The Second Sight, page 21
“It won’t do any good. If you didn’t want her wondering about her father you should have told her he was dead.”
“I’ve never lied to her.”
“Then why are you so afraid of telling her the real truth?”
“There’s a curse on the Christophers, that’s why.”
“That’s horseshit. They’ve just had a little bad luck.”
“Is that what you call disappearance and murder and prison generation after generation? I want Zarah to be happy, that’s all. I want her to be free. I want her not to be a Christopher. Just keep your mouth shut about Paul. I don’t know why you came here. I don’t know why I don’t throw you out.”
“Why don’t you?”
Cathy, who had been staring furiously into Wolkowicz’s eyes until now, averted her gaze.
“Because then you would tell her.”
“Okay, from now on I’ll keep it impersonal,” Wolkowicz said.
“But it won’t do any good. She’s already in love with him, thanks to you.”
Wolkowicz kept his word, as he always did in unimportant matters, but it was impossible to keep Zarah off the subject that fascinated her. She spent as much time as possible with Wolkowicz, asking questions.
“Why is my father in prison?” she asked.
“I told you,” Wolkowicz said. “His best friend did it.” “I don’t mean that. What crime was he charged with?” “Espionage.”
“You mean he’s a spy.”
“That’s what the Chinese think. But they’re wrong.”
“Then he was never a spy.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then he was a spy at one time?”
“Let me tell you something,” Wolkowicz said. “You’re asking questions that nobody should ever ask and nobody would ever answer. People lie. You can’t just ask for the truth and expect other people to tell it to you. It’s too valuable. You have to watch, listen, read, remember, put things together. You have to keep quiet. For example, look at that old guy.”
Wolkowicz and Zarah had gone for a walk in the village in the late afternoon. The narrow streets, barely wide enough for two people to walk abreast, were half in shadow, half suffused in the dusty light of the sinking sun. There were no wheeled vehicles of any kind in the village, only donkeys with loads lashed to pack saddles. The man Barney was talking about was an old Ja’wabi in a white caftan and turban who walked ahead of them through the sparse crowd.
“That’s Suleyman,” Zarah said. “He’s going to the mosque.”
“Let’s follow him.”
“We’re already following him.”
“I mean like spies. You go ahead, keep him in sight. I’ll fall back, like I’m not with you. Count your steps. When you’ve taken two hundred steps, stop. Do something natural, like go into a shop for a minute. As soon as you stop, I’ll take over and you’ll fall back. I’ll follow him for two hundred steps, then stop and do something natural. Then you take over and I fall back again. Got it?”
Zarah’s solemn face broke into a smile. “It’s like a game.”
“That’s right. Remember everything he does and says while you’re on his tail—everything. No detail is too small. You’re going to have to report. We’ll go back to the house separately and meet in the courtyard. Go.”
They followed old Suleyman for twenty minutes as he loitered through the streets, greeting friends, buying spices in a spice shop, and finally sauntering into the mosque just as the salat al-maghrib, the sunset prayer, was being called by the muezzin. Zarah was in the lead position, and although Wolkowicz had not instructed her to do so, she walked on, as if she were headed for some other place and had no interest in the man she was following.
“I think you’re a natural, kid,” Wolkowicz told her when they joined up later in the courtyard of her mother’s house. “Give me your report.”
Zarah recited detail after detail: the names of the spices Suleyman had bought and what he had paid for them, the words he had spoken, the identities of the men and women he had greeted.
“Okay,” Wolkowicz said. “Was there anything he didn’t do that he should have done?”
Zarah thought. She did this quietly, without changing the calm expression on her small face.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“What about just before he went into the mosque?”
“He was just walking along.”
“Right. Picture the mosque. As you walk toward it, what do you see?”
“The minaret, the square, the tree, the door.”
“What’s right beside the door?”
“The fountain.”
“Now think again What did the old guy fail to do before he went into the mosque?”
Zarah remembered, but she was reluctant to say what she had missed.
“I know you know,” Wolkowicz said. “Spit it out.”
Zarah said, “He didn’t wash.”
“Right,” Wolkowicz said. “Wasn’t he supposed to wash his hands, face, and feet before going inside to pray? Isn’t every good Moslem supposed to do that? What’s it called?”
“Wudu.”
“Why didn’t he do his wudu?”
Zarah’s face flushed slightly but she did not answer.
“You’re holding out on me,” Wolkowicz said. “What’s the big secret?”
Zarah did not answer. Was she embarrassed to have missed this detail? Wolkowicz didn’t think so; he thought there was another reason for her silence. But he pressed on as if he suspected nothing.
“There were half a dozen other old men inside the mosque,” he said, “but the ground around the fountain was dry. No splashes. I guess they, didn’t perform their wudu either. Isn’t that kind of funny?”
Zarah made no reply at all, not even a shrug or a smile. “I have to go now,” she said.
“Keep thinking about it,” Wolkowicz said. “Why didn’t they wash? Don’t tell anybody else what we found out. Tomorrow I’ll show you how to write with invisible ink.”
7
AT PRAYER TIMES FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS WOLKOWICZ DROPPED BY the mosque to observe the worshippers as they went inside. Only old men seemed to attend, and like Suleyman most neglected to perform their ablutions before entering. Once inside, their prayers were too faint to be heard. In the cool of the morning he read the books he had brought with him—Hubbard Christopher’s The Rose and the Lotus; histories of the Berbers in French and English; The Jerusalem Bible in plain English translated directly from the even plainer Hebrew of the Old Testament; the Koran.
One morning while Zarah was at her lessons he went next door to call on Lla Kahina.
“I’ve got something for you,” he said. “Remember this?”
Wolkowicz produced the novel, open to the frontispiece.
Lla Kahina glanced at the picture of Lori and herself without surprise. “Zaentz’s painting,” she said.
“Otto told me about the eyes. I didn’t see it at first.”
“Nobody did, until they saw it. Then they saw nothing else. It caused a sensation—it’s all there, in Hubbard’s book. Zaentz was very clever.”
“So was Hubbard. Did you know he was writing everything down like that?”
“He had our permission,” she said.
“You mean the three of you faked the whole book?”
“No, lived it. Everyone thought we were a ménage à trois, so we played a joke on them. Hubbard called it ‘the Experiment.’ Every one was experimenting in Berlin in those days. One day Lori was criticizing Hubbard because one of the characters in a story he was writing did something foolish or stupid. He defended himself by saying, ‘My characters do whatever they like. I can’t control them.’ Lori was annoyed—she could be very Prussian, very exclamatory, especially about art, and she truly believed that Hubbard was an artist. She said, ‘But you must control them! Otherwise there is no art!’ Hubbard said, ‘I can’t, unless I lie about them.’ Lori said, ‘But they don’t exist!’ Hubbard said, ‘They exist, all right. All I do is make them visible when they come into my head. Did Meryem exist for you, or you for her, until you met? Did you foresee what’s happened because you did meet? Would either of you be what you are now if you hadn’t met?’ And Lori said, ‘My God, you’re right, you must write about us. We’ll be your characters.’ That’s how the Experiment began.”
“So what did you do then?”
“We went around Berlin as usual, seeing people, doing things, making conversation, and Hubbard watched and listened and wrote it all down.”
“You mean he spied on you.”
“With our permission. Anyway, all writers are spies.” “Did he tell you what to do?”
“He made suggestions, but we did as we liked. He said we were just like his other characters, rebellious. But he had more control than he thought. We soon became possessed by the Experiment, more like the beings he was writing about, less like ourselves. Lori said the book should have been called Which is Which?”
“How did you know what he was writing about?”
“He read it to us every day. What he wrote was never exactly what had happened.”
“Was it close?”
“Very close, but not stenography. He used our real names, but he didn’t write what he already knew about us, only what we did and said, and what that revealed. He could improve on our speech, simplify it or make it more eloquent, as long as he respected the meaning. Those were the rules of the Experiment. He was scrupulous about the rules.”
“There’s nothing about Paul in the book.”
“No. He wasn’t part of the Experiment. But he was there.”
“He must have been very small.”
“Five or six.”
“So there were Nazis already.”
“The book is full of them. So was Berlin.”
Wolkowicz said, “In the book you play the part of a Jew.”
“That was Hubbard. Lori told him the Nazis would think what he wrote was the truth. He published it anyway.”
Wolkowicz reclaimed the book from her hand. “What about this?” he asked, then read aloud from a marked page:
“An Aryan followed the girls down the Kurfürstendamm and into the Adlon Hotel. While they had their tea and the string quartet played a song written for saxophones on violins, he stared at them with eyes the color of rainwater from a table where he sat all alone. They thought he had fallen for Lori, like for like, but no he had exotic tastes and then he came over and bowed CLICK! CLICK! and asked Meryem to dance. Meryem? Meryem? he said, making her foxtrot, that’s a Jew name but you look like a nigger and smell like one. Delicious! The Aryan looked like a boy who tortures cats. His breath smelled of Black Forest cake. Why do you wear purple tassels? he asked. Because Yahweh commanded us always to wear them, Numbers 15:37, Meryem said. Commanded who? Heydrich said, Jewesses? Yes, Meryem said, I confess I am from the Lost Tribe of Israel. Count for me, are you counting? I am the great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great great
great great great great great
How many is that? Seventeen, the Aryan said. Meryem continued,
great great great great great great
great great great great great.
How many is that? Eleven more, twenty-eight altogether, the Aryan said. That’s not enough, Meryem said, but this lovely song will be over if I go on, anyway we’ve been lost since Solomon was chosen by Yahweh to ascend the throne of Israel after the death of David, three thousand years ago more or less, that’s how Jewish I am, I am a hundred times the granddaughter of Joab, the commander of the armies of Israel and Judah and the conscience of the king. And you don’t have any eyebrows or eyelashes. Wie heiβlen Sie? what’s your name, Aryan? Heydrich! the Aryan replied, and I am going to lick those tears off your face before I’m done, you delicious little nigger!”
Wolkowicz closed the book. “Did you really dance with Heydrich? Did you really say those things to him?”
“Yes, but he wasn’t the real Heydrich at that time,” Lla Kahina said, “There was no SS yet.”
“How about afterward?”
“Afterward he knew about the Experiment.”
“And then what?”
“Then he was the real Heydrich.”
8
EVEN BEFORE HE FOUND CATHY AND ZARAH, WOLKOWICZ SENSED that he had stumbled onto some great secret about Lla Kahina and the Ja’wabi. Ordinarily he would have watched and waited as his suspicions matured, but he had very little time to waste. He had been out of touch with the Outfit for almost two weeks, and if he did not report his whereabouts and account for his movements soon, he would have to invent explanations. This was always dangerous; in his circumstances it might be fatal.
In the few days left to him, he made a head-on assault on Lla Kahina, calling on her every morning. He approached her through The Rose and the Lotus. “What did you mean,” he asked, “when you told Heydrich that you were one hundred times the granddaughter of Joab?”
The two of them sat together beside a fountain in the shade of a dusty olive tree.
“Heydrich?” Lla Kahina said.
“In Hubbard’s book.”
“Ah, we’re back to the Experiment. Did I tell Heydrich that?” “The Meryem in the book did.”
“It sounds like something she’d say,” Lla Kahina said. “So what is the topic for today?”
“Joab.”
“Why Joab?”
“Because of what Meryem said to Heydrich. I don’t want to repeat old questions, but why did you say that?”
“Who knows if I even said it?” Lla Kahina said. “Hubbard wrote what we told him, not what actually happened. He was fascinated by anything having to do with Jews, and that’s why you should be careful .what you believe when you read his books.”
“Why Jews? He was a New England Yankee. What did he know about Jews?”
“He saw what was coming. He knew it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. Jews had been slaughtered before. He wanted to protect his friends, save them, defend them against slander.”
“Lori felt the same?”
“Stronger.”
“She was a Prussian.”
“I don’t know why she felt as she did; it’s just the way she was. She hated stupidity and the Nazis were stupid. She loved intelligence and talent and Jews were the brightest people in Berlin.”
Wolkowicz produced his copy of The Rose and the Lotus from the pocket of his rumpled jacket. “Listen,” he said:
“When the violins started to play again the Aryan approached, smiling in time to the music, and bowed to Meryem. May I have the honor, gnädige Frädulein? Oh, dear, I’m sorry, no thank you, Meryem said. The Aryan said, What! are you going to hold a little joke against me? It isn’t the joke that disgusts me when it’s held against me, Meryem said, you are too susceptible to niggers; that is what offends me, that your mind and body go their own ways, the one so noble and anti-Semitic and the other so beastly. The Aryan said, On the contrary my mind and body are one and the same, everybody will be like that in the new Germany; we are going to kill all the gods other people have brought into Germany, the one the Jews gave us and the one the Christians gave us, both of which came from the Romans who had lost their original gods and therefore their reason for being. We are going to go back to our own German gods, back into the wonderful unified nature of our ancestors who lived in harmony with the German forest. Meryem said, Then you should go to the Grunewald since you are all tree worshipers and rub up against a tree, gnädiger Herr, good afternoon. The Aryan escorted her to the table. Smiling brilliantly and shouting Herr Ober! Schaumwein! the Aryan sat down at the table and said, If you will not dance with me then you must talk to me, it will be a strictly intellectual conversation: What do you think about killing gods? Meryem said, We Jews have a lot of experience with that: When Yahweh chose the Hebrews as his people he caused nations to fall before us but he always insisted that we destroy the gods of our enemies, showing no pity, he was very particular about that. The Schaumwein came. Gallantly lifting his glass filled with the sweet sparkling piss he had ordered the Aryan said, Prosit! Who is this Yahweh? I’ve never heard of any god by that name. Meryem said, You will if you go around trying to kill gods. That’s his specialty. My tribe slew dozens for him. The Aryan said, Wonderful! The Berbers will be our shock troops. Lori said, Look, he behaves with the joyous conviction of the hopelessly insane; they all do.”
“What tribe was Meryem talking about?” Wolkowicz asked. “The Jerawa?”
Lla Kahina laughed, genuinely surprised by his knowledge. “You know about the Jerawa?”
“I’ve been reading about them in Ibn Khaldfün. They were Jews, and they beat the Arab army on the Al Meskyana River in A. D. 688.”
“Quite correct,” Lla Kahina said.
“What interested me was the leader of the Jerawa,” Wolkowicz said. “She was a woman, a prophetess who could see into the future. Her name was Kahina, just like you.”
“It’s a well-known story,” Lla Kahina said. “Kahina called herself Queen of the Maghrib until the Arabs came back with a bigger army and defeated her. She was beheaded and the whole tribe converted to Islam.”
“The whole tribe? I heard that some didn’t convert, that they split off from the others and wandered away into the desert.”
Outside the walls of the house, the village was quiet. Because of the absence of machines and outsiders and the Prophet Mohammed’s supposed prohibition on the lute, the harp, and the flute, this was a deeply quiet place altogether, the quietest Wolkowicz had ever known except for the Burmese jungle.
He took an orange from the plate, slit the skin with his fingernail, and smelled it. “I’ve been wondering,” he said. “Do you think any of the Berbers are still Jews who just pretend to be Moslems?”
Lla Kahina watched his eyes for a moment before replying. “Anything is possible,” she said.
“I read an interesting fact in one of the books about the Berbers. All through the desert of the Maghrib, from Tunisia to the Atlas Mountains, inscriptions have been found, all saying the same thing: ‘Up to here, I, Joab, son of Zeruiah, pursued the Philistines.’ “
