The Barter (29 page)

Rebecca peered into the man's handsome, shadowed face. “Herr Krause? Is that you, sir?”

Robert Krause smiled thinly. “Indeed, and thank you for remembering me, Mrs. Hirschfelder.”

“How could I forget? You promised me eternal life.” Rebecca laughed. “Please, come in. May I introduce my aunt, Miss Nussbaum.”

Again the deep bow. “But I am afraid I have come to visit you during a time of sorrow.”

Rebecca smoothed her hands down the skirt of her mourning dress and said, “My father, Dr. Mueller, passed away this winter. My son, Matthew, is our bright consolation. Will you sit?”

“I will fetch some coffee,” Frau offered. “It would be my pleasure, sir.”

“You are from near Bonn, madam?” the magician asked abruptly.

“I am,” Frau said, a flush of pleasure in her face. “Duisdorf, in the western country outside of Bonn.”

“I knew within a moment,” Herr Krause said warmly. “I am from Bonn myself.”

“Then my pleasure is doubled,” Frau replied. “Excuse me, I will return in a moment.”

“I thought you had left our town in January for your next engagement,” Rebecca said, seating herself opposite the magician with Matthew in her lap.

“I had. I returned,” the magician said, fixing her with such an odd stare that she felt herself obliged to sit up straighter. His look wasn't amorous—far from it. He seemed almost irritated by her.

“I hope you traveled well,” she said politely, not sure how else to broach his hostility.

“I confess I did not,” Robert Krause answered. “I found I had unfinished business here. I see now that I am not likely to gain any satisfaction of it despite the effort I made in returning.” He paused,
then blurted, “Tell me, Mrs. Hirschfelder, you are not of— Your parents, they are not both German, are they?”

“My late father was born in Duisdorf, like my aunt Adeline with whom you are acquainted,” Rebecca answered calmly. “My mother's people were from Italy.”

“Ah.” Herr Krause nodded with a great upward jerk of his cleft chin. “That explains it. Your darkness, you know. You stand out. When I saw you in the theater, I thought, this woman cannot be from Germans.”

“You did seem rather swift to make up your mind about me,” Rebecca said, with some haughtiness she couldn't restrain. He really was hostile, she thought. She kissed Matthew's creamy cheek, then set him on the floor near her feet on the rug with some of his scattered toys.

“I did, I am afraid. I apologize if I seem rude,” Herr Krause said. He jerked to his feet and strode across the room to Matthew, then knelt beside the boy before Rebecca could make a motion to protect him. The magician gazed into the boy's face; then suddenly in his hand was a toy wooden turtle, brightly painted.

Altogether it was the most astonishing thing Rebecca had ever seen—at such close range, Krause did seem to have magical powers—and she laughed and clapped her hands before she could stop herself. The young man relinquished the toy to the little boy, who promptly put it into his mouth. “
Danke sehr!
” she exclaimed, delighted.

The magician settled back into a seated position on the rug and looked up at her in a way that was now familiar and friendly. But his cheeks, she saw, were as scarlet as if he'd ridden through a rainstorm.
Is he ill?
she wondered. She fought an impulse to pluck away the
turtle in Matthew's mouth, as if it were poisoned. “I'm more comfortable down here with the little creatures, if you don't mind, madam,” Herr Krause said.

“Not at all.” At that moment Adeline returned with a tray of quick breads and fragrant coffee, and if she was surprised to find a young man who was not Rebecca's husband seated on the floor at her feet like a conquered swain, the woman gave no sign of it. She merely poured the man a cup.

“Black,
bitte,
” he said.

“
Sehr gut,
” Frau replied, and handed him the cup without a twitch.

“Miss Nussbaum attended your performances, of course. My entire family saw them. Matthew included.”

“You did me more credit than I deserved. My performances here were flawed by a multitude of mistakes,” the young man said. “I reentered town this morning expecting to be met with flaming pitchforks at the train station.”

Rebecca wondered at his casual reference to pitchforks—the story of the murdered ghost children had returned to her many times in her disquieted winter hours. She had theorized, too, about its application to poor Mrs. Brandt. A woman like Mrs. Brandt, who had been young when the country was at war, might have witnessed atrocities, but something as horrible as seeing children stabbed to death with pitchforks seemed beyond the pale even for those grim times. She had turned over the possibilities like playing cards but never produced a satisfying explanation. “Your effects seemed so well done,” she protested. “You had us all believing you could read our minds.”

“A woman is invited up to the stage, and everyone in the theater
begins to whisper her name—it's not a difficult thing, if you have a sharp ear, to surprise her and everyone else by having overheard it.” Robert Krause tapped Matthew's little ear gently and produced a penny between his fingers. “A mirror may function as a screen. A box may have secret compartments, themselves with mechanical surprises. The truth is, Mrs. Hirschfelder, the tricks of my trade are so well-known that to make a living, a man like myself must seek out those rare pockets of humanity that haven't already divined that magicians are far from divine.”

“Oh, no one accused you of that, I hope.” Rebecca smiled.

“I haven't seen your like before,” Frau put in. “You are a gifted young man, Herr Krause. You should not sell yourself short.”

“No one has accused me of doing that, either.” Herr Krause nodded. There was a brief pause, followed by a tumble of words: “But I did feel that I needed to return here, Mrs. Hirschfelder, to find you and to—if I could—rectify my error.”

“But not to apologize for dooming me to a long and lonely life here on earth?” she teased.

“Ah, is it so lonely?” He looked at her with sharp eyes. If the question had been posed by a young man similarly seated at her feet even two years ago, that young man's purpose might have been romantic. But she sensed that something else entirely was afoot here and began to feel uneasy.

“No. I have my little boy, as you see. And my good friend—” She nodded to Frau across the room. “My husband also, who has a successful farm not far from here.” She was surprised at how naturally the lie came to her.

“But a long and solitary existence, that's what you perceived me to mean,” Robert Krause pursued, his eyes narrowed and stark. When
she didn't respond, he said bluntly, “That was what I saw for you, madam. If you will forgive me. What I saw was that you will not remain in the earth when you are buried. You will not remain quietly interred.”

After a shocked pause, during which everything in the room seemed to wheel around and come to a stop in front of the young man looking at her with such intensity, Rebecca regained herself enough to retort, “You just said you weren't a divine medium. You admitted you had nothing but a few well-worn tricks.” She shrugged. “I didn't take you seriously, whatever you saw.”

Krause, however, hardly seemed to hear her. He went on, with some of the relentlessness that they had paid good money to watch on the stage, while Rebecca stared at him in growing consternation over her little boy's fair head. “I thought I might have made a miscalculation, you see. It's rare to see a ghost on earth before she walks, and I thought I'd made a fool of myself—I
did,
I did indeed make a fool of myself that night, rushing off the stage without pausing to bow! I was— How do you say it? I was rattled. Do you know how it works? You have heard how this trick is done?”

Rebecca shook her head, lips dry.

“I will tell you. It is simple. You observe what everyone else in the theater expects for that person, and you calculate the difference between how that person expects to die and how others expect him to die. The difference is the sum! The sum of the years the person has left, multiplied by the way those years will end! Another magician taught me the trick of it in Chicago, years ago. Really it is simple once a few times you have done it.”

His words were coming fast now indeed, his accent thickening
in his excitement. “One never—almost never—calculates a difference of nothing. Of zero. Do you see? Everybody else thinks you are already dead! But what is plain in you, my dear Mrs. Hirschfelder, is that you don't know it yet!”

He nodded briskly, professionally, and Rebecca saw with a profound sinking of heart that the golden-haired young man was mad.

“No. You don't, and you never will accept that you will die.
And
,” he added significantly, his face turning cold and rude, “you won't sacrifice a second of your life for anyone else, neither! Ha! What do you say to that,
Fräulein
?”

“Get out of here,” Frau thundered, suddenly rising to her feet like a mountain with a storm gathering over its head. “Get out of here, you terrible man. What you know about death and about this woman would fit in my hand, here.” She thrust her cupped hand toward him. “Imposter.”

Rebecca stood hastily as well, tears of pity in her eyes. “It's all right, Frau. I think Herr Krause is tired. He may be saying things he doesn't mean. I'm sure he didn't come here intending to offend me.”

Sitting on the floor beside her son, the insane magician stared up at her with a narrowed focus; then his brow cleared abruptly and he scrambled to his feet, looking lost. She extended her hand to Robert Krause, and he clasped it in his. His hands were slick with sweat, cold and hot at once.
The poor man,
she thought.
Such a waste.

“I apologize, Mrs. Hirschfelder. I do apologize. But this may save you yet.”

He leaned toward her over her little boy's head, uninvited, and kissed her gently at the corner of her eye, then in the center of her soft, dry mouth. He was so shockingly hot, perhaps with fever, that
she felt his body radiate warmth at hers like a coal. Then in the stunned silence that followed his transgression, the magician Robert Krause turned on his heel and left the house.

Rebecca got to the parlor window in time to observe him leaning heavily against the ash tree in the front yard, as if overtaken, and then he stumbled to the street and made his way out of their lives.

*   *   *

I
n the brooding, quiet hours after Matthew had been put to bed, Adeline and Rebecca had been in the habit of sitting in neighboring chairs by the kitchen stove in silent companionship, like a pair of old spinster sisters. With the weather beginning to take a pleasant turn, Rebecca and Frau now sat outside on the small back porch in the evenings, wrapped in shawls against the crisp oncoming spring, and they found themselves on the back porch that evening, both of them unhappy and preoccupied.

On the porch in the dark with Frau in the cool spring night, breathing the fresh scent of the growing things around them and longing for the home she had abandoned and for the love she had wasted, Rebecca said softly, “What do you think he meant, the poor man?”

Frau grunted.

“Don't you think it was strange? What he said—that I would be a ghost? And that I would never sacrifice anything for anyone? Didn't it remind you of— And the kiss? Aren't you thinking of my mother?” Rebecca pulled her wrap around herself. She'd been feeling chills all afternoon. “I am. I'm thinking of that story you always told me,” she said accusingly. “If I had never heard that story, I would just think Herr Krause was a sad wandering madman with a few clever tricks.”
She looked at Frau. “It's as if he
knew
that story about my mother. But he couldn't have, could he? And if he did, he knew it wrongly.”

Frau cleared her throat with a great, defensive harrumph. “He
certainly
knows it wrongly, if he knows it at all. Men
always
observe women's lives to be
sacrifice,
” she said brusquely. “It is a word I dislike.”

Rebecca looked over at her old friend with some surprise. “That's quite a declaration, Frau,” she said with a little laugh. “What on earth do you mean?”

Frau sniffed. “We women have lives that are not easy, never easy. But they are not for
sacrifice.
That makes it seem like a thing that is weakly done, a surrender. I believe in more like
Tausch.
Exchange. Whatever a woman does, she must get something for it, if it is done with will and with purpose. Your mother say to me once, ‘A woman cannot have happiness without purpose, or purpose with no happiness.'”

Rebecca chewed on this for a moment out of deference to Frau, who she knew had faced deprivations of the sourest and loneliest sort, and who she believed had lived without much love, purpose, or happiness in her long years, other than what little she and her mother and Matthew had given her. She then said slowly, “I don't think it's that simple.”

“Simple. What she did was simple?” Frau demanded, pointing to her. “Would
you
have done it? Give up an hour of your life, and your Matthew's? And for what would you make this exchange? To save his life, or yours? To save your marriage? To save your family?”

Rebecca stared at Frau, startled. And then the older woman's indignation began to seem like an insult.

“What are you suggesting, that our lunatic fire-breathing
magician was right?” Rebecca retorted, mocking.
But he did take my kiss. He did take my tear.
“Or that because
you
made up a story about it, my mother really bartered the last hour of her life to save mine?” She had never spoken harshly to her Frau before. Her chest hurt; it felt like she was stomping boot-shod on her own heart. But Frau had never before flung in her face what was so obviously, openly wrong between John and herself. Neither Frau nor the Doctor had ever once commented on how cool Rebecca and John were with each other, how they seemed to speak to each other and to everyone else with bitterness, how they'd lost touch with friends and grown remote toward their loved ones, how even their little boy seemed afraid to misbehave, afraid to be anything but good, good, good, reluctant to prompt any more love to fall out of his universe than was already so clearly missing. Frau, of all people, wasn't supposed to have eyes to see or ears to hear. What could this old woman know about the thorn in Rebecca's heart? “I don't believe that simply telling a story makes it real, Frau. And I certainly don't believe I am to be an unquiet, graveless, lonely soul, who never gave anything to anybody . . .” But here her archness failed her, and she found that she couldn't go on.