Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

“But you stopped,” Krzysztof said. “Why was that?”

She couldn’t explain this to Rose, or even to herself: how could she explain it to him? The argument she and Rose had had, when they were working together on one of the papers that grew out of Rose’s thesis — how bitter that had been. At its root was a small kinetics experiment that Rose interpreted one way, she herself another.

“It’s so … pushy, ” she said. The easy excuse, and at least partially true. “Science, I mean. At least at this level. When I started I thought it was something people did communally. Everyone digging their own small corner of the field, so that in the end the field would flower — I didn’t know it got so vicious. So competitive. I hate all this hustling for money and priority and equipment. Actually,” she said, “I hate these people. A lot of them. I really do.”

“We’re not very inspiring in groups,” Krzysztof said. He pulled his hands apart and dropped the wire forms, disrupting the bubbles so that suddenly he held nothing, only air. Science was a business now, and sometimes he could hardly bear it himself. Yet he could remember the excitement of his youth, that sense of clarity and vision; it was this, in part, that had pulled him from Kraków to Cambridge. But not only this.

“Your grandfather,” he said. “If what you remember about his youth was true, our families might have come from the same place. In northeastern Poland is this huge forest — the forest where the bison live, where this vodka comes from. That might have been the forest your mother meant in her stories.”

“Do you think?”

“It’s possible,” he said, and he repeated the name he’d told her earlier: Bialowieza. Bianca tried to say it herself. “It’s a beautiful place.”

“And there are bison there? Now?”

“There are,” he said. “It is partly because of my own mother that they still exist.” The whole story swirled before him, beautiful and shapely and sad, but just as it came together in his mind Bianca leapt up from her seat and held out her hands.

“I could show you something,” she said. “Something really beautiful, that you’ll never see if we stay here. You probably think this country is ugly, all you ever see are airports and highways and scientists. Do you want to get out of here for a while? We’d only be gone an hour, and you could tell me about the bison on the way.”

“I don’t want to be rude.”

“I promise you, no one will notice. I’ll have you back so soon they’ll never know you’re gone.”

No one had approached them this last half hour; the other guests had taken root, on the grass and the steps and the chairs, and were eating and drinking busily, arguing and laughing and thrusting their chins at each other. But a threat loomed, in the person of the woman — the wife of Arnold? — standing closest to them. Although she was chattering with a postdoc she was sending glances Krzysztof’s way, which made him shudder. He’d been stuck with her, at an earlier dinner, while she explained the chemistry of what made things sticky, but not too sticky: something to do with those small yellow paper squares that now littered all other sheets of paper, and on which his colleagues scribbled curt notes. She might sidle over if he and Bianca continued to sit by this fountain.

He held out his arms to Bianca. “If you would?” Just then all the cylinders in the shrubberies flared at once, casting a warm light on the paths and the pool and the patio — yes, of course they were lanterns, not dolls. Expensive, tasteful lanterns, meant to look faintly oriental.

“My pleasure,” she said. She raised him and held her finger to her lips in a gesture of silence. Then, to his delight, she led him through the ferns and azaleas until they disappeared around the side of the house, unseen by anyone. Krzysztof was too pleased by their cunning escape to tell Bianca how badly he needed to urinate.

They drove toward the glorious red horizon, as if chasing the vanished sun. Although the road was narrow and twisted, almost like an English road, Bianca drove very fast. Krzysztof clutched the dash at first, but then relaxed; what was left of his hair rose in the wind, tugging at his scalp like a lover’s hands and distracting him from the pressure in his bladder.

“Is there any of that vodka left?” Bianca asked.

He handed her the bottle and watched as she held it to her lips. “So,” she said. “Tell me about those bison.”

He stuck one hand through the open window, letting it cut into the rushing breeze; then tilted it slightly and let the air push his arm up. “I was born and raised in Kraków,” he said. Had he told her that already? “But my mother grew up in the country, in this forest where perhaps your grandfather was from. It is so beautiful, you can’t imagine — the last bit of primeval forest in Europe, the trees have never been cut. There are owls there, and roe deer and storks and bears. And it was the last place where the wild bison, the zubre, lived. When my mother was young the Russians controlled that part of Poland and the forest was the tsar’s private hunting preserve.”

“Your mother was Russian?”

“No— Polish. Defiantly, absolutely Polish.” He almost stopped here, overwhelmed by the complexities of Polish history. But it wasn’t important, he skipped it all; it was not Biancas fault that she knew nothing and that, if he were to hand her a map, she couldn’t place Poland more than vaguely. “After she married my father they moved to Kraków — he was an organic chemist, he taught at the university. During the First World War he was conscripted into the Austrian army and disappeared. We don’t even know where he died. So it was just my mother and me after that. Later, when I started university myself, we heard stories about how the German armies trapped in the forest during the war’s last winter ate the zubre after they’d finished off the lynx and wild boars and weasels. There were only a thousand or so of them left in the world. The forests had been cleared everywhere else in Europe and rich people had been hunting them for centuries. Then those German soldiers ate all the rest. What could they do? They were freezing and starving, and they butchered the zubre with their artillery. This made my mother bitter. Her father had been a forester, and she’d grown up watching the bison grazing on buttercups under the oaks.”

Bianca interrupted him — he seemed old again, he was wandering. And crossing and uncrossing his legs like a little boy who had to pee. Was a bison the same as a buffalo?

“This is Meadowbrook,” she said, gesturing at the gigantic houses and formal gardens tucked back from the road they whizzed along. “Isn’t that a ridiculous name? Rose has a little apartment above the garage of one of these estates.”

A tiny space, further cramped by mounds of books and papers and useless things — that was her sister, Bianca thought, trailing a whole life’s garbage everywhere. From apartment to apartment Rose had toted relics of their mother: old clothes, mismatched earrings, broken dishes. A faded green book, which Suky had used to study mosses. A big wad of old letters and another, much older book, bound in flaking brown leather: antique geology, bent to prove God’s role in the creation of the world. When Bianca, in a cleaning frenzy, had tried to throw it out, Rose had seized it and pointed to the handsome pictures. Engravings of fossils, stony fish and oysters and ferns — and wasn’t the inscription inside the front cover marvelous? Unmoved, Bianca had examined the spidery handwriting:

I do this day, June 4, 1888, bequeath this most valuable book to my dear friend — to be by her kept all of her life — I also trust that she with her very brilliant mind may find great instruction therein, and that through her, the good contained herein may be spread far and wide.