The Second Sight, page 32
“Why poison gas? Why not an atomic bomb?”
“He knows nobody would ever give him that. Gas, maybe—it could come from anywhere. It has certain historical associations.”
Photographic images from Auschwitz and Treblinka flashed in Yeho’s brain. He said, “Tell me names, times, places.”
“Names I can give you; we gave them a shopping list. But there is no timetable. That’s the beauty of the operation, it’s absolutely random and completely unpredictable.”
Butterfly reeled off a list. Yeho recognized all the names but one.
“The Ja’wabi?” he said. “Who are they?”
“I’m not sure. We’d never heard of them, either. It seems that they’re some tribe of desert nomads who’ve been masquerading as Moslems even though they’re really Jews. Some German Hassan met in East Berlin, a former member of the SS, told him all about them. The idea of these Jews touching the Holy Koran drove him wild; it was like a sexual reaction. That was when he asked for the gas.”
“Did you give it to him?”
“No. But he’ll find a way. Madmen are very resourceful.”
TWO
1
WHEN CHRISTOPHER OPENED THE FRONT DOOR OF HIS HOUSE IN Washington and saw Zarah for the first time, he spoke to her in German: “Lebst du noch?”
“What? I don’t understand,” Zarah replied, looking straight into his eyes. She was a self-possessed young woman dressed for business: tailored suit, white blouse with one simple pin at the throat, low-heeled shoes, pink lips and fingernails, her mother’s wedding ring on her right middle finger, a plain watch on her wrist.
This fashionable disguise could not conceal her intense physical attractiveness, but Christopher, even while he stared at her with something like hunger in his eyes, seemed oblivious to it. He was looking at, or for, something else in her face and body. Finally he said, “I’m sorry; forgive me. For a moment I mistook you for somebody else.”
“My grandmother, I think. I’m told that I resemble her quite closely.”
She spoke in Lori Christopher’s incisive tones, but if Christopher heard what she said, he gave no sign. They looked at each other in silence. It was late morning in a neighborhood in which wives and husbands alike practiced one of the saprophytic Washington professions, law or journalism or politics, and a deep hush hung over the street of empty houses, as if everyone for miles around except Christopher had gone to a funeral.
She said, “May I come in?”
He stepped aside. Zarah came into the hall; it was even quieter inside than out. No radio or television played in another room, no household machines hummed in the kitchen or the cellar. Going inside was like crossing the threshold between imagination and reality. She thought, That’s exactly what I’m doing after all these years. She looked around her. It was a high, narrow house, but filled with dappled sunlight that fell first through a very large oak tree growing on the curb and then through tall Palladian windows. Beyond the double door leading into the sitting room she saw Zaentz’s drawing of Lori hanging on the wall and strode across the carpet to examine it. She had Lori’s purposeful walk, and when she turned around after scrutinizing the picture, a process that took several minutes, Christopher saw that she had the same gravely inquisitive expression, the same wide-open unwavering gray eyes. He asked her no questions, expressed no surprise; standing politely in the doorway, he waited for her to explain herself.
“Yes, there is a close resemblance,” she said. “This was made when your mother was what—nineteen?”
“About that age.”
“Years younger than I am now.” Zarah spoke English with a native American intonation, but with the faint hint of some other, more strongly aspirated language also present. She said, “Was that German you spoke to me on the doorstep?”
“Yes, it was German.”
“What did the words mean?”
He hesitated for a moment, looking very intently at her face, and replied, “The English equivalent is, ‘Are you still alive?’ “
His voice was very soft; she had to strain to hear the words.
Zarah said, “Do you often speak German when you’re surprised?”
“I haven’t spoken it in twenty years. The words just came out.”
Zarah stared at him, unblinking. “I’ve imagined your first words to me many times,” she said. “But I never expected anything like that. Can we sit down? I don’t think my legs will hold me up very much longer.”
She sat on the bench of a piano beneath the picture of Lori. Christopher remained standing in the doorway. Framed photographs crowded the gleaming mahogany lid of the piano: sepia portraits of Christopher and his parents and relatives; a slim dark-haired woman with a nervous face, his second wife, holding a pretty female child who closely resembled her; the child by herself on a horse, on a boat, standing on the balustrade above the Place de la Concorde with Christopher’s arm around her and the Arc de Triomphe in the far background at the end of the Champs-Ely sees. He was looking upward at the little girl with an expression of love on his face. Zarah looked away. The room ran the whole length of the house, like a gallery, and through the french windows at the back Zarah could see a garden with swings and slides and a doll-house. Both walls were hung with drawings, prints, and paintings. She had studied such things with one of her tutors, and she recognized a Pissarro, a Constable, a Munch, and a flame-filled shipping scene that seemed to be a Turner intermixed with two or three unrecognizable abstractions and one naive Douanier Rousseau-like picture showing lions and leopards lying down with farm animals and blond children dressed in gossamer togas.
“What is that picture?” she asked.
“It’s by an American painter named Hicks,” Christopher replied.
“I like it. I like them all.”
“Most of them belong to my cousin. He lives abroad.”
“Which cousin is that?”
“Horace Hubbard.”
“Elliott’s son?”
“That’s right.”
Just as Zarah had always been told, her father was, physically, a male version of herself, but far stiller. Framed like a portrait by the doorway, he was nearly as motionless as a figure in a painting—one of John Singer Sargent’s would-be gentry posed on a platform above the artist except for the total absence of disdain and the rumpled clothes (old yellow corduroy pants, a checked shirt under a threadbare sweater). He seemed younger than she knew him to be. His hair was darker than she had pictured it, but it had not begun to turn gray. His well-made body had not thickened, no veins showed on his hands which hung quietly along the seams of his trousers. His face was weatherburned, like the face of a Ja’wabi of the same generation who had spent his youth in the saddle—but tan instead of olive.
“Do you want me to explain myself?” she asked.
Christopher smiled for the first time, faintly; he seemed to be amused by the question.
“Does that mean yes?” she asked.
“I’m a little curious.”
“That’s a relief. Can you sit down, too?”
He motioned to two facing sofas in front of a fireplace. They sat down opposite each other.
“I’ve rehearsed all this,” she said, “but I don’t think the performance is necessary. I think you can see who I am even if you can’t quite believe it. I’m not sure I believe it, either, but here we are. I learned of your existence by accident when I was eight years old. I overheard my mother talking to Barney Wolkowicz …”
Christopher’s eyes changed; the good humor went out of them.
“… who came to tell her that you were in prison in China. By that time you’d been a prisoner for years; it took him a long time to find us. I don’t know how he did it. Or why. Nobody else ever did. He just rode over the mountains and knocked on the door one day. My mother was infuriated. She hadn’t even told her own parents where we were, or that I existed.”
“You’re Cathy’s child?”
“Yes. She went into hiding when she found out she was pregnant, to keep me a secret from you. I was born twenty-three years ago on April tenth, if you want to do the arithmetic. Do you find that too strange to believe?”
Christopher closed his eyes briefly. Opening them again he said, “No.”
“You’ve thought about her, then?”
“Yes. Often. She was the most beautiful human being I ever knew.”
“So everyone said. She hated it. Is that all you remember?”
“No. Far from it. I hope she’s well.”
“She’s dead,” Zarah said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t betray her in this way.”
2
ZARAH HAD BROUGHT SEBASTIAN LAUX ALONG AS A WITNESS. THEY had driven down from New York together in Sebastian’s Bentley, and he had waited around the corner in the parked car while she made herself known to her father. He rang the doorbell at twelve-thirty precisely. His chauffeur stood behind him on the steps with a picnic hamper in one hand, a silver wine bucket in the other, and a plump old-fashioned briefcase, the kind with straps, under his arm. “We left the city at five-thirty in the morning in order to get here in time for lunch,” Sebastian said. To him, New York was “the city”; all other urban agglomerations were known by their proper names. Even more than most New Yorkers, Sebastian was uncomfortable in Washington. He could not be persuaded to spend a night there or eat the local food or drink the water. When he could not avoid a trip to the capital he had himself driven from Manhattan, a ten-hour round trip, in case the airlines and the trains failed or went on strike at the same time, trapping him in this strange disembodied metropolis of lethargic clerks and fried fish.
“Shall we eat in the garden?” Sebastian asked. “I think we have everything we need.” He looked upward at the leafy canopy, which was just beginning to be touched by the first colors of fall. “It’s a lovely day. The trees are wonderful in Washington, one always notices that.”
On his way through the house he paused in the gallery to look at the pictures and the worn Afshãri carpets on the floor. He was on familiar ground here because he had bought and furnished the house for Christopher while the latter was in captivity. “Ah, Harvey Hubbard’s Cappadocian fountain!” he said when he stepped outdoors into the garden. “Does it still work?”
Christopher turned a faucet; water gushed from a small Roman fountain that an archeologizing cousin had excavated in Caesarea Mazaca during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.
“Imagine tucking this beautiful thing away in an attic,” Sebastian said. “But that’s where we found it!”
While he examined its ancient dolphins anew, the chauffeur, an elderly, silent Cockney who also acted as Sebastian’s butler and valet, changed into an apron, covered a small table with a checkered cloth from the hamper, and laid out the delicatessen luncheon that Sebastian had brought with him: smoked trout, chicken in aspic, string beans in vinaigrette, strawberries, crème fraîche, a liter of French mineral water, and a brown bottle of Alsatian Gewürztraminer. They sat down in the shade of an umbrella.
“Paul is not fond of wines that have German names,” said Sebastian to Zarah, lifting his green-stemmed glass, “but this is exceptional even after five hours in the trunk of the car. It was your grandfather Christopher’s favorite wine, my dear. He wrote a poem about it. ‘Perfume of Bacchus, evaporating on the tongue of memory.’ I think you’ll like it.”
For the remainder of the lunch they talked about the pictures and the rugs inside the house; Sebastian had definite opinions about such things. He did not like tribal carpets. He did not like abstractions, either; he himself had bought the Munch as a wedding present for Hubbard and Lori Christopher; he liked that, and not only because he had got it for a song. “Munch had potential, you could see that,” he said. “In a hundred years no one will look at blobs and splotches. Faces and bodies, that’s what pictures are all about.” He was in his seventies now. None of his habits had changed, and as an old man he looked and behaved very much as he had done in Paris half a century before. He never mixed food and business, but as soon as the servant cleared the table and disappeared with the repacked hamper, Sebastian drew a gold watch from the breast pocket of his suit and put on his reading glasses.
“One-thirty. Time to get down to business if I’m going to miss the traffic on my way back to the city,” he said. “I’m sure you’re wondering, Paul, how all this came to pass, and if you can believe the evidence of your eyes. I don’t blame you. The resemblance between this young lady and your mother at the same age is astonishing. Lori wasn’t quite as tall or as fair-haired as Zarah, your mother’s hair was almost auburn, but otherwise it was like being revisited by a ghost from the past when she came to see me for the first time.”
“When was that?” Christopher asked.
“About a year ago, but of course the Bank has known about Zarah since before she was born.”
“You are the Bank.”
Sebastian returned his steady gaze. “D. & D. Laux & Co. has always handled her mother’s account. And her parents’ before her.”
“You’ve never mentioned any of this to me, Sebastian.”
“Catherine did not desire it. Obviously I am bound in these matters by the client’s wishes. Now that Zarah has inherited she wants to make herself known to you. I am here at her request to assure you that in my opinion, based on all the information at my disposal, she is exactly what she represents herself to be—the daughter of your former wife.”
“And mine.”
“That certanly was Catherine’s belief.” Sebastian turned to Zarah. “Do you still wish to pursue this question in my presence?”
Zarah looked first at him, then at Christopher. “Yes,” she said. “That’s why you’re here.”
“Paul?”
“If that’s why you’re here, Sebastian, I guess you’d better get on with it.”
“Very well. As you doubtless know, there now exist tests by which paternity can be proved or disproved with almost complete certainty. I believe they compare DNA samples. I have given Zarah the name of a specialist here in Washington who can help you if you wish. Now for the circumstantial case.”
Sebastian unbuckled his briefcase, opened the lock with a tiny key attached to the watch-chain wound through the buttonhole in his lapel, and extracted a manila file tied with a cloth tape. From this he produced a number of documents and laid them neatly in a row on the table before him.
“There were reliable witnesses to Zarah Christopher’s birth,” he said. “In fact she was delivered personally by a woman in whom I have absolute trust. This is her affidavit, recorded a day or two after the event.” He laid one of the documents in front of Christopher, who read it. It was a clinical description, written in lucid French, of Zarah’s birth, which had taken place in a tent during a journey across the Idáren Dráren.
Christopher lifted his eyes. “This is signed ‘M. Laux.’ “
“My wife,” Sebastian said.
“I didn’t know you had a wife.”
“You knew her well when you were a child in Berlin—Meryem.”
“Meryem was your wife? Did my parents know that?”
“They were the only ones who did know.”
“She’s still living?”
“Yes. I haven’t seen her since 1939.”
“But you correspond.”
“Meryem has her own ways of keeping in touch.”
Sebastian gave Christopher another document. “There is room for doubt as to the date of conception inasmuch as you and Catherine, though still legally married, were no longer living as man and wife when it occurred. Here is an affidavit by Catherine as to time and place and certain other pertinent details.”
Christopher had not seen Cathy’s handwriting in more than twenty years, but he recognized it at once: the self-conscious backslanting letters climbing up the page, the circular dots over the “i’s,” the ornate capitals. She provided the date of her last menses, which had taken place fifteen days before conception. Letters attesting her pregnancy from the doctors she had visited in Geneva and Paris were attached.
“Does that accord with your recollection?” Sebastian asked.
“Yes. Completely.”
Sebastian put a finger on Meryem’s affidavit. “Meryem tells us that Zarah was a twin. As she wrote, the other child, a boy, was stillborn; he was buried near the place where he was born; apparently the grave still exists. She describes a very unusual complication in regard to the stillborn twin. The medical term is fetus papyraceus. Here is a passage from one of your father’s novels, The Small Rain, published in 1928.”
Sebastian handed Christopher the open book; the paragraph in question was marked with a paper clip:
Still coated in blood and mucus the glorious boy opened his eyes and looked for the first time at his mother who said Dear God he spoke to me, he said where is my twin. But there was no twin except that there almost always was a twin in this family, but this time the other child was a fetus papyraceus with a girl’s face as beautiful as the boy’s own face, which was their mother’s face in small, imprinted on the tissue of her body, and it had been pressed absolutely flat in the womb by the child that lived.
“This passage is a description of your own birth,” Sebastian said. “Hubbard told me so himself when the book was published; also that this complication, in which one twin dies in the womb and is pressed flat by the other as it grows and develops, has occurred several times in the Christopher family. Your father’s fiction, as I’m sure you realize, was really not fiction at all, but a sort of embellished diary, an imaginative rendering of the literal events of his life. He redecorated the scenery, he sometimes resorted to metaphor, but never departed from the essential facts. In that, as in so many other things, he was far ahead of his time.”
Soon it was two-thirty, time for Sebastian to go. He closed his briefcase and rose to his feet.
“Paul will see me out,” he said, holding out his hand to Zarah. “I’ll say goodbye to you here, by this fountain. It would be wonderful to have one like it in Tifawt, in one of those garden courtyards, wouldn’t it?”
