Chapter I. Ariadne’s Thread #3
“The only copy. I never asked what he keeps there, and he never told me.”
“And where’s this storage supposed to be?”
“Why, in his office.”
“There’s nothing there.”
Erik had taken everything. Only the empty furniture remained, wooden carcasses decaying in his abandoned office.
“Can I take a look?”
Ariadne responded with a shrug. They went to the second floor, and the cat trailed behind them.
Quaint didn’t scare her now as much as he had on the first day, but she tried to keep him in sight.
He went straight to the last closed door, moving with confidence in the corridor, like someone who had been many times before in an apartment that was supposedly hers.
“Quaint,” called Ariadne. “How did you meet Erik?”
“It’s complicated.”
The office smelled like an old wardrobe that had not been opened in years, and inside were the desk, the chair, the shelves, and a massive cabinet that had so many drawers, doors, and locks that it had taken Ariadne months to clean all of it after Erik disappeared.
“Complicated means you won’t tell?”
Quaint touched one of the panels, a fingertip tracing the mother-of-pearl of the intarsia. She hated that cabinet in particular, and had tried to remove it from the office several times, but it was so heavy, antiquated, and dark that it looked like a shadow encrusted to the wall.
“When we met, Erik was a boy of twenty-three, clever beyond his age, and he discovered on his own what I was, which amused me. At the time, I believed him to be kind, curious, and intelligent, and I thought there would be no issue in introducing him to my world. Let’s say he aged like a rotten apple. ”
“Rotten,” repeated Ariadne. “That’s not how I remember him.”
Instead, her memories were of books with annotations made on the sides of every page, entire dialogues they had written around literary or academic texts, questioning or agreeing with the content or one another.
Erik had talked to her like an equal; he had believed there was something she could be, something more than a helpless, decaying cocoon of a person …
“That’s not how I wanted to remember him either.” Quaint removed his jacket, leaving it folded over the chair. “Erik has his qualities, I guess, but it would be a lie if I didn’t say I disagree with most of his scientific curiosities, or whatever he calls them nowadays.”
The thread. Ariadne could still hear Erik’s placid and constant voice, the only stimulus in what felt like an endless night. You need to follow the thread.
Quaint cracked his shoulders and neck.
“What about you? Erik rarely interacts with other humans.”
“When I was younger, I had a health complication and he helped me recover.” Ariadne was surprised by the coldness of her voice.
Erik said she had been unconscious for almost a week when he brought her to the house, and he was almost quitting when she finally woke up.
“I owe him everything I have. My home, my job, my body, my knowledge … Even the protection of the guls of this street. I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for him. ”
“I see.”
Quaint placed both hands on the side of the cabinet, lifting it as easily as he would have lifted the furniture of a dollhouse. Behind it, on the dusty wall spotted with mold, was a door she had never seen before.
“Ariadne.” Quaint dusted his clothes and inserted the key into the hole. “I don’t know what he keeps here. There might be things…”
“Yes?”
“Never mind.”
Ariadne watched as he unlocked the door.
The storage room was as big as a comfortable bathroom and was crammed with countless objects: piled suitcases, a trunk, a small chest of drawers, a rack with several articles of clothing, and prototypes of arms and legs, thrown around like amputated limbs.
Quaint turned on the light, and the cat observed them from the office.
Ariadne stopped in front of a tattered satchel with a red cross. Next to the satchel was a military uniform, old and green, and a pilotka with a red star. Ariadne held the jacket in the air, the sleeves longer than her arms, and stared at the single medal on its chest.
“Red Army,” said Quaint, as if that was the most natural response in the world. “From 1945, I believe.”
He took a bunch of papers from the trunk, and several black-and-white pictures fell to the floor.
Ariadne knelt to look at the people in one of them.
A young man with blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses smiled on a bench, and a middle-aged white woman laughed by his side, the finger wave of her short bob appearing under her hat.
Someone had written over the picture with beautiful calligraphy:
To my darling Erik
With love, Genebra
Buenos Aires, Summer of 1953
“Genebra and I lived in Paris during the war,” said Quaint, stretching his neck to look at the picture. “I don’t remember much of this time. I guess my worst memories of Erik have overwritten the best ones.”
“That’s impossible.” The man in the photo had the same smile as Erik, the same long nose, the same thin lips, the same down-turned eyes. “Erik can’t be older than fifty.”
“Born in 1923, actually.”
She wanted to laugh, but she was only able to grimace. “He would be more than a hundred…”
Quaint stared intensely at her. Ariadne wondered what he saw behind the round black lenses—did he see a frail rabbit, hideous and frightened? An unpleasant human woman who couldn’t smile? The promise of food? A naive and inexperienced child?
He started to collect the pictures scattered on the floor, piling one on top of the other.
“Erik isn’t a gul, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Then how…?”
“Maybe we should leave that story for another day.” Quaint offered a cryptic smile, mouth pressed in a taut line.
Ariadne moved to another photo. A man leaned on the railing of a balcony, a cigarette resting comfortably between his tattooed knuckles.
Smoke escaped from his lips, blurring the image of the city behind him.
“You haven’t changed at all.”
“How kind of you.”
“Quaint.”
“I should have warned you,” he said. “I assumed you knew that Erik is older than he looks.”
“No, he never…”
“I’m very sorry. It was insensitive of me not to ask.”
Suddenly, the storage room felt too small for the two of them, and Ariadne crawled over to the chest of drawers, dirt clinging to her sweatpants.
“Anything there?”
“Notebooks,” said Ariadne, waving one with a leather cover. “Many notebooks.”
“Ah!” That caught Quaint’s attention, and he stooped behind her to look at the contents of the drawer over her shoulder. “His journals. Those might help.”
In her memories, Erik was constantly drawing or writing, but she never knew to what extent.
Countless pages written in Russian, realistic sketches made in pencil with diminutive notes next to them, folded newspaper articles, crumpled toffee wrappers, and dried plants that turned to dust when she touched them.
She even found a drawing of Quaint: the sunglasses, the tattoos, the smile.
Erik had taught her how to read Cyrillic script, but thousands of cursive handwritten lines were a little bit of a challenge for her, and she had to focus to understand.
“Were you born during the Ming dynasty?”
Quaint, who had already moved to another box, turned around immediately, and Ariadne allowed herself a rare smile. There were two things most guls considered too private to share: their age, and eating full meals in front of others.
“It’s you.” She pointed at the scribbled lines. “‘Quaint, a Chinese gul born sometime during the Ming dynasty. A well-traveled diplomat.’ There’s something else, but I can’t understand it.”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I suppose Quaint is not your real name.”
Quaint chuckled, taking the diary from her hands to read what Erik had written there.
“It’s not. Some of us guls have this impertinent habit of changing names from time to time. My wife used to call me Quaint, and it stuck.” He played with one of the rings on his left hand. “Maybe someday I’ll tell you my other names.”
“Are you married?” Ariadne raised an eyebrow. She couldn’t imagine what kind of woman a man like him would like.
“Widowed. But I was married, yes, more than once, in one way or another.” Quaint pulled every journal out of the drawer, checking the dates on the spines.
“Here, from last year! ‘Tomorrow, I will go to Genebra’s house, but I must leave the journals behind. I can’t stop thinking of their proposal.
What do I need to do to be left alone? I don’t want to do this again. I caused enough harm…’”
“Wait—Erik left years ago.”
“That’s not what he wrote. There’s more: ‘I’m not brave enough to talk to Ariadne, but I won’t run away anymore.
I’m often drowning in guilt whenever I come to the clinic without telling her, but I know it’s the right choice: they don’t know about it, and Boniface and Terebê swore they would keep her safe.
The last thing I would want is to see her involved in this nonsense. ’”
Ariadne took the journal from his hands.
How dare he? How dare he enter the house while she slept without telling her?
He knew she rarely ever left. How could she rest now, knowing someone had gotten into the apartment and she had not even noticed?
She turned the page and found something else written in pencil:
Quaint, if you’re here, I need your help again.
There are people who know what I did in 1972, but I won’t say a word. Promise.
I will ask for help in Cabaré.
E.
Ariadne glanced at Quaint from the corner of her eye. The man repeated the words again and again without a sound.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that someone took Erik,” answered Quaint. “And, if what he wrote is true, the situation is worse than I could have imagined.”