The Sleeping Nymph, page 43
“There was nothing you could have done for her,” she said again, but she wasn’t sure whether or not Krisnja, with her mind so warped, could truly understand.
She had conducted a secret existence all of her life. She had watched her own mother die, probably killed by her grandmother for turning away from the cult, or for being too close to the child Ewa had wanted for herself, to raise as the perfect devotee that Hanna had never managed to be.
“I choose you, Krisnja,” Teresa whispered. “But please let me save them, too.”
She let her go. The girl looked up. Tears fell down her wounded face. Her hands broke free of the false knots loosely binding them together.
With a sigh, Krisnja relaxed, her arms falling open, her eyes closed, her head lowered as if in a final act of surrender.
It happened in an instant: a drop of wax touched the floor and erupted into flames. Just in time, Teresa managed to push the girl away and to throw herself onto Marini.
The fire was licking at her shoes and consuming oxygen. The heat was already unbearable, singeing her skin. The flames had quickly crawled across the room, forming a ring around them.
“Go!” she shouted at Krisnja, but the girl didn’t move.
“Forgive me,” Teresa thought she heard her say.
There was a loud thump and a gust of fresh air burst into the room. The flames crackled furiously, ingesting the new oxygen suddenly at their disposal. They grew and swallowed another part of the room. The window shattered.
“Lean on the wall!” Teresa shouted. “We need to stay on our feet.”
She was pressed against Marini, trying to help him keep his balance. The smoke was thick and toxic, and gathered near the floor. Breathing it in would mean succumbing to certain death.
What difference does it make, at this point? It’s better than burning alive.
Teresa closed her eyes against the heat and the caustic fumes from the fire. She opened them again when she felt someone grab her. The men who’d suddenly appeared in the room moved quickly, using fire extinguishers to clear a path to safety. She recognized some of her team, but there were also people there she’d never seen before.
“There’s a woman in the other room!” she yelled, handing Marini over to the rescue team.
When she saw her diary among the flames, Teresa lunged toward it, but Albert pulled her back.
“We have to go!” he shouted.
Teresa threw one last glance at her burning notebook and gave up. She allowed herself to be led away and saw Parisi running out with Matriona in his arms, as the people of the valley came by to help keep the flames down enough to allow them to flee.
It was over. They were safe.
Her paper memory, though, had turned into ash.
102
The flames had destroyed the house, reduced it to black fire-ravaged embers. Smoke rose in swirling fumes into the night sky, while white-hot ash rained onto the ground, mixing with the petals the wind had ripped from the trees in bloom.
Teresa was sitting in the back of an ambulance, with the doors open. The paramedics were dealing with a few cases of mild smoke inhalation among the people who’d come from around the valley to help beat the fire and it was down to her to keep an eye on Marini.
The young officer seemed to have mostly recovered from the hallucinogenic effects of whatever substance Krisnja had used on him, but traces of its effects still lingered, manifesting as the occasional nightmare that shook him as he rested: stretched out on the ambulance bed, he would look like he was sound asleep, but then he would sit up all of a sudden, and start raving and screaming. Teresa would have to calm him down and push him back onto the bed, and also make sure that the needle of the IV drip that was cleansing his blood drop by drop was still properly attached to his arm.
“Another minute and we’ll be off,” one of the emergency medical team told her. “Everything okay?”
Teresa nodded, though she wasn’t particularly sure. Once she’d been left alone again, she looked up toward the starry sky, her lungs full of the smell of a bonfire that tasted of magic and salvation, but also damnation.
She couldn’t help but think of Krisnja, who had already been taken away by her colleagues—of the brainwashed little girl she had been, of her mother, from whom she had been torn away by the person who had then raised her and so heavily conditioned her mind: Ewa, grandmother and executioner, who seemed to have cursed her own bloodline, who kept coming back in the shape of a demon in the hallucinations her granddaughter, experienced as part of the shamanic trances she induced in herself by taking datura. She kept coming back because she was the source of Krisnja’s suffering, and the object of both her love and her hatred.
Krisnja had only been trying to protect herself, to save herself, but now she would forever have to pay the price Ewa had demanded, like a bounty on her own head.
Marini sat up again, one arm outstretched as if to point at something. He was mumbling incomprehensibly.
Teresa stuck out a hand and pushed him right back onto the bed.
She was thinking of Aniza, of the Sleeping Nymph who had led her all the way here. Would she find peace, now? Teresa hoped so. She could almost feel it: there would be no more sorrow for her now, only calm. She hoped the same might be true of Alessio Andrian.
Marini woke up again.
“Is it morning already?” he asked, with a bewildered look at the needle in his arm.
She glanced at the lock of hair sticking up from his forehead, like the comb on a disheveled rooster’s head.
“Good morning, handsome,” she said, holding back a laugh.
He looked scruffy, dirty and singed around the edges. If he could have seen himself in the mirror just then, he would probably have recoiled at the sight.
He turned over to lie on his side.
“I feel sick.”
Teresa moved away and pulled her coat tight around her. All she wanted to do now was to go home and turn her thoughts off until at least the morning.
She heard him muttering something behind her and noticed that he was holding a crumpled piece of paper. It looked familiar. Teresa rifled through her pockets and realized she’d lost the page from her diary that she had found in Emmanuel’s home.
“Give that back!” she barked.
“Shame on you, Superintendent. Shouldn’t this be with all the rest of the evidence?” he murmured.
For someone who’d been drugged, it seemed he could still see pretty clearly.
“It’s none of your fucking business, Marini.”
“But it is. It’s about me.” He looked at the page, his eyes widening. “A son?”
“Sons can be assholes, too,” she snapped, trying and failing to snatch the note back.
He folded it up and offered it to her, purposely missing her hand a couple of times. He seemed not so much poisoned as outrageously drunk.
“I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist,” he said with a sigh.
His voice seemed gentle, as did his expression—or perhaps it was just the drugs in his system.
“I won’t tell anyone.”
She pulled the diary page from his hand.
“Speaking of sons . . .” he said, trying to get up. “I’ve got one of my own to claim, assuming his mother’s not completely ruled me out by now.”
“She’d be better off if she did.”
“I know.”
Teresa looked at him.
“Are you sure about this?”
“I’ve never been so sure about anything.”
“Marini, you’re still high.”
He pulled himself into a sitting position, pulled the needle out of his arm with a whimper and after several attempts, finally managed to get to his feet.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Teresa demanded. “You can’t even stand.”
He managed a few yards, reciting her diary entry as he went. Teresa removed one of her scorched shoes, took aim and threw it at him, hitting him square in the back. He fell flat on his face and stayed there. A paramedic spotted him, and together with a colleague, picked him up and put him back on the bed. This time they strapped him in, though by then he was fast asleep anyway, mouth hanging open.
Teresa watched the firefighters and the police working to extinguish the last of the flames. Her memories had been destroyed, lost forever. It hurt, but at least death had been kept at bay that night.
A man approached her. She didn’t think she’d ever met him before, though by now she no longer trusted herself.
“Superintendent Battaglia,” he said.
It wasn’t a question.
“Do I know you?” Teresa replied, too tired to worry about hiding a possible lapse.
The man smiled politely.
“No, we don’t know each other.”
His accent didn’t belong to the valley. She had only just noticed that his clothes smelled of smoke and that there was a black soot mark on his cheek. She glanced instinctively at the charred remains of the house, then back at him.
The man brought out a blackened object from the folds of his coat.
“I wanted to thank you,” he said, handing it over.
Teresa took her diary. It was in poor shape, the cover reduced to ashes, but the pages seemed to have been left almost entirely intact.
“How did you get this?” she asked him as she leafed through the pages.
The man didn’t reply and she felt her disquiet grow.
“Thank me for what?” she said when he continued to remain silent.
“You’ve helped me to find a treasure I had assumed had been lost forever.”
Teresa glimpsed the outline of something wrapped inside his coat and a sudden glint of gold in the light of the dying flames.
The Virgen Nigra. It had always been hidden in the home where Ewa had lived with her heir.
“Who are you?” she asked him.
The man’s smile vanished.
“A friend who brings a warning: be careful. Be very careful. The Mother of Bones is far, but not too far, and now that she knows the Virgen survived, she will not rest.”
Teresa was about to reply, but the man turned around and quickly disappeared in the throng of rescue vehicles. She tried to stand up but fell back again, her breath catching, her heart beating madly in her chest.
De Carli and Parisi arrived soon after that, bearing her discarded shoe. Blanca and Smoky threw themselves at her.
De Carli took a video of Marini snoring in his sleep, but Teresa didn’t have the heart to tell him off. They could all do with some levity, after all.
“What are you looking at, Superintendent?” Parisi asked, following the direction of her gaze into the darkness.
“A stranger,” she replied, lost in her thoughts.
“What stranger?”
Teresa put her shoe back on, held her hands out for Parisi to grab them and was soon back on her feet.
“A man who found something he’d long been looking for,” she murmured, still peering into the night.
But that was another story and she was no longer a superintendent.
“Lona told me to give you this,” said de Carli. “It must have fallen off.”
It was her holster with her service pistol.
Teresa looked at it but didn’t move. Taking it would mean a lot more than just having her job back. It would also mean that she would have to start hiding again.
“You hold on to it for now,” she murmured.
She looked for Albert among the rescue personnel. He was standing not too far from where she was. He stopped for a moment to glance at her before getting into his car.
He seemed tired, or perhaps he just looked like someone who’d narrowly avoided death. He’d threatened her with vengeance and loneliness, but he had thrown himself into the fire, too.
He’d thrown himself into the fire for her.
Teresa mouthed a thank-you and thought she saw him give her a quick nod before he disappeared behind the car’s tinted windows.
“Everything okay, Superintendent?”
Parisi’s voice seemed to come from far away. Teresa nodded distractedly, her mind already racing ahead, following a new lead.
She was tired. She had just come face to face with death, and she was afraid that she might not be able to rise up to the challenge she was about to accept; but in spite of everything, she pulled out a pen from her pocket and opened her diary. She wrote down a few words, then looked back up at the night sky.
Mother of Bones. Be careful.
Epilogue
The valley turned pink. Sky and earth had merged into one, suffused in a copper-colored mist that seemed at once to be falling from the heavens and rising from the depths of the earth. It blurred the outline of things, mixed them up into pastel hues of translucence and dust that gifted an opalescent gleam to the tiny particles of water vapor suspended in the air. In that field of earthbound clouds, the Wöda emerged like a sinewy silver dragon sliding sinuously down the valley through karst caves and all the way to the flatlands at the bottom of the valley.
Teresa climbed slowly up the hill, where the men were waiting for her. Marini, Francesco, Raffaello Andrian and his uncle Alessio were all observing the view in silence. The meeting between the elderly painter and the nephew of the Sleeping Nymph had been an intense encounter: no words had been exchanged—none had been required. They had merely clasped each other’s hands, a tear running down Francesco’s face.
Andrian had recovered from his heart attack, but he hadn’t said a word. He never would. Teresa suspected that the mysterious visitor Raffaello had seen sneaking out of Alessio’s room that day the painter had fallen ill must have been Krisnja. She wondered what he must have thought when he saw her. Perhaps he had believed for a moment that it might actually be Aniza, or her ghost. His heart hadn’t been able to bear it, but he was so resilient that he had managed to overcome death once more.
Teresa was sure that Alessio knew where the Sleeping Nymph had been laid to rest, and equally sure that he would never tell them. He was keeping her safe, somewhere in his heart, and in the earth that had given her life.
Teresa had returned to the valley with peace in her heart, to find a community grateful for what she had done and wrapped around Francesco. He had tried to thank her, too, but she’d deflected.
“I had to be tough on you,” she’d told him as if to apologize.
“And I was being stubborn,” he’d replied, taking her hand.
But the strangest moment had been the meeting with the shaman Matriona and her special band of women. Rarely had Teresa been so unsure of how to handle a situation.
Matriona had approached her with a smile and allayed any misgivings Teresa may have had by giving her a hug, which was so much more than a simple gesture of reconciliation: it was also a knot that tied them together, a meeting between sisters who were also mothers and daughters. Matriona had slipped a small pouch in Teresa’s hand.
“Black cumin—two grams a day. It reduces fasting glucose and counteracts insulin resistance.” She had leaned closer then and lowered her voice to a whisper. “And for the other thing—curcuma, ginkgo leaves and huperzia.”
She had responded to the shock on Teresa’s face with a sly smile.
“Improved vascular function helps the mind,” she’d explained quietly. “Ask your doctor, if you’re not sure. They’ll confirm that these plants will help.”
Teresa had decided not to ask Matriona how she had figured it out. She was sure the answer would unsettle her. She had seen in that woman’s eyes something that reached beyond mere reason, something that came from a place far away, an ancient wisdom.
Teresa joined the men upon the hill. Andrian was ensconced in his wheelchair, looking frailer than ever before, but his gaze burned with tenderness now that he was close to the woman he loved. His eyes were fixed on a spot in the valley somewhere in the woods below, and there was an intensity in his expression that transfixed Teresa. Aniza must be there, protected by the mountains and adorned with flowers. She lay under the Musi mountain range, whose ridges traced the profile of a woman asleep, her face turned toward the sky. In the valley, they called her “the sleeping beauty.”
Alessio was holding the baby shoes Aniza had knitted for their unborn child, and Teresa watched as he nudged them toward Marini, who stood next to him. Slipping out of his reverie, Marini took a moment to understand. He looked at Teresa, as if hoping for advice.
She gave him a decisive nod. It was right. Life went on. It was hope.
The moment Marini took the gift in his hands, the whole forest seemed to stir, traversed by the vast ripple of a warm breeze scented with blossoms and budding seeds.
Teresa closed her eyes and let it all course through her, igniting her soul.
She wasn’t religious; life had robbed her of faith. But there, in that very moment, she could have sworn she had felt the presence of something bigger.
A woman who had never left the valley, nor the man she still loved.
Now, Aniza was a flower among flowers, earth in the earth. She lived on in other creatures, in that interconnected life, but a part of her, some vivid, intangible part, remained there by Alessio’s side.
Seven months later
When Massimo had thought of his child, he had always imagined a boy, some part of himself replicated in his own image.
He hadn’t been prepared for the wonder of cradling a fragile and formidable goddess in his arms. She’d made him her servant from the moment she had come into the Earth. The universe with the perfect balance of its laws, revolved around her, and her pull was so overwhelming that he was powerless to resist it.
Aniza would be the north and the south, the east and the west of his life, until the day he breathed his last breath as a father.
