The Caryatids - Bruce Sterling [39]
She glanced once at the sailor. He meant nothing to her, he was even less than a newbie: some Balkan local in a sleeveless striped sailor’s shirt, a floppy canvas hat. He wore sunglasses: not even spex. She saw her own face mirrored twice, on the shining lenses on his unshaven face.
“I came here to be with Herbert,” she told the sailor.
The sailor smirked at her. Then he threw her a careless salute and set to work to cast off.
Once the sails were up and the sailor was busy at his tiller, Herbert emerged from belowdecks. Herbert wore swimsuit trunks and a borrowed shirt much too small for him. She had never seen Herbert out of his Acquis uniform before. There was a forest of hair all over his arms and chest.
With a flourish, Herbert unfolded a mildewed canvas deck chair. Vera sat in it. Then Herbert sat at her feet.
“How was your day?” he said.
“He wants me to defect,” she told him. “He wants me to leave the Acquis and join his civil society. He said that I could have the whole island if I became Dispensation. That was his bribe for me.”
Herbert didn’t seem much surprised by this. “So, what did you say to the gentleman’s ambitious proposal?”
“I didn’t say much. But I couldn’t do it. I can’t.”
“I knew that!” Herbert crowed. “I knew you’d never sell me out! I knew you’d turn that son of a bitch down!” He rolled to his bare feet and fetched a big hand-woven wicker basket. He flapped its wooden lid open and produced a bottle of prosecco. “All the gold in California can’t buy Vera Mihajlovic! Damn it, this calls for a celebration.”
Vera accepted the wineglass he offered her. He yanked the cork from his bottle with a pop like a gunshot.
The wineglass was elegant and pretty. It was Austrian crystal. It brimmed with a foaming crest of bubbles.
“You could have ordered me not to see that man,” she said, teary-eyed. “You didn’t have to test me like that.”
“Vera, I can’t do that to you. I can’t order you to do anything. I would have had to beg you. I would have had to beg you, please, not to break my heart.” She had never seen him so happy as he was at this moment.
“I always know what you’re feeling, Vera. But I never know what you think. So, yes, I did test you. I have tested you with nine years’ hard labor. Well, precious, I promise you: That was your last test from me. The last one. From now on, everything between us is different.”
“You really thought that I would leave you?”
“I know that you love me, Vera. But I know you love this place, too. This island is a part of you. You are this beautiful place. Could I order you to leave this island with me—for a terrible island, the worst in the world—if you wanted to stay and be that rich man’s ‘Duchess of Mljet’? I couldn’t do that.”
He tipped his glass against hers, then sat back and drank. Vera sipped at the fizzing wine. She disliked alcohol. Drinking alcohol to alter one’s emotions, that was such a strange thing to do.
Herbert refilled his glass and gestured with the bottle’s neck, at the long silhouette of darkening Mljet. The wind of early evening was brisk, and their crewman was making good speed on the rippled waters.
“I spent nine years of exile on that little rock,” Herbert said. “If not for you, I would never have gone there at all. I was an empty man when I first came there. My wife dead. Kids dead. Broken and defeated in my own homeland. Full of horror. The world was in turmoil: half upheaval, half collapse—and it still is! You see those cliffs, those hills? You know what that island was to me? That was a prototype. A test case. An experiment. And now look! We have won!”
She did not know what to tell him. The truth was so far beyond any words that he would understand.
She knew very well what had happened, why they had met. She’d been in an evacuation camp on the Croatian mainland, along with a battered host of other weeping, traumatized women from Mljet. Nobody had any food, or clothes, or medicine. They had nothing. They had nothing but mediation.
The social workers, the