Salt Skin Page 3
Still carefully and slowly, Margaret headed towards the home surrounded by a two-metre tall brick fence, which did not blend into the landscape of the adjacent territory, let alone it absolutely did not match the house crippled by time. Intertwined iron bars proudly crowned this guardian of “something unclear,” painting in the air the contours of barbed wire.
She opened the gate doors, where a small garden greeted her and a path withdrew into the depths, leading to the house. Walking slowly, Margaret stopped in front of the front door and listened to the silence, time and time again, looking over her shoulder and thirstily catching every breath of wind and the rustle of animals moving in the night. Without even looking at the door, she walked past and tiptoed on the concrete path leading to a small structure in the form of a shed in the depths of apple trees. When she opened the heavy door, a creaking sound pierced the peaceful silence of the village. The woman went inside, locked up with a key and turned the lights on by pressing two switches at once, which was quite unusual, for there was only one lamp in the shed.
There was no one inside. Boarded up windows, long overgrown with cobwebs and hanging tiers of their natural splendour, served as unmistakable evidence that no single hand had touched that place for at least fifteen years. There was a mess of books with torn jackets around, some bags with old clothes, tools and broken dolls. She unwrapped that very same black bundle and took a neat 9mm gun out of it. To the right from the entrance, in the far corner there was a large closet, the doors of which hardly restrained the onslaught of the things struggling to break loose from it. Next to it, there was a small dresser with peeling paint. The woman pushed it away and squatted next to the door in the floor and, upon taking an old cumbersome key from her pocket, turned it in the lock. It was a small cellar with neatly placed jars full of salted cucumbers and tomatoes on the shelves, old canned food, some empty bottles of wine and beer, candles and packed lightbulbs. The order was almost perfect, which strongly contrasted the scene we had seen above. It reeked of a dead rat mixed with dampness and wet boards. Silvery cobwebs hung only in some corners, significantly smaller than the ones above and the dust on the shelves and items betrayed the lack of proper care over a small period of time. Everything else stood in its place and kept a silent tranquillity.
Having descended to the cellar on the wooden stairs, Margaret sat on her knees and, leaning her head and left ear to the cold floor, held her breath. But apart from the frantic beating of her own heart and a drop of sweat sliding on the black strands of her hair and smashing on the concrete, she did not hear anything. The young woman got up from the floor, glancing upwards, as if she was pondering leaving but something drew her relentlessly to follow along, besides she knew well where she needed to go. Tying the waterfall of her hair in a tight bun on the nape of her head, she pushed back the ancient, empty closet, cracked from dryness, which was in front of all these shelves with pickled goods.
In the place of the furniture that was fashionable at least seventy years ago, there was another small door in the floor. Her heart started beating faster – maybe even faster than I usually drive when I want to go wild on the deserted roads. It felt as if it was going to jump out of her chest. She quietly sat next to the door with her fearful eyes darting from side to side, as if she were reading something, greedily listening to the whispers of the night. Nervously pulling her hair, biting her nails and covering her mouth with her hand, Margaret frantically rolled her eyes, at one moment lighting up with brilliant lustre, at the next suddenly dying out, as if she was disconnecting from this world. She grasped her waist with both hands and bending, started to sway from side to side. She was shaking and glancing back, making some kind of strange guttural noises resembling the muffled howl of a wounded beast. It seemed that her whole life depended on what would happen next.
Perhaps five minutes had passed and perhaps it was an hour, before she abruptly stopped shaking and stilled completely. Her eyes darkened, giving them a marble stone expression, her lips tightly clenched and not a muscle flinched on her face. Cold and completely black eyes, which devoured the honey brown colour, turned to the door in the floor. She fetched a small copper key from under her silk beige blouse, which was always on a chain around her neck. The young woman inserted it into the keyhole with a sharp confident move and turned... The thing she saw next left her in absolute shock. Least of all, she expected to see that there! Her hands started to shake again and the veins on her forehead, which was sweaty from excitement, appeared from tension. The woman felt that the hair on her head started to stir, tickling her skin with some nervous prickling sensation. At first, she just did not believe her eyes. She had to make multiple attempts to realise what was happening. Several times, she closed her eyes tightly, shaking her head, and then rapidly opened them, as if hoping to see what she wanted.
Suddenly, she felt wildly ill and, with her head spinning, it seemed to her as if she might fall into this very secret room. Her legs would not listen to her, becoming treacherously numb. She was unable to move and, coming close to fainting, she only managed to grab the edge of the hole in the floor with her thin fingers, almost falling face-down and, hanging over the room with eyes opened, once again carefully examined everything inside it.
At a quarter to eleven local time, somewhere on the outskirts of the god-forsaken backwoods, the fatal silence was slightly disturbed by a heart-breaking inhuman scream muffled by walls and underground floors and resonated through the vicinity of the perimeter of scarcely ten metres, which is exactly where no one should be around. No one, except for that very unattractive pair of eyes as black as coal, which, earlier that day, we had seen near Margaret's house.
Chapter 4
“But why did she yell so ‘ard? What did Margaret see in the basement?” Mr. Schwartz would not be appeased. He was interested like a child, eyes wide open with excitement and pleasure. Despite the fact that Pierre was speaking pure French, Mr. Schwartz kept savouring his outrageously broken English.
“Patience, Monsieur Schwartz. The thing that Margaret was keeping in her, as you say, ‘basement’ was a complete surprise to everyone.”
The basement was not a basement at all but a bunker left from the war. Margaret’s grandfather, the Sicilian, built it in his garden. He lived in fear his whole life that revenge would one day befall him, be it in the dark of night or light of day. His name was Lucas Agostini and he fought for the Italian Resistance movement during the Second World War.
He was a Sicilian from his peeling toenails to the very tips of his hair, stiff and black as raven’s feather. The thing was, Margaret’s grandpa, before he went to war, promised a girl from his village on the sun-drenched shores of Sicily that he would marry her. He was unable to return because, as you remember, he had met Margaret’s grandmother who captivated him with her extraordinary beauty so he did not keep his promise and disgraced the honour of the maiden who was waiting for him. And you know, dear Monsieur Schwartz, what a fervent people these Sicilians are! The fieriest blood in the whole of Southern Europe runs in their veins, or maybe even in the whole world! In their hearts, the code of revenge sacredly reigns, which is also known as the code of honour.
Perhaps her grandfather was deemed dead in Sicily. Nonetheless, he knew that if someone found out his secret, his mother would truly mourn her son.
So, settling in that house, Margaret’s grandfather started to build a safe haven for his family in case of Sicilian vendetta. He thought over and considered each scenario that could crumble on him and his family, with the punishing force of the Sicilian popular justice formed by centuries of existing traditions. Thus, he started to dig an immense hole. He alone was unable to cope with it and simple human efforts were certainly not enough. In order not to arouse unwanted suspicion and draw attention, he needed to invent something that would ensure both the depth of the hole and the safety of the secret.
Day and night he dug, obsessed with the idea that the cortege blazing with offense, harnessed with black, incred
ibly big steeds would gallop here any moment; a squad of Sicilians with good conscience would pour out of it to get even with the traitor, to spill his blood and to redeem the honour of the girl left in his homeland. People say that he would wake up in the middle of the night and rush to the apple orchard to continue doing what he started. It was still a time of war. Even though the battle was not unfolding in England, the country was still in the anti-fascist coalition, completing the big four.
Now imagine one day in the early morning when the US troops were transporting combat weapons through Great Britain, for some inconceivable and unforgivable oversight that defied any explanation, one projectile fell at the exact same spot where Margaret’s grandpa was digging his secret room. Fortunately, no one was injured and the case was covered up, naturally. After all, it was a flagrant violation, for the publicity of which hundreds of generals’ and high-ranking officials’ heads would roll.
The hole turned out to be bigger than the Sicilian assumed, having gone to the depth of six metres, so Margaret’s grandfather, who was not appeased, came to the idea to make the bunker one storey deeper than he had previously planned. So it was.
The bunker was walled up with stone, then poured with concrete and installed with soundproof fibre along the perimeter, then surrounded by another layer of bricks, just to be sure. There was nothing superfluous in the room; it was minimalistic. Having dug a trench in advance, Lucas constructed a semblance of sewage, furnishing the toilet and washbasin with a small screen, considering everything in advance. Having bought a lot of long-lasting canned food, the Sicilian congratulated himself on finishing the job. On the second floor, a cellar was built, which would banish the suspicion and indeed serve as an excellent addition to the household. On the surface, at the highest and top floor (for a simple passer-by), a regular, inconspicuous shed was erected, identical to the thousands of others in every hamlet.
That is how the work proceeded, which seemed to have calmed down Lucas Agostini until he started to suffer from another obsessive idea whose ghost crossed over his impetuous mind, as a black cat crossing the road in front of a superstitious driver on Friday the 13th, overshadowing the joy of our Sicilian and reducing all his efforts to nothing. This time, he dreamt that his accidental acquaintance walked by the house, brought to English land by fate or the devil. What could he do with him, but to imprison the potential informant in the very same bunker and make sure that this news would not leave his alive mouth?
Without a second thought, Margaret’s grandpa, completely consumed by his fear, anchored huge metallic chains in his bunker placed on big iron rings and thus turned the bunker into a solitary confinement chamber.
They say that Lucas’ wife, Margaret’s grandmother, an Englishwoman, could not endure yet another whim of her fervent husband and, with the help of a passing merchant, left him, running away with their child to the south of England, as she said, “away from this madman.”
Shaken to the core of his Sicilian soul with such a betrayal and utterly devastated, Lucas closed himself into his home forever, secluded from the eyes of this treacherous world. It was too painful for him to realise that having committed offence against conscience and honour, against his family and homeland for the beautiful magical eyes of the Englishwoman, enveloping him with their languorous lustre, he earned betrayal and loneliness. As a penance, he buried himself in reclusion, disowning everyone and everything.
Thus he lived his whole life, forlorn and forsaken, and the bunker was never needed. They said that Lucas Agostini himself never touched the bunker and never opened it as a sign of regret for crippling his family, for which he blamed this very same damned bunker. That meant that the concrete structure, just like the Sicilian himself, existed solitary and forgotten until exactly the day when, long after its creator's death, its heavy door was opened by a creature of divine beauty with burning honey eyes and two rose petals lips.
Chapter 5
Let us rewind to the time when Margaret was not yet that rich and popular but young and even more attractive. At the age of twenty-one, she came to our nice little town and found a job in accounting with an unpleasant, but fabulously rich banker. It was 1986, three years before Margaret opened her carpet store at the intersection of Mardol Street and Bristol Avenue. She rented a small flat near the office and walked to work in order to enjoy every new day.
As I have already said, Monsieur Schwartz, she did not like her work. Her, if I may say so, sick and unbridled imagination needed its own special outlet into this world as the imagination of any creative and gifted person does. But all these boring, black and white documents, various shelves of reports, figures and diagrams could not replace for Margaret the crunch of snow under her feet on a sunny day, the fire, which burned in her when she took a bath or the flowing light, which she imagined in the night. In a word, her imagination was so developed that right from her office, populated with five more faceless clerks, in just one second she moved to the highest pinnacle of the Alps and, smiling to the sparkling rising sun on the horizon, breathed in this intoxicatingly fresh and crystal frosty air.
After working for about a year, she started to languish and life seemed utterly unbearable in this accounting, saturated with boredom and the smell of paper until one fatal circumstance, or rather one diabolically wrong acquaintance, which forever changed the life of not only Margaret, but the habitual course of our innocent town.
The young man was a little taller than medium height, a little skinny and his limbs were elongated. His whole figure resembled more the figure of a teenager at that wonderful stage of formation, turning from a child to a man. His name was Martin Krisi and he was barely twenty-four at the time when he met Margaret. I have to tell you a little bit more about him, Monsieur Schwartz, for in this story he plays not the last, if not the most important role. After Margaret, of course.
The young man was of African descent and his velvety skin, the colour of dark chocolate, gave away a newcomer student in those places where those people are usually not favoured. At a very early age, he lost his parents, first his mother, then his father, leaving him alone with his two sisters who soon became wives and flew from the family nest, and an older despot brother, who, on top of everything else, suffered from an uncertain stage of alcoholism. The only reminder of his mother was a tattoo on his right shoulder blade. Impressed by tragic circumstances on the threshold of life, Martin had it made, in the form of an inscription in uppercase calligraphic handwriting, “Christine, ’69.”
Somewhere in Southern Africa, in the country famous for the largest waterfall in the world, Martin lived in an old one-storey house, which he inherited after his parents had died, along with his brother who, as you already know, was suffering from alcoholism. Frequent beatings and various kinds of humiliation from him developed a woman-like hysterical and nervous character in the young man. He could break down, cry, laugh, grin, rush to fight, scream, stomp his feet, love and hate the whole world at the same time. The roughness of his character provided each conflict with an inevitable subsequent scandal and the sharp edges of his hysteria incited and provoked with its fits anyone who dared to infringe upon his sense of self-worth. As he grew older, the scandals in the family became more frequent and heated and, at some point, drew Martin to alcohol. Watching his brother fall to the very bottom of the citadel of the green dragon, he, on no account, wanted to go down the same path. Krisi knew: the abyss had already thrown its arms open, luring him with its darkness and ready to devour him whole, without choking.
Accustomed from early childhood to survive in difficult conditions, trying to earn money for food by any means necessary, he had learned how not to provoke people but twist them artfully round his little finger, fancying himself as a politician who played at his own game. He did not disdain stealing and a small deceit or fraud did not awaken any pangs of conscience in him. This ambitious creature was trying to climb out of poverty by any means, hence the skills of deception and lies, which he sharpened over many years
on the wild, poor streets of Zambia, brought him to the level where a man of his knowledge and deeds could easily sell anything, in a manner of speaking, even snow to an Eskimo.
Unfortunately, no matter how great the gift of persuasion and convoluted magical eloquence he possessed, it was not useful in the land where all questions were solved much faster and easier at gunpoint or with the threat of a knife. Bandits indeed are business people. They, as nobody else, know that time is the most precious resource in the world.
But whatever small job he mastered, it was too insignificant in the ocean of wistful dreams and big plans for Krisi’s life. He wanted something much better than stealing twenty quid from a roadside gas station. The young man wanted to soar, to make a fortune. He needed to start with something, so he gradually began to think about different ways that could provide him with a better future.