Servants of the Map (10 page)

“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.

Farewell—
Yours devotedly—
Susan A. Snead

Who was Susan Snead? Who wrote that book, where had it come from? Suky’s aunts might have known, but they were gone and had taken Suky’s history with them. Now no one, not even their father, knew anything anymore—or so Rose had shouted at Bianca, wrapping the book in a sheet of paper and tucking it back in the corner. Someone has to save
something,
Rose had said.

The truth, Bianca thought, was that Rose kept the book simply
because she’d found it in Suky’s closet. That clinging to the past was the single most irritating thing about her. Why hang on to useless relics, when life was all about moving quickly, shedding the inessential?

“What did you say?” Krzysztof asked.

Had she spoken? “It used to be the gardener’s quarters,” Bianca said, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the apartment. “Over there, near that big stone house.”

He ducked his head to see over her shoulder. Whatever house she’d pointed out had vanished. Suddenly she slowed and turned the van down a narrow lane between two stone pillars. “Almost here,” she said.

He hurried on with his story, sensing that time was short. He skipped everything personal, all his struggles between the two great wars. He skipped the strange evolution of his mother’s heart, the way she’d left him alone in Kraków and returned to the forest of her youth, yearning to rebuild what had been destroyed. The way she’d turned in disgust from his work, from every kind of science but forestry.

“The bison were gone by the end of the war,” he said. “Almost extinct. But a Polish forester started trying to reestablish a breeding stock, and my mother moved back to the Bialowieza to help him. There were a few in a zoo in Stockholm, and some in zoos in Hamburg and Berlin. A few more had survived the war in the south of Poland. And my mother and this man, they brought some females from that little group to the forest, and borrowed bulls from the zoos, and they started a breeding program. From them come all the European bison left in the world. There are several thousand of them now—because of my mother, you see? My own mother.”

They were in a forest of sorts right now—the lane grew narrower and turned into a dirt track, and trees brushed the side of the van. When they emerged into a small clearing, Bianca stopped the van without saying a word in response to his tale.

“I run here,” she said. “Almost every night. It’s a park, this place. But
no one comes here, I never see any people. I like to run just before dark.” For a second he pictured her pounding down the dirt paths. She came around to his side of the van and helped him down the awkward step.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. Why had he been telling her that story? The forest, his mother, the starving soldiers; the bison, so huge and wild, just barely rescued from oblivion. That part ended happily. The rest, which he would never tell Bianca, did not: the German army had overrun the forest in a matter of weeks. Then it had passed to the Russians, then back to the Germans; swastikas had flown from the roofs. The resident Jews had been slaughtered under those ancient oaks, and the farmers and foresters had been deported. His mother had disappeared. And all the while he’d been safe in England, unable to persuade her to join him. Unable to save her, or anyone. In test tubes he’d grown chains of molecules, searching for something that might be turned into tires for planes and jeeps.

“It’s a park now, that forest,” he said, unable to let the story go. Then the pressure in his bladder grew unbearable and he said, “Would you excuse me for a minute?” He stepped behind an oak and into a thorny tangle, disappearing in the brambles. Behind him, Bianca was puzzled and then amused as she heard the long splatter of liquid on leaves, a pause, more splatter, a sigh. The sigh was one of pleasure; even this simple act was no longer reliable, and Krzysztof felt such relief as his urine flowed over the greenery that he was hardly embarrassed when he emerged and Bianca gently pointed out the bit of shirttail emerging from his fly like a tongue.

After he tidied himself, Bianca led him across a muddy field and into the trees at the far edge of the clearing. The sky had turned a smoky violet gray, truly dusk, all traces of red disappeared, and with it the color of the leaves and Bianca’s hair.

“No bison here,” she said cheerfully. “But I think we made it just in time. This whole area—I hate this area, it’s one giant suburb. This is the
only bit of real woods left for miles. But something kept eating everything Rose planted in her garden, and when I started jogging here I found out what it was. Be quiet now.”

He was. He was exhausted, remarkably drained, the vodka swirling through his veins. The marzipanlike taste of the bison grass; was it that flavor the secretive, lumbering creatures had craved as they grazed? The only time he’d visited his mother in the forest, just before he left for England, she’d fed him a dish of wild mushrooms, wild garlic, and reindeer, washed down with this vodka. He’d tried to persuade her that war was inevitable. Her hair was gray by then, she no longer looked anything like Bianca. She lived in a low dark hut by herself and said she’d rather die than leave her home again.

A deer appeared in the clearing. He blinked his eyes; it hadn’t been there, and then it was. Bianca inhaled sharply. “Oh,” she whispered. “We made it just in time.” He blinked again: four deer, then eleven, then seventeen. They came out of the trees and stood in the gathering darkness, looking calmly at each other and at the sky. How beautiful they were. He squeezed Biancas hand, which was unaccountably folded within his own.

She stood very still. Night after night, during these unsettled weeks, she’d left Rose’s apartment and their difficult quarrels, slipped on her running shoes, and sped down the long driveway, past the houses of the wealthy, across the busy suburban road, and into this park. Almost every night she was rewarded with this vision. She could hear her mother’s voice then, as if the deer were transmitting it:
The good contained herein may spread far and wide.
The deer seemed unafraid of her and often stayed for half an hour. Tonight they were edgy, though. Their tails twitched and their ears rotated like tiny radar dishes; their heads came up suddenly and pointed toward the place where Bianca and Krzysztof were hidden. They were nothing like bison. They were dainty and delicate-footed, completely at home here and yet out of place beyond the confines
of this small haven. Still she couldn’t figure out either how or when they crossed the bustling road between the park and Rose’s apartment, to browse on the lettuce and peas.

She didn’t have to tell Krzysztof not to speak; he stood like a tree, wonderfully still and silent. But his face gleamed, she saw. As if he’d been sprayed with water; was he crying? Suddenly one doe leapt straight up, turned in the air, and then bounded away. The others quickly followed. Darkness had fallen, the show was over.

“You okay?” she whispered.

“Fine,” he said. “That was
lovely.
Thank you.”

“My pleasure.”

She slipped an arm beneath his elbow to guide him back through the muddy part of the field, but he shook her off. He was restored, he was himself. He strode firmly over the ruts. “It’s hard to believe there’s a place like this so close to the congestion,” he said.

She was behind him, unable to make out his words. “What?” she said.

He turned his head over his shoulder to repeat his comment. As he did so his right foot plunged into a deep hole. For a moment he tottered between safety and harm, almost in balance, almost all right. Then he tipped and tilted and was down in the mud, looking up at the first stars.

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.