Kathleen Spivack - Unspeakable Things

“And what was that?” Maria asked urgently.

The Rat did not answer. And when finally she did, it was in a low, reluctant voice.

“I ask of you only this, dear madame,” Rasputin said. “That for the next two weeks, you shall be my companion.”

Rasputin looked into Anna’s eyes with a piercing yellow glare. The Rat felt herself go weak. “If not…” The Monk did not need to say more.

“And did you do it?” Maria asked.

The Rat was silent for a long time. A shiver crossed her little body.

“Yes,” she finally said. “I agreed. And so I went every day to Rasputin’s apartments. And there, I did with him…” She paused. “Unspeakable things.”

In the darkness, both she and Maria were silent. Maria stared into the room, wondering what “unspeakable things” could cover. She thrilled to the dark inclination of the phrase. “Unspeakable things.” The words repeated themselves.

From behind the blanket that separated the room, Maria’s grandfather’s snores rose like wisps of smoke into the thin air. The room was starting to take on the outlines of early morning. Maria’s mother slept as if flung down onto the couch. Only Maria and the Rat lay awake in the half-light. And finally the Rat, too, fell asleep, with small, slack, shallow breaths, as Maria lay half-awake, listening.

Ilse was to speak to her daughter later. The next morning, as Maria’s mother was combing her daughter’s hair, she pulled the child toward her and hugged her. In one corner of the room, the Rat sat hunched contemplatively over her cup of tea. Maria’s mother cast a quick look at the older woman. “Maria,” her mother said softly, “there are things we should be silent about.” She stroked her daughter’s long, shining hair, then deftly plaited it. “We must be silent, do you understand?” Her hands moved efficiently.

Maria could hardly wait to get home that afternoon to see if the Rat was still there. And indeed, there she was, bent over as when they had left her, but this time with a large book propped open and a lorgnette in front of her. Upon seeing the children, the Rat sighed, put down the lorgnette, and held out her arms to them.

Each night, Maria huddled around the Rat’s small body and waited for the next installment, spellbound. “My husband,” the Rat whispered into the dark, “you know, I never saw him again after that. He was sent to Manchuria. And so…”

And so? Maria’s heart was pounding with excitement. “And so.” The Rat turned over and went to sleep.

The next morning, before everyone else was awake, the Rat picked up the story of Rasputin. “And afterward, he, too, disappeared. That was terrible. But I was not sorry.” She was silent for a long time. “And of course the Holy Tsar and his family. It all happened so quickly.

“I stayed with my husband’s mother until she died. It was my duty.” After her death, the Rat yearned to return to Hungary. “To see my family and friends and your grandfather, who was then still living in Vienna. Yes, all this I wanted. But,” the Rat continued sadly, “I had my duty to my husband also. And so I waited and waited to hear news of him. But no news came.”

The Rat decided to try to find her husband. “I only knew that I must see him one more time to say good-bye.” Taking two servants with her to accompany her three children, she set out toward Manchuria. “I did not know if we would ever return, and so of course I took the children. We traveled all through Russia. Mother Russia.” The Rat whispered into the dark, staring outward at the memory. “But I never found my husband again.”

“And so, she never saw her husband again,” Maria’s mother was to tell Maria, many years later. “Nor her two sons. Except for one daughter, who went to England, all were lost.”

“What happened?” Maria had wanted to know this ever since the Rat had started once again to tell the story of her travels throughout Russia. Maria knew a bit about Anna’s children — mostly of their mischief and misbehavior. But once the Rat embarked on the story of their travels through Russia — herself, the two servants, and these children — there always came the point of absolute silence, when the Rat turned her face to the wall and refused to say another word.

“She never saw any of them again. We don’t know what happened. Your grandfather tried to find out. But…We can only imagine,” Ilse told her daughter quickly, sensitively. Maria’s mother immediately continued on another topic in order to forestall Maria’s possible questions. But Maria had no intention of not asking questions.

“And then,” she asked, “what happened to the daughter?”

“She went to England. Aunt Anna managed to smuggle her out.”

Maria thought this over. “And how did Aunt Anna come to us?”

“We don’t ask this question,” admonished Maria’s mother impatiently, pursing her lips.

Maria couldn’t wait for night to happen again, to hear the beautiful hunchback’s story, whispered obsessively in the dark, into the whorled echoing shell of the child’s ear. Unspeakable things.

Hadn’t Maria known all this already? The Rat, curled in upon herself, dreaming of Rasputin, her spine a bent half circle, floated in Maria’s mind as in their small bed. And Maria’s grandfather, his white hair an aureole about his head, dreamed in a cloud of quiet snores behind the army blanket draped over a clothesline, so close to them both. In the room, Ilse turned over on the couch, where she lay wrapped in a quilt. Next to her, little Philip pressed his nose against her body.

In a dank basement far away, secreted in another place, another city, with the long name — Washington, D.C. — David, Maria’s father, husband of Ilse and only remaining son of Herbert and Adeline, peered at a page and tried to type what he saw there. He rubbed his eyes. He was so weary. There was always more news to translate. Always more to decode and try to understand. He tried not to read what he saw beneath the mild reports that came to him from abroad. For he was an alien, and a translator whose usefulness was controlled. David translated the advertisements from foreign newspapers — ads for goods, which were limited, ads for people who sought spouses, even in the midst of catastrophe. The Allies felt that perhaps, in these ads, great schemes might, in code, contain military secrets. David wondered. But he translated into English the desperate hopes for marriage and family that, even in the midst of devastation, reflected the ordinary yearnings for a more ordinary happiness on the part of the German-speaking people. David translated these pathetic ads, then passed the translations on to his superiors. Maybe they could decode them? What did it matter? David dreamed of his family sometimes. But when he thought of his mother, Adeline, he stopped thinking and bent again to his work.

The Rat twitched in her little space, and Maria moved her body accommodatingly to make room for her. Everyone stirred in the little room, as if a wind had touched them, and then everyone, in unison, turned over and slept more deeply.

After the last little patient of the day had left, Felix took a moment to enjoy a cigar, a glass of wine in hand. Schatzie lay at his feet, adoring. But Felix did not linger too long. For he was a disciplined man with a careful schedule laid out for himself.

He moved rapidly toward his laboratory, as he called it: a small dark closet that he had cleverly converted into a small working lab, complete with a microscope, smuggled in from Germany during those last days, and shelves of slides. He screwed his monocle more tightly to his eye and bent toward the eyepiece of the microscope.

There, a small number of cells lay beneath his eye in their petri dish. It appeared, though he could not be too sure, that there had been some activity. Briskly, Felix tried to focus the eyepiece further. He could not be sure; no, he could not. He moved to the counter beside the instrument and carefully noted the date and time, as well as his hesitant observations.