The Second Sight, page 25
Meryem had no idea what a Prussian was; Sebastian’s words did not register on her mind. While he talked and drove she watched the city stream by, Hôtel-Dieu on the right, Hôtel de Ville on the left, the Seine lined with fishermen in between. She was perfectly relaxed, a rare state of being for Sebastian’s passengers. Taxicabs, practically the only other vehicles on the streets, honked wildly at him as he overtook them and cut them off. He swerved in front of a chauffeured Rolls-Royce, turned onto a bridge, bumped over the curb, and parked on the sidewalk.
“We’re here,” he said, pulling up the hand brake with a whirr of ratchet teeth. “Will you come upstairs? We’ll be well chaperoned by the Christophers. You can’t imagine how honorable Hubbard is.”
Meryem asked, “Is he tall or short?”
“What do you predict?”
“I have no idea.”
“You don’t? That’s amazing! He’s enormous, like a Viking. Lori is about our size.”
In the elevator, because it would have been bold to gaze into Meryem’s eyes, Sebastian looked more closely at her gold bracelets. She also wore several gold necklaces and rings set with emeralds and rubies on every finger. He had been too busy driving to notice these until now. At first sight he had assumed that the bracelets were costume jewelry—how could they be anything else when there were so many of them?—but he was trained to recognize gems and precious metals, and he realized on closer inspection that everything she had on was quite genuine. Meryem was wearing enough wealth to buy the apartment building where he lived.
They were very close together in the rising cage. Despite her flapper’s costume and the masses of gold jewelry, she smelled the same as she had smelled in the Idáen Dráren: musky, spiced, feral. The physical effect of her aroma was very powerful.
Meryem said, “Do you ever think of Tili?”
“Tili?” Sebastian said. “Oh—Tili! That nice little black mare. Yes, I do.”
“I should hope so,” Meryem said. “She saved your life. Didn’t you hear the flood coming? Even after you saw the storm on Tinzár? Even after I warned you?”
The elevator came to a stop, bouncing on its cables. Sebastian did not open the gates: Meryem had his whole attention.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Are you telling me you saw the flood—saw everything that happened?”
“Perhaps not everything,” Meryem said. “I saw Till saving you, the water coming down, the stones inside the flood—and you, when you waved your hat and spoke to me.”
“What else?”
Someone called the lift from below and it started down again. There was no stopping it.
“What did I say?” Sebastian asked.
“You said, ‘Meryem, I love you,’ “ Meryem said. “Your watch had just chimed between my breasts.”
Sebastian had never heard a woman refer to her own breasts. He found himself imagining them, brown like the rest of her, but with dark nipples like raisins. They reached the bottom of the elevator shaft. A middle-aged couple waited there with ill-concealed resentment that they had been inconvenienced. The woman was a hawk-faced blonde in a silk dress and fox furs who wore a single strand of pearls, as fashion dictated. She stared in disbelief at Meryem— what was this black girl clinking with bangles doing in her elevator?
“We’re going back up, Monsieur-’Dame,” Sebastian said. “We seem to be entrapped.”
“Entrapped, Monsieur?”
“By fate,” Sebastian said.
“We will wait until you are … finished,” the woman said coldly.
As the lift rose again with a whine of its electric motor, Meryem pulled off her cloche. Her long black Oriental hair uncoiled and tumbled down. She put her beringed hands in it and shook it out, releasing scents of clove, ambergris, and the perfumed salts of perspiration. In this lightless space, she looked very dusky, very beckoning in her Paris frock and high-heeled pumps, as if dressed for a costume party on the other side of the world.
Now what am I going to do? Sebastian wondered.
4
AS SOON AS MERYEM SAW LORI AND HUBBARD CHRISTOPHER SHE realized that both their fathers, like her own, had been killed by their enemies. She waited until they were seated in the garden of a restaurant in the Bois de Boulogne before mentioning this.
“Yes, that’s so,” Lori said. “Mine was beaten to death by a mob of idealists in the Tiergarten; Hubbard’s was shot, by mistake, as a spy by a firing squad of idealists in Mexico. Did Sebastian tell you all that?”
“No,” Meryem said.
“Then how do you know?”
“My own father was killed by the French.”
Lori looked with puzzlement into her unruffled face. “That seems to break the chain of idealists,” she said.
Across the table, Sebastian was ordering dinner. “Clear soup, asparagus, grilled gray sole, saddle of lamb, wild strawberries for everyone,” he said. “Ask the sommelier to choose a Chablis to drink with the fish; a Pauillac, the Château Pichon-Longueville 1919, with the meat; and a champagne with the strawberries—it doesn’t matter what kind as long as it’s brut.” He liked plain food. This was his spring and summer menu; between September and April he substituted oysters for the asparagus and cheese for the berries.
He turned to Lori. “Are you and Meryem having a nice chat?”
“We’re discussing our murdered parents,” Lori said. “It seems you’re the only one at the table who is not yet unfathered.”
She was smiling politely, but it was an effort: The death of her father, an army officer who had been kicked to death by a gang of Spartacists after surviving four years on the Western Front, was painful to her because the circumstances had been so stupid. She did not like being reminded of it by a stranger who had no right to know about it.
“I’ve offended you,” Meryem said. She laid her brown hand over Lori’s white one on the tabletop. No one had touched Lori without her permission since infancy, but for reasons she never fully understood (she thought about her own gesture for the remainder of her life), she did not draw away. Instead, she turned her hand over and entwined her fingers with Meryem’s.
“You haven’t offended me,” she said. “Just surprised me.”
“What did she know?” Hubbard asked. His long face wore an expression of amused surprise. Why was Lori holding hands with this stranger?
“She knew that both our fathers had died violent deaths.” “Sebastian has been talking about us again.”
“Not me,” Sebastian said.
“Then who? Do we have somebody else in common?”
“The author of the universe,” Sebastian said. “Meryem seems to be in touch with the Great Unknown.”
Glancing from face to face, he told them about Meryem’s visions of his escape from drowning in the Idáren Dráren.
Hubbard listened to the story with a cynical smile on his lips and his head tilted to one side. He had grown up in a family that believed in ghosts and second sight and mental telepathy, and he had made up his mind to live a life of complete rationality, in which nothing that could not be seen and touched was regarded as real.
“Forgive me, Meryem,” he said. “But if you saw the thunderstorm on the mountaintop, and if you knew the river Sebastian had to cross rose on that mountain, and if you had seen such floods before, and knew horses, and knew Sebastian is the sort of fellow who’d wave his hat at a girl who isn’t even there, then you could have deduced the whole scene.”
“‘Deduced’?” Sebastian said. “Really, Hubbard. She was miles away.”
“Then how do you explain it?”
“It’s obvious. Meryem is a clairvoyant.”
“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t realize.” Hubbard, who towered over Sebastian and the rest of them even when sitting down, grinned merrily at Meryem as if they shared some delicious private joke. Meryem had never seen such friendly, guileless eyes as Hubbard’s. “Do you see into the future as well as the past?” he asked. “My Aunt Lucy could do that. Out of the blue she’d say, ‘Cousin Chloe died yesterday,’ or ‘Elliott is going to score the winning touchdown next Saturday.’ And then, a couple of weeks later, we’d get a letter confirming the prophecy. Aunt Lucy said things just popped into her head—she’d be doing her embroidery and all of a sudden there was Chloe in her grave or Elliott running into the end zone to win the game for the Old Hundred. Is it the same with you, Meryem?”
Meryem did not answer. The fish arrived, glazed with butter. Butter was a new taste to Meryem. She did not like it.
“What you can do,” Lori said to her, “is turn the fish over, then eat down to where the butter is.”
Using two forks, she did this to the plump filets of sole the waiter had placed in front of her, then handed her plate to Meryem in exchange for her own.
“Thank you,” Meryem said.
“If there’s no such thing as clairvoyance,” Lori said, “how did I know that Meryem doesn’t like butter on her fish?”
Hubbard saw that Lori had decided to be Meryem’s friend and dropped the banter. “How indeed?” he said between mouthfuls. “Very good food, Sebastian. A summer’s night in Paris. Psychic girls. We’re living in the land where dreams come true.”
For the next several weeks Meryem and Lori spent every morning together. Except for Paul, who was always present, the two young women were alone from breakfast to luncheon: Hubbard was in another room, writing; Sebastian was at the bank; Sebastian’s manservant, a misogynist, went to the market every morning in order to avoid them.
They talked about Germany and the Idáren Dráen, discovering that Prussians and Ja’wabi had many things in common: for example, Lori’s Uncle Paulus had cut off a Russian officer’s arm in a sword fight at the Battle of Tannenberg and thrust the stump into a fire to cauterize it, and Meryem’s grandfather had lopped off the limb of an Arab and stopped the bleeding with the ashes of camel’s hair that every Ja’wabi carried into battle. They talked about horses, children, remedies for illness and injury, animal husbandry, landscapes, weather, poetry, ancestors, music. Meryem sang plaintive Berber songs and Lori attempted to transcribe them on the piano, holding Paul on her lap while she did so.
Lori had never before had a friend of her own sex who did not talk about men to the exclusion of all other subjects. Sebastian was right about the systematic education of females in Germany: all the girls Lori knew in her own country had been taught to read Latin and Greek and speak French and English; they were acquainted with the most highly regarded works of literature and the main facts of history connected to all four of these languages as well as their own; they knew Greek and German mythology; they read music and could play the most popular works of the German composers from memory on at least one musical instrument. But when they were not in the presence of men, all this knowledge ceased to be interesting because it ceased to be useful in attracting, entertaining, outwitting, and manipulating men. So they talked about men—but with circumspection, as if there were spies in the room. And of course there always were; any one of them would go over to the enemy and betray them and their secrets at the first opportunity, and they all knew it.
Sebastian’s apartment, where they met, was on the top floor of the house at the tip of the Ile Saint-Louis. Lori and Meryem spent their mornings on the balcony outside the salon. On days when there were wind and clouds it was like sailing through Paris while sitting on the prow of a ship, with Notre Dame off the port beam and the Church of Saint Gervais to starboard and the monotonous gray cliffs of Haussmann’s Paris mercifully hidden beyond the horizon. Saint Gervais still bore marks of the damage done by a German shell from Big Bertha which had fallen on it on Good Friday, 1918, killing or wounding 200 poople who were, in some cases at least, in the act of praying for the death of all Germans.
The Christophers were amateur sailors. Hubbard had spent the small proceeds from the publication of his scandalous novel on a yawl; it was called Mahican after a tribe of Red Indians. Lori described sailing with her husband and son over the gray waters of the Baltic to Denmark and Sweden and picnicking on the beaches. She had been sailing all her life.
“As a small child, in August, 1913, I sailed to Saint Petersburg with my father and my Uncle Paulus and my boy cousins,” she said. “They were all on leave from the army. The sun shone from four in the morning until midnight. Saint Petersburg was like a city of doll houses, Venetian palaces way up north, made of stucco to resemble stone. When I asked what was inside, my cousin Bartholomaus said, ‘Dolls. A czar doll, a czarina doll, a czarevich doll and thousands of other dolls all kissing their behinds.’ “
“He’s dead now,” Meryem said.
“Yes, killed in the war,” Lori said. “And both of his brothers, one in Russia, the other at Verdun. Everybody except Paulus and me—and my father, of course, until a German mob got him.” “And Paul.”
Lori looked down at her blond child, who listened intently, as he seemed to listen to all adult conversations. “Paul is half American,” she said, “so maybe he’ll be half lucky.”
“Is that why you married an American?” Meryem asked.
“Very likely. It’s a well-known fact that the women of defeated nations are powerfully attracted to their conquerors.”
“The Americans conquered Germany?” Meryem knew little of European history apart from the victories of France she had learned about in school; she had certainly never been told in a French classroom that the Americans played a part in the 1914-1918 War.
“They came just before the end on the side of the French and the English,” Lori said. “Otherwise Germany might have won, although everybody I knew would have been dead just the same. They seemed very innocent to us. I guess I thought it would be a good thing to marry into a nation that was so ignorant of death. Besides, I couldn’t wait to make love to him.”
“You didn’t see Paul when that happened?”
“See him? You mean imagine what he was going to be like before he was born?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I did. But I had the wrong picture in my mind. I thought he would look like Hubbard, be sane like Hubbard—an American, safe from the lunatics of Europe. But from the moment he came into the world he looked just like my family. When they handed him to me I saw my father, my cousins. Regiments of the fallen.”
Paul was gazing attentively into his mother’s eyes.
“He’s listening,” Meryem said.
Lori kissed her son. “I hope so,” she said.
5
“WE MUST GET MARRIED,” SEBASTIAN SAID, SITTING BOLT UPRIGHT IN the bed he shared with Meryem. “But how? You’re a Mohammedan and I’m a sort of Catholic. We’ll have to go to the Mairie, have the civil ceremony, then work out the religious questions.”
“Why should we get married?” Meryem asked.
“Why? Because of the child.”
“What child?”
“The one we just conceived.”
Sebastian, aged twenty-two, was under the impression that sex ual union invariably resulted in pregnancy.
“There will be no child,” Meryem said.
Sebastian looked down into her face with male knowingness. “Oh, no?” he said. “Let me tell you something, little nomad. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your clairvoyance.”
“Then come closer.”
It was eight o’clock on a Sunday morning. They had been making love since dawn, except for brief catnaps from which they awakened each other, and now they began again. A few steps away across the Pont Louis Philippe, the bells of Saint Gervais were pealing. To his great surprise Sebastian, committing fornication while church bells shook his bed, felt no guilt, only exhilaration over the amazing discoveries he had made about his body and Meryem’s and the way in which they seemed to be connected to some mysterious bank vault in which the true pleasures of the flesh had been, until now, held in safekeeping for them.
Weeks had passed since their reunion, but this was the first time they had been alone together. They had spent the whole intervening time in the company of the Christophers, dining with them every night, going to the movies, the art galleries, and the theater, driving out to Versailles and Fontainebleau in Sebastian’s Studebaker for picnics.
But the night before, Lori and Hubbard and Paul had taken the train to Berlin. Before boarding, while the men drank warm champagne in the Wagon-Lit compartment and talked over plans for a sailing voyage down the Volga, or perhaps a walking tour of Hungary, Lori took Meryem by the arm and strolled with her down the platform.
“You may already realize this,” Lori said, “but if you want Sebastian you’ll have to arrange it yourself. He’ll never ask the question. These well-brought-up Americans are unbelievably shy; they’ve been told that women are like flowers, too beautiful to pluck, and for some reason they believe it. If I were you, I’d get him into bed tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes. Otherwise you may never see him again. He avoids being alone with you. That must mean he can’t trust himself. What more can yowask for?” Lori kissed Meryem on both cheeks, then, dryly, on the lips. “Come to Berlin,” she said. “Don’t write or telegram. Just come.”
“I’ll come.”
“Remember what I said about tonight. Strike first, strike hard.”
The train shuddered and then began to move. Hubbard shouted from the open door of the car. Lori, in high heels, sprinted after it, seized him by the hand, and swung aboard.
Sebastian stood on the platform, waving. “Good old Hubbard!” he said.
Meryem took his hand. He gave her an absent, tender look. The sentiment in his eyes had nothing to do with her—it was the residue of his goodbye to his friend.
“What now?” Meryem asked.
