Kreuzweise

Sonja woke at six, as she had woken at six since the world was still pretending, and made the chicory in the dark.

She measured her life these days in the things that still worked. The stove worked. The solar worked, mostly, if you asked it politely and not before eight. The hand mill worked, because it was a hand mill; she had seen to the electric one in '31, in an incident Klaus still described as mysterious. The kettle worked. Her hands worked. That was the inventory, and most mornings it balanced.

The dog worked best of all.

Versace ⁓ nine years old that summer, three kilos of apricot-colored authority ⁓ began his patrol the moment her feet touched the floor: kitchen perimeter, terrace door, one long look at the sand rectangle where the pool would famously someday be, and back to sit on her left foot while the chicory steeped. This was the arrangement. She had not chosen it, and would not have admitted to wanting it, and it was, if she was honest with herself at six in the morning, which was the only hour she permitted that, the reason she got up at all.

Breakfast in the second year of the total quiet was a theory with two proofs: gofio stirred into goat milk, when there was milk to trade for, and figs, in season, from the tree at the bottom of the plot. The figs were in season. The tree was the only thing on the property older than the disappointment ⁓ a survivor of the farmhouse Klaus had fed into a skip, still producing sweetness every August with the doggedness of something that had decided not to take the hint. Sonja ate standing at the counter. She gave the dog the bottom third of her fig, which was their secret, and the worst-kept secret on the hill.

Klaus took his breakfast on the terrace, with the notebook.

"Next year," he said, to the bay, which had not asked. The notebook said Q3 2034. The notebook had said Q3 2034 since he had bought it, two years ago, and the date was now eleven months away, and Klaus regarded its approach the way other men regard a ship on the horizon: as proof of harbor. "You will see, Sonja. Next year the routes reopen. This is documented."

Sonja turned a page of an old magazine and let him keep the horizon.

The man had come up the hill on Tuesday, with a camel.

From the kitchen window Sonja had watched Klaus receive him on the terrace like a delegation. The camel stood below them in the sun with a pair of wicker cages roped across its back, chewing sideways at nothing in particular, and in the cages four brown chickens turned their heads in the small mechanical way chickens do. The man was from up the Erques valley ⁓ big hands, a beard kept short for practical reasons, a face the era had planed down to its load-bearing walls. He was not a monster. Monsters had turned out to be rarer than the magazines had promised. He was a hungry man with a scale where other men keep an eye, and Sonja had watched that scale find the dog through the terrace door and weigh him, at a glance, to the gram.

She had gone very still at the sink. The stillness was the whole of what she did.

Klaus had explained it that night, in the voice he used for line items. Protein. The Erques man kept goats and salted fish. The dog ate, and produced nothing, and sentiment was a currency the island no longer accepted. And then ⁓ and he had said this gently, with the patience of a man being, by his own accounting, kind ⁓ "You need the protein more, Sonja. It is for you."

It is for you. She had gone to bed beside those four words and lain awake with them like a knife left in the mattress.

She had said nothing on Tuesday. She had said nothing on Wednesday. This was the part she would return to for years afterward, in the cardigan hours, at the window: not the arrangement, which was Klaus, and therefore weather ⁓ but the two whole days in which she, Sonja, who had once been the fastest tongue in three villages, had stood at her own sink and said nothing at all.

It was Thursday now. The Erques man was coming back down the valley on Saturday.

Yara came up the hill at four in the afternoon, on foot, unannounced, the way she always came ⁓ which is to say the way weather comes, with everyone pretending afterward they had seen it building.

The troupe was working the coast that week; Sonja had heard it from the Ramos girl, who had heard the fire show at Alcalá described in terms that required both hands. Yara drifted up to the villa when the circuit brought her near. Not often. Often enough. She was twenty-five that summer and she came through the gate the way she did everything now, with an economy of movement that made the rest of the world look like it was overacting, and she was brown from the road and her hands were marked with the small pale commas that fire leaves on people it has decided to keep.

Versace met her at the gate at the top of his voice. It was the only shouting the villa permitted, and everyone had agreed to call it barking.

"Hola, Sonja."

"Yara."

They were thirteen years apart, which had turned out to be the exact distance at which two women could see each other clearly. Not mother and daughter ⁓ never that, both of them too honest for it. Something more lateral. Two people stranded in the same man's imaginary future, one of whom had gotten out.

They went down to the fig tree, because that was the custom: the one corner of the property where the farmhouse still faintly held, in root and shade, and where Klaus never came because there was nothing there he had paid for. Sonja picked. Yara ate. The dog worked the ground under them for windfalls with the focus of a professional. Yara told the small stories ⁓ Tibor and a leaking bucket of lime, a plaza in Alcalá, a boy who had tried to juggle and been humbled ⁓ and Sonja stood in the fig shade with her cigarette and laughed twice, quietly, which for Sonja was a festival.

She did not mention Saturday. She would return to that, too, in the cardigan hours.

Klaus came to dinner in the good mood of a man whose ledgers were closing.

Dinner was gofio, salt fish, and figs, eaten on the terrace while the light went long and gold over the dead resorts. Klaus talked about the routes. Klaus talked about the notebook. Klaus said next year twice and documented once, and Yara let it all go past her like road under wheels, pleasant, unbothered, asking small questions in the right places. Sonja watched her do it and thought, not for the first time, that the girl had learned stillness somewhere, real stillness, the kind you could rest a glass on ⁓ and that she herself had only ever managed the frozen kind, which looks the same and is the opposite.

Then, over the last of the fish, Klaus said it. Matter-of-fact. A line item, read aloud in the presence of family, because it had genuinely not occurred to him that it was anything else.

"Saturday the man from Erques takes the dog. Salt fish and a side of goat, a good trade. The animal eats and produces nothing ⁓ Sonja needs the protein more." He gestured, reasonably, with his fork. And then he said a name that was not anybody's, in the direction of his child, asking her to agree with him.

"Her name is Yara," Sonja said. Flat. Bored. The way you correct a man who keeps misreading a label.

It was the only sentence she had. She spent it on the name.

The dog was under Yara's chair, working on a fig skin. Yara looked at Klaus for a moment with an expression of mild, polite interest, the expression of a tourist being told about local customs, and then she said, "The trade is good," and asked whether there was more fish.

And that was how Sonja knew.

Because there were two Yaras: the one who argued, who had left slammed doors in this house at sixteen and seventeen and eighteen ⁓ and the one who had come back from the island with her stillness, who agreed with you pleasantly, the way the sea agrees with a swimmer right up until it has its own idea. The trade is good. Sonja sat with her chicory going cold and understood, with a small interior lurch that was equal parts terror and hope, that the arithmetic on this terrace had just changed hands.

Klaus, satisfied, moved on to the harbor at Los Cristianos and what would be done with it, next year, when everything came back.

Yara said she would stay the night ⁓ the road back to the coast was long and the troupe didn't move until Sunday. She said it easily, stretching, and took her old room, and said good night to Klaus by name and to Sonja with a look, and was gone up the stairs by ten.

Klaus had his schnapps and his satisfaction and was asleep by eleven, breathing like a man with documentation.

Sonja lay in the dark and did the thing she did instead of sleeping, which was to hold the day up to the light and turn it. The trade is good. She had said nothing again ⁓ a third day of nothing, a personal record, she thought, in a discipline she had never wanted to be good at. Beside the bed, on the floor, the dog was not in his basket.

She noticed that at half past midnight. She was at the kitchen window by twenty-five to.

The moon was doing what the moon does over the dead resorts, silvering everything equally, the way institutions do. And across the terrace, without hurry, went Yara ⁓ boots on, backpack on, and in the backpack, with his chin hooked over her shoulder and his eyes half closed, the dog.

He made no sound. Nine years old, a creature whose entire vocation was sound, and he made none at all ⁓ and Sonja understood, with her forehead almost touching the cold glass, that he had been waiting years to be stolen, and had known his thief on sight, and had probably known before any of them, the way the dogs in the song knew. The dogs always know first.

Yara stopped at the Fiat.

It sat where it always sat, by the gate, drinking the moon through its little solar panel, Klaus's one running vehicle and the apple of his arithmetic. Sonja watched Yara consider it for a moment, head slightly tilted, an artist before a canvas. Then Yara took something small out of her pocket and bent to the hood, and began, without hurry, to write.

She did the hood first. She walked around the car ⁓ she walked around it the way you walk around a thing you are being fair to, giving every side its chance ⁓ and then she wrote on the back for a while. Two words at the front. One long word at the rear. She stood back, checked her work in the moonlight the way she checked a rigged wire, made one small correction, and capped whatever it was she had written with.

Then she looked up at the kitchen window.

Sonja did not step back. It was too late to step back, and she found she did not want to. They looked at each other through the glass for a moment that had no proper length ⁓ the woman who had said one sentence at dinner, and the girl who had heard it ⁓ and then Yara raised one hand, unhurried, in the small island wave that Sonja had seen pass between strangers on the roads for years and had never once received: you, I see you, all is acceptable.

Sonja's hand came up off the sill about four centimeters. It was the most she could do. It appeared to be enough.

Then Yara turned, and adjusted the strap, and went out the gate and down the hill with the dog's chin on her shoulder, and the two of them were a single silhouette, and then they were the dark between two agaves, and then they were the road's business and none of the villa's at all.

Sonja stood at the window a long time.

She did not wake Klaus. She did not read what was written on the car ⁓ there would be time, there would be a whole performance of time in the morning. She washed the chicory cup that did not need washing. Then she went to the corner where the dog's basket sat, and picked up his bowl ⁓ the good bowl, the one she had traded a silk scarf for in the second year of the marriage ⁓ and dried it, and put it at the bottom of her wardrobe, under the winter things, where accounting could not reach it.

She was, she discovered, not crying. It was the other thing. The one with no magazine name. The one where a window closes somewhere in a house and a draft you had stopped noticing finally stops.

Klaus found the dog gone at seven, and was annoyed, in the way of a man whose delivery has been mishandled.

He found the car at ten past.

Sonja stood on the terrace with her chicory and watched him read it. He walked from the hood to the back the way Yara had known a reader would have to walk, all the way around, receiving the sentence in its intended order, and Sonja watched the sentence arrive. Two words on the hood: LECK MICH. One word, the long one, across the back: KREUZWEISE. The old knight's invitation ⁓ the most famous rude sentence in the German language, the one Goethe put in the mouth of Götz von Berlichingen and every German schoolchild has kept warm ever since, split across a solar-charged Fiat so that the car itself now made the offer, permanently, to anyone who took the time.

Klaus said the knight's name. He said the playwright's name. He said several things about the scrappers of the coast, their upbringing, and the decline of standards in vandalism, which had once at least been illiterate.

He did not say his daughter's name. He stood in front of a sentence she had chosen for him out of his own bookshelf, in his own language, in her own hand, and he attributed it to strangers ⁓ and Sonja, watching, had to put her chicory down on the wall, because a laugh was pressing up under her sternum with the dumb insistence of a spring under sand, and if it got out it was never going back in.

It did not get out. She had had years of practice.

"Which way did the boy go," Klaus demanded, and here for once his grammar failed him, because the sentence had nobody in it he could name without work.

"I was asleep," Sonja said.

She had been at the window. She knew the road, the turn at the agaves, the direction of the coast. She held all of it the way the wardrobe held the bowl.

On Saturday the Erques man came down the valley, looked at the empty terrace, listened to Klaus for a while, and shrugged ⁓ the shrug of a hungry man who had seen arrangements fall through before and would see it again, and who privately, Sonja suspected, had not much liked the job. He took a payment for the inconvenience and went back up the valley behind the camel, the cages empty now, and the era swallowed him, the way it swallowed most people who were neither monsters nor saints but simply weather.

The car was never repainted. There was no paint. There was, Klaus said, no point, until things came back ⁓ and so the sentence drove everywhere the villa's business went, for years, announcing itself to the island at large, and the island at large came to know the little Fiat by name. Klaus never understood why people on the coast road sometimes waved.

Down the hill, that same night, there had been a fire at the cave above Diego Hernández, because there was always a fire.

The troupe was in from Alcalá. Tibor was working the bar. And into the ring of light came Yara with a backpack that had started to squirm on the last switchback, and she knelt, and unzipped it, and three kilos of apricot-colored refugee stepped out onto the sand of a new world and shook himself from nose to tail, flinging the villa off in all directions.

He inspected the fire. He inspected Tibor, who offered a piece of dried fish with the gravity of a customs official approving papers. He inspected the assembled company, who were louder than anything the concrete box had ever permitted, and found them, on inspection, correct. Then he climbed into Yara's lap, turned around twice, and sat facing the flames like a small emperor reviewing a fleet.

"Who's this," somebody asked.

Yara looked down at him. He had been named, until that night, for a fashion house ⁓ a label chosen by a woman who had wanted the idea of a dog, for a life that had wanted the idea of everything.

"Torbellino," she said.

Whirlwind.

And the little dog, who had answered to the other name for nine years the way you answer a customs officer ⁓ accurately, and without warmth ⁓ turned his head at once.

He came from a fashion house. He did not look back.