Chapter 12 #3
“Far worse is coming, Mischa. I can give you everything in the world, except happiness. You have to find that without me. When you hear gossip about me, you’ll hate me.”
“I won’t listen.”
“But you will. And you’ll believe it, because it’s true. Then you’ll know, and hate me, and be extremely hurt and so will I, and I’ll never speak to you again.”
I tilt my head. “I could never hate you.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Well what is it?”
“I can’t talk about it,” he sighs. “The gossip’s not even as bad as the truth, by the way. I wish it was.”
I level my eyes at him. “Whatever it is, I don’t give a fuck. Life is fleeting; try me as a holiday wild-card. I’m excellent in bed. Like, one of the all-time greats. Nobody does it better. Give me a whirl.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, but I really admire your honesty, by the way.”
“Thanks. You should try it sometime.”
Austen shakes his head. “That’s a dangerous idea.”
“Go on, try it. Tell me something true about you, seeing as I told you something about me, and you won’t tell me what the bad thing is.”
“Well,” he sighs, and thinks for a while. “We ran away a lot, me and my brother. I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”
“Why did you run away?”
“It’s just a lot of pressure, I guess. The first time we ran away with Mom.
She was a Rhodes scholar and Dad’s English upper-crust. They married young and were pretty crazy for each other, until we were about eight, when Mom went on the run from Dad.
I’m not actually sure why. All I know is my mother airlifted us from our life with no explanation.
We were supposed to be going to Hong Kong Disney that day, while my father was in a meeting.
She took us to the roof of the hotel and packed us into a helicopter to the airport. ”
“Where did you go?” I ask.
“America. She threw away our passports and credit cards and kept a stack of hundred dollar bills in a hollowed out bible. We made this bizarre journey until we were deep in Appalachia, where Mom’s mother lived. Meemaw is the best person on the planet.”
“I’d love to meet her.”
“They hadn’t talked since she left for Oxford.
She didn’t even know about us and she was only about forty herself.
We thought we had a normal life, but it had been gilded, and this was not that.
It was dirty and cold and scary, at first. There was a lot of hillbilly deprivation everywhere.
People’s carpets were always so old and musty.
I always wondered why they didn’t just rip it up and burn it.
So many feet had been over it. Now carpet is this thing I don’t like because I know how bad it can get. ”
“They put carpet on the walls in Russia, like it’s a painting,” I say. “It never gets stepped on.”
“That feels very correct to me,” Austen agrees. “At first. Mom’s accent changed and we stopped talking until we sounded right too. Sounded American.”
“I can’t imagine you sounding American.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” he says in a hillbilly drawl. “I can always sound like I’m from the hill country.”
I gasp. “No way!”
“Yessir,” he grins. “I was in the woods a long time.”
“My god your voice is sexy in any accent,” I say, and take a drink.
“Thanks,” he shrugs. “But a year later my parents were back together like it never happened, and back to a life of luxury in the United Kingdom. It wasn’t normal anymore though, it was privileged and extraordinary, and it took months for everyone to understand a word we were saying again.
High society is difficult to get accustomed to, it requires so much of people.
I call it the ‘soul tax’. The free life we had in America was honestly like a drug. Americans are so kind too.”
“Real sweethearts,” I agree.
“For nearly a year there, we had just been children, without the mountain of responsibility and obligation to prepare for a life of obscene wealth and power. We had nothing but the other kids to go shoot squirrels with so we could eat. We were deprived in every way, and it was fine. That’s why we live in Massachusetts now, why we have a cabin in the woods. ”
“You make so much more sense now.”
“I’ve never told anybody about that. I don’t usually talk to people like this.
I know that if I tell people about everything that has happened to us, they’ll never believe it.
I worry that even my therapist doesn’t believe most of the things I tell her.
Please don’t tell anyone anything I’ve said.
My sister was a newborn when that happened so she doesn’t even remember. ”
“I believe you, and your secret’s safe with me,” Mischa says.
I raise an eyebrow. “Well, one of them.”
We can hear the revelry out on the street getting louder. It sounds like people having a lot of fun; shouts and hoops were coming from all directions.
“I think it’s almost midnight,” Austen says.
I get up and take his hand to pull him up too. “Time to head down.”
???
When I was eleven, in Austria, life was not easy.
Because Sofie and I were seeking asylum without our parents, we were not able to stay at the Traiskirchen refugee center, and we were put in a group home.
I fought viciously to protect my sister, and was planning to take her further north as soon as possible.
There were a lot of other kids from Yugoslavia around, and they brought the war with them.
They would travel in groups. Albanians with Albanians, Serbs with Serbs, Croats with Croats.
.. on and on. While all the languages are slightly different, they can mainly be mutually understood because they are very similar.
Almost every day they would rumble with one another on the way home from school.
Sofie was too young for that, so I hid our identity.
We had learned American from television, and we called it Cartoon Language.
I made Sofie use it on trams and buses so we wouldn’t have any trouble.
The day we packed our bags to leave for Scandinavia, there was a mix of all the groups going home from school on a tram.
I knew shit would pop off so I sat at the back with Sofie and waited.
A Serb girl was getting really lippy with a Croat boy and he snapped back at her a blistering line that made me crack up with laughter.
Suddenly all eyes were on me, and every kid was asking where I was from, who my little sister was.
This or that? Those people or them. Where? What were we, exactly?
Sofie was terrified, and the tram had stopped near the Sacher Hotel in downtown Vienna.
I grabbed her hand to run. The Croat boy stopped me and I punched him, so the Croats assumed I wasn’t one of them.
A Serb tried me too, and I hit him just as hard.
The Albanians beckoned me but as one stepped forward I pushed him into the road.
I ditched my heavy backpack, grabbed Sofie’s arm and we bolted down the street to the Secession Building.
There we hid in the empty basement gallery, surrounded by the Beethoven Frieze.
Sofie cried against the back wall. I hugged her, and battled my bubbling rage.
“You like this painting,” I reminded her. “It’s from the Ode to Joy. Remember when we would dance to it with Mom?”
She wiped away her tears. “It’s very beautiful.”
The large white basement was bigger than a dance studio.
Our mom was a dance teacher. We started learning in the womb, and nothing makes my sister happier than dancing.
We stepped out into the middle of the floor and started performing our ballet steps.
Soon we were both spinning on one foot, in a competition to see who could twirl the longest. Sofie’s laughs echoed against the lofty plaster ceiling, and I felt free.
When we stopped I noticed a man was watching us, holding my bag. He must have had velvet on the bottom of his shoes, because he came down the stairs so quietly, we didn’t hear him. He had a fine suit and was carrying an ivory cane, although he didn’t seem old or frail.
“Joy, the lovely spark of heaven's fire, an embrace for all the world,” he said in German, in a thick Russian accent, and pointed to the frieze with his cane.
He did not apologize for staring, or try to explain. I took my bag silently and went to leave. His eyes followed us up the stairs.
Outside the Serbs were nearby.
“Look what we got!” an older boy yelled when he saw us.
There was nowhere to go from here. The man had followed us, and looked out at the scene from the top of the stairs.
I told Sofie to wait and I stepped out to fight them.
The first boy came and I pushed him past me.
He came again and I hit him. The man came down and stepped in between me and the next one.
The boy came for me anyway, and I grabbed the man’s cane and gave the kid a hard whack.
The boy may have been a bully, but he was still a boy, and couldn’t take a hit like that without letting it show.
He rubbed the top of his head where I hit him and stepped back.
“Leave my children alone,” the man said in that strong accent.
Once he said it, I realized that these boys now thought I was actually Russian, and not Yugoslavian at all.
“Da!” I said, in the most Russian-sounding way I could muster.
The man was amused. The boys backed right off. Not their circus, not their monkeys, as the saying goes.
I turned to the man when they left.
“Thank you, sir,” I said in German.
“Yes,” Sofie said, and curtsied. “Thank you very much.”
“You could have really hurt him, hitting him like that,” he said.
“I wasn’t trying to.”
“Why are they making trouble?”
“They thought we were on the other side.”
“Were you?” the man asked.
“We’re only on our own side.”
He nodded, seemingly impressed. “Do you have anyone taking care of you?”
“Yes,” I lied.
“You do not,” he said. “What’s with all the candy in your bag?”
“I steal it, and sell it at school.”