Joel Fishbane

Lady Moscow

I.

Austen found me as I was getting changed and the message was to the point: get thee to the hospital. I thought it was a false alarm. What did they call them? Braxton-Hicks. The body and its practical jokes. On my feet since three, I was dreaming of the one free beer they give the cooks. But when I turned on my cell, I had five missed calls and the texts all said the same thing. 

As a kid, I never got the story of my birth. Once upon a time in Berlin, a father ran off and a mother took an epidural; the father never returned and the mother remembered nothing but fevered dreams. I’d always thought I’d do better with my own kids. Backstory is important–without them, we’re just blank slates. So I tried to pay attention as I drove to the hospital, thinking that every detail would count. The rain. The song on the radio. Even the fact that the lot was full and I had to park four blocks away. 

It took them forever to figure out where to send me but, at last, I was sent to the sixth floor where the nurse’s face collapsed when she heard who I was there to see. Instead of taking me to the delivery room, I was made to stand there dripping while they fetched the doctor. He delivered the verdict without mercy. The baby’s early arrival was due to some internal issue but the main complication was Valeria’s pelvis. Was it true she had injured it as a girl? Why hadn’t we scheduled a C-section? 

“We did,” I said. “It’s in six weeks when the baby is due.”

“You should cancel that appointment.”

He tried to sound optimistic but I could smell the fear–his bad comb-over shuddered as if the last remaining hairs knew something I didn’t. I paced the waiting room but couldn’t stand the looks of the waiting. Everyone was too patient, too quiet. Like they were in a state of delusional optimism. Not me. I was planning for the worst. Ducking into the stairwell, I lay my head against the yellow wall. I should have stayed for that beer. Five minutes wouldn’t have made a difference and at least I’d have a gentle buzz. Phone in hand, I went through my contacts. There were friends I could call but I didn’t want them; the only person I wanted was a man I’d never met.

II.

My wife is a curious woman by which I mean she’s interested in the world. She’s head of housekeeping at the Outlook Springs Hotel and has a history of betraying the privacy of guests. Valeria once wanted to be a writer and has never stopped being fascinated by how others live. She takes pictures of their wardrobe and sometimes tries on the things she likes. It’s open season on their laptops; if there’s no password, she goes through their browser history and reads their mail. 

The writer in Room 201 wrote his first drafts on yellow legal pads like the ones we used to have around the house. Valeria found the first completed chapter on the third day after his arrival. It was just sitting there, she said, begging to be read. The first paragraph caught her eye and by the second she was hooked. Needing to move on–she had plenty of rooms to clean–Valeria took pictures of the chapter so she could read the rest on her break. 

“Here, listen to this,” she said at home. “Tell me what you think.” 

“You couldn’t have taken something of value? Why don’t you ever go into the bank accounts?”

“I’m nosy, Henry. I’m not a thief.”

“What’s this writer’s name?”

“I never know anyone’s names,” sighed Valeria. “I only know them by their rooms.” 

Valeria read me the first chapter while I made dinner. It introduced us to Odessa Nevsky, a teenage orphan who joins the army. A good beginning made better by the historical setting. The army is the Red Army; it’s June 1941 and the Germans have declared war. Odessa Nevsky has no future. She doesn’t know her parents and was given her surname after being found on Nevsky Prospect. The communists are conscripting women and, since she’s uncertain about her age, it’s easy to lie when she enlists. Now she has food, clothes, and a purpose. She also has a future–the first chapter ends with the narrator telling us her future husband is among the German troops marching along the Northwestern Front. 

The desk clerk, who knew all the gossip, told Valeria that the writer in Room 201 had a deadline and wasn’t going to leave until he had finished the draft. He had a steady routine. After writing in the morning, the novelist left at noon to enjoy the diversions of the city. This left my wife plenty of time to snap pictures of the next installment in his book. In the evenings, she read to me while we ate spätzle and pork knuckle. It was always spätzle and pork knuckle; since getting pregnant, Valeria never wanted anything else.

The writer had many talents but not one was consistency. Sometimes he only wrote a few paragraphs and Valeria didn’t want to snap pictures until the next chapter was done. We filled the time imagining what would happen, just like we used to do with our favorite TV shows. It was a blessing for Valeria, who needed something to keep her mind occupied while she cleaned. It was good for me too. Since dropping out of law school, I’d been dying a slow death at the pub. It was good work but it had no meaning; I got more out of cooking at home.  

I thought about Odessa as I prepped onions or scrubbed a fryer clean. In Chapter Two, she’s trained as a sniper and assigned to the 528th Rifle Regiment. The cruel and petty Polinova Ilyinichna mocks Odessa for being an orphan and Odessa prays for a battle so she can prove herself. The underage sniper trains herself by shooting at targets placed above a pyramid of glassware. Each time the glass doesn’t shatter, she shudders with relief.

“Polinova is going to turn her in,” I predicted.

“Odessa is going to win her over,” said Valeria. She was rubbing vanilla lotion into her hands; they were always sore after cleaning all those rooms. “Just you wait, Henry. Those two will become friends.”

“Ha! Odessa shouldn’t trust her.”

“You always see the worst in people, Henry.”

“I’m a realist, Valeria.”

My wife put a hand on her belly. “I think Polinova is going to surprise you.” 

The third chapter opens as the German Army tries to take Moscow–they’ve launched two pincher offensives designed to isolate the city. The 528th is called to help defend the city and Odessa Nevsky displays fortitude and skill, picking off Germans with preternatural ease. She becomes a terror to the Nazis and they call her der Geister-Scharfschütze–the Ghost Sniper. With Polinova’s help, Odessa Nevsky makes machine gun nests and digs trenches. The Red Army starts their counteroffensive and Polinova, with grudging respect, applauds Odessa’s heroics.

Valeria crowed in triumph. “You see! What did I say?”

“Polinova is toying with Odessa. Lulling her into a false sense of security.”

“You’re such a pessimist.”

“All impotent men are pessimists. We are hoffunungslose. Men without hope.”

“My poor Henry.” Valeria kissed my head and face. “It’s just a little trouble. And things worked when it counted. Isn’t that a reason to be happy?”

At the end of the third chapter, Polinova dies. No. She doesn’t just die. She sacrifices herself to save Odessa Nevsky’s life, thus proving that I should have trusted her from the start. Things are not as bad as you think and maybe they really did work when it counted. But I still worry. For the hoffunungslose, it’s hard to be optimistic; it’s hard to live with the knowledge that the secret to having a baby might be to make sure you’re not at home. 

* * *

Chapter Four. The Ghost Sniper is awarded the Order of the Red Star. “You will not have died in vain!“ Odessa calls out to Polinova’s spirit and the rest of the chapter details Odessa’s revenge. The Ghost Sniper embarks on daring reconnaissance missions and gains prestige for her ability to sit for days, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. She picks her way through the army, assassinating majors and oberstleutnants. Throughout the country–throughout both countries–she becomes a legend. Her picture is never published. The Ghost Sniper remains a ghost; the orphan remains unknown. 

In August 1942, Odessa Nevsky’s regiment is sent to fight near a village in the northwest. As the fighting increases, her companions are decimated and she’s forced to hide in the belfry of an abandoned church. Now alone, she creates a crow’s nest from which she can see everything around her. As the chapter nears its end, Odessa decides she only has to survive until reinforcements arrive. The Ghost Sniper knows she shouldn’t draw attention to herself–but she has such a perfect shot of the German soldiers below! They’re ignoring the church, which they think to be decrepit and cursed. Odessa Nevsky watches them through the scope of her rifle. This is how she sees Jarmen Müller for the first time. The view is limited but it’s enough: she falls instantly in love. 

“Talk about melodrama!” I said. 

“You don’t believe in love at first sight?” said Valeria. 

“I believe in loneliness and lust,” I said as I worked in the kitchen. Of course, I was marinating pork knuckle; of course, I was making spätzle from scratch. “Odessa wants affection. How long has it been since she’s been kissed?”

“I believed in love at first sight when I was young. It would be a shame to give it up.” The baby must have kicked because Valeria held her belly. “We need to make sure that doesn’t happen to her, Henry. When she asks about us, tell her you loved me at once. And tell her you never stopped, even if it isn’t true.”

“I never stopped,” I said.

“That’s right,” said Valeria. “You say it exactly like that.” 

When Chapter Five begins, the Ghost Sniper is watching Unteroffizier Jarmen Müller through her riflescope. Her supplies are running out. The radio is broken and the weather is wet and harsh. The promised reinforcements don’t appear and the Ghost Sniper wonders if all is lost. One afternoon, she overhears villagers talking and deciphers enough to understand the Germans want to turn the old church into a hospital. Time to leave. On the next moonless night, Odessa Nevsky slips into the village with all her gear. It’s wuthering and the howls surround her. She doesn’t dare use a light and gropes her way, relying on her memory as she tries to make her way to the distant woods. In the dark, the Ghost Sniper sees other ghosts and even the face of her poor Polinova. What she does not see is the light moving behind her–she doesn’t hear Jarmen Müller approach until it’s too late. 

It was here that the writer of Room 201 put down his pen for six and a half excruciating days. 

“How can he have writer’s block now?” I ranted. “The next chapter is so obvious.”

“Enlighten me,” said Valeria. For once, we weren’t in the kitchen. Instead, we were in the common room where she was mending other people’s laundry. Her protruding belly made for a convenient desk on which she could drape a friend’s two-tone godet skirt.

“It’s obvious,” I went on. “Odessa will be taken captive.”

“And sent to a death camp?”

“Something worse.”

“What could be worse than a death camp?”

“The things they always do to women in war.”

Valeria’s expression turned grim. “You have an ugly imagination, Henry.”

“I told you–I’m a realist.”

“But to think of such a thing right away…” My wife wet a new thread. “Some people would think of happier possibilities.”

“Like love at first sight?” I should have stopped there but, for some reason, I went on. “You’d like them better, I suppose? Those people who think of happier possibilities? You wish I was like them.”

“I wish you’d be more positive, Henry.”

“Is that what you liked about Mr. Pennsylvania? Did he think of happier possibilities?”

Valeria glared at me. “You know we don’t speak anymore. Why would you even mention him?”

I couldn’t say. Sometimes, I went whole weeks without thinking of Mr. Pennsylvania. This wasn’t his name, of course, but I have a long habit of not learning people’s names. When we first met, Valeria was Lady Moscow. I didn’t want to ever care about Mr. Pennsylvania and was glad when he moved away. But moving away and being gone are two different things. 

I sat down and shuffled a deck of cards; I wanted something to do with my hands. “You think Odessa will escape.”

“I think it would be fun to see her struggle in the wilderness. Then she returns to Moscow, ready for the next adventure.”

“She needs to be taken by Jarmen Müller. He’s obviously her future husband.”

“Why would you say that?”

I started building a card house, working on the foundation with care. “Authors don’t name unimportant characters. And the first chapter told us her husband was among the German troops. The plot is obvious. She will be tortured for a time and then Jarmen Müller will fall in love and rescue her.”

“I don’t think it will get that bad.” Valeria eyed me through the needle’s eye. “Not everything has to be the worst possible scenario. You need to have more faith.”

I kept building my card house. Until about five months ago, Mr. Pennsylvania lived next door. He was a contractor and we hired him to fix up the house. At one point, he kissed Valeria and there was some heavy petting. She swears she ended things before they went too far. That she told me should have made me trust her–but I kept thinking that this could have been why she told me in the first place. Confess the minor sin to cover up the rest. Valeria was right. I really did dream up the worst possible scenarios. I added another layer to the card house and then another. I hoped it wouldn’t collapse; I tried to have faith.

* * *

In Chapter Six, Jarmen Müller tries to arrest Odessa Nevsky but, in a dramatic reversal, she gains the upper hand. Now he’s at the end of her rifle, afraid to cry for help. All the Ghost Sniper has to do is pull the trigger. But the sound may alert the others so she stuffs a mitten into his mouth and pushes him into the woods. Odessa tells herself she has no choice. Leaving him behind risks exposing her existence. She will shoot him as soon as they are far enough away. But they just keep walking across the muddy earth as Odessa drags branches behind her to disguise her tracks. 

As time passes, the Ghost Sniper has many chances to put a bullet in his brain. It would make sense. He’s sharing her rations and they both might starve before she finds her regiment. And what will happen once she does? He may be treated as a POW but it’s just as likely he’ll be killed. All she’s doing is delaying the inevitable. The more Odessa thinks, the more she despairs. Before, she only saw him through her rifle scope. Now she is close enough to see the lines in his face and the gleam in his desperate blue eyes. 

“She’s going to get into so much trouble,” I told my wife.

“She can’t help it. She’s in love.”

“Ha! It’s not love. They can hardly talk to each other.”

“There’s more to love than words, Henry. I love our baby and we’ve never talked.”

“That’s different. The story is losing all credibility.”

“So you don’t want to hear the next chapter?”

Until now, it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a choice. What had we talked about before Odessa Nevsky? Oh, we had done the usual things. Bought baby furniture. Painted the spare room. But it was always like slogging through muck, as if we were the ones hiking across that cold Russian terrain. The story of Odessa Nevsky had altered the mood. I imagine this was what it was like for those who read Dickens and Hardy back when their novels were serialized. How many marriages had they saved? 

“Read me the next chapter,” I said. “Absurd or not, I still want to see what happens next.”

Chapter Seven. Odessa Nevsky can’t make a fire. Her prisoner signs that he can help if she unties his hands. As soon as the ropes are undone, he shoves her aside and takes off across the frontier. It’s late September and the Russian wilderness plays tricks on the mind. There’s a lake that looks like it’s frozen. Of course, it’s too early for this to be true. Crack goes the ice and the fractures spiderweb around him. Here is a chance for Odessa Nevsky to abandon him to his fate. Instead, the captor becomes the savior. Through gesture, she instructs him to get down and disperse his weight. Then she tells him to roll towards her as she extends a long branch which they use to pull him to safety. As soon as the Ghost Sniper knows he’s all right, she punches him in the face and ties him up. Jarmen Müller doesn’t fight. He’s staring at her in wonder, seeing her for the first time. 

The journey continues. Odessa Nevsky rations her supplies. She hunts when she can and amazes him when she skins and cooks a rabbit with nothing but a knife and flint. In payment, Jarmen Müller teaches her German words. Baum. Tree. Schnee. Snow. She does the same in Russian. Armed with limited vocabularies, they speak like schoolchildren. I miss home. I hate war. At one point, he tries something harder and it takes her an hour to understand. Thank you for saving me from the ice.

“They should have reached Moscow by now,” I said. 

“She lost her compass, Henry.”

“They would have run into other people already.” I was trying to fix the window frames. Mr. Pennsylvania was supposed to do this but, with him gone, it was up to me. I had already cleaned the gutters and, next week, I would start the back deck. I liked when Valeria watched me work. I felt masculine when the sweat made my shirt cling to my skin. Sometimes, I worked shirtless and the sun baked me to a golden brown. Who needed the man next door? I could be sexy too.

“Do you want me to go on?” she said. “Or do you want to nitpick the plot?”

“Go on.” I sighed and she waited while I banged some slats into place. 

Chapter Eight, in which Odessa Nevsky wakes to find a wolf has wandered into camp. She reaches for her pistol but the wolf, starved and crazed, gnashes its teeth. There’s foam around his jaws. Rabies. Jarmen Müller is powerless since she’s tied him up. As the wolf nears, the Ghost Sniper inches away but this puts distance between her and her gun. Her wits desert her. She will die in this wilderness, steps from the man she loves. And she hasn’t even told him! Odessa Nevsky the Ghost Sniper, that great Russian legend, weeps as she awaits her doom.

Then a shot cuts through the night. The wolf collapses and there is her German soldier standing in the moonlight. While she panicked, he was worming his way free. Apparently, he could have done this at any time–but he wanted her to feel she was safe. Jarmen Müller teaches her another German phrase: Danke, dass du mich vor dem Wolf gerettet hast. Odessa Nevsky stares into eyes that seem too large because of the gauntness of his face. She tries to repeat the phrase but it’s very long and her emotions are not her own. Instead, she flings her arms around him and kisses his mouth.

“At last!” Valeria fell back against the rug in an imitation of ecstasy.

“I told you it was going to happen,” I said.

“But I didn’t know how. That’s how it is in life. You know you’ll fall in love someday but you never know when.”

“You never know when you’ll fall out of love either.”

Valeria sat up. “Why can’t you just enjoy things?”

“Because it’s the middle of the story, Valeria. Any couple who is together in the middle is doomed. Remember Romeo and Juliet?”

“Not everything is the worst possible scenario, Henry.”

I sighed. I’d forgotten I was trying to have faith.  

For the next three days, the writer in Room 201 made no progress. Perhaps he was afraid for the same reason I was. In comedies, writers only bring the lovers together at the end. The only reason to have them together earlier is so you can tear them apart. In fiction, every wedding is a potential prologue to tragedy. Given this, you’d think we’d turn pale on our honeymoons; you’d think we’d be biting our nails, terrified to see what might happen next. 

* * *

Chapter Nine sees our heroes on the run. They know they can’t return to Moscow without risking separation so their only hope is to find a place to hide until the end of the war. As they wander, they happen upon an isolated mountain monastery. The monks have taken vows of neutrality and will accept all strangers provided they don’t bring the war past their gates. It’s a fortunate discovery that happens at the most convenient possible time, marking it immediately as the sort of unrealistic plot point that will probably be removed in future drafts. But the important shift has occurred. Odessa Nevsky and Jarmen Müller can now live out the war in peace. 

They spend their days helping with chores and teaching each other their languages. They have much in common. Both are orphans. She is named for a street in Leningrad while he is named for a small town in Pomerana. He also hates the Nazis, having been forced into a war he never wanted to fight. Like all lovers, they dream of a place entirely their own and, if the Allies win, they decide to go west. How? Such is a question for Chapter Ten.

This time, we had to wait eleven days, during which we invented all sorts of convoluted ways they might smuggle themselves to London or New York. Most were fantastical. Knowing how two defectors might have emigrated at the end of 1945 required research that neither of us had time for. This, I imagined, was why the writer in Room 201 had stopped writing. He was at the library figuring it all out.

Nope. When Valeria discovered Chapter Ten, the writer had scrawled “Six Years Later” at the top of the page, underlining each word with a decisive slash. 

“The lazy bastard!” I said. 

“Writers do it all the time,” said Valeria.

“He’s reached something he can’t explain, so he’s skipping past it and hopes we won’t notice.”

“You’d rather get bogged down in the details of immigration? Better to keep the story moving.”

I wasn’t surprised by her enthusiasm. Pregnant women are always leaping ahead. Nobody wants to be pregnant–they just want the thing they get once it’s done. For weeks, my wife had been living in the future, dreaming of what it would be like to nurse her baby in the newly painted room. I had to admit the philosophy was tempting. Living in the past wasn’t doing us any good. Like Odessa and Jarmen, we needed to get past the war and reach that time of peace. If someone had offered me a six-year jump, I probably would have taken it. Bypass the days of uncertainty.

But, all right. Chapter Ten. Six years have gone by. They were married in the monastery and Odessa has taken his name. Now she is Odessa Miller–at Pier 21 in Halifax, they changed a single vowel and erased the past. To avoid anti-German sentiment, Jarmen has become Jordan and they live in Toronto where Odessa works as a bookkeeper for eighteen dollars a week. Her husband is a shipping clerk (twenty-one dollars a week) and, once they find a loan society set up by Russian emigres, they buy a house for five thousand dollars. They go into business for themselves. The former Ghost Sniper uses her keen eyes to make ornate pillowcases and Jordan Miller convinces furniture stores to buy them–the owners give the pillowcases as gifts when someone buys a couch. Jordan Miller buys a factory and they shift from pillowcases to slipcovers and comforters. They never tell anyone the true story of how they met. Everyone thinks Jordan emigrated from Russia before the war; they think the couple escaped before the fighting began. 

Yes, things are going well for the Millers. Then a new couple moves in next door. Our narrator warns us that the new neighbors are going to drive our heroes apart. A world war couldn’t divide them but Lancaster and April Roberts are an entirely different sort of threat.

“I told you they were doomed,” I said. 

Valeria huffed as she squeezed vanilla lotion over her hands. “Just because they get driven apart, why does it mean they won’t get driven back together?”

“Never trust a writer who puts the couple together too soon,” I said. 

“Not everything is a worst-case scenario, Henry.” She had been saying this a lot lately–it had become her mantra. 

In Chapter Eleven, we learn Lancaster is a newspaperman who hopes to mimic Hemingway and leap from correspondent for the Toronto Star to pre-eminent novelist of the age. Like Hemingway, he’s an athletic boxer with a heavy beard. The window offers a view of the neighbor’s lawn–you could say she’s in another crow’s nest–and Odessa watches her neighbor exercise in the yard. His shadow is sleek while the boxer himself is muscle and sweat. Later, while wandering through the warehouse, she recalls the way the sweat ran down the curvature of his arms. Lost in her thoughts, she doesn’t hear when someone calls out. What did they say? Look out? Odessa Miller looks up just as a bolt of fabric, loosened from a nearby pile, slides off and descends to the floor. Like a javelin, it strikes her down.

A good cliffhanger. The next day, Valeria announced the writer in Room 201 had put the Do Not Disturb sign on his door. Then it was the weekend and my wife had two days off. We became terrified the strange novelist might leave. We weren’t really worried Odessa would be killed–it was too early for that–but I suspected bad things were afoot.

“He’s going to punish her for her lust,” I said as I made dinner.

“It could just be bad luck, Henry.”

“Think about the symbolism, Valeria! She’s struck by something long and phallic. That has to mean something.”

“I don’t think writers think about these things as much as you think they do,” said Valeria.

“Maybe you didn’t when you were writing,” I said. “Maybe that’s why you stopped.”

Valeria glared at me and went to the bathroom. We didn’t usually talk about her failed efforts. She had given up on her MFA around the time I left law school. We were both dropouts. I suppose that’s one of the things that brought us together. I portioned out the spätzle and arranged the pork knuckle next to it. I assumed she was pouting behind the locked door but then she cried out in a terrible voice. There was blood in the toilet and she was having cramps.

As I drove to the ER, my wife had her face against the window, weeping into the glass. “I suppose you think this is it,” she said. 

“I never said that.”

“You don’t have to. You and your worst-case scenarios.” Valeria wiped her face on her sleeve. “Someone should tell God this is a terrible twist.”

“You think this is God’s doing?”

“He’s just another damned fiction writer. Always throwing in problems to spice up the plot.”

But the crisis was a false alarm. The doctor didn’t even tell Valeria to stop cleaning and, a few days later, she went back to work. Writers love foreshadowing the finale–writing teachers insist it proves you’re clever–and God, the damned fiction writer, loves his omens. But, like most omens, we didn’t see this for what it is.  

* * *

A bandaged Odessa is sent home to rest. Throughout Chapter Twelve, the lights are too bright and the radio is too loud. Since Jordan needs to work, he turns to their neighbors for help. Lancaster Roberts works from home (he’s taken time off to write his book) and he starts coming by every day; they even give him his own key. A rash of gooseflesh covers Odessa whenever she hears the shadow boxer climbing the stairs. Years ago, Odessa fell for her future husband while secluded in her crow’s nest. It’s no different now. She’s isolated. And loneliness can be an aphrodisiac. They become friends and, bit by bit, something more. Odessa reveals an intimate truth: their lovemaking has provoked neither pleasure nor children. The war, she believes, has made her husband impotent.

“Those veterans had all the luck,” I said. “They had an easy excuse.”

“There’s nothing lucky about it, Henry.”

“I suppose Odessa is going to start admiring Lancaster’s strength? His great virility?”

Valeria scans the page. “She does.”

“Then it won’t be long now.”

“That might not be where the story’s headed, Henry.”

“Worst-case scenario, Valeria. This time, there’s no getting around it.”

Prone to headaches, Odessa asks her nurse to read to her. He starts with Hemingway, of course, and moves on to his own. He’s trying to write a thriller about a double agent living in America. He’d love some help with the plot and he knows so little of life in Russia. The smitten Odessa raises the Iron Curtain. Soon, she has told Lancaster Roberts who she and her husband really are.

But what else happens in that darkened bedroom? The writer of Room 201 leaves this up to our imaginations. There are poetic descriptions of their deepening bond. Moments when Odessa notices the glorious muscles of the boxer’s arms. But anything explicit is left for us to decide. Odessa recovers her health and, when she later learns she’s pregnant, the paternity is unclear. 

“It’s not unclear at all,” I said.

“She didn’t sleep with Lancaster,” said Valeria.

“Not on the page!” I argued–we were having dinner and I gesticulated with my fork. “Didn’t your writing teachers ever talk about subtext? It was Hemingway’s bread and butter.”

“What if there isn’t any subtext, Henry?”

“There’s always subtext, Valeria.” 

Valeria looked over the pages again. “Hemingway used subtext but we always know who slept with who. Knowing who slept with who is important. It’s why history is such a litany of marriages and births.”

“It would be nice if writers weren’t so ambiguous all the time,” I sighed. “Life already has too much uncertainty. I like when fiction gives me all the answers.”

My wife touched her expanding belly. “Do you really need the answers, Henry?” 

“I think Jordan Miller needs them.”

“Well, the chapter isn’t over yet. Maybe the answers are coming.”

“I don’t see how. The novel is set in the 1950s. In the world before DNA tests.”

“I hadn’t thought of that. But I guess you have. You’ve been thinking a lot about DNA tests, I suppose.”

I focused on the food.

“I told you it wasn’t necessary!” said Valeria. 

“For the hoffunungslose, things are always ambiguous,” I said. “There’s always something not on the page.”

Valeria had been taking a lot of baths but it wasn’t because of the pregnancy. In marriage, as in war, privacy is at a premium–you take it where you can. Later, after she locked herself away, I found her phone and called up the pictures of the final pages of the chapter. I sent them to myself and read on. 

At the end of the chapter, the Millers return home to find their neighbors waiting with guns. They didn’t need to break into the house because Lancaster still had his key. Here comes the twist: the couple are actually KGB agents tasked with finding Odessa Nevsky, the hero of Russia, missing in action since 1942. Imagine their horror when they learned the great icon was married to a German! Or that she had sat out the last years of the war! It was a travesty. They have received orders to bring Odessa Nevsky back to Russia where she will stand trial. Robert Lancaster–or, rather, Vladimir Suvorin–will claim the child as his own. Of course, Jordan Miller will be killed. 

Such a revelation can only be followed by a struggle and a gun goes off, as they so often do. Lancaster/Vladimir is dealt a fatal blow while his wife escapes. As the agent withers away, Jordan demands to know one thing. Did he sleep with Odessa? But the Russian dies without an answer, leaving Jordan Miller with uncertainty, that terrible curse. Then he hears a cry: it turns out a stray bullet has struck the pregnant Odessa. At the hospital, the doctors tell him that the trauma has led to catastrophe. Surgery is needed. Will the baby survive? Will Odessa? They tell him to pray. But what will he pray for. asks our narrator. The wife who may have betrayed him or the child who might not be his? 

I didn’t mention this cliffhanger when we went to bed and lay awake for a long time in a room that smelled of vanilla lotion. Valeria was gone when I woke. She had left an angry note on the back of the envelope for an unpaid bill: Go hang yourself, Henry! And hang your DNA test too! I shoved the envelope in my pocket and it was still there later that day when I found myself in the hospital, facing the same choice as Jordan Miller. Like him, I knew I should pray. I imagined God, that damned fiction writer, waiting for instructions. Leaving it up to me to decide where the story goes next. 

III. 

The Outlook Springs Hotel has an automated phone system which meant I could connect immediately to Room 201. The first time I called, the writer didn’t answer. When I called back, he answered with groggy concern. 

“My name is Henry Koch,” I said. “I’m a great fan.”

“A true fan wouldn’t wake me up,” said the writer. 

Now what would I say? I couldn’t tell him the truth. It would expose Valeria to trouble. “I saw you at the hotel. I followed you to your room.”

“It’s almost midnight. What do you want?”

I stared at the yellow walls. I was a cook and a failed law student. It was a force of will to invent an excuse. “I’m a novelist too. I need advice. Perhaps I can explain the scenario and you can tell me what should happen next.”

One can never go wrong appealing to vanity. With a sigh, the great novelist told me to proceed. I outlined the story of my marriage as if it were a plot, waiting for the writer in Room 201 to give a grunt of surprise. Surely, I thought, he would notice how familiar it all seemed. The possibly cuckolded husband. The ambiguous affair. But the novelist only asked for a few points of clarification. Was the narrator third-person omniscient? Or was this a first-person account in which our narrator’s observations can’t be trusted? I invented answers as fast as I could, anxious to reach the heart of the matter. I finished with my maybe-betrayed protagonist at the hospital. At any moment, the doctor will tell him he’s a proud father, a widower, or a man who needs two graves. 

I heard a lighter and the writer in Room 201 took a deep drag of a cigarette. “Your problem is that you’ve written yourself into a terrible point. For one, your protagonist is a terrible person. Why is he not immediately praying to save both lives? What sort of man is he?”

“Since when did protagonists need to be sympathetic?”

“This is the problem with the modern age. Everyone wants to be clever. In my day, you always had heroes you could care about.”

“Never mind all that. How would you end the story?”

 Now it will come, I thought. Wouldn’t you know it? he’ll say. Only recently, I wrote a similar scenario. 

“I would never write such a story. No matter what you choose, the reader will be unsatisfied. If everyone dies, you’re a nihilist. If everyone lives, it’s sentimental. If the mother dies, you’re melodramatic. And if the baby dies, everyone will hate you because you should never kill animals or babies, not if you want to be a success.”

“It sounds impossible.”

“It is. Go back and change the last chapter.”

“Say you can’t.”

“Stubborn, eh? You’re married to this ending?”

“For better or worse.”

The novelist smoked on the other end. “Have your hero kneel in prayer and ask for everyone to survive. End things when he looks up and sees the doctor approach. Let the audience draw their own conclusion. The important thing is that we know your protagonist has decided not to be such a suspicious self-centered prick.”

“Do you think you’d ever write an ending like that?”

“Never. I would have them time-travel their way out of it. That’s the joy of writing science fiction–you always have more options.”

I frowned at the stairway wall. “You write science fiction?”

“Exclusively. I thought you said you were a fan.”

I immediately ended the call and called the front desk. I’ve met the gossipy desk clerk at office parties and it wasn’t hard to learn the name of the writer in Room 201. He had been there for almost three months but he almost never left his room. I looked him up online–he had won awards, all for writing sci-fi.

Back in the waiting room, the faces of the waiting were what I feared. Men and women, each in their own disheveled state, lost in contemplation. I still had the pictures of the last chapter, written on legal pads exactly like the ones I had used in law school and told Valeria to throw away. I pinch-zoomed the image so I could study the slope of the consonants. The little curl on the tail of the white. Then I took out the crumpled envelope with Valeria’s note. That sci-fi novelist had been right. I was a terrible character. Who else but an unsympathetic protagonist can’t recognize his wife’s handwriting?”

Here, listen to this, she had said on that first day. Tell me what you think. 

I knelt and clasped my hands.Time travel isn’t just the domain of sci-fi writers. All writers can do it because all of them can go back and have their characters take a different path. Odessa and Jordan Miller don’t need to be left where they are. The writer of Room 201–the real writer–can go back and change the ending. I’ll make sure she does. Lancaster and April will both die, leaving the married couple free to confront their issues. Let them say it’s sentimental. I think it’s the braver choice. The tragic ending is easy; it’s harder to choose for the story to go on. Not everything needs to be a worst-case scenario. I heard those footsteps and looked up. The doctor was on his way.