The Autumn Castle (3 page)

—from the Memoirs of Mandy Z.

I
first conceived of the Bone Wife as a child of eight in Bremen. My mother had taken me to a traveling exhibit of puppets,
dolls, and automatons in the town square. I had always been, and continue to be, overly interested in contraptions, inventions,
gadgets with wheels and cogs. The exhibit was set up in the shadow of the Dom—its dark spires pointing toward the broad sky—on
a summer afternoon that stretched on for miles. I wandered between the exhibits, clutching my mother’s fingers in one hand,
and a sticky ice cream in the other. Such an array of painted faces: some plain with round black eyes and pointed noses, some
so garishly colorful that even I could sense their brightness; clown faces, girl faces, boy faces, cat faces, elephant faces;
spindly legs, silk feet, straw-stuffed arms, antique lace, and stiff linen. I was swept away by the sea of ghastly wooden
smiles and laughing fur eyebrows. One doll in particular caught my eye as it was the exact image of my mother, but without
her stern hairstyle and clothes. This little doll had perfect ringlets and a pretty frilled dress. Oh, I cried for that doll!

“Mama,” I said (in German, of course, as it is my native language), “if you do not buy that doll for me I shall die.”

“Nonsense,” she replied, dragging me farther into the exhibit.

She did not understand that I needed to possess it, to have a version of my mother with pretty curls and a frilly dress. I
hated her for dragging me away from it. We stopped in front of a display of an automaton, which from the front looked like
an ordinary doll but from the back was a mass of whirring wheels and gears. The doll’s owner—a hefty, mustachioed man dressed
like a nineteenth-century traveling salesman—wound it, and the doll began to bounce up and down, its arms scissoring through
the air and its head bobbing, its mouth articulating silent words. Then the mustachioed man placed a peanut on the table in
front of it, and the doll bent down to pick it up. It was the most amazing thing I had ever seen and all the way home to our
farmhouse at Niederbüren I pictured that automaton over and over, and in my mind the face of the mother-doll became imposed
over it, for it was often that I had seen my mother pick up the objects that my father and I left behind us when we had tired
of them.

I secluded myself in my bedroom that evening, drawing plans for a mother-doll. A life-size automaton shaped like a woman,
who could pick up my toys and could not speak. That, I thought, would be the perfect wife for me. I was not interested in
women then, and I’m not now. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that I am interested in men either. I have never experienced
the faintest twinge of the sexual urges with which the rest of the world is obsessed. I believe it to be a legacy of the genetic
damage suffered by our family, and I have never envied the passions of others, as they too often lead to vulnerability.

I shelved my plans for a mother-doll or a wife-doll, partly because I was a mere boy with no idea how to build an automaton,
but also because soon after this occasion I saw my first faery, and it had such a profound effect upon me that most childish
thoughts were permanently driven from my mind.

My parents had told me about faeries, and about the special connection our family had with them. I had taken for granted that
one day I would meet one, and perhaps thank him or her for our good fortune. I imagined they would look like the faeries in
the books in my bedroom: tiny people with little wings and sparkly eyes. I didn’t know then, as I do now, about the many different
breeds of faeries and how vastly they differ from one another; the complexities of their bodies that I now understand so intimately.

On this day, on the day I saw a faery for the first time, I was playing with my toy boat in a puddle on the banks of the Weser.
It was the first fine day in a week, and the grass and trees were clean, washed. I was concentrating hard on the boat in front
of me. In my imagination, I was making an Atlantic crossing. A shadow fell across me and I looked up to see a man smiling
at me.

“Hello,” he said, “that’s a nice boat.”

My body had never before performed such a complex reaction to the mere sight and voice of another being. My eyes dilated,
my skin grew warm, my body felt stiff, and a fist of nausea pushed up inside me. I opened my mouth to scream, and only a low
groan came out.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Don’t be afraid.” And then he knelt down across the puddle from me and reached out to touch
my boat. I could smell him then, I could smell his bones deep under his skin, and such a thrill of revulsion shuddered through
me that I felt I might actually lose control of my body, that I might explode or die. Instead, I took a deep breath and called
at the top of my lungs, “Mama!”

The stranger stood immediately and took two steps back. “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said.

“Mama!”

But it was my father who heard my calls and emerged from the house, peering across the narrow road at me. “Immanuel?”

“Immanuel,” the stranger said. “That’s a fine name.”

I sprang to my feet and ran to my father, locked his right leg between my arms and buried my face in his soft stomach. “Papa,
that man is strange,” I managed to say. Then I heard the stranger’s voice. He had followed me.

“I didn’t mean to frighten him,” he said in a soft, tender voice.

Then my father’s voice, rumbling deep in his stomach. “Oh, you’re a faery. That’s why he’s frightened. He’s never met one
before.”

Now I looked around, glared up at the stranger. So this was what a faery looked like. I was disappointed and disgusted. While
he was near me, I felt as though my skin might be sick.

“How do you know?” the stranger said.

“My family knew faeries. In 1570 the first child of that union was born.”

The faery’s eyebrows arched upward, and I marveled that such a revolting being could look and move so much like a normal human.
“Really?”

“So you see, Immanuel,” Papa said, “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

The faery reached out to me, and I spat on his hand. “Don’t you touch me, you foul creature.”

My father gave me a hard smack on the side of the head and apologized to the faery.

“I should leave,” the faery said. “I don’t want to distress the child further.”

He walked off, and I tried not to think about the obscene bones and joints that moved under that skin.

“What was all the fuss?” said my father.

“I could smell his bones.”

“The faeries are our friends.”

“I feel sick. I hate the faeries, they make me sick.”

“Their bones gleam like silver. I’m sure they don’t smell bad.”

Gleam like silver! I wanted to open up the faery and see such a bone. Carve away the layers of flesh and muscle and discover
the grand secret inside. It made me quiet, and Papa thought that his reprimand had touched me. He fetched my boat and brought
me inside.

Despite the sunny days that followed, I spent all my time in the corner of my room with my drawing pad. I drew dozens upon
dozens of pictures. Pictures of the faery, whose eyes were dead crosses, with flaps of his skin peeled back to reveal shining
bones. Pictures of the bones with tiny sparks drawn around to indicate the gleam of precious metal. Pictures of the bones
emerging, as if spontaneously, from the faery’s mutilated body. Pictures of body parts, half-stripped to reveal the surprise
within, like the silver coin in a plum pudding. Drawing the pictures provided me with an addictive sensation of relief. Such
an ache would well up inside me just thinking about the faery and the odd smell of his bones that the only way to feel relaxed
and peaceful again was to imagine him divested of those bones.

When my mother found these pictures, I was pulled by the ear to appear before my father and my grandfather and answer for
my sins. She waved the sheaf of drawings in front of them, and their mouths became little circles of shock.

One by one, in the white sterility of the room, their faces loomed in front of me.

“Immanuel, no,” Papa said, “you are not to think such things about the faeries.”

Opa, who was a terrifyingly large man with a white beard and gleaming eyes, grabbed my upper arms in his strong hands and
shook me. “You rotten little scoundrel! You evil boy! Why do you think we have so much money? Why do you think you live in
a giant farmhouse with every toy you could ever want? It’s because of the faeries.”

“You must put every one of these ideas out of your head,” Papa said, brandishing the drawings.

“You must respect the faeries.”

“We have our good fortune because of them,” Mama said. “You owe them gratitude and love.”

But no matter how long they nagged and bullied me, no matter how many clips around the head and bruising shakings they gave
me, I knew the opposite was true.

I owed the faeries only contempt. I owed them only my sincerest hatred.

The afternoon air bit cold as Christine walked home from Friedrichstrasse Station, vainly pulling her cardigan tighter. Of
course, she could have taken the U-bahn down to Oranienburger Tor, which was much closer, but underground travel was something
she avoided at all times. Thirteen years of bad dreams about tunnels meant an obsessive frostiness stole over her skin every
time she approached an underground space.

Her back ached in hot buzzes. It had been a bad day. Busy and tiring, and the continual stress of those half-forgotten memories
haunting her as though they were desperately important. As she crossed Weidendammer Bridge, she scratched at her left thumb.
It had become irritated around lunchtime and now an itchy red blotch had spread across its tip. She paused, leaning on the
bridge railing above the pale gray Spree, and examined her thumb. An old memory fought back toward her and she shook her head
in wonder. This was too weird. May Frith had disappeared nearly twenty-five years ago, but her memory was alive in Christine’s
body. At seven, after reading a cowboy story together (May was a precocious reader), they had decided to become blood sisters.
They had each pricked their thumbs, then smeared the tiny drops of blood together. Christine touched the spot now, and it
prickled gently. Surely coincidence. Surely she had received a tiny paper cut during the day, and it had grown inflamed. She
put the tip of her thumb in her mouth and sucked it delicately; thought she could faintly taste blood.

“I’m going nuts from the pain,” she muttered to herself, turning and heading home.

Hotel Mandy-Z was a gently crumbling, late nineteenth-century apartment building on Vogelwald-Allee, a dead-end street that
dipped into an enormous storm drain and a square of green behind Friedrichstrasse. It had once been the head office of an
Asian travel agency, but the Reisebüro sign had been painted over in gray (she could still see the letters faintly underneath)
and “Hotel Mandy-Z” had been added in gold by one of 1998’s Zweigler Fellows. She let herself into the tiny lobby, checked
the mail, dashed past the gallery door so Mandy wouldn’t see her, then proceeded upstairs. The gallery was situated on the
lower floor with the studios, Gerda and Pete lived across the hall from each other on the first floor, and Jude and Fabiyan
on the second. The third, fourth, and attic were Mandy’s.

Christine unlocked the apartment door and called out, “Jude?”

“In here.”

Christine looked around as she closed the door behind her. Jude had cleaned the entire apartment. The kitchen gleamed, the
ashtrays were empty, the tables were free of the usual piles of books and papers. Jude had clearly had a bad day too. When
he couldn’t paint, he cleaned. Obsessively.

She followed his voice to the main bedroom, where he was smoothing the covers over.

“I washed the sheets,” he said.

“Bad painting day?”

He stood up and sighed. “Awful. Didn’t feel like I was painting at all, just putting marks on the canvas.”

She reached down to help him with the corner of the duvet, pulled a muscle in her back and winced.

“Christine?” he said, approaching her.

“Bad-back day too,” she said, lowering herself onto the bed. “Maybe I’ll just stay here.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“Sit down a minute.”

He sat next to her; she held up her thumb. “Can you see that spot?”

He peered closely. “Yeah. What is it? An insect bite?”

“I don’t know. It itches really badly.” She sighed and lay back on the bed. Jude leaned over her and kissed her forehead.

“Jude, I think I’m going crazy.”

He smoothed her hair. “No, you’re not. You’re just adjusting to a new city.”

“It’s not new for me.” She held up her thumb again. “When I was seven, out at Zehlendorf, I pricked this thumb—right where
that red spot is—and became blood sisters with the girl next door.”

He smiled. “That’s a long incubation period for an infection.” His teeth were slightly crooked. That was something she loved
about him. A lot of her friends back home were getting their teeth bleached and capped, giving them all the sterile, homogeneous
look of movie stars.