Andrea Barrett - Servants of the Map

In the emergency room, the nurses and residents were impatient. No one seemed able to sort out Krzysztof’s health insurance situation: what were these British papers and cards, this little folder marked Traveler’s Insurance ? Then there was the vodka on his breath, and Bianca’s storm of hysterical tears; for some minutes the possibility of calling the police was raised. X-rays, blood tests, embarrassing questions: “Are you his girlfriend?” one nurse said. From Bianca’s shocked rebuttal, Krzysztof understood that, as he’d feared, she’d never seen him, not for one moment, as an actual man. Almost he was tempted to tell her how clearly, and in what detail, he’d imagined her naked. She sat in an orange plastic chair and sobbed while he was wheeled in and out of rooms, his veiny white legs exposed in the most humiliating fashion. And this exposure was what distressed him most, although several friends had met their deaths through just such casual falls. Somehow the possibility of actual bodily harm had not occurred to him as he lay calmly regarding the stars from the muddy field.

“The ankle’s not broken,” a young doctor finally said. “But it’s badly sprained.”

“So he’s all right?” Bianca kept saying. “He’s all right ?” Unable to calm herself, she sat as if paralyzed while the doctors drew a curtain around Krzysztof and went to work.

Krzysztof emerged with his lower leg encased in two rigid plastic forms, each lined with a green plastic air-filled pod. Velcro straps clamped the shells around him, as if his ankle were an oyster. A boy young enough to be his grandson had given him two large pills in a white pleated cup, which resembled in miniature the nurse’s cap worn by a woman he’d loved during the war; the woman’s name had vanished, as had the pain, and his entire body felt blissful. Bianca carried the crutches, and a sheaf of instructions and bills. She opened the van’s side door and tried to help as two men lifted Krzysztof from the wheelchair and draped him along the back seat.

All the way back to Constance’s house Bianca drove slowly, avoiding potholes and sudden swerves. “Are you all right?” she asked every few minutes. “Is this hurting you?”

Drowsily he said, “I have not felt so good in years.” Actually this long narrow seat was more comfortable than the vast bed in his hotel. The jacket Bianca had folded into a pillow beneath his head smelled of her; the whole van was scented with her presence. On the floor, just below his face, he saw nylon shoes with flared lumpy soles, socks and shirts and reeds and a bird’s nest, a canvas sack and a withered orange. Behind his seat was a mat and a sleeping bag. “Do you sleep in here?” he asked.

“I have — but not these last weeks. I’m so sorry, I never meant — I can’t believe this happened.”

“My fault,” he said. “Entirely. You mustn’t blame yourself.”

“Everyone else will,” she said bitterly. “Everyone.”

Should she bring him straight back to his hotel? But she had to stop at Constance’s house, let Constance and the others decide what was best for him. Perhaps Constance would want to have him stay with her. It was past eleven, they’d been gone for hours; and although she’d had plenty of time to call from the hospital, the phone had seemed impossibly far away. Now the only honest thing to do was to show up, with her guilty burden, and admit to everyone what had happened. Behind her, Krzysztof was humming.

“Talk to me,” he said. “It’s lonely back here. All I can see is the back of your head.”

“Those bison,” she said. “Are they anything like our buffalo?”

“Similar,” he said. “But bigger. Shaggy in the same way, though.”

“I heard this thing once,” she said. “From a friend of my mother’s, who used to visit the winery when Rose and I were little girls. He was some kind of naturalist, I think he studied beetles. Once he said, I think he said, that the buffalo out West had almost gone extinct, but then some guy made a buffalo refuge in Montana and stocked it with animals from the Bronx Zoo. Like your mother did, you see?” For a minute her own mother’s face hovered in the air.

The van slowed and made a broad gentle curve — Constance’s circular driveway, Krzysztof guessed. “In Polish,” he said dreamily, “the word for beetle is chrzaszcz.”

Bianca tried to repeat the word, mashing together the string of consonants in a way he found very sweet. How pleasing that after all she’d paid attention to his stories. Their slow progress through the afternoon and evening had culminated properly among the deer, and all of it had been worthwhile.

“We’re here,” she said. “Boy, this is going to be awful —just wait for a minute, I’ll tell everyone what’s going on and we’ll see what to do.”

She turned and touched his head, preparing to face her sister.

“Don’t worry,” he said gently. “I’ll tell everyone I asked you to take me for a drive. I had a lovely evening, you know. I’m very glad to have met you.”

Neither of them knew that out back, beyond the rubble of the party, large sturdy bubbles had been forming for hours at the lip of the bamboo fountain, to the mystification of everyone. They did not see the bubbles, nor the inside of the house, because Rose and Constance came flying out the front door to greet the van. Terrified, Bianca saw. And then, as she prepared the first of many explanations, the first clumsy attempt at the story she’d tell for years, with increasing humor and a kind of self-deprecation actually meant to charm in the most shameful way, she saw their faces change: that was rage she saw, they were enraged.

In an instant she’d thrown the van into gear again and stomped on the gas. Krzysztof said, “Where …?” and as they lurched back onto the road, leaving behind Constance and Rose and the fountain and the lanterns, the squabbling scientists, the whole world of science, she said, “Back to your hotel, you need to be in your own bed.”

Back, Krzysztof thought. Back to the airport, back to England, back across the ocean and Europe toward home; back to the groves of Bialowieza, where his mother might once have crossed paths with Biancas grandfather. Might have escaped, like him; might have survived and adopted another name and life during all the years when, in the absence of family or friends, her only son shuttled between his laboratory and his little flat and the rooms of the women who one by one had tried and failed to comfort him. Back and back and back and back. Where had his life gone?

He thought back but Bianca, her foot heavy on the accelerator, thought away. From Rose, their mother, their entire past, books and papers and stories and sorrows: let it sink into the ocean. She had her wallet and her sleeping bag and her running shoes and her van; and she drove as if this were the point from which the rest of her life might begin.

Kingsessing, on the Schuylkill

September 8th, 1810

HE RODE PAST EARLIER, that slip of a Sophie at his side: James. If you knew what I feel when I see him … But why shouldn’t you know? If I can imagine you, not face or your gestures perhaps but your mind and your heart, why not imagine you capable of feeling all I feel? I picture us on the bank of the river here, near the field-stone bench, exchanging confidences. I think how, when at last I find you, I will hand you these lines and you will know me.

The aunts do not even look up as he passes. The hayfields surrounding us, north and west, belong to James; the lush pastures to the south; the oats and rye and cattle and sheep, the fine stand of timber between our wedge of river-front land and the ramble of the Bartrams’ botanic gardens — his, all his. He is nearing thirty, not yet married though rumored to be looking for a wife. Wealthy, now that he’s come into his grandfather’s estate. And favored in all the other ways as well. About him there is a kind of sheen, the golden skin of good fortune.