The death of the Goose made Sofia feel alone in a way she hadn’t felt since the beginning of the war. It was a loneliness that knew no bounds. She had no idea how to situate herself in the universe. There was no one to make her feel small. There was no one to put her in her place, so she didn’t know what or where her place was.
She had never been allowed to feel vulnerable because the Goose had made her feel he was more so. She hadn’t even been allowed to have her own emotions. She would wait to see what the Goose was feeling. And it wasn’t difficult to find out because he was so solicitous and articulate about his own state of mind.
She began to properly grieve her own life and all she had lost. She had lost her mother. She had lost her home. She had lost her city. Before, she had not even felt she had a right to weep for these things. Because she had not really felt they belonged to her. But the Capital and all its details and splendours had belonged to her. They belonged equally to every resident there. That was the thing about a city—no one could own it or call it their own. It was a collective voice. And there were no main characters. Because behind every door of every apartment was a completely different story in which the inhabitants were the central characters.
Her mother had duped Sofia into thinking she was the main character of the whole city. Now that the city and all its books had been destroyed, she realized her mother was not the main character. Sofia, as a survivor, was the main character because she was alone.
The soldiers left Sofia in the middle of the road in her misery, and she felt doubly abandoned. She realized there was nothing left to the world she had known and loved. She didn’t even care about getting to the Black Market. She felt as though she had been rudely awakened from her delusional dream. Of course her mother’s book was not there. For the first time since she had decided to run from the train, she felt as though she had no purpose whatsoever. Had any of this been worth it? She should have just listened to the soldiers. She should have gone off to her death then. She would have been shot while wearing her own shoes. She would have died with dignity, with a pretty coat and shiny shoes, a packed suitcase at her side.
She had been rejected by the little girls in the village because she was no longer one of them. She could never re-enter the world of girlhood after the things that had happened to her. And what had she done to the poor goose? She had dragged him along on this adventure with her. She had made him behave and act like a human, only in the end to be killed like a goose. She had given him an ignoble death.
She stood in the middle of the road with her arms stretched side to side. “I am from the Capital! Do not mistake me for a peasant. I am bourgeois. I am a bohemian.” A military car swerved around her. It blared its horn. She waited, standing absolutely still, expecting that at any minute, the car would back up over her. Or that someone would come out of the car and shoot her. But the sound of the car faded into the distance.
Everybody walked past her quickly. She seemed to have become untouchable now that she no longer had the Goose. She thought they were slightly frightened of her. A small truck was approaching. She ran to it, shouting into its open window.
“The Capital is not destroyed. Not yet! There’s one head you haven’t put a bullet in. I escaped from the Children’s Train. You were right to get rid of all the children. We may look skinny and weak, but our roots are deep. And we will each grow into an enormous tree, and there will be a new forest that grows. And we will believe in the absurd. And those branches will tangle with one another. And they will form a line you can never get through. You will go mad when confronted with our nonsense.”
And then Sofia became quiet and just stood there.
A truck full of soldiers stopped in front of Sofia on the road. It was much too big to swerve around her. One of the soldiers got out of the passenger seat. He walked around the side of the truck and over to Sofia. “Is there anywhere you want to go?” he asked her in her language.
What could she answer, except “Can you take me to the Black Market?”
He looked one way down the road and then turned his head in the opposite direction, as though it were impossible to ascertain the difference between one way and the other. Perhaps she and the Goose had contemplated the Black Market so much, they had relegated it to the sphere of the imagination and it could no longer be obtained in the real world.
Then he bent down and picked her up. Sofia had not been picked up since she was a much younger child. She forgot how it made you feel weightless. It made you feel as though you had nothing to worry about. It made you feel as though there were people in the world who were so much stronger than you. And you could let them run the world. She allowed someone to make her feel like that. In that moment.
The back of the truck was lowered. The soldier lifted Sofia higher and passed her to one of the soldiers on the back. He seated her between himself and another soldier. She rode along in the truck. She felt nothing at all. She wasn’t sure where they were taking her. She did not believe they could possibly be taking her to the Black Market because she no longer believed there was such a place as the Black Market.
She simply could not believe any magical site existed anymore. All magic had died with the Goose. Even if it had ever existed, which she could not from experience say it had, it had surely vanished into thin air.
Sofia knew she ought to be paying attention to the landscape. That was what she ordinarily did in order not to be lost. But she was already lost. There were no landmarks. The road looked the same all the way along as she was travelling. There were only odd spindly trees along the road. They were only cracks in the porcelain that was the sky.
She didn’t react when the truck slowed and the soldier handed her down to the side of the road. Soon she was alone, but she still expected them to come back and hunt her down, like some sort of hare in the wild. She found she didn’t have the will to run. She stood there for a while after the sound of the truck disappeared into the distance. She was coming to terms with the fact that she was still alive.
Sofia noticed a golden car on the side of the road. The car looked as though it had been in an accident. One of the doors on the right side had been smashed in. It was a fashionable make to drive. It was a sports car. A race car driver had gone up in flames in this same make. For that reason, it had become very popular. It was synonymous with living dangerously. Her mother had the exact same car. All the male intelligentsia loved her car. Sofia had heard one of them say it was a very masculine car, and for this very reason, he found it attractive when her mother drove it.
Sofia thought for a moment it was her mother’s car. She was terrified. She thought her mother had survived the war. For the moment, she couldn’t imagine anything more disconcerting. She wanted to turn and run. Sofia approached the car, hoping to dispel the illusion, hoping it would vanish, as it might in a nightmare. She peeked into the car. She knew immediately it wasn’t her mother’s at all. The seats were a dark red instead of black like her mother’s. The back seat was filled almost to the roof with metallic cookie tins and boxes.
She noticed a woman squatting down in the trees while going to the bathroom. The woman pulled up her tights and walked over to her. She was tall, and her brown hair was tied in a bun over her head. She was wearing a man’s blazer over a dark blue dress. She was wearing a holster with a gun under her jacket. It rocked up against her full breasts.
She had on a pair of boots that were made for a man. Sofia wondered whether there was a single person in the country who still wore women’s shoes. And what they had done with the women’s shoes. Maybe they had been tossed in a huge pile. They were being kept somewhere in a storage room for when the war was over.
The young woman smiled at Sofia. Sofia immediately relaxed. The smile she was offering was so friendly. She looked at Sofia as though she were recognizing a friend. It put Sofia at ease. It made her want to weep. She felt as if she was suddenly not completely alone in the world.
She wanted to speak to someone. She wanted to hear the sound of her own voice. Before the war she had always been so quiet. She hadn’t realized just how much she had changed since the beginning of the war. The Goose had prevented her from getting to know this new self. The Goose had always spoken to her in a way that kept her shackled to the past.
The woman called out something, but Sofia did not know how to answer. “Hello,” the woman said. Sofia was thrilled to hear her own language come out of the woman’s mouth, even with a thick accent.
“Hello,” she said.
“What in the world are you doing out here all by yourself?”
The woman pulled a string of sausages from the inside of her coat. There had been no previous indication her coat could contain such wealth. It was very much like watching a magician pull a never-ending rope of handkerchief out of his pocket. She ripped one sausage off for herself and one for Sofia. The woman ate hers slowly. But Sofia was ravenous and devoured hers. The spices delighted her mouth and taste buds. She felt the sausage fill her body with comfort.
“What is your name?” Sofia asked.
“Most people call me the Black Market now. But my name is Rosalie,” the woman answered. And whereas Sofia had no previous affection for the name, she now would think of it as the most beautiful she had ever heard in her life.
Rosalie put the rest of the sausages back in her inner pocket.
Rosalie opened the trunk of the car. She pressed the latch, and it sprung open. Inside was the aroma of coffee. It was the same kind Sofia’s mother liked and insisted she could never live without. There was quite the trove inside the trunk. There were piles of stockings and fur stoles and gloves and jewellery. There were jugs of vodka and jam and dried fruit. There were bricks of butter and cartons of cigarettes.
Sofia looked in the trunk. She was searching for her mother’s manuscript. Would the book be there? There was part of her that felt if she was to see her mother’s book there, she might drop to her knees as though shot. It would shock her to such an extent, she wouldn’t be able to bear it. But of course, the manuscript, hidden between the covers of a folktale collection, was not there.
How can we ever be given proof that something does not exist? That absence, the unknowing. Is that what keeps us going in life? Looking for something that we lost, that we believe should be ours. Do we ever come across anything we are looking for?
She had needed to come to the Black Market in order to know that, truly, her mother’s book was gone. It had been destroyed in the great bonfire of Elysian culture. She had to know that there was no such thing as magic. It was not at all possible for the limbs of the trees to pluck her mother’s manuscript from the hands of the Enemy and drop it into this trunk of ordinary marvels.
She had believed in the survival of her mother’s book because she still put stock in make-believe. And in a fable, an object as precious as her mother’s manuscript could never disappear. It could only ever transform into a stream, or a wolf, or a tree, or a road, or a talking bird.
She had to come to the Black Market to stop believing such a thing was possible. To trade in her childhood desires for new ones.
“You thought the Black Market was a place,” Rosalie said, interrupting Sofia’s silence. “You thought it was like the strange garden of jewels that Aladdin was led to. But now you find it is only me, an ordinary girl in a stolen coat and a beat-up car. You must be very disappointed.”
“Oh no,” Sofia said, returning from her thoughts to reality. “This is much better than I expected.”
“What do you like?”
“I only wanted to see the Black Market. I wanted to know it really existed. I have been imagining and picturing it for so long. I drew a map to be able to find it.”
Rosalie again reached into her coat, and this time pulled out a map. It was an official map, printed on ordinary paper. It was not like the childish hand-drawn map filled with green trees and blue rivers that she had made herself. It was not at all like the map Tobias had stolen from her. But she did not hand it to Sofia.
“You needed a new map to be able to find me. There’s no use for an old one. The names of all the cities have changed. The old maps are really more like traps than anything else. I will be your map. I will take you wherever you need to go.”
Sofia watched the map disappear back inside the coat. “How can I pay you? I had a bag full of treasures just recently with things to trade. I lost it, along with my companion who was a goose.”
“You were looking for me, but I was looking for you. I had heard a story about a girl who travelled around with a goose, and it infected my imagination.”
Rosalie reached into her shirt and pulled out a necklace with Sofia’s stolen ring on it. Sofia looked at it as though it were a miracle, and she smiled.
“Where to?” Rosalie said as she opened the passenger door wide for Sofia.
“Back to the Capital,” Sofia answered.
“Excellent idea,” said Rosalie. “I adore the Capital.”
Sofia was wary for a moment. Who in their right mind would get into a car with a member of the Enemy? She liked her accent. For some reason, it seemed familiar to her. It reminded her of the scoop of molasses her mother often put into her milk, even though she would beg her not to.
It made her happy to see a young woman acting as any young man might. She did not like to think about Celeste, sitting in her wondrous, submissive glory, like a statue of a martyred saint. She was happy to see a woman war profiteer. She would make a choice to trust this woman.
And Sofia also knew she needed to go back to the apartment. Her mother had burned all the rough drafts of her memoir in the fire while she was writing, so as not to leave evidence. But surely she had ferreted away some sort of draft, some evidence of her great work. So she would see if her mother had left anything behind at all.
Sofia bent down and got into the passenger seat. She could see right away that Rosalie liked to add a flourish to all her actions. She made a wild swing with her hips and slammed the door of the car shut with her behind.
Rosalie climbed into the driver’s seat. She pulled down the sun visor. Some papers and change fell out and landed on her lap. But she didn’t notice at all. She fixed her hair in the mirror by grabbing her topknot with her fist and moving it one way and then the next. Then she took out a tube of lipstick. She spread it over her mouth. It became a sparkling shade of light pink.
As Sofia was adjusting herself into the passenger seat, Rosalie turned towards her and asked, “Did you eat the goose?”
Sofia immediately felt guilt. She was guilty that she was alive and he was not. She didn’t know whether she was allowed to feel joy and pleasure and happiness. How could she when the Goose had undergone something so horrific? She thought the only thing she could do for the Goose was to contemplate his terrible tragedy all day long. She and the Goose had spoken so much about the Black Market. They had arrived now, and she was enjoying it all by herself. There were so many things that were going to happen to her. The Goose wasn’t going to have anything. He would never get to see the wonders in this car.
“What are they being changed to?” Sofia asked, wishing to move on to a new subject.
“What?”
“You said the names of the cities were being changed. And I was wondering what they were being changed to.”
“Famous people from our country.”
This surprised Sofia as she did not know there were famous people in the Enemy country.
As the car began to pick up velocity along the road, Sofia noticed a body hanging from a tree. She looked away, but something in her own body recognized Tobias.
Rosalie’s driving soon distracted her. It felt so free to be driving in a car. Rosalie sped when she drove, taking full advantage of being in a race car. The moving and bustling and jerking of the car made all the tins in the back rattle up against each other. It sounded as though they were in a funeral marching band.
Rosalie rolled down her window. The wind began to blow her hair wildly all over the place. The bun on her head fell down over her forehead. As though she were a unicorn. She didn’t try to straighten or right her hair, even if it was going to blind her for a split second, which might cause her to crash. She didn’t slow down when she came to a bend in the road.
Sofia didn’t care about Rosalie’s dangerous driving. There was some danger that led to a beautiful feeling. She was so used to peril leading to terrible, sad places. To discover now that it could be used to elicit joy felt good. It made her want more of it. That was what Rosalie was selling from the trunk of her golden sports car. It was the thrill of adventure, the wonder of risks, the pleasure of transgression, the delight of self-destruction.
All her limbs were alive. She felt ready to leap, as though she had the legs of a goat. She felt as though she were one of the forest trees that she had observed turn into lithe human-like forms. Trees stretched deep down into the ground, their roots twisting around one another like telephone wires singing messages through them in a rapturous, entangled choir. A tree could never be uprooted from a forest. That was why, for a moment in the spring, they took on the forms of young people. The thing about the metamorphosis out of girlhood is that there is a buoyancy to it. It is a moment in life, a brief flash when you must at least try to run. To see if you can run fast enough to catch up to that feeling of being yourself. And claim it as your own.
Rosalie drove the car along the coast. There was a small road on the cliff that went up and down.
Rosalie turned on the radio in the car. There was a scratching noise for a brief moment, and then a voice came on. Sofia was surprised. She was so used to radios having only static on them that she had not thought to try turning it on. It was a man speaking calmly and melodiously in the Enemy’s language.
So another language was in the airwaves. New voices and songs were being broadcast all over the country. If she were to meet a talking goose at some point in the future, she was quite sure it would be speaking in the Enemy’s tongue.
Sofia actually recognized the speaker. It was the voice of the Leader—a voice Sofia hadn’t heard since the beginning of the war, inside a movie theatre with her mother. But Rosalie had no visceral reaction of fear. Instead, she listened to his smooth, authoritative voice as though he was relaying something obvious and mundane. And he might have been, as the war was now over.
“What is he saying?” Sofia asked.
“He is wishing everyone a happy St. Vasilia Day. Everyone loves this holiday.”
“What is St. Vasilia Day?”
“St. Vasilia danced for thirteen days straight to prove she believed in God. So in my country, when you turn thirteen, you have to wear a long white dress that goes down past your feet and put a crown of candles on your head and walk through the town. Everyone lines up to throw flowers at you. It’s totally crazy. You always forget just how many flowers there are until they arrive. They come in trucks. It takes three or four truckloads. We used to grow daisies in the backyard to make a little extra money on flower day. But everyone likes it because there is a big party afterwards. Everyone gets so drunk. There’s a dance everyone likes, where you move in a spiral and wave flowers over your head. You don’t have this?”
“No, but we have Porcelain Day. There was a porcelain factory that burned down once, and all the little girls working there were killed. So now we paint eggs every year to commemorate it.”
“Well, we can celebrate both days. I have a cake. We should stop on the beach and eat it.”
When they got to the beach, Rosalie jumped out of the car and began running towards the water. She ran like a deer being flushed out of the forest.
Rosalie took all her clothes off and flung herself into the water clumsily. The waves knocked her this way and that. She had trouble standing upright. She stood up for one second and was dragged violently under as though a shark had just bitten her. Then moments later, she righted herself with her hair in her face and her arms spread out wide.
Sofia undressed more slowly. She was self-conscious of how dirty her body was. There was black along the lines of her toenails and fingernails. Her feet were stained with black. As though they had gangrene. As though they had been run over by a truck. As though they had frostbite and needed to be amputated. She stepped with them into the water. The waves rushed up to them. Like the hands of a hundred pedicurists rushing to massage and clean the dead skin off her toes, and to polish her toenails. And when the waves pulled back, her feet were clean. As though by some sort of miracle.
She wanted her whole body in the water. She ran forward and dove into the waves. She heard the roar of the waves around her as though she had entered a portal to a new reality.
The two young women swam out in the water. They were just two happy heads floating on the top of the water like beach balls filled with dreams. They laughed and pushed each other under the water. Rosalie disappeared and grabbed Sofia by the feet. As though she were the mysterious Elysian mermaid. How wonderful to be murdered by a myth.
While hunched over and clasping her body, Rosalie ran to the trunk and brought out two blankets. They were both shivering violently. They spread their blankets on the sand. And lying down next to each other, they let the sun fill up their pores.
Then the hunger set in. It was as though a hole opened wide in Sofia’s stomach. It was a well. The hole went right through her and deep into the ground. It seemed as though nothing could fill the hole in her stomach. She could have fed herself turkeys and hares and pigs and loaves of bread with pats of butter on them. She could have swallowed an entire couch. She could have swallowed an entire battalion of soldiers. There was room for them in her belly.
They ate together. Ripping off chunks of bread with their teeth. They ate the thickest, densest cake Sofia had ever encountered. The cake was almost black, and the dried fruit inside it lit up like windows in the night.
They grabbed at it with their hands. They didn’t need forks or knives or napkins. They enjoyed instead eating like dogs. She no longer had any table manners. She was no longer civilized. Because she did not belong to any civilization. Her nation had been destroyed. They were just two girls on holiday in a foreign country.
“How did you come to be the Black Market?” Sofia asked.
Rosalie looked at Sofia carefully, then she looked out at the sea, as though her story were as long and wide as it was.
“When I was a little girl, I was so wild. I thought I was just like the boys. I could run around the way they did. I loved to climb trees. I loved playing soldier with my brothers. I would pretend everything was a gun. I loved the thrill of it. I was always getting myself dirty. I used to imagine being on ships and trains and driving cars. I imagined going to different countries. I imagined going to America. But when the extremists took over the country, it changed everything. My father told me I would have to marry a man I didn’t even know.
“Everything was forbidden to me. There was a song that I loved by a singer who was executed. It was still stuck in my head. I was taking a shower, and I started singing the song out loud. My father came in and attacked me while I was naked. He beat me. And I couldn’t see or defend myself.
“I went and I denounced my whole family two days later. I turned them in at the local office. All of them. I said they were enemies to the cause. They hated the Leader. They were spies who were giving information to the enemy. They were sympathizing with the resistance. I put all the ideas that were in my head in their mouths. I accused them of all my crimes.
“They loved that. They executed my whole family. They didn’t care whether what I was saying was actually true. They wanted to make an example of a family who had been denounced by one of its own. I didn’t feel anything when they were shot. How could I? When it meant freedom for me? My freedom was the most important thing. And there was no way I could be free with them alive.”
Rosalie turned to Sofia, as if to see whether she was shocked.
“Can I hear the song?” Sofia asked.
“You want me to sing it?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know if I can do it justice.”
Rosalie put her forehead down on her knees, to indicate she was shy to perform. Then she lifted her head and began to sing. Although the song was in the Enemy language, Sofia knew exactly what it was saying. Or she thought she could make out the meaning, in any case. It was so kooky and sweet, and from Rosalie’s expression, she could tell the song was funny.
And it was by listening to this girl sing a contraband song that she knew the Enemy had not won and would never truly win. There would always be artists. There is a need to create art. And the nature of good art is to express freedom. It finds a way to reject oppression. And some people might say that artists are silly. And that art is a frivolous and unessential part of life. And that artists are irrational and live ridiculous lives and never truly grow up. And that you cannot equate art with necessities like food and shelter.
But here was a song that had survived a war. And when Rosalie sang it, whenever she sang it, it would be a reminder that the Leader’s vision had not penetrated the souls of everyone in their country. There was a dissident voice.
This song written by the executed singer was contagious. Rosalie might sing it around a group of soldiers, and they would then have the song in their heads. And it would cause them to think in an irreverent way.
That was why Sofia’s mother’s book was of such radical importance. If she could save anything from the artists, if she could take even a single clipping from the branches of their thoughts, it could be put in a glass on a windowsill by a child with an imagination and it would grow into a beanstalk.
“So what was it you did to survive?” Rosalie asked.
She didn’t mind telling Rosalie any of her secrets or insecurities. She didn’t feel judged. There was no one alive in the world who knew her story. She told Rosalie in case she did not make it across the border.
“I was supposed to take my mother’s manuscript out of the country. You see, I wasn’t supposed to go to the country for safekeeping, like all the other children were doing. My mother would never have done that. She would rather I die in the city than be sent to the country. She used to say she hated what the country did to people’s minds. That it made them lazy.
“She sent me to the country to be with cousins. But they weren’t really my cousins. I had never met them. They might have been third cousins. But I didn’t believe her. It was a house that was near the border. I was supposed to wait. Then I was supposed to establish a routine of gathering berries in a large bowl by the barbed-wire fence along the border. One day, I would find a hole cut in the barbed wire.
“I was supposed to get her manuscript out of the country. There were people on the other side of the border who were waiting to publish it. There was no way she could get to the border unnoticed. So she sent me with this very dangerous manuscript. She sent me, even though I’m not fully grown, to be a spy.”
All those months ago, Sofia had left the train, with her suitcase, after being evacuated by the Enemy. She was running through the woods when she was suddenly cut off by a soldier. There was no way to escape him. He grabbed her hard by the arm and dragged her out of the woods. He brought her to a cabin at the train station that was being used as some sort of headquarters by the Enemy.
The soldiers all laughed when Sofia said she wanted to be a collaborator. But they sent for someone higher up. He looked thinner and harder than the others, and peered through round wire glasses. He introduced himself as the general. The others still had grimaces on their faces because they were not sure whether to take her seriously because she was a child. “But I could see he took me seriously. That was why he was in charge.” The general knew that in wartime, things are not at all what they seem. The most innocent-seeming person or place carries the seeds of your destruction.
She sat across the table from the general. Another soldier came and put her suitcase on the table between them. She opened it for them to look at. There was nothing out of the ordinary in their eyes. They checked the lining of the suitcase. They had an enormous dog come and sniff it. But no one detected anything wrong.
“I know of information that is going to be taken out of the country.”
“In what form?”
“A book. A very important book.”
“What book is this? I don’t think I could consider it important. I’m not afraid of any book written in this country.”
“The book hasn’t been published yet.”
At this, the general raised his eyebrows.
“A manuscript?”
“Yes. It was written by a very famous intellectual. One of the most famous in Elysia. It is about everything marvellous in our country, and how you have destroyed it. Others will read it. They will think of you as villainous, even if they don’t come to rescue us. They will use it to take the country from you in the future.”
Everyone in the army had been told it was through the written word that Elysia was particularly vicious. No one had ever weaponized words the way Elysians had. That was why the order had gone out that all books in the country were to be burned.
There were no Elysian writers abroad. The language would quickly be forgotten. But this was a new book. This was a book written after the war broke out. It wasn’t meant to be read by citizens of this country. It was specifically meant to be read by people on the outside. The Elysians were going to spread their hatred of the Enemy to the rest of the world through this book.
The Enemy had thought that the war was almost over, and that they would achieve a definitive victory. Their hard work had triumphed over the sophistication and bourgeois pretentions of the Elysians. Their fancy words had proved to be powerless. But this was the one thing they had not factored. This was the general’s worst fear. This was why they had to be so brutal. There could be no words escaping from this country. There could be no witnesses. But people did not believe witnesses. Instead, they had an almost absurd faith in the written word.
“The book is to be brought immediately to a translator who will render it in English in order to make it accessible to everyone in Europe,” Sofia said.
“Who is the writer of the manuscript?”
“Clara Bottom.”
There was a noticeable shudder through the room as they recognized her mother’s name. She thought her mother would have been delighted to know her name was recognized. And even better, it was associated with power.
Sofia knew then she had made a deal. She would be able to trade her mother for freedom. When she began the conversation—or negotiation, whatever you want to call it—she wasn’t sure she really had anything to barter.
Perhaps she had fool’s gold. Perhaps she was negotiating for her life with her mother’s narcissism. But her mother had not exaggerated the importance of her book.
“I heard there are papers you give to collaborators to keep them alive. That you can show them to any soldier and they are not allowed to shoot you or imprison you. They have to let you live.”
“You speak about this paper as though it gives you immortality. But yes, there is such a thing.”
“Show it to me! Fill out the paper. I want to have it near.”
“You don’t trust us.”
“No, of course not.”
They all laughed.
“If you don’t trust us, how can you believe we would respect what is on a piece of paper.”
“You believe in words.”
The general stared into Sofia’s eyes, seeing his own truth there. He then nodded to a man in uniform who was seated at a small desk at the side of the room with a typewriter on it. The desk was surrounded by opened boxes filled with files. And there were stacks of folders surrounding the typewriter. It seemed quite impossible he would know where anything was in this disorder. But he quickly went to a pile of folders next to him, retrieved a navy blue one, delicately pulled a sheet of paper out of it, and put it in the typewriter.
“What is your first and last name?” the general asked.
“Sofia Bottom-Zier.”
The general’s eyes opened. The others who understood her language also stared at Sofia with a different intensity.
“Clara Bottom is my mother.”
They all paused for what would normally have been an imperceptible moment, but to everyone in the room it seemed long and heavy. Sofia was careful not to allow any expression on her face. She did not have much pride left. She had revealed her weakness to every soldier crammed into the room. She would preserve whatever pride she could by not allowing them to see her feelings or her reaction. She would not let them know how it felt to betray your own mother. They could all go home and imagine it for themselves.
Perhaps her actions made them feel justified in their genocide. There must have been moments in their carnage when they wondered whether they were murdering people who were just like them. And their loved ones.
But she had shown them the Elysians were monsters. They would walk into an office and trade away their own mothers. They had no values and familial ties. They cared only for themselves. They were pathologically narcissistic. It didn’t matter if you killed them.
They did not understand her. Sofia could tell they could not understand her. For the first time she felt like the most intelligent person in the room. This was an unusual feeling for a child to have in a room full of adults. But there you have it. She understood them, but they did not understand her. The general handed her the paper.
At the same moment, another clerk typed out an arrest warrant for Clara Bottom and a search warrant and placed them next to the general.
“You realize this is a search warrant to go through your mother’s apartment looking for the book, and this is the warrant to shoot her?” said the general.
Sofia held her paper in her hand. It was thick the way important paper always was. She ran her fingers over the raised print of the insignia at the top of the page. It felt as though she were running her fingers over the numerals on a bill. Or the lines on the palm of an old woman. It felt like skin. Something that, if it were ripped in half or cut, would regenerate and heal itself. It was a living thing. She was going to survive the war because of this. She was the only one who was going to survive the war. She was safe.
And to be honest, she was happy to be freed from the burden of carrying the book around. Now she did not have to wander near a barbed-wire fence where at any minute enormous dogs might come to attack her. Or she might be murdered by soldiers. Also, there were landmines! No matter how hard she tried to imagine being blown to smithereens, she could not.
She wondered whether she would be in a hundred pieces in the air. And would then perceive the world simultaneously in a hundred different ways.
She was safe. She was safe. She was safe.
“Do you know where exactly she keeps the manuscript? Is it in your apartment?”
Sofia could tell from the blank and unresponsive faces of the other soldiers in the room that the general was the only one who spoke her language fluently.
Sofia then stood up and asked to see her suitcase. She put her arms out towards it so everyone in the room was quite aware of what she wanted. They looked to the general, and since he showed no objection, one of the soldiers placed the open suitcase in front of her. All the grown men in the room leaned forward to see what was in the shiny pink lining. They were all rather wary. They believed that they had searched the suitcase thoroughly. And were she to pull a weapon or something else contraband out of it, it would reflect very poorly on them.
She took out the book of folktales. Everyone looked once again at the cover. There could be no doubt it was a children’s book. And a much-loved one because the sharp edges of the cover had become rounded and bent. There was an illustration of a goose on the cover. The goose had a debonair expression on its face, which was enhanced by the fact that it had on a bow tie.
There was an illustration of a girl standing next to the goose. Her hair and manner registered impeccable breeding. She had on a prim black coat and a matching black hair ribbon. Her black buckle shoes were shiny. She quite obviously lived in the city, which made her affinity for this farm animal even more absurd.
Sofia opened the book. She turned past the table of contents, which was a list of fables that were no longer in the book. And when she arrived at the first page, she turned the book for the general to read.
Everyone in the room was impatient for the general to stop reading and explain to them why he was poring over the pages of a children’s book with such concern. But Sofia was in no hurry. She could watch him read for the rest of her life, if need be.
“You realize, of course, that this means the immediate execution of your mother.”
She looked up from her paper. At that moment she saw the general pick up the warrant for her mother’s arrest. He handed it to a soldier, who folded it, tucked it into his breast pocket, and headed out the door to put an end to Clara Bottom.
The soldiers motioned to Sofia that she was free to leave herself and return back to the war. The moment Sofia’s feet touched the dirt outside, she began running again. As though she had never stopped running, as though she were still running from the train and the bullets, as though she had never been captured, as though she had never betrayed her mother. She spotted a peasant girl and asked to switch coats with her. But she was careful to take the certificate the soldiers had given her out of her pocket.
The small certificate moved in her hand, as though it were struggling to take flight. She whispered “Hush” to the paper and stored it safely in her new, tattered coat by her heart. She was surprised it was still beating. She was very much in shock that she was alive.
And then she was on the back of a truck, cradling a goose, wondering how she could reclaim her mother’s manuscript. There was no logical way to do so. Except to head to a place filled with all the things children weren’t allowed to yet understand: the Black Market.