Katharine Hepburn tosses her hair. “Hell if I care ,” I say.

Sage smiles. “This is a missed opportunity for Hollywood.”

She’s turned off her phone, because her sisters will be calling her nonstop, once they discover her departure. At one end of the couch, the dog is snoring. The screen abruptly fills with the carnival colors of a commercial. After watching something that’s so black and white, it’s overwhelming. “I suppose it’s done now,” Sage says.

I check my watch. “The movie’s got another half hour.”

“I was talking about Reiner Hartmann.”

I reach for the remote and mute the television. “We don’t have the possibility of a deposition from your grandmother anymore, much less a video testimony.”

“I could tell a court what she said—”

That’s hearsay,” I explain.

“It doesn’t seem fair.” Sage tucks her leg beneath her on the couch. She is still wearing her black dress from the funeral, but she’s barefoot. “That she would die, and he would still be alive. It feels like such a waste. Like she should have lived to tell her story, you know?”

“She did,” I point out. “She told it to you, for safekeeping. And now that she’s gone, maybe it’s yours to tell.”

I can tell Sage hasn’t thought about her grandmother’s death that way. She frowns, and then gets up from the couch. Her purse is an oversize black hole, from what I can see; I can’t imagine what’s inside it. But she rummages around inside and pulls out a leather notebook. It looks like something Keats might have carried around in his purse, if that was in style back then.

“The story, the one she talked about that saved her life? She rewrote it, after the war. Last week, for the first time, she showed it to me.” Sage sits back down. “I think she’d like you to hear it,” she says. “ I’d like you to hear it.”

When was the last time someone read aloud to you? Probably when you were a child, and if you think back, you’ll remember how safe you felt, tucked under the covers, or curled in someone’s arms, as a story was spun around you like a web. Sage begins to tell me about a baker and his daughter; a soldier drunk with power who loves her; a string of murders linked like pearls throughout the village.

I watch her as she reads. Her voice begins to take on the roles of the characters whose dialogue she’s speaking. Minka’s tale reminds me of Grimm, of Isak Dinesen, of Hans Christian Andersen; of the time when fairy tales were not diluted with Disney princesses and dancing animals, but were dark and bloody and dangerous. In those old tomes, love took a toll, and happy endings came at a cost. There’s a lesson in that, and it’s tugging at me; but I am distracted, held spellbound by the pulse in Sage’s throat that beats a little faster the first time Ania and Aleks—the most unlikely of couples—meet.

“Nobody,” Sage reads, “who looks at a shard of flint lying beneath a rock ledge, or who finds a splintered log by the side of the road would ever find magic in their solitude. But in the right circumstances, if you bring them together, you can start a fire that consumes the world.”

We become the upiory in the story, awake all night. The sun is already crawling over the horizon when Sage reaches the part where Aleks falls into the trap the soldiers have set. He’s jailed, and scheduled to be tortured to death. Unless he can convince Ania to kill him first, out of mercy.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-21