Page 8 of A Map to Paradise

7

In the week that Eva had been helping June she had, among other things, made several meals for Elwood Blankenship, washed and dried his laundry, cleaned his bathroom, and tidied his writing room, which was upstairs and across the hall from his bedroom—the door to which she had never seen open.

She hadn’t minded the extra work, though Melanie’s charge to find out if Elwood was being properly treated wasn’t ever far from her thoughts. Unlike Melanie, June—who spent most afternoons on the sofa with a heating pad—had truly needed help with the house. Eva had even offered to come in on Sunday, not one of her usual working days. She hadn’t gotten bored once or found herself at any point cleaning a room that was already clean.

In truth, she liked working for June, despite the lingering question of whether all was well inside the Blankenship house. She liked the recipes June had her make for Elwood’s meals, written on spotted, fading recipe cards that had belonged to June’s grandmother. She liked the music June listened to. She liked the loved homeyness of the Blankenship furniture and décor.

She liked Elwood’s cat, Algernon, who often sidled up to her to rub his whiskered face on her ankles—an unexplainable phenomenon to June. The cat apparently usually excelled in grouchiness and in swatting earrings and water glasses off tabletops.

And Eva could not help but like June, too, who, though in obvious pain, didn’t complain about it. She didn’t complain about anything.

It was hard to imagine June was the kind of person to intentionally harm someone. Eva had witnessed firsthand the kind of person who could do that.

Yet every afternoon when Eva left the Blankenship house, Melanie would catch her before she headed down the hill to the bus stop to ask her if she’d actually seen Elwood. Every afternoon she told her no. For all her lovely qualities, June was adamant that Eva not bother Elwood. At all. The couch where June spent her afternoons offered an unobstructed view of the first half of the stairs that led to the second story. Eva went up those stairs only the few times June told her to, and if she’d tried to contact Elwood through his closed bedroom door, June would have heard it.

But Eva did tell Melanie she’d seen evidence that Elwood was moving about the house during the many hours she wasn’t inside it. Socks and underwear lay tousled in his laundry hamper. Damp towels hung on the rungs in the upstairs bathroom that he used. His bedroom slippers lay askew by the back door. Pipe ash rested in the tray that sat on a little table by the corner armchair. Two dirty dinner plates from the night before were always sitting in the kitchen sink when she arrived, along with two wineglasses, two coffee mugs, two cereal bowls, and two spoons. Two of everything, really, waiting to be washed.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” Melanie had said on Day Three. “You need to try Elwood’s bedroom door before June’s back improves and you’re done there.”

“She told me not to disturb him.”

“For heaven’s sake,” Melanie said in an exasperated voice. “Elwood is not some kind of madman who can’t handle seeing a stranger! He just doesn’t go outside. And it’s not a disturbance to ask someone if there’s anything you can do for them.”

So on the fourth afternoon, and while June was sitting on the couch with pages of Elwood’s current screenplay to proofread, Eva did attempt to make contact from the hall side of his bedroom door, behind which she heard the sound of a radio playing and the whirring of an oscillating fan. She tapped on the door as lightly as she could and said softly, “Mr. Blankenship? Is there anything I can get for you? Mr. Blankenship?”

There’d been no answer.

With a trembling hand and a whispered prayer she’d tried the doorknob. It would not turn.

Melanie hadn’t liked that when Eva told her this an hour later.

“But maybe he couldn’t hear me knocking or my voice,” Eva said. “I had to be quiet or June would’ve heard me. He had music playing and there was a fan on in the room, too. I could hear it. And if he really doesn’t want to be disturbed, he would in fact lock his door, wouldn’t he?”

“You need to try again tomorrow,” Melanie said. “Wait until June is going to the bathroom and is behind a closed door. Knock louder.”

Eva said she would try.

But by that next day, the fifth day, Eva was beginning to wonder if the problem wasn’t that Elwood Blankenship was possibly locked behind his bedroom door and perhaps chained to his bed.

It was that Elwood Blankenship wasn’t inside that house at all.

Yes, there were plenty of dishes stacked in the kitchen sink for two people. Yes, there were his clothes in his hamper. Yes, his office chair was often pulled out, there was paper waste crumpled in the little trash can under his desk, and freshly typed pages routinely lay in a little folder by the typewriter. Yes, his opened mail lay strewn about and there was the pipe ash and the slippers…

But she never heard the creak of floorboards above her.

Never heard the toilet flush upstairs.

Never heard a cough or a sneeze or the clearing of a throat coming from the second floor.

Never cleaned razor leavings out of either bathroom sink. Not one whisker.

Never caught the faintest whiff of shaving cream or toothpaste or foot powder or any kind of odor at all in Elwood’s bathroom.

If the telephone rang and the person on the other end of the line wanted to speak with Elwood, June didn’t go upstairs to ask him if he’d like to take the call. Her standard answer was that her brother-in-law was indisposed and could she give him a message, even though the afternoon calls were becoming more frequent.

But the most telling observation? Elwood’s clothes and towels that Eva had twice been instructed to wash didn’t smell or feel like they’d been worn or used.

Eva had cleaned many houses in which men resided. She was familiar with the daily residue of their existence. There was nothing about the Blankenship house to indicate that a man lived inside it, only signs that a man once had.

She knew Elwood’s departure had to have been recent—sometime after she’d overheard him speaking to Melanie earlier that month from an upstairs window.

But she also knew how unlikely it was that he had left the way most people leave a house: by getting into a car or taxi or even just by walking away from it. Elwood had made a practice of not stepping outside his front door. It had been nearly a decade since he’d been anywhere, she’d been told.

Eva spent the entire afternoon of the fifth day pondering if it was possible Elwood had suddenly decided he needed a change of venue and had called for a midnight taxi when the cover of darkness could perhaps mimic the feeling of being inside a closed room. Maybe a longing to see some of the world again had outweighed his longstanding desire not to see it.

But then why would June feel compelled to lie about that and go to such elaborate lengths to give the impression he was in the house? Wouldn’t it be a wonderful sign of improvement if Elwood Blankenship had finally left his house? Wouldn’t June be celebrating her brother-in-law’s triumph rather than hiding it?

It made no sense. Elwood’s absence didn’t seem possible, except for one explanation that seemed too absurd to consider.

The rose garden. The shovel. The wee morning hours.

When she imagined telling Melanie any of this, it sounded ridiculous—as ridiculous as Melanie thinking June was keeping Elwood a prisoner in his own house.

Because June did not seem like a terrible person. She came across as kind and caring. Not only that, but Eva was fairly certain June loved Elwood in a deeper way than just as his sister-in-law, and maybe had for a long while. It explained why she continued to care for him after she’d become a widow. Eva could see it in the way June talked about Elwood and when she looked at his photograph on the hi-fi, at his slippers by the back door, and even at his pipe in its tray. It was a look of longing, as though June missed Elwood. Somehow, the Elwood she had long loved was gone from her life. Eva knew that look. She’d seen it in the mirror every morning since she was fifteen. Elwood’s absence was not something June was happy about.

Because June loved him.

The mood inside the Blankenship house was a heavy mix of sadness and longing.

Eva could feel it.

It was a feeling with which she was all too familiar.

But it still didn’t explain where Elwood was.

“I want you to remember, Little Sparrow,” Eva’s father had whispered in the last few seconds before the men of her neighborhood were taken, “that there was a time when we didn’t have to run or cower or hide. We were home and weren’t afraid. We will find each other again in that same kind of place. But right now you must run.”

It was late August of 1941. Eva was a few weeks shy of her sixteenth birthday.

His next words were a quick command to Irina Prinz, Sascha’s weeping mother, to pull her away from him. A Russian soldier had unshouldered his rifle and was using its barrel to push Eva’s father toward a large truck and a misshapen queue of other men. Her brother Arman was also being prodded to that terrible cluster. Sascha was apparently already in it, though because of the crowd she could not see him.

The men were all ethnic Germans, just like her father, Arman, and Sascha were, and the truck they would be forced to climb aboard was bound for the Saratov train station. From there they would ride like cattle for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers until those who survived the grueling trip reached the gulag, a wasteland of numberless labor camps near the Arctic Circle, and from which, it was said, no one ever returned.

The soldier yelled at Papa to move, and Eva caught a glimpse of Sascha in the group of men at the truck. She untangled herself from the arms that held her and dashed toward him, screaming his name. The next moment she was on the ground, and the side of her head felt as though it had burst open with the piercing light of a thousand stars.

Arms came around her again, pulling her back, pulling her away, the light of those stars becoming less brilliant with every tug.

Irina, still weeping, was dragging Eva from a second soldier who’d rammed the end of his rifle stock against the left side of her head.

When her vision fully cleared, the now-loaded truck was being thrust into gear to drive away with its human cargo. Irina and Sascha’s little sister, Tanja, were huddled beside Eva for the moment on the warm pavement just outside the glass factory with other weeping wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters.

“They will be coming for you,” Eva’s father had murmured to Irina just moments earlier. “They’ve already taken the men from the neighboring towns on both sides. Today or tomorrow, they will come for the women and the children; everyone else in the neighborhood. Don’t stay here, Irina. Take Tanja and Eva and go…”

Germany had declared war on Russia, and Stalin wanted ethnic Germans living in Russia nowhere near the advancing armies of their ancestral countrymen. Never mind that the Volga Germans like her father, brother, and Sascha had been self-governed Russian citizens for two hundred years. Deportation to labor prisons and resettlement camps at the farthest reaches of the empire would take care of any possible collaboration with Hitler’s forces, Stalin had reasoned, and if they died along the way, so be it.

Eva and her father and brother had just sat down to breakfast when they suddenly heard shouts up and down their street, pounding on doors, cries of distress, and commands in harsh Russian for the men in the neighborhood to assemble in front of the glass factory at the end of the block. They had five minutes to pack a bag. Anyone disobeying this direct order risked being shot.

Papa and Arman had been eating the oatmeal Eva had made; she’d been cooking for her father and brother since Tante Alice had passed away when she was twelve. She’d loved that part of her life. Sascha had whispered to her once that she was a better cook than his mother, and she’d adored him for saying it even though she did not think it was true.

“Can they do this?” Arman had asked after the soldiers banged on their door, verified his and Papa’s identities, and personally announced the edict. Arman was only a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, plenty old enough to be included in the roundup of sixteen and older.

“I…I think so,” their father had answered.

“So we have to go with them?” Arman’s eyes had been wide with alarm. “Where?”

“For how long?” Eva asked.

“I’ll find out,” Papa had said. “Stay here. Pack a bag, son. Eva, you pack mine. I’ll be right back.”

With shaking hands, Eva had placed Papa’s pajamas, clean socks and underwear, a change of clothes, a comb, a toothbrush, and her mother’s framed photo—which had been on her father’s nightstand for as long as she could remember—into a travel bag. Because they’d not had time to eat, she hurried into the kitchen and put the remainder of yesterday’s loaf of bread inside the bag, along with two small apples and a wedge of cheese. It was at that moment she realized if all the men and older boys were being taken, that meant Sascha would be taken, too.

Sascha, who lived three doors down, had long been Arman’s best friend. Eva had grown up with him and his sister, Tanja, who was four years behind Eva in school. When she was much younger, Sascha had joined in with Arman’s roguish teasing, running from Eva with glee when she tried to play with them. But that was when they were children. Their feelings for each other changed when Eva was thirteen and Sascha fifteen. Six months earlier they’d pledged their love to each other and secretly vowed to marry when Eva was old enough.

The thought of losing Papa and Arman to an unknown future was bad enough; losing Sascha was unthinkable. She was to spend the rest of her days with him. He was her destiny. Where he went, she was meant to go.

Eva had dropped her father’s bag and run to the door, throwing it open to dash over to Sascha’s, but her father had been returning to the apartment that same moment and his frame filled the doorway. Behind him on the street Eva could hear women crying, babies wailing, men shouting.

She had fallen back a step as her father stepped inside.

Papa’s gaze had sought Arman standing in the small living room with a rucksack over his shoulder and cap askew on his head.

“They are taking us to a labor camp, Arman,” Papa had said, his voice empty of strength and falsely calm. “I don’t know for how long. Perhaps a very long time. And it’s far. Quite far. It will not feel like August there. Get your coat. And get mine.” Then he turned to Eva. “Listen to me, Eva. You need to stay with Irina and Tanja now. Do whatever Irina says. Promise me you will.”

But Eva could not speak. Papa had not included Sascha’s name in his instructions to her. They were taking him, too, just as she feared. Bile rose in her throat.

“Spatzi,” her father had said. “You must stay with Irina now. You need to tell me you understand.”

But before she could answer, an armed soldier on the street shouted into the house from the open door. “Seechas!”

Now!

When Papa and Arman had hesitated, he bolted up the four steps to stand on the threshold. He repeated the command with a shout.

Her father had reached for his coat over Arman’s left arm and his travel bag on the floor by Eva’s feet. He nodded to his son, and Arman took a trembling step toward the door.

“Follow us down to the glass factory, Eva,” her father had said over his shoulder as he paused on the threshold. “We need to find Irina.”

“Idti!” the soldier commanded. Move!

Eva’s voice had finally found its way back to her throat. “What about Sascha?” she yelled, but Papa didn’t answer her. He raced out the door to catch up with Irina and Tanja far ahead of them in the human flow filling the narrow street. She scrambled after him.

“You and the girls must get out of here,” he’d said to Irina when they reached her and as they closed the distance to the glass factory. “Don’t wait and don’t sleep tonight at your apartment. Take my vehicle and put the bicycles in the back. Stay off the main roads and drive west until it runs out of gas. Abandon it somewhere where it won’t be found for a while. Then use the bikes. Stick to the countryside. Speak only Russian. Finding the advancing German Army is your only hope—do you understand? You must go to where they are. Try to get to your sister’s place in Kyiv. The German Army will have to take it before they try for Moscow. You must try very hard to get there. Do you understand?”

Irina had nodded, wide-eyed with fear.

This was when Papa had finally turned to Eva, called her Spatzi , his little sparrow—a pet name that she’d long since outgrown—and told her they would surely meet again, as though he already knew he’d never see her again this side of eternity.

A split second later the soldier was cracking her on the side of her head with his firearm and a weeping Irina was pulling her away.

When Eva discovered the awful truth weeks later that tens of thousands of ethnic Germans who were put on trains bound for the gulag perished en route or died within weeks or months of arriving, and when she finally understood there was no plan to bring the Volga Germans back home, not even if the Red Army was successful in driving out the Nazi forces, and when she learned executions of political prisoners were as regular an occurrence at the gulags as cold gray skies, what haunted her most was having been denied the chance to speak to Sascha once more before he disappeared from her life for good.

She never got to say goodbye to him.

And because of that, her love for Sascha was forever still in motion, still spinning, still reverberating within her.

Like a bell that could not stop ringing.

Eva was certain now the same was true of June with regard to Elwood. Her love for him was swirling madly around inside her, too, just as strong and real; but unlike Sascha, perhaps Elwood did not reciprocate the feelings of love.

And it was this truth that troubled Eva the most when she mentally listed all the other things she was certain of:

Elwood never steps outside the house.

If Elwood suddenly stepped outside the house, June would be happy, celebratory.

June is not happy.

June is pretending Elwood is in the house.

Elwood is not in the house.

Melanie had said something didn’t feel right, but in actuality it was worse than that. Something was terribly wrong.

And Eva didn’t know what to do about it.