Sofia had always thought her father was much kinder than her mother. Her father came from a wealthy family that had made its fortune in silver. Her father seemed to know a lot. But he had no desire to impress his knowledge on anyone else. You were reminded only when he had an answer to a random question. Someone might ask at dinner what the population of France was. And he would suddenly answer with an undeniable assurance: Forty-one million.
His home office was tidy and accommodated a shelf of business awards. He listened to the radio for hours, preferring radio plays most of all. Ones that you could listen to with your eyes closed to forget where you were. He never missed the murder mystery show. Sofia liked to sit on her father’s lap and listen to the show with him. Although she much preferred the children’s hour. And no matter how closely she listened to the murder mystery, she was never able to guess who the killer was. This gave her a sense of happy dependency and ineptitude.
Her father would take her out to the Centre Park on Sundays when they were together. He liked to sit in front of a huge four-hundred-year-old tree in the park. He said it calmed him and let him think his deepest thoughts. Clara scoffed that it was the Elysian in him. She said his family came from deeper in the woods then hers did. “He is still bonkers about trees.” And she said it sometimes took a few generations to wash the tree fetishism out of a person’s blood.
Sofia liked him because he did not ask her questions about why she had no friends at school. He did not ask about her grades and then look at her as though he could not quite comprehend how she could be his child. Unlike her mother, he didn’t expect her to be anything other than an ordinary maladroit child. And the expectation, or lack thereof, made her feel relaxed and lazy and content.
Right before her father left, she had run up to him and said, “Take me with you. I want to be safe and away from the war too. I don’t have to stay with Maman!” He had put his hand on her shoulder. And she realized he was gripping it firmly in order to hold her back if she came any closer. “A girl should stay with her mother.”
And her mother had said one word from her boudoir. “Idiot.”
And Sofia had felt ashamed because she believed her mother was calling her an idiot for asking to leave. She blamed her mother for their being left behind in the Capital when the war came.
But now she realized it was her father she was calling an idiot. Because he would not take their daughter to a safe place while she stayed behind to fight the war.
He said it as though he were doing her a kindness. But in truth, he wanted to be free. Sometimes war can set a man free.
Her father was alive and well. But he was dead to her. He could never be her father again. It was that she and her mother had lived through something. And had fought through something that was so life-changing.
Her mother, with a bullet in her head and buried in a mass grave, was more alive to her than her father, who was sitting somewhere comfortable in the United States.
One evening in the tiny house in the woods, Sofia fell into the topic of her father. Since there was no beginning or end to the winter, she would allow herself to wax poetic for as long as she wanted on any given subject. She was slumped in the armchair, holding a stick that she was waving around like a wand.
“My father is a stranger to me now. He would not even recognize me. He would be ashamed to call me his daughter. He is dining in New York City tonight. And sleeping in his comfortable bed. He is going to get remarried. How wonderful it will be for him to start over again. He won’t marry anyone like my mother again. He will be the centre of attention in any room. He will be the God of his family. And he will have other children. And they will be very clean and tidy. His new children will have perfect teeth. And perfect hair. And they will do well in school. They will write essays about the past and not the present. They will have impeccable manners. They will have no memories of the war.”
“It is impossible to be a child who has lived through a war your parent has not,” the Goose agreed. “You will spoil the dinner party with your tales of degradation. Your existence will be a sort of affront. It will definitely be rude. You will be an accusation to everyone around you.”
They both knew from the power of the knock that a man was at the door. They froze like animals that were so frightened by danger it made them incapable of movement. They were just a goose and a very skinny girl. For all the power plays they had engaged in during the winter, they could not defend themselves now. They did not have a gun. They might have very well used something in the kitchen to defend themselves. But they knew they didn’t possibly stand a chance with their clay pots and wooden spoons.
They could only beg for mercy.
“What if it’s a soldier?” the Goose whispered.
“What if it isn’t?” Sofia whispered back.
And the Goose looked at her completely startled, having no idea what she could possibly be thinking about. Because he was under the assumption that nothing could be quite as bad as an Enemy soldier at your door.
The man was wearing his long khaki army coat. And his large bag was the kind she had seen soldiers carrying on their backs as they went off to war. But when he took it off, he had on a knitted yellow sweater underneath a large suit jacket that had cigarette burn holes in the sleeves and stains on the lapels. He was wearing a pair of blue pants held up with suspenders.
He had a pin of a small flower he wore on his lapel. They gave those pins out for free on Constantina Day. It was the national flower, a lyridina. She thought it was charming that he had a flower on his lapel, as it was more traditional for a woman to wear such a pin on hers. She thought he wasn’t afraid of being feminine. She liked that about him immediately.
He took off his fur hat and long coat and slouched onto a kitchen chair. His limbs were so long he didn’t seem to fit onto it properly. If the world were the same as it had once been, she imagined he would have had trouble being seated on a bus. His limbs would trip other passengers going to and from the doors. He introduced himself as Tobias.
The water from the lake was probably poisonous to anyone who had not become accustomed to drinking it. It would certainly give you diarrhea. She poured him a glass from a pitcher that had a broken handle—but a pretty painting of a scenic village on its side. His glass was transparent, which she regretted and was self-conscious about. The water was the colour of rain and not the colour of water from a tap. It was filled with tiny bits of debris and mud. They floated around like small sea creatures.
She waited to see if Tobias would say something. But he raised the glass to his lips and drank it with a great look of satisfaction. She was pleased.
She did not know why she felt the need to entertain this man in a manner that would have been suitable at a dinner party before the war. Except that she suddenly wanted, more than anything, for him to like her. She didn’t know him at all, but for some reason his opinion was more important to her than anyone else’s.
The more she looked at him, the younger she realized he was. And the more the difference between their ages diminished, the more pleased Sofia was. She didn’t dare ask him his age because he would then ask for hers. And she was hoping she could pass herself off as more than fourteen.
“Why would he just knock on a door like that? If he really is fleeing captivity? He would be terrified of soldiers being in the house,” the Goose demanded.
“Why would you just knock on the door like that?” Sofia asked the man. “What if there were soldiers inside?”
“I saw the mushrooms glowing from the window. I knew it was someone who had been raised in the same country as me. The first thing I thought when I saw all those mushrooms was that the girl from the Elysian children’s story about mushrooms must be in that cabin. And now that I have come in, I am so delighted to find that I was right.”
“My name is Sofia.”
“Of course it is.”
Tobias was so familiar with her. He acted as though she had been expecting him. His familiarity was so off-putting, it made Sofia doubt her sanity for a moment. It made her wonder whether she did know this man. Whether he had always lived there with them.
He also had the mark of someone who had survived the winter. But he was more alive and humorous than she was. He seemed to have found a way to exist in this war without being transformed by fear.
Tobias wasn’t beautiful. His eyes seemed slightly too large for his head. When he looked askance, it seemed as though his eyes might roll out of his head for a brief moment. But just as quickly, his face went back to looking normal. His eyes quickly realized they had gone too far and settled back into his head.
Tobias’s lower teeth were stained black along the bottoms. It gave his grin a distinct resemblance to that of a wolf. He had grime in the pores on his nose and around his eyes. He might have had beautiful hands if the thumbs had not looked as though they were hit with a hammer and flattened as though made out of clay. His hair was so dirty it stuck up over his head and kept the marks of his fingers having run through it.
He appeared older than he actually was, at first. From his clothes and bearing he seemed to be in his late twenties. But when he came in, it became more apparent he was around eighteen or nineteen years old. She noticed he had dog tags around his neck.
“Is this dinner tonight?” Tobias said, sitting down and pointing to the Goose.
“No. He is my companion.”
“Well, forgive me for such an affront. Truly.”
He had a smirk on his face that seemed practically permanent. As though he considered everything around him perpetually hilarious. But he was the only one in on the joke. In his old age, all the wrinkles in his face would surely form to accommodate that smirk.
Tobias tried to act as though he were completely in control. But when Sofia put the hare down on the table, he couldn’t help himself, and he went at it like an animal. He ate with his head and body over the plate because he had been starving for the whole war. And he now had an animal’s attitude towards meat. She could tell he was trying to talk and be social, but his passionate gorging of the meat got in the way.
When he was done, he pounded his fists on the table. “My God. It feels so good to eat another’s flesh.”
He reached deep into his enormous backpack and began rooting around in it. His backpack was so large, it could pass for a magic sack from a fairy tale. It was the type of bag that was given to you by a troll. Whatever you wanted, you only had to picture it, then you would reach into the bag and find it there, at your fingertips. She wondered what the price to pay for such a gift was. Very often in these stories, it ended up being your first-born child. Tobias pulled out a green bottle with no label on it.
He looked around and then spied the teacup on the shelf. Both Sofia and the Goose cried out so abruptly that he froze in his tracks and then turned towards them.
“Sorry,” said Sofia. “We never, ever touch that cup. It’s very important it stay still. You’re welcome to use the other glass for as long as you want.”
“As long as I want?” He smirked slightly as he said it.
He poured himself half a glass of the booze from his bag and knocked it back.
“Drinking always makes me feel like dancing.” He started jumping up and down and kicking his legs out and clapping his hands. It was a dance that was popular in the very north of the country. They had an annual New Year’s concert in a large performance hall in the city, and people were known to accidentally kick each other in the head. It was conjectured in the Capital that this was the origin of their slower ways.
“Where are you from?” Sofia asked.
“Where am I from? That’s a fascinating question. Is anyone from anywhere?”
“Well, yes, I think. Maybe not. Never mind the question.”
“Where are you from? You don’t have to tell me. You’re from the Capital. Ah, yes! A fine and spectacular place to be from. The jewel of the country. Or I imagine it was the jewel of the country. I hear it’s in ruins and infested with soldiers. It’s suicide to go visit it.”
“You have never been?”
“No, I have not. And I suppose now I never will. I know it was once considered very gauche never to have been to the Capital. It always shows. Those from the Capital are polished and cultured in a way people not from the city could never be.”
“Are you from the north?”
“What was it that gave it away? Was it my table manners? My speech?”
“Nothing. I was simply asking.”
“No, please do let me know. I’m dying of curiosity.”
“It was the dancing.”
He sat down and leaned back in his chair, his eyes gleaming. His face cracked into an enormous grin. His face more or less remained fixed like that as he continued to stare at her. She had never had anyone stare at her like that. She could not make sense of it. It was equally intimate and cold. He filled his glass and leaned forward, handing it to her.
“Here. Have a drink. I don’t want to drink alone. You’ve been a great host. The most wonderful host. Both of you are. I have to be an equally amenable guest, do I not?”
She swallowed, and the liquid went down her throat as though she had swallowed a goldfish. There was a burning in her chest. And then her head was a light bulb that had just been turned on. Her heart was beaming the way Jesus’s was in statues and paintings in the church. It was wonderful. She laughed. But the laugh didn’t seem to come from her mouth. It seemed to come from some place farther away. As though it were passing through a wall, or as though the laugh were coming from a bedroom upstairs.
Why did she like him? Of course she would be predisposed to like anyone who walked through the door because she had been alone all winter. It was as though her veins were vines, and small leaves began to grow on them. Small little flowers blooming, popping open, stretching their petals. She wondered whether he felt it too.
“How did you end up here, so far south?” Sofia asked.
“I’m a deserter. Or I was. I enlisted in the army because I was looking for adventure. I lived in a tiny town, and I felt trapped there. All anyone ever spoke about was the weather and their aches and pains.”
As he was speaking, he took a coin out of his pocket. He made it dance back and forth across his knuckles. He watched the coin dancing over his knuckles as though he were a nurse monitoring a heart machine, waiting to see if it would skip a beat. It was like he was hypnotizing himself.
“It was more horrible than anything you could imagine. It wasn’t heroic at all. They tell you that fighting for your country is dignified. You think the worst thing that can happen to you is that you will die. You believe there are two options for you. And they are coming out alive or being killed. But what you don’t know is that dying isn’t at all the worst thing that can happen to you.
“You don’t understand what it means to be sent to your slaughter until you are sent to your slaughter.”
He smiled, and it was impossible to know whether he was satisfied by his tale or by the smooth motion of the quarter. The coin was like a ship dancing on the waves.
“There’s plenty of room here,” Sofia found herself saying. “You can stay here with us if you would like. And you’re the first person who has come by in months. I mean, I would offer that to anyone from our country who stopped by. I think it’s a duty.”
“A duty? Peculiar. Are we even still citizens of the same country if that country no longer exists?”
“Yes. Aren’t we still nicer to one another than the Enemy is?”
“I’ve been shot at by both. Once I was shot at so many times, I took off all my clothes and stared at my body in wonder. I couldn’t believe there weren’t any bullet holes.”
“How do you miss the bullets?”
“I run back and forth. I’ve observed terrified animals. The trick is to never look back.”
“And run for the woods,” they both said at the same time.
“What’s your trick?” Tobias suddenly asked.
“What do you mean?”
“What wicked thing have you done to survive? What trick do you have up your sleeve? You know what? Forget about it. I really have no right to ask.”
That night, Sofia was awakened by Tobias calling out in his sleep from the other room. “No, don’t do it. I’m so afraid. I want to go. Please don’t hurt me anymore. I can’t bear it. Please, I want to see my mommy. Please, where is my mommy? Take me to her. She wants to see me. I want her to hold me. I want to go home.”