was a little skinny girl standing on the porch in the morning. Her feet were stuck to the floor. Celeste reminded Sofia of one of these fairies.
One of the objections to traditional fables in her country was that they all seemed to be about sex and rape; although no one could put their finger on where in the story the sexual act had actually happened. Her mother had particularly despised these stories. She didn’t understand how reading about the repeated degradation of girls was suitable entertainment for anybody. But Sofia found them comforting, especially now. These horrific fairy tales now seemed to have a context and to make sense. Especially since she was going through adolescence without her mother.
One day, Celeste spent the entire afternoon in the backyard with her arms spread to both sides. She told Sofia she wanted to know what it felt like to be a tree. But she could never be a tree. Sofia knew that staying in the hospital forever was not an option. The soldiers would obviously return. Each day she woke up feeling a little more desperate, knowing her luck might run out and the soldiers might arrive. And anyway, she needed to keep moving. She wanted to get to the Black Market. She wanted Celeste to come along with her. But she knew she couldn’t ask her just yet.
She looked at Celeste, with her arms spread, as though nothing in the world could touch her. But Sofia felt the opposite.
Sofia felt the constant sense of being followed. It was painful to be this aware of your surroundings.
Now she understood what those animals in the forest were feeling. Previously, she had considered them paranoid. They looked around, sensed nothing, and then scurried off. But now she knew what they were sensing.
She thought she could make out the heartbeat of a soldier nearby. It was ferocious. She knew it was the heart in her chest that was actually beating. But it was beating in a way it never had before. So she seemed to think it had to be the heart of a soldier that was rocking her insides.
She felt a different sort of coldness in the air. It smelled like copper. As though she were holding two fists of pennies up to her face. It was the smell of a male hand up against her mouth.
Every sound was amplified. The sticks beneath her shoes snapped. As though she were standing on ice that was cracking and she was about to fall through.
Celeste showed Sofia her medicine bag. She did not want to share the pills with anyone. She was as protective with the bag as a dog was with treats. But Sofia had no desire to touch the pills because she saw the effect they had on Celeste. She looked beatific when she gazed into the bag. It was an enormous bag that the few remaining pill bottles rolled around at the bottom of. Sofia couldn’t imagine Celeste carrying it if it were full. Sofia once gave her a plate, and it fell through Celeste’s hands and smashed on the floor. “I’m sorry. It was too heavy.” There were still a couple of full bottles among the empty ones. They could not last forever, although Celeste seemed unconcerned about that. She had become dependent on these pills while she was with the soldiers. They had been able to hold her captive with them. But now she had these magical pills and was free of the soldiers.
A peculiar state came over Celeste right after she got high. It was as though her brain were a toilet and she had just flushed it.
“Look at my hands.” She held them up for Sofia to look at. “Can you see through them?”
“No.”
“You can’t? They look like they are made of the same material as clouds. Like the steam on the surface of a mirror after you take a warm bath. I’m afraid to blow on them or they will disappear.”
She was standing with her hands against the window, and she was breathing steam on it. “I feel that if I have a perfect enough thought in my head, I will be able to exhale frost on the window.”
She was staring into her cup while sitting outside. When Sofia sat next to her, she held up the cup. There was a leaf floating in it. “I’m afraid to move. I want to take a sip, but I don’t want to upset the sea in my cup and have the ship sink and all its poor passengers slip away to an untimely death.”
Celeste was humming a song. It sounded so pretty and forlorn. It was familiar to Sofia and began to strike emotional nostalgic chords in her body. Sofia searched her brain for the composer. Then she realized all at once that Celeste was humming the tune to a cola commercial that used to play on the radio.
She came out of her room wrapped in a blanket. She spent the whole day wrapped in it as though she were in a cocoon. She categorically refused to take it off, despite the bottom being covered in dirt and debris.
There was something ethereal and transparent about Celeste. She always reminded Sofia of the moon when it came out during the day.
She nodded off on the couch with a cigarette between her fingers. Sofia hurried over and plucked it from her. There were already two cigarette burn holes in the beautiful light blue nightgown she was wearing. She remained with her hand out, as though preparing to take a drag. As though she had paused for a brief moment in a conversation to collect her thoughts. And the moment she opened her eyes, she would deliver something profound.
She nodded off everywhere, very much like a cat. She curled up in an armchair. The chair seemed like a large hand that was holding and admiring Thumbelina. She folded her limbs up, like the petals of a flower that were closing at night. And she would fall asleep in nooks and crannies. She once offered to wash the dishes. They then found her headfirst in the sink as though she were in the midst of being swallowed by a whale.
Sofia went to talk to Celeste, but when she entered the bedroom, she found her holding the Goose in her arms. Unlike the boys, Celeste showed great affection for the Goose.
“You are so beautiful. You remind me of laundry. When the laundry comes back, you hold it in front of your face and you can’t believe it. All the stains are gone away. You would never know a meatball fell on me. You would never know I had my period.
“I saw you dunk your head in the pool, and it was the most wonderful thing. It was as though I was at the Olympics. Do you remember that time the gymnast Lydia Meusla was expected to win bronze at the Olympics. And everyone was so excited that our country would finally win a medal. But then she slipped and broke her ankle. You reminded me of her when you stuck your butt up in the air like that.”
Sofia got very worried when Celeste began to make a fuss about his neck. She knew it was his greatest desire to be told he had all the attributes of a swan.
“Your neck is so beautiful. It’s so long. I wish I could have a long neck like that. I’ve been told I have a long neck. But it’s not like yours. You have a neck that was meant to wear pearls. My mother always said I had to hold my head up high so it would accentuate my neck. But my neck is nothing like yours. It’s extraordinary. Is it longer than goose necks should be? When I first saw you, I was certain you were a swan.”
The Goose stretched his neck upwards as she spoke and rocked from one foot to the other, intoxicated by Celeste’s compliments. Obviously, she knew just the words he delighted in hearing.
Sofia was worried that were Celeste to leave, the Goose might decide to go with her. When she could not find the Goose, she would go to Celeste’s room and often find the two of them napping together. She thought Celeste did nap like an animal. So that was perhaps why the Goose wanted to do it with her. Once, Sofia walked into the bathroom. Celeste and the Goose were both sleeping in the bathtub, curled around each other like twins in a womb.
It was odd to her that the Goose seemed so relaxed around Celeste. She asked him about it when he was waddling out of the swimming pool. He shook his body, and an arc of water droplets spun around his head like a halo.
“She reminds me of the Goose Girl, who was tasked with looking after the geese on the farm. They both had the same je ne sais quoi. The same insouciance.”
“I can put up with you saying almost anything, but I cannot bear to hear you speak in French.”
“À ton goût,” the Goose said as he shook all the water off his feathers.
Sofia couldn’t really blame the Goose for being smitten with Celeste, as she was too. As each day went by, she became more and more attached to her, and frightened about being separated and being on her own without a human companion again.
The Goose began to elect to stay in the hospital more often when Sofia went to scavenge in the town. Although she was a very wealthy child from an important family, she often remarked that people seemed to favour the delightful lower-class Celeste above her. When they walked down the street together, people called out joyfully to Celeste. A delivery boy took his hands off the handlebars and put both to his mouth, kissed them, and then flung his kiss at Celeste. Celeste reached out with her hand, snatched the kiss out of mid-air with her fist, and put it in her pocket. When she walked into the butcher shop, the owner opened his fat arms to her, as though she were his granddaughter.
Celeste was never worried about the future. That was what made her such an enticing child. She lived in the moment. What was more beautiful than being a girl who lived in the moment? It was like watching a pigeon hopping around in traffic. Or a cat darting across rooftops.
But Sofia was constantly preoccupied with the future. She knew they could not stay in the hospital.
Even the cans of food were getting low. She had come to realize how fast cans of food disappeared when that was all you were living off. They emptied so quickly, leaving behind cans like bullet casings on the floor. Even though she was doing most of the eating on her own. She ate far more than Celeste, who, although she had once had a ravenous appetite, now seemed to exist happily on air.
Celeste seemed not at all concerned about the food running out. Sofia went hunting for other cans. It was somewhat less daunting than fishing or hunting for hares. At least there would be no fighting when she chanced upon them. It would only be unconditional surrender.
She tucked her paper into her coat pocket. She dared not go outside without it on her. Sofia quite liked going through the debris of the town. The village had not been completely pillaged and picked through yet. She stopped at a large house without a wall. She was so preoccupied with examining the labels on old cans of beer that she didn’t hear anyone approach until a voice spoke up.
“She’s death herself, the girl who lives up there. I think even the Enemy were afraid of her. That’s why they didn’t take her with them.”
Sofia sat up to see an older woman with a large scab on her nose and missing teeth. She had a large backpack filled with objects she was scavenging too.
“She was up there, you know,” the woman continued. “A lot of us saw her. Even with all that was going on, she wasn’t hard to miss. She was standing up on top of the roof, and she was watching everything. And she was still watching everything. And she was still watching everything. And she was still watching everybody get killed. There wasn’t any feeling in her at all. Now that’s a sign of the devil, isn’t it?”
“She’s not the devil! She was our maid from when we lived in the Capital.”
“Well, if you’re vouching for her, stay away from me! I don’t want nothing to do with you. They say it’s you lot from the Capital who started this war with your arrogant ways. But I’d move on before the soldiers come back this way. They have no mercy on this town.”
Sofia was so disturbed by this information, she forgot to ask the woman for directions to the Black Market. She would know something about it. Then Sofia could get away from here. She had to get away from here.
She was surprised when her mother first told her that the Black Market was not always in the same place. It was like a travelling circus. The Capital circus toured all over the country before returning home. Naturally, they travelled so others had access to them. But they also travelled in order to collect the best performers in the country. The ones who hadn’t had the wherewithal to come to the Capital themselves.
Sofia knew this because every time she saw the circus again, it would include a strange performer from the far-flung regions of the country.
Once there was a girl about her age who wore a sparkling white leotard and rode her bicycle across a high wire.
They had to travel to faraway places to find poor people who had been neglected in this peculiar manner. No mother had worried about this child dying. Sometimes neglect can help you discover your potential.
The Black Market was like this. It travelled in order to become richer. She wished for a moment the Black Market would just come to her. Or come for Celeste at least, and turn her into a dancer and not a monster.