Karla was kind and gentle, especially with the children, and she filled the families with confidence. She kept her sense of humour through the smell, and the endless stooping to lift and clean and give comfort in dark, humid hovels; through the sickness and the dying; and through the fear, when the epidemic seemed to be getting worse, that we, too, would sicken and die. Through forty hours without sleep, she smiled every time I turned my hungry eyes on her. I was in love with her, and even if she'd been lazy or a coward or miserly or bad tempered I would've loved her still. But she was brave and compassionate and generous. She worked hard, and she was a good friend. And somehow, through those hours of fear and suffering and death, I found new ways and reasons to like the woman I already loved with all my heart.
At three after midnight on the second night, I insisted that she sleep, that we both sleep, before exhaustion crushed us. We began to walk back through the dark, deserted lanes. There was no moon, and the stars punctured the black dome of the sky with a dazzling intensity. In an unusually wide space, where three lanes converged, I stopped and raised a hand to silence Karla. There was a faint scratching sound, a whisper and scrape as of taffeta rustling, or cellophane being squeezed into a ball. In the blackness I couldn't tell where the sound began, but I knew it was close and getting closer. I reached around behind me to grab Karla, and held her pressed against my back, turning left and right as I tried to anticipate the sound. And then they came-the rats.
"Don't move!" I cautioned in a hoarse whisper, pulling her to my back as tightly as I could. "Keep perfectly still! If you don't move, they'll think you're part of the furniture. If you move, they'll bite!"
The rats came in hundreds and then thousands: black waves of running, squealing beasts that poured from the lanes and swept against our legs like the swirling tide of a river. They were huge, bigger than cats, fat and slimy and rushing through the lanes in a horde that was two or three animals deep. They swept past us at ankle-height and then shin-high, knee-high, running on one another's backs and slapping and smacking into my legs with brutal force. Beyond us, they plunged on into the night toward the sewer pipes of the rich apartment towers, just as they did every night on their migration from nearby markets and through the slum. Thousands. The black waves of snapping rats seemed to go on for ten minutes, although it couldn't have been so long. At last, they were gone. The lanes were picked clean of rubbish and scraps, and silence clogged the air.
"What... the fuck... was that?" she asked, her mouth gaping open.
"The damn things come through here every night about this time.
Nobody minds, because they keep the place clean, and they don't worry you, if you're inside your hut, or asleep on the ground outside. But if you get in their way, and you panic, they just go right over the top of you, and pick you as clean as the lanes."
"I gotta hand it to you, Lin," she said, and her voice was steady, but fear was still wide in her eyes. "You sure know how to show a girl a good time."
Limp with weariness and relief that we weren't badly hurt, we clung to one another and staggered back to the clinic-hut. I spread one blanket down on the bare earth. We stretched out on it, propped up against a stack of other blankets. I held her in my arms. A sprinkling shower of rain rappled on the canvas awning overhead. Somewhere, a sleeper cried out harshly, and the tense, meaningless sound swooped from dream to dream until it disturbed answering howls from a pack of wild dogs roaming the edge of the slum. Too exhausted to sleep just yet, and tingling with sexual tension in the press of our tired bodies we lay awake and, piece by painful piece, Karla told me her story.
She was born in Switzerland, in Basel, and she was an only child.
Her mother was Swiss-Italian, and her father was Swedish. They were artists. Her father was a painter, and her mother was a soprano coloratura. Karla Saaranen's memories of her early childhood years were the happiest of her life. The creative young couple was popular, and their house was a meeting place for poets, musicians, actors, and other artists in the cosmopolitan city. Karla grew up speaking four languages fluently, and spent many long hours learning her favourite arias with her mother. In her father's studio, she watched him magic the blank canvases with all the colours and shapes of his passion.
Then, one day, Ischa Saaranen failed to return from an exhibition of his paintings in Germany. At close to midnight, the local police told Anna and Karla that his car had left the road during a snowstorm. He was dead. Within a year, the misery that ruined Anna Saaranen's beauty, and killed her lovely voice, finally smothered her life as well. She took an overdose of sleeping tablets. Karla was alone.
