Last Snow - Eric van Lustbader [129]
Her carnelian eyes came back to him, in the light of the entryway their mineral quality making them transparent. “Jack, you don’t hate me for what I did, do you?”
“Did? What did you do?”
“What I said to Alli.”
“No, not at all. She needs all the help she can get, even if that help is sometimes difficult for her to hear.”
“I’m relieved then.” She placed a hand on his arm. “After all that’s happened—”
“But that’s just it.” Jack suddenly decided to take the bull by the horns. “I don’t know what happened to you.”
“What? I told you.”
“But you didn’t, not really. When I first saw the scars I decided not to ask you how you got them because I thought it might be an invasion of your privacy, but now I’d like to know.”
“Why? Why is it important now?”
“I’ve already told you, you have a particular affinity for understanding a young woman you met just days ago. I want to know how that works.”
Soft echoes of footfalls, of muffled voices came to them now and again. Since their arrival the mansion had come alive as if it had been waiting for them. A number of cars were parked on the generous expanse of gravel outside and the interior exhibited the air of expectancy, the bustle of hastily arranged preparations.
“It works,” Annika said, “because we’re both broken.”
Her mineral eyes studied him with a frightening intensity. In those eyes it was possible to get lost, moreover, to want to get lost. Jack felt himself losing his sense of time and place, and he enfolded her in his arms, felt the slight tremors of her emotions firing along her bare arms.
“It works,” she said, “because, like her, I was taken. It works because I’m just like her.”
“DARLING, YOU’VE only taken one bite of your stollen,” the widow Tanova admonished. “Did I put in too much cinnamon?”
Dyadya Gourdjiev smiled vaguely. “No, Katya. I was just thinking about the past.”
Katya Tanova came and sat beside him at the dining room table. They were in her apartment, which was smartly furnished in the latest Western style. She was not a person to become stuck in amber like so many of her friends who had not moved on from the things they had liked in their thirties and forties. Their homes were like museums or mausoleums, depending on your level of cynicism. Katya’s public persona—cool, proper, even a bit formal—was in stark contrast with her private demeanor, or at least her behavior with Gourdjiev, which was very private, indeed. With him she was like a young woman, coquettish, bantering. She often threw her head back and laughed, or else she engaged him with an intellectual rigor he found positively erotic.
“For most people that’s not so good, darling, but for you it’s terrible.”
He nodded with gravity. “That may be true, but I can’t help it.”
“She came to see you, didn’t she? You saw Annika.”
He stared out the window at the hideously bare branches of a tree.
Katya wore a sleeveless flowered dress short enough to show off her strong legs, but not so short as to be unseemly. She had kicked off her shoes when she sat down. Her feet, wrapped in sheer stockings, were quite beautiful.
“You always become so melancholy when you see her. And the past—”
“Sometimes I can fool myself into thinking I’m happy, or satisfy myself at being so clever at this game or that. Once in a very great while I can even feel young again, but it always fades, this feeling, and then I realize that I’ve simply deluded myself. I expend so much energy trying to ignore the past, or forget it or—and this would be best of all—erase it, but it comes back to haunt me again and again.” He turned from the window with a bleak smile. “How can it not?”
“But, darling, how can you keep blaming yourself, when—”
“It wasn’t my fault? I should have known, I should have foreseen—”
“How could you, you’re not a sorcerer.”
“If only I were, I could obliterate the past, alter it with a wave of my hand!” he cried in anguish. “Such a terrible ending. No one deserves that.”
“Especially not Nikki. She was your wife but she was my best