href="#litres_trial_promo">Chapter Fifteen: The Queen of Lake Ilmen
Chapter Sixteen: In the Heart of Vietnam
Chapter Seventeen: Kings and Heroes
BOOK ONE THE LAND OF LUPINE AND LOTUS
The Lotos blooms below the barren peakThe Lotos blows by every winding creek …Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an enqual mind,In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclinedOn the hills like gods together, careless of mankind.
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
The Carapace
Carapace n. a thick hard case or shell made of bone or chitin that covers part of the body of an animal such as a lobster.
Once upon a time, in Stonington, Maine, before sunset, at the end of a hot war and the beginning of a cold one, a young woman dressed in white, outwardly calm but with trembling hands, sat on a bench by the harbor, eating ice cream.
By her side was a small boy, also eating ice cream, his a chocolate. They were casually chatting; the ice cream was melting faster than the mother could eat it. The boy was listening as she sang “Shine Shine My Star” to him, a Russian song, trying to teach him the words, and he, teasing her, mangled the verses. They were watching for the lobster boats coming back. She usually heard the seagulls squabbling before she saw the boats themselves.
There was the smallest breeze, and her summer hair moved slightly about her face. Wisps of it had gotten out of her long thick braid, swept over her shoulder. She was blonde and fair, translucent-skinned, translucent-eyed, freckled. The tanned boy had black hair and dark eyes, and chubby toddler legs.
They seemed to sit without purpose, but it was a false ease. The woman was watching the boats in the blue horizon single-mindedly. She would glance at the boy, at the ice cream, but she gawped at the bay as if she were sick with it.
Tatiana wants a drink of herself in the present tense, because she wants to believe there is no yesterday, that there is only the moment here on Deer Isle—one of the long sloping overhanging islands off the coast of central Maine, connected to the continent by a ferry or a thousand-foot suspension bridge, over which they came in their RV camper, their used Schult Nomad Deluxe. They drove across Penobscot Bay, over the Atlantic and south, to the very edge of the world, into Stonington, a small white town nested in the cove of the oak hills at the foot of Deer Isle. Tatiana—trying desperately to live only in the present—thinks there is nothing more beautiful or peaceful than these white wood houses built into the slopes on narrow dirt roads overlooking the expanse of the rippling bay water that she watches day in and day out. That is peace. That is the present. Almost as if there is nothing else.
But every once in a heartbeat while, as the seagulls sweep and weep, something intrudes, even on Deer Isle.
That afternoon, after Tatiana and Anthony had left the house where they were staying to come to the bay, they heard loud voices next door.
Two women lived there, a mother and a daughter. One was forty, the other twenty.
“They’re fighting again,” said Anthony. “You and Dad don’t fight.”
Fight!
Would that they fought.
Alexander didn’t raise a semitone of his voice to her. If he spoke to her at all, it was never above a moderated deep-well timbre, as if he were imitating amiable, genial Dr. Edward Ludlow, who had been in love with her back in New York—dependable, steady, doctorly Edward. Alexander, too, was attempting to acquire a bedside manner.
To fight would have required an active participation in another human being. In the house next door, a mother and daughter raged at each other, especially at this time in the afternoon for some reason, screaming through their open windows. The good news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. The bad news: their husband and father, a colonel, had just come back from the war. They had waited for him since he left for England in 1942, and now he was back.
He wasn’t participating in the fighting either. As Anthony and Tatiana came out to the road, they saw him parked in his wheelchair in the overgrown front yard, sitting in the Maine sun like a bush while his wife and daughter hollered inside. Tatiana and Anthony slowed down as they neared his yard.
“Mama, what’s wrong with him?” whispered Anthony.
“He was hurt in the war.” He had no legs, no arms, he was just a torso with stumps and a head.
“Can he speak?” They were in front of his gate.
Suddenly the man said in a loud clear voice, a voice accustomed to giving orders, “He can speak but he chooses not to.”
Anthony and Tatiana stopped at the gate, watching him for a few moments. She unlatched the gate and they came into the yard. He was tilted to the left like a sack too heavy on one side. His rounded stumps hung halfway down to the non-existent elbow. The legs were gone in toto.
“Here, let me help.” Tatiana straightened him out, propping the pillows that supported him under his ribs. “Is that better?”
“Eh,” the man said. “One way, another.” His small blue eyes stared into her face. “You know what I would like, though?”
“What?”
“A cigarette. I never have one anymore; can’t bring it to my mouth, as you can see. And they”—he flipped his head to the back—“they’d sooner croak than give me one.”
Tatiana nodded. “I’ve got just the thing for you. I’ll be right back.”
The
