Charis and Zenia are sitting at the kitchen table. They’re finishing supper: baked potatoes, mashed-up squash, a cabbage salad. This cabbage came from the market, because Charis’s own cabbages have all been used up. They’ve been turned into juice and poured into Zenia, green transfusions.
“You’re looking stronger today,” says Charis hopefully. “I’m strong as an ox,” says Zenia. She puts her head down on the table for a moment, then—raises it with an effort. “Really, I am.”
“I’ll make you a cup of ginseng,” says Charis. “Thanks,” says Zenia. “So, where is he tonight?”
“Billy?” says Charis. “Some meeting, I guess.”
“Don’t you ever worry?” says Zenia.
“About what?” says Charis. “That it’s not just some meeting.”
Charis laughs. She has more confidence lately. “You mean, some chick,” she says. “No. Anyway, it wouldn’t interfere:” She believes that. Billy can do what he wants with other women, because it wouldn’t count.
Billy has begun speaking to Zenia. He now says good morning to her, and when he comes into a room she’s already in, he nods and grunts. What he calls his Southern manners are having a struggle with his aversion to Zenia, and the manners are winning. The other night he even offered her a puff on the joint he was smoking. But Zenia shook her head and Billy felt—rebuffed, and that was that. Charis would like to ask Zenia to take it easy on Billy, to meet him halfway, but after the way he’s behaved she can hardly do that.
Behind Zenia’s back, Billy is if anything even ruder than he was at first. “If she has cancer I’ll eat my hat,” he said two days ago.
“Billy!” said Charis, appalled. “She’s had an operation! She has a big scar!”
“You seen it?” said Billy.
Charis hadn’t. Why would she? Why would she ask to see a person’s cancer scar? It wasn’t something you could do.
“You want to place a little bet?” said Billy. “Five bucks there isn’t one.”
“No,” said Charis. How could you prove such a thing? She had a short vision of Billy rushing into Zenia’s room and tearing off her nightgown. That was not something she wanted.
“Penny for your thoughts,” says Zenia.
“What?” says Charis. She is thinking about Zenia’s scar. “Billy’s a big boy,” says Zenia. “You shouldn’t get too anxious about him. He can take care of himself. “
“I was thinking about the winter,” says Charis. “How we’re going to get through it:”
“Not how—if,” says Zenia. “Oh, sorry, too morbid. One day at a time!”
Mostly Zenia goes to bed early because Charis tells her to, but sometimes she stays up. Charis makes a good fire in the wood stove and they sit at the kitchen table and talk. Sometimes they listen to music, sometimes they play solitaire.
“I can read the cards,” Zenia says one evening. “Here, I’ll read yours.
Charis isn’t sure about this. She doesn’t think it’s such a good idea to know the future, because you can hardly ever change it, so why suffer twice? “Just for fun,” says Zenia. She has Charis shuffle the deck three times and cut away from her so the bad luck won’t come towards her, and then she lays the cards out in rows of three, for the past, the present, and the future. She studies the rows, then adds another set of cards, crossways.
“Someone new is
coming into your life,” she says. Oh, thinks Charis. That must be the baby. “And someone else is . going out of it. There’s water involved; a crossing of the water.”~~ Zenia herself, thinks Charis. She’ll get better, she’ll leave soon. And anyone who leaves here has to cross water.
“Anything about Billy?” she says.
“There’s a jack,” says Zenia. “Jack of Spades. That could be him. Crossed by the Queen of Diamonds.”
“Is that money?” says Charis.
“Yes,” says Zenia, “but it’s a cross card. There’s something off about the money. Maybe he’ll take up dealing drugs or something.”
“Not Billy,” says Charis. “He’s too smart.” She doesn’t really want to go on with this. “Where did you learn?” she asks. “My mother was a Roumanian gypsy,” says Zenia carelessly. “She said it ran in the family.”
“It does,” says Charis. This makes sense to her: she knows about gifts like that, there’s her own grandmother. Zenia’s black hair and dark eyes, and also her fatalism—they’d go with being a gypsy.
“She was stoned to death, during the war,” says Zenia. “That’s terrible!” says Charis. No wonder Zenia has cancer—it’s the past lying inside her, an oppressive heavy-metals past that she’s never cleaned out of herself. “Was it the Germans?” Being stoned to death seems worse to her than being shot. Slower, more bruising, more painful; but not very German. When she thinks of Germans she thinks of scissors, of white enamel tables. When she thinks of stoning, it’s dust and flies and camels and palm trees. As in the Old Testament.
“No, by a bunch of villagers,” says Zenia. “In Roumania. They thought she had the evil eye, they thought she was hexing their cows. They didn’t want to waste their bullets so they used stones. Stones and clubs. Gypsies weren’t the most popular item, there. I guess they still aren’t. But she knew it was going to happen, she was a clairvoyant. She handed me over to a friend she had, in another village, the night before. That’s what saved me.”
“So you must speak some Roumanian,” says Charis. If she’d known all of this, she would have gone about curing Zenia some other way. Not just with yoga and cabbages. She would have tried more visualization, and not just about the cancer: about the Roumanians. Perhaps the keys to Zenia’s illness are hidden in another language.
“I’ve repressed it,” says Zenia. “You would too. I got a look at my mother after they’d finished with her. They left her there, lying in the snow. She was just a big lump of rotting meat:”
Charis flinches. This is a stomach-turning image. It explains why Zenia throws up so much—if that’s what’s inside her head. She needs to get such poisonous images out of her.
“Where was your father?” she says, to steer Zenia away from the dead mother.
“He was a Finn,” says Zenia. “It’s where I get my cheekbones.”
Charis has only a vague notion of where Finland is. It has trees, and people with saunas and skin boots, and reindeer. “Oh,” she says. “Why was he in Roumania?”
“He wasn’t,” says Zenia. “They were both Communists, before the war. They met at a youth congress in Leningrad. He was killed later, in Finland, fighting the Russians, in the Winter War. Ironic, isn’t it? He thought he was on their side, but it was them who killed him:’
“My father was killed in the war, too,” says Charis. She’s glad they have a bond in common.
“I guess a lot of people were,” says Zenia dismissively. “But that’s history.” She has gathered up the cards and is laying out a new batch. “Ah,” she says. “The Queen of Spades.”
“Is that still my cards?” says Charis.
“No,” says Zenia. “These are mine.” She isn’t looking at the cards now, she’s looking at the ceiling, obliquely, out of her half-closed eyes. “The Queen of Spades is bad luck. Some say it’s the death card:” Her long black hair falls like a heavy veil around her head.
“Oh, no,” says Charis, dismayed. “I don’t think we should do this. This is too negative.”
“Okay,” says Zenia, as if she doesn’t care what she does. “I think I’ll go to bed:”
Charis listens to her as she climbs up the stairs, dragging one foot after the other.
XXXVII
The winter wore on. It wore them down. Taking a bath was an arctic experience, feeding the chickens was a polar expedition: trudging through the snow, battling the fierce winds that swept in off the lake. The chickens themselves were cosy enough, inside the house that Billy built. The straw and droppings kept them warm, the way they were supposed to.