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“Well, you weren’t wrong when you described him as being the introspective sort,” I said to Lucia after Lucius had left. “He struck me as being more the Gallic philosopher than the stereotypical Czech businessman.” I took another sip of my Budvar.
“I told you so. He keeps you entertained, though, doesn’t he?”
“It can’t be easy to make a success of a club like this, though?”
“Maybe not. But as long as there are people who remember what life was like before the surveillance crackdown, and as long as there are youths who don’t remember, but who still feel clamped down on and claustrophobic without being quite able to explain why, there will always be a need for places like this. It’s just a case of supply and demand.”
“So the people who are here now are the people who demand their freedom—is that what you’re saying?” I asked.
“A taste of it, at least. Take me—I’m scared of terrorists, why wouldn’t I be? I’m glad of the war on terror, as they call it, and the fact that our society is now organized enough to nip potential threats in the bud. In that sense, I suppose I might be different from those boys and girls on the dance floor. But that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes want a breather, a time-out. Just once in a while, it’s nice to be able to relax and spend time in a place where nobody knows what you’re eating, what you’re drinking, who you’re dancing with, for how long …”
Me time. In the truest sense of the phrase. That was what Lucia got from this place.
A place where nothing is observed, nothing recorded, and anything goes.
And Lucia wanted to share it with me.
“It was very kind of you to bring me with you to this place,” I said. “Thank you.”
“It’s nothing. It just felt like the right thing to do. I’m not sure why,” Lucia mumbled, staring at her beer glass.
“To talk about John?” I asked, as I placed my own glass down on the counter.
“Maybe. I’m not religious. I have no priest to talk to. And I don’t believe in counseling.”
“I know what you mean. I’m the same.”
Lucia’s eyes glinted with the faintest hint of a smile. “Poor little me, huh? No sympathetic priest to pour my heart out to, and I’m not in the habit of keeping a journal to sort out my thoughts.”
“Maybe you should write a book? They’re all the rage, aren’t they, confessional memoirs. A coming-of-age story or something.”
“I just don’t seem to have the talent or the inclination for it. Pretty pathetic, I know, considering I studied language.”
“Well, I guess that leaves just one option. You’ll have to tell me all about it.”
Lucia’s eyes flicked away from mine and toward the abyss that threatened to pull in the dancers. It was as if she longed to be sucked down into that bottomless pit herself.
“I was in bed with him when Sarajevo disappeared.” So began Lucia’s story.
Her voice was completely different from that point on. A thin whisper. Really, I shouldn’t have been able to hear her without bringing my ear right up to her lips. The music should have drowned her out. And yet, somehow, I could hear every one of her words with absolute clarity.
“John’s wife had gone to visit her sister in Sarajevo, taking their daughter with her. John and I were making the most of that precious time together without them. Cambridge was our oyster. It was a time when we didn’t have to worry, when John wasn’t constantly looking over his shoulder. It was such a lovely time. I was happy. So happy that I couldn’t even bring myself to feel the slightest bit guilty at what we were doing. Every spare moment I had, I spent with him.”
Then Lucia paused and bit down hard on her lip. An act of self-flagellation to punish herself?
“I remember it clearly. We had just made love, and I had gone for a shower. I emerged clean and fresh to find John frozen stiff, glued to the nanolayer projection. The front page was showing an update flashing across the top. Sarajevo had been hit by a nuclear bomb. He was watching the linked video clip.
“I was terrified. I just stood there, still wrapped in my towel. He, too, was paralyzed, just watching the same clip over and over again. The anchorwoman in the clip was just reading out information as it was transmitted to her, and the subpage below the clip was saturated with constant updates, links to new clips. John made no effort to look at any of them. He wasn’t interested in finding out any new information. He was stunned enough by what he had already seen, and all he could do was keep his eyes glued to that.”
Lucia stopped to take a sip of her beer. Her voice was calm and disinterested; it was as if she were talking about events that had happened to somebody else. I almost expected her to start the next part of her story with something along the lines of “once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a woman called Lucia Sukrova.” But when she continued, it was about how John Paul flew to Sarajevo.
“I wanted to go with him, but even I had some sense of shame—it would hardly do for a mistress to accompany her lover as he traveled to discover the fate of his wife and daughter. Had John and I been in bed laughing when the bomb exploded? Was he inside me when his wife and only child were obliterated from this earth? I didn’t know what to do, what I could do. I had no idea how I was going to act, how I was meant to act, when he returned from Sarajevo. The worst part of it was that I still loved John, with all my heart. I ached for him as soon as he got on that flight. I needed to feel his body wrapped around mine again. And I wanted to mortify the part of myself that had these unbearably selfish feelings.
“In the end, I didn’t need to worry about what to say to him when he came back. He just silently returned, dropped out of school, and went away somewhere. I didn’t try and look for him. I was afraid of seeing him again. After all, he had become the living embodiment of my own terrible sin. And I didn’t have the confidence or the strength to face the consequences of my own actions.”
Lucia’s story was over.
I had been listening in silence. There was nothing I could have said. After she finished, she stared in silence at the bottom of her glass. I had no idea what I was supposed to say next. What to say to help ease the massive burden she was carrying on her shoulders.
I particularly couldn’t say anything because her story hit so close to home.
That vague sense of emptiness that I remember feeling when I read her profile back at briefing. It was crystallizing, coming together. The gaps were being filled in, the skeleton fleshed out with Lucia’s story. The written word only encompasses so much; Lucia’s voice was so much more revealing.
I remember someone once saying that we have eyelids but no earlids for a reason. You can shut your eyes and be oblivious to the words written down in front of you, but you can never quite block out a story that someone else shares with you from their own mouth, with their own lips. Not unless you can completely shut off your ego from your body.
It was only now that Lucia had shared her story with me that this fact really hit home.
The human voice adds color to a story.
The color of penitence. Thick, heavy slabs, dark and red like dried blood, saturated like a Mark Rothko abstract.
John Paul’s wife and daughter disappeared that day in Sarajevo. And Lucia had no way of atoning for her sins against them. No way of begging for forgiveness. Because they were dead. Not even their corpses remained.
To lose the subject of your feelings of guilt is to lose your hope that you can ever truly be forgiven. That’s why murder was such a taboo in all cultures—there was no way of atoning to your victim. No possibility of pardon.
The dead cannot forgive.
That was why Lucia was suffering so. She had already started her irreversible descent down that slippery slope and had learned too late that her actions were painfully, hauntingly irrevocable. In her mind, there was no one and nothing left in this world who could possibly forgive her for what she had done to John Paul’s wife and daughter.
God is dead. Which meant that sin was now solely in the realm of humanity. Humans were always the ones to commit sin, but now, instead of praying for divine forgiveness, humans had to find some way to work it all out for themselves. When the spirit was no longer living, the flesh could no longer afford to be weak. But when the target of the sin was gone …
This must have been why I was so drawn to Lucia. She was a kindred spirit—a fellow unforgivable. Like me, she was beholden to the dead.
Which was why I decided to tell her about my own sins.
It was the least I could do. And looking back on it now, I see that it was my own way of acknowledging that I liked her.
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