Lambs
Robert Uley (American watercolorist, 1958–2035), knelt on his bed and leaned out the small square window of his cottage’s loft as the sheepman and his dim-looking teenage son and their avid black and white dog separated the lambs from the ewes. They had herded the sheep into a round pen, and now, amid urgent bleating, the son was scooping up the lambs one by one and passing them to his father, who set them down in a different pen away from their mothers. Grinning, the boy thrust a wriggling lamb feet-first at the sheepman, who dodged the flailing hooves and lost his temper. While the father shouted, the son rolled the lamb over and held it against his chest, gazing at the ground.
Beyond the pens was a flat shelf of grass and beyond that, down some cliffs, was the North Atlantic, smooth this morning, with a glossy grey mineral sheen. A smattering of low islands, partially shrouded in a retreating bank of mist, added interest to the horizon. Robert worried for a moment about the lambs being hungry, then realized there was probably no more need for them to eat. He closed the window and descended a ladder to the large room that was kitchen, studio, and living space. He put water in the electric kettle for tea and flipped the switch. Tea only appealed to him, for some reason, when he was abroad. At home he never thought to drink it.
A while later, after the lambs had been herded onto a trailer and the sheepman had driven them away down the hill, and after the trailer had bounced back empty up the road and gone down again laden with ewes, someone knocked on Robert’s door. It was Sasha Kranz (American painter, 1988–2035), the girl in the cottage next door. She was young, cheerful, and scrubby, her roly-poly body swaddled in layers of paint-splattered clothes and surmounted by a vast and imperfectly knitted green snood from which her head popped like the round finial on a newel post.
“Sorry to intrude,” she said, peering around him into his cottage, glimpsing stone walls and furniture similar to but not identical to the furniture in hers: a tired IKEA loveseat covered with a tartan wool blanket, a peeling red wooden chair at a small table, a stove with a basket of peat bricks beside it. Charcoal drawings of sheep were clothespinned to strings that crisscrossed the stone walls. Robert stepped outside, blocking her view, and pulled the door shut behind him, confirming her earlier impression of his secretiveness. She reminded herself not to be nosy. “Just wanted to let you know we’re doing a group dinner tonight,” she said. “Potluck style, but you don’t really have to bring anything. You can just show up if you want.”
He leaned against the red door and looked away. He wasn’t one for eye contact, generally. The part of his face that showed between his bushy beard and strawlike bangs was weathered from time spent tramping around outdoors and, rumor had it, from hard living, and there was a wariness in his pale eyes that seemed childlike, as though he anticipated being scolded and was preemptively resentful. His hands were black from handling his dry little plugs of drawing charcoal and cracked as a miner’s. Robert Uley was famous in a insider-y, cultish way—one of Sasha’s art school teachers, Maxine Hill, had shown slides of his work—and Sasha had entertained a fantasy of them becoming friends, roaming around the hills together sketching, maybe even having some roughhewn en plein air sex (Maxine would die), though it turned out he was so quiet she found herself babbling to fill the silences.
“Some people are here,” she went on, “apparently just for a couple nights. They’re staying in number three. I guess the wife is a big deal, although I’d never heard of her. Bettina Ericsson?”
Robert frowned at the ocean. Ages ago, before he’d decided to withdraw from the art world (and, while he was at it, most of the rest of the world) he had endured a drunken one-night stand with Bettina Ericsson. He doubted she would remember: she had been plastered and had never asked his name, and he had been clean-shaven then and much younger, and it had happened in chaotic nocturnal artistic New York, back when the city had seemed halfway to ruins.
Good thing you already did a lot of sketches since now your models are gone.
“How do you know she’s a big deal if you’ve never heard of her?” he asked. In his opinion, Sasha was talented but too credulous, too permeable, too easily impressed and wounded.
“Just from the way she acted, you know? She’s kind of graaaand.” Sasha put her fists on her hips and pulled her soft chin back into her neck with an expression of Napoleonic hauteur. “Have you heard of her? She does installations? I guess she writes poetry, too? And songs? She said she’d published like five books, and some opera she wrote was performed in Brussels or somewhere like that. Antwerp?”
Robert deplored the studiedly offhand, roundabout process of insinuation by which artists established a pecking order and of which Bettina had been—presumably still was—a master. With vague allusions and her graaaand manner, she convinced people that momentous, hush-hush-for-now developments were lurking in her near future. Big things are in the works, Bettina had said to Robert all those years ago. And then, pressing her finger to her lips: Shhhhh.
Her unexpected presence was the kind of intrusion Robert hated. He had come to Ireland because a sculptor friend had recommended this artists’ residency, praising its windblown austerity and the charm of its cottages (restored from roofless, moss-covered pre-famine shells) and the starkness of its clifftop location and the abundance of interesting ruins and ancient standing stones to be encountered on walks. The friend said one might also stumble upon the odd people the stones attracted, people with long loose hair and flowing robes who roamed the hills with knapsacks full of herbs and wine and candles and bits of bone, playing at paganism.
This description turned out to be accurate, even about the self-styled Druids, whom Robert had come across once or twice setting up their altars, but still the place didn’t seem so different from his cabin on the shore of Lake Superior. He found himself wondering why he had come.
“Should be interesting, anyway,” Sasha said. “See you later? Eight-ish?”
He wanted to say he was ill or too deeply into his work to do something as mundane as eat dinner, but if he refused, she would be hurt. Instead he gazed past her at the drooping barbed wire fence, wisps of wool still clinging to it here and there, and empty field beyond, speckled with sheep droppings. “They took away the lambs.”
Sasha spun around to confirm the absence of sheep. “They did? Shit, that is so sad. They were so freaking cute. I don’t know if I’ll be able to eat lamb after this. Do you eat it? Lamb?”
“No.”
She gestured at the cottage’s closed door. “Good thing you already did a lot of sketches since now your models are gone.”
He continued to look at the field and plucked at his beard with thumb and forefinger. The sheep in his paintings were dingy wool cylinders with long, blunt faces, yellow eyes, and comically skinny legs. They had stained knees, shit-crusted fleece on their haunches, slashes of bright blue spray paint across their backs that identified which sheepman they belonged to. He liked to paint white things because of the pleasure he gleaned from leaving voids of dry white untouched paper, herding the loose-running paint around the edges. After Sasha left, he went inside and looked at his sketches, then at the stack of paintings on his table. What was the point of them? The animals he had studied, sitting among them for hours with his charcoal and drawing pad, were perhaps a bleating mass flowing into a slaughterhouse at this very moment. Surely a true painting of sheep would have some hint of collective doom. He had an impulse to burn his work, but he always did.
At eight-fifteen, Robert left his cottage. It would not be dark until almost eleven. The wind had picked up, stippling the sea with whitecaps. Waves bloomed against the distant islands in silent puffs of spray. He opened the door to the communal cottage and peered into the gloom. A peat fire on the open hearth clouded the air with acrid, earthy smoke. From the kitchen came voices and a wash of electric light, but the main room—thick stone walls with bare rafters under a high peaked roof—was illuminated only by half a dozen mismatched candles scattered on the long table and what evening light came through the small, deep windows. At the end of the table, Bettina Ericsson (Danish installation artist, poet, singer, photographer, playwright, 1949–2021) sat staring at Robert.
“Which one are you?” she said
“I’m Robert.”
“Oh, yes. The other American.” Her Danish accent, strong when he last encountered her, had mostly fallen away. “I met the girl already.”
Her gaze was level, inert. She had concealed herself under a theatrically voluminous green Loden cloak with frog closures at the neck, but he could see she was now a large woman. The angles of her face had become vague and low-lying with fat and age. Her eyes were lined thickly with black, and her long, pale fall of hair had been wrapped, turbanlike, around her head and secured with an excess of combs. She had never been beautiful, but as a young woman she had been handsome—gaunt and regal, with thick yellow eyebrows that at some point she had replaced with skeptical arcs of brown pencil.
“I’m Bettina Ericsson,” she said, thinking he was rude not to ask. Probably he already knew who she was—in fact, he seemed vaguely familiar, though so many people did. Such was one consequence of living a full life. People passed in a blur; she could hardly be expected to remember them all. She added, “I’m an artist, poet, singer, and playwright.”
“All of those?” Robert said mildly, wishing he hadn’t come, remembering how she had bared her teeth at him in bed, how he had been afraid to kiss that fierce mouth. The whole experience had been frightening, like being called upon to perform an exorcism. Annihilate me, she had commanded, gripping his jaw. Make me sorry I met you.
“A photographer as well, actually,” she said. “Among other things. You know, you remind me of someone. Who?”
He lifted the bowl he had brought, his potluck offering, and tipped his head toward the kitchen. “I’ll just take this in.”
“I’d love a glass of wine.” She spoke slowly, imperiously. “My husband’s in there. Send him back with it if you prefer to hide. I can tell you’re shy. What is your surname, by the way?”
“Not shy, just quiet.”
“Excuses, excuses,” she said, a hand emerging from the cloak to wave him away.
Zachary Moskowitz (Irish art historian, 1954–2035), or O’Moskowitz, as he liked to joke about his status as that rarest of curiosities, an Irish Jew, sat on the kitchen counter and drank red wine out of a jam jar while the American girl peered anxiously into the oven. When she bent over, the tail of the man’s shirt she was wearing stretched over her ample ass. He thought she was careless to have let herself get fat while she was still young, though honestly the sight turned him on. Sasha’s broad ass, if he were to give it a friendly fuck right there in the kitchen, promised the kind of erotic thrill he most enjoyed: the opportunity to grip, clutch, cling to an abundance of flesh while at the same time savoring the enlivening tang of contempt.
“How long does it take to roast vegetables?” she asked. “I feel like these have been in there forever.”
“Give them a poke and see,” Zachary said, bouncing his heels against the cabinets.
Sasha found a fork and opened the oven, blinking against the heat, not wishing to bend down while this impish man watched her with the kind of jabbing, prodding, presumptuous lust that doesn’t care if it’s welcome. He was small and slight with curly grey hair, long yellow teeth, and quizzical, wide-set eyes. She was trying her best to pretend she liked him. She wanted to be a good sport, always, especially at residencies, which were supposed to be about camaraderie and the free exchange of ideas. Robert came in with a bowl of something.
“Robert!” she said. “You’re here. Will you look at these vegetables and tell me if you think they’re done?”
“Shake hands first,” said Zachary, hopping down from the counter. “I’m Zachary. Bettina is my wife.”
Robert set down his bowl and shook hands. He accepted a fork from Sasha and bent obligingly into the heat.
“What kind of an artist are you, Robert?” Zachary said from behind him. “Not to ask the unanswerable.”
“Watercolors.” He jabbed at a parsnip. “Almost,” he told Sasha. “A few more minutes.”
“Watercolors! Brave man. I don’t know how one controls the paint. Not sure it’s worth it anyway—I’ve never liked them much, although I’m sure yours are good. Sort of anemic, usually. Or messy. I’m a professor of art history at Trinity, since you asked. When Emma offered us the cottage for a few nights, we jumped at the chance—you know, coming to the source of it all, submerging ourselves in art’s primordial ooze.”
“Ooze?” repeated Robert.
Zachary drew an arch in the air with one arm. “All of this. You lot. You people busy making things. Not to worry, though, I won’t be peeking through your windows to critique. Really it’s just a wee vacation for us. We’ve been trapped in cities for ages. Bettina never has much of break between her many exhibitions.”
He sounded Irish, but his diction had a confusing English bluffness that came and went. The accents over here tended to make Robert anxious. He worried about misunderstanding and being misunderstood, and he knew that the natives were busily gleaning subtle, incriminating information from every word. The caretaker of the cottages had an impenetrably dense Kerry accent and deployed unreliably decipherable Irish words here and there, and Robert had taken to avoiding him to spare them both any more baffling exchanges.
He became aware that Zachary seemed to be waiting for him to say something, probably to ask about Bettina’s many exhibitions. He would not.
“Incidentally,” Zachary said, “what’s your surname?”
“It’s Uley,” Sasha said with something like pride.
Zachary drummed his fingers against his lips. “Uley. Oh, yes, yes, yes. I believe I’ve heard of you. You’re quite well-known, then, aren’t you? Uley. Watercolors.”
Robert wrapped his hand in a dishtowel and pulled the pan of vegetables out. From the main room, a burst of chatter suggested that the last two members of their small community, had arrived.
“I’ll just go see who that is,” Zachary said and trotted off, nimble as a satyr.
Bettina was watching the doorway for Robert, and when he appeared behind the chubby girl, carrying a stack of empty plates, she said, “You forgot my wine.”
“So I did,” he said. No apology, nor did he offer to rectify the mistake. Americans, she thought.
“Too late now, anyway. These girls beat you to it.” Several bottles of red wine, provided by the new girls, stood open on the table.
China Colleran (Irish printmaker, 1978–2035) had a shaved head, a floral garland tattooed around her neck like a ligature, and a severe manner; she cranked and rolled the various presses in the printmaking shed with the brusque industriousness of an assembly line worker. Mädchen Hauer (German composer, 1982–2035) was ethereal, bland, usually holed up in her cottage with her laptop, keyboard, and headphones. Sometimes the other artists spotted her wandering down the narrow lanes, green wellies crusted with sheep shit, clutching bouquets of wildflowers and grasses.
Having acknowledged Robert’s neglect, Bettina found she wanted him nearby. Aloof people were a challenge. Sometimes, when she explained to them who she was, they became useful acolytes, or, if they refused to be convinced of her immortality, she enjoyed disdaining them. Also, she had decided she didn’t know him but that he reminded her of someone. She was curious who. “Come sit by me,” she said, draping her arm over the back of a chair.
He sat. She peeled back the foil from a platter in front of her, revealing a set of dainty brown ribs garnished with a spiral of lemon.
“You did rack of lamb?” China said. “Just in the little kitchen in your cottage?”
“My wife is a fantastic cook,” Zachary said. “Give her a knife and a fire, and she’ll give you a feast.”
“Cooking is my meditation,” Bettina said to Robert, fixing him with her hard green gaze.
You feel sorry for the lambs then, Sasha, but you still eat them.
They passed around the food. “Where does this come from?” Mädchen asked about the watercress salad.
“Robert brought it,” said Sasha, taking a slice of bread from a basket.
“But from the supermarket?”
Robert had made a small pile of rice on his plate beside a small pile of Sasha’s roasted vegetables. “I found it in the stream up the hill,” he said.
“Foraged!” declared Zachary. “So picturesque! I hope you washed it. We should have insisted this be an entirely foraged meal. Bettina and I should have plucked our lamb from across the road. Someone else could have gone down and prised mussels off the rocks.”
“My husband is a Jew, you know,” Bettina said to Robert while she sliced her lamb. “He loves things that don’t cost money. He pretends it is an aesthetic choice, but it is a genetic compulsion.”
To Sasha, who was listening without being included, the way Bettina talked about her husband’s Jewishness had a weird salaciousness to it, like someone confessing a fetish. Sasha’s father was Jewish, and yet she could manage to get through a conversation without referencing it in a tone of dark candor. She always felt an aura of discomfort, a lowering memory, when Europeans talked about Jews and Jewishness, and now she glanced at Mädchen for no reason other than that she was German.
“There aren’t any lambs for you to pluck anymore,” Robert said. “They took them away today.”
“Away?” said Zachary. “To slaughter?”
“Not to Club Med anyway,” said China.
“The landscape seems different now,” said Sasha. “I feel different when I look at it. Sorrowful.”
“So you’d rather your meat be shrink-wrapped, stamped with the golden arches, nothing to do with an animal?” Zachary said.
“No,” said Sasha. “It’s not like that.” She looked at Robert for help, but he appeared occupied with eating. Already she was ashamed of her desire to make these people like her. Obviously they could not be bothered. Sometimes when she was with a group of artists, especially after a few drinks, the conversation took on a thrilling freedom. They spoke about their preoccupations and emotions with a candor derived from a communal trust that they were not ordinary, that they all led similarly obsessive, elevated lives. It had been a mistake to think this would be one of those gatherings. They had already dismissed her. They assumed because she was young and friendly and American she could not be a good artist. But she was—she would be—and if they trusted surfaces so easily, then they could not see the truth of things and therefore could not be good artists themselves. Reassured, she took some lamb.
“You feel sorry for the lambs then, Sasha, but you still eat them,” China observed.
Sasha blushed. “I’m thinking about becoming a vegetarian.”
“No, don’t do that,” Zachary said. “There’s nothing better than a bit of meat on the bones.” He smirked. At a loss, she smiled, then berated herself for it.
“Are you a vegetarian?” Bettina asked Robert when he passed along the lamb platter without taking any.
“Yes.”
She settled back in her seat, and when he dared glance at her, he saw she was studying him. There was something expectant about the way she looked at him, as though they were a pair of spies tasked with passing secrets over dinner. “I wouldn’t have thought. You seem like the red-blooded American man. Strong and virile.”
“My wife is a bit a slut,” Zachary said cheerfully. “But there’s a great deal to be gained from that, for the brave.”
Robert had the disorienting sense Bettina had mistaken him for someone else. Maybe that had happened the first time, too, when she had beckoned him from her table in that dingy bar and instructed him to buy her a whiskey. After that, his pitiful supply of cash exhausted, she had bought the rest of their rounds and made vague boasts about her imminent artistic glory until she abruptly instructed him to take her to his apartment, which he had done, silently leading the way up four flights while she sang an aria and paused on the landings to savor the echo of her own voice in the urine-smelling stairwell. Naked on the mattress on the floor of his barren studio, grasping his shoulders, she had bared her teeth, reminding him of a stoat or a mink, some fierce, soft animal. Her exposed incisors, stained and slick, had been somehow more intimate than any confrontation he had with the damp mess of curls that flourished unchecked between her legs.
“How do they kill them, the lambs?” Mädchen asked.
“Cut their throats, don’t they?” said China. “Or is it like cattle? With a bolt gun?”
Bettina was looking up at the ceiling. “Real thatch,” she remarked. “Très authentique.”
Robert was thinking about the lambs. How did they kill them? Could the lambs see the others being slaughtered? Could the ewes hear the lambs? How did people bear it, killing such small, innocent things? Gutting them one after another after another? He used to have dogs, but with his last dog, from the time she was a puppy, he had been bothered by the fact that she would die. Too often, scratching her back or putting down her bowl of food, he would be reminded she would die and would think about how she did not know. Which was better, innocence or knowledge? He couldn’t decide.
The others were talking about Tessa, a shared acquaintance, who had just had a big solo show in London.
“I’m not sure it did what she wanted it to do,” Zachary said in a mournful tone, glee simmering underneath. “I’m afraid it was a bit of a reality check.”
“Is the work good?” Sasha asked.
“You don’t know it?” Bettina said, shocked, setting down her knife and fork. “She is quite well known, quite talked about. You can’t be so provincial.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s good,” Zachary said. “Tessa has lots of rich friends who will buy.”
China, glaring, reached out to break a piece of dripped wax off a candle. “I like her work,” she said. “There’s something about the way she applies paint that I find very moving.”
Moving, Sasha repeated to herself, momentarily distracted from her outrage at being called provincial. Yes, paint could be moving, as a medium. Medium: the viscous colors she squeezed from metal tubes but also a spiritualist figure, the one who bridges the gap between the living and the dead. Her paintings were the disembodied visions, the rappings and tappings brought over from the other side by her beckoning brushes—the other side being the flickering dimension that must be her imagination, traversed by feelings that took the form of images and colors she could never translate to paint the way she wanted to. Paint was the medium of both her hope and her disappointment.
Bettina gave Robert a conspiratorial look. Americans were always fascinated by the aristocracy. He would enjoy a few tidbits about Tessa. “She’s terribly, terribly posh,” she murmured, slicing lamb as she spoke. “She’s one of those people who says she lives on a farm but means she lives in a castle. Her husband says he’s a soldier, but he means he’s a general. She’s close to the Middletons.” Watching him for a reaction, she snapped a bite of meat off her fork. He stared back at her, and she began to wonder if he wasn’t a little simple.
Zachary rolled his eyes. “Useful for discounted party supplies.”
Jaysus, they were a pair of snobs, though, weren’t they, China thought, poking bits of hardened wax back into a candle’s molten cauldron, watching them soften, turn transparent, and disappear. They were the kind to say whatever nasty thing was nearest at hand and assume it was clever because it was nasty. Zachary’s thigh was against hers, pressing, but she didn’t bother moving away. She thought about being in the printmaking cottage, rolling out sticky ink, heaving over the press’s heavy lever.
“Build up the fire a bit, would you?” Bettina said to Robert.
He rose, less out of obedience than a desire to be away from her. As he placed a new peat brick on the fire, brown and heavy, the ones already burning collapsed and broke apart, and he had to snatch his hand out of the sudden blaze. The chunks of glowing orange peat looked almost transparent, like a bed of crystals, and rippled with light. At the edge of the hearth was a basket of kindling and newspaper. The paper on top had photographs of a sheepdog trial, and Robert took a page and set it on the fire, where it vanished immediately into black flakes of ash. What he wished he could capture in his paintings, but never would, was flames eating through the empty white middle of the paper, the blackened edges creating the outline of a sheep.
I know who you remind me of. You remind me of the loneliest man I ever met.
Bettina was looking again at the cottage’s thatched and raftered summit, dim with candlelight and full of smoke. She lifted her surprisingly long, elegant hands, and everyone looked up, too. “This is Valhalla,” she said. “It really is Valhalla.”
“My wife is Danish,” Zachary explained. “Norse mythology has had a heavy influence on her.”
“Have you been up the road?” China asked. “To see the monastic cells? A thousand years old. Likely more. You could barely call them huts. More like caves. You can’t believe anyone could have lived there. The monks must have been so cold, chilled to the bone absolutely all the time.”
“What does that have to do with Norse mythology?” Bettina said.
“Nothing. I just wondered if prayer ever gave them any pleasure.”
“Is it supposed to?” said Zachary.
China shook her head. “You would hope it might offer some comfort.”
“I think it was all one and the same,” said Zachary. “The more miserable they were the more sure they were about their holiness. Hope their cocks froze off.”
“I know who you remind me of,” Bettina said to Robert, so loudly and triumphantly that everyone fell silent. “You remind me of the loneliest man I ever met.”
“Who was he?” said Sasha after a moment.
“You didn’t have to ask, dear Sasha,” China said. “She’s going to tell us anyway.”
Some years ago,” Bettina said, pausing to stare into each of the others’ faces in turn, “maybe four or five years ago, I traveled as far north as I could, to the high Arctic, to islands where there is nothing but ice and snow. You always have to be on alert for polar bears. People carry guns, but I would not. I refused. Walruses lie on icebergs. Glaciers are everywhere, bright blue, creeping down to the sea. Sometimes where they meet the sea they collapse, and you can be killed by flying bits of ice.”
“Tell about the airship,” Zachary said.
Her eyelids flickered with annoyance, and she said, “I will tell my own story my own way.” Then, after a pause: “There is an iron pylon there, like a tower, you know, a spire, from which an airship had departed one hundred years ago. They were trying to reach the north pole. Of course all were lost.” She glared at Zachary. “That’s it—that’s all there is to say about the airship. More interesting: I saw an abandoned settlement, a whaling settlement, where there were still huge rusted iron pots for boiling the whale fat, and the bones of the whales were heaped up, and the permafrost had spat out the bodies of the whalers themselves from their graves. There were skeletons you could see, still in wool trousers and hats.
“Most people talk about the beauty, the starkness, but my project had nothing to do with the landscape specifically. I cared only about the remoteness. I was to communicate telepathically with a group of artists in Antwerp.” She stared around the table.
“So you’re a psychic as well,” China said.
Bettina nodded again. “It is the greatest of my gifts. So. At appointed times on appointed days, I sent messages to the artists, and they would be waiting to receive them and to do what they sensed I was asking. I learned later it worked quite well, really, that they heard me quite clearly—something to do with the polar regions’ strange effect on magnetism—but that is not the point.
“I arranged to visit an abandoned town where there had been a coal mine. The mine belonged to Russia, although the islands themselves did not. There are so many abandoned places in these islands. The place is too harsh—people have grand dreams, but the cold and ice wears them down. The hardness. The mining town was made up of big buildings in a Soviet style, blocky, you know, all on stilts because the ground is frozen, enough to accommodate more than a thousand people, although now only one man lives there.”
Bettina cast a significant glance at Robert. “This man walked down to meet me at the dock. He was wearing a long coat with red stripes and brass buttons on the front and a tall black fur hat, like a hussar or a cossack or I don’t know, and he had a rifle over his shoulder. For the bears, you see. He had long hair and a high-pitched giggle. He had once been a professor of political science at a university in Novosibirsk. Before he came to the Arctic, he was planning to kill himself because his wife had cheated on him. One day he had his bottles of pills and vodka assembled in his desk drawer at the university, he had been surfing the web, wasting time until everyone else left and he would be free to die, when he stumbled upon an advertisement for a job as guide to this ghost town. So instead of dying he decided he would come to live alone in this ruined place. Every few months a helicopter brought him supplies, and he had a small generator, just for his rooms. Otherwise, nothing.
“He led me up the road to the town. Where the buildings were, there was a grassy field and a huge bust of Lenin at one end. The grass had been imported from Ukraine, Alexei said, as well as the soil in which it grew. If they had not brought the soil, too, the grass would not have grown. The mine was above, on the mountainside. There was a sort of covered tunnel leading up top it. The miners had to climb up to the opening and then be lowered down again, into the dark.
“One of the buildings was an aquatic center. Alexei left me alone in there—I asked him to. There was an empty swimming pool of green tiles. On the level below the pool it was very dark with many small rooms and narrow corridors. I went through with a flashlight. The darkness made the most ordinary objects seem terrifying. Things like a doctor’s scale or a boot or mattress.
“It was all I could do not to run out of there, but I did not. When I left, I felt I was covered in ghosts. Like perhaps I was halfway to being a ghost myself. I went to sit by Lenin to recover myself, and as I was sitting, I saw a curtain move in a building across the grassy square. There was a figure in the window, a shadow, and then it was gone.
“I will admit I was frightened. Or thrilled. I don’t know if I can always tell the difference. The point is I was coursing with adrenaline. I felt I was accessing a new plane. The polar regions, you know, things are strange there. Compasses don’t behave. There is the aurora. The sun does not set, and then it does not rise. You are always in danger of being devoured by a bear.” She shrugged. “It’s strange. But it makes sense to me, because of my Norse blood. So I thought, yes, I am afraid, I am electric with fear, and even though it is not the appointed time, I will try to put this feeling to use and communicate with Antwerp. I closed my eyes and centered myself like I do, and that is when I had my great vision.”
She surveyed the table, waiting.
“Well,” China said wryly, rising, pleased with herself, “it’s time for bed. Good night and sweet dreams.” She made a small bow and left. When the door closed behind her, a gust of cold wind made the peat flare almost white. A candle blew out, but Mädchen relit it from one of the others.
“What was the vision?” Sasha asked.
Bettina leaned back into the shadows. “The end of the world,” she said. “I know it is coming. Not tomorrow, you know, but not in too long, either. I saw the planet sweeping along its orbit without any life on it. I saw other things I can’t describe. Or perhaps I will not allow myself to describe them.”
“Unfortunately, her vision didn’t tell how the world would end,” Zachary said in apparent seriousness. “So we don’t know what to warn against. Not that anyone would listen.”
“I think it will be quick,” Bettina said, “if that’s any comfort. I saw a white flash. Fire.”
Sasha nodded, eyebrows politely raised, relieved the vision was so mundane, so unimaginative.
“So,” Bettina said to Robert, “that’s who you remind me of. Alexei. Not in the way you look. Just something. It was him, if you wondered, in the window. He liked to do that as a joke when people visited. Spook them.”
“I’m not lonely, though,” Robert said.
Bettina seemed genuinely surprised. “No?”
“No.”
Mädchen, who was holding a pale hank of her own hair to her nose and dreamily considering whether she would wash it after dinner to get the peat smoke out or wait until the morning, understood everything but had nothing to say about Bettina’s vision. A bodhrán was lying on the windowsill behind her, and she picked it up and began to tap out a rhythm. When she stopped, a tapping continued. They all looked around, surprised. “It rains?” Mädchen said.
There is something terrible, isn’t there, about watching them with their mothers, knowing what’s going to happen to them.
“Must be,” said Zachary.
The tapping became more forceful.
“Sounds like hooves on the roof,” Robert said.
“Still on about the lambs, are you?” said Zachary.
“Like hooves,” Bettina repeated. “Hooves. Yes. The simile holds. You know I have written three books of poetry.”
“It’s the ghosts of the lambs,” Zachary said, “come to take revenge on us. They’ll be coming through the windows to slit our throats.”
“There is something terrible, isn’t there,” Bettina said, “about watching them with their mothers, knowing what’s going to happen to them.”
“Would it be better if they did know?” Robert said, thinking of his old dog, how before it died it had raised its head and closed its eyes and seemed to suckle at the air. Had death conjured its mother’s teat?
“Innocence is pitiable,” Bettina said.
“Knowledge is pitiable, too,” said Zachary.
An obscure, unbearable confusion had welled up in Robert. “Why do they feel fear?” he asked. “The lambs? Before they die.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bettina.
“I mean, because they don’t know they’re mortal. What do they think they’re afraid of?”
“They don’t think,” Zachary said, exasperated. “They just act on instinct. You’re missing the entire point of animals.”
“Fear helps them survive,” said Sasha, “run away at the right times, whatever. It’s an adaptation.”
“When the mothers try to protect their babies, what do they think they’re protecting them from? When the babies get eaten, what do the mothers think has happened?”
“It’s not as though we know much more than they do,” Bettina said. “We know we should be afraid. That’s all.”
After a silence, Mädchen said, “Is there pudding?”
Sasha jumped up, started clearing plates. “I brought an apple pie.”
“Just like mum makes,” said Zachary.
Perhaps I should sing,” said Bettina, pouring the dregs of a wine bottle into her glass. “Many of my poems are meant to be sung. My husband can accompany me.”
“On what?” Sasha asked, but Zachary was already reaching for a guitar that had been propped in a corner of the room, hidden by a bookshelf. Robert smiled to himself. Of course they had come prepared. They were quite the duo. What did they do when no one was looking at them? Did they hang themselves up in a closet or fold themselves up in a trunk?
Zachary dragged a ladder-back chair up to the hearth and sat with his legs crossed, cradling the guitar, tuning it. Bettina, in her long cloak, came and stood beside him. She went through a series of vocal exercises, alternating duck call sounds and arbitrary high notes.
“The smoke is not good for my voice,” Bettina paused to announce. Then she said, “Look at Zachary with his guitar. Like Bob Dylan. Another sexy Jew.”
To Sasha’s disappointment and Robert’s relief, the song was beautiful. Bettina’s voice was raspy and soulful, Zachary’s accompaniment minimal and sweet. Mädchen joined in with the bodhrán, and as the rain kept up its percussion on the roof, the music seemed partly to be sifting down from the sky.
Robert, who had been drinking wine with great purpose during Bettina’s story, closed his eyes and thought of the Arctic. He would like to go there, to see the snow and ice which he might paint by not painting, by leaving the paper blank. He thought of the white bears, the black water.
Sasha wished the song were not so lovely. Its loveliness was making Bettina’s vision more credible, more frightening. She wondered about the white flash, if anyone would even have time to understand what was happening.
Mädchen tapped the bodhrán and thought of the standing stones, of the people who sometimes came striding up the hills in long robes. She gave them flowers for their altars.
When Robert left the dinner, the rain had stopped but the wind still blew. The dense mat of clouds was breaking up into rafts of piled-up billows lit silver as they passed the moon. The sound of the ocean surged and diminished, surged and diminished. In open channels between the clouds, stars grazed their black field.
Walking back to his cottage, Robert swung his flashlight over the hillside. Two ewes and three lambs huddled there in the damp grass. Their eyes flashed green in the light. One of the ewes, startled, lurched cumbersomely up and gave a protracted, woeful bleat. It was such a futile sound, Robert thought, such a strange groan. They called their babies with that sound, complained about the wind and rain, expressed alarm and warning and happy anticipation of the feed pellets the sheepman dumped out of fifty pound sacks every morning. These five must have been off somewhere when the others were taken. Sheep were always escaping from their fields, brainlessly squeezing out through gaps in the fence and wandering over forbidden hillsides that were no different than the ones they’d left behind. Did these sheep wonder where the others had gone? He thought they must. He opened the door to his cottage and stood there for a moment looking out, almost inviting them in, almost offering them shelter.
The lucky few. The lonely refugees in the dark, mothers and babies. The sheepman would find them, Robert supposed. They might have only won themselves one extra night. They would give themselves up in the morning for pellets. He hummed Bettina’s song to himself as he lit a peat fire in his stove and fed his paintings into it one by one. They flared into light, then blackened, their edges curling over, the sheep disappearing.
When the fire comes, the white flash, he is an old man. He is ready for it, sitting waiting on a folding chair on the shore of Lake Superior with his pad of paper and a piece of charcoal in his trembling hand as the sky changes and then is gone.