“What happened?” he asked.
She was still looking past his head in a way that made Neil want to give his face another once-over, thinking there must be something nasty on his cheek. Suddenly she leaned in, looking right at him with strange intensity. Either he had something on his face or she was going to kiss him. Neil thought he might pass out. But instead she smiled, like something there had pleased her.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
They stopped in front of a largish house. Neatly clipped hedges made it look businesslike, like a dentist’s office. She stood on the sidewalk, digging for her keys. “Wow, this is your place?” Neil said. It even had a garage.
“It’s my friend’s,” she said.
They went around to the back door and left their shoes in the hallway. Without her heels she was the same height as Neil. She put on some slippers and Neil followed her down the hall, clenching his toes to hide a hole in his sock.
The house was warm. It had a carpety smell and the soft floors seemed to absorb any sound. “My friend, he’s a little bit crazy today, so, you know, sometimes he says some stupid things.”
“Was that him on the phone?” Neil asked.
“Yeah, he’s always calling like this. He has some small problems with his computer, I don’t know what.”
“We can go someplace else,” Neil said.
“No, no, it’s okay. I think I must show him how to make it working again.” She led Neil through a living room into a sort of study. At first Neil didn’t see anybody, just lots of cardboard boxes, some of them open and filled with plastic spools of photo negatives. Books with titles in various languages stood on a bookcase with World War Two army helmets acting as bookends. There was a large photograph of a naked girl on the wall. Something about it made Neil feel that it was only polite to look away. Which was when he saw a man sitting in the blue glow of the computer monitor, watching him.
“She’s beautiful, yeah?” the man said, and Neil thought for an awful second that he was talking about what’s-her-name. “Picked her up at an auction in Leeds. Fucking five hundred quid, but she’s worth it, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Neil said, looking at the photograph in what he hoped was a mature and thoughtful way. “Oh yeah, wow,” he said. “I’m Neil.”
“Barry,” the man said. He wasn’t British; he sounded Australian. His chair was the rolling office type and he scooted it on well-worn furrows in the carpet toward Neil to shake his hand. “Magdute said something about you coming. American, eh?”
“Yep,” Neil said. “I’m studying in London.” Magdute, he thought to himself, trying to print it into his brain. Mag-doo-tay.
“London’s a great town,” Barry said.
“Oh yeah,” Neil said. “Yeah, definitely.”
Magdute shifted behind him.
“You made it working?” she asked.
“Hardly. Get me out of this blue screen, okay?” Barry said, and added something in another language. The sound of it was so different from Barry’s Australian accent that it took Neil a moment to realize that the words, whatever they were, were coming from him.
“Yeah, okay,” Magdute said. She clicked on a couple of things on Barry’s computer.
“So you’re studying—” Barry tipped his head back to look at Neil. “Economics?”
“History, actually,” Neil said.
“Ah-hah!” Barry said. “Bit of a history buff myself. What’s your area?”
“I haven’t totally decided,” Neil said. “I have a professor who’s an expert on medieval France, and, I mean, I think that’s pretty interesting.”
“Mm,” Barry said. “I go in for the more recent events myself. See those casings there?” Barry pointed to a glass jar of what looked like bullets sitting like a paperweight on his desk. “Dug those myself out of the Ponary forest, just outside Magdute’s hometown. A hundred thousand executed from 1941 to ’44. Give or take.”
“Okay, Barry, don’t start with this now, okay?” Magdute said. She dug the router out from under some papers and unplugged it.
“You get east of Berlin and they’re fucking allergic to history,” Barry said. “Lits are the worst. Couple of skeletons in that closet, ja Liebchen?”
“You have Explorer like from 2002,” she said, not looking up. “I am getting you new, okay?” She plugged the router back in and got Barry’s computer downloading, then turned to Neil and said, “So you will wait please? I am going to get you those things.” She went out and Neil tried to think of something to say. He could still see the naked photograph out of the corner of his eye. It was making him uncomfortable, but when he turned his head he saw there were others. He didn’t want Magdute to come back and see him looking at them, so he focused on a dusty case filled with old army canteens and a gas mask that stared back at him with black apocalyptic eyes. It gave him the creeps, but he was running out of places to look.
Barry jiggled the mouse, then shouted something in the direction Magdute had gone. Neil knew he ought to know what language it was. He took a guess.
“Gosh you can speak Russian?” he asked.
“Lithuanian,” Barry said. “Roots in ancient Livonian. Don’t let her hear you call it Russian—too long under the Soviet boot, yeah?”
“Oh, right,” Neil said. Some history major he was. “So, did you live there or something?” He was glad to have a reason to stop looking at the walls.
Barry laughed. “God no. It’s a hobby of mine, languages.” Magdute came back in with a shopping bag and a chair for Neil. “Magdute helps me,” he said.
She said something in Lithuanian to him, and then to Neil, “He does the endings no good.”
“Poorly,” Barry said to her. “I make my declensions poorly.” He turned to Neil and said, “Estonian is easier.”
“You know Estonian?” Neil said.
“And six or eight others. Bulgarian, Latvian, Polish—a hobby. I’ve been trying to learn Ukrainian, but I can’t find a girl, and the tapes are shit, you can’t do it with the tapes.” He said something else to Magdute. She rolled her eyes and left again, and there was the sound of banging from another room. Barry shouted something that made Neil jump. It was incongruous, the switch to those strange-sounding words from Barry’s big-voweled accent.
“Always banging into things, that one,” Barry said. “Blind as a bat.”
Magdute came back in with lemonade. She said something to Barry and he said something back. It was a language that sounded like sticks rubbing together, occasionally making a spark. As she bent to give him a glass of lemonade Barry brushed his hand over her cheek, like there was an eyelash there.
Neil wanted to leave. He tried to drink his lemonade quickly, but it only made him remember that he needed the bathroom. He wondered how soon he could ask for it without seeming rude.
“You must be really good at languages,” Neil said.