Вадим Бабенко - The Place of Quarantine

Something pierced me through – a lightning, a discharge of current. Memory, like a merciless knight, had hurled a lance at me. It had broken through my armor, knocked me to the ground…

“What? What did you say?” I almost shouted, glaring at her. “I never told you those words – where did you hear them, from whom?”

Elsa froze, dumbfounded; her fingers convulsively squeezed her glass of milk.

“Try to remember!” I insisted. “This is important – you must remember!”

She very slowly, carefully raised the glass to her lips but did not drink and put it on the table. After a pause, she said quietly, “Just as I am able to bring things down to earth, so you have an amazing talent to spoil everything. To ruin everything – always, always!”

I didn’t answer. Elsa got up and went to the door of her bedroom. On the threshold she turned, and I caught a glimpse of her face. I saw her pursed lips, her eyebrows drawn together. And her narrowed, unforgiving eyes.

That night I hardly slept; my brain was working nonstop; ill-defined, half-smudged pictures flashed before me and unhurriedly floated away. Everything around seemed to be shaded with swirls of hoarfrost or threads of a cocoon that swaddled me like an infant. It was like looking at a familiar landscape sweeping along beyond the window of a train, trying to guess the stations and getting them wrong over and over again.

All this, however, did not matter – I myself, my dreams, my guesses, either right or wrong, played no role whatsoever. In wakefulness or oblivion, I had been caring only for what Elsa would tell me. Then the morning came, and I jumped up hastily – even though it was still too early. To kill time, I picked up one of the articles but immediately threw it away. Mathematics, quantum fields and outer spaces had become superfluous, unnecessary. Instead of my recent eagerness, I felt only irritation and incomprehensible anger.

Then, unable to bear it, I went into the living room, despite the odd hour. I opened the door and was surprised to see that Elsa was already there – she was walking from one corner to the other, straightening something, shifting things from place to place. I said hello; she nodded without uttering a word. I noticed an unfamiliar hard-edged crease mark on her face – an innate shadow of determination.

For a while we were silent. I fiddled with a pot of coffee, filled my cup and took the first sip. Then Elsa went to the kitchen cupboard and said without turning around, “It’s good that sometimes I get up early. If you hadn’t also happened to come out at this ungodly hour, you might still be under the impression everything gets tidied up on its own. It’s convenient to think so, don’t you find?”

“You said there were maids,” I reminded her.

“Well, what can you expect from maids?” Elsa shrugged. “They just do their job; they don’t make things cozy.”

She poured herself a coffee, tore open a plastic packet and put some slices of bread in the basket on the table. Then she pushed it closer to me and said sarcastically, “Why aren’t you eating anything; aren’t you hungry? What else would you like for breakfast? We have kangaroo meatballs today. Tender as quail mousse. Just your thing!”

I didn’t answer, only sipped my coffee, noting that my hand was trembling a little. It was clear: my roommate had remembered something important, and she wasn’t happy about it.

Elsa sat down opposite me and meticulously inspected the table. “You know,” she sighed, “for some reason, I don’t like our tablecloth anymore. All that nonsense embroidered over it, all that baby babble… Really, it’s time we had a makeover. We can hang something on the walls…” She glanced around and added in the same tone, “By the way, regarding those words that made you so concerned yesterday. I had a funny dream last night!”

I looked up at her. “Sorry,” Elsa said, “‘funny’ is not quite the right word. Actually, completely the wrong word, although it all started amusingly enough: three years before my first death, I was with a lover in Bali. In ten days or so I got tired of him and went home early. I did not get a direct flight; the stopover was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. For six hours, I was almost going crazy with boredom, and in the end that was exactly what happened…”

She finished her coffee, broke a soft, untoasted bun and covered her eyes with her hand. “ What happened?” I could not hold myself back.

“Don’t hassle me; I’m trying to visualize, to remember the details,” Elsa said coldly. “So: there was not much time before my flight. I was walking toward the plane and suddenly stumbled upon some people staring at a television. One of those big TVs hung under the ceiling, and the entire screen was taken up with the distorted face of a man in the bright, roving beam of a searchlight. In one hand he had a megaphone, and in the other he was holding an Asian girl tight to himself – and she was also secured to him by a rope. There was some noise in the background – caused, as it soon became clear, by the helicopter on which the camera was located. I remember, I was dumbfounded by the unreality of the whole scene, and then he brought the megaphone to his mouth and screamed in bad English those words about the ocean, about dharma and – again and again – something like: ‘I am giving us freedom!’ ‘You can all gain freedom,’ he shouted, ‘freedom from your losses.’ And he continued: ‘This is your Buddhist celebration of death, but we are not seeking death, we are looking for a new life. This is not a suicide,’ he repeated, ‘we are only liberating ourselves!’”

“Brevich…” I whispered and asked in a hoarse, tremulous voice, “And the girl? Tell me about the girl!”

“I didn’t remember much,” Elsa shrugged. “She was young, slim, and yes, there was a bright streak in her hair – in thick black hair down to her shoulders. And the most striking thing I remember was the terrible fear in her eyes. Unimaginable fear – of course, in her place, anyone would be scared, but she seemed to be afraid of something more, something I could not imagine. I don’t even know how to explain.”

“Well, and afterward?” I mumbled.

“Afterward…” Elsa shivered. “I remember, they were shouting something to him, probably the police, and the camera angle from the helicopter changed slightly, so that we could see wings attached to his back – big black wings. Then the subtitles came on – and I learned that everything was taking place in Bangkok, on the roof of an abandoned skyscraper. I even remember its name – Sathorn Unique. And… And then my flight was announced, so I went to the gate.”

“You mean…” I could not believe my ears. “You left without finding out how it ended?”

“What was I supposed to do?” Elsa asked angrily. “Should I have missed my plane? This happened in a foreign country to people I didn’t know. Despite the fact it was a real drama…”

I kept looking at her – as if not believing, as if even pleading for something.

“That’s all,” she said firmly. “All I can say is: both her fear and his insane look made an impression on me for a long while. But time passed, and everything was forgotten. And don’t think,” she added with irritation, “that I was hiding all this from you. It’s just how my memory dealt with it – after all, yours also didn’t come back quickly.”

“No, it didn’t,” I agreed, looking into my cold coffee. “But, however, sooner or later…”

And suddenly I believed everything – Elsa’s story, Brevich’s insane cry and that Tina had been with him up there, on the roof of the skyscraper. All the parts of the puzzle finally came together. There was no one to ask for mercy, and no point in begging – to anyone or about anything…