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Oh, if we led a simple life,
For each my love I’d bear a child –
For every man I cherished,
Of each and every kind.
– Veronica Dolina, Когда б мы жили без затей (Oh, If We Led a Simple Life)
“We need three children,” Beatrice announces suddenly. Lemony jerks up his head – the book he’s reading is not a most interesting one, but the volunteer who borrowed it from the library before him left a message in it by underlining certain sentences, and in his attempts to decipher it he’s managed to forget he’s not alone in the room. Beatrice keeps sewing just as if nothing had happened, and it seems like she isn’t expecting him to answer at all, but she would have hardly said it out loud if she had forgotten there was someone else in the room, like he did. So Lemony figures out he ought to answer; it’s only that he’s completely at a loss for words.
“I am sure you’ll be able to crawl in there yourself,” he finally says. Beatrice puts away her handiwork – a new jacket she’s sewing an extra stash pocket onto – and gives him a puzzled look.
“Crawl where? What do you even mean?”
“Into the gallery. I take it you’re talking about the Friday mission. I mean, Jacques has already made sure that the vent shaft is wide enough for an adult to get into – not an adult of my size, but yours easily. So there’s no need to involve any children. By the way, why must there be exactly three of them?”
Beatrice rolls her eyes, having finally figured out what he is talking about.
“I marvel at your logic, Mr. Snicket,” she says quizzically, but it’s a good-natured kind of quizzing. A strand of hair has got out of her hairdo and Lemony wants to tuck it behind her ear, but in order to do that he’d have to get off the couch and go to the other end of the room. So that is how old age creeps up on you, he thinks absent-mindedly – here he is, unable to make himself cross the room for the woman he loves, and he isn’t even twenty-five yet. “No, I’m not talking about the Friday mission. What I mean is that you! And me! And Bertrand! We need to have three children. That’s all I wanted to say.”
“All right,” Lemony agrees. It’s a dangerous topic for conversation, one related to plans for the future, and for the people of their lifestyle it is rather pointless, if not dangerous, to make such plans. But Beatrice has always spat upon danger – at least when her own life was concerned, not the lives of others. “Now?”
Beatrice laughs.
“No, not now, of course,” she says. Her look of slight perplexity tells Lemony she hasn’t really given much thought to when exactly that should happen. “Someday. When the circumstances will be right.”
(And when they would have been right? Especially for the three of them, as she used to dream back then? That remained one of the million questions he never found to be right or wrong because he never got the chance to pose these questions to her. Just like “Why didn’t you tell me everything at once?” Or “Did you really think I shall love you less once I learn what the two of you have done, as if I’ve never done any terrible things myself and thought there was no other way?” Or “Why did you read Anna Karenina to your son, and why did you teach your daughter to use makeup to draw scars on her face? So that one day they would walk the same path as we once did, or so that they would know it well enough to avoid it?” What was she thinking, his Beatrice, selfless and whimsical and reckless and ingenious, when she was putting her hand on her growing belly, lulling her children to sleep, remodelling her pregnancy dresses or donating them to charity shops, braiding Violet’s hair, packing lunches for school, going to the bank to speak with that insufferable bore Poe, hiding safety matches from her children – not because there were any particular memories related to fire, any very specific notoriety, but just because playing with matches is a dangerous thing to do? There were some things he knew for sure – such as that all her neighbours used to like her, that she was considered a good mother, that she always remained the loveliest woman in the world – but not the answers to all these questions.
And did she realize she turned out to be almost right? She and Bertrand had three children, and the boy looked so, so much like her. Of course, when he first saw the middle Baudelaire child in the photo, the first thing that caught his eye was glasses: Bertrand, for as long as he could remember him, always wore glasses as well; his glasses even were in the similar style. But the thick, dark, a little bit curly hair was hers, and so were the brown eyes, and so was the shape of the boy’s face. Did she ever remember that far-off jesting conversation while combing Klaus’s hair or fixing his tie, when she would cast a quick glance to the mirror and notice, without a doubt, how much her son looked like her? Or had that carefree day disappeared from her memory, forever gone where all those memories that bring nothing but dull pain should better go?
He hadn’t forgotten. Ever)
“In some ten minutes it will be ready,” Bertrand tells them as he enters the room. He wipes his hands on his apron and shifts his gaze from Beatrice to Lemony, curious. “What were you talking about?”
“Beatrice thinks we need three children,” Lemony says.
“Why three?”
“See,” Beatrice points at Bertrand theatrically, “he understood at once what I meant!”
“I have no idea what you meant, but I hope it’s the same thing as what I mean,” Bertrand sits down on a chair covered in a jumble of clothes – his own shirt, Beatrice’s cape, and Lemony’s jacket, or maybe Bertrand’s jacket, for Lemony wore it yesterday and noticed that it is tight in the shoulders. It’s easier for Bertrand and Beatrice to steal his clothes than for him to steal theirs; if they leave that jacket hanging on the chair, sooner or later Beatrice will take it too. “So why exactly three?”
“Why, so one would look like you, one like me, and one like Lemony.”
“And what shall we do if any of them take after none of us?” Lemony cannot resist asking. “Suppose one of them looks like…” the words “his grandparents” freeze on his tongue. At times he isn’t sure if he actually remembers his parents, or it is just his writer’s imagination painting their images based on what Jacques and Kit have told him. The moments he isn’t sure about that scare him: what shall be called into doubt next? The memories of their farm, of the games he used to play with his siblings before they were taken away, of the first books he had read and the first melodies he had learned? Beatrice hasn’t seen her parents for twenty years. Bertrand has never seen his.
“Give them up for adoption, naturally,” Bertrand says with a serious look, but in his eyes and in the corners of his mouth a smile is already emerging – the very smile Lemony loves so much.
(Oh no, he never forgot. How could he forget when each photo he carefully put into a folder, or pinned to the wall amid newspaper clippings and document copies, brought back the memories of that conversation? Three children – just as they discussed back then. And if Klaus Baudelaire looked just like his mother, then Sunny Baudelaire was a spitting image of her father. An uninitiated person could assume that it is too early to judge which parent the child looks like if the child in question has just recently started walking, but he just knew – even though Bertrand clearly was much older when they first met than his younger daughter was in all these photographs. Yet whether it was because Sunny Baudelaire was an unusual child in many respects, or because some features stay the same no matter the age (he refused to consider his own sentimentality as the possible reason), the facts stayed the same: the daughter looked remarkably like her father. The same smile – its shape has already been formed and promised to reach the ultimate likeness when the baby’s other teeth come through. And the bright blue eyes, and the fair hair – which must have been as soft as the one he used to run his fingers through many years ago.
Her father’s looks, and the name of the woman who… well, she did not bring both of them up, of course, that could hardly be counted as upbringing. For that matter, he wouldn’t have named the child after her, but that had not been up to him to decide: he had no chance whatsoever to participate in making that decision. Strange as it may be, he saw her in his dreams once or twice, eyeing him even more reproachfully that she always used to. Eyeing him the way that made him want to scream: yes, yes, I know what you’re going to say, it is I who should rather be dead, it was him who should have stayed alive, do you really believe I think otherwise? But it was no use screaming because it wouldn’t make him feel better, and that woman was long gone anyway. Even she was gone too.
And Sunny Baudelaire learned to cook early; just in case there was any need for another evidence of how much she resembled her father)
“Oh, screw you,” Beatrice waves him off. “I’m describing an ideal situation, get it? An i-de-al one!”
“I guess three children would be ideal indeed for our, hmm, situation,” Lemony observes. He thinks all this talk amusing, despite the topic lying close to dangerous grounds. It is an incredible stroke of serendipity to find a book that makes one feel as if it was written just for them, or a song that sounds as if it was their soul transformed into music, or even a dish one would like to keep ordering in each and every restaurant, knowing one shall never get enough of it. Yet the greatest luck possible is finding people that one can talk about anything with, spend as much time with as one can, and feel surely willing to spend one’s whole life like that, with them. Certainly there is a more appropriate word to describe this than ‘serendipity’ or ‘luck’, but for volunteers that is a dangerous ground too, and Lemony never says it out loud, keeps it in his mind like a dragon guarding a treasure, hoping that Beatrice and Bertrand do not need any words to understand how he feels.
“I hope you’re not suggesting there would be one child per each of us to raise,” Beatrice says. “Or we’re splitting the breastfeeding duties too.”
“I guess Snicket means that in case of divorce each of us could take one of the kids,” Bertrand suggests merrily.
Lemony salutes him. “Exactly. The question is how we’re going to split them up, should the need arise.”
“Ask each of them who they would like to stay with?”
“Out of question. Too progressive. It is the notions like thith,” Beatrice starts to lisp on purpose and both of them laugh as they understand at once which one of the older volunteers she’s mocking, “that are poisoning our society! No,” she continues in her normal voice, “I suggest we draw lots. Write their names on the slips of paper, put them in a hat, well, you know the drill.”
“And then you’ll be the one complaining when you don’t get the kid you like the most,” Bertrand winds her up. Beatrice takes a spool out of her sewing basket and hurls it at him.
“How dare you imply,” she says, her voice dramatically offended, “that I won’t love all our children.”
Bertrand, who has managed to catch the spool before it hit his forehead, smiles.
“Relax,” he says, placating. “I’m just messing with you. I do not doubt that you will. And I will love them all, too.”
“And so will Lemony,” Beatrice says. She sits back in her chair and looks at Lemony with a smile, and suddenly he realizes that despite all the jokes and hyperboles, this conversation is very serious and important.
“And so will I,” he says quietly. “With all my heart.”
(And then there were lies, libel, a hasty escape, accusations, letters, telegrams, a faked death, and then another one and another one and loneliness and stalking and the inability to simply call and say he missed them – and then death again. Not his anymore, but this time it was real. And there were manuscripts in thick envelopes and hiding places and safes, and there was the Editor’s tired voice on the phone, thirteen books and the smell of fresh printing ink, but there was no Beatrice and no Virgil – only memories. Like this one: just another ordinary evening, just another light-hearted conversation. Yes, absolutely light-hearted. What they were joking about back then could never come true, and if some parts of it did, then never completely. But there was something about the face of Violet Baudelaire that distinguished her both from her father and from her mother – never mind that she could be mistaken for Beatrice from afar, as confirmed by many guests who attended that horrible cancelled wedding; never mind that she used to tie her hair up with a ribbon just like Bertrand once used to.
Violet Baudelaire was fifteen years old. Fifteen years ago a lot of things used to be different.
He was afraid to study her face too closely)