I thought of Kroner’s love for me, which I’d spurned. I thought of how he’d lavished it on his little girl instead, his daughter. I thought of how my child had ruined his.
And the truth was worse than any of us knew.
It was while he was in the hospital that we found out she was pregnant.
That summer Karin ran away. She was gone for almost a week and when she came back, she was riding in the front seat of a fast, steel-blue car with number-plates I didn’t recognise. The man behind the wheel had unusual, bright-orange hair.
‘Chromanski’s the name,’ he said, shaking my hand.
He told me where he was from — a large town, about two hours to the west of us. He said he was a lawyer. I thought he was rather young to be a lawyer, but I chose not to question it. He’d met Karin in the lobby of the Hotel Europa one night, while he was having a drink with two associates.
He took me aside. ‘Your daughter’s beautiful. Unfortunately, I’m already engaged to be married.’ He looked up, saw Karin through the window. She was sitting on the porch, twisting a strand of hair around her index finger. ‘And besides,’ he said, with a smile that was faintly conspiratorial, ‘she’s under age, isn’t she?’
‘And pregnant,’ I said.
That put a new expression on his face.
But he seemed honest enough: he hadn’t taken advantage of her, and he’d driven her all the way home, a distance of more than a hundred kilometres. I thanked him for going to such trouble. Trouble’s the word, he said, grinning, and I thought he could well be right about that. Karin was still sitting on the porch when Chromanski left. He smiled at her as he walked away across the grass. She watched him turn his steel-blue car round as if her last chance of happiness was locked in the boot.
Later that day, she told me she’d gone to the town to find a father for her child. Each morning she sat in the lobby of the largest hotel, the Europa, and waited for the right man to appear. Her plan was to let the man make love to her, and then pretend the child was his. Her condition didn’t show yet. She’d studied herself from every angle in the mirror. There was a slight curve to her belly, but nothing a man would notice. At last, one evening, she met Alexander Chromanski. He was a little drunk. Her eyes were beautiful, he told her. Brown and silver, like loose change. ‘Not worth much then,’ she replied, her bitterness surprising her. ‘On the contrary,’ he said. On the contrary. Those were his exact words. She’d never met anyone who spoke that way, and it seemed beautiful to her, at least as beautiful as her eyes were to him. She thought he must be the man she’d been looking for.
‘You were going to deceive him,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘He would’ve been happy.’
I moved to the window. ‘Sly,’ I said, ‘just like your father.’
She joined me, staring at the place where Chromanski’s car had been. ‘Did he say anything to you?’
‘Nothing much. He said he was engaged.’
‘And what did you tell him?’
‘The truth.’
After that, Karin didn’t want to see anyone. I arranged for her to live at my father’s house outside the village. On the same day I freed Mazey from his chains and brought him home to the hotel. He moved into my old room on the first floor, at the back. I screwed a hook into the ceiling near the window and hung his wind-chimes from it. The weeks went by. Then, towards the end of June, Karin asked for me. She was worried about the brown line that ran from her belly-button to the triangle of new dark hair between her legs. I told her it was normal. She couldn’t get used to it, she said. It was as if someone had been drawing on her in the night. Her body was not her own. She said she’d thought of throwing herself off the roof of the Hotel Europa. If she got three lines in the paper she’d be satisfied. Then she looked at me, and I could tell from her eyes that she hadn’t forgotten Emerald Joe and that singer, Esztergom. She wasn’t threatening me, though. She didn’t have that kind of nature. Later, she lay on her bed and wept at the thought of her death, the smallness of the article, her own insignificance. I knew she wouldn’t do it — her vanity would prevent her — but, at the same time, it was too late to dream of husbands.
When Kroner was discharged, in September of that year, I moved him into the room next to Mazey’s. I saw that his broken tooth had blackened; it must have happened gradually, over the last few months, but I felt as if I’d only just noticed. He had partial use of the left side of his body, and he could make noises that were almost words (they were like words with all the hard sounds taken out), which was the best that could be expected. He spent his days upstairs in a wheelchair. I had run a piece of string out of his window, down the outside wall and in through the back door, and I’d attached a bell to the end of it; if he needed something, he could pull the string with his good hand.
One day I was standing in the kitchen by myself when a cup dropped from my hands. It landed on the floor and didn’t break, it just rolled about, and suddenly I found that I was laughing. I didn’t know why I was laughing, but it was very funny and I couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard, my stomach ached, and I didn’t even know the cause of it. If anyone had seen me then, they would have thought I’d lost my mind. But maybe that wouldn’t have been such a surprise, not when you looked at the rest of the family.
The baby, a girl, was born in the early hours of a December morning. Outside, it was dark and cold, sleet falling silently, slanting behind the black glass of the bedroom window. It was an easy birth. The contractions started just after midnight. By dawn both mother and child were sleeping peacefully.
During the first few days Karin couldn’t seem to decide what she felt about the baby. One moment she’d be bending over it, holding it against her breast and soothing it, the way any mother would; then she’d remember who the father was and how the baby had been conceived, and she’d push it away. At the end of the month, when the time came for the baby to be christened, she told me I could call it whatever I liked. Call it whatever you like — this was exactly what I’d said to Kroner sixteen years before. Some families are condemned to repeat themselves, it seems, old tragedies giving birth to new ones. I suggested Nina, after my father’s mother. When Karin heard the name, she laughed harshly and said, ‘Why? Was she born of a halfwit, too?’ The next time I looked at her, her cheek had reddened where I’d slapped it.
She was still frightened of Mazey and what he might do. She wouldn’t eat at the same table or sleep under the same roof. Under no circumstances would she let him touch the baby. She carried on living at my father’s house, partly to avoid Mazey, but also, I thought, because she felt embarrassed and ashamed. Everyone in the village had heard that she’d had a baby, but no one knew who the father was. Rumours started flying. People don’t like to be left out, and that’s one way of getting revenge. There was a lot of mocking talk about a virgin birth. Not that my father noticed. He was almost eighty by then, so silent and so withdrawn that it seemed possible that Mazey’s inability to speak wasn’t a defect at all but a trait, inherited from him, along with a love of whittling. And besides, he’d always liked having Karin there. Apart from anything else, she could keep an eye on his progress with the dovecote. He was experimenting with lead weights, using them as ballast in the base of the tower. He only hoped he’d live long enough to finish it.