It took some pressure from Sofia for Celeste to talk about what exactly had happened in Abeu Ivor.
“The town was occupied, but then a garrison of our soldiers arrived to liberate it. I was so surprised to see them, I called out, My God, we thought you had all disappeared into thin air.
“My Enemy officer told me that they once came up against a troop of our soldiers. And they all disappeared into the woods. And they never came out. They sent soldiers to follow them, and THEY never came out of the woods. Since then, his men have been superstitious about the woods and don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I said that in the olden days, Elysians believed that trees could come to life. And they would take the form of people, but odd people, who appeared only when death was near or you were in mortal danger. But that really, nobody believes that anymore. And he looked concerned when I told him that.
“But of course, the Enemy had the advantage because the hospital was up here on the hill like a fortified castle. They just went ahead and put missiles up on the roof. And they launched them on the soldiers. And the whole city below. They blew everything up. Nobody stood a chance. I tried not to see it. I kept the curtains in my room closed. I had to plug my ears too. There was so much banging. Louder than the bombing in the Capital. Much louder.”
“Where are they now?” Sofia asked.
“The Enemy soldiers had to join the procession heading towards the Capital. Our soldiers—those who were still alive—ran off to somewhere. I do hope your mother was already dead by the time they arrived. I heard a lot of mothers took poison when they found out their children hadn’t crossed the border. It would be sad to know your mother was shot in the head. She was so pretty.”
The thought of someone she knew well being shot to death seemed to evoke only a fleeting sense of melancholy in Celeste. As though it made her suddenly wistful for an easier time. Sofia realized it was because she had seen her own mother being taken off to be killed. It had made her immune to death. Everything paled next to that horror. She wasn’t afraid of her own death either.
Celeste, it seemed, was a girl who could not live without her mother. Maybe that was a weakness that came with having a mother who was too sweet and spoiled her with nonsense and affection. Sofia knew the way she was raised made it impossible for her to act the way Celeste was now.
She would not lie about and let herself mope around because her mother was dead. Her mother didn’t believe in such extravagant shows of affection. She had raised her daughter to be a survivor. She had raised her to be a soldier. She had raised her to know when she should put herself first. Sofia knew there was a point when she would have to leave Celeste behind.
“What happened to your feet?”
Sofia was surprised she didn’t immediately snatch them away so Celeste couldn’t look at them. She wanted Celeste to see them.
“It’s from walking in fancy shoes.”
“Your feet are so interesting—I could look at them for hours. They don’t look real. They look like a monster’s feet. A tiny, adorable monster. I wish I had a bronzed pair of your feet. So I could put them on a shelf as a way to always remember you.”
Celeste then reached into her pocket and took out two slim blue silk stockings. She pulled each one onto Sofia’s feet. When Sofia looked down, she believed they looked lovely.
“Where did you get these stockings? I thought they were impossible to find.”
In times of war, stockings are always the first thing that goes missing.
“I got them at the Black Market, of course.”
Sofia let out a gasp at the mention of the Black Market. She felt her heart fall off a windowsill and plummet ten storeys. “Can you tell me how far from here it is?”
“To be honest, I can’t be sure. It was a church in the middle of nowhere. Isn’t it peculiar how everything is in the middle of nowhere now?”
“Nothing is in the middle of nowhere. What road did you go down?”
“The one that leads down the hill. The winding one.”
She touched the window as she pointed to the road. She was looking at the window as though it were a painting and not something to look through.
It took some level of prying and cajoling to get any concrete details about the Black Market from Celeste. It made Sofia feel sneaky, but she persisted. She walked up behind Celeste and began stroking her hair and speaking in the soft voice of a kind elementary school teacher.
“Try to remember what you saw on the way. It’s fun. It’s like a sort of game. Lie down and close your eyes. If you imagine some place in your mind and you concentrate on it long enough, you end up being right there, as though you are in a dream.”
Celeste found this to be an appealing activity. She was generally averse to anything that involved getting out of bed. So she welcomed this activity, which required her to lie in bed and close her eyes.
“Shall we go to the same place, then?” asked Celeste, having already closed her eyes.
Sofia could immediately tell from the thickness of the air in the room that Celeste had fallen asleep. She breathed the air in deeply, and when she exhaled it, it was filled with the air of her dreams. It was a thick, swampy air. The ground was soft in her dreams. Your feet sank into the ground as though it were mud. It didn’t matter if you were standing on a cement surface or a carpet in a living room.
Sofia moved her shoulder gently against Celeste’s. Celeste’s body roused. It was like pulling an unconscious drowning body out of the water and resuscitating it.
“Oh, right,” Celeste said. “I was somewhere else for a second.”
“We got into one of the cars. Look out the window of the car and tell me what you see.”
“I see trees. So many big trees. I don’t think I have ever seen trees that big before. If we were to stand on either side of a tree and wrap our arms around the trunk, we wouldn’t be able to hold hands.”
“That must be the Ancient Southern Forest Ridge. I knew it was near this town.”
“To get to the Black Market, we continued down that road. There was nothing but trees. Oh, wait. There was an unusual bridge we crossed. There were statues of two giant green women holding hands. And our car drove underneath them. Everyone in the car remarked on how beautiful they were. Which surprised me because I didn’t think they liked the things we built, since they spent so much time blowing them up.”
“That’s Moldia.”
“It was Moldia. It was all destroyed. We drove through it. Then we continued down that road. I don’t think I saw anything else that wasn’t broken on that road. But at the end of it we came to a green church.”
“It was painted green?”
“Yes. It was very small. And it was made out of wood. It was painted white. And there were leaves painted on the front of it. At first I thought it was ivy that was covering the front of the church. But when I got there, I looked and saw the leaves were painted on it.”
“Moldia was once very religious. They decorate their churches with flowers and plants there. It’s to commemorate the Virgin Mother.”
“You know so much about everything, Sofia. That’s because it was important for your mother. Did you know that Clara paid for my ballet lessons?”
“Oh!” said Sofia, who had never understood how Celeste had been able to afford those classes.
“My mother would take me to the classes on Saturdays, and afterwards we would eat ice cream. It was wonderful for both of us. I took ballet classes for two years at the Children’s Conservatory. The one next to the library? I know some exquisite ballet moves. I can present them later.”
Sofia’s little map no longer fit all the details. She found a large piece of thick paper in one of the storage rooms. She unfolded it on a large table. The paper was as big as she was. She could lie on the paper, outline her body with a pencil, and then cut it out. She wondered whether she needed a map as large as the country itself. She worked on it with a charcoal pencil she had found in an operating room. Celeste sat down next to her and ran her fingertip along one of the rivers.
Celeste wiped her finger under her nose. It left a smudge, like a black moustache. Sofia was too shy to tell her she had a moustache on her face and should wipe it off. When they returned to their room and Sofia went to the bathroom, she was surprised when she saw her reflection. She, too, had a black moustache under her nose.
It was easy for Sofia to assume that Celeste would forget about the ballet presentation. She sometimes forgot what she was talking about in the middle of a sentence. It was as though her thought had popped like a soap bubble. But to the surprise of Sofia and the Goose, she arrived in the visitors room, where they were sitting that evening, in a costume of sorts.
She was wearing a pale blue bathing suit over a pair of lavender leotards with holes in them. She had tied a curtain panel from the bathroom around her waist like a skirt. It was a peculiar outfit indeed. But what was most peculiar was that she had gone to such an effort.
She stood there, perfectly erect with her feet turned out to the side. She turned her face down slightly. She put her arms akimbo and placed her fingertips prettily on her hips. They all waited for what came next for a long couple of minutes. But Celeste remained frozen in place.
Sofia jumped up and hurried over to wind the music box. She put it on. There was the scratching noise. As though someone was trapped in a coffin and trying to claw their way out. Or a mouse was trying to make a hole in a cereal box. And then a piano note filled the room. Like feeling a single drop of rain. Sofia put her palm out and looked up at the ceiling, whereupon there was a soft sudden downpour of notes.
Celeste began to rock her body back and forth while leaping from foot to foot. It was a pas de chat. A move that seemed eminently appropriate for her. She pranced about on her toes in a very small circumference. If she had taken ballet another several years, she would have been permitted a larger circumference. She then put one foot forward, positioned her arms in front of her. As though she were reaching out to hug someone who was retreating from her, as though on a boat, and she then executed a pirouette. Her legs clicked together like knitting needles.
Celeste was by no means a professional dancer of any kind, or especially talented. But that day, she showed them something ephemeral. She embodied ordinary fleeting girlhood. She was born to be carefree. She was born to laugh at other people’s jokes. She was born to leap screaming off of diving boards. She was born to read romantic novels on the bus and almost miss her stop. There was something about her spirit, the spirit of every girl, that was so, so beautiful.
This was what they imagined she was like when she was isolated in the square that day. When she tiptoed out into the square wearing a nightgown and in bare feet. She had given a similar dance performance.
Now she also seemed to understand how beautiful she was. This was why the officers had lifted her up and carried her off, and had taken her to a place where they could dress her up and touch her body. Why they decided they could not, would not shoot her in the head. It was why they decided they wanted to keep her like a pet. So they could look and look and look at her.
That was when her personality was still lit up.
Looking at Celeste, Sofia couldn’t help but be reminded of the porcelain figurines Balthazar had lined up on the fence for execution.
Later, Sofia chanced upon the Goose at the end of the hallway. He was so lost in thought he didn’t notice her. He was swaying around with his wings in the air and his neck winding around strangely. She could not make heads or tails of what he was doing. But then he began to spin, and she realized he was dancing ballet. In imitation of what Celeste had been doing earlier. He tried to stand on the tip of his webbed foot, but then stumbled and fell to the floor. He sat on the floor like a ballerina taking a moment offstage—at the side of a class.
She wondered whether Celeste had in fact given him some of her pills. But she wasn’t sure a goose could survive pills that had been invented for human pain. It seemed more likely the Goose had got high through osmosis. She did not have a complete knowledge of the way a goose’s mind worked. They moved in flocks. And when they were in a flock, they moved as one body. They shared parts of their brains with one another. She thought it must be what soldiers felt like. They never quite knew if they were pulling the trigger of their own volition, or if it was the group doing it.
“We have to leave before the Enemy returns,” Sofia said to the Goose, hoping he had not lost sight of their mission.
“Oh, what a bore. We are living in a grand mansion and we have patrons. It is so comfortable and joyous. All we have to do in return is be our pretty little selves.”
“I feel as though no one here is remembering the early work of my mother. She said girls have been conditioned to believe they have no agency, so they always turn to men to solve their problems. But solving problems is what makes a girl a person. We can’t call on men to save us. Or we will never be real people.”
“I remind you again, this is the woman who sent you off on a train to be murdered,” said the Goose. “Whether she knew that you were being sent off to be murdered is hardly the point. Whatever the intent, had you stayed on that train, you would be dead. So your mother is homicidal and does not have your best interests at heart. Let’s go with the prevalent philosophy in this hospital.”
“My mother was opposed to thinking as a group. She always said you have to make sure you are thinking your own thoughts, and not those of someone else.”
“Oh, who could ever keep up with your mother’s standards? She probably simply said these outrageous things to pay the bills. Why not take a moment and just relax? Take the easy route. It wears the body down. We are good.”
“We have to eventually move on. What about the Black Market and the Capital? And your bottle of ink and your manifestos?”
“Oh, Sofia, don’t you know dreams make a person absolutely miserable in life? You can’t enjoy today because you’re worried what effect it will have on tomorrow. Why? Tomorrow never actually comes, Sofia. Have you considered that?”
Celeste began to run out of her drugs. She became twisted up inside. She seemed to be desperate for something. She had a look on her face as though she’d had a striking realization. As though she had remembered her child was all alone waiting for her at a train station and she had no way to get to her. She looked as though she was afraid of all the things that ordinary people were concerned about during wartime but that had never bothered her before.
Sofia had believed Celeste was immune to what was happening in the country. But now that she was sober, it became clear how volatile Celeste actually was. It made sense she had become addicted to sleeping pills. She could hardly bear this reality.
The cruellest thing about withdrawal was the realization that one had to go through life wide awake and conscious of what was happening.
Celeste’s problems returned to her brain, one by one, like birds returning after being frightened. They settled down and began picking at her thoughts again. Like tiny drills trying to hit a genuine source of anxiety. One that might bubble over the whole day. All she wanted was to be able to experience that numbness once again. It was as though she wanted to pour bleach on her brain to erase all the dirty thoughts.
Celeste left the hospital later that day. Sofia kept waiting for her to come back. She couldn’t figure out where she had gone. Celeste never went for long walks. She was too frightened by the prospect of having to walk all the way back. She didn’t like to be in the sun very long because it would burn her skin and make her feel dizzy.
Sofia went outside looking for her. She found her sitting on a large stone. She was weeping profusely. It looked as though she was doing all the crying she had put aside for the past months. Sofia hadn’t thought Celeste was capable of these intense, enormous emotions. As though her sadness were a frozen ice cap, and as it melted, there was a huge flood of sorrow.
She looked different after crying like that. It was as though she was more alive.
When a newly sober Celeste first began to tell her stories about the acts she had engaged in with the soldiers, Sofia felt sick to her stomach. She felt the way she did when she had dreams where she was naked. Vulnerable. And horrified. She was too young to hear about these things. Even though she was now well acquainted with mass murder, she should still be sheltered from such stories.
It seemed impossible that she would ever have to engage in sex. Or at least it was so far ahead in the future, it was inconceivable to even worry about it.
She and Celeste got under the covers together. Celeste liked to wrap her arms around Sofia when she was talking. She whispered the stories into Sofia’s ear. She became very tactile whenever she was talking about sex. She held Sofia’s hand up in front of her face. She pulled on each finger as though it were a petal on a flower. Another time they were lying next to each other and Celeste took a strand of her own hair and began moving it over Sofia’s face as though it were a paintbrush.
“What’s nice about being a girl is you really don’t have to do anything in sex. You can just lie there. Just like you’re having the most wonderful nap. Sometimes you can make a little cooing noise, and they like that. But really you can’t go wrong. Sometimes they ask you to do the most peculiar things. And then you can get shy. But you shouldn’t worry. They always like your performance.”
“You can’t believe the men are on your side,” Sofia said, feeling distraught because of Celeste’s misinformation. “They are never on your side. Not really. Not any of them! No men can be trusted during the war. I got kicked out of my grandmother’s house by two boys. They were from our country too. They weren’t even enemies.”
“You say that about men, Sofia. But that is because you still act like a little girl. You haven’t started liking men yet. When you do, you’ll see. You can’t turn back from it. It makes you feel so warm inside. Once you feel it, you can’t go back to being satiated by any other type of affection. No other kind of love can work for you. You feel like there is stardust all over your skin. They make you laugh in a different way. There’s nothing quite like a handsome man making you laugh. It’s funnier than puppet shows and movies and the circus. And they do it just for you. I once laughed for almost six hours straight. Everything else is so boring.
“You can taste their words when they talk. They taste like warm tea with a little bit of milk. Some boys’ breath tastes like there is honey on it. And they are so much stronger and heavier than us. When they sleep next to you, their arms and legs wrap around you. It’s like you took a nap underneath a tree in the park, and when you woke up, all the roots were wrapped around you, holding you. And you feel powerless, but in a good way.”
Sofia realized how dangerous a woman’s psyche could be. The ability to romanticize and find things pretty could become perverted. It could lead a woman to value abuse and structure her whole life around it. She needed to rescue Celeste from this hospital and her own impulse. She had to fight against the villainy of heterosexual love.
Celeste made her index finger and middle finger tiptoe over Sofia’s arms. She must have run these same fingers over the soldiers. What did they do to deserve such a wonderful tiny dancer all over their bodies? That was how they knew they had won the war. It was nothing the politicians said. It was nothing the bombs exploded. It was not the bodies lying in graves. It was these two pretty fingers. They had stolen them from Sofia’s house. They had brought them here.
“We will go to the Black Market together. I will buy you everything the soldiers would have, I promise. I will treat you better. I won’t expect anything from you in return.”
“They make me feel special, Sofia. Please don’t take this away from me. Please don’t ask me to go with you. It will feel as though I am disappointing you.”
She had managed to curb her addiction for drugs. But she had not been able to escape the deep, irrational addiction she had developed for being abused by men. Women who were addicted to men were always addicted to the wrong kind of men.
Her mother had always said that sexual desire was important in women. Celeste was talking about sexual desire. And it seemed a terrible thing. It seemed like something rotten. It was something girls caught, like a terrible cold. Or they pretended it was pleasant. But it was dark and dirty. She didn’t understand why her mother would promote this. Why was this a feeling that could empower a young girl?
Sofia went scavenging through the town again one morning, this time looking for objects to trade on the Black Market. She found a decorated pink tin box with roses painted on it. There was a small gold-plated crank on the side. She turned the crank around gently, round and round until she felt resistance and it came to a stop. She opened the lid of the box, and the music began to play.
She knew this tune. It was one that was too mysterious and complex to play on her clarinet.
It was as though she were in the concert hall in the Capital. Many couples went there on their first dates. It was built by an architect who was known for being one of the few men who was happily married to the same woman for his entire life.
There was a ring in the music box, an expensive-looking ring covered in tiny diamonds. Her heart beat so quickly. With this ring, she would be able to get anything she wanted from the Black Market. Her mother’s book could now be rescued. She would be able to buy it and hold it and protect it, and never lose it again. Oh, certainly this ring would cover the cost of the book she wanted most in the world. And there would be change! She would get a warm fur coat and eat food that was not in a can. And for Celeste, luxuries! She would be able to buy her a dress and chocolates and ribbons for her hair. She would buy her tins of flower-flavoured tea and lipstick and new high-heeled shoes. And she would be able to have her mother’s book. She felt like dancing around. She held the ring in front of her and said, “I do, I do, I do!” She could buy herself Celeste’s love, and have her mother’s as well. The world was hers for the taking.
Sofia walked through what appeared to have been the town square, with a destroyed fountain in the middle. She stepped over the smiling green head of a bronze angel that had once adorned the fountain. She walked to the edge of town and found herself staring at a man hanged from a tree along the roadside. She wondered what he had done to receive this dishonour.
She was used to the bulging features of hanged people. Three members of the resistance had been hanged in the square by the bombed concert hall, and they were left there for a week. She imagined what this hanging man’s face must have looked like when he was still alive. She suspected he might have been handsome. But that might also have been because he was wearing a dignified suit. Because of the tailoring, she was surprised it had not been taken. But without the suit, she supposed, no one would know it was a person of dignity who had been hanged.
Sofia circled around the body, looking up at the rope and the height of the branch. She felt nothing towards the body. It was as if seeing him there had turned a switch in her head, and she saw other humans and animals as abstractions now. His shoes were at the height of her forehead, and she could not stop looking at them. She felt entirely strange and full of desperation.
She examined the tree. The trunk was thick with low-growing branches. It was clear the soldiers had not climbed the tree in order to hang the man. They must have had a ladder of some sort.
She walked around, scanning the ground, and found an overturned kitchen table next to a pile of rubble. It was made out of metal, which, no doubt, had enabled it to withstand the explosion. She pulled it over by the leg. It made a screeching noise as she dragged it. She felt like a kid who was dragging a dog against its will home from the park.
The table let out such a loud creak when she flipped it over that she stood back and looked up. In order to see whether that noise had woken the man from the dead. He hung there with the exact same absurd expression on his face. As incapable of change as an oil painting portrait. Since that wasn’t going to wake him up, nothing would. She climbed on the table, which wobbled slightly, as though a tank were passing nearby.
She was now standing face to face with him. And she was quite surprised to realize he was quite short, almost the same height as her. She took his jacket off first and laid it on the table. Then she unbuttoned his shirt and placed it on top. She pulled his suspender straps off his shoulders. She unbuttoned his pants. She then jumped off the table. She unlaced his shoes and pulled them off and dropped them on the ground. She pulled his pants off.
Well, he was naked now. Except for his underwear and his undershirt. She knew she ought to have some sort of empathy for this man, but she didn’t. Instead she felt glee as she stuffed his clothes in her backpack and hurried back to the hospital.
She hung the suit from the window so it would air out. To someone who was not in the middle of a war, it would have smelled like rot and death. But these were smells that suffused the air and so didn’t bother her. She spritzed the suit with a bottle of rose water the soldiers had given Celeste and put it on. She lit all the candles from the church. She wound up the music box. She opened the box and waited for it to summon Celeste. As soon as Celeste walked into the room with her mouth agape, Sofia swooped her up in her arms. Celeste smiled, and they danced to the tune together.
Sofia put her nose into Celeste’s hair. And even though it was filthy, it smelled good.
“You are the prettiest girl in the entire country.”
She waited for a second to see whether Celeste would play along or find it insulting. She listened for a response. And then Celeste sighed a little happy sigh of such contentment, Sofia would say anything to cause her to make it again.
“I shall do anything for you. I will murder anyone who tries to harm you.”
“But I am so frightened all the time.”
“You don’t need to be. I will do all the worrying for you.”
“Shall I make you dinner every night? And make your home the prettiest place you can imagine?”
“No, my love. I will hire maids to do all this for you.”
“And what will I do with my time?”
“You will focus on being yourself. You will listen to the music on the gramophone I will buy for you. You will spend time in luxurious bubble baths I will draw for you. I will take you to a hairdresser and they will fix your hair. They will put products in it that make it so it will never get tangled. I will buy you tickets to a million different shows.”
She wanted to win her over from men. She wanted Celeste to value and trust her as much as she did the officer whose return she had put so much faith in. She began to make promises to her.
Perhaps none of these things made sense to Celeste because they presupposed the end of the war and everything returning to normal. Celeste had given up hope of that ever happening. It wasn’t even possible for the war to end. The precious things that made up her country had already disappeared. Her mother could never be returned to her, so that life was completely over.
“I have already given up, Sofia. I was captured. I am a captive. I don’t have any rights or desires. Everyone is a captive now. All we can do is beg for kindness from the soldiers when they come. The best we can hope for is that they marry us. Then we can have babies. And they will be so cute and sweet. And they won’t speak the same language as us. But they will be safe. Everyone in the country will love them. No one will try to kill them.”
And the way Celeste put her hands on her belly, Sofia knew immediately that she was pregnant. She wasn’t sure why she hadn’t noticed before that her belly was slightly risen like dough. But she would never have imagined that Celeste, who was unmarried and so young, could be pregnant.
“I don’t think babies like being born. That’s why they cry all the time. It takes a few years for you to convince them that it is worthwhile to be alive and tie their own shoes.”
Celeste bit the side of her thumb as she said this.
Sofia had always found the act of being pregnant to be humiliating. It was so strange. Whenever she thought about it, she found it made her uncomfortable. It defied all logic. What could be more embarrassing than walking around with a baby in your belly? Everyone would know it was there. It made her think of ogres who would swallow babies whole. And have them rolling around inside them. On top of that, everywhere you went, everyone knew you had had sex.
She hated to think about it. She could not believe her mother had let her live inside her body. She was not physically demonstrative. Sofia watched other mothers doting over their children, gathering them up in their arms, squishing them up against their chests, and smothering them with kisses.
Her mother did not think babies were interesting at all. She never stopped to gaze admiringly into perambulators when they rolled past her on the sidewalk.
Clara had told Sofia that one of the conditions she had when her father asked her to marry him was that she didn’t want children. They went on a cruise to celebrate Clara’s having won an award. She was thirty-one at the time. It was on this cruise that Clara became pregnant. Mistaking her symptoms for seasickness, Clara was too far along by the time she found out she was pregnant.
Her mother had told her that she used to adore caramel sundaes. But when she fell pregnant, they nauseated her. And she would sit at the café and order one and stare at it and just weep, with tears falling on the ice cream. She was sad because it represented everything that was being taken away from her. She was sad because she was a non-fiction writer and she didn’t like metaphors.
Sofia preferred the stories of the origins of magical babies that she read about in her book of folk tales. There was one about a woman who gives birth to a turnip. The turnip has all these eyes that are always watching her. In the end she can’t stand it anymore. So she boils the turnip and eats it for dinner. Then she gets pregnant and gives birth to a little girl with six eyes all over her face. The little six-eyed girl has to go through all sorts of adventures. In the end she meets a prince with six eyes.
These babies never belonged to their mothers. They were completely independent of their bodies. Even if their mothers loved them, they inevitably felt the call of their true natures and returned to proper landscapes and people.
But now that Celeste was standing before her pregnant, Sofia realized there might not be anything magical about pregnancy at all.