“Is your family still alive, do you know?”
“They are dead. My sister… maybe. She lives in Roma with her family. And you?”
“Gone.”
His eyes are soft with empathy. “But we are here, yes?”
“For now.”
“You must have the hope.”
“Sometimes it’s hard.”
“Yes, is hard. Maybe hardest the mans and the womans have seen. But we are here.” He holds up two goat’s legs. “And tonight we have food.”
Soon we are satiated in a way none of us have known for weeks. The goat is tough, stringy, overcooked, but I don’t care. As each hot bite slides down my throat, I lose myself in a fantasy where I’m in a fine restaurant devouring a steak, and a wine waiter hovers nearby, eager to refill my glass.
The soldier tears into his portion, ripping away the fibrous tissue. “Sorry,” he says when he realizes I’m watching.
I stop chewing long enough to answer. “Don’t be. It’s good to enjoy food with friends.”
He toasts me with his canteen.
Friends. Is that what these people are to me? Lisa withdraws further daily, and the Swiss is incapable of anything warmer than a snarl. Only the soldier, the newest of our group, feels like someone in whom I could confide. Even now they remain in character. The Swiss gnaws at the meat, gaze darting around the group as though someone will wrestle him for his prize. Beside him, Lisa carves her meal into doll-sized pieces with my paring knife. Her hair is a limp greasy waterfall concealing her face as she chews and swallows.
Soon my belly swells with food, and I feel that now-familiar flutter.
Stabbing his knife into another chunk of meat, the soldier smiles and offers me the handle. “Eat, eat.”
“I can’t. Too much food.”
“You are too skinny.” He laughs. I laugh, too, because we are all too thin, and we’d need more than just this meal to regrow our padding.
“You’ll be fat soon enough,” the Swiss says abruptly. “If that monster inside you does not die.”
I chew, swallow, wonder if the Swiss ever had manners or if this world snatched them away. The soldier looks at me.
“I’m pregnant.”
Lisa stares through the fire with her one eye, her mouth no longer moving.
“You didn’t say,” she says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because we’ve had other things to worry about.”
“I thought you were my friend.”
The Swiss laughs. It’s not a happy sound. “Women.”
Afterward, when we’ve buried the scraps and settled around the fire, the Italian inches closer to me.
“You have bambino? I will come with you to Brindisi, make sure you are safe. My country, my people are…” He makes a motion like snapping a twig in two.
“Thank you.”
He’s a hero. Streets all over the world are littered with people just like him.
I dream of mice and broken men and all the promises I couldn’t keep. They hound me until I wake. The ground where the soldier had lain is empty. Beneath the tree’s rim of drooping branches, the Swiss stands watching the night. Although he’s not facing me, can’t know my eyes have opened, he speaks.
“The soldier left.”
“Where did he go?”
“I told you, he left.”
“Just like that? Without saying good-bye?”
“He said
“In the dark.”
“The man changed his mind and said he wanted to find his sister, if she is still alive. I saw him back to the road and pointed the way.”
When he turns, I see he’s holding something in his hands. An icy glove grabs my heart, squeezes until I ache from the cold.
“That’s his gun.”
“He gave it to me. A gift.”
I don’t believe him. But suddenly he’s the one holding a gun and I’m holding nothing as a shield. So I say nothing. I curl up close to the fire’s humble flicker and watch as he polishes the weapon with the flap of his shirt.
I don’t say what I think. I don’t dare speak the words for fear that utterance will lend them the spark of life.
“Raoul is gone.”
James is leaning against my apartment door, his skin on loan from Madame Tussaud’s, his breathing labored as though he’s trying to inhale soup.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry.”
We’ve been here before, one or both of us heartbroken. The evening usually ends with too many drinks and morbid tales of other past loves, but not tonight. On this night James looks as though he’s clawed his way out of a coffin. “What happened? I thought you guys really hit it off.”
“He didn’t
“Dead?”
I can’t believe it, and yet, I’m not surprised, but I can’t explain why. Only that somewhere deep, I know something I wish I didn’t.
“That’s what I said,” he cries. “I was going to fall in love with him. Maybe I already was in love and that’s why this hurts so bad. We’d already talked about getting a place out of the city eventually. Having a family.”
“What happened, baby?”
“He just died. He got sick and then he stopped breathing. Then he got cold like his fucking potsherds.”
“I’m so sorry, James. So sorry.”
“That’s not the worst of it.”
I crouch beside him, encircle his shoulders, pull him close until his head tucks into my neck’s curve. “Tell me.”
He looks up, the fine threads in his eyes blazing red. “I think I’ve got what he’s had. I think I’m going to die.”
My mouth opens but the words don’t come. And then I find them hidden in that place where you store the lies you tell the people you love so you can protect them from the world’s hard truths.
“You’re not going to die, James. I’m taking you to the emergency room, okay?”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I am, I promise. Let me get my keys.”
“I mean I don’t believe I’m not going to die. I can feel it, Zoe, waiting for me. When I fell asleep last night, Raoul was there. Only, it wasn’t my Raoul. It was Death wearing his face, same as in that new exhibit we’ve got from Africa. He loved that exhibit. He said it made him feel good to know that there was a time and place where it was socially acceptable to wear a mask.”
“I want you to show me the exhibit when you’re feeling better.” His head sags, sinks to his chest. “James?”
Eyes closed, he smiles at the ground. “Still here. You haven’t got rid of me yet.”
