Karolina
LAURA VAN DEN BERG
I first saw Karolina outside the Sumesa on the corner of Avenidas Oaxaca and Álvaro Obregón. She was smoking a stubby cigarette, a sled-like backpack hitched to her shoulders. I stopped short, felt my heart lurch. Could it be? Karolina was my brother’s ex-wife; they’d divorced five years ago, in Seattle, and I’d not seen her since. Right before their divorce, she had gone missing for fifteen days, an event still marked by dread and shame. The second time I saw her was by the bus stop on Avenida Michoacán. The third sighting was in Parque México, late at night. I had decided to walk back from a work dinner in Roma Sur to the hotel because I was having trouble sleeping and a long walk before bed—tracing the park’s serpentine paths, imagining the alertness being drained from my body one step at a time—seemed like a preemptive strike against insomnia. The dog run was empty except for a young man throwing a tennis ball for a German shepherd. The owner was wearing sunglasses, despite the hour. I was just past the run, in the thick green center of the park, when I came upon Karolina asleep on a bench, squeezing her giant backpack like a lover.
The city was four months past the earthquake. The moment I had heard news of the disaster, I called a friend in the conservation department of the National Museum of Anthropology. He and his family were safe, he said, though a building in their neighborhood had collapsed and thirty-two people had lost their lives. At home in Miami, as I watched the death toll tick up on my laptop, it had never occurred to me that Karolina had been in danger here, too.
The man in sunglasses leashed the German shepherd and left the run. He whistled. The dog carried the tennis ball in his mouth. I have always been a little uneasy around dogs. I wondered where the man and his dog had been when the earth started to thrash under their feet, whether they had been afraid. I knelt by the bench. I touched Karolina’s cheek. Her skin was sticky and cool. I grasped her shoulder. I willed her to open her eyes, but she seemed fast asleep.
“Karolina,” I said.
My voice jolted her into the waking world. She stared, and then her mouth yawned open, exposing the sheen of molars, and she screamed. I fell backward, as though shoved. “Karolina,” I said again, but she leaped to her feet and ran away, knees high, her giant backpack upright in her arms. I watched as she disappeared into the night.
A moment later, the man with the German shepherd burst through the darkness and rushed to my side. He took me by the arm and helped me up.
“Are you all right?” he asked, in Spanish. “I heard a scream. Were you attacked?”
Had I been attacked? It nearly felt that way.
I was conversational in the Romance languages, as this was important for my work, so I lied and told the man that I had fallen, tripped over something in the dark.
He nodded and released my arm. I noticed him looking around, searching for whatever it was I had tripped over. His sunglasses were crooked on his face. The German shepherd paced around me—full of suspicion, I couldn’t help but think—and then dropped the tennis ball at my feet.
IN THE WAKE OF A NATURAL DISASTER, an art restorer—I worked for a museum in Miami; my specialty was mosaics—mourns not only the loss of life but the damage done to the history of human culture. I could not see an image of a collapsed building without worrying what had been destroyed inside. In the Great Earthquake of Lisbon, in 1755, the Ribeira Palace, which once sat on the Tagus River, was obliterated—sculptures and tapestries and paintings, by Rubens and Correggio, vanished. In 2010, the earthquake that devastated Haiti brought down the Cathédrale Sainte-Trinité and its famed religious murals; a painting by Guillaume Guillon-Lethière is believed to have been destroyed when the presidential palace collapsed. Years and years of artistic history—which is to say human history—gone.
Or nearly.
In some cases, people gathered the fragments and with these fragments made a new shape.
My husband (soon to be my ex-husband) was a psychologist who specialized in trauma; in this way, both our vocations placed us in close proximity to disaster and its aftermath.
THE MORNING AFTER I FOUND KAROLINA in the park, I delivered a talk at a conference, on the restoration of Roman mosaics in the ancient city of Stobi. The conference had been on my calendar for many months, and the talk was one I had given before, and yet the subject matter felt freshly urgent. My throat was dry and I kept pausing for sips of water.
My friend at the National Museum of Anthropology attended my talk and though he was complimentary afterward he said that he couldn’t help but notice that I had seemed nervous. Are you sleeping? Are you feeling all right?
