Between Mountains by Maggie Helwig

Author:Maggie Helwig [Helwig, Maggie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36953-6
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2004-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Part Two

LAW

XI

Aurora Borealis

November 6–8, 1999

“Have you ever seen the human fish?” he asked her.

She was in the kitchenette of her flat, making hot chocolate. He’d just come inside and he was sitting on the sofa, shivering in his leather jacket—he didn’t seem to own a proper coat, and she wondered how he managed in the hard Bosnian winters.

“Not really. Not exactly,” she said.

She’d stopped counting the number of times he had turned up, calling her from a service station on the A12, or just waiting in the bar downstairs until she got home from work. As if there was a tacit agreement between them that he would not tell her in advance, that he would not give her the opportunity to refuse.

“Tell me about it,” he said, his blue eyes intense, slightly magnified by his glasses. Certain things in the world were inexplicably important to him. She gave him the mug of hot chocolate, and he held it high up against his chest, closing his eyes and letting the slight curl of steam run over his face. “I know I shouldn’t have come.”

This was part of the ritual; there was no need for her to respond. She sat down beside him and looked at the cup in her own hands, its shiny orange glaze.

“It was the summer after my father died,” she began. Her uncle in Rovinj had invited them for the summer; he was her father’s brother, he felt responsible for the family, Lili and Sasha and their mother Vjosa, without an adult man now. Sasha was still just small, very interested in American comics, particularly Batman, and the trip to the caves had probably been for his benefit mostly.

They drove up to Slovenia, three adults, three children, and two teenagers, all crammed into a station wagon, Lili sitting by the window with her book, trying to pretend she was alone.

Anyone else would have asked her about grief. Would have been stricken by the image of that moody skinny girl reading poetry in the car, tapping her cigarette ash out of the window, surrounded by cousins, her little brother saying, “My papa died, you know,” at half-hour intervals. Daniel wanted only, and quite genuinely it seemed, to hear about the human fish, as if he trusted all necessary truth to emerge from that.

“We didn’t go to the Postojna caves, too many tourists. We drove up to the Planina Lake area. It’s part of the same cave system, but not so well known. They’re water caves at Planina, you have to go in with torches, I mean flashlights, and big black boots. It’s very dark. Further on you have to get in rubber rafts. The torchlights reflecting on the water, all broken up, so you see the people lit up only in fragments, half of somebody’s face, an arm.” He shifted his mug into one hand and began to run the fingers of his other hand through her hair, bending towards her to kiss her just behind one ear.

“The sounds—it’s

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