Along the road two women sat unloading baskets of gourds and chatting. On one of the gourds an anole perched, turning his head to examine the vibrations. Leda talked about a friend from school, Elsie, and the night her mother had dozed on the couch and the two of them had drunk sweet fermented wine that Elsie had smuggled in. Elsie kept threatening to throw up and that would make them start laughing all over again, though they had to be quiet. And Elsie’s boyfriend came over and tried to get in, but Elsie didn’t like him anymore, though he didn’t know it. He just stood at the window saying, “Let me in, let me in,” in a voice muffled by the glass. Of course, her mother had missed the whole thing.
“Who was her boyfriend?” Karel asked quietly. “What happened to him?”
“I don’t think you knew him,” Leda said. “We shut the sunshades at one point, and when we remembered them he was gone.”
They walked to the very edge of town. The dry brush in front of them extended to the hills in the distance. They turned and headed back. Leda told him more about Elsie, who was always talking about marriage and supported the regime because she liked the colors and because she’d gotten picked as a flower-bearer for the local celebrations of the Great Trek.
Leda asked if he was so quiet because of what she’d said, and he said he guessed so. She apologized.
He smelled flowers somewhere, and sage. Leda said that actually she was worried about Elsie and he said he thought it was a phase, and that Elsie would probably grow out of it. Leda said she thought that was really true and a good point.
She indicated a cloud she thought was shaped like the outline of their country, and not only could he see no similarity but they couldn’t even settle on exactly which cloud they were looking at. She talked about a dream she kept having involving a tunnel inset with luminous windows. In the windows she could see coral, sea urchins, and champagne bubbles. She asked him why he supposed blue was a common color among reptiles but not among other animals. She asked him if he thought he wanted to work with reptiles when he grew up. He talked to her about exploring someday in the plateau deserts, about finding new species and setting up a Reptile House where they had everything they needed. She asked what sort of things they needed. He told her about gravels and drainage and vivarium design and food storage, registering her responses and noting with pleasure the way she opened her mouth a little the instant before laughing.
She told him her mother admired his steadiness and devotion to the Reptile House. She said she really liked her mother more than it seemed sometimes. She told him about her nanny, whom she remembered as having a beautiful voice and being magical with injuries and animals. Not an old woman at all, pretty, with dark eyes and hair and a coffee smell. She used to tell Leda she was working to make money for her family. She talked along with the radio to improve her language and told stories about her brothers in the desert while she folded sheets and pillowcases. Leda’s mother just fired her one day, to save money, it turned out, though no one told Leda. Her mother said later she hadn’t considered the change important enough to merit discussion. Leda had been home sick from school for two weeks afterward and no one could figure out what was wrong. Everybody had been worried. She figured all the money her mother had saved firing the nanny had been turned over to the doctors. She loved her nanny and told her everything, as her mother said, all her secrets. Now all she had was her journal. When Karel asked what kind of secrets, she said she couldn’t say, or they wouldn’t be secrets.
An article in The People’s Voice interested him: in the southern swamps the Civil Guard was using snapping turtles tied with rope to retrieve corpses. He tore it out to show Albert. It got him thinking about his old life in the city. It was in the city that he’d first seen a snapping turtle, in a traveling exhibit. It had had a big effect on his growing love of reptiles.
Summers he and Leda played as often as he could talk her into it at the beach. She had other friends but liked him too. They were walloped by breakers when the waves were good, after storms, and scavenged along the shoreline when the sea was calm. Their favorite place was an underwater rock shelf filled with jellyfish slipping by on the action of the waves. They swam furiously with no style but a lot of splashing. Leda thought it was very funny to carry starfish out of the surf on her arms. The sand dried immediately after a wave’s departure. When they buried each other they would leave their faces bare, and arrange crosses of pebbles atop their chests.
He remembered the pointed gables of the beachfront hotels and the green cypresses, and one hotel, the Golden Angel, with a painting they both loved in the common room. The subject was a cavalry charge they couldn’t identify. It involved a chaotic spread of chargers all in near-collision and all about to burst the plane of the painting and trample the viewer. Whenever they’d had too much sun, the hotel manager, a tubby man with a bald and sunburned head, would allow the two of them, sandy and barefooted, a few moments in the room on the condition they sit on none of the furniture in their damp suits. They’d crouch or kneel on the thick red carpet in front of the painting. The horses’ nostrils were dragonish and the eyes oversized with fear and excitement. The dragoons riding them were as relaxed as strollers in a summer garden. The dying or about to be trampled infantry below looked thoughtful and melancholy, as if overrun while unexpectedly drowsy.
Behind the Golden Angel through an alley of oyster shells and cat droppings they found the Seaman’s Hostel, where they could get free fish broth and sermons about children alone in a world like this, and farther up the hill the Sea’s Trade, a little open-air restaurant that looked down into the harbor where the gulls pecked garbage from around the ships, and where when they had some money they could eat pastries stuffed with pink shredded fish and prawns sprinkled with lime juice and crayfish and young eels that Karel always swallowed in too-large pieces, and a weak wine with some melon that made them feel like teenagers. At night there was a fair and a wheel of fortune with a leather flap slapping against nails and they could buy warm fried fish wrapped in newspaper, and ride on wooden bulls with gilded horns on a merry-go-round in and out of the harsh lights of the ticket booth.
And they loved a place his father called a junk store that featured bins of sheet metal with low glass dividers separating tiny toys: hand-painted soldiers, tin buses, rubber lizards, tiny puzzles, miniature knives and pliers, ocean liners with wavering hand-painted waterlines. White horses, golden dice, purple dolphins.
He had a dream in which Leda led him into a beautiful emerald darkness and talked to him about underground rivers far in the earth, dark caverns dripping with crystal-line water. She whispered something so close to his ear it tickled. She pointed to the volcanically unstable island on the horizon known to them popularly as the Roof of Hell. He could see waterspouts like great spirals of glass taking the sea into the clouds. In the harbor she pointed out enormous whirlpools, racing cavities like inverted bells, pulling the sea down into the earth, leaving the surrounding waters weirdly domed.
After that dream he lay there trying hard to remember more, especially about Leda at that age, but found that the details had started to disappear and that he could no more make her return that way than he could have altered elements of the cavalry’s charge in the painting they loved. Ultimately all that came back was pieces: her shout, her bare shoulders on the merry-go-round, a yellow shirt he wanted, until he was left only with the dark reach of shadow in the troughs of waves and a glimpse of their discarded shoes on the beach.