One Way or Another(60)

“But what if he asks her to marry him?” Martha was frowning.

He said, “Well, that of course, would be a whole different ball game.”





42





ANGIE


I should have known Mehitabel was not simply being kind, cleaning me up, bandaging my wounds, lotioning my bruises, rubbing oil so gently into my shorn head. I already knew Mehitabel was not a gentle woman, I was perfectly well aware that she was cruel, violent, sadistic, and very probably insane, and yet somehow I believed she was helping me, merely because I wanted it so badly to be the truth. I understand now that wanting to believe is halfway in the battle of actually believing; that, like anything, if you want it badly enough, you might actually imagine it to be so. Suddenly I believed Mehitabel cared, that she was here to help me. I didn’t even stop to think there might be another reason. That’s the way it is when you are desperate.

I tried to fill my head with reminders of how courage had gotten many people, ordinary people like myself, through tragic situations, through dangerous times, moments of terror and shame. Why then, could I not be like them, those brave members of the wartime French Resistance, the survivors of holocausts, of terror camps? I was in my own personal terror camp. There was no one here to help, only myself, my own reminders of my mother, of what she would expect, of people out there, free people walking the streets, heading to work, out on the town for a night like the ones who came into my restaurant, of how my life was then and might be again, if only I could find the courage to overcome my fear, my imprisonment, my sadistic treatment. If only I could keep my sanity.

Being locked up is a frightening thing in itself; being alone and locked up is a form of hell; not knowing who is going to unlock that door and what will happen next … was unthinkable. I simply could not go there, I must live for the moment, whatever moments might remain to me.

I’ve thought about the famous women who were imprisoned, left with their own thoughts, their fears for their future or their imminent demise, of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots; of Anne Boleyn, the ill-fated Queen of England; of Joan of Arc, whose captors knew no mercy. And I also thought of the women who had struggled to keep their dignity while imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, of their terrible circumstances, so much more harrowing than mine, degraded, humiliated, and in the end murdered. Some had survived though, which is how we know their tales; they had brought honor and glory to those who had not, and disgrace and the ultimate penalties on those who had inflicted this on them. There were no SS guards here, no soldiers with machine guns in turrets ready to shoot if you made a run for it. Then why did I not make another run for it? Why? I asked myself, over and over again. It came down to whether I was more afraid of staying and taking what they would do to me, or making a run for it and taking the consequences of either being caught and killed, caught and brought back and further tortured, or getting away with it. Free.

I thought of King Henry the VIII’s doomed wives, alone in their beautiful houses, of the famous women freedom fighters in France in World War II; I racked my brains for memories of school history lessons where I’d been told about these women, how they had overcome their circumstances One way or another. It seemed to me that One Way was okay, “Another” was not what I wanted even to think about.

For me, there was only one way. I made up my mind. Freedom would be mine, I knew it. And then Mehitabel came back.

This time she was brisk, businesslike, cold as ever. Again, she had brought clothes, which she thrust at me, scarcely bothering to look.

“Get dressed,” she said. “At once.” And then she left.

It was a replay of what had happened not too long ago, only the clothing was more comfortable. I eased the gray sweatpants carefully over my lacerated limbs, pulled the gray sweater over my shorn head—noting it was cashmere as I did so, and therefore soft and did not hurt. There was a pair of red flip-flops, too big but better than bare feet, although I did not know where I was going, a long journey or short, a walk across gravel paths or grassy fields. I knew nothing and that was the way I wanted it. I preferred not to know my fate, that way I did not have to deal with it. I simply accepted the situation, did as I was told, and bided my time.

I sat quietly on the sofa, feet together in their flip-flops, hands folded meekly in my lap, head downcast, lost in a barrage of thoughts, the uncertainty, the fear. Then I heard footsteps, the familiar clack of Mehitabel’s heels on the wooden floor as she came back. The key turned in the lock. I lifted my head to look. At the vision that was Mehitabel.

She was in evening dress, long, dark green silky satin cut close to her body, lightly draped across her hips, slit to the thigh on the left. The bodice was perfectly plain, and fit her small breasts as though it belonged, exposing a little cleavage, just enough to excite a man, I thought, though why I was thinking such a thing when my life was in jeopardy I have no idea. It’s a woman thing, I suppose, being able to take in your captor, your rival, your enemy’s appearance and assess it, even though your life is in her hands. Cunt, was what I thought as well. If ever there was a woman who fitted that indecent word, it was Mehitabel.

Her hair was piled up on top and fixed with sparkly diamond combs. A necklace—a simple strip of emeralds, if matched emeralds could be called “simple,” sat perfectly on her slender neck. The color almost matched her eyes. I even took in her shoes, glimpsed under the hem of her slender skirt, delicately bejeweled cream silk with spiky heels that gave her an extra few inches of forbidding height. She wore a wide gold cuff on each arm, an emerald ring the size of a large gooseberry, and almost the same color, on the third finger of her left hand. Had she gotten engaged? To Ahmet? No, oh no, that could never happen. Ahmet would never marry, even I knew that.