The Second Sight, page 20
“I give up.”
“Zaentz gave them each other’s eyes. That’s how close they were.”
Wolkowicz looked again: the blonde had emerald eyes, the brunette enormous gray ones.
“In a way they were the same person,” Maria said. “That’s how Lla Kahina knew; that’s why she came here.”
“Knew what?” Wolkowicz said.
“That Cathy was pregnant with Paul Christopher’s child.”
Even Wolkowicz’s natural cunning and long years of training were not strong enough to overcome the look of surprise that burst out on his broad face.
“Cathy was knocked up?” he said. “How did she know it was Paul’s kid?”
“She knew,” Maria said. “I advised her to get rid of it but she wouldn’t do it. If it had belonged to some casual lover she would have gone straight to the abortionist.”
“So where did she go?”
“With Lla Kahina,” Otto said.
“Where to?” Wolkowicz said.
Otto shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “They just vanished. Our letters came back. Even Cathy’s parents don’t know. It broke their hearts, as they say over there in Kentucky, across the water.”
He smiled. So did Maria. Wolkowicz closed his eyes for a moment, then picked up Hubbard’s novel and began to read.
4
WOLKOWICZ FOUND CATHY IN TIFAWT, LLA KAHINA’S VILLAGE HIGH in the Idáren Dráren. No roads led to this place, and the journey through the mountains by donkey had taken nearly a week. He arrived in the afternoon, and viewed from a distance in westerly sunlight, Tifawt glittered as if fragments of broken mirrors had been mortared by the thousands onto its walls and minarets. According to his French-Berber dictionary, which Wolkowicz consulted while sitting astride his donkey, the name meant “light.”
Asking directions at the gate, Wolkowicz went directly to the house where Cathy lived. A servant opened the gate, admitting him to a courtyard.
Cathy found him kneeling beside the fountain, washing his face. He still smelled of donkey. His clothes, his hair, and his bushy black eyebrows were powdered with red dust.
“I’d forgotten how much you look like Beelzebub,” she said. “Well, you haven’t seen me in a long time,” said Wolkowicz.
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s a rude question.”
“Seeing you washing up in my fountain is a rude shock. I thought I was getting away from people like you. How did you find this place?”
“I heard this legend about a beautiful white goddess living in a city that sparkled like diamonds,” Wolkowicz said. “So here I am. Can I come in? I bring news.”
Cathy turned in a swirl of Berber skirts and led him inside, away from the midday sun. The house was very grand, with marble floors and magnificent gold-and-vermilion doors like pages from an illuminated manuscript. It was furnished in the Arab style, with car pets, low tables of hammered brass, and cushions on the floor, filigree screens instead of glass in the windows.
As they settled down on pillows to drink the tea that had been laid out on one of the tables, a muezzin called the noon prayer. The voice, an effortless bel canto baritone, came from quite nearby. Wolkowicz jerked his head in the direction of the sound and raised his eyebrows in inquiry.
“The minaret is right next door,” Cathy said.
“How often does he come outside and warble?”
“Five times a day,” Cathy said. “Sunrise, noon, afternoon, sun set, and bedtime. That’s the salat az-zuhr, the noontime prayer. It’s performed when the shadow of a stick driven vertically into the ground falls shortest. Next comes the afternoon prayer, salat al-asr, when the shadow is equal to the length of the stick, plus the length of the shadow at noon.”
Wolkowicz swallowed a mouthful of very hot, very sweet mint tea. “What happens if you’re at the North Pole?”
“Then you pray according to shadows at Mecca.”
“How would you know?”
“Allah would provide.”
“What are you, a convert?”
“No,” Cathy said. “Who did tell you where I was?”
“Nobody. I just sort of figured it out.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“Okay,” Wolkowicz said. “The truth is, Otto Rothchild told me you ran off with Lla Kahina. So all I had to do was find out where she was to know where you’d be.”
“You know Lla Kahina?”
Wolkowicz shrugged. “Never had the pleasure. But we’ve got lots of mutual friends.”
“Why did you want to know where I was? David Patchen told me I’d never see any of you people again.”
“He lied. Look, I’ve got something to tell you.”
Cathy rose to her feet. “If it’s about Paul I don’t want to hear it,” she said.
“It’s about Paul,” Wolkowicz said. He told her where Christopher was now, leaving out none of the details. Her eyes widened and filled with tears.
“But how?” she said. “He was smarter than anybody else.”
“In some ways, yes, he was,” Wolkowicz said. “But he had a weakness for cripples.”
Cathy had stopped crying. She said, “Cripples? Are you saying that David Patchen is responsible for this?”
“That’s only my opinion. Don’t be too hard on him. It’s just his way of taking care of his friend.”
“But good God,” Cathy said. “ ‘Death with twenty years suspension of execution at solitary forced labor with observation of results?’ What does a sentence like that mean?”
“It means they may or may not shoot him twenty years from now.” “Shoot who?” asked a voice.
A girl of about ten—Wolkowicz was not good at guessing the ages of children—had come into the room, unnoticed by Cathy, and listened to everything Wolkowicz had said. She was blond and slender, with steady gray eyes and the deeply calm demeanor of an exceptionally self-confident adult. There was no mistaking whose child she was.
“Your father,” Wolkowicz said.
5
ZARAH CHRISTOPHER WAS NOT A FLAWLESS BEAUTY LIKE HER MOTHER, but Wolkowicz thought her the most ravishing child he had ever seen. Her comeliness lay not in the shape of her face and body, but in the calm intelligence that lit up her features. She had her father’s gestures, his facial expressions, his faint voice, his quietude. It was strange to recognize these qualities in a child her age—not the promise of them, the fully realized qualities themselves—knowing that she had never met her father, had never even seen a photograph of him. All she knew about Christopher, until Wolkowicz arrived, was that she resembled him. As he later discovered, even this much knowledge was accidental. One day, standing outside a door, she had overheard Lla Kahina and her mother discussing the resemblance: “How can she hold her head like that, how can she have that look in her eyes? She doesn’t know he exists.”
“But Zarah doesn’t really look like her father,” Lla Kahina told Wolkowicz. “The likeness is deeper than that—both she and her father look like a third person.”
“Who?” Wolkowicz asked.
“Her grandmother,” Lla Kahina replied. “She’s the image of Lori Christopher. Zarah should have been named for Lori, but she named herself.”
“What do you mean, she named herself?”
“She was a twin. During labor she thrust her arm out of her mother’s body, then drew it back inside. The midwife tied a scarlet thread around her wrist to show she was the firstborn.”
“So?”
“So when she was born with the scarlet thread on her wrist we called her Zarah. The word means ‘scarlet.’ “
“Like Judah’s harlot daughter-in-law.”
“What?” Lla Kahina said.
Wolkowicz smiled merrily, pleased that he had surprised her. After Waddy Jessup abandoned him in Burma, he had spent two years in the jungle with no book to read but the Bible. He had virtually memorized it.
“The story of Judah and Tamar, in Genesis,” he said. “Tamar was a widow. Her husband’s brother, Onan, wouldn’t give her a child, he spilled his seed on the ground to keep her from getting pregnant, so she veiled herself and posed as a prostitute when she saw her father-in-law coming to shear the sheep. Judah succumbed, and got her pregnant with twins. When they were born the same thing happened—one of the twins stuck its hand out and the midwife tied a red thread around it to show it was first out of the womb.”
Lla Kahina gave him a deeply thoughtful look. “That’s right. That child was named Zerah.”
“So the kid’s got a Hebrew name?”
Lla Kahina shrugged. She was in control of her expressions again. “A name from the Bible. So does her father. So do you.”
That evening, by the running fountain in the courtyard, Wolkowicz pressed Cathy for more details about her life since she ran away from Christopher. Why had she come to this place? Why was she hiding Christopher’s child from him?
“Why should I trust you?” she asked.
“You shouldn’t trust anybody,” Wolkowicz said. “But I already know your big secret. Maybe if you tell me a few little ones I’ll understand what’s going on in your head. I may even sympathize.”
“You’re offering me your friendship?”
“We’ve got a lot in common.”
“We do? What?”
“What did the beauty and the beast have in common until they got to know each other?”
Wolkowicz grinned his crockery grin. Cathy smiled back in spite of herself. She had always sympathized with him, because of his grotesque physical being. Wolkowicz understood this. He had been inducing people to confess to him for most of his life. Gazing into Cathy’s face, he thought that she was better looking now than before and much more interesting, like a portrait an artist had begun in youth and repainted in old age. The huge wisteria eyes, which used to be so empty and unfocused that she seemed to need glasses, were now filled with those distant cousins of intelligence, wariness and disdain.
“I’ll tell you what,” Wolkowicz said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere out here. There are no witnesses. What say I tell you my biggest secret? Are you ready?”
Wolkowicz was clowning. Cathy nodded, amused in spite of herself.
“Okay,” he said. “Here it is: I work for the Russians.” “You do what?”
“Surprise! I spy on the Outfit for the opposition, Always have. Patchen has figured it out, he thinks. He just can’t prove it yet, but I’m sort of on the run.”
“You’re joking.”
“No. If I lie to you, I blow the friendship. I’m an enemy agent. No shit.”
Wolkowicz had Cathy’s entire attention now. As she looked at him, a squat figure with black chest hair visible through the thin white fabric of his shirt, she began to smile. It was a slow smile that began in her eyes and spread gradually over her face. Wolkowicz knew that she believed him, that he had made the seduction.
“My God, but that’s funny,” she said. “Did Paul know?”
“He may have guessed. He was a great guesser. He never said anything.”
“He never said anything about anything. But why?”
“I’m a Russian.”
“You are? You mean you’re one of those people they select in childhood and send to the States like time bombs? What are they called?”
“Sleepers. No. My father was an old Bolshevik, but a Trotskyist. When Stalin took over he had to leave Russia.”
“What about your mother?”
“Dead, according to my father. I don’t remember anything about her.”
“Your father carried you all the way to China on his back, Paul told me.”
“That’s right.”
“How old were you when all this took place?”
“Six, seven.”
“Do you remember anything about it?”
“I remember riding on the old man’s back, sleeping,” Wolkowicz said. “We always traveled at night to avoid the soldiers. Stalin was trying to collectivize agriculture by shooting all the peasants. During the day guns were going off all over the place, villages were burning, people were yelling and screaming. There was no food, there was a big famine in Russia that winter. The peasants burned their crops and killed their horses and cows and sheep and pigs and chickens to keep Stalin from getting them. We ate dead animals. Millions of farm animals were rotting in the fields everywhere we went. The stink was unbelievable, but some of them froze. We’d find one that wasn’t too bad, cut off a leg, and cook it. Tasted pretty good if you were hungry. Horses, cows, anything.”
“Horses?” Cathy said, shuddering. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.
“What doesn’t?” Wolkowicz said.
“The whole thing. That you’re a Communist because you ate dead horses when you were six years old. What sense does that make?”
“What sense does anything make?” Wolkowicz asked. “Why did you decide to screw all those Wops when you were married to somebody like Christopher?”
“What do you know about that?”
He named her lovers, counting them off on his fingers. “Patchen showed me the pictures. Don’t worry. Your husband never saw them.”
“He’s not my husband. Not anymore.”
“He’s not? That’s good. Now it’s your turn to tell me your secret. Why did you do this? Why is a girl like you hiding out with a bunch of natives in the middle of nowhere?”
“The reason is simple,” she said. “Paul held out on me.” “Held out what?” Wolkowicz asked.
“Himself,” she said. “He’d never let me see who he was. He never let me touch him, not the real Paul. I couldn’t stand it.” “So now what have you got?”
“A part of him that he doesn’t even know exists. That’s pretty good revenge, don’t you think?”
Cathy smiled triumphantly. Wolkowicz smiled back. He knew exactly what he was dealing with, exactly how to handle it.
6
CATHY’S DETERMINATION TO KEEP CHRISTOPHER AND EVERYTHING about him a secret from Zarah had only made him more real to the child. She had always known that her father must exist, and now Wolkowicz had confirmed it. She followed him everywhere, wanting to know more—her father’s name, whether he resembled the father she had invented, whether he knew that she. existed. Wolkowicz, however, was sworn to secrecy.
“Sorry,” he told her when she asked questions. “I’m not allowed to talk about him.”
“Why?”
“Because I promised I would never reveal his name or anything about him.”
“Then tell me why he’s in prison in China.”
“How much did you hear the other day when I was talking to your mother?”
“Everything. I followed the two of you into the house.”
“Good for you,” Wolkowicz said. “He’s in prison because a friend betrayed him.” “Why?”
“Because his friend was afraid that he’d be killed by enemies if he stayed outside. He thought he’d be safe if he was in prison.”
“What enemies?”
“Everyone was his enemy.”
“Why?”
“Because he knew the truth about them. Don’t ask me what the truth was.”
“But you said the Chinese might shoot him twenty years from now.”
“Better twenty years from now than right away. At least that’s what his friend thought.”
“But he’s in solitary confinement, all alone.”
“That won’t bother your father. He’s always been alone.” “But he had my mother.”
“For a while, yes. What I meant was, he’s different from everybody else. He’s one of a kind. Nobody ever understood him.” “Am I like him?”
“Yes, you are,” Wolkowicz said. “In fact, the resemblance is amazing. If the two of you ever get together, he won’t have to worry about being alone anymore. Neither will you.”
Zarah asked the name of the friend who had betrayed her father. “I’ve heard it was his best friend, the man he trusted most in the world,” Wolkowicz said.
“What is his name?”
“David Patchen. But don’t hold it against him. He thought he was doing the right thing.”
“How could it be?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you can ask Patchen when you grow up.” Zarah asked questions about the prison where her father was confined. Where was it?
“Nobody knows,” Wolkowicz said. “Manchuria, probably. Very bleak, very cold.”
“What is solitary forced labor?”
“Hard work, like chopping down trees or digging with a pick and shovel, all by yourself except for the guards. Do you want to read about it?”
Wolkowicz had brought a satchel full of books with him over the mountains. He brought it into the courtyard, where he and Zarah always met, and spilled them out onto the marble pavement. Some of the books were very valuable, and these were wrapped in cloth. In his new identity under deep cover, he was posing as a rare book dealer. He rummaged through the rest.
“Here it is,” he said, handing Zarah a memoir written by a man who had served a sentence for political offenses in a Chinese prison. “Take this, too.” The second book was a volume of Paul Christopher’s poems. “Tell me what you think of the poems,” he said, dropping volumes back into the canvas bag.
It never occurred to Wolkowicz to wonder whether Zarah would be able to understand the books he gave her or the things he told her. He knew that his words would lodge in her mind forever.
Cathy found the book of Christopher’s poems in Zarah’s room and confronted Wolkowicz with it.
“Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?” she said, whispering.
“It’s just a book,” Wolkowicz said in his usual voice.
“Lower your voice. She’s overheard enough.”
“What are you so worried about? He’s gone forever. She’ll never lay eyes on him.”
“You’re sure of that? You know damn well they’ll find each other if they know about each other. Nothing ever stopped Paul, and she’s just like him.”
“She could do worse.”
“You’re right. She could fall in love with him, and that’s exactly what would happen the first moment she saw him. I don’t want you giving her any more of your rotten clues.”
