When Sofia arrived with the Goose at her grandmother’s house, she wanted to collapse on the doorstep, she was so relieved. They had finally arrived at a house Sofia could relax in and feel safe. She would have preferred that her grandmother be home, of course, but she had left the country months before. So when Sofia and the Goose entered her grandmother’s house, she was shocked by the disorder it was in. There were piles of clothes on the shelves and floor. There were dirty dishes all over the sinks and counters.
It smelled different too. Her grandmother had always had a particular smell of lavender and herbs. It made her happy and relaxed. But now the house smelled rank, of rotten food, smelly feet, and cigarette smoke.
Before she could make sense of it, there were two boys, slightly older than her, standing in front of her in the kitchen.
The larger dark-haired boy was dressed in the most peculiar outfit. He was wearing an older man’s suit that was much too big for him. It was also very strange to see a child dressed as an adult. It gave him an air of superiority. Sofia realized at that moment that he must have got the suit out of one of the closets. It was one of her grandfather’s suits. Her grandmother never threw anything away. She had a sentimental attachment to everything. She thought all objects had souls.
The other boy was fair and had a softer, gentler face. He was wearing a green blouse and slacks. These belonged to her grandmother. He had cut the bottoms of the slacks with a pair of scissors, and they had a raggedy edge. She noticed he also had on a pair of her grandmother’s grey silk slippers with roses embroidered on the toes and kitten heels. He slid across the kitchen floor with them. He seemed to be enjoying the clothes.
“My name is Abelard,” said the boy in her grandmother’s clothes. “And this is the inimitable Balthazar.”
“And just who the fuck are you?” Balthazar asked. “This is private property.”
“I am Sofia. This is my house.”
The boys looked at each other uncomfortably.
“Bullshit. You can’t come in here. It belongs to us,” said Balthazar.
“This does not belong to you at all. It belongs to my grandmother.”
“Your grandmother is not here,” Balthazar said. “There is no one here but us. So it doesn’t belong to her. If the soldiers are seizing everyone’s homes, nobody’s home belongs to them anymore.”
“What indeed is a grandmother?” said Abelard. “If you want to stay with us, there will be less food. We will have to divide it up another way.”
“But she has a goose. We can make a meal out of it. And soup that will last four days.”
At that, the Goose began to squawk.
“You can’t eat him. He’s extremely intelligent,” Sofia said, stepping in front of the Goose.
“He is your pet?”
“I am not a pet!”
“He is not a pet. We are companions. We have decided to travel together.”
“You know,” Balthazar said, “I am beginning to think you are not quite right in the head.”
“That fascinates me,” Abelard interjected. “That in itself is a reason to let her stay. I am intrigued by madness. I often think of myself as being afflicted by a certain lunacy.”
“You aren’t mad at all,” Balthazar sneered. “You’re desperate for attention. And you’ll do anything to stand out.”
“We can’t throw her out if this is her grandmother’s house,” Abelard said excitedly. “She’s bound to become angry. She’ll feel hard done by. She’ll turn us in.”
“We would have to kill her,” Balthazar said. “I’m not there yet. And she has a certain charm. She travels with a goose.”
Sofia had always been too shy to engage with boys. Especially boys her age. Whenever they came close to her, it always seemed to remind her that she was a girl. As though that were something distasteful. Now here they were.
A boy once came up to her on the way home from school. He was holding his fist out in front of him. Not in a threatening way. More like it was on fire and he was trying to keep it away from the rest of his body. He stepped in front of her. Opened his fist and tossed a large spider on her. It fell onto Sofia’s coat. Squiggled around hysterically as though it were looking for its limbs.
Sofia had a horror of bugs, the way children who had grown up in the city did. And she shook and began screaming wildly. And for a week afterwards, she kept checking her body, never able to be absolutely sure the spider was not somewhere on her.
And now, she had the distinct feeling, there was a spider creeping around the crevices of her body. Perhaps in one of her pockets. Perhaps in her stocking. And she was certain the boys had put it there.
These strange boys did not seem to be intimidated by Sofia. They did not seem to be upset in any way that they were in the presence of a girl. They did not seem at all unnerved. They stared at her.
She and the Goose sat next to each other, completely immobile and prim. There could be no unaccounted-for movements with their arms and legs. They were always being judged. It seemed safer to remain as still as mannequins in a store window. How physically demanding and awkward it was to allow yourself to be judged. As a girl, you always felt like an unwelcome guest. Even if you were in your own house.
She looked at the Goose. He was holding his head up as high as was humanly possible. He was obviously under strain. She wondered whether he was trying to pass himself off as a swan.
Seeing the Goose’s terrible insecurity made her wonder if her own insecurity was causing the Goose to feel this way. And that made her want to be stronger.
The Goose said to Sofia, “Your shoes are untied.”
Even though they were not, Sofia bent down to pretend that she was tying them. At this point, the Goose craned his neck so he could whisper into her ear with his beak.
“Tell them your parents are coming, and they will throw them in prison for trespassing. Say your father lifted pianos for a living when he was younger so they will think him very big. Tell them you have two giant dogs that despise strangers and will surely rip their throats out. You cannot allow boys to stay in this house. They will make your life hell.”
“How did you know to get off the train if you are not a spy?” Balthazar asked, interrupting them. “Did you know all the children were going to be executed?”
“Were they all executed? How do you know?” Sofia asked back.
“Abelard understands the Enemy language and overheard some of the soldiers talking.”
“One of the cooks at my orphanage spoke the language. She used to let me have beet soup. It was hard to disguise because it always left my lips so red.”
“Where are all the trains with the adults going, then?”
“To the Enemy country.”
“Why?”
“To take people to work in camps. But they should really just allow themselves to be thrown in a mass grave. They are going to have to work in mines.”
“But a lot of them looked too fancy to go into mines.”
“I think that’s the point. It’s some sort of re-education. They are supposed to get rid of their bourgeois sensibilities.”
“Are you hungry?” Abelard interrupted.
“Yes, I’m starving.”
“Well, I do have something I want you to try. It’s a soup I whipped together with some herbs from the yard.”
Sofia devoured it with a large spoon. She tried to control herself, but she simply could not. She felt herself turn into an animal. She shovelled the food into her mouth. She snatched at the bread as though the boys might take it from her. But they were staring at her with no desire to intervene, calmly smoking cigarettes. She dunked the bread viciously into the soup. Then moved her head close to the bowl to shove what was left into her mouth as quickly as she could.
“Were you on a train from the Capital too?” Sofia asked.
“Oh no, my lady,” Balthazar answered. “We were not. We met on the way out of Shumus. It was bombed to smithereens last month. It was an extraordinary sight.”
“City hall was knocked down,” Abelard said. “The bell on top of it fell down and landed on people. Their legs were sticking out from under it, like cockroaches underneath a shoe. Like it had knocked out a whole group of witches, all at once.”
He crawled under the table and stuck his legs out, as if to demonstrate. Then he quickly scrambled back out to finish his description.
“There was a cradle in the middle of the road. I saw a baby sleeping so peacefully inside it that I let it be.”
“They didn’t even spare the babies?” Sofia asked.
“Nobody was spared,” Balthazar said matter-of-factly. “There were people who had been evacuated from the hospital. You could tell because they were all in pajamas, as though a slumber party had been interrupted.”
She felt frightened. That they were able to wax poetic on such horrifying sights meant they had seen and become accustomed to almost anything.
“They rounded up everyone. I fled the city on my motorbike, and I met Abelard on the road.”
“And we have been together ever since.”
The country had put so much effort into creating newspapers and presses and radio shows. And now here she was, hearing about the war from two boys in her grandparents’ clothing.
“Look how you’re eating. What must they think of you?” the Goose nagged in her ear. “I’m so embarrassed to be with you. I am mortified. I mean, we are their guests.”
Sofia yawned, her mouth stretching wide and crooked like that of a sleepy lion. She was too tired to be offended by what the Goose was saying. His words floated around her head but were unable to get in. Like words of people passing on the street outside the window. Almost minutes after she had finished her bowl of food, she was overcome by a need to sleep. She couldn’t sit on the chair. And her head began snapping up on her neck, as though she had come up with a scientific revelation.
Abelard took her bowl from in front of her. “I expect you’ll be wanting to go to sleep.”
Sofia went to spend the night with the Goose in her mother’s old childhood bed, in a room filled with forbidden books.
“I don’t like it here,” the Goose said in the dark. He raised both his wings and stood up on his tippy-toes. And then lowered himself again slowly. “It isn’t safe. I don’t like these boys at all.”
“Boys always make bad first impressions.”
“All I know is that you promised me we were on our way to the Black Market—and here we are in an old lady’s house. It has the smell of an old person. It smells like mothballs and faded perfume and mould. With some lavender.”
“I don’t mind it,” Sofia said. She was happy to find the room still smelled the way her grandmother’s house usually did. She changed into one of her mother’s old nightgowns, which she found hanging in the closet, and the aroma of the familiar surrounded her.
The smell of the boys had changed the atmosphere in the rest of the house. Their musk had seeped into everything. It was marking the territory the way dogs did. The smell emanated from their greasy hair. From their dirty toes. They had made the living room smell like so many different things. It smelled like the lake. It smelled like stones that had been lying in the sun. It smelled like smoke. It smelled so much closer to death than a girl did.
She thought that soon the smell of the Capital would leave her body. She too would smell like animal turds and gunpowder.
“How long will we stay here?” the Goose asked when they climbed in bed.
“At least for a little while. The Enemy are probably looking for children to shoot now. Perhaps they get a compensation, the way farmers give hunters rewards for killing wolves.”
“I thought children were a protected class.”
“You thought wrong. It’s positively criminal to be a child right now. Anyway, this is our house.”
“You say this is our house. But it isn’t. Is it? Not anymore. Because the country isn’t ours. It isn’t theirs either. Can’t you see? Everything is suspicious. You can’t trust the chairs. You can’t trust the carpets. They look so familiar, you could swear you were in your home. But you are not. And it is time for you to leave. You always have to keep on the move during a war. You must keep marching. There is nowhere safe. So we keep to the road. In activity. We can’t sit here like sitting ducks.”
“I will have to stand up to the boys in the morning. I will let them know who is boss. That’s how you deal with men.”
“Where in the world did you ever get this idea?”
“My mother lectured on it at the Bibliothèque Nationale.”
“What makes sense in a library does not always make sense in the real world. Why should you even listen to your mother at this point? She was the one who sent you off on a train to be murdered.”
“You don’t have to be frightened of them. They are only boys. They are acting like men, but really they are almost the same age as me. And besides, they are clearly from poor backgrounds. They will listen to me because I am from the Capital. And I am more educated and more worldly. They know this is my house. I will have to be very firm with them.”
“Ah, you think they are going to want to reinstate your relationship before the war? You think they will gracefully accept that you come from a wealthy family? That your mother would never let you play with them? That before the war, you would be communicating with them only to give them orders, to get rid of your trash or mop your stairwell floors? This is a war. You can’t trust any of your old hierarchies. In fact, I think having been a posh child might work against you.”
“You think I am a snob?”
“We established this, yes.”
“Well, you are a snob too.”
“Absolutely. I don’t want to have anything to do with those boys. I have no qualms with admitting I am superior to them. I consider myself an intellectual. And they are part of the proletariat. It is up to me to understand their condition since they are too stupid to do it themselves.”
“Goodnight.”
“Goodnight.”
In the morning, Sofia washed her dress and hung it up to dry in the bathroom. She put on a large sweater over her nightgown and walked into the living room. She was able to take stock of how ramshackle and disorderly the house had become. This was natural because the house was extremely cluttered and filled with items. Her grandmother had been a great collector. Particularly when her husband was cheating. The more she tried to repress his cheating, the more objects she purchased. When Sofia picked a porcelain bulldog off the floor, she felt a sense of longing for her grandmother so intense, she thought she might keel over and die from it.
The house was not only messy but also suffused with tobacco smoke. The boys seemed to have only very recently taken up smoking. There was something awkward in their gestures as they smoked. It made it seem as though they were pretending to smoke instead of actually smoking.
They had come across her grandmother’s pile of cigarette cartons. The cartons that had a winking woman in a sailor hat on the label. She purchased them in bulk from the Capital. The boys smoked the thin cigarettes as though the supply were infinite. And they would never run out. Or perhaps it was like with candy, where they thought they had to shove as much as possible in their mouths before it was taken away.
Balthazar took enormous inhales with a cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger, then stood with the smoke in his chest and exhaled. Abelard waved his cigarette in the air around him, as though he were making circles with a ribbon. Sofia had seen him admiring himself in a mirror while smoking.
That evening, Balthazar arrived at the table dressed in nothing other than a green velvet housecoat, while Abelard wore a blue silk dress whose neckline fell below his nipples. Sofia was back in her own dress, tailored for her size. After eating, Balthazar retreated to the basement. He came back with a bottle of wine. Sofia knew it was a very expensive bottle that her grandmother was saving for a grand occasion, but she said nothing. Balthazar poured them all drinks, and he and Abelard polished off their glasses quickly, while Sofia carefully sipped hers.
“There’s a rule we have that you cannot miss your mother and start weeping once you are drunk,” Abelard said.
“All right,” Sofia answered.
“Will that be hard for you?” he asked. “Do you miss your mother? I adored my own mother.”
“He doesn’t know his mother,” Balthazar said. “He was living in an orphanage when the war broke out.”
“My mother was a prostitute and my father was a travelling thief,” Abelard confided.
“He isn’t ashamed in the least,” Balthazar scoffed, lighting another cigarette. “In fact, he’s proud of his heritage. He can’t shut up about it.”
“My mother was murdered. She loved me, though.”
“You were so young when she died that you can’t know anything about it.”
“There are some things you just know. She was wild about me. Everyone in her family told her to put me in an orphanage. But she didn’t listen to them. I was the light of her life. She thought she could make enough money and would be able to raise me properly. She went out every night, meeting different men. But she was so beautiful.”
“How do you know she was beautiful?” Balthazar demanded.
“She was so beautiful it made men angry.”
“How so?”
“They were furious she didn’t belong to them. There was nothing they could do to win her love. Because her heart was already taken, by me. They would beg her to stay longer, to spend the night with them. But she had to get home to feed me. One man was so enraged she was leaving that he slit her throat. It snowed for seven days after she died. That is a fact.”
“Who told you?”
“It’s in the almanacs. At the orphanage I was told that the day I arrived, there was a terrible blizzard. They almost didn’t hear the knocker because the wind was so loud. Can you imagine such a thing? They might have left me on the doorstep. I would have been a block of ice.”
“Oh, I’ve had more than enough of your fairy tales. You talk like that about your mother because you never got a chance to know her. And what about you?” Balthazar said, addressing Sofia. “What’s your opinion of your mother?”
“My mother is a well-known writer.”
“I don’t believe it for a minute. What did she write?”
“The Rights and Importance of Women in the Modern Age.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“I have,” said Abelard.
“You have not.”
“And how about you?” Sofia said, not wanting to go into her feelings towards her mother. “Don’t you miss your mother at all?”
“Not in the slightest,” Balthazar answered. “I’m happy never to have to see her face again. I hated living at home. I hated always being cooped up. I hated being forced to go to school every day. To be honest, at the beginning, the war eliminated certain things that drove me crazy.”
Sofia wondered whether hating your family made it easier for you to survive the war.
“Maybe things will be okay,” Sofia suddenly said, as if to change the subject from mothers once and for all. “Maybe they only shot the children who ran from the train. Maybe we’ll be able to return to life as it was before.”
“I’ve seen things you’ve never seen before,” Balthazar said, shaking his head. “The Capital hasn’t really got the worst of the fighting yet. They started killing everyone in my town. I saw a young girl spit on a soldier who whistled at her. They hanged her from a lamppost. Everyone could see up her skirt after that. That was the first murder I saw. If I close my eyes, I can still see her hanging there. It’s like she’s in my head. Clear, like I’m watching a movie. And when I close my eyes, it’s as though the theatre goes dark and she comes up on the screen again. Hanging. I don’t think I’ll ever be curious about what happens under a woman’s skirt ever again. It ruined that for me. Probably for the best.”
Abelard opened his mouth as if to add some sort of anecdote of his own, but then shook his head and shrugged.
“Until they invade and destroy the Capital, and everyone in it,” Balthazar concluded, “the war is not over; in fact, it has hardly even begun.”