Today we are pulling something new out of the Reliquary — a flash fiction piece from C. Tomasevic about invented identities, the peculiar comforts of pretending to be somebody else, and the slow death of old Europe.
Enjoy! 🖤
After the Germans executed him in May of 1940, people only mentioned Lord Pyotr Pennypacker in hushed tones, as though he were a cursed man whose name they were afraid to invoke. As though they feared that by merely mentioning him they might bring his fate down upon themselves. But this had not always been the case.
All through the previous decade he had been talked of openly and with reverence among Viennese cafe society, legendary high and low for his quick smile and razor wit, his incomparable knowledge of the Russian Classics, his self-deprecating humor, most of all for his genteel manner. For how—and this part had gone largely unspoken—he reminded them of that beautiful world to which they all so dearly yearned to return, the world they had lost in the Great War. Or rather, the world they had killed.
In any case Pyotr Pennypacker had come to represent something far beyond himself. Something, to put it mildly, he had never intended to become.
It started out as a joke. A con, really, but who wants to fuss about the difference?
The mark was a wealthy American heiress who had settled in Paris to write her novel. About what, you ask? Women, in a general sense, though naturally one woman in particular: a poor widowed maid who falls in love with…well, and so on. She adored the Russians, Tolstoy and Turgenev above all, never poor old D—, much too grisly. So Lord Pyotr Pennypacker was invented to suit her entirely: an Oxford-educated English aristocrat, exiled son of Russian émigrés, penniless but passionate, preserver of the arts in a world gone loud with Bolsheviks and brown shirts. The heiress left Paris before he could be unleashed on her. Upon her, at least.
You see, His Lordship was in truth a semi-professional American confidence man named Wendell Peters, who had grown up on a ranch in California, failed as an actor and stage performer, fought in the Great War, and then never got around to leaving Europe. Pyotr was a character who demanded an audience, who symbolized something so deeply rooted and yet still somehow silent in his player’s heart that Peters had no choice but to let him loose.
And so Peters died and Pyotr’s life began. He first appeared in Paris in 1928, where he dazzled the local literati and got into a fist fight with Ernest Hemingway, then moved on to Luxembourg, Stockholm, and Berlin, which he left in a hurry. He traveled to Rome, mostly to see the Vatican, then along the Mediterranean, going as far as Antioch before turning back upon being warned by an Orthodox priest that the French authorities were planning to make an example of him—this being after he had slept with one of the local Imam’s wives, a very dear man, really, the priest assured Pyotr, but proud, quite proud.
This was when the old affliction—the nameless pain, the aching fear—began to gather over him again. He had thought—believed—hoped?—that being Pyotr would keep the horrid feeling at bay, as though the sadness that had haunted him for so many years were an external thing, a tormentor that wouldn’t recognize him, wouldn’t find him if he changed his name, affected an accent, erased who he really was.
As Pyotr and Alia, the Imam’s (ex?) wife, sailed out of Constantinople toward the Balkans across the Black Sea, he briefly considered heading north into Russia, which he had never actually visited. He discarded the notion outright, though not without regret, and he confessed as much to Alia. It was there on a clear midsummer’s evenfall, gazing beyond the dark edge of the sea as the light sank into the deep, that she reminded him of the borrowed verse that had first brought them together:
“You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl through life?”
She told him that all he’d had to do was say those words aloud—not even to her directly, just to everyone else who had been there that day at Sister Miriam’s literary salon—for her to know exactly what she wanted to do, where she wanted to go, who she wanted to be.
“You should do yourself the same kindness,” she said, and pressed her lips gently to his cheek.
They parted ways in a Romanian port, and as they embraced for the last time she repeated the lines again: “You were born with wings. Why prefer to crawl?” Then he traveled on alone by train.
On the eve of 1929, exhausted from his journey, Pyotr Pennypacker, who by now had all but forgotten his true name, arrived for the first time in Vienna, though Russia continued calling to him. In his dreams he saw himself flying over the black vastness of the sea, away from the world he couldn’t bear but felt safe in. He filled journals with imaginary trips to Moscow, where he got into imaginary scrapes with the local authorities and made love to imaginary women. And under the bed in his rented room he kept a suitcase, packed his first week in the city, which he opened only once a year, on New Year’s Eve, to take everything out and refold it along the same creases, like a bird arranging its wings for a flight it kept deciding against.
He talked endlessly, especially once the damn Germans came down on them, of getting the hell out of Vienna. Instead he spent the next two years lending an English lord’s stationery, an English lord’s signature, and an English lord’s bored, unquestionable manner to exit papers for anyone who needed them. Not one was ever for himself.
The Germans came for him in May of 1940 and found the suitcase under the bed, still packed, every shirt folded along its old creases.
Then they took him out and placed him against a wall.
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