EQMM, June 2012 Read online

  The deserted gate where he had left her now teemed with newly arriving passengers, the digital board above the airline representative announcing that their flight was due to board in forty-five minutes. Jennifer was nowhere to be seen.

  Connor stood stock-still, terror arising from the pit of his stomach to squeeze his now-trembling heart—what if she had never been there at all? What if the whole encounter had been a hallucination, a waking dream? He took a deep, shuddering breath and forced himself to keep his eyes open, to look; to not give in to despair and doubt.

  She spoke his name, and through the din of constantly tramping feet, broadcast announcements, and the soft, pervasive roar of a thousand murmured conversations, he heard her voice. Turning to its source, he spied Jennifer across the central walkway and began immediately to go to her, his earlier, momentary fears discarded as if they had never existed. It was all he could do not to run, shouting her name.

  As he drew near, he could see now through shifting gaps of humanity that she clutched someone's hands within her own, and as he watched she bent her long, slender neck to kiss the knuckles of their owner, her pale face radiant with joy. “Connor,” she breathed.

  He stopped in his tracks as if turned to stone. After what seemed an eternity, he managed to say, “Is everything all right, Jenny?”

  The slender, dark-haired young man glanced up from Jennifer's embrace with a combination of embarrassment and relief. Upon seeing Connor, his expression quickly changed to one of fear as well. Jenny's head remained bowed in an attitude of beatific surrender.

  “Oh . . . do you know this lady?” the young man began, snatching his hands from Jenny's grip in the same breath. “I . . . she . . . she seems to think she knows me.” He threw up his own hands now, palms outward, and began to back away from Jenny and Connor. “I'm sorry, if I . . . well, I couldn't seem to convince her . . .” He turned suddenly and fled into the crowd.

  Jennifer's soft weeping drew Connor back to her now-kneeling form. “Jenny,” he said, placing a hand onto her thin shoulder. She turned her lost, desperate gaze upwards, taking in his face, and even as he watched, her expression shifted like daylight streaming through racing clouds. The tears vanished and this sun of discovery lit her features from within. Suddenly she was beaming. “Connor?” she said, clutching his hands within her own, a note of hysterical joy struggling for voice. “Connor,” she repeated more forcefully, closing her eyes and bowing her head. He felt her lips brush his knuckles.

  He struggled to pull Jenny to her feet as their fellow passengers looked on with equal mixtures of alarm, curiosity, and amusement. Suddenly the older man he had noticed earlier appeared at his elbow and gently, but firmly, brushed him aside. Jennifer looked up in alarm at the intruder, then went suddenly limp, docile in his grip. She rose obediently to her feet and took a seat where he indicated, her face blank and downcast, the features that were just moments before radiant and animated now slack and vacant as a discarded mask. The old man took a seat beside her, gently patting her trembling hands all the while.

  Still holding his newly exchanged ticket, Connor loomed over his usurper. “Excuse me,” he said brusquely.

  The older man looked up at him, his thin face a mixture of annoyance and alarm. He was busily stroking Jennifer's clasped hands, the same hands that Connor had only minutes before held in his own. Her shoulders rose and fell with quiet, helpless sobs.

  “Yes,” the man answered in the same tone.

  Even as he spoke, Connor recognized the resemblance in the shape of the face, the dark eyes, the long slender nose, and a sudden caution stole over him. “Do you . . . know . . . her?”

  The older man's face appeared to ripple with emotion, anger, sorrow, and exhaustion all competing for dominance. “I apologize,” he began, “you must be wondering what in the hell is going on.”

  Connor nodded uncertainly, his eyes traveling from the strange man to the weeping Jennifer, from father to daughter and back again.

  “She got away from me here in the airport,” he continued. “Since her mother died, I've had the devil of a time keeping an eye on her. . . . I'm not getting any younger, you know.” Connor nodded dumbly.

  “Those two gentlemen over there,” he pointed at the bar area and two now-empty stools, “said she had been through here pestering people. It took me awhile to find her in this crowd, nonetheless. I apologize if she's been annoying you.” He sat back with a loud sigh.

  “This is a big airport,” he added tiredly, as if this explained everything.

  Connor had never met Jennifer's parents and if they had been shown photos of him during his college days, a lot of years had gone by since. Mr. Armstrong had no idea who he was talking to. “Where are you taking her?” he asked with only the slightest tremor in his voice.

  “Out to a place in Kansas,” he answered. “Her brother lives nearby and he'll be able to check in on her from time to time . . . have her out to his home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and such . . .” He trailed off uncertainly, his eyes darting guiltily from side to side.

  “I see,” Connor said, still staring at the tear-stained, pallid face of his lover. “Tell me,” he heard himself asking, “who's this Connor guy she's looking for?”

  The old man's shifting features coalesced into a hard mask. “Oh, so she thought you were him, huh? I thought as much. She thought one of the guys at the bar was too. Hell, she thinks any man with dark hair and that is roughly her age is him. Sorry.”

  “Well, who is he?” Connor persisted.

  Jenny's dad looked up at him, his eyes gone hard now too. “He's the sonofabitch that caused all this.” He waved vaguely over Jenny's bowed head. Connor could see tears forming in the corners of his eyes. “She was away at college and fell in love. You know how young girls are,” he glanced beseechingly at Connor. “They give away everything when they think they're in love . . . their whole heart . . . everything.”

  He took a deep breath to regain his composure. “This young bastard left her high and dry, and never looked back, as far as I know. She cut her wrists over it . . . can you imagine . . . and we're Catholics, you know.”

  Connor nodded as if he did and the old man went on.

  “The cops and the paramedics just managed to save her; they couldn't believe they'd brought her back. It was a miracle in some ways . . . a curse in others. She's been like this ever since . . . searching, you know . . . for him.”

  He sagged in his seat, then straightened suddenly. “I'd kill him if I could,” he said. “I know it's wrong, he was just a boy then too. But I would even so.”

  “Yes,” Connor murmured in agreement. “Yes, I . . . he deserved it.” He felt the shame of his own cowardice.

  Jenny's father glanced up at him tiredly; then appeared to lose himself in thought. After a moment more, he shook himself and rose, drawing Jenny to her feet like a marionette. “Well,” he began, “we've got about twenty minutes till boarding and our gate is at the other end of the terminal. We've got a long flight ahead of us.”

  Connor stepped back to allow their passage. When Jenny's face turned his way, he dropped his own to stare hard at the worn grey carpet. “I hope you have a good flight,” he murmured.

  “I just pray for an uneventful one,” the old man rejoined, then led Jennifer into the throng of passengers making their way through the airport.

  Connor watched Jenny walk away on her father's arm, her small, neat head swiveling this way and that in search of him; a search without ending, its original goal no longer recognizable or even important. Only the pantomime remained: a desperate repetition of recaptured joy and fresh loss that only faintly resembled actual life—Jenny's ghost.

  As Connor watched Jenny's face glow and fade with each passing stranger, he thought of his wife and son, strangers also, whose faces glowed with hope and love each time he returned from one of his business trips, then faded within the cool shade of his indifference, his distraction with a secret past. Now he understood that he, too, was a
phantom, an apparition that haunted his own life.

  Connor looked down at his freshly issued pass and saw that he had six hours until boarding, and for the first time felt a longing to be home, to recognize, and be amongst, those who loved him. In the end, he asked himself, wasn't that enough . . . to be loved and know it?

  Even as he heard his name cried out in joy and happy surprise from somewhere behind him, he resisted the impulse to turn once more, and instead marched steadfastly toward his gate and home.

  Copyright © 2012 by David Dean

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  * * *

  Passport to Crime: ANNETTE WRITES A BALLADE

  by Judith Merchant

  * * * *

  * * * *

  Judith Merchant's first work of fiction, a short story, appeared in 2008. Her second story, “Monopoly,” won Germany's Friedrich Glauser Prize for Best Short Story in 2009 and was subsequently translated and published in EQMM. Now here she is with another Glauser-winning story: 2011's “Annette Writes a Ballade,” in its first English translation. In the two years since our last publication of the author her first novel has seen print in Germany; a second is due out later this year.

  Translated from the German by Mary Tannert

  * * * *

  Editor's note:

  —

  Esteemed Reader,

  The publisher of this work has requested that I write a few words on the discovery of Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's secret diary, published here for the very first time, and gladly do I oblige.

  It was the year 1861 when, through a chain of peculiar familial circumstances, I received a modest inheritance in the form of some furnishings, which I accepted with gratitude. Among them was a secretary. My joy at receiving it was all the more upon hearing that Annette von Droste-Hulshoff herself had written some of her early works seated at this desk, during those years when she still made her home at Burg Hulshoff.

  I sent for a cabinetmaker known in these parts to have the secretary repaired and refurbished for sale. To be of assistance—and in order to reduce somewhat the sum of his considerable hourly wages—I helped him empty the many drawers and compartments. Upon removing the topmost drawer, a thin book neatly bound in now-faded silk fell from the inside of the secretary, and with great presence of mind I hid it from the curious eyes of the cabinetmaker. This book I still possess, and I have spent years contemplating its singular content. But I am grown old, and as it is unlikely that I shall survive the winter I no longer desire to keep this story to myself, but offer it to the public for the first time. Should it seem improbable, perhaps even fantastical, it provides nonetheless the first explanation of the disappearance of the servant girl Margret, who had traveled with Fraulein Annette to the moors and was then seen no more. To be sure, the authorship of many an important contribution to our German poetic arts . . . Yet the reader shall judge this for himself!

  signed, Conrad Hesterkamp

  Munster, Westphalia, November 1899

  Burg Hulshoff, 18 September 1820

  * * * *

  Dear Diary,

  Just half an hour. Thirty minutes. 1800 seconds. Is that too much to ask???? That's the time it takes for a stroll (in slow-mo, at that) through our beautiful park; that's how long it takes the stableboy to muck out nearly four boxes. So in half an hour it just absolutely positively has to be possible for Anna Elisabeth Franzisca Adolphina Wilhelmina Ludovica, Baroness of Droste zu Hulshoff, to put a few measly lines on paper, no matter how bad they are! At least three. Three! Or even two! But I can't even manage ONE that isn't lopsided and warped. Grrrrrr.

  It's supposed to be a ballade: Oh! hazy the shiver of the palace park so fearful of the dawn . . . And that's as far as I get. The whole thing bogs down right there, every time. But I really, really REALLY want to be a successful writer. It's turning out to be incredibly hard work; at least, it feels like it. But I want to learn anyway—and Mama promised me I could. Professor Spricker, my tutor, doesn't know any ballades, and our piano teacher wouldn't know one if she fell over it, but Mama said she'd find someone. . . .

  Oh, somebody's calling me!

  See you later, dear Diary.

  * * * *

  Back again. That was Mama. She had some terrific news: We're about to be honored by a VIP. I'll bet you're wild to know who's coming, aren't you? Take a deep breath, Diary dear, and I'll tell you—it's the privy councillor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe himself! It turns out Mama really did write to Adele Schopenhauer and tell her I want to be a poet, and she's the one who sent him (evidently he owed her a favor, hah!). It just goes to show: Connections are everything. Anyway, he's going to look at my poems and help me with them, at least that's what Adele wrote Mama. Except I want to write BALLADES. But it doesn't matter. Adele probably just got poems and ballades all mixed up, a lot of people do that.

  So now Mama's fluttering around the house, all worked up because she didn't have new curtains made after all. And Margret's complaining about all the silver she has to polish. But enough about them. I'm going to copy out my best lines in calligraphy; keep your fingers crossed that the quills don't blot the paper too much. They have to look good for the privy councillor. The ballades, I mean, not the quills. And then he can teach me how to write. People say he's not so bad at it himself. Just two more days, Diary dear, and then there'll be lots to report!

  Burg Hulshoff, 20 September 1820

  * * * *

  Dear Diary,

  He's here, he's here! Really tall too, and sort of imposing, even if he's not as young as he once was. And he always wears this fussy-looking wig, really curly, I think it's his manservant's job to powder it in the mornings. And while we're on the subject, his manservant keeps hanging around. Every time I look up he's just standing there, trying to seem busy with some pseudo thing or other, whatever it is manservants do. Margret's already starting to look dreamy and flirt with him, she's probably hoping she's finally going to catch her fantasy man. All I can say is: Goethe's manservant? Get real! We're not living in some Harlequin romance here, you know. . . .

  And just between us girls, Diary dear, Goethe doesn't look as good as you'd think from all the portraits of him. I did a quick charcoal sketch of him the other evening in the parlor while everyone was looking the other way, listening to Mama. It wasn't easy, let me tell you. My eyesight's not the best, and nobody's allowed to get too close to him. We all have to stand waaaaaay back, it turns out that's one of his little eccentricities. Tomorrow's my first lesson. I can't wait to hear what he says about my ballade!

  Burg Hulshoff, 21 September 1820

  * * * *

  Dear Diary,

  Lots to report! There was a terrific fight, and Margret's still howling so loud in the servants’ quarters that I can't sleep, so I figure I may as well get up and tell you about it. Her mortal sin, evidently, was to use up at least a dozen candles polishing the silver. Mama called it a blasphemous waste and said she'd throw Margret out in disgrace. Margret burst into tears on the spot and said she needed more light to do her job, really truly, and she has to stay because nobody else'd hire her. And then Mama said that would serve her right! Poor Margret. It's been pretty chaotic here with such an, how should I say it, exalted houseguest, if you know what I mean. The privy councillor uses an incredible amount of hot water every morning and Margret gripes that she's run off her feet carrying all those water cans up and down stairs. And that manservant of his just stands around doing nothing—not that that's had any effect on Margret's practically drooling on him despite all the extra work it makes for her. Go figure. He was good for one thing, though: He told her Goethe's missing a tooth, an incisor, and it embarrasses him, that's why none of us is allowed to get too close.

  But I haven't even told you about my first lesson yet. I read the beginning of my ballade out loud to the privy councillor, and when I got done he had a really weird expression on his face. He kept saying “Hmm, hmm,” and then he said he didn't really see why the palace park s
hould be afraid of the dawn, and basically it was important for me to understand that something truly sinister needs to be at the heart of a ballade. And then he recited one of his ballades to show me what he meant, but I didn't think it was sinister at all, it was about a man who wants to take a bath and the tub runs over and he's got too many brooms. Is that trivial or what? After that I had a hard time paying attention to all the other things he read me, I just kept thinking, when your name's Goethe and you're a privy councillor and elevated to the nobility and especially if you're the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, you can write any old thing you want and they print it and everyone runs right out and buys it. Talk about unfair! Anyway, as soon as he stopped talking I thanked him politely, and then he said I should think up something really gruesome for tomorrow. But I've been thinking, and it's just not very grisly out here in Munsterland, it's actually kind of tame and provincial, so I'll have to find another setting and then invent something horrible to happen there, maybe a murder. Murder would be optimal.

  Oh, and then there's something else I noticed today, a strange thing. I can't explain it. Goethe's afraid of something, really afraid. He twitches when a horse whinnies outside, and sometimes, all of a sudden, his eyes go wide with fear. Maybe he's being stalked, but who'd do that? I'd like to know what kind of a guy could make Johann Wolfgang von Goethe afraid of him.

  —

  Wait a sec, somebody's knocking. In the middle of the night!

  Sorry about that, Diary dear. That was Margret. She finally got done howling about Mama and just wanted to tell me that Goethe's manservant finally got around to asking her to go for a walk with him. First she turned him down, you know, for the sake of decorum and everything, but now that Mama's been so mean to her she says she doesn't give a rat's a— about decorum and she's going. Good grief. Let her, then!