Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman Page A

this Eva over me now. She is crying and I am with her, there is no distance, no fog, no gauzy memory; this is the room I know, this hotel on the Jersey Shore, ninety minutes south of Philly, through the Pinelands and the sand grit, to the boys on the jetty, and Eva and I, here, in this room with the same key handed to us for years, and the empty bottle of Vranac on the table, and the mass graves of Bosnia and the fallen, rebuilt lands of Europe, all in this bed, brought back by Eva’s will, her body, the warm, thick scent that covers me, and I reach up and feel her throat and her breath and she is at that moment when the eyes roll slightly back and the body shivers and she drops upon me, wet and her hair covers my face, and I lick the salt on her neck, and I think I will stay, but, again, the lights are flashing in the house of a coming storm and when Eva sits up, the face I see is being pulled back, as if she is slipping into the night, into the ink, her pale body the rim of memory, only to fade.
    The lady looks into my eyes, slips off me, and curls at my side.
    “James, you were here. You know you were.”
    “I felt so many known things rush through me, and then out again. When I try to fix on one it is gone, and I chase to another and it disappears, too.”
    “Try to remember our story. You were back just a moment ago, try to remember what my body brought back to you.”
    “I don’t know our story. Maybe bits. The only thing I rememberfor sure is Kurt and Vera. That summer of thunderstorms and the Impala in the sun and my body, young and lanky, brown. Then something happens, and there is blankness, an empty canvas stretching millions of miles long. I don’t know. I hear something in me sometimes, a voice calling through deep, deep bone, but it never surfaces.”
    “I will tell you about me, James.”
    She is Eva Kapuscinski. She was a linguistics professor at the University of Warsaw. Her father was a partisan killed in that beguiling time of the 1950s, the beginning of the long run of communist tyranny; her mother was a poet who hanged herself from a tree when her verse turned less taut. Eva was raised in an orphanage; her skyline the ruins and smoke of a city rebuilding, years and years of rebuilding from a world war that, although ended much earlier, lingered over broken rooftops and cluttered rivers. She joined an underground Catholic church, took communion and prayed penances in back rooms and basements. She played soccer with the boys in the streets and later as a young woman at university she bought a bike with a basket, riding through the fog and drizzle to classes.
    She was Eva, the girl with white roses and books on Mayan verbs and Yeats and Shakespeare. She took an assistant professorship at the university after graduation, comfortable in a cocoon of dissertations and classics, and secretly helped edit a newsletter for the resistance. The events from the outside passed under her desk lamp. It seemed that every day was capable of annihilation, the world’s fate balanced on the tips of ICBMs and silos. Billions of people suspended, she thought, between the bear and that funny, long-legged man with the white beard and top hat the Americans called Uncle Sam. Mascots of freedom and doom; the world reduced to caricature.
    One day, after securing tenure, Eva was approached about spying by a professor of mathematical theory, whom she had vaguely known from late-night university vodka parties. It was cleverly done, shethought; he spoke in equations, letters and numbers, so that he could be at once specific and obscure, and she could deduce what she wanted, accept or decline, and then each could go his or her way. She accepted, but not that night. It took a while, he with his equations, she with her texts. But they created a world of doublespeak, a place of secrets and codes right out in the open. They became lovers, but only in passing; spying Eva said was its own lover, demanding and jealous. She never knew